Linda Goodman's Sun Signs (71 page)

The fish takes on the color of his surroundings. If you shut your Pisces employee in a small cubicle with drab furnishings, bare floors and drapeless windows, he'll begin to look like the office itself. You'll look up one day and there he'll be—an exact imitation of his immediate working world. His conversation will be drab, his ideas bare and dull. As you stare at this listless, plain, cold and colorless creature with nondescript clothing and a mousy personality, you'll wonder what happened to that person you hired who was bright, sunny and full of fresh imagination, whose conversation was rich and sparkling and who wore vivid, cheerful clothes. Believe me, such a Neptunian transformation is easier to remedy than other personnel problems. Just hang some gay, green drapes in his office, cover the floor with soft, emerald carpeting, and plunk a vase of happy daisies on his desk. Pipe in some soft, low music, smile at him once an hour, on the hour, and the fish you hired will reappear in his true colors. The Piscean personality is elusive, but it's amazingly easy to reel it in, when you use the right bait.

Your Pisces assistant may be a little sloppy at home, but she'll probably be neat at the office. She'll daydream on her own time and try to be methodical during working hours. Of course, there are exceptions, when her mind can wander in odd directions. There's a Pisces woman I used to work with in a radio station who had the most peculiar filing system. I don't think it was permanent. It may have had something to do with the fact that her mind was on a novel she was writing on weekends. One day the boss asked her why the drawer in the filing cabinet marked “L” was so full it was always popping open and cracking him on the shin. Her answer was unexpected, to say the least. “Because of all those letters,” she informed him efficiently. In all fairness to Pisces, however, she did have a Sagittarius ascendant and an Aquarius Moon, which can make for a little loopiness when they're mixed up like that.

After she left to peddle her novel in New York, the filing problems became really tangled for a spell. The first week she was gone, one of the announcers needed a music theme for a Notre Dame football game. Rushing over to the record file, he hurriedly checked under N for Notre Dame. (He was looking for the song that goes, “Cheer, cheer, for old Notre Dame” …) Not finding it under N, he checked the letter C, thinking perhaps she had filed it under the lyric. It wasn't there, either. Perspiring nervously, for it was now one minute to game time, he realized she may have tucked it away under the title, “Victory March.” He flipped open the file. No such luck. The game went on the air sans music that day. Weeks later, the record turned up. The Pisces had filed it under F. Why? You can't guess? For “Fighting Irish,” of course. It was perfectly logical to her. That's how everybody referred to the team in the office pool. Well, it does make some sense.

The average female fish will be a little more conventional. She'll be gentle and considerate, and get along beautifully with the other members of your staff. She may even be a sort of den mother, if you can call the office a den. The other employees will go to her with all their troubles, minor and major. You may cry on her shoulder yourself on occasion, she's such a sympathetic listener. This woman may read the cards for fun (though she'll secretly take it seriously), and it's a cinch she'll be able to read your mind—so be careful what you're thinking when she passes your desk.

An occasional Pisces employee can be fussy or critical, but they usually won't be energetic enough about it to be really annoying. These people need nearly as many compliments as Aries and Leo to feel secure, but be sure you're sincere, because they'll sense it quickly if you're not. If you have reason to scold a Pisces, you may wonder where the fish went for a day or so. He didn't leave. Not yet. There he is, hiding behind the outgoing mail basket on his desk, trying to pretend he's invisible by not speaking, barely moving and hardly breathing. He has been hurt, and you'll have to do something very sweet and lovely to make him brighten. The fish is ultra sensitive, remember. When your mood changes, so will his. Pisces has a way of cutting himself off from others when situations become painful. He seeks the sunlight and rosy, beautiful emotions. When gray or black appears, he dives down deep to escape. A thoughtless word can make him weep inside, although he'll probably tell a joke to disguise it. Pisces has a way with a clever line, and his humor, though it's not ever obvious, is seldom faraway.

Money won't mean a lot to your Pisces employee. He'll talk a good salary and bonus, but he'll hardly notice if he has to take a temporary cut in pay when business is slow (unless he has a large family to feed). Actually, many Pisces men and women are happy with a reasonable wage, as long as you're open-minded about loans. The fish will often approach you with empty pockets and a big smile a day or so before payday, and charmingly ask for a light touch to see him through. He may forget to pay it back unless you remind him. His intentions are honest, but there's always something extra he needs. The chances are just as good he gave it to someone else. Money ordinarily passes through Pisces like water through a sieve. He's sort of a middle man for cash. He'll borrow a hundred from you, then turn around and hand it to a man whose wife needs an operation. As neglectful as Pisces may be to repay your loan to him, he'll happily give you his last dime if you're temporarily short, and he probably won't be in any more of a hurry to get it back than he was to return the hundred he got from you earlier. In fact, it sometimes gets so confusing, you may forget who owes what to whom. That's the way the typical Pisces sees the whole monetary setup anyway. In a hazy way, he feels money was created to spread around. When a person needs it, the cash should be there. When you don't need it, you pass it on. It's a kind of bread-cast-on the-waters theory. It works surprisingly often for the fish, but such Neptune philosophy can bewilder other Sun signs. (Of course, a Virgo, Cancer or Capricorn ascendant, or perhaps an Aquarius or Taurus Moon can spoil all the fun.)

More Pisces employees quit than are fired. They're too elusive and too shrewd about human nature to wait for the painful hook. Sensing your displeasure in advance, the fish will wriggle away before you get a chance to embarrass him. You'll find the single Piscean man less apt to leave a job lightly than the married one, whose wife probably works. In fact, her willingness to work if necessary may have been one of her main attractions, though romantic love was probably equally important. The female fish may only be marking time until some man comes along to rescue her from repulsive competition, unless she's involved in a creative endeavor she thinks of as a career.

There's little danger the Pisces employee is after your job. He probably secretly pities you for the responsibilities you carry. After all, it's tough to move around with burdens on your back, and Pisces seeks a changing scene. The length of time he brightens your office will depend on the variety of changes it offers his wandering nature. When the snails begin to bore him, or when the whales and sharks threaten to devour him, he'll glide away. The Neptune employee will never get stuck in a bunch of seaweed.

Shake her snow-white feathers, tune in to her nonsensical wavelength, and old Mother Goose may show us a secret message. There may be a pearl of wisdom hidden in the apparently childish prattle of her nursery rhyme.

How many miles to Babylon? It seems to be quite a leap from the sandal-clad people of Chaldea and the jeweled, perfumed Pharaohs of Egypt to the space age—from the lost continent of Atlantis to the jet-propelled Twentieth Century. But how far is it, really? Perhaps only a dream or two.

Alone among the sciences, astrology has spanned the centuries and made the journey intact. We shouldn't be surprised that it remains with us, unchanged by time, because astrology is truth, and truth is eternal. Echoing the men and women of the earliest known civilizations, today's contemporaries repeat identical phrases: “Is Venus your ruling planet?” “I was born when the Sun was in Taurus.” “Is your Mercury in Gemini too?” “Wouldn't you just know he's an Aquarian?”

Astrological language is a golden cord that binds us to a dim past while it prepares us for an exciting future of planetary explorations. Breath-taking advances in all fields of science are reminding us that “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (even if your name is Sam or Sydney instead of Horatio). Arthur C. Clarke's concept of space tourism is no longer a fantastic dream and the concept of test tube babies as described in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is now clearly a reality.

Could it be that the science fiction writers have a better idea of the true distance between yesterday, today and tomorrow than the white-coated men in their sterile, chrome laboratories? Einstein knew that time was only relative. The poets have always been aware, as have the wise men, down through the ages. The message is not new. Long before today's overwhelming interest in astrology, daring men of vision like Plato, Ptolemy, Hippocrates and Columbus respected its wisdom; and they've been kept good company by the likes of Galileo, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Sir Isaac Newton, Dr. Carl Jung, and Stephen Hawking. You can add many Presidents to the list; also great astronomers like Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler and Dr. Gustave Stromberg and Edwin Hubble. And don't forget numerous Nobel Prize winners, all of whom have made significant contributions to the fields of science and mathematics.

In 1953, Dr. Frank A. Brown, Jr. of Northwestern University, made a startling discovery while he was experimenting with some oysters. Science has always assumed that oysters open and close with the cycle of the tides of their birthplace. But when Dr. Brown's oysters were taken from the waters of Long Island Sound and placed in a tank of water in his Evanston, Illinois laboratory, a strange pattern emerged.

Their new home was kept at an even temperature, and the room was illuminated with a steady, dim light. For two weeks, the displaced oysters opened and closed their shells with the same rhythm as the tides of Long Island Sound—one thousand miles away. Then they suddenly snapped shut, and remained that way for several hours. Just as Dr. Brown and his research team were about to consider the case of the homesick oysters closed, an odd thing happened. The shells opened wide once again. Exactly four hours after the high tide at Long Island Sound—at the precise moment when there would have been a high tide at Evanston, Illinois, if it were on the sea coast—a new cycle began. They were adapting their rhythm to the new geographical latitude and longitude. By what force? By the moon, of course. Dr. Brown had to conclude that the oysters' energy cycles are ruled by the mysterious lunar signal that controls the tides.

Human energy and emotional cycles are governed by the same kind of planetary forces, in a much more complicated network of magnetic impulses from all the planets. Science recognizes the moon's power to move great bodies of water. Since man himself consists of seventy percent water, why should he be immune to such forceful planetary pulls? The tremendous effects of magnetic gravity on orbiting astronauts as they get closer to the planets are well-known. What about the potential correlation between lunar motion and women's cycles, including childbirth—and the repeated testimony of doctors and nurses in the wards of mental hospitals, who are only too familiar with the influence of the moon's changes on their patients? Did you ever talk to a police officer who had to work a rough beat on the night of the full moon? Try to find a farmer who will sink a fence rail, slaughter a pig or plant crops without astrological advice from his trusted Farmer's Almanac. The movements of the moon and the planets are as important to him as the latest farm bill controversy in Congress.

Of all the heavenly bodies, the Moon's power is more visible and dramatic, simply because it's the closest body to the earth. But the Sun, Venus, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto exercise their influences just as surely, even though from further away. Many scientists believe plants and animals are influenced by cycles at regular intervals, and that the cycles are governed through forces such as electricity in the air, fluctuations in barometric pressure and the gravitational field. These earthly forces are originally triggered by magnetic vibrations from outer space, where the planets live, and from where they send forth their unseen waves. Phases of the moon, showers of gamma rays, cosmic rays, X-rays, undulations of the pear-shaped electro-magnetic field and other influences from undefined sources are constantly penetrating and bombarding the atmosphere around us. No mineral or living organism escapes it. And that includes living human beings.

Dr. Harold S. Burr, who was the emeritus Professor of Anatomy at Yale's Medical School, stated that a complex magnetic field not only establishes the pattern of the human brain at birth, but continues to regulate and control it through life. He further stated that the human central nervous system is a superb receptor of electro-magnetic energies, the finest in nature. (We may walk with a fancier step, but we hear the same drummer as the oysters.) The millions of cells in our brains form a myriad of possible circuits through which electricity can be channeled.

Evidence seems to indicate that the mineral and chemical content and the electrical cells of our bodies and brains respond to the magnetic influence of sunspots, eclipses and planetary movements. We are synchronized, like all other living organisms, metals and minerals, to the ceaseless ebb and flow of the universe; however, we need not be imprisoned by it, because we also possess free will. The soul, in other words, is superior to the power of the planets. Unfortunately, most of us fail to exercise our free will (i.e. the power of the soul) and are just about as helpless to control our destinies as Lake Michigan or an ear of corn. The purpose of the astrologer is to help us gain the knowledge of how to avoid drifting downstream—how to fight the current.