On June 3, 2023, I found myself speaking to an old classmate who sat behind an old scarred desk at the front of the room in his wooden cabin. A bit like a rustic schoolroom. The windows of the cabin were open, rain was pouring down and it was chilly. The windows were only closed by wooden shutters but were propped open and in the distance there was a tall, dark mountain. There was a staircase beside the desk with a hood over it and on the first step my cat was curled up sleeping. I remember thinking he was clever because under that hood he wasn’t getting wet unlike me. I was leaning against the stair railing and it was raining everywhere in the room.
Through the open window, on the mountain in the distance there was a dark body that was shriveled and covered in something like mold and a long string was attached from the body to my classmate. I was telling him that he needed to let his cousin go. I told him I couldn’t reach his cousin, he couldn’t reach his cousin, no one could. I noticed that he was locked in a square relationship to the desiccated body on the mountain who was long dead but he couldn’t separate himself. This was some ancient trauma. I was disappointed in him. I was brutal and told him he needed to stop looking, put the shutter down, and cut the strand. That was all that remained that could be done. He angrily told me I didn’t know what it was like to love someone. I was sad and told him I could cut it for him but he would still need to release the string. He refused.
Then I woke up. At breakfast, I told my husband about the dream. I hadn’t thought about this classmate in years. I mentioned it was like another dream I had after a funeral when a colleague had died and the atmosphere had been dreadfully sad, the congregation unwilling to relinquish the person, and I dreamed he came to ask me for help, he was tied down, needing help ascending my staircase. Souls should be able to fly but he couldn’t bring himself to release the ties and couldn’t make the upward flight. In this case, the deceased person was struggling to cut the ties and I excel at this. He wanted to try and ascend the stairs with them and so that is what we did but when we came to the place where I stop he had to cut them or go back down. He asked me to cut them and I did so. Once the ties were cut, he could move out on his journey. It was also like some other dreams where deceased persons would sit and discuss their lives with me. I often thought this was my way of saying goodbye to someone.
I couldn’t remember the date of this classmate’s birthday and I pulled out my phone to look them up. His obituary immediately loaded and I was shocked to find out he had died many months before. We had not been friends except when the people he wanted to impress weren’t around and then he was friendly. It was this very trait that kept me from considering him a true friend.
The symbol of the cousin on the mountain and the ties between them in a square relationship meant I might be able to read his natal chart. Literally, I expected to find Mercury square the Sun on his birthday. I intended to place Mercury in the tenth house to see what his astrology was saying. Mercury is the planet of your siblings and cousins. The Sun is your lifeforce, its you. The tenth house of career and public areas is the house of Capricorn and the mountain goat. Mountains. As I went to look up the details of where he was born, I found his mother had shared a cache of documents and pictures including his birth certificate on a large public platform with millions of subscribers and was able to find out his actual birth time.
Watching the Shawn Ryan Show on Youtube inspired me to share this story. Shawn seems to have a ninth house focus. One wonders if that is his real name. Shawn Ryan sounds like an Irish James Smith or the first two names of someone whose last name is missing. Secrecy. Scorpio. Yet his show is ninth house. Prominent Jupiter. Sagittarius. A Jupiter’s Quest. Something like that. Maybe a ninth house north node. Questing. Questioning. Anyway on the show, some fellow was talking about near death experiences and the Christian god and described a welcoming committee of soul friends and family that reminded me of Michael Newton’s Journey of Souls, Life between Lives. This however is not what my dreams are made of. Instead, I assist the soul up my staircase but come to a door in a Greek temple made of crystal that only they pass through. Beyond that is a flight or further climb.
In my ninth house north node journey, I have wrestled with belief. For all the effort I put into studying astrology, I don’t actually believe it is the answer. Maybe a clue, maybe just a hobby that passes the time. Ever since the shipwreck of my religion set me swirling on the gyre of Neptune’s ocean with no path or course set, I’ve become openminded to the possibilities without being willing to concede that any might be correct. My shipwreck leaves me in no doubt it is not for us humans to know. Only to seek but never to find.
Still, if past lives are real, I had to seek the most important past life that informs my life now. I saw through that persons eyes first and this gave me a context. Then through a meditation that turned into a dream, I got a name. A name I didn’t know. Slightly unusual. Junius. The first sound of the last name. Since I’m not a man, seemingly odd. It was unusual enough and context clear enough that I found two people who matched. Then I found out they were the same person. That person was just a regular, working fellow. Then researching who he was, he led me back to one place, my hometown, his birthplace and his first job.
The job was the bolt from the blue, immediately I recalled a memory of my childhood standing in front of his first workplace. A memory of my childhood that I believed to be so true without knowing how I knew that I told people then and wrote it on Wikipedia twenty years ago before the religious shipwreck, before I believed it might be possible that we have past lives, in an article that exists to this day. I looked around in my life and there I saw them all again. My soul family and soul friends had surrounded me all my life from my hometown to finding them again in my new home.
The cherry on top a single old newspaper article about Junius who described his journey from our shared home county to (for only a brief few years) the new hometown I now live in. His name inscribed in just one Census record here. To quote Edgar Cayce knowing about past lives is to help you understand this life, otherwise knowing that you lived, died and were buried under your grandmother’s cherry tree does not make you a better neighbor, citizen, mother or father. I get that. Knowing about him, my religious shipwreck isn’t the end of a 28 year waste of my life, it was a signature event. Not a waste but the point.
In the way astrology is very literal, my classmate had come to my school from another state and on his first day in class was required to sit right behind me. In astrology, you would write that a Jupiter in the third house. Foreigner in a school. His Jupiter in his third house is conjunct my Mars Venus conjunction. In the dream, he was sitting at a scarred desk in a rustic cabin. Jupiter can represent professors and his sitting at the desk suggests he might be Jupiter sitting in his third house.
When we were 16, I had actually met one of his cousins on a summer trip to Europe when she had joined our school’s group. Jupiter in the third. Traveller with a school group. I don’t recall anything other than one memory of her riding piggyback on him somewhere in Italy I think. They were very close and I wonder now if he was playing out some old archetype in an attempt to work out this aspect of his karma. The veil between the spirit and material world is very thin. And why June 3, 2023, why not sooner or even later?
There is a square between two planets with one in the tenth house. The Virgo Mercury in the seventh squares the retrograde Sagittarius Neptune in the tenth. He couldn’t cut the cords because of love and the seventh house is Venus’ house of partnership, marriage and relationship. This aspect tells us that he had a partnership with his cousin and there may have been a big, olympic sized public loss. Retrograde Sagittarius Neptune conjunct Midheaven in the tenth house.
Strange then that a great uncle of his made public news when he was tried for being part of an embezzlement of a bank’s money. In the 1950s, this uncle was accused of writing $2,000 worth of checks without funds to back them in a scheme which came to light when a bank cashier killed himself.
Imprisoned by ancient trauma, my classmate has a Aquarius Moon in the twelfth house. Aquarius trauma. Moon represents the past. Twelfth house can be prisons. The lost cousin on the mountain is the retrograde Sagittarius Neptune. The retrograde 11° Sagittarius Neptune is on the Sabian symbol “in the left section of an archaic temple, a lamp burning in a container shaped like a human body.” Literal. The cousin is a mouldering body on the side of the mountain.
The dream disappointment I felt in him was his failure to address the karma. Finding out he left behind a widow and young children left me shaking my head. The opportunities he had squandered to step out from his devotion to being part of the popular crowd. His Leo Sun ready to shine but he continued returning to the Aquarius Moon. This classmate had immense social power and, with a single word, could have silenced the bullies he chose to call his friends. I didn’t accept this treatment nor did I allow them to dish this treatment out to others in my presence and for that they ostracized me. Therein lies the problem, he needed his friend group. Aquarius Moon. He rarely, if ever, participated in bullying especially as he got older but he continued to accept the mistreatment his friends dished out to a host of people in our class. Whenever they were out of the picture, he was friendly. Twenty-four years after we last spoke to each other, he showed up and needed help.
It doesn’t surprise me his old friends aren’t letting him go. They were never spiritually mature. They were too concerned with themselves and he wasn’t concerned enough about himself.
Again and again, he had the chance to stop them or break ties with them. Plumbing the depths trying to find the place where an Aquarius Moon could eschew emotional safety from his friends and open the prison gate. I remember him running over to stop me coming to a class event to avoid the mistreatment and insults they threw in my direction. His running interference was sad, he needed to stand up for his values. I was fine, he wasn’t. It was all a training ground so he could practice trimming cords. No cords were ever cut and in the end, the one he came to address sat intact untouched for months.
The Cashier & the Suicide
Strange then that embezzlement story. The cashier, John F. Wagner, went to the bank vault and shot himself in the head before the bank examiners arrived that day. He knew they were coming. A suicide in the bank vault. Days later, a suicide note was found that indicated that $1.8 million (worth about $21,500,000 in todays dollars) was missing and identified twelve people who had received an advance. He said there were others. This loss broke the bank and the FDIC had to step in.
Mr. Wagner, who worked for the bank for twenty years, didn’t seem to profit from the scheme as all the money was given out to others. A tremendous amount of people showed up for his funeral, he had an honor guard, and he was much loved by the people in the town. No doubt since he was passing out cash. He struggled to say no and had made loans and cashed bad checks to people in need. Sound familiar. This uncle’s life overlapped the life of my classmate but John Wagner’s story looks a lot like the square aspect between Mercury and Neptune. What was he thinking? It has occurred to me that my classmate is the next sequential incarnation after the bank cashier. Reincarnation.
It is a compelling chart suggesting that my classmate might have once been John Wagner. Known as Johnny he genuinely seems to have died because of others taking advantage of his kindness, good nature and an unbalanced trait of wanting to please too much. Wanting to be liked to death. After he died, he caused the FDIC to take a big loss. Money is created and so conversely it can also be destroyed. That is the crime for which Johnny Wagner was guilty. He was destroying money through unpaid debts.
Then why a cousin and not a friend? The Wagner Gemini retrograde Pluto conjunct retrograde Neptune opposing the Sun suggests another even deeper story underlying those transits. Gemini is the zodiac sign ruled by Mercury. Deep down, he told me it is a cousin who was lost on the mountain and for love he cannot cut the old binding tie.
The long dead Johnny Wagner and the dream of June 3, 2023 activates my classmate’s Mercury-Neptune square and this links the events together. The same pattern is drawn in both charts. A story retold again and again of an ancient trauma. This is how reincarnation seems to work. We play out the story, then we play out one that rhymes with it. Some replay it more than they should. My classmate got a new chance once he was born and my dreams suggest some souls stay spiritually active as their previous selves before moving on.
So, I guess there might be a next time. I spoke to someone at work about the dream, the one who is sure names have archetypical meaning, and why I sometimes look up what a name means, and he was shocked. He immediately pointed me to C. S. Lewis’ book The Great Divorce. It was a strange twist to read about the rain.
The June 3, 2023 transit suggests illumination of the problem (transit Sun oppose natal retrograde Sagittarius Neptune). The solution lays there in his own horoscope, the north node conjunct Uranus, allowing him to break the cord. He may free himself anytime. But at the end of October 2029, there will be a Sun-Mercury-Jupiter conjunction alignment with his north node. When Jupiter transits my classmate’s north node, I have hope he will cut the ancient cord of the long ago love for his cousin and release himself from his ancient prison. If not, just maybe we will try something like it again to better effect.