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The word to know today
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Dispositor
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The planet that rules the sign the Moon currently occupies. When the Moon is in Aries, her dispositor is Mars, and the tradition understood whatever she signified in that sign as operating under Mars's authority and character.
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Researchers Searched Human Brains For Plastic. Not One Came Back Clean.
When scientists set out to look for microscopic plastic in human brain tissue, they expected to find some.
They didn’t expect to find it everywhere.
According to research published in Nature Medicine, every single brain sample contained plastic particles. And the details behind that discovery are hard to ignore.
The brain held several times more plastic than organs like the liver and kidneys.
Samples collected in 2024 contained about half again as much as samples from 2016.
People who had been diagnosed with dementia showed some of the highest levels of all.
To be clear, no one has proven that this plastic causes memory problems. But the trend is heading in one direction, and it’s picking up speed.
Most of what researchers identified was polyethylene, the same material used in plastic bottles, disposable cups, and the wrapping around much of the food we buy.
Want to know where most of it sneaks into your day, and the simple ways to cut back?
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Dispositor is the old term for the planet that rules whatever sign the Moon occupies. The Moon is in Aries tonight, at two degrees, waxing gibbous at ninety-four percent illumination. Her dispositor is Mars.
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The word is Latin, but the concept runs through all the earlier material. A planet in another planet's sign was understood to be a guest in that planet's house, subject to its host's character and condition. The Moon in Aries answers to Mars, and the tradition read Mars's character as hot, dry, and oriented toward action. Ptolemy, writing in second century Alexandria, catalogued the essential dignities in the Tetrabiblos: Aries belongs to Mars as domicile, the sign a planet rules. The Moon holds no essential dignity here. She is not in her domicile, her exaltation, her detriment, or her fall. The old term for this condition is peregrine, from the Latin for foreigner: a planet in a sign where it holds no essential dignity.
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What complicates the picture is the phase. At ninety-four percent illumination, the Moon is one night from full, still gathering light toward opposition with the Sun. The tradition held that a Moon approaching fullness carried increasing visibility and force. Bonatti, writing in thirteenth century Italy, applied this principle to elections, the branch of astrology concerned with choosing the right moment to begin something: the tradition held that what you start under a nearly full Moon is exposed to sight. Peregrine in a cardinal sign and almost fully lit. Not weakness. Something closer to force with no one to answer to.
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From the shelf
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Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos
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Written in second century Alexandria, the earliest surviving systematic treatment of the planets in their signs and the dignities attached to them.
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