For as long as we've looked to the heavens for wisdom, we've looked for news of love. Forebodings of disaster, war and the rise and fall of fortunes are reduced to trivia when the liberating joy of passion is written in the stars, and at the moment, it is -- a moment within which is contained the real potential for freedom, creativity and celebration, and also one in which the opportunity for healing some of our deepest and darkest sexual wounds is quite available.

Dr. Deborah Anapol, psychologist, author, shaman and social visionary, has convened the Celebration of Sacred Sexuality at Harbin Hot Springs in northern California the weekend of October 10, 1997. The astrology of the event -- which was not researched until well after the dates and times were established -- reveals that it will occur during a once- in-a-lifetime planetary convergence, signaling an opportunity for a generational advance in the way we perceive, express and experience our sexuality.

I do not believe that the stars dictate our lives, but they make very strong suggestions, and they seem to record history with startling accuracy.

A few weeks ago, the tiny planet Chiron, discovered in 1977, entered Scorpio for the first time in some fifty years. Astrologically, Chiron rules consciousness itself, hyper- awareness of the here/now that extends into other dimensions of reality, the subtle or "psychic" realms which we all know are opening very, very rapidly. For this reason, Chiron's quest focuses the theme of holistic healing, and shows us where each of us has the most profound personal work to do and the most important healing gifts to offer the culture. When you think of Chiron, think of Shamanic religion, which is the disciplined, direct accessing of Universal power for the highest purposes. In its brief, two-year journey across Scorpio, we get the opportunity to examine, experience and heal our deepest sexual wounds, and once we have done that, express some of the deepest passions we have ever known.

Chiron in Scorpio is fitting astrology for the Harbin Springs conference, presenting us with an opportunity to expose and express what we have long hidden and repressed. During Chiron's last visit to this sign, which occurred around 1946, the social visionaries of the Beat Generation were discovering themselves, discovering each other and emerging in the world -- people like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady and others, all of whom helped bust the Queer Barrier and made masturbation, free-flowing jizzum and group sex part of pop-culture. In fact, Ginsberg's hysterically ironic coming out poem, "In Society," was written exactly one Chiron cycle ago, just before Chiron last entered Scorpio.

Since the sexual revolution faded into the harrowing twilight of AIDS, many people have taken every excuse to refuse and deny their sexuality on the conscious level, and with it, the growth opportunities it presents. Others went to the opposite extreme, taking great pleasure in risking their lives. In many ways, the sex = suicide years blasted the culture back to the 1940s, when sexuality was considered nasty and dangerous and deviant, something that could, in theory anyway, be stuffed back where it came from if we didn't want to deal.

That was not possible for everyone. Anapol, who is as compelled to carry out her life mission as she is personally compelling, continued her efforts through these dark ages, carrying the torch for the rest of us. Her highest vision has always been one of an Aquarian sexuality, in which we hold each other first as friends and then as lovers, never daring to take possession or control of the other. Friends means that love is based on trust and freedom, and on the idea that we need to really be there for ourselves before we can be there for others. Idealistic, yes -- but that is Aquarius, the sign of visionary thought. And it is where we have the freedom to experience ourselves fully as individuals and also as participants in our social groups and the culture.

Indeed, the year 1997 has brought some powerful planetary movements in Aquarius as well, as anyone born under that sign can tell you. This includes the combined action of the planet Jupiter, the planetary lord of justice and the bringer of all good things, combined with the revolutionary, Promethian power of Uranus, which influences social upheaval and blasts away the old so that real change is possible. The Uranus-Jupiter conjunction, which happens once per generation, always brings with it breakthroughs in technology and social consciousness. The 1969 conjunction, to give one fine example, brought both the first Moon landing and the Woodstock festival.

Yet to experience the fun and freedom of Aquarius, to love each other as brothers and sisters, we must first do the hard work of Scorpio, where the themes include facing our darkest passions and jealousy, and experiencing deep psychic purification. Here, we confront death and the loss of the other, experience the full emotional surrender to orgasm and the total surrender of the ego into love. Scorpio is that place in both consciousness and experience where we face the shadow self and do the work of evolution into higher forms of being, where we boil ourselves clean and are reduced to the truest, purest essence of what we really are, which is love.

During the Celebration of Sacred Sexuality, the activity in Scorpio and that in Aquarius converge in potent alignment, as Chiron in Scorpio forms a dynamic aspect, called an exact square, to Uranus in Aquarius. Squares, which are often mistakenly viewed negatively in conventional astrology, mean that *something happens*. It will be many, many decades before anything like this takes shape again, and it occurs once only for a few days in our period of history -- the weekend of October 10-13. Energetically, it feels like a blast of lightning leaping across the sky, drawing the most electrical, uncontrolled Yang energy out of Aquarius and bolting it across the sky like green lightening, into Chiron and energizing the deep, dark, Yin pool of Scorpio. We may not be ready to make the leap into Aquarius, but it seems ready enough to make the leap across to us.

It is a moment of inspiration, a moment of freedom and coming together, when the people who have been doing their depth work, who have been studying the ways of the psyche and learning to love without taking property rights over the other, will have their moment of emergence. Others will hear the first call to awakening. Many sexual healers will be born at Harbin Springs, as will sexual artists and revolutionaries, because, rather suddenly, the impossible becomes inevitable.

In chart for the moment of the opening ceremony (7:30 p.m. PDT, Harbin Springs, Ca.), two other factors join in, suggesting that the feminine force will be very active at this event and for the years to come. The first is that Pluto and Venus form an exact conjunction. This aspect speaks about our deepest sexual wounds and how they often work to drive us to deeper states of both pain and ecstasy. On the radar screen of astrology, this shows up in the southwestern sky, also called the Eighth House cusp -- Scorpio's house. Many of us bear sexual wounds, including having survived rape, incest, spousal abuse and many other forms of sexual and emotional violence and imprisonment.

This is an opportunity to bring these wounds to the surface, and if you are ready, to release them and go to a new level of freedom and pleasure. The best professional and shamanic help will he available, in the form of more than thirty teachers of Tantric Sexuality representing many world traditions, in the true Sagittarian spirit. More important, there will be a community to provide spiritual support for this kind of deep healing work of our feminine side. Venus conjunct Pluto in the sign Sagittarius suggests other major themes as well: sexual independence, sexuality at the core of a religious values system, and the emergence of a world erotic culture.

Would it be bolder to say that the future is unwritten, and let the chips fall where they may? Perhaps, but this is what I see written in these star maps.

Lest we take astrology too literally or get the sense that we are being carried along by mere fate, remember that at its purest, astrology represents a celestial calling, an opportunity to move the direction of your life in the direction of the larger Universe around you. Like any calling, whether you choose to answer is up to you.

But it's a powerful calling. The event begins as the Aquarius Moon blazes over the Uranus-Jupiter conjunction high in the evening sky, pulling our collective consciousness in the direction of real freedom -- saying that this celebration shines a bright ray of light into a dark world that has known more pain of loss, suffering and war than it has ever known about the incredible healing power of love and passion.++