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Cool Plunge: 2018 Astrology Overview
Something about this past full moon and this January 1st was intensely aligned and organized, which is calming. The beginning of our new year lined up with a strong lunation, on a Monday, a moon day, the beginning of the week. The lunation in question fell in Cancer, definitively aspecting some of the more personal planets, and softly dancing with some of the larger-scale transits that will shape the year to come.
It’s symbolically rich. Cancer is the sign of attachment, attachments that ask us to feel, and to sacrifice some of what we feel and hold them privately to preserve the attachment and work together. Throughout the first weeks of our new year, this energy – of renewal, in combination with recommitment – will call on us and ask us to enter our year with sureness and confidence in our desires and precise self-knowledge of our capabilities and hopes.
All That Capricorn: January 16 2018 New Moon Astrology & More
This month brings us the year’s blue moon, one of which doubles as a lunar eclipse. The lunar energy seems like it could get really zany, but we’re all saved by a decidedly more rare event: six planets in the sign of Capricorn all at once, mid-month, and zero retrograde planets.
The month began with the full moon stimulating a grand water trine with Mars in Scorpio and Neptune in Pisces. Since the moon opposed Venus, the tone setting is about our needs, and relinquishing obligations to tend to our more intimate and internal evolution.
Continue reading All That Capricorn: January 16 2018 New Moon Astrology & More
Debunking the Cusp: Stelliums & Just How Important Is Your Sun Sign, Anyway?
Say it with me: astrology isn’t just your sun sign.
Many people are drawn to the illusory image of “the cusp” as the explanation for why they just Don’t Feel Like a Typical Zodiac Sign. But any astrology take worth its salt will point out that your sun sign isn’t the be-all end-all. While the luminaries (the Sun and Moon) and rising sign dominate in explaining the crux of someone’s personality, the other planets can pose specific challenges to those points. They can drown them out in number and intensity, or even negate and obfuscate their strengths.
Astrology already accounts for designated patterns of why someone would relate or not vibe with their sun sign. The most important of these is the position of the inner planets, which describe parts of our personality that are present, but less focused on discussing direct things like our ego and our emotions, pieces that are more personal or obvious to us.
Even more so, because of simple astronomy, we already know specifically why so many people feel aligned with a sign adjacent to their sun sign. Not just any other sign, but exactly the ones highlighted by The Cusp – the signs bookending their sun sign.
The inner planets’ relatively similar orbital rates and close positions mean that, unless recently interrupted by a retrograde, they often tend to clump up in the same few zodiac signs, and from Earth’s vantage point this is often pretty close to the location of the Sun. In natal charts, this means that it is very common for people to have a stellium (three or more placements) that falls in the sign adjacent to their sun sign.
Cusp babes, as said by the “general cusps,” tend to fall on days when the Sun has recently changed signs (clearly.) But there’s something else important about this. Usually, when the Sun has changed signs, the inner planets change signs, have already changed signs, or are about to change signs as well.
Basically, the planets and Earth are all moving around the Sun at different rates. The inner planets – Mercury, Venus and Mars – orbit the sun on rates that are even marginally similar to Earth’s and all of their distances are similarly much, much closer to the Sun than all those other guys. The gap between Mars and Jupiter alone could fit several more sets of Mercury, Venus, and Earth between them.
This means that within the scope of one Earth year, one revolution of the Earth around the Sun, the inner planets cover quite a bit of ground in the zodiac. Because the zodiac is a geocentric system of mapping the sky in relation to Earth, the ground they cover in the zodiac is quite similar to that of the Sun. The illusion of retrograde motion additionally makes them track closer to the Sun through the zodiac. The outer planets, being much further away and taking more time on the scale of an Earth year to cover the same ground in the zodiac, move at rates more like tens of Earth solar years. Jupiter itself, the next closest one, takes over a dozen Earth years to clear the entire zodiac wheel.
The result, in astrology? It is exceedingly common for people to have one or more inner planet in the sign next to their sun sign. Some people even have all three, which alone is a forceful stellium that can displace much of their visible characteristics and traits onto that sign. If you have three major planets in Libra, you’re going to feel a bit like a Libra to other people. You have very defined and wide-ranging traits that are absolutely informed and described by the energy of Libra, and that’s a totally legitimate interpretation of the chart.
It’s worth nothing that each year, based on outer planet movements and retrogrades, having a stellium in a particular sign is more or less common for given signs. That’s because outer planets can make up stelliums as well. For example, in a year when Jupiter is in Virgo and no inner planet retrogrades occurred within a few months’ radius, Virgos and possibly Leos or Libras might commonly see Virgo stelliums occur in their birth charts.
Another rarer example would be when two outer planets conjunct or pass in a sign, such as the Uranus/Neptune rendezvous in Capricorn around the early 90s. Many millennials born in the winter of affected years have supercharged Capricorn from the abundance of planets in that region of our zodiac at the time. It has a magnetic pull on the place of the chart where it falls, since two heavyweight planets are holding it down. For someone who already has a lot of activity in the sign, the stelliums get enormous – I have seen Sagittarians, Capricorns, and Aquarians from the time period with 5 planet stelliums in Capricorn. It affects each chart a different way, but it always has an effect. Something similar will happen with an upcoming conjunction of Pluto and Saturn just a few years from now – some Capricorns, some Aquarians, and some Pisces born in that span of time will be very, very Aquarian, and lots of children born in those years will have a similar magnet on the part of their chart that holds the degrees of Aquarius.
What does having a stellium mean, though?
When this does happen, and someone DOES have a stellium in an adjacent sign, made up of inners, outers, or some combination, they obviously approach the venues of those planets (and the regions of the affected houses) in ways ruled by that sign. This is the case for everyone, but the weight and proportion of traits ruled by one sign will change according to the number of planets. For people with significant or very affective personal stelliums, the line becomes blurry – how much of their personality is ruled by one sign, their Sun sign, or the other, their stellium?
Astrological interpretation is meant to suss out these differences and explain them fully. This is why you need someone who can actually read the chart, take stock of what’s there, and interpret it based on their knowledge – someone who can understand what it’s trying to tell you about yourself and your path, your roles and your opportunities. The chart, when read thoroughly, describes very clearly what traits belong where and how they can manifest. Like reading any planet, the traits of the sign and planet and house and any aspects or important movements it makes will affect what it has to stay. A stellium just adds a gravity to the energies in their corner, and can give someone an air or a flavor of a different sign.
When You Don’t Relate To Your Sun Sign: Are You Really “On The Cusp?”
Help! I don’t relate to my sun sign!
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone smugly state to me that astrology Cannot Be Real because “I’m an Aries and I’m shy,” or “I’m a Virgo and I am a mess,” or “I’m a Leo and I have stage fright and short hair,” or whatever. Listen, no single astrologer has ever said you must be x because your sun is y. And there’s so many ways that astrology already accounts for that.
However, a popular trend with some astrologers has been to…NOT explain or educate people on why they might have real and detailed aspects in their chart that express this, that very clearly show and describe why someone might feel distant from their sun sign or have traits of multiple signs. Instead, a school of thought has emerged where intermediate level astrologers draw a haphazard line around the dates of sign change in the zodiac and say… “welp, falling here makes you both of these signs, actually, because you’re on the cusp.”
Listen, I get it. Some signs get relentlessly dunked on, or get summarized so brusquely and cruelly. If all you see all the time when you first get into astrology is a constant barrage of “this person is a sensitive crybaby who never does anything cool” or “all of these people are manipulative cheaters and liars who are incapable of love,” it feels really bad. It hurts your self-esteem even though it’s stupid and you know it doesn’t really reflect on you. Ultimately, it turns you off of your sun sign. It makes you look for reasons not to be that, identify with that, or call yourself that. That is why those of born between like the 15th – 30th and 1- 10th of a given month (depending on your flavor of cusp-strologer) get so entranced upon finding the concept of The Cusp.
I am On The Cusp, as in a general cusp that someone attached to the dates of my sun sign. When I first heard of cusps, I was a wide-eyed kid who devoured astrological concepts…and who was incredibly disappointed by the “fussy schoolmarm” depiction of Virgos.
I really believed in the system of astrology and found it fascinating, but when it came to what it said about me, I was like, so offended that these people who didn’t know me were condemning me to a life of being boring and enjoying broccoli and folding socks. All the other signs got these fun, exciting associations, like parties, glamour, witchcraft, science, romance… I was miffed to be described solely with words like “critical” and “narrow-minded” and so on, and I stayed away from my own chart except to sigh dejectedly and curse the sky for not making me a Fun and Cool Leo, until one day, digging through some Google search or another, everything changed.
I stumbled upon some Geocities site with in-depth catalogues of this new thing called the Cusp Signs, and I was like, WOW. I am Not Like the Other Boring Virgos who are just whiny and fussy because actually, I am a Virlibra!! I am beautiful and desirable while still being enthralled and soothed by neatly organized things and the act of alphabetizing. This makes so much sense!!
Learning that I was a Cusp felt freeing, and it made me feel so, so special. I, unlike those one-dimensional, middle-of-the-month Virgos before me, was a complex being. I had more than two traits, and some of them were even cool. I was so proud, and whenever someone would wave me off and be like “Typical Virgo!” I would smugly reply, “Actually…” and inform them about ~The Cusp~, and feel proud of myself for knowing this secret and being able to describe what gave some people an astrological edge.
But that’s why it was such bad astrology. (Aside from the fact that jumping to correct people on my sign is like, peak baby Virgo and should have been proof enough for me that cusps are fake.)
When I had looked upon my sun sign as a failed and inadequate descriptor of me, Not Like The Other Virgos little me, I was dismissing the art of astrology and its complex network of concepts and reading techniques that vividly illustrate how each one of us is a multi-layered whole, a holistic being formed and described by a combination of life experience, background, generation, and so much more, a soul at a place in time shaped and shaping the context of people and place and time they’re part of.
My chart, in actuality, had never condemned me to a life of high neck frocks and furrowed brows and maternal tsking at people for folding book corners or whatever it is schlocky sun sign descriptions of Virgo say we do. My chart already had a lot of beautiful connections, placements, and detail that explained, with accurate and ancient measures, why I am a type B, self-expression oriented, emotional, social Virgo – and still very much a Virgo, who experiences more butterflies from opening a new package of really nice pens than getting a text back from someone I have a crush on.
When I learned how to read those points and orient myself in the complex and illustrative mess that is any natal chart, I began to see and appreciate the qualities that I desired that were already in me, because I could clearly identify where they were, and they were so much more descriptive and real when placed in their proper context. Even better, I allowed myself to acknowledge the wonderful things about my sun sign that I tried to cast away by embracing “being a cusp.” When I saw myself more objectively, through learning to read the objectively pointed out places in my chart that show my habits and my potential, I genuinely did like myself more, even the parts of me that I thought of badly or was disappointed in before.
I want you to have a better experience with astrology too, and I want you to have it with things you can find yourself. So it’s time for us to debunk The Cusp.
Cusps are fake.
Cusps are fake cause they don’t use the coherent principles that astrology was built on to inform their interpretation. They’re loose, vague, and just not the most specific or accurate way of talking about why someone doesn’t feel or express certain traits. They simplify sun signs and collapse all the other placements that add nuance, depth, and clarity to any reading, waving them off in favor of simplicity.
People latch onto it because it is the easiest and simplest to understand answer to “not feeling your sun sign,” and it makes a lot of intuitive sense. The thing is, astrology requires precision and logic in addition to intuition. That is what makes it more rigorous and precise than other forms of spiritual work – things have their place, their definitions, and their effects. Sometimes, a feeling is enough to go on. But astrology has added benefits because it has easily-mapped systems.
That being said, the experience of feeling like a cusp is totally real. It just usually isn’t caused by “being a cusp.” We’re going to talk about the real reasons that someone might not identify with their sun sign and why they might “feel” like a cusp.
Protected: Horoscopes for the Signs | Full Flower Moon in Scorpio
Full Flower Moon in Scorpio | May 10, 2017
It’s the Full Moon! As we talked about last time, at this full moon, you can expect some issues that became highlighted in the past two weeks of your life to resolve, amplify, or transmute. The Sun is still transiting grounded Taurus, but the moon is briefly slipping into the opposite space — the deep, oftentimes murky waters of Scorpio.
If Taurus is fixed and stable, Scorpio is loose and speculative. Both are highly stubborn. Like at any full moon, your conscious desires and goals may be at odds with some emotional pathway in your heart. This time, it’s likely that something material or concrete is being challenged by psychological difficulty. That sounds abstract, so let’s say that you’ve recently committed to picking up a work project that you don’t really actually like. At the new moon, you felt really motivated because you knew the job would improve your finances in some measurable way, and that’s what you were emotionally preoccupied with at the time, so you took it on and felt great. You’ve since realized something about the project or the client doesn’t gel with your own motives, and you don’t feel so great about staying. That’s just a basic example, but there’s many emotional layers that this lunation could play off of.
The Sun and Moon are the center of every single lunation, but the connections they make to other celestial bodies color in the full story. At this time, both are making a serious, yet positive connection with a very intense planet — Pluto, which governs complete transformation.
Pluto transits (“moves around”) at a glacial pace because of its distance from the Sun and earth, so it’s normally just a background player in the astrology of our day-to-day lives. It’s like a single note in a chord that plays for years on end, subtly defining generational changes that we experience as a collective. However, when it makes aspects to closer bodies and planets, its influence becomes much more personal — and its strength packs a hell of a punch.
This means that changes brought about by this full moon — and remember, full moons crave and foster change — will not be superficial. The kinds of changes that occur when Pluto is onboard occur deep in the core of our beings. This isn’t to say that you should necessarily prepare for something that, from the outside, looks dramatic and shaken up. Other people may not be able to perceive that the stakes have changed for you at all. But the kind of change you pursue at this time is a demolition or a transformation of some construct in yourself that’s been a long time coming.
While Pluto itself will not bring perceptible, dramatic change at this time, there still is the opportunity for superficial shake-ups, and that’s all thanks to another dynamic occurring at the same time. Neither Mercury nor Uranus makes significant contact with the sun or moon, but they do themselves conjunct (overlap) in Aries, bringing out a grand fire trine with Saturn and the North Node. We’ll discuss the grand fire trine in more depth later, as it’s a special dynamic that comes into focus throughout this entire year and really peaks in late summer. But the conjunct of Mercury and Uranus at this time is important. Thanks to Mercury’s retrograde, it’s the third such conjunction since late March, meaning this one is the one where the truth (Mercury) comes to light quite suddenly or unexpectedly (Uranus.) This is a jumpy aspect. Uranus is quite unpredictable, so what this dynamic looks like is a sudden event occurring, after which longer-held secrets kind of tumble out after the initial tremor. It is quite neutral, however, so the rapid energy can certainly work in your favor.
Things have already changed, but after this full moon, they will really start to feel different. This process of embracing the flame of change will continue all year, so consider this full moon a landmark at which you have important opportunities to shape the scope of that change. Like the flower, you cannot stay a seed forever — you eventually must accept the sunlight.
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Don’t Fear the Lord of Karma | Saturn in Astrology + moodboard
Not all planets are interpreted equally, that’s for sure. There are some planets that everyone straight up loves, or at least appreciates having in their corner. For those of us who associate our emotions with celestial bodies, there’s something irresistibly charming about the moon — we relate to her cycles of hiding in rest, and then shining close and beautiful upon all. There is something sympathetic about the moon, and astrology nerds love her nearly unanimously.
Likewise, it’s very rare for someone to complain about the unbounded energy and excess a strong Jupiter transit brings them. (“It’s going through my second house? For an entire YEAR? Helping me bring in extra cash? Oh noooo,” said basically no one ever, save for maybe an extremely change-resistant Virgo.)
Beautiful Venus is romanticized and adored for her glamorous associations with love and money — things people categorically love — and even Mercury, the trickster scapegoat, who consistently gets the most blame for Literally Everything from casual astrology fans, is almost never unwelcome for those of us who study the stars. Who could look down upon the gift of our own voice? Our ability to communicate and connect, the parts of our lives that Mercury’s placement make easier for us to navigate through that connection? These planets and bodies are all held in high regard for their blessings, whether they appear in a harmonious birth chart configuration or make a pleasant, lucky slide through an aspect of our charts throughout our lives.
But then, there are the others.
Some planets have had a bad reputation for literal centuries. The old classical astrologers resented them so much that they even gave them a mean name — the “malefics.” They were understood to, at best, bring difficulty into someone’s life, and at worst, to create obstructions, large blocks that we stumble on over and over and over again for decades at a time. Their place in your life presented a magical door that continually gets slammed shut in your face, and only your face, every time you try to walk through.
Now, it might be that I have a habit of rooting for the underdog thanks to my rising Chiron, but I’ve always found this interpretation of the Big Baddies to be cruel and unsympathetic to their energies, and also to the people affected by them. I feel that acting as though birth placements are some kind of lifelong curse is an unnecessarily defeatist and wholly inaccurate view that makes astrology itself out to be some big mean malefic. A great example of how this works is the classical malefic — Saturn.
The old astrologers really, really did not like this guy. They named him after a dude that ate like six of his own children. In Vedic symbolism, he has just as much of a tough guy reputation, but more along the lines of “tough love.” I much prefer the Vedic metaphors for Saturn as a planet — he is a teacher, a “lord of karma.”
The one aspect of Saturn’s malevolence that we have no control over is where he falls in our birth chart. There, he brings some kind of discomfort or difficulty to an area of our life, a mark that follows us throughout childhood and adolescence. It’s something so intrinsic to us for the first few decades of our lives that we have, for the most part, learned to work around it, and just accept it as something we’ll never have or be. But it’s deeper than that. Your Saturn placement is not the place where you can just waive off your failure. It’s a failure that you are repeatedly confronted with, obviously and painfully, so that you can develop a strength there — a wisdom that is more advanced than someone who was born with a gift in that area. Saturn gives us flaws and weaknesses as incentive to develop our “work ethic” in this part of our life. Basically, Saturn in a birth chart is like a strict parent who pushes you to achieve with less. Some people handle this energy better than others, which is why so many people panic during rough Saturn transits.
However, Saturn repeatedly provides for us windows of opportunity in which we can grow and improve. Every few years or so, Saturn transits into a new sign, bringing in fresh energy that interacts with the cosmic landscape in a new dynamic, not to be repeated again throughout our lifetime in quite the same way. Depending on our personal chart and the other transits occurring at the time, each of these transits is a unique opportunity to shape, evolve, and upgrade the parts of ourselves that Saturn is influencing.
Saturn takes about 29 years to move through the entire zodiac, so we experience each of these windows only a few times at most in each of our lives. The god Saturn, in the ancient Greek and Roman traditions, was associated with time, which is where some of his aspects of cruelty and destruction comes from. We only have so much time. Saturn the planet understands this and believes we should use it in as disciplined and focused a way as possible. It pushes us to do so by raising the stakes and cultivating our talents through work.
In future posts, we’ll be going over what Saturn specifically means in your chart’s configuration, as well as how it matters in transit through your chart, and specifically what is going on with Saturn at this moment in time.
(Image Credits: I made a little Saturn moodboard. Images in this spread feature the art, work, or image of Rowan Mersh, Velwyn Yossy, Yiqing Yin, Dolce & Gabbana, Meadham Kirchoff, Donyale Luna, Adut Akech, and KTZ. Other images were found while browsing unattributed, let me know where they came from.)
So, How Was Everyone’s New Moon In Taurus? | Some Moon Stuff, and then some moon stuff
Mine was stressful. I don’t recommend scheduling large-scale product fulfillment during good ol’ Mercury Gatorade, and in fact, I did not, but Mercury did anyway. It’s cool though, except your new moon ~ insights ~ are a little late this week. Sometimes I think I need a Gemini moon to write.
But the fact that they’re late is totally fine, because for some reason, everyone loves to talk about the moon on the day that she’s doing something exciting, but then forgets that her influence lingers for a lot longer than that.
You probably know already that the moon takes almost exactly a month to complete an orbit around month. The length of time it does in fact take is called a “lunar month” — it’s 29.5ish days. (There are slightly different figures for it depending on whether or not you’re using a sidereal system of astronomy / astrology or a tropical system. I’ll tell you about them in a later post because an explanation of them is necessary to understand why Ophicius is a scam and a lie. For now, think of them like the Celsius and Fahrenheit of figuring out where in the heck we are in relation to the other stuff in our neck of the galaxy.)
Throughout its lunar month, the moon passes through different “phases” depending on how much we can see of it. The amount we can see of it is directly related to where it is in relation to both the Sun and Earth. The moon just reflects the light of the Sun. The less of it that’s facing the Sun, the less we can see. You’ve probably incorrectly been told that the new moon is caused by Earth’s shadow; it’s actually the exact opposite. It occurs when the moon is between Earth and the Sun. The side of the moon that’s facing the Sun is getting all of the sunlight, and the side facing us isn’t getting any, so we don’t see a moon at all.
This is reflected pretty directly in astrology, too. At the new moon, from Earth’s point of view, the Sun and moon are lined right up — and so they’re in the same region of the zodiac, the same sign. We call this a conjunction. (As you might imagine, the full moon is when the opposite happens, and the moon is on the other side, directly opposite the Sun. That one is called an opposition.)
Anyway. The energy of the new moon and full moon are very different, which is why in astrology they’re said to “set” for different time periods. At the new moon, the Sun and moon are in the same sign, and working through the same kinds of energy. Since the Sun represents our will, and the moon represents our emotions, this loosely means that the new moon is the best time for us to act upon an intention to try and set it in motion — our desires and energy are lined up with our hopes and feelings, and we can set a goal more easily. The full moon, instead, is a time when things feel pulled apart or amped up by the oppositional activity, and is a time more prone to conflict (or passion, or elevation, or conviction.)
The new moon is the setting of the scene, and the events of the full moon usually come from and relate to it. So its themes have more a longer life than the period of opposition and conclusion that follow it. In this way, most astrologers will tell you that a typical new moon usually sets the tone of an entire month, where a full moon defines the following two weeks. Both have a tendency to completely “conclude” one month later during the next lunar cycle. (Eclipses are the same thing but longer.)
So, why am I telling you all this moon stuff now?
Because every lunation is impacted by the aspects it makes with the rest of its chart, and this one was really beautiful and special — it doesn’t have any.
The rest of the zodiac is doing all kinds of weird stuff, and on this month’s New Moon, the Sun and moon just kind of sat there quietly together, alone, ignoring everything, in lush and restful Taurus.
Sometimes we are completely honest that the things we have been through affect us emotionally. We can be really on top of unpacking and feeling it through just sensing the wear-and-tear the world puts on our hearts daily. We move into a period where pain feels pressing and understanding it intimately is necessary to survival, and analyzing where it came from is so clear as to be almost subconscious — because it’s obvious. We can feel exactly where it hurts.
But sometimes, even if we have gotten really articulate about how the history of ourselves has written us into being, and even if we have identified the places in ourselves where trauma has snagged and loosened our weaknesses, we still fail to trace the thread through to how we allow us to hurt ourselves through it. We can be unable to see how those emotional blockages, tensions and traumas that we have gotten so used to impact our ability to recognize what we deserve. We don’t slow down enough to feel the way the stress carries on. It’s through connecting with other people that we can often identify parts of ourselves that need attention and work, but actually unwinding it often requires real isolation, even though that’s the time when it’s sometimes the hardest to feel. Like a chronic condition or a mark on the body, we become so acclimated to its existence that we might almost forget that it is there. This might make our emotional states more manageable on a day-to-day basis, but it can also make us forget the injustice of the cause of our stress and distress in the first place. If you can’t remember that it shouldn’t have been done to you, you forget that you need to treat yourself with kindness and softness, and think of yourself as someone who is deserving, because you need it, right now and always from now on.
This New Moon falls in Taurus, a sign that always wants us to acknowledge what we materially need in every sector of our life, and even asks us to spoil ourselves a little, with any experience that stimulates and soothes our bodies. Since it does have the luxury of occurring unaspected by other planets, the whole month is about a part of you that is only for you. Every other planet can retrograde. Everyone in your life can be going through something you can’t fix or handle. Every step of the process can hit a roadblock. Everything else can go wrong, but there is one place in yourself that you trust enough to just be there. Accordingly, the new moon this month wants to let you know that no matter what else is going on, you can create a part of your life that feels good, and you can use it to treat yourself to space, solace, and rest. I hope you do.
Full Pink Moon in Libra | April 2017 | Identity Theft
Today is the Libra full moon for the year. Lunations always have an immediate influence on the feeling of the two weeks following, plus some later effects that can arise up to a month later. The chart around them can often feel like a look behind the curtain at things that are going to come up during that time period, and the moon itself is always deeply influenced by the activity in the stars around it.
This full moon is taking place during a quadruple retrograde. We’re nearly finished with Venus retrograde and we’ve already gone over some of the simple parts of this Mercury cycle, but today we’re going to go over some of the emotional effects of those movements and how they’re highlighted by this moon.
I tend to feel personally that Mercury retrogrades come on very fast. The last week of “shadow” prior to them always has a few events occur that make me realize what the “theme” of the retrograde is going to be, and how that might play out. For the past week, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the phrase “identity theft.” Mercury is currently moving backwards through a Venus-ruled sign, as Venus herself cycles up from the dark space of her own larger retrograde cycle. The way they’re woven together this season, you’d expect one’s movement to bring up issues that are related to the other, and I can see that happening right now. And in general, this relationship between the two bodies makes sense.
Relationships are based on communication; values are often reliant on what we’re able to understand and be informed of. Aries, where the Sun is this full moon and where Venus has left and is moving back towards, is about the expression of the self. It stands in opposition to Libra, where the moon and Jupiter are currently shining, and which rules the ways our selves harmonize into one cohesive entity — relationships. The needs of these two parts of our selves and all oppositions in astrology are, I think, often wrongly expressed as a tension. They are also interdependent on each other.
I think Venus’s time through personal-expression Aries and spiritual Pisces has asked us to make some changes to the way we ask others to respect the boundaries of our self. I think Mercury’s time through Venus-ruled Taurus is asking us to consider how other people can bring clarity or confusion into our understandings of ourselves. And so, this full moon is like a perfect thesis for the rest of this retrograde season — how do we define ourselves through each other? How come love and appreciation makes us desire sameness with each other, but necessitates that we understand and put words to our difference?
Because this is moon is wrapped up in a tangle of retrogrades, the way that we’re going to answer these questions is through confusion and agitation. The feeling that maybe we can’t resolve these two interconnected needs, before coming to the resolution that we might be able to. We all know Libra is a sign that wants to talk about balance, and moving into its energy, we often find that we’ve incorrectly weighted the scale so far.
So: back to identity theft. Because we’ve got these retrogrades, the identity theft here can totally mean credit card information, fraudulent accounts & people posing as each other online, false information and other effects that have material consequences. But on the emotional end, I also mean “who is stealing you.” Who is thieving your identity and why? This month is going to have us questioning and identifying how identities (Aries), values (Venus/Taurus), and ways of speaking (Mercury) can be co-opted for personal gain (back to Venus). But beyond that, we will be learning to guard ourselves against people who would speak for us or speak over us. Not just because it’s rude, but because it actually restricts us from speaking ourselves, as ourselves. (That’s the Saturn piece.) This full moon is a beaming, shining highlight on specifically the emotional undercurrent of all of this retrograde energy. It’s asking you to let go from judging yourself so you can more accurately judge the environment and people and communities that surround you, and whether or not they acknowledge you, and how they could be doing that better.
All of these are very inner planet issues, but look at how they intersect with outer planet movements to understand the full story. Neptune in Pisces makes the reality of situations very difficult to grasp. This placement, and its hard aspects with Saturn and Jupiter over the course of the past year or so, are what have given recent events the emotional quality of “unreality,” making world events seem like “fact stranger than fiction.” The inability to tell what Really Happened, what’s Really Going On has pervaded and obscured political discourse and our ability to ascribe cause or accurately describe its effects. This dynamic is the fake news, alternative facts, “not the Onion” influence in recent world astrology.
In our personal relationships, and in the scope of this lunar month, it describes how we often willfully see through other people’s ability to hurt us or use [our thoughts, labor, emotions, selves] us when they’re close to us. In fact, we write it off as something they may be doing unintentionally because they want to be closer to us, and we are intoxicated by the idea that someone desires this sameness and intimacy with us. Neptune in Pisces is the wishful thinking, “they don’t know what they’re really doing” denial of what’s really going on. It’s the part when you ignore the fact that something bothers you because you don’t think the other person did it on purpose and so you’re unwilling to blame them. It makes you forget that intent doesn’t erase impact, and prevents you from being able to identify the problem and speak to it.
Uranus in Aries is about the transformational qualities of self-(re)presentation and how those may change in opposition to our other needs — to connect with others, to relate to them (Jupiter in Libra). The Jupiter energy wants us all to be brought together, to work together, to balance each other. But the Uranus energy comes in bursts and fits, upsetting the delicate weight of the scales. It’s our needs, unique to each one of us, and how wildly unpredictable they can be until we realize they exist. The sun and moon mimic this during tonight’s lunation, and show us the balance that we still have to make.