Hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, and earthquakes happen not just on the macrocosm.  They aso happen on the microcosm.  In your life as on the world stage, they are primal encounters with the four elements that shape reality, within us and arond us. When these mighty elemental storms strike, they remind us of our smallness and the fragility of the worlds we make.

Last night, on the eve of the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, another massive storm named Isaac barreled into New Orleans.  Isaac’s status as a Category 1 hurricane fell far short of the Category 5 devastation wrought by Katrina. Yet 12 hours after Isaac’s landfall, driving rain continues to swell rivers and strain levees–and it’s not forecast to end for 30 more hours.

Equally ominous are the energetic patterns revealed by the astrology of these two storms.

Mapmaker John Nelson’s stunning map of every hurricane on the planet since 1851–a haunting depiction of the fractal nature of reality.

At first glance, the astrological chart for Isaac’s landfall is reassuring.  The Katrina chart had “power” and “fate” written all over it–planets in the early degrees of the cardinal cross falling on  half the angles and a harsh and volatile T-square between Mars, Neptune, and Mercury. Isaac’s pattern is less fated and predetermined.  The chart angles fall midway in the mutable signs, and although the Ascendant and the Nadir are both boldfaced with planetary conjunctions, they are wider and thus not quite so intense.

Nonetheless, Neptune, who is the rule of the Isaac chart, closely opposes the Sun and widely opposes Mercury.  In his own sign, Neptune caries maximum strength.  In this storm, as in Katrina, one of America’s oldest cities confronts the water element in all its  archetypal potency–as she has throughout her history.  In the chart for New Orleans’ 1805 founding, Neptune squares the Sun.

A pivotal point of the Isaac chart, howeve, is saturated with hope and promise. Hand in hand with Neptune in the Isaac chart, hovering just above the Pisces Ascendant, is Chiron the Healer, carrying the energy of “a summons to rebirth.”

Neptune occupies a degree of the heavens that carries the energy of self-protection.  In the seven years since Katrina, New Orleans has spent $14 billion on improvements to its levee system. Today, eyes around the world are riveted on those levees as the rains continue to fall.

What fate awaits New Orleans when the storm clouds clear?  Isaac struck at a fateful moment of transits and progressions to the Katrina chart.  Whatever the coming hours and days bring, this storm is continuing to unfold a deepening and fateful relationship, for New Orleans and who love it, with the great forces of the cosmos.

When Katrina made landfall seven years ago, the Moon was at the very top of the chart. Luna was at her most powerful, in her own, oceanic sign of Cancer.  As Isaac struck, Katrina’s progressed, or evolving, Moon was just 3 degrees from the ascendant of the deadly 2005 storm. There’s a reason for that sense that “it’s all beginning again” that so many have had in recent days.  The portals of Katrina’s devastating power are being activated and  whether consciously or not,we all feel it.

Meanwhile, the Isaac chart’s wounded healer, Chiron, is within 2 degrees of an exact conjunction with the Katrina chart’s Uranus.  The possibility for a profoundly liberating healing is very real.  Isaac brought Pluto the Transformer to the very depths from which Karna arose, the Karina chart’s Nadir where Pluto was within 6 minutes of an exact conjunction.

And Uranus the Cosmic Awakener has just crossed the Katrina chart’s Descendant.

Hurricane Katrina and her still-evolving energetic pattern is a macrocosmic event in which each one of us is participating.  Eric Frances called Katrina the Awakener in a brilliant post written shortly after she struck. (Read it here at http://planetwaves.net/astrology/neworleans.html.)  You could also look at her as a gateway to the shift of ages occuring within us and around us. The Ascendant, Midheaven, Descendant, and Nadir of the Katrina chart are the very degrees being awakened within us all. These are the degrees Uranus and Pluto are catalyzing, as they dismantle what is outworn and outlived so that we can live again.

These two mighty forces clash again and again, seven times in all, between the summer of 2012 and the spring of 2015.  As they do, you, like every one of us, will reverberate with the profound transformation  that began in the city of New Orleans on August 29, 2005–and continues today.  For you are the cosmos, as it existed at the moment of your birth, and you are the world.  Like other cataclysmic events, Katrina and Isaac come to remind of Neptune’s most transcendent truths–ultimately, we are One life. Our fates are inextricably tied.