Is This Basket Configuration A Real Thing?

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/].

Happy Friday, everybody. Today we're going to talk about the so-called basket configuration that's in the sky, not because I really want to talk about this, but because I've been getting so many questions about it, and it felt like, yeah, okay, fine, let's talk about it.

It is a really interesting configuration of planets in the sky, whether we call it a basket or whether a basket is or isn't a thing, we're going to talk about the configuration, and hopefully make some sense out of it, and also talk a little bit more about large grand aspect patterns, the grand cross, the grand trine, the yad, all of these kinds of things, so we'll talk a little bit about that today, so hopefully it'll be a little bit of an astrology lesson, while also talking about this interesting configuration of outer planets that's taking place this month.

Hopefully, it'll be practical, instructive, interesting. But before we get into it, remember to like and subscribe, share your comments, your reflections, give us that little thumbs up, it really helps. Transcripts of all these daily talks always on the Nightlight website, that's nightlightastrology.com Head over there.

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All right, let's show you what this Barbos - it's called Barbos Basket. Now, today I don't have notes, I'm just kind of going off the cuff. No, I shouldn't say I don't have notes - I don't have five things to watch for. I do have notes, I always have notes: Jupiter to Uranus, Uranus to Neptune, Neptune to Pluto, Pluto to Jupiter. So that's the basket.

Now this configuration is mostly harmonious. The harmonious piece here that can be seen is Pluto trining Uranus Neptune. Neptune trining Jupiter, Pluto sextile Neptune, Neptune sextile Uranus, Uranus sextile Jupiter. The only real tense part of it is the Jupiter opposition to Pluto. So this opposition here is a real stress point, but otherwise the planets are connected by sextiles and by trines, so it's a beautiful little configuration, all right, so that's what we're going to talk about.

This configuration, let's just speed it up and show you, so it's pretty much exact right now, and certainly here at the late part of July, during the Jupiter Pluto opposition, all four planets are at the same degrees, four degrees of their respective signs, and then we start seeing that transition, probably right around the Jupiter Cazimi moment, which is July 29. We're going to see these planets starting to pull apart from each other just a little bit.

We'll see the Pluto and Uranus are getting a little farther away in August, and Neptune is also kind of pulling apart, so now these outer planets are going to stay configured for a while, Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus, but the Jupiter piece that really kind of creates that big grand pattern pulls away pretty quickly here by the end of July, but it's a very powerful configuration. And people have been asking me about it.

Well, what's with this basket? Is a basket a real thing? That's what I've been. Is it a Hellenistic thing? You know. Oh, God forbid that it isn't. I'm just kidding. So, Barbot, Andre Barbeau, I think his name was, so he's a very influential French astrologer who did mundane astrology. He died somewhat recently, I think. I think I want to say it was in the 2010s.

Anyway, he was not a natal astrologer as much as he was a mundane astrologer, and he looked at the correlation throughout his career of the outer planetary alignments, Jupiter through Pluto, he contributed something called the cyclic index, which I am not admittedly an expert on, and I haven't, like, studied his work closely, so I'm just kind of giving you the basic, but it, the cyclic index has to do with how closely clustered together or spread apart the five slow moving planets, Jupiter through Pluto, are over periods of time.

He was trying to understand rhythms of mundane collectives, civilizations, empires, so to speak, like ancient mundane astrology over long planetary cycles. So his work would be a little bit more like Richard Tarnas' work than, say, Liz Greene's natal work, if that makes sense, in case you're not familiar with the distinction between mundane and, like, natal, but his cyclic index is not the same as the basket, the basket is a particular type of configuration that he named within his mapping of these outer planetary cycles, low index moments within his scheme.

Let's call it scheme, is that the I don't know, his map planet scheme sounds like shady, like a schema is more like anyway, low index would be planets clustered and high index would be planets dispersed. Now, again, that's about as much as I know about his work. I'm again not like a student of his work, but he became.. he's had some remarkable predictions on a mundane level.

If I remember correctly, he, something about his cyclic index, I don't remember what it was, coincided pretty closely with the pandemic in 2020, but the problem with the basket, which is a configuration that's in the sky right now, it's a part of his mapping of these outer planetary cycles. I first of all, I would just say, is a basket a real thing? People are asking me, is a basket a real thing. Here's my answer to that.

It's just the name. It's just an.. it's like looking in the clouds. I see a rabbit, I see a bumblebee, whatever. You know, I don't think the.. I mean, you could synchronicities, and you know, I'm all about interesting namings being synchronistic. So, if a basket has some synchronistic divinatory meaning, then great, but I don't think you should care too much about what you're calling it, right?

It's just a configuration of planets, is it a real configuration of planets? Yes, absolutely, you can see I just mapped it out for you, but is there something literal about basketness that I would say take it more as poetry, and the problem is that when people take an idea, like, I mean, just think about it, Barbos basket, right, and then all of a sudden you see people attaching prophecy to it, you see the shock thumbnails of the really serious everything's gonna change, you know, it's like I'm being a bit of an ass, but you get what I mean, it can get a little apocalyptic, so what do we want to say about Barbos basket?

We've reduced a lifetime of his work and research right now at this moment into a meme about a basket, you know, like we'd say that, but I think, right now, honestly, just observing the amount of people talking about it, that are coming to me, talking to me about it, it feels like, what do they call them, Rorschach tests, people are either projecting apocalypse or utopia onto a geometric figure that was given a creative name by a mundane astrologer, and I'm not saying he wasn't a good one, or that the configuration itself isn't meaningful.

I just think we have to be careful, because the ancient traditions that practiced astrology had some pretty consistent things that they said about reality, like the big one is that everything is constantly changing and impermanent, which means there are no two baskets, there are no two moments that are exactly alike, and so we always have to avoid the trap of abstraction, and abstraction would be to look at large epic geometric patterns that are being formed between the planets, devoid of any context, and projecting onto them, you know, the end or beginning of all things, the hope and redemption or salvation of all things, or the end and doom of all things.

To me, abstraction is attempting, it's like a tempting medium for lots of projection, abstract patterns in charts. In fact, when people say, "What does it mean if I have three malefics in my chart? You know, stuff like that, where it's some.. oh my god, there's some big pattern that I'm noticing, and most of the time the answer to that is, it doesn't mean anything devoid of context, context is the starting point for all oracular work, and what we mean by that is not losing track of the fact that we're in a living cosmos, we're living beings, the present moment is co-contingent, it's contingent, it's co-arising, and it's all that's real, you know, it's everything, and that's not something that we have an easy time perceiving, because we experience time, we experience time and space, and we have a perception of moving through time in a linear, like straight line or something, but when we try our best to remember that eternal perspective, then we recognize that that eternal perspective is the perspective of an eternal living being that we're part of, called reality.

We call it divinity, we call it God, we call it one, whatever, we have so many names, the cosmic animal, the anima mundi, but when we recognize we're in that and it's an eternal, infinite living being, I think it's hard once you have that kind of perspective, and you feel it somehow inside of you, and it enlivens your heart. Abstraction is almost the easiest way mentally. Mental abstraction is a very quick way to lose touch with the living being that we are and are a part of, and so I'm always a little suspicious of grand aspect configurations and their abstract big generic meanings, or anything in astrology that takes up that kind of mind space, that's like, here's this big complicated pattern, like a kite, or like a yacht, it's not that I don't believe that those are real configurations that could have real meaning.

It's just that there's a tendency toward exaggeration and abstraction that can actually be a really problematic thing in astrology that tempts us into objectification, objectifying ourselves, objectifying the cosmos, and again, like I think context is everything. So I'm rambling here, but I think the point with Barbos basket is, is there a configuration? Yes, can it point to, in mundane astrology, are those configurations important for significant shifts in culture, in history, in the landscapes of different industries and governments and religions? And yes, I think so, I really do.

But when it comes to personal interpretation of those things, I think that context is deeply necessary. It's deeply needed. So, it's like, how many times have I heard someone come and say, oh my god, everything in my life is because of my yad. You know what I'm saying. And so it's tricky, because on the one hand, you don't want to just dismiss that there are planets configured in an interesting way, but also people tend to take these big patterns and project onto them everything good or everything bad, everything great or everything difficult, and I think life is usually more nuanced, and we want to try to work our way back into the present, and I'm not sure how much those kinds of things always help us, I'm skeptical anyway of that, but that's where I stand, and you don't have to agree with me, we can all be friends and have different conclusions, but the first thing I would say is that the basket configuration I don't think is a prediction as much as it is the starting point for an archetypal conversation.

I'm less interested about the basket than I am in thinking about the planets and their relation to one another, so one of the things that people, you know, like, if I had to summarize, what do I think this configuration is likely to bring up collectively. Let's start there, and then we can move into the personal. Let me put the chart back up on the screen, actually, so I. Let's talk about this on the collective level.

I think we've talked about this at length on the channel already, but the main tension point for the cycle is the Jupiter opposition to Pluto. Now, the Jupiter opposition to Pluto being the tense part, I think can sort of form the baseline of the interpretation for collective events, so if we talk about Jupiter, Pluto as changes to institutions, changes to leaders, changes to authority, changes to ideology, or changes in meaning and philosophy, religious and ideological tensions that are erupting and very powerful transitions of leadership, or that elements of what have been unseen are being seen and then a kind of crisis of meaning comes with it that all to me feels very Jupiter Pluto.

Well, if we take that as kind of the heartbeat of the whole dynamic, and then we think about Neptune, Uranus configured nicely to the Jupiter-Pluto dynamic, they've got sextiles and there's trines in the mix here too. Then to me, what I would say is that the potential for this crisis of meaning to be a spiritual crisis of meaning is very powerful, because of Neptune's involvement. Neptune brings that otherworldly, transcendental, imaginative quality. It makes this conversation something almost religious.

On the other hand, Uranus could make it very technological, Uranus could make it very intellectual or cognitive, and so you put those things together and you have the potential for shifts of meaning or purpose in the collective to be both sort of philosophical and spiritual and existential, while also maybe sort of technological and cognitive or perceptual. That to me feels like, okay, now we're talking about something in the zeitgeist that could really shift the way we think, that could really change the way we think or perceive things, big collective events that happen that change our thinking, that change our beliefs that bring about a kind of crisis of faith, but that crisis of faith is ready to create swift, smooth, coherent changes.

So I think, for example, about, you know, for me the only thing that in my life that parallels this that I could think of were my first experiences with entheogens and ayahuasca, so with those experiences, there was a pretty deep crisis of faith and belief that came with them. You know, it wasn't just like, oh my god, I'm seeing the universe, it's all so great. I mean, it literally uprooted and sort of instantly eroded the basic ontological or epistemological foundations of my life as a growing up as a Christian, so you know it wasn't just pretty light show from the cosmos, it was deeply disturbing to my paradigm.

However, that disruption, because the experience was uplifting, inspiring, profoundly wise and healing, it could be two things at once, and therefore the changes that came into my life were pretty swift and easily integrated. Yoga came into my life more, Eastern philosophy, mythology, comparative religions, yoga, meditation, all these things started sort of pouring into my life to sort of seamlessly support a transition of mind and belief, so I see something similar in the clouds, you know, in the basket, where a crisis of meaning, as difficult as it might be, and as unsettling as it could be, may also find swift and easy transition and support.

You know, people think of all the sextiles and the trines and they just imagine all these good things happening, but when at the top of that, when there's an opposition involved, I think what we could be talking about is things like integration, cooperation, momentum, a kind of mutual reinforcement that can accelerate big changes, and maybe help them happen sort of seamlessly and smoothly, but that doesn't mean that the initial change doesn't involve some real challenges to what we see or think or believe or know, or that a shifting or change of purpose comes about because of pretty transformative, heavy, intense, transformative events.

There's Pluto. They probably will be very Plutonian, but they could be more easily, swiftly integrated. Or, like an example that I thought about was the Renaissance scientific revolution, the Reformation of the Christian Church, the Industrial Revolution. In these moments, there are huge paradigmatic changes happening, but they tend to happen very quickly and smoothly, and with a sort of cooperative cohesiveness, that is why we call them a movement, why we call them a renaissance, or a revolution, or a reformation, because there's enough support to create the change somewhat seamlessly, although the change itself is fraught with certain core struggles.

So now I'm not predicting anything the likes of those huge transformations, but we could see almost like events in the collective that we look back on in a few years and recognize as a kind of flashpoint. I wouldn't be surprised if July and August included that, so you know, harmonious configuration, mostly harmonious, could mean it's very collaborative. It does not necessarily mean it's comfortable. What else? So, from these planets, I would also say, like, Jupiter wants meaning, wisdom, understanding to grow.

Uranus wants to awaken and break out of the status quo. So we have wisdom that wants to awaken and grow, right? Neptune wants to dissolve, inspire, and almost like imagine, so we have growth that wants to awaken and imagine, dissolve and inspire. Pluto wants to transform and create that death and rebirth pattern, so we have meaning that wants to grow, awaken, inspire, break patterns through death and transformation, and the overall configuration suggests a powerful moment of such change that could also be collaborative and cooperative.

That sounds good. Like, I'll tell you, I'll take that. There are times in life where change is going to come one way or another. At least there's the idea of support built in for such a change. I think that's the way I'm looking at it. Jupiter opposite Pluto really is the dramatic axis of the group. Trines and sextiles create a kind of atmosphere that's conducive to the change, but the opposition is probably the plot line.

If purpose is emerging in some new light, then there's a deeper necessity that's forcing it, that's the Jupiter Pluto opposition. So technological shifts, ideological shifts, spiritual movements, economic restructuring, ecological awareness, and it's not because a basket is causing something as much as it is that those larger, slower outer planets that astrologers tend to associate with sweeping cycles of collective change are configured very powerfully and very closely this month, all of them, so I think, yeah, on that level it'd be silly not to acknowledge it.

Just I think it's funny how many people are getting caught up in the basket. So I'm not. When people say, "What does the basket mean?" What I'm interested in is what kind of conversation happens when Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto are all talking together. To me, that's the question, not what is a basket. But anyway, hopefully I have given these thoughts without being.. I don't know, I never knew Andre Barbeau, you know, no idea who he is, personally, I imagine that he probably wouldn't have gotten too stuck on the name of a basket either, but I wonder if our desire for change, for growth, for excitement is not such that it invites us to project a lot onto big configurations like this, but I wonder if the real, the deepest form of revolution is the revolution that takes place in a present heart, that turn is the turn to what is most present, and I think that's always the hardest turn, the most radical turn, and it's always the one that we forget the most quickly, and when we come back to it, when we truly come back to it, is usually the most original, the most inspiring, the most deep, transformative, the most meaningful.

All the outer planets covered, so as cheesy and as cliched as it might sound, I just can't help but wonder if there is any answer ultimately for those of us who love tracking the cyclical dynamics of the planets, than to practice being present in our hearts. To me, doing that doesn't mean it negates astrology, it cancels out the interest that we have in astrology. Instead, I think it keeps us present for it, and it's a lot harder to get caught up in salvation or damnation, you know, when we do that. But there's the algorithm, the algorithm has other thoughts.

What is the algorithm, anyway? I guess it's just all of us in some weird fun house mirror. But anyway, much love to you guys. I hope you've had a very nice week. If you didn't send me birthday wishes yesterday, I forgive you. You can send them to me now. I'm 45, Jesus, wow. I don't even know what to think about it. I'm gonna be putting me in a basket soon anyway. I love you guys. Have a great weekend. Bye, everyone.