http://www.bigskyastrology.

com/articles/eclipse/

The following article is excerpted from a lecture presented

to the San Diego Astrological Society in April 1999.
Working with eclipses
in natal astrology.
To work with eclipses for yourself or your client is actually really simple. I don’t know if this
is your experience, but I find that a client usually comes to me for the first time because
they’re at a critical turning point, a “crisis” in their life. It’s usually very easy to pinpoint
the source of the crisis with eclipses. I just map out the solar and lunar eclipses for the
year, figure out where those points fall in the client’s chart by house placement and hard
aspect to natal planets. Then I backtrack 18 years, at 4.5 year intervals. These will show
me years where the client was receiving conjunctions, squares, and oppositions from
eclipses to roughly these same areas of their chart.
At that point, I have easy reference points for exploring these issues in more depth during
the reading. Then I calculate secondary and solar arc progressions, transits, and the solar
return chart for the year; almost invariably, the configurations in the chart receiving the
most emphasis from eclipses will also show a lot of important activity in all these
charts. Fairly quickly, the main themes for the year emerge and provide a solid framework
for a reading.
This is a fairly conventional way of working with any kind of cycle, whether it’s cycles of
Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, progressed lunar phases, anything. For me, what makes eclipses
especially appealing as a cyclical tool is:
 They’re really easy to use. If a client comes to me and says, “When will I find a
relationship?” It’s a fairly simple matter to say, “Well, when were you last in an
important relationship?” – find where the eclipses were, and work with 4.5 year
periods from there. The 9 year opposition part of the cycle seems especially strong.
 Secondly, of all the tools we use in prediction, eclipses are the least subtle!
People notice their effects. They have a kind of bare bones, brass knuckles sort of
immediacy about them.
 Finally, eclipses show where crisis is occurring and how it’s related to past
events, in a way that can reveal to your client just how far they’ve come in dealing
with a particular issue in their life. That can be extremely helpful and validating
when your client is in “Why do I keep making these boneheaded mistakes?” mode.
Eclipses move clockwise through the chart, unlike progressions and transits, which
move counter-clockwise. And because solar eclipses usually occur in opposite signs in a
given year, they will very often fall in houses of the chart that directly oppose one another.
So in interpreting eclipses in the houses, I’m working not with twelve individual houses so
much as six teams of houses, or house axes, directly opposite one another.
The size of the houses in your chart vary, of course, depending on where you were born. If
you were born extremely north or south of the equator, generally one or two of these
house axes will be quite large while the rest are quite small--so that progressions, transits,
and—yes—eclipses spend more time transiting the large houses than the small ones. On
average, though, you can count on eclipses falling in a particular axis of your chart for
about 1 ½ years at a time.
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Eclipses in the 1/7 axis:

Crisis of Individualism vs. Relationship.
We meet a young woman who has just become engaged to the man of her dreams – a
fairly common event during this cycle, with its connection to the seventh house of
partnership. She can’t believe he loves her and treats her so well—all the other men in her
life have been rotten. He wants to take care of her, support her emotionally and financially,
and she’s torn between not believing her luck and really not believing her luck. "What did I
do to deserve this?" she asks herself, just like all those other times when the treatment she
was receiving was not so loving.
Her decision to marry him will probably be the simplest part of this cycle. The minute they
announce their plans to marry, their excited friends and families pounce, anxious to help,
to give advice. Before the bride knows it, the plans for her wedding day have been taken
over and she has ceased to be a flesh and blood person: she is now a “bride,” constantly
shuffled around from caterer and wedding consultant and her new in-laws. As the weeks
pass, she shows the strain of constant planning and decision making, trying to please new
and important people in her life, trying to keep everyone happy as the plans for the
wedding progress -- she becomes more and more frantic and exhausted.
Meanwhile, people are treating her differently. Her single friends wish her well, but they
treat her with a curious mixture of enthusiasm, resentment, and sadness – “We’re losing
you,” they tell her, and she wonders with a start if that’s true: will she be one of those
women who abandons all her friends when she gets married? Her friends have helped her
define herself, and the thought of losing them is like losing part of her identity. She
becomes anxious that the “I’ will not survive becoming part of a “we.” She finds herself
growing short-tempered and defensive with her husband to be, who tries to be
understanding but has worries of his own, particularly about how much she’s spending on
the wedding.
Eclipses falling in the first and seventh house axis don’t always describe a marriage, but it
is an event that well describes the fundamental crisis of this cycle: profound challenges to
self and identity brought about through close relationships with others. It’s a cycle that
frequently describes turning points such as marriage, divorce, moving away from home.
Like eclipses to Mars, the ruler of the first house, this cycle is a time of marking out
important territory for ourselves in the world, and trying to defend ourselves against
perceived attacks on our individuality; as with eclipses to Venus, ruler of the seventh
house, we are evaluating our self-worth and values in the context of personal relationship.
And because eclipses falling in the 1st and 7th houses often square natal planets in the
10th and 4th houses, we find that changes in our identity and personal relationship status
can also have an effect on our career choises, as well as marking a significant change in
how we relate to our family of origin.
Eclipses in the 12/6 axis:
Crisis of Retreat vs. Adaptation. 
After the hectic activity of eclipses moving through the first house and seventh houses,
eclipses move into the 12/6 house axis, and our young newlywed finds herself in a Crisis
in Retreat and Adaptation. After months of frenzied activity, planning a wedding, setting up
a new household, our young couple enters the honeymoon phase. For a year or so they
barely leave the house for social engagements; they’re just plain worn out, and they need
some time alone.
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Our young bride is wondering just when the exhilaration of married life is supposed to kick
in! She adores her husband, and their wedding day was beautiful. So why does she feel so
tired all the time? Why does she find herself crying at odd moments, picking fights with her
husband over inconsequential things? Why does she feel so weird?
Meanwhile, she’s spent hours changing her name on countless documents: the DMV, the
passport office, Social Security office, credit cards. People call her by her new name and
she doesn’t even know who they’re talking to.
Living with someone new has brought about the challenge of working out new routines and
adapting old habits. Will we have separate bank accounts or joint? Which toaster will we
keep? Who does the dishes? After years of sorting out her own routines, each day with her
husband is like recreating the wheel!
Eclipses in the twelfth house, like eclipses to Neptune, are times for retreat and
recuperation. Our young bride is recuperating not just from the wedding, but from a lifetime
of bad relationships, stored up hurts and disappointments – and confronting her illusions
about relationships, and her new husband. Now that she has a safe haven, she can
surrender her armor – and purging the emotions that have resurfaced is a tiring business.
Eclipses in the sixth house, like eclipses aspecting Mercury, find us delineating and
defining roles and expectations, and dealing with the day to day reality of living with
whatever changes we made in the 1st and 7th houses.
The fundamental crisis of this cycle involves honoring our need for solitude and
contemplation, while simultaneously taking care of the mundane tasks at which we spend
the bulk of our time. Ideally, we can bring some 12th house contemplation to the 6th
house, and approach our tasks as a spiritual journey – instead of envisioning spirituality as
something which occurs apart from the everyday world.
Eclipses in the 11/5 axis:
Crisis in Reception vs. Self-Expression.
After awhile our young bride, a little stronger and better rested, emerges into the world to
reconnect with her old friends. But some of those friendships didn’t survive her
disappearance. Some of her single friends are convinced they were right about her
dumping them when she got married, and don’t return her calls, while others insist she
continue the social pace they enjoyed together when she was single. Some of her married
friends have upped the ante and moved on to having kids, and have no time for her.
Maybe her marriage required her to move a great distance from her ordinary support
systems; maybe in making the life-changing transitions of getting married and confronting
her past, she has outgrown a lot of her old friends. Anyway, it seems that everyone has
abandoned her at once, and the more she tries to pretend that everything is the way it’s
always been, the worse she feels.
One day, while unpacking some boxes, she runs across a short story she had started
writing a few years ago, and then set aside when she became engaged. Reading through
it, she starts making some notes in the margins; when she looks up again, she notices that
several hours have passed. She sets the story aside to make dinner – but is excited at the
prospect of getting back to it tomorrow.
As with eclipses to Uranus, the ruler of the 11th, this cycle finds us out of step with those
around us. The crisis lies in rediscovering the 5th house part of ourselves, those creative
passions that are more compelling than any dinner party we could go to, and that
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eventually lead us out to share ourselves with the rest of the world – at which point we
naturally attract the friends and associates which are appropriate for us.
Eclipses in the 10/4 Axis:
Crisis in Direction vs. Connection.
It’s a couple of years since our young woman rediscovered that story she’d written, and
eclipses have moved on to the 10/4 axis of her chart. She’s happily married, emotionally
sound, she has new friends and creative energy to burn; but she finds herself feeling the
lack of a strong purpose, a direction, a sense of meaning to her life. She dislikes her job
and doesn’t feel she is working in her ideal profession; her boss is a real tyrant, and lately
has been piling lots of work on her and blaming her for missing deadlines she didn’t know
existed.
Her husband encourages her to leave the job; after all, they both can live on his income.
But that wouldn’t solve the problem, because it goes deeper than just her problems with
her boss: she doesn’t know what to do with her life.
She might have more clarity, she suspects, if her mother had provided a stronger role
model. Her mother stayed at home and cooked pot roast and raised her kids, and that
certainly is not the direction our modern young woman wants to take.
Then one day, as eventually happens in life, her mother dies. Our young woman returns to
the family home –and, metaphorically, to her fourth house-- to celebrate her mother and
mourn her loss, to grapple with endings and mortality. One day, sorting through a trunk of
her mother’s momentos, she finds something that shocks her: the yellowed, hastily
scrawled pages of a short story her mother had written years before. … Her mother, a
writer? She’d never thought of her mother as a writer, or indeed as a creative person at all.
If the 10th house and Saturn, its natural ruler, send us out into the world looking for
meaning in life, the 4th house and the moon send up on a treasure hunt deep within
ourselves and our lineage. Here, we find the raw material, diamonds in the rough, that we
can polish and refine into a meaningful gift to offer the world.
Eclipses in the 9/3 Axis:
Crisis in Mastery vs. Skill
It’s been some months since the death of her mother, and our young woman has a secret:
late at night, after everyone has gone to bed, she has been rewriting her mother’s short
story, and it’s been growing and growing. She’s added pieces of her own story, the one
she found in that box a few years ago. And she thinks – just maybe, when she dares to
think about it – that it’s good, this story, and she thinks if she had the time, she could
maybe even make it into a proper book.
One morning at breakfast she confides in her husband about the story, the idea of the
book. He tells her what a marvelous idea it is that she has, to write this book! “Oh, leave
that damn job, you’ve hated it so long – why don’t you take a chance and do this
marvelous thing?” And the more supportive he is, the more resistant she becomes. “I’m
not a real writer, I majored in accounting, if I leave my job and this doesn’t work out it’ll
leave this big embarrassing hole in my resume…” In her heart of hearts, she knows she’s
found her career, you see. The hours she has spent working on this story have been the
happiest she’s known in years. But the thought of committing to something so unknown
terrifies her. Who is she, after all, to think she can be a writer?
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She feels she needs an objective analysis of her ability, so she decides to take a creative
writing course at the local university. For her final paper, she submits part of her story. A
week later she receives her paper in the mail with her professor’s glowing comments. The
next day, her heart absolutely in her throat, she goes to work and gives two weeks notice.
Eclipses in the ninth house, like eclipses to Jupiter, invite us to take a chance in life, to act
on faith, even though we feel we are not up to the challenge. While eclipses in the 3rd
house, like eclipses to Mercury, provide the impulse to develop skill. Often, this is the cycle
when we take an existing interest to a journeyman level – make the leap from reading and
writing a language to speaking it.
Eclipses in the 8/2 axis: 
Crisis in Intimacy vs. Self-Sufficiency
It’s perhaps a year since our protagonist made her dramatic leap of faith, throwing herself
headlong into a bold new enterprise. The thrill of sleeping late and taking long lunches with
her friends has worn off. She and her husband are beginning to notice the loss of the
income she was earning at her job. And she finds it’s every bit as grueling to sit alone in a
room writing all day, as it is to sit in an office hunched over spreadsheets.
The book is shaping up into something a little different than she had anticipated, and in
exploring the motivations of her characters as she writes she is confronting some of her
old demons as well. She catches herself brooding; she’s often troubled, for reasons she
can’t quite explain to her husband. A good friend discovers a cancerous tumor; and in the
face of her friends’s ordeal, our young woman feels increasingly ridiculous, sitting around
in a room writing stories all day – and even more ridiculous for feeling increasingly
depressed.
Her moods are straining her warm relationship with her husband. He applauds her
compassion for her friend, but doesn’t understand why she seems to be taking it so
personally. “You should be enjoying what you have,” he tells her, “instead of feeling guilty
for having it.”
But that’s part of the problem, because more and more she’s feeling like nothing she has
is really hers. She’s unaccustomed to being completely supported by someone else
financially, and it makes her doubt she’s worth anything on her own. She might eventually
be able to sell her book, but she is realistic enough to know that might be a long shot. So
the crisis becomes, is my worth dependant on how much money I’m earning? Is the worth
of anything I do accurately reflected by the money it can earn me?
The questions we ask ourselves during this cycle are among the most fundamental: who
am I really, and is that of any intrinsic value? What’s important in life? Usually we
experience some level of psychological discomfort, as we are tested in our resolve in
pursuing whatever thing we went after in the previous cycle, or through exposure to the
illness or death of others. Usually, this cycle also introduces financial discomfort, because
money, in our society, has come to define our self-worth; working through financial
difficulties often clarifies for us our true self-worth, apart from our bank balance. And we
must know what is valuable about us before we enter relationship with another--which is
the promise of the new cycle ahead.
And what becomes to the young woman in our story? Well, maybe the financial strain weakens her
marriage and she experiences real problems in this area as eclipses move back into the 1st and 7th
houses. Maybe she completes her book so she can take it out to meet other people (7th house) in the
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next cycle. Maybe she just incorporates a whole new level of understanding of herself and what’s
important, into her existing relationships, so that they became richer and more authentic.
Eclipses 2002
26 May Lunar eclipse  5 Sagittarius 04
10-11 June Solar eclipse (annular) 19 Gemini 54
24 June Lunar eclipse  3 Capricorn 11
19-20 November Lunar eclipse 27 Taurus 33
4 December Solar Eclipse (total) 11 Sagittarius 58
Look for connections to the following years:
1997/98, 1992/93, 1989/89, 1983, 1979/80, 1973-75, 1969, 1964, 1960/61, 1955/56,
1950/51, 1947...
Eclipses in Aspect to Natal Sun
Todd's third house Sun in Pisces conjuncts Mars and Mercury, trines Neptune, and
opposes Pluto. We might suppose that a Sun in Pisces would be sensitive and spiritual,
which he is. We might guess a Sun in the third house would be witty, versatile, and have
issues with siblings, all of which is true enough in his case. And with the Sun conjunct
Mars and opposed Pluto we might hazard a guess or two about the nature of his
relationship with his father-- none of them pleasant.
Todd's father was harsh, verbally cruel, and occasion, physically punishing. He spent the
last few years of his life gravely ill and eventually hospitalized, and during much of this
time Todd was on the opposite end of the country, on a spiritual and sexual journey of
discovery. As an eclipse conducted his natal Sun, Todd returned home to help his family
through the last days of his father's life. Although he was a source of strength and comfort
for his family, his grief over the loss of his father was complicated by his secret--he was
gay-- which left him feeling isolated, guilty, and profoundly relieved at finding himself freed
from the Sun/Mars/Pluto reality of life under his father's dictatorial rule.
Although the Sun is an astrological symbol of the father, actual, physical death of one's
father is not a foregone conclusion when an eclipse aspects this point. But it often marks a
time when we stand up to him or his memory, or go against his wishes often for the first
time. Sometimes it's not our father at all, but a father figure "stand in" -- boss, mother,
husband. One client had a particularly difficult T-square in her chart involving the Sun,
Moon, and Pluto. When eclipses aspected these points a few years ago she was caught in
the death throes of a longtime, enormously painful relationship with a noncommittal man, a
man as emotionally remote as--you guessed it--dear old dad. Encouragingly her father,
long estranged from her since his divorce from her mother, began to reach out to make an
emotional connection with her, and within a couple of weeks of a solar eclipse conducting
her natal Sun she was to see her father for the first time in thirteen year. My hope for her
was that through this interaction with her father she could come to an emotional resolution
about his early rejection of her, and so could begin to release this negative, rejecting
image of her father. Having confronted and rejected this negative archetype, hopefully she
would no longer need to hold on to a difficult relationship with an emotionally unavailable
lover.
However the symbolism plays itself out, an eclipse conducting, opposing, or squaring the
natal Sun signals a time when we stand up to be counted; a time characterized by the fear
and confusion that come with claiming our throne, and a time of inevitable clashes with
authority figures in our lives who are invested in our staying in the role of child.
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When we surrender our ties to "father"--whether through literal separation or a

psychological turning point whereby we break ranks with what he stands for -- we lose our
King, the absolute ruling monarch of our mythical childhood kingdom. Never again can he
hurt, demean or control us--but never again can he protect us, play with us, or hoist us up,
laughing on his shoulders in the afternoon sun. We become, for better or worse, the ruler
of our own kingdom.
Eclipses in Aspect to the Natal Moon
There's a wonderful scene in Steve Martin's movie The Lonely Guy in which Martin's
character--a real loser--walks into a swank restaurant for dinner and requests a table for
one. Immediately, a hush falls over the entire restaurant and a spotlight follows the lonely
guy as he makes the long, agonizing journey across the room to his table. "Is there
anything I can get for you, sir?" asks the maitre'd in a superior, patronizing tone. "Could
you turn off the spotlight?" pleads Martin, in mortified sotto voce, "and could everybody go
back to talking?" Anyone who's ever had dinner alone in public can relate to his feeling of
being completely and embarrassingly exposed!
It's funny about the moon--as a symbol, it describes both our most public and most private
selves. It describes many of our publicly observed characteristics, yet it also describes
what we do after a long day amongst the savages, after we get behind the delicious
privacy of our front door. What do we eat? Do we turn on the television, pick up the phone,
read something? (If you have a Gemini moon, like me, you do all of these things at once.)
And oddly, it is that very same "every(wo)man" self which, when revealed, makes the
public identify with us.
Long before I was an astrologer, a musician, a secretary, a wife, a cat-owner--I was a
writer. It came as naturally to me as breathing: moon in Gemini. Whether I was lonely,
bored, upset, or suffering from a case of unrequited love, virtually no situation could not be
made better by the simple act of putting a writing instrument to a sheet of paper.
Notebooks filled with inane scribblings dating back to my teenage years fill a couple of
large cardboard cartons in the garage, and one of my deepest fears is that one day I'll be
killed suddenly in some freak accident and someone, cleaning away the remains of my life,
will run across them and have a good laugh.
Soon after we were married, and a few months after a lunar eclipse opposed my natal
Moon, my husband came to me with a sheepish expression and confessed that he'd run
across one of my notebooks while looking for something in the garage and had read a bit
more of it than he should have. Well, I came completely unglued. I felt so--exposed! It was
weird; here's a man who knows the deepest, darkest secrets of my finances, my sexuality,
my bodily functions, and I was going berserk just because he read some stupid thing I
wrote in a notebook? He was completely taken aback by my reaction, which was basically
stunned silence, quickly followed by heaving, hysterical sobs.
My client Barbara would understand perfectly. She describes herself as a writer and
consultant specializing in relationships, which is described pretty well by her natal moon in
Gemini in the fifth house opposing a Sun/Mercury conjunction in the 11th. For the past
year, eclipses have been conjuncting these points. "...(At the moment) my boundaries and
sense of stable self are not good," she wrote to me. "It's hard to be around people at
all...the reality of exposing my writing (which stems from my deep self) triggers all my
exploitation d abandonment traumas at a deep level." This is, of course, the kind of person
who will be a deeply affecting writer, the most sensitive of counselors; but now, under the
shadow of the eclipses, is the time for healing her own pain.
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The moon represents that part of ourselves which is most vulnerable, and which we strive
to protect. It's not like Mars, the guardian of our need to survive; it's more about our need
to protect what we are, our fundamental self. When an eclipse stirs up this instinct, we
perceive that we are engaged in a battle to be ourselves. My eclipse-provoked hysterical fit
was not about my husband reading my notebook. It was about the process described by
the eclipse opposing my moon--getting married, moving in with someone, and learning to
trust him with my fundamental, everyday self, the one who watches soap operas and
Beavis and Butthead; who can eat a whole box of Kraft macaroni and cheese in one
sitting; who must read TV Guide on a weekly basis. This kind of stuff seems shallow, but it
is the mundane stuff that constitutes our daily reality. It is the stuff which, in the hands of
an enemy, can be used to hurt us most deeply.
Eclipses in Aspect to Natal Uranus
I have this theory about Uranus: that its placement in our chart shows where we are
the proverbial square peg trying to fit into a round hole. The interesting part of this
scenario, and one I've tended to overlook with Uranus (and Aquarius) is the part about
"trying to fit." It's not just that the square peg doesn't fit; it's that it keeps trying to
integrate itself into something that is unlike itself. Uranus is that part of us which is all
rough, pointed edges, going through life bumping up against smooth, rounded places. And
the more we reject the lonely, disenfranchised, mad scientist within us and try to be like
everyone else, the more we are subject to misadventure. In a strange way, it seems
these misfortunes are the universe's way of trying to validate our individuality.
I came face to face with Uranus in 1971, when eclipses were hitting my natal Uranus and
my family moved from rural Indiana to the big city--Los Angeles. I went from being a
relatively normal kid straight to circus geek status. For one thing, I got sent to a Catholic
school (my natal Uranus is in the 9th house) even though I was not Catholic. For another
thing, I was a chubby, lily-white kid with a really goofy accent, in a land of lean, brown,
preternaturally sophisticated pre-teens. Suddenly I was a weirdo, but I really wanted to
fit in! And eventually I learned to actually use my "weirdness" to gain acceptance. It was
my "hook."
Fortunately, it was around this time that I had my initial exposure to astrology, which is
also associated with Uranus. In 1989/90, eclipses again conjuncted this point and I
became quite serious about astrology, studying with a teacher and taking tentative steps
toward reading for strangers. This year, with eclipses squaring my Uranus, I published my
first article in a national astrological magazine.
I'm writing this just a few weeks after 27-year-old rock singer Kurt Cobain, considered one
of the premier voices of his generation, killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head. In
1992, eclipses were squaring Cobain's Uranus/Pluto conjunction when Cobain's band,
Nirvana, became a phenomenal overnight success, eventually selling more than 10 million
copies of their album Nevermind. Young fans, sick to death of slick, big-budget acts like
Michael Jackson and Madonna, embraced this obscure, grungy group of anarchists from
(of all places) Seattle and took Cobain, the group's key songwriter and front man, as their
anti-hero.
From everything we know of Kurt Cobain, he was horribly miscast in the role of rock star.
He was, at heart, a rebel, an anarchist--a very square peg indeed, and widely regarded as
a genius. Which brings us to another dimension of Uranus: brilliance. If a person is
merely quirky and remains in obscurity, apart from the mainstream of society, we call him
eccentric, or even insane; but if he can integrate into society to a degree sufficient for
us to identify with him, and yet still retain his individuality, we call him a genius.
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One could say Cobain had "the round hole" of big time fame and fortune thrust upon him.
One could also argue that, in signing with a major record company, he willingly took his
first step toward the round hole. However it happened, it may well have been this inability
to reconcile his individuality with societal forces which resulted in his serious drug
addiction and, ultimately, his death.
Obviously, not everyone dies, or even has an accident, when eclipses aspect their natal
Uranuis. Still, my research did reveal a rather significant number of car accidents under
this influence, including fatal ones, and a number of other deaths, particularly related to
heart attacks and other cardiovascular crises (as Uranus rules the circulatory system). So
what does this mean? Maybe accidents and sudden illnesses suggest that we're
rejecting or stifling a Uranian influence in our lives. The world is changing too fast for
us, or not fast enough. We desperately seek "our people," but resent being asked to
conform to any kind of group rule. Out of step with our world, we feel isolated.

I’ve been semi-obsessively watching and rewatching Albert

Brooks' gently amusing "Defending Your Life", currently in heavy rotation on HBO. The film
presents a vision of the afterlife in which the newly deceased are sent to Judgment City, a
sort of cosmic Ellis Island where each spends four days in court viewing days from his or
her life, defending the choices and decisions made on earth and examining his
progress in overcoming his fears. A person who led a fairly fearful life might examine
events from as many as twelve or fifteen days of his life, while the relatively fearless might
only look at a few days. A defense lawyer helps the deceased "defend" his life, while a
prosecuting attorney points out his most serious miscalculations. Finally, two judges rule
whether he "moves on" or returns to earth to try to get a better handle on his fears. Brooks,
as we soon see through the filmed excerpts from his life, was fairly ineffectual at mastering
his fears in life. His troubles continue in Judgment City, where he falls in love with the
radiant and fearless Meryl Streep but limits his involvement with her out of fear he’s not
"good enough" for her. It soon becomes obvious that even his own death was not enough
to persuade Brooks to live his (after)life to the fullest!
To extend Brook's allegory, one way of thinking about eclipses in astrology is to imagine
an afterlife in which you will be asked to defend your life based on how you handled
the most fearful planet or aspect in your chart. A tortured Sun? A debilitated Mars?
How did you handle the challenges related to this planet and its stressful configurations?
Imagine viewing scenes from five days of your life: The days on which, at 18 year
intervals, solar eclipses conjuncted that planet in your natal chart. You were at a turning
point in your development, struggling to overcome one of your darkest fears. What events
defined these turning points, and how did you cope with them? How effectively did you
handle your fear?
Eclipses, like those filmed scenes in Brooks' imagined afterlife, throw particular complexes
in our chart into bold relief through developmental crises. Eclipses closely conjuncting,
opposing, or squaring your most stressed natal planet or aspect can coincide with
dramatic external events -- the death of someone close to you, an illness, a job change
or relocation, a great romance, a divorce; or simply profound internal events, like
depression. In any event these times are often marked by events so dramatic they seem to
take place in a dream state of suspended animation; when we regain consciousness the
entire landscape of our lives have changed.
http://www.bigskyastrology.com/articles/eclipse/

Look to “personal” planets, particularly the Sun and Moon, in difficult aspect to the outer
planets (Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) to find your most sensitive planetary
combination. My Moon/Pluto square, for instance, is extremely sensitive to eclipse
aspects, inevitably heralding profound events which force me to confront my fear of loss.
On the other hand, eclipses aspecting my fairly happy natal Venus (trine Neptune, sextile
Pluto) usually presage fairly pleasant transitions. Unless an eclipse triggers a “high
tension” planet or aspect in your natal chart, or one of the angles, you are likely to
experience it as a subtle or psychological influence. About every nine years the pivotal
planet will receive a solar or lunar eclipse conjunction or opposition, and each time you
navigate this pivotal eclipse “season” you have another opportunity to face your
fear -- perhaps a fear of anonymity (the Sun), of disconnection (the Moon), of authoring
your own life (Saturn), of sudden change (Uranus).
Not all eclipses are associated with what we think of as unhappy events. Many
coincide with events which are joyous -- a marriage, say, or the birth of a child. These
eclipse events are in some ways more traumatic than tragic ones, because we don't
expect to be frightened or disoriented by them, and receive little support from others for
our feelings ("For heaven's sake, can't you even enjoy it when something good happens to
you?"). But the energy of eclipses is crisis, a crossroads, a turning point. Choosing
something good for your life -- a partner, a child, a high powered career -- necessarily
means closing the door on something else (life as a single person, total freedom, relative
lack of responsibility). It's normal to mourn loss, even loss that's necessary to clear
our path to joy.
Fears are nothing to be ashamed of; we all have them. But when you think of how many
of our harmful and limiting choices in life are motivated by our fears, it soon
becomes evident that we must make peace with them in order to "move on" to a
fuller and happier life. Observing the cycle of eclipses awakening our fears with precision
every nine years or so helps us identify these moments of truth when they come our way,
and even perhaps to prepare to do battle with them when they appear on our astrological
horizon.
At the end of his film Albert Brooks is condemned to return to earth while the woman he
loves is allowed to "move on" to the next level of evolution. It's a defining moment, calling
for desperate action. In the face of separation from his great love, Brooks musters the
courage he lacked in life (and, until now, in death): He escapes from the tram taking him
back to earth and jumps onto his lover's speeding tram, suffering electric shock as he
dangles from the moving vehicle, unable to get inside. Elsewhere, his judges and
attorneys observe his desperate attempt to escape his destiny and be reunited with the
woman he loves. Brooks’ defense attorney turns to the judges and asks softly, "Brave
enough for you?" The judges smile and intone to some unseen force, "Let him go." The
door of the tram opens and Brooks slips inside, next to the woman he loves, hurtling
alongside her toward the great unknown.