This page will either help you navigate the labyrinth of written content and artwork that is Planet Waves, or provide another source of exponentially increasing confusion in the world.
For starters, Planet Waves Weekly has all the newest stuff, delivered by email and posted online, as well as the weekly, monthly and all specialty horoscopes, the birthday report, and much besides. Here is the link to subscribe. Single, family and Circle of Friends group subscriptions are available.
The newest open access content by other writers, and some by me, is at this link. Hundreds of our older articles by about 25 different writers are kept on the former What's New page, which is suspended in time as of the October '003 edition. As you fish around, search, etc., you may notice a wide diversity of daily pages that appear, for example this, linked to other daily pages and so on.
Newer dailies are posted at Planet Waves Weekly. Here are some of the older ones in that series.
When navigating older areas of the site, beware of old contact links (which may send email nowhere), old consultation links with outdated details and business terms (all of which are null and void except for the latest), and old phone numbers with antiquted area codes. Since beginning full-time writing for Planet Waves I've called about 11 cities and three countries my home. Here is the latest contact information. For those seeking professional astrology work, here are the latest two consultation links: basic consultations, and the Become Your Chart series. I also do Tarot and horary astrology consultations, including half-hour Tarot sessions.
We now have a toll-free number, whcih is (877) 453-8265. Please call during Pacific business hours, i.e., not before it gets light Out Left here, and not before Sasquatch has had breakfast. We are in the California/Oregon zone, i.e., in Washington State up by Canada, three hours behind (earlier) than New York, eight hours behind London, nine hours behind Paris, and about ready for lunch.
All the newest (free access) horoscopes are kept here. The 2003 annual horoscope and essays — called The Pisces Point — is stowed here. The 04 annual — called aquasphere — will be posted here in early December. To purchase the CD mouse back three words and click (ships early December). It's gonna be fun: radio is one of my passions.
Here is a collection of articles that reference Chiron. Here are a bunch of old monthly horoscopes covering 1999-2001, and here are some old weekly horoscopes. For access to some of my oldest writing still posted, check Chronogram.
The Information Bumper Cars.
You are more likely to find what you're looking for on this web page by chance than by design. Planet Waves is more like the information bumper cars than the information superhighway.
Trip around and you'll come across some rather interesting old stuff. But if you're stuck, search in Google with a search string that includes the words Planet Waves and something about the subject you're looking for. Sample strings could be: Planet Waves Chiron, Planet Waves Asteroids, Planet Waves Envionmental, Planet Waves Roller Skating, Planet Waves Genexhibitionist, and so forth.
The complexity of the site is caused by several facts: a) a lot of subject area is covered, including astrology, sexuality, ecological issues, political issues, and personal essays, and b) many articles don't link back to where you found them.
Another reason why Planet Waves is so complex is that we don't purge old postings (most of the time). So each time the site goes through an organizational stage, old menus may vanish but the articles remain live so that the search engines can find them.
Far more than you probably ever want to know
but may find yourself reading anyway.
What we call Planet Waves is a project hosted on three different domains, which happened as I slowly got a grip on how to run a web site and revised my organizational methods from utter chaos to mild, unpretentious semi-order, then started working with some trusty 2600-types who taught me more than I knew the day before. Then I needed a new site to host the weekly horoscope once it went pro, which it very much has. For reference, the three primary domains are: PlanetWaves.net, EricFrancis.com and PlanetWavesWeekly.com.
PlanetWaves.net hosts articles published between January 1999 (shortly after the site begain) and July 2001, most of which are not listed individually anywhere that I know of, but should be. EricFrancis.com hosts articles published from July 2001 through November 2003 (beginning when the weekly horoscope resumed after I took a break in the spring of 2000), including most of the newest run of weekly, monthly and annual horoscopes. PlanetWavesWeekly.com is the host of the weekly horoscope beginning in January 2003, mostly accessed by a nifty keyword area—but two pages are open access.
A bunch of my writing has appeared on StarIQ.com, and some old sites such as The Worlds of Eric Francis and Star Navigator. The Worlds site is no longer hosted anywhere besides the Wayback Machine — oh, yeah, articles from that era are also posted on the Chronogram site in New York, possibly as far back as 1997, which I would consider my early period of astrology writing. Anyway, the Wayback Machine is maintained by Archive.org, and is an attempt to archive each and every web page created — a vitally important, ambitious, expensive and pretty much imossible project, but they don't miss much. (You can if you have such fetishes even see the very first homepage of Google there.)
If you are a long-time reader remember reading something from long ago that you can't find, or that appears to be out of print, the chances are we have it on file; just email. Speaking of having things on file, many, many thanks to Jeanne Treadway, Mary Jane Stelle, Tracy Delaney, Pam Purdy, Keiko Ito, Chelsea Bottinelli and Jordan Laughlin,who have done formidable jobs archiving and organizing content on Planet Waves.
A bit about.
Astrology office and publishing house, Planet Waves is an organic heirloom of the original Internet ethos.
Staffed and created by an internationally, transgalactically scattered group of artists, writers and researchers, Planet Waves strives to honor the hot-blooded curiosity and creative impetus that distinguishes humanity from most iguanas, many space aliens and almost all politicians.
Founded by Eric Francis (the latest of his community publishing projects, including Generation magazine, reach student handbook, Student Leader News Service, The Underground Astrologer and Radio Navigator) and, from the outset, featuring artwork by Via Keller of Studio Psycherotica, Planet Waves contains most of Eric's writing on astrology, plus archives or links to his selected writing on environmental issues and sexuality.
We also offer a subscriber service. To find out more, please scoot over here.
Editors pondering picking up Eric's horoscope in your newspaper, magazine, zine or rag, you can request a media kit by calling us at (877) 453-8265 during business hours and after Sasquatch bathes in the stream behind the office, Pacific zone.
If you're interested in a personal astrology consultation, check here. If you're interested in a Tarot consulation, check here. Here is some astrology.
aquasphere login. aquasphere order page.
Currrent horoscopes.
October Monthly horoscope
Autumn 2003 horoscope
September Monthly horoscope.
August Monthly horoscope.
July Monthly horoscope.
2003 Annual Edition The Pisces Point.
Options to Hysterectomy a special section.
Q: You've left journalism altogether?
A: Well astrology the way I do it is journalism. I still write articles and I still publish a Web page. I'm still a columnist and I write essays. I still have some investigations going on in slow mode, mainly environmental stories that I'm always developing. I'm mostly out of news journalism, but I'm still an editor and I publish a general interest web page which does tend to obsess over politics at times. Astrology is more personal than we think of journalism. It's closer to home, with people writing about their relationships and families and their spiritual growth, their sexuality, and taking politics more personally. I guess that's the difference.
Q: Where do you write from?
A: From my desk in my home on Vashon Island. I haven't been traveling much lately, but once I get going I can stay away for a while.
Q: Explain the process of when you sit down and start writing your horoscopes.
A: Typically it starts with charts. Any moment can have a chart. The horoscope chart is just merely a picture of where the planets are in relation to each other and in relation to the horizon at any given moment. So it's a wheel with the planets in it, and the Earth's horizon, and you can stop time and you look at what's where. What's overhead, what's below, what's in the east, what's in the west. Then you try to make sense of the thing. And, usually charts are cast for a reason or for an event, so for the horoscope column, I'll pick a point in time, a full moon or a new moon, and I'll begin to work off of that, and I work with an unusually high number of planets. Currently there are more than 50,000 catelogued objects orbiting the sun. I work with about 50 to 100 of them more or less depending on the chart rather than the typical 'nine planets'. Nine planets is like saying the 'seven seas'. I don't use all of them for every chart, but I do use a bunch. They all add a little. Then I begin to just make up a story. It's really more akin to fiction writing than anything else, but so is when you come back from a government meeting and you've got notes in your notebook and you have to make up a story about what happened in that meeting. You may lead the article with an event in the meeting that took only five minutes, but most of the meeting was spent arguing about something else that wasn't so important to your editor. So if the board voted on something that only took five minutes, you might lead with that. Someone who attended the meeting, a voter or someone, might not understand that. So it's a little like that with astrology. I have to make a choice about what is important and prominent at any given time and then I begin to play off of that. So in one sense, it's very subjective.
Q: How do you make that choice?
A: Intuition. It's based on training, it's based on my value system, it's based on those things. It's based on the sequence of events leading up to and following it. Something also just might seem interesting. A lot of astrology is about pattern recognition, but everyone sees slightly different patterns.
Q: And that's why so many horoscopes are different on any given day, because each writer brings something different to the table?
A: Often completely different, but it's fun when we pick up on the same themes. One of the ways I learned astrology was I picked a couple of good writers and I began to back-engineer their columns. So the way I would learn astrology would be I would take the Patric Walker horoscope and I would take this thing called the ephemeris, which tells you where all the planets are, and I would look up what he was talking about. So I would say when it's written well, you should be able to see something about how it's working if you look.
Q: Is there such thing as an objective horoscope? Is there an objective way to make a prediction?
A: Well, it's not all about prediction in my view. It's more about interpreting the moment, I think much more so. In traditional astrology there is a set of very strict rules you can follow in which two astrologers looking at the same chart might come up with a similar interpretation. You never can really tell. That's about one chart pertaining to one question as opposed to one chart pertaining to the day's events for the entire world. So you see right away there the fact pretty much we're using one chart to talk about the events of the day or the week for everyone presents a certain challenge and that challenge is not just one of interpretation -- it's about framing the discussion. So, the answer is mostly no, you couldn't get the same thing. But deep in astrology, when you're well-trained and you've had a good teacher and you know what you're doing and you have the ability to both follow tradition and be creative, there's a point where you could say that this interpretation is the way it is and maybe convince someone. Astrologers tend to take an interest in how creative one or the other comes up with an interpretation from the chart. But, I think when you're on that level, it might sound like two Rabbis interpreting the Torah. As opposed to saying the Torah means one thing objectively.
Q: How were you trained?
A: A variety of ways. I was mentored, I chose people who I felt were strong astrologers and whose spiritual position I liked. And then a lot of practice and studying on my own and just doing it. I would say writing horoscopes has taught me more about astrology than anything else because it's very challenging to look at the chart and start coming up with something totally new for that day or that week. And so the creative process of astrology is the most important part of it. (track 15 8:50). It's a combination of learning the tradition and applying the creative process to it. Being a journalist was very helpful.
Q: How so?
A: It gave me the ability to put things into language that were difficult to understand. One thing about astrology is that you have to be really clear. You don't want to give people an airy-fairy reading in their horoscope. You also don't want to be too definitive. Part of the art of writing the column is having the right touch. Like a news story, you can't make it sound too important, but you can't make is sound like nothing. The poetry of it is writing in a way that's oblique enough so that the reader can bring a lot to it.
Q: You want to generalize it so much so people can get their own interpretations from it.
A: I would say general is the wrong word. I would say oblique is the right word, leaving it open to interpretation. It's important to be specific as well. The most important thing a person writing a horoscope can do is to not be afraid of being wrong because if you're afraid to be wrong, you're going to be wrong.
Q: How do you get people interested in the horoscopes you write?
A: I don't really have to do much. Readers just find me. I just began posting to the Web and it began propagating over time. I was on the Web close to the beginning. I was on American Online on an area in the UK going back to 1996 or 97, so right away I had a pretty wide readership. Some pagan people in the UK were helping putting together an area on AOL and I got recruited for that. I grew up with the Net at an astrologer unlike other astrologers who grew up with newspapers or exclusively in the print world. I came of age exactly the same time the Internet did.
Q: How old are you?
A: I'm 38.
Q: Are you carried anywhere in the print media?
A: I'm carried in a magazine out of New York called Chronogram. I stand in for the Cainer horoscope in the London Daily Mirror, as well as writing for a paper in Milwaukee, another in Washington, and a lot of web pages.
Q: How difficult is getting a gig?
A: There's only one astrologer per magazine, second of all, they tend and keep people a long time. So unlike freelance writing where you can jump around a lot, I think it's more challenging. We'll see. I think my column is really different than most people's.
Q: How's that?
A: I think I'm coming from a different place than most other astrologers. I have a good blend of the mundane and the mystical. I think I'm not afraid to tackle deep psychological issues even in a little 100-word blurb. I give a pretty in-depth analysis of the psychology of a particular moment. I would say if I specialize in anything, it's doing that. To be able to read the symbols off the chart and put them into an intelligible language that speaks to the conditions of a moment
Q: Is that what makes the best horoscope writers, those who can communicate well?
A: I think it's really important. After all, what ever is being conveyed is coming across trough communication. They could be the best astrologer in the world, but if they can't convey their idea, what good is it? That's probably why I think the best one's come from England.
Q: Why is that?
A: There's two reasons. One is that there is deep mystical tradition in the culture. You know Tolken comes from England. And they understand mysticism in a way that we don't. The Puritans got a hold of mysticism here and said that this is just evil. Also, the British were able to hide it. They just took the whole movement underground. Around the turn of the century it came back up. They have an older tradition with most things, of course. Their culture is more steeped in mysticism and it still has one foot in the Pagan world. The other reason is because Brits are more literate. And they're funnier.
