Alex's Asteroid Astrology |

January 4th, 2021 at 09:01am by Alex Miller

COVID-19 Comes Home

[Cover Photo: the author with his Aunt Betty, 2011]

I had made it all the way through 2020 without personally knowing anyone infected during the coronavirus pandemic. Until New Year’s Eve, the last day of the year, when my cousin called to tell me that her 90-year-old mother had been hospitalized with COVID pneumonia. Aunt Betty was my mother’s sister, and had been a fixture of my childhood and an integral part of my family festivities for decades, until a hip fracture resulted in her moving in with her daughter nine years ago. This disrupted our seasonal celebratory cycle, and I have only seen her sporadically since then.

December 30th, 2020 at 01:34pm by Alex Miller

The Nashville Christmas Day Bombing

2020 went out with a bang in Nashville, Tennessee, when on Christmas Day 63-year-old Anthony Quinn Warner self-detonated a bomb in his RV in front of an AT&T network hub, killing himself, devastating the surrounding area and causing communications outages across the state. No motive for his destructive suicide has yet been established for Warner, a tech specialist conspiracy theorist whose writings express concern with “shape-shifting reptilian creatures that appear in human form and attempt world domination.” But Warner took pains to prevent additional loss of life, with the RV broadcasting warnings of the pending explosion and urging evacuation for 15 minutes before detonation. Despite these precautions, eight were injured in the blast.

December 28th, 2020 at 09:30am by Alex Miller

Trumping Death

Given Trump’s disdain for science, fact and expertise, coupled with a complete inability to take direction or follow sage advice and a propensity for reckless action, it was perhaps inevitable that he and the coronavirus would become personally acquainted at some point, sooner rather than later. So Trump’s 12:45 AM EDT Tweet on October 2, 2020 confirming that both he and Melania had been exposed and tested positive, was hardly a shock, but it was a thunderous admission regardless. With Trump’s age and corpulence, he was a prime candidate for a serious, if not deadly, COVID-19 infection, and with his re-elect pending just a month away, his turbulent campaign was thrown into a tailspin, while a shattered nation waited with bated breath for the outcome.

December 17th, 2020 at 10:03am by Alex Miller

House Diary: Yule

[Cover Photo: An early winter sunrise bathes the landscape in pinks and purples]

Yule is the Norse term for the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, a time of hope as we draw the old year to a close and begin anew. Although most pagans have adopted this name for the holiday, humanity has celebrated this return of the light for millennia, under different appellations in cultures across the globe. The Romans brought in live oak and other evergreen plants, gave gifts, lit candles and celebrated the festivals of Mithras, God of Light, or Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun. In Celtic lands where winters were colder, huge bonfires were the order of the day, sympathetic magic to encourage the sun’s return. The Yule log tradition stems from the bringing indoors of a large section of tree trunk, estimated to be enough to burn for a full twelve days, a period of annual feasting as the old year died and was reborn into the new. Stone markers, from monoliths to the extravagant display of Stonehenge, were created to mark the exact moment of the light’s return.

December 10th, 2020 at 09:22am by Alex Miller

Trump & Sisyphus: Futility in Motion

Asteroid Sisyphus is named for that worthy denizen of Hades, doomed to forever roll a rock uphill, only to have it roll down again, thus necessitating endless repetition of the action. As such, astrologically, Sisyphus represents futile action without purpose or accomplishment – repetitive, pointless effort which achieves nothing lasting.

In light of President Trump’s repeated, one might say endless, refusal to accept the clear results of the 2020 election, where Americans handed him his hat and showed him the Oval Office door, it occurred to me to take a closer look at asteroid Sisyphus, to see what role it might be playing in the election and its aftermath. It’s not just Trump who’s beating this dead horse: 90% of elected Republicans in Washington refuse to publicly acknowledge his loss, and his “legal team” has been rejected in all but one of the nearly 50 court cases filed to overturn the results in key battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin.

December 6th, 2020 at 02:06pm by Alex Miller

2020 Holiday Asteroids: A Gift-Giving Guide

2020’s holiday season promises to be one of the weirdest on record, with coronavirus pandemic concerns dimming the lights and dampening spirits across the globe. A Zoom Christmas isn’t what most of us anticipated as we cleared the wrapping debris from the last Yule debauch, but perhaps COVID isolation is the universe’s way of telling us we’ve overextended ourselves, socially, fiscally and commercially. Time to focus on those nearest and dearest, and what’s right in front of our noses.

Santa may be masked this year, but he’s still expected to make his annual rounds. He could use some help, however, so AAA is stepping into the breach with holiday gift-giving suggestions, employing asteroid Santa as our guide for the best options for each Sign. (And check out the links at the end of this article for prior articles on Christmas-themed asteroids and how they show in the charts of classic Yuletide shows, songs and entertainers.)