Even though we all knew Pope Francis was seriously ill, it was still a surprise to get an early AM text here in LaLa Land that he had died right after Easter Sunday.

He seemed like a good human, and for non-Catholic atheists like myself, a veritable breath of fresh air after the last two conservative popes and all of their joylessness.

He was the first Jesuit pope, and thus also, techinically, a “Black Pope.” Of course, the Jesuits of today are far less radical and brutal than were the original Jesuits that were banned in 1773, but a Jesuit Pope is a big deal in the scheme of things.

Francis did set that historic mark for the Catholics, and he made it through his term without a scandal, while holding the hardliners at bay. I would say it was a successful Papacy, but it’s not like anyone cares what I think, so on to the ‘strology.

The Charts

It didn’t take long for astrologers on social media to post their charts for his reported time of death of 7:35 AM, and here is my rendition of it:

Death-dealing Pluto, conjunct the Moon, on the midheaven, is almost too good to be true in astrology world. But, Uranus, the planet of suprises, in that mundo square, suggests that the ending was indeed abrupt. (The two most important points in any astrology chart are the mideaven and the ascendant.) I will be exploring the secular astrology much more in depth in a future blog post, but for now, I want to focus only on the sky maps, which are far more interesting, especially for the folks who follow my other blog – occursionmedia.com – that goes in depth about the very peculiar astrology of the surprise resignation of Benedict XVI in 2013, which in turn led to the term of Francis. (Francis was Pope for 12 years, but presided over 13 Easters.)

The next sky map shows the Moon/Pluto conjunction just below the midheaven [MC]. The “midheaven” in an astrology chart is not the actual middle of the heavens, but just the intersection of the ecliptic and the local meridian:

When we zoom out from that view, we see that Cygnus, the Northern Cross, is at the zenith, which is the sky directly up overhead from the location at hand, and that the center of the cross – Sadr – is at its highest point – it’s culmination. As you can see, the mideaven is much closer to the ground than is the Northern Cross:

The backbone of the thesis of my e-book, On The Exaltation of Mars, contends that the Northern Cross’ central star Sadr is aligned to Mars’ exaltation degree of 28° Capricorn in the ancient fixed “Fagan” zodiac; and, that exaltation degree is marked by two stars – one in Capricorn, and one in Aquarius, that make an almost perfect lineal alignment, as shown in the next graphic:

You can read my work on the Mars exaltation star alignements here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Without reading up on it, I can briefly say that the former pope – Pope Benedict XVI – renounced his office on the day that the Sun passes between the two stars shown at left in Figure 5 – Deneb Algedi and Sadalsuud. That day was February 11, 2013, and the time was about 11:30 am.

Furthermore, that day was the 84th anniversary of the signing of the Lateran Treaty that created “Vatican City” as its own country, and also worked out the details of how Italy and the Vatican would coexist.

In my view, those events, and now the passing of Francis, point to a high reverence for the alignment to the Northern Cross within the inner sanctum of the Catholic priesthood. And, yes, this means that astrology is central to the Vatican as an institution. It’s not the kind of popularized zodiac sign astrology one finds in the newspaper next to the comics, but instead a very elegant and ancient “whole-sky” astrology that is personified and allegoried in the central biblical story of that Iezus fellow.

Now, having been around the planet for a while, I know that it’s hard to pin down a time of death for anyone that wasn’t hit by a train or crushed by a 16-ton weight on the set of Monty Python. The stoppage of breath or a pulse is a good clue, but was there a resuccitation effort? Where he hooked up to those machines that show the squggly lines and go “beep”? We may never know.

How the people around the Pope used to determine if he is dead is even more strange, with a silver hammer that they knock on his head to see if he goes “Ouch!” And, therefore, I see this report of an exact time of death as a bit dubious, and perhaps a tad fabulist. I can imagine it would have been easy for the inner circle to notice that the Pope had dies, and thn simply look up which time of day Sadr culminated on a smartphone astronomy app, and then noticing that the Moon and Pluto are aligned, agree on that time and officialize it to the world.

They could have said, “just after 7 AM …”, for instance, and still have been true to the event. But, to report exactly 7:35 AM, which is within only a few seconds of the center of the Northern Cross itself culminating over the Vatican? It’s almost too good to be true in astrological terms, and probably is.

Then again, the whole process that got Cardinal Begoglio into the Papacy 12 years ago began with an alignment of the Sun to Sadr and the Northern Cross. So, heck, why not just sew the whole matter up tightly for eternity with some sacred ritual astrology moment? If the Pope died 8 hours earlier, would any of us be any wiser? Would it matter to anyone outside of the obsessive-compulsive clergy? Only the close circle of a handful of people deep in the Vatican know the truth, and they’ll never fess up to the profane world, let alone Ed Kohout. No, we only see what they want us to see, and what they want us to see is 7:35 AM.

The truth we can see, then, could be something that these two popes wanted us to see – that the “true cross” is in the firmament – the heavens, and that the Gospels are an elaborate allegory of the enternal motions of the infinite cosmos that our puny little minds can never hope to understand.

What is God? The mystery of it all. Does the mystery deserve our awe, our wonder, our fear, and our revernece? Of course it does. Humans are able to have awe and wonder, unlike my cat or your horse. Our human gift is that special awareness of the magnificence of nature. It is what makes us sacred (uniquely elevated) in the realm of nature.

Oh, gawd, I’m starting to sound like some smarmy Deep Pockets Chopra lecture. Please, forgive me! 😉

I have more to say on Francis and his tenture, because much of it is highly interesting, but I wanted to post this opening salvo in a timely manner. It’s not every day a celestial cross just falls into my astro-lap.

►Ed