SUSAN MILLER: Age of Aquarius

Susan Miller, the queen of astrology, answered our call to give hints as to how stars could shed light upon our path through these turbulent times of global change.

Your website Astrology Zone has been my guilty pleasure for decades now, since my early twenties. I came up with the idea of giving you a call for an interview, when I saw in my May horoscope that you were telling how a new publication venture could go very well for me! I was not sure if you would answer the call…
Sure! I love Turkish people. When you go on Twitter, you get other Americans around 3 p.m. in New York. If you stay a little longer, you get Europe. If you stay until about midnight, you get Turkish people. And if you would stay until 3 or 4 in the morning, you get India! It’s so funny how the whole world comes together. I am always up late writing, because each sign takes me seven hours to write. I can only write two signs a day. I start on the 20th of the month. I do two charts, a New Moon and a Full Moon for every sign. We prepare these 24 charts per month at the beginning of the year. Then I start writing with Aries and then Taurus, by the time I get to Libra I’ve definitely memorized the month. Even by the time I am writing the last sign, Pisces, I give them 100%.

I know your mom had a special role in your career choice. What did you learn from her?
I was born with a birth defect and I was in the hospital for almost a year. I did homeschooling in the hospital. Then I came home, but I was going to be at home for two and a half more years. I had a lot of therapy, every day for six hours. My doc said: “You are 14 years old and we’re going to get that nerve back!” I was paralyzed from the knee down. I wore a big brace up to my hip, which was made out of metal. It had two crutches. We lived on the second floor of a brownstone on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I was isolated throughout my high-school years, it was weird. I went to college at New York University, but it was a little hard socially. No one would be my friend, because I was one of few women majoring in business. They thought I was there to get married, but I was there to learn.

Getting back to my mother: I wanted to know if my therapy was going to amount to a good ending. So I begged her to teach me astrology. She had taken an 8-year correspondence class with her sister’s insistence. She said, “Ok! I’ll study it and I’ll show you it doesn’t work.” After she studied it, she found out it actually works! So, my mother knew astrology, but never did consultations with people. She only did it for the family. It was a secret. She never told other people that she knew astrology. She said it wasn’t accepted.

I kept asking her to teach me, because of my leg. She kept resisting. But I was persistent. So finally, she started teaching me. But she said: “You will study for a year, and you wouldn’t know anything. You must study for 12 years! You’re only going to read for the family and I must be in the room while you’re reading.” I didn’t tell anyone and it would be 20 years before I would charge for a chart reading!

THE FORESIGHT OF INTERNET BECOMES A REALITY

What encouraged you to go online as early as 1995 and start your website?
When I was 9 years old, we were at my grandmother’s house in the country, sitting under the lilac bush. I asked my mom, “What am I going to do when I grow up?” She said, “Let me check your chart. Ok, here it is: You’re going to write when you grow up. At the end of your thirties, some newly invented form of communication -so new that we don’t know the name of it yet- will change the way you work and will be the channel that you’ll make your ultimate contribution to the world. That is in your midheaven. You have Aquarius out there, that’s why it’s a new invention. Uranus rules Aquarius, so it’s something that runs on electricity.” She was drying her hands from washing dishes. She said, “Look, there are little dots or lines that go through the air that are invisible. And it has something to do with your writing.” Oh my god! That was the internet she was talking about, but she didn’t know it and I didn’t know it back then!

Years later, I went to college, and then worked for magazines like Life, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan and then became an agent for commercial photographers, because I loved photography. My biggest client was Coca Cola. We were also shooting Cheerios. I took the creative director and the copywriter of Saatchi & Saatchi to lunch, after a job that came out really well. This is how one day, one minute can change your life! I was reading their charts to thank them and the creative director Scott said, “My wife would love you! She is the creative director of Warner Books, every cover goes to Jackie.” I said, “Oh, I have to meet her, I love books!” He said, “She works in the Time & Life building across the street from Radio City Music Hall.” So I went up there and we became fast friends. She would give me books, take me down the block to a very expensive and elegant restaurant. I would read her chart every six months. One day I said to her, “Jackie, you have to buy a raffle ticket!” She said, “No, I’m not going to do it! It’s a waste of money.” But I insisted, “You have to do it, you have a rare aspect. Look, I’ll narrow it down. Buy it between December 15th and 31st.” Well, she bought one and forgot about this talk. On New Year’s Eve, she went out with her husband, came back home and her answering machine was blinking. “Congratulations Jackie, you’ve won the first prize. You’ve won the Porsche!”

Jackie got me a little book in the end and I really loved writing it! It sold and did great in a year. One day she said: “Now I am sending you upstairs to the webmaster. They don’t know what they want. Why don’t you tell them what they should have?” Time Warner Inc. was offering me a spot on Pathfinder, which was the name of their site before AOL. I remember being in the taxi, going down towards Times Square. It was a very hot day in July and I knew this was everything my mother had predicted. The internet was just starting in 1995.

I went upstairs and met “the suits”. Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth were sitting across from me. I said, “What do you want?” They said, “Something short for women every day.” I said, “No. This is not a female thing. Men need to know the future as well. In ancient days in Mesopotamia, only the King was able to afford the astrologer, who happened to be a mathematician at the nearby university!” They were looking at me: “Sure, we could include men.” You know, I write in a very non-feminine way. I’m a girly girl, and could wear an evening gown vacuum cleaning, believe me! But I have to keep the fluffiness down.

When I said the texts should be long, they said “No, web wisdom! It should be 500 words.” I said, “Well, astrology need detail and we have the room, it’s not going to cost us anything. We need to do this once a month.” They said, “That’s crazy! Everybody else is doing every day.” I said, “The way I write is so detailed that I think they will come back three times.” Actually Google Analytics says today people come back 2.9 times a month and 52% are from outside the US. That’s how I started and I grew fast. When you are starting a business, use your guts.

“Now, our solar system is leaving the Age of Pisces (or the age of religion) where we built cathedrals and had beautiful art. Now we are going into the Age of Aquarius. Everybody has a different idea when this started, but I think we entered it when Sputnik went up, triggering going to the Moon and everything else.”

PASSAGE TO A NEW COSMIC AGE

In what ways popular astrology differs from ancient teachings?
There are always new things. The ancients only new Mercury through Saturn. They didn’t know about Uranus, Neptune or Pluto. Those are all new planets. Pluto was found in 1930, and that’s when the age of atomic bomb began, as Pluto rules destruction, death and rebirth. It rules the Phoneix rising from the ashes. It rules the masses. It also rules viruses and it is the cause of the problem we’re having right now…

On your website, you mention this phenomenon of Pluto and Uranus and how they interplay to spread this virus.
And Jupiter! Jupiter and Pluto meet every 13 years. Well, they’ve met this month (June), and they are both retrograde -kind of sleepy and weak. But they are meeting again on November 12th, when they will be strong. And that’s going to trigger a second wave. We’re going to start feeling it at the end of September, straight through November and part of December. But I do feel that we’ll have some kind of treatment or vaccine by Christmas, or January 6th at the very latest. That’s according to my mathematics.

What I like about astrology is that it makes us think in terms of millennia and feel like part of the history of the universe. You know, hippies first started talking about the transition to the Age of Aquarius in the sixties… What were they talking about?
The Earth rotates in three ways and everybody thinks only in two ways. Morning and night: that’s one way, right? Summer, fall, winter, spring: that’s another. But there’s a third way. Imagine our solar system on a dinner plate, spinning and spinning… As it spins, it goes in an elliptical course and it goes backward. It takes 2,500 years for our solar system to go through a sign. Now, it’s leaving the Age of Pisces (or the age of religion) where we built cathedrals and had beautiful art. Now we are going into the Age of Aquarius. Everybody has a different idea when this started, but I think we entered it when Sputnik went up, triggering going to the Moon and everything else.
All the astrologers expect the grand mutation to take place this year! What’s happening is this: Jupiter is meeting with Saturn, which happens every 20 years. So astrologers are like: “Oh, 2020 is the year!” For the past 200 years, they’ve always met in an earth sign: Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn, except for the year 1980. But I’ll get back to that.

What happened over the last 200 years? We built castles, cathedrals, roads, bridges, tunnels, railroads. We started the assembly line and manufacturing. Everything about modern life started in the last 200 years. Now it’s changing. These two planets are now meeting in Aquarius and for the next 200 years, they are going to meet in air signs: Aquarius, Gemini, Libra. Earth signs are very tangible, whereas air signs are very intellectual. It’s not what you have that gives you status in the future, but it’s what you know and what you’ve experienced.

There was an exception in 1980, when two planets met at Libra. That was the only time they met in an air sign and they went back to Taurus in 2000. I think the babies who were born in 1980 (minus and plus 5 years) will lead us into the next age, because they are born with this in their chart and understand it in a way that none of us can understand. We are walking across that bridge and will see the difference. We’ll have advances in medicine with CRISPR technology, taking out things from our genes that could hurt us. Governments have to make rules about designer babies and things like that, but they are late in making them…