I think I have found my spiritual father. His name is Fritz Riemann and I’ve been reading his work in the past week, at my analyst’s recommendation. I began first with his book which in English has been rather poorly translated as “Anxiety: Using Depth Psychology to Find a Balance in Your Life” (in its original: “Grundformen der Angst“), and then I realised that he was also the author of another book I had on my list, the beautifully titled “Astrology and Psychotherapy” (or “Lebenshilfe Astrologie“) a book which I see as the manual to my future profession.
I’m just two weeks away from turning 39 years old, an age which is usually marked by something called the mid-life crisis. This is described as a pivotal period in a person’s life (usually spanning from the 37th year of life until the 41st) in which the foundations in a person’s life are revised and new decisions for the future have to be made. It’s like a pitstop in the middle of a person’s life in which past actions are coming up for scrutiny in order to find the answer to the burning question “How do I move forward in life?”.
It’s called a “crisis” because something breaks down (usually a career path or a significant relationship, a way of life) and this catapults the individual into a pressure chamber of a mindspace, in which solutions need to be found with urgency.
Carl Jung wrote about this period in a positive light. He saw this breakdown as a special indication that a person was getting closer to living out the truth of their identity or in his terms, the crisis was an opportunity to finally ‘individuate’. What made the crisis so intense was the extent to which someone had lied to themselves so far in their lives, and build a life on shaky and borrowed values, rather than on their personal intuition or on what mattered most to their individuality. In his words:
The nearer we approach to the middle of life, and the better we have succeeded in entrenching ourselves in our personal attitudes and social positions, the more it appears as if we had discovered the right course and the right ideals and principles of behaviour. For this reason, we suppose them to be eternally valid, and make a virtue of unchangeably clinging to them. We overlook the essential fact that the social goal is attained only at the cost of a diminution of personality. Many—far too many aspects of life which should also have been experienced lie in the lumber-room among dusty memories; but sometimes, too, they are glowing coals under grey ashes. – C. Jung, The Collected Works, p. 395
Astrologers also wrote about this period as being one marked by the multiple aspects that transiting Saturn would be making to the natal Saturn and Uranus placements in an individual’s chart, precipitating painful and unexpected changes that have long-lasting consequences. The most notable of which is Erin Sullivan in her book “The Astrology of Midlife and Aging”. Sullivan describes the mid-life crisis as:
“Between the ages of thirty-seven and forty-one, in synchrony with the transit of the planet Uranus’ opposition to its place in the horoscope, something mysterious takes place within the psyche. Further, Dante says: “I cannot clearly say how I had entered the wood; I was so full of sleep just at the point where I abandoned the true path” (II 10-13) The ‘sleep’ with which we are full at the meeting at the crossroads is really the unconscious life that we have within and that is still unlived. Jung said that in this phase of life one is living the “unlived life”, assuming correctly that midlife does not begin a time of rapid decay, loss of libido, and inevitable death but rather in a time in which one might recollect one’s life and, from that recollection, build upon a profound understanding and conscious action toward the next phase of adulthood.” Sullivan, The Astrology of Midlife and Aging, p. 4
Similarly to what Jung and Sullivan have described in their books, I also find myself needing to change my profession at this turning point in my life, as I am no longer able to make a living out of just being an astrologer and tarot reader. I am lucky that I am able to have the interior and exterior resources to be able to undergo this transition with a relative amount of meaning. After I was hit with the transit of Saturn conjunct my natal Mercury and Sun in the last 3 years, I witnessed the gradual loss of a lot of the things and people which used to anchor me in place. I’ve also felt blocked in my development, both creatively and emotionally and frustrated with life.
This produced a crisis of meaning inside of myself and aware that Saturn rules over time and old age, I sought the wisdom of those older than me. In a random way – and possibly influenced by this year’s transit of nostalgic Jupiter in Cancer – I was reminded of an old dream of mine, that of completing my psychotherapeutic training. So after my father’s death I signed up for a professional training to become a Jungian analyst. And I’m happy to say that as lost as I was a couple of years ago, I am now meaningfully placed exactly where I need to be, since my current training offers me a sense of purpose and meaning, which I was robbed off in the past.
However, there are still plenty of difficulties to overcome, most of which have to do with the reshaping of my very soul. I am overwhelmed at the moment by moods, fears and bouts of low energy, which I am processing each week with the help of my supervising analyst, by doing dream analysis and art therapy. This is where depth psychology and the work of many Jungian analysts come in handy, as I don’t believe I would’ve been able to start the process of “mining” through my memories and rearranging my inside, without their help.
So here I am, in my second semester of professional training reading the works of Fritz Riemann and Marion Woodman, my substitute spiritual mother and father. While the German author is helping me stitch together my previous experience as an astrologer and put it in relation to my current experience of being a trainee psychotherapist, Marion Woodman is my wise maternal guide, helping me understand the deeper layers of my psyche and especially my relation to my own Shadow, and what lies beneath it: the Animus and the Death Mother Archetype, two figures who have been haunting me for a while.
After, watching the documentary “The Way of the Dream” and having read her interview with Daniella Sieff titled “Confronting the Death Mother: An Interview with Marion Woodman“, I was curious to find out more about Marion, much like I wanted to discover more about Fritz and his attraction to astrology. I kind of feel like they are kindred spirits to me, or at least ancient members of my soul family. So naturally I pulled up their birth-charts.
Fritz was born a Sun in Virgo (loosely conjunct Venus), with a Moon in Aquarius (loosely conjunct Jupiter). He has a natal Saturn in Capricorn conjunct Chiron (the Wounded Healer Archetype) and a Uranus in Sagittarius conjunct Lilith (the Wild Feminine Archetype). Remarkably he is a member of the Pluto in Gemini generation and he has a natal Neptune in fellow water sign, Cancer. His Mars is in proud Leo and his Mercury is conjunct his North Node, both in the sign of Libra.
His comfort zone, is marked by Aries, as his South Node is in Aries. Unfortunately, I have no idea in which astrological houses these planets are falling because I am lacking information on his birth time, and hence there is no Ascendant. But he seemed like a charismatic and optimistic fellow (which is rare for Virgo men to be honest). So I am wondering if perhaps his Ascendant was in Leo, which would’ve placed his Mars conjunct it too?
In terms of comparing our charts and finding out why I feel he is one of my kindred spirits, I can see that he has his nodal placement opposite to mine as I was born with a SN in Libra/NN in Aries, and that his Moon and Jupiter fall around my Venus in Aquarius (so I fall in love with the ideas that he cared about, and with Aquarius energy these ideas are indeed audacious and astrological).
Moreover, his Uranus in Sagittarius is conjunct my natal Saturn in the same sign (which makes him the perfect, wacky mentor for me) and his Pluto in Gemini sits in a tight conjunction to my natal Chiron in Gemini in the 8th house, while his Mars in Leo sits on top of my Midheaven. I interpret these two final aspects as being motivating and healing to me, even from beyond his grave. No wonder, I see his work as that of my spiritual father figure.
Moving on to Marion, she was born with a Sun in Leo conjunct the Moon and Mercury (so she is a New Moon baby, an aspect that denotes a pioneering spirit and a true individualist). She has her natal Venus conjunct Neptune in Virgo, an aspect which made her perfect for analytical work but it may have gradually eaten down her relationships due to a perfectionist streak. Furthermore, her natal Mars is conjunct the North Node in Gemini and her South Node is in Sagittarius (and sadly) conjunct her Saturn, which denotes a rough upbringing no matter how positive the Jupiterian influence may be.
In addition, I see a bold Uranus in Aries, Pluto in maternal Cancer and Jupiter in enterprising Taurus conjunct Chiron (the Wounded Healer Archetype). You can easily see that she has not had an easy life and that growth for her came during painful moments when she was wounded but she had to heal others (Jupiter conjunct Chiron). At the same time, she was able to increase her awareness of the pains of the human condition and bring truth in areas of life previously thought of as taboo, such as in her description of the Inner Tyrant. Her book “The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women” is a pearl in terms of helping me understand the painful underbelly of romantic attractions and why they usually fail and end up in heart-break.
Being born with Saturn conjunct your comfort zone means that any comfort in early life is usually robbed off you as a form of karmic debt, and Marion has been vocal in her book “Leaving my father’s house: A Journey to conscious femininity” about the strained relationship she has had with her father who blocked her chances of being herself (Saturn in Sagittarius). But she was an exceptionally intelligent and wise woman, almost to the point of having an intelligence which stood against her in many ways, and may have self-sabotaged her chances of being happy in life.
In terms of placing her chart in conversation with my own natal chart, the fist thing I noticed is how we share the same Saturn placement and how her South Node is almost perfectly conjunct my Moon in Sagittarius, denoting a deep and unconsciously fertile link between the wisdom she provides and my compulsive search for wisdom. In addition, her Uranus in Aries is conjunct my natal North Node and Jupiter in Aries, making her a truly wise, maternal guide for me to learn a lot from, especially in relation to my own masculinity and wounded Animus (Aries).
Moreover, her Pluto in Cancer falls in my 9th house, where I have Lilith in Cancer (the Wild Feminine Archetype), an aspect which I fondly refer to as the Erin Brockovich effect in terms of using feminine power to combat the abuses of the patriarchy. Marion’s writings liberate me and give me the feeling that I can live life completely free of taboos and complexes as a powerful woman, surviving a changing world (much like Marion had lived her life).
It’s strange how I just begun with an intuition that I should read the works of both Fritz and Marion, and then as I dived into their work and found how strongly it resonated with me, I fell under the suspicion that it may be more to our shared energies than meets the eye. Astrology then showed me in concrete ways, of what I initially just spun out of the thin air of a gut feeling, that I was correct. So I rest my case once more.
Astrology is truly magical, and following your intuition and insights is almost like putting the whole energy of your natal chart in motion towards fated events. This is why it is so important to allow the inner compass to guide you in life, rather than fall for external opinions or follow the indications of others. Trust your gut, trust you path and walk in the direction of your soul tribe. Pursue interests and learn from those who came before you. I would even go so far as to say that this may be the pragmatic application of Jung’s core theme of individuation.
May your journey be filled with suprising joy and boundless wisdom!
Seeing as the highly feminine and exalted transit of Jupiter in Cancer of this year, is providing the perfect background for such a topic, I would like to analyse in the following article some famous and difficult mother-daughter relationships from an astrological point of view. I have experienced such a relationship throughout my life and chances are that if you were drawn to the title, you may also be immersed in such a maternal bond (and consequently the maternal complex that comes with it).
I think this article is also about feminine rebellion and about the astrological signs that point in someone’s birth-chart that their destiny is about becoming a rebel, even if only a gentle one at best. It is to some extent about those character traits that push someone to stand up against external forces that try to dim their natural light, their energy and their capacity to be who they feel they are meant to be, even when these forces come from inside your family unit and your bond to the mother.
In astrology, all aspects connected to the Self and its capacity to express what it is, are contained within the Sun sign, the astrologically dominant planet under which we are born and which shows the seasonal proclivities of the part of year in which a person is born and metaphorically speaking, the kind of “weather” that a person continues to have throughout their life.
As an example, for a Gemini (a person born at the end of May and beginning of June) their world revolves around communication and socializing since that period of the year shows Nature in full bloom, is abundant in fresh produce and as a result people organise celebrations, parties and weddings. While for a Sagittarius (describing someone born at the end of November and beginning of December) their solar light points them in the direction of growth during trying times, as Nature dies around the month of November to prepare for a renewal, and for developing a sense of adventure when faced with life’s darker side and the vicissitudes of surviving Winter.
In addition, astrologers tend to associate the Sun’s solar light to masculine traits while the Moon’s energy in our chart shows our feminine potential; as such the Sun is considered to be the placeholder for the Father archetype while the Moon is the placeholder for the Mother archetype. Bearing that in mind, in this article I want to write about how a feminine Sun signs and their destiny (their North Node) could live under the shadow of someone else’s control and of the karmic masters who wield it in our lives, those first initial spiritual teachers who mould our capacity to intuitively understand our Sun sign and who demarcate how well we can express our inner light during our formative years. I am of course, talking about our mothers.
What happens when someone’s solar energy (i.e. their vitality, capacity to grow, their personality, skills and energy levels) is frustrated by their bond with a mother figure? In the following, I will be looking into the charts of two famous women who suffered at the hands of their mothers but they somehow managed to transform that suffering into haunting literature and cautionary tales of the price of fame and entertainment.
Rebellion and control are usually not words associated with ‘normal’ or ‘thriving’ mother-daughter relationships. This is why these word ends up labelling other types of mother-daughter arrangements, those barely ‘good enough’ forms of mothering which usually look ‘good’ on the outside and are experienced as ‘living hells’ on the inside. What would be the purposes of such relationships in our lives?
In the summer of 2024, I became strangely obsessed with the biography of Shirley Jackson, an American author I discovered after watching the Netflix series ‘The Haunting of Hill House’, a series which even though it is a departure from Shirley’s original text, it was nonethelss brilliant in my opinion in its fantasy depiction of domestic & familial horror.
I then started learning about Shirley’s life and work with the help of the channel Books and Cats on Youtube, which has plenty of videos on Shirley’s work and her legacy. I came to fnd out that domestic horror is the literary genre which Shirley spear-headed, and as a person who has had lifelong issues with emotional neglect and maternal control, her story and writing spoke so deeply to me, as if it woke up parts of my soul that lay dormant and needed some stirring healing. So I thought of composing this article after I finished reading “The Lottery and Other Stories“.
Photo of author Shirley Jackson and of her natal chart, created with the help of http://www.astroseek.com
At the same time as discovering Shirley’s work, I got drunk one night and called my mother. Somehow everything I had repressed in my relationship with her came spewing out of my mouth. Needless to say, I had an argument with her; this is something usual in our dynamic and it is hurtful each and every time, like putting salt on an open wound. My mother was hurt by her own mother so she ends up hurting me and thus we perpetuate mutual hatred on the maternal line.
I resist having children for fear that I may unconsciously continue this dreaded cycle of pain. After our fight, I fell asleep crying. The next day I opened my eyes and they immediately fell upon one of the books in my bookshelf as the light from the Sun outside was making it stand out. I bought a book last Spring and realized I forgot to read it. This book was Jeanette McCurdie’s “I’m glad my mom died”. I picked it up and could not put it down, since it spoke volumes to my current state of despair in my ‘bond’ with my mother.
Photo of actress Jeannette McCurdy and of her natal chart created with the help of http://www.astroseek.com
Although, I have no prior experience of being a child star, I could emotionally identify with Jeannette’s experiences. And I felt weirdly understood at the same time. These are some of the contextual elements which brought me in contact with both women’s reflections on their experiences and I’m going to use an astrological perspective to interpret these experiences to see if there is anything in their natal charts that shows that their mothers had to teach them some tough karmic lessons in order to make them into the individuals that they reluctantly became.
I will be drawing in my analysis from Jan Spiller seminal book “Astrology for the soul”. I hope this post will appeal to those of you who love the two celebrities but also may have the same astrological markers discussed. We know that Shirley had a co-dependant relationship to emotionally abusive mother from the letters she wrote to her but never sent. You can find out more about Shirley’s life from this video or by dividing deep into her Wiki entry. For Jeannette we obviously know a lot about her relationship to her mom from her best-selling memoir and some revealing interviews she offered the public after her mother’s death. One of the main things that attracted me to writing an article about these two women were the fact that they had problematic mothers and that they also shared a South Node in Cancer / North Node in Capricorn destiny.
When analyzing the destiny of a NN in Cap it is important to check the sign, house & aspects made by the person’s natal Saturn (as Saturn is the planet presiding over their NN since it is the traditional ruler of Capricorn). So we see that Shirley (a Sagittarius Sun and Ascendant with a Moon in Leo) has a Saturn in Cancer in the 8th house, while Jeanette (a Cancer Sun with a Moon conjunct Mars in Taurus) has a Saturn in Aquarius in the 7th house; these are too highly relational houses, denoting problems and blocks on the path of loving and being loved, trusting and being able to create intimacy. Saturn, astrology’s great malefic, parked in these houses for life also denotes low-quality relatives and issues of money and painful duty being deeply intermingled with parental care.
Although the gals have the same destiny as their nodes are similar, they are ‘living’ out this destiny in specific ways as shown by their dissimilar Saturnian placements: for Shirley it is emotional & maternal karma (Saturn in Cancer) while for Jeamette it is group-based & self-awareness karma (Saturn in Aquarius).
Their Saturnian placements are furthermore, amped up by their lunar nodes, those parts of the natal chart that describe the growth potential and destiny of someone’s life. Here is what Jan Spiller has to say about NN in Capricorn/SN in Cancer individuals:
“Capricorn North Node people need to find a focus beyond their scattered emotional needs and those of people around them. When they bring themselves into alignment with a higher principle or spiriual belief , they feel protected and nurtured. These people excel at being “the boss” (…) To achieve success in any area, these folks need to be “in charge” of their own piece of the puzzle. When things don’t go as they want, they overreact emotionally, subconsciously hoping that others will see how upset they are and change their behavior. But other people perceive this as a means of controlling and are unwilling to modify their behavior just to appease these natives (…) These folks are extremely sensitive to their own emotions and those of others.” – p. 400-403
If we take a brief look at their astrological placements we can see that Shirley is a Sun in Sagittarius with a Moon in Leo and a Sagittarius Ascendant; not only that but she has a whooping 8 planets and points in her chart in Fire signs! That is a considerable amount of passion and lust for life that had to be kept under wraps due to the presence of a watery and maternal Pluto in Cancer, the marker which shows that her destiny (South node in Cancer) was bound to her relationship with a dominant mother figure who worked on her emotionally (Pluto in Cancer).
On the other hand Jennette is a Sun in Cancer with a Moon conjunct Mars in Taurus and an undetermined Ascendant. She is a member of the so-called Millenial generation, being born with a Pluto in Scorpio. What I found interesting, and what binds the destinies of these two women together is not only the fact that their power lies within their emotional healing as both of their Pluto placements are in Water signs but also the fact that they both have a South Node in Cancer & North Node in Capricorn – the quintessential marker of a person who is meant to gradually and irrevocably separate from their mother figure and find their own financial success by overcoming hardships, limits and the many temptations of their own basic instincts.
I know it’s considered childish or a sign of having a weak character for blaming your parents, and especially your life-giving mother for all the problems in your life, and I agree. Life as an adult will show you many times that in order to move forward with it, you’ll necessarily have to get ‘childish’ and explore your past, your roots and pluck what is rotten in order to prepare the ground for fresh growth. It’s an unnerving and often frightening psychological process of coming to terms with parts of yourself that are exactly like what you are criticising in your mother (you know that old saying that every daughter inevitably ends up turning into her mother, and this clichee begins to feel eerily familiar once you reach your late 30s).
Again, I want to let Jan Spiller speak on behalf on this nodal placement’s complicated family dynamics:
“Capricorn North Node people have a hard time letting go. They are very sentimental and they don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. When they start to leave a situation, even if its clearly not working, they get depressed – so they tend to “hang in there” until their realize deep down that there’s no hope. They do all they can to make the relationship, the job, the situation work. When their survival is threatened they will leave; but they will be much better off letting go before the situation escalates to that point (…) Their whole world revolves around their family and they expect the dynamics to be reciprocal. But more nurturing from family members, usually isn’t forthcoming – it’s just not set up that way in this lifetime (…) Capricorn North Node people need to let others know what the rules and limits are, and then stick to them unflinchingly (…) These folks must learn to stand behind their word. Their commitment must be stronger than their fear of upsetting the other person.” – p. 406-409
Of course, one thing to keep in mind is that we all know about Jeannette & Shirley because they managed to face their fears & succeeded to a large extent in growing into their NN in Capricorn. They are more or less willingly fulfilling the “take charge” requirements of their destiny and this is how a Romanian astrologer like myself got to hear of them and their lives: through their work & their stoic and scary reflections on family life. Think about having this kind of reach & influence in your own life, if you happen to have this nodal placement and are struggling to embody it. Decide today to set goals & take charge & see where the soulful journey takes you.
And don’t worry for you shall be blessed. As the SN in Cancer/NN in Capricorn individual has to integrate their mother’s wounded energy to become the father they wish they had themselves. One exercise I like to do to integrate this maternal/paternal healing energy is to pray not only “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost”, but also “In the name of the Mother, the Daughter and the Holy Body”. Amen.
“ The individual is driven by his personal crises into deep waters which he would usually never have entered if left to his own free will. The old idealised image of the Ego has to go, and its place is shaken by a perilous insight into the ambiguity and many-sidedness of one’s own nature.” – p.79, E. Neumann, Depth Psychology
When Pluto, the planet of Rebirth and Intensity, reaches the Nadir (also known as the Imum Coeli or the root portion of a birth-chart) it begins a soulful and emotional transformation that has the potential to change the relationship of an individual to their environment. Individuals experiencing this transit are becoming increasingly aware that surrounding reality seems to be shaped by what they feel and how much they feel it.
The Imum Coeli, translated from Latin, literally means ‘the bottom of the sky’. You may encounter some astrologers refer to the IC as the Nadir, another obscure term defined by the Oxford Dictionary as: a) (in astronomy) the point on the celestial sphere directly below an observer; b) the lowest or most unsuccessful point in a situation. In a 2014 article on the reputable website astro.com, Polly Wallace describes the IC as poetry in motion and in the following way: “Definitions of Imum Coeli include the lowest heaven and a literal translation as the undersky. Such evocative phrases conjure up a sense of the IC as a territory in its own right (…) As the undersky, the IC is always hidden. It stands like the portal into a mysterious zone. The realm of the lowest heaven is vast; it encompasses all our past(s), all the detail of our origins and our roots – and all our secrets. It is another world, an inner world, experienced on a level as profound as the deepest darkness of night-time and of winter. Like the earth below our feet, this realm is the fecund darkness where seeds germinate, where roots develop intricate and enduring networks.”
I guess you can imagine what darkness is unleashed in the life of an individual when the farthest and most intensely contested planet of our solar system meets with the most mysterious and hidden point of the chart. But this darkness is unseen to others, it is private and known only to the person affected. Contrary to other places in the natal chart, the 4th house describes interiors of many different kinds, and what could be more interior to a person than their psychology, their memory and their soul. I am personally becoming more reclusive since this transit has begun. I feel the need to sleep during the day and stay active at night. The soul is awake at night and I feel its power so strongly at the moment. I am so driven to read, write, watch movies and draw – I do these things to understand my drivers and patterns, so I can remake them. I do these things because I love them and they make sense to me. Reality and daily living seems harsh and belligerent, devoid of meaning and I push myself to be in my own ‘bubble’ by wearing noise cancelling headphones. But more on my personal experience with this transit in the middle portion of this article. Let’s get back to the traits of Pluto’s movement conjunct the IC and inevitably on the cusp of the 4th astrological house.
Unlike Venus, Pluto has no delicate finesse. It acts like a sledgehammer, especially in the debut of a transit, the first months up to a year when it switches signs. The theme of its transit is brought up suddenly – like a punch in the stomach – all of the emotions that have been repressed, overwhelming the psyche of the affected person with memories, patterns, unresolved wounds and chaotic emotions are suddenly out on the table. It takes the next decade to work through them, and as the work is performed a deep, personal transformation occurs. Then at the middle point of a Pluto transit, the rebuilding begins and slowly what was once dark and hopeless turns into light and passionate love. Throughout the entire duration of that Pluto transit, the individual will have to do the deep psychological work of organizing their messy psychic content, discarding what is now dead and useless and continuing to nourish what remains vital and alive inside of them.
If one can deal with these emotions and work at understanding them, then their immediate reality will begin to mirror their hard-working inner world and a state of attuned harmony is reached after some time. However, if one allows themselves to be drawn into a whirlwind of emotions without comprehending them, if one begins to live more intensely in the past than in the present, becoming complacent in the struggle with the forces of the unconscious, then there is potential here for one’s worst nightmares to materialise and for a mental health condition to completely take over one’s life.
Either way emotional transformation and confrontations with core, wounded aspects of our largely unconscious Self are necessary for personal growth. Most importantly, the main theme of any transit to the IC is reflecting upon or establishing a sense of personal safetyin the world again.
The sign or constellation that Pluto travels through will also determine the way in which emotions and past memories are unleashed and how the individual will work at integrating them. As this transit happens it will also end up affecting the home, the immediate and private environment of an individual. For most people and in most charts, the IC lies in the 4th house, the house ruled by the Moon and the astrological sign of the celestial Crab, which symbolizes the protective shelter in which we regroup our forces.
What Others are Saying About this Transit
To prepare for this article, I read extensively whatever I could find on the topic. First of all, I turned to Steven Forrest’s seminal text “The Book of Pluto” and found this beautiful and psychological interpretation of the meaning of the 4th house:
“the fourth house is the “House of the Home”. In most modern astrological texts, it is interpreted in more psychological terms, as the house of the inner self, the feelings, one’s deepest archetypal roots (…) Every human who has ever lived possesses a fourth house. Translated, we all to some degree have a need for ‘family’ – a word we must use broadly to mean a set of unquestionably secure social relationships. Loyalty and lifetime commitment are the critical notions here, not blood kinship. Depth, often unspoken depth, may possibly develop in these bonds, but it is less central. Roots, a safe haven, a place to let one’s hair down – these are the crucial concepts (…) To form clan and hearth with other human beings is the ultimate act of trust. Due to your wound, you may turn away from it, taking refuge in your own self-sufficiency (…) “If I really opened up, they’d be too shocked to handle it” – that’s often the belief at the roots of this particular navigational error. Even more fundamentally “There’s something horrible and dirty inside of me” (…) Your navigational error, if you succumb to it, would be to live the life of a ghost, with your fire, intensity, and vision removed from your biographical life while you went through the motions of existence. And, regardless of outward appearances, at the psychological level you would live the life of a heartless, homeless person.
– p. 79-83
Some people describe this Pluto-IC transit as the midnight of the Soul. As Lynn Hayes writes: “It shows the psychological legacy from our parents and ancestors that submerges in the unconscious until activated, usually by transit of a planet to that point. This is the point at which we enter the underworld of our own internal psyche, turning inward to meet the essence of who we are in this lifetime.”The Raw Astrologer describes this transit in such a perfect way as Pluto invading your personal space and beginning to chaotically and disturbingly recreate your family life, your home and your sense of security.
This placement can have a beautiful side-effect and that is coming in touch with the Plutonian imagination which can be vast, intense and mystery-increasing. As Anne Whitaker describes in her account of being born with such a placement, that in her childhood: “My ‘real’ life – eating, sleeping, going to school – was incidental to my inner life which was full of what I felt were the really interesting questions: why are we alive, where do we go after death, do we live on several planes of existence at once, what is happening in other galaxies”. In addition, June from Saturn & Honey writes that this type of Pluto transit is a family curse-breaker: “4th house Pluto means staring the truth of one’s early life or longer-term family history in the eye and choosing not to continue the pattern, committing to change. Let the ways of the past end with you.”
Over at Little Golden Age blog, and in a short post which contains a good amount of personal experiences with this transit, actuallyjessica writes on surviving Pluto: “I quite literally hope that I survive. I realize that many people don’t ever experience this kind of astrology, so I’m trying to extract the lessons, tear down the old bullshit, transform my powerlessness into wisdom and turn my lump of coal into a shiny diamond. If you, like me, are deep in this Pluto business, I hope you find your way through the darkness to bright new days.”
Pluto conjunct the IC (the bottom of the sky) means that Pluto is also in opposition to the Midheaven, as Peter Holm from Holm Astrology writes: “when the home and family are being affected in our lives and security wavers, it may be due to demands from the MC, which deals with one’s status, occupation and ambitions (…) The IC and MC, particularly in early life, depict incidents linked to the parents which in turn will affect the child. This parental influence on a child, shifts as we mature. The influence widens in such a way that we are no longer just influenced by the parents that dictate our lives, but we are also now affected by an extended version of the family and our place in the overall structures of life.”
Finally, for a really comprehensive description of this astrological placement and transit, Astrology by Jo offers a description of the IC as being the one to set the feeling tone of our upbringing and the soul’s inheritance. These deep parts are what are illuminated and transformed by Pluto. One can find their root power under a Pluto conjunct the IC transit, but before the moment of intense breakthrogh comes the pressure-cooker build-up. Let me exemplify with a brief account of the last two years of my life (2024-2025), as Pluto gravitated between 29th degree of Capricorn and the 1st degree of Aquarius and encircled my IC.
My Personal Experience
Initially I felt invaded by this energy, and it felt like against my will the structures in my life which I had worked so hard to build, started moving and shifting in dangerous ways. I went from suffering constant auditory pain in my household, to waking up with the bleakest moods I’ve had in my life, to visiting my dad decaying on a hospital bed, to having shouting matches with my mother, and being threatened with violence by neighbours. The upsides of this energy, have been reshaping my career to do a training in Jungian analysis, expanding my social family by adopting two more cats from the street, and realising the meaning that alcohol had in my family’s life and bypassing ‘a need to drink’ by sublimating it into drawing and painting again.
In the final months of Pluto in Capricorn at 29 degrees, I began to obsess over anything related to the home, to protection and to securing the boundaries of my daily living experience. Just shy off my 36th birthday, I bought an apartment in March of 2023 with my lifetime’s savings. What had initially felt like a wish come true, soon turned into a nightmare. I came to realize that while my place was cozy and practical, it was surrounded by problematic individuals and part of an environment which I had considerably underestimated under the spell of my first-time buyer’s excitement. I am not a financially wealthy being, and actually the wound of poverty is the strongest marker in my personal chart (see that Saturn in the 2nd house placement).
To me, owning a home, even if it was a small flat, was a very important aspect of breaking through ancestral patterns of women being denied the right to property or having money to buy their homes, and thus finding self-empowerment and safety. Dazed as I was by finally finding a place that I was able to afford in crowded and expensive Bucharest, I had not realized I was trying to sleep in a hornets’ nest. And there can be no true safety in such an environment.
Across the road from my apartment a highway was being finalised and when I moved into the place in March, I had no idea that roadworks would last until the end of November of that year. I lived for months with loud drilling noises, made worse by the fact that the building next to mine also was being enveloped simultaneously as the highway – something damaging happened to my nervous system during that period, the repercussions of which I still have to live with. Over the summer of that year, the neighbourhood turned into hot mulch, and the air was toxic due to the dust in the air.
Even with the windows closed, the surrounding noises were unquenchable, especially since I was hit with another issue: my next-door neighbour was prostituting herself to the workers in the neighbourhood and would place loud music on her subwoofer, every time they came to see her to drown out her moans. To make matters worse, often these men would knock on my door, as the doors to the flats were so close to each other.
As summer burned outside, the inside of the building was littered with garbage and we lacked an Intercom, so strangers were freely entering the building to get drunk or high on the staircases. One night I got woken up by the sound of a man snoring loudly as he had fallen drunkenly asleep near my door. And to top it all off, one of my neighbours from two doors down across from mine had frequent psychotic breakdowns in which he would dress as a woman and threaten to jump out the garbage chute or paint the hallways with crayon and other bodily fluids.
Whenever I would leave my home I was equipped with a pocket knife, pepper spray and ready to record any interaction coming my way. I felt like walking through metaphorical ‘trenches’ and distracted my attention by making my indoors look cozy and warm and by taking care of the neighbourhood’s stray cats. By taking care of the vulnerable I was also and indirectly sending out a cry for help: ‘Would someone take care of my vulnerable Self?‘ It took me a while to understand that this elusive someone had to also be me.
All these interferences and frights made me crave safety in life like never before, but as the planet Saturn resides in my 2nd house, I am deprived of experiencing it in this lifetime, unless I put in hard work to obtain it. Interestingly, just when I thought I had figured out the deeper meaning of the 4th house in astrology, I began reading Wanda Sellar’s book ‘Introduction to Decumbiture‘ and was struck by how often she associated the 4th house with ‘the grave‘. This terrified me at the time, as I imagined my own sudden death, but in turns out that this death took someone else in my family, the parent I was attached to the most, my father. Most of us will have this Pluto to the IC transit happening somewhere in our charts and part of the reason I am writing this article is to help prepare some of you for what may come and how to read the energies that could emerge in your life, disturbing your peace, home life and emotional foundations.
I eventually (and reluctantly) ended up selling my flat in February 2025. Even writing this sentence is sending me into a slight panic attack, which tells how I continue to be emotionally attached to this idea of a place as a container of my sense of safety. When in reality, these disruptive events that are causing me to move home so frequently are trying to help me cement the understanding that I am actually the home I am looking for, the home I idealise and crave to own or to build. It is inside of myself that this feeling of safety, of belonging in the world, that needs time and nurture to root and sprout, to grow and expand until I end up feeling safe as a state of being. The root of this feeling begins in my past and is reconstituted in the present through my body and my relationships to others, it is with these two aspects that I need to make peace, by relinquishing a sense of guilt, shame and fear and learning to trust more, to be gentler and to flow.
After I sold the flat, I moved into a rather old-looking apartment, a place in desperate need of new furtnitue and renovation, with big windows and vast amounts of light. I was drawn to that exposing light and didn’t mind the old furniture because to be honest I was so destroyed at the thought of having sold my home that I’ve felt deep down inside that I somehow don’t deserve better. I wrongly believed I had failed at making a home. I sold what was so dear to me. I had given up. I accepted this weird rental with two-beds and linoleum flooring and a kitchen that was tiled in the same style like a sanatorium because I felt sick, frail and somehow self-punishing.
The strangest thing is that the week that I moved into this intermediate home, this purgatory flat, my father died. Two months later a neighbour died. 4 months later, I realised my landlady was suffering from undiagnosed mental health issues that pushed her to cross my boundaries regularly & months later I moved out in a panicked state, right before Christmas after having an argument with her because she had begun following me. The same week I moved out, I also had sex for the first time after 4 years.
When the Scorpio man with beautiful blue eyes, whom I had the spend the night with, asked me “Why did you wait so long?” I answered “Because I was waiting to have sex with someone I loved. But in the meantime, I guess I got pragmatic”. On some level it’s not healthy to put off sex for so long as an adult, and a part of me felt that if I had sex maybe my neurotic symptoms will cool off. And they did, temporarily at least.
Thanatos and Eros, the death drive and the sex drive felt like two large psychological pillars that had marked my existence in the weird limbo-flat in which I stayed for most of 2025. When I moved in, I witnessed the death of my father. When I moved out, I had a night of passionate sex with a stranger. I had ultimately chosen life, and pleasure and sex, which prompted me into a rebirth of some kind. I guess the duality had to be activated inside of me in order to believe again that I am worth more and that I deserve better. I am now renting a one-bedroom apartment which no one knowns the address of and I can’t believe how much I am enjoying this little detail. It’s a place with a dark red wall, just one bed, a place that feels somehow more solid, exceedingly warm and protected, although it is also on the pricier side. I sleep all day and stay awake at night to work in perfect silence. I feel balanced, because somehow, I had managed to jump into a new reality, and had left some of the pain behind. I go to therapy sessions on a weekly basis, analyse my emotions and dreams in a diary and create as often I have energy. Although, I am not sure yet what I am now becoming, I feel somewhat released of the birthing pains and pushed on the path of learning to walk again.
The Energy of this Transit as Shown in Films
Because of my recent experiences, I resonated so strongly with a couple of movies which portrayed the psychological transformations of 4 women. Each at a different level of their becoming, the protagonists’ struggle in their homes, mirrored some of my own intense emotions. I also found it remarkably healing to look at stories driven by women, which placed the themes of motherhood, desire, safety, loss and betrayal at the core of their cathartic decisions. And maybe this could serve as some interesting recommendations to understand the deeper meaning of a Pluto in the 4th house transit or natal placement.
In the following section, I will share my perspective on what the place of the home represented on an emotional and psychological level to the main characters in each of the movies I list below. Interpreting the symbolic meaning of a home is a good exercise in preparing for what is to come. However, understanding something may not inevitably protect you from it, but it will certainly help you feel like you are at least more aware of the wise implications of this energy, so that when it happens you are able to handle it and even – dare I say – enjoy it?
Similarly, when someone is aware that they are going through for example, a Saturn return then it is easier to handle it on a mental level, as you understand that tests, limits and hardship are inevitable. I find it fascinating how the movies I am drawn towards, as this transit is unfolding, are centered around the theme of rebirth within the space of the home. These movies show me that when other women go through intense emotional experiences (whether blissful or terrifying) their homes change with them, and in some cases are even exorcised by them. It’s also interesting to note that almost all of the movies I have chosen to discuss have female protagonists and in all of them something either creepy or erotic tends to take place (these being core Plutonic themes). In my description of the following movies, I’ll figure-skate around any spoilers in case you haven’t seen these movies, so you may safely continue reading.
Created in the final stages of the Pluto in Scorpio era, this movie features the magnetic Sharon Stone in such a vulnerable role that at the same time brings an electrifying edge, which only she can perform on screen. Her story begins with moving into a new condo in a weirdly shaped, futuristic building, reminiscent of the intimidating structure in High Rise. She has her reserves about this place (which she should’ve listened to) but is eventually convinced by the estate agent to give it a try. Little does she know that this will be a life-altering decision because not only will she become the fresh target of the building’s covert murderer, but also meet the man of her dreams. Again, the themes of death and sex, Eros and Thanatos are brought to life in this decision to move home.
The movie finds its thrilling bits in the way it keeps you guessing whether her lover is potentially the killer or not, but what really makes the movie fascinating to watch is the state of being under constant surveillance and seeing how this pressure cooker builds to a quick life-affirming denouement. I have to say that the soundtrack kind of sucks though, taking away from the eerie atmosphere of the movie, but her chemistry with William Baldwin is sizzling. As a sidenote, both of them are Pisces Sun actors, and I think I could write a whole different article on William Baldwin’s penchant for starring in erotic thrillers with awesome Piscean co-stars (see Fair Game for another example).
It’s clear by now that I’m a big Rebecca Hall fan, but this movie was surprisingly scary and also deeply emotional at the same time. I kind of sweated and cried with her, since the movie centres on a theme which unfortunately was something, I experienced as well in my life: romantic betrayal, then abandonment and the desperate search to understand the truth about the man you once loved. The really scary character in this movie, is this truth, which once brought to life, shatters the foundations of her sense of psychological security.
This rather flawed movie is at the same supremely atmospheric and carried for most of it by the ultra-talented Jennifer Connelly, who lights up the screen with her soulful performance. It’s also a supremely damp, soggy and wet film in which the environment is literally suffocated by leaks and spill overs, denoting the repressed emotions of the main protagonist, a single mother who in the wake of a divorce has to start life all over again together with her small daughter. She rents an apartment in a building in desperate need of refurbishment on Roosevelt Island in New York, finds a job and enrols her daughter in a new school. All seems to be rebuilding well, until her bedroom ceiling gets a strange leak that keeps becoming larger and larger with each passing day, and then her daughter befriends a girl who no longer exists. With its emphasis on loss, repressed emotions, ghosts, water, broken bonds, porous walls and the desperate seeking of safety in the figure of a mother, this movie holds such deep and obvious fourth house themes that it should be used as compulsory viewing material in astrology schools.
A once stable child psychologist with a family of her own, becomes agoraphobic and obsessed with the aparent murder of her neighbour from across the street – I guess you see how these two things clash, and from the tension of not being physically able to leave her flat the excitement of the film develops as well as the horror. On the surface level this is the plot of a movie that holds no punches in delivering the most gruesome fighting scene I have ever witnessed between a teenager and an adult on a rainy rooftop. but I won’t say more so as not to spoil the plot for you all. You’ll notice early on that the movie draws heavy inspiration from two classic claustrophobic stories that also happen to take place in mythical apartments: Rear Window and Dark Passage, and coincidentially two of my all time favourite films.
The place of living may not be a home for all, but it matters to us all as a vessel of psychological containment for our fears and worries, or what Jung called the ‘unum vas’, the alchemical vessel which holds matter and distils the soul, as we transform and individuate. The home as a shell, your personal safety coating against the harsh world and the perils of nature, or the home as a container of our psychological changes, the walls recording daily dramas, witnessing the unravelling of our private selves. In the home you are who you are, you rarely bring your Persona in and your Ego doesn’t seek the approval it normally seeks from other people’s public validation. So being ‘at home’ can allow the Self to emerge.
I always thought that if people were to know my homebody, ‘pyjama Self’ they would probably find it very different than my academic Self. Last year, in 2025, I dared to show others, with the help of my work on the Internet, this fragile, pyjama Self. I didn’t get much validation and approval, but neither did I get offense and rejection. I felt left to inhabit a limbo area of my Self, much like the apartment I was inhabiting. But I did move in a whispered way from exposing this vulnerable Self, to taking it within and protecting it. This is why I feel safest now, in a state of being ‘draped up’, of not existing during the day, but rather meeting and making friends with my nocturnal Self, my night being. My spirit animal is the sensitive and misunderstood bat and I am comfortable with that image, because usually right before a drastic rebirth you are meant to walk inside the darkest of nights for a while.
Nocturnal little animals You keep your mother up You watch the town shut down You watch the lights go off Shutters closing in the bars
Homes can permit or block the development of us as beings, for example, if you look back at your childhood home (or lack thereof). Homes can also be places to hide what we don’t want others to see, or places within which we hide in order to control the environment around us, to spy on the world that hurt us so much that we can no longer participate in life, like the Woman in the Window portrays so well.
Homes can be places within which desire plays out like in Sliver, birth may happen, diseases and death can occur, away from the prying eyes of strangers. We allow ourselves to be vunerable, soft, pliable in the home. Moreover, houses can be vessels to our memories, and haunted homes especially so, in that they can become a projection screen for parts of our unconscious mind that we have yet to come in contact with: those infamous skeletons in the closet, those darkened basements that house the unspeakable, those creaky floors, bedroom windows that won’t shut properly and those singing pipes, that threaten to burst when our emotions get the best of us but we bottle them up anyway, like its shown in The Night House and Dark Water.
What is left ‘un-homed’ is equally important to what the home represents. The space that is left when we outgrow a place and silently move on in life, leaves an energetic imprint. We leave traces of ourselves everywhere we have been and homes are the containers of these past, previous, ghostly selves, that we can no longer fit into. It’s a different way to interpret the sense of ‘horror vacui’ , which appears so frequently around abandoned homes and derelict places. This is why revisiting a location can feel so distabilising or why entering in a new place can also overwhelm us, because we come into contact with what has lived here in the absence, much like Steven Soderbergh shows in his haunting film “Presence”(2024).
And absoring that absence, welcoming the past self into the present, private reality we dispose of, can help us to create that elusive and transient sense of being ‘at home’, like it is so tenderly portrayed in a movie that managed to leave me in cathartic tears, as it deals with healing a father-daughter relationship through art, the poignant Sentimental Value (2025). Please go watch it, it will leave you loving.
In conclusion, I guess it helps to welcome the past, no matter how painful it has been, and to resist running away from it, as it will show you the way forward in life when you are going through a period of being ‘stuck’.
Ultimately, I understood that to feel safe in the world, no matter the location or place, is to feel safe embracing that haunted basement, those secret skeletons in the closet and that scary attic that have always been part of me. Like the goddess Hekate, I have to find a way to carry a torch even in the darkest parts of my Underworld, those places I didn’t dare visit while I was young because I was unprepared to take on the burdens of Eros and Thanatos, but that now as an adult are asking me to integrate them with courage and honesty into all aspects of the experience of being alive.
The spiritual goal toward which the whole nature of man strives is to rescue the light of consciousness…it is the sea to which all rivers went their way.
The final leg of this intense Mercury retrograde in Scorpio/Sagittarius reminds us that we are currently under a beautiful astrological configuration, brought about by the meeting of Jupiter in Cancer (at 24° 47′ degrees) together with Saturn (25° 15′), the North Node ( 24° 24′), Neptune in Pisces (29° 45′) and also Uranus in Taurus (29° 16′). These 4 massive planets of our solar system, together with the lunar nodal axis in Pisces/Virgo, are cozying up to each other within the span of 5 degrees and forming pleasant and harmonious trines and sextiles.
With so much soothing Water and Earth energy in the sky, the air feels thick with generative emotions, creating a fertile, spiritual ground for romantic ideas. But because Earth and Water romantic energy is often tinged with serious and rather heavy feelings such as melancholy, yearning, loss, sadness, possessiveness, forgiveness, and low self-worth, it develops a rather gothic and dark sheen.
Collectively speaking, it took us a while to get here after a year that began with considerable chaos and irritations (and I blame Jupiter in detriment in the sign of Gemini for that). At the beginning of this year, most of us felt lost, almost like we dissolved and had to let go of things and people we felt emotionally attached to. This loss created spaces in our hearts, in our minds and in our homes that are now being watered and replenished by the rich soil of new seeds, a life germinating with so much emotional potential. A life which awaits the simple spark of Saturn re-entering Aries in the month of February 2026 to light up. Until then, we have time to reflect on what exactly this year was, and I’m personally choosing to do so through the medium of film.
Saturn & the Bleeding Father Wound
I think it’s significant that from a cinematic viewpoint we began the year with big releases such as Nosferatu and are ending it with Frankenstein. The Zeitgeist denotes a growing fascination with horror in our collective, both in terms of movies, but also in the gaming world. Could it be that the realm of horror in art is helping us deal with our own crippling existential anxieties in a collapsing socio-political environment? We usually associate the Archetype of the Father with the spark of vitality, with the energy to overcome obstacles, to boldly face life’s challenges and to contribute to society. But as society and social norms are dissolving right before our eyes, is our conception of the protective and all-encompassing Father Figure also crumbling?
Much like it was gorgeously shown in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, are we left with hunting the monsters of our own psyche, placing upon those on the fringes of society the monstrous qualities of our unintegrated, collective Shadow? Is this why it feels so difficult to exist as a non-conformist, sensitive and creative person in a global village in which everyone thinks the same, looks the same and feels nothing?
If masculinity then appears distorted in our collective unconscious do we transform it into something perverse or perhaps expect it to be perverse? Because things usually exist in pairs, then we cannot speak of a ‘perverse’ or ‘distorted’ form of masculinity haunting the collective without shedding light on its opposite: the higher-minder, redeeming image of man, as a defender, protector and spiritual guide. This is why we may have these counter-trends proliferating in the collective at the moment, being swept over by both religious fervour (see Rapture Tok) and smutty satisfaction (see Werewolf Romances or Biker Tok). There’s a lot more to say on this topic but I’ll let Jungian Analyst and prolific fairy-tale collector, Marie-Louise von Franz explain the psychological tendencies:
People of all ages needed an inner guide to help them overcome life's trials. This need has prompted people to see in certain individuals, gods or deified inspired personalities, the personification of all the skills they are looking for. When people are confronted with this impulse, the father archetype often appears, bearing the image of a deified or god-like counselor. - p. 255, Archetypal Symbols in Fairy-Tales: The Profane and the Magical.
So, at present, are we choosing (more or less consciously) to worship a Demonic Father, a Destructive God which imbued with our own unacknowledged heavy feelings, has the power to obliterate us? Are we then seeking redemption through destruction? And how do these collective energies in which we exist daily end up affecting our behaviours, especially our gendered attachments?
Some Uranus in Taurus Witchcraft
For me, 2025 started with a trip to the local movie house to see Nosferatu, a movie I was eagerly waiting for. Stuffed in my seat liked a tinned sardine with a big crowd in a room that was hellishly warm because the air conditioning was not at full capacity on that cold January evening, I was too distracted to enjoy the movie by the bickering couple sitting next to me who had also berated me for not sitting in my proper place (aka the one I bought the ticket for). Nonetheless, I loved the movie! The dark aesthetics lingered in my mind, as well as that unforgettable, final scene, symbolic of the painting Death and the Maiden (see first image of this post).
After the movie, I came home and felt a sudden and overwhelming urge to take a bath. But rationally I told myself “No, don’t take a bath, because you are during your period at your day with the highest flow and you will literally bathe in your own blood if you do”.
Stupidly enough, I listened to reason and learned to regret it, because I woke up the next day with a severe cold that locked me in bed for the next 3 days. After I recovered, and being an impressionable Pisces, I felt that somehow the dark and evil nature of the monster portrayed in Nosferatu was somehow “stuck” to me and made me feel physically ill. I did some occult research and discovered that bathing in your own blood is actually a protective strategy that can help someone let go of the slimy energetic strings that were attached to her through the malevolent evil eye of others (or in my case, the bad vibes of the bickering, dramatic couple sitting next to me in the cinema). Menstrual blood is especially powerful, as it contains both death and the seeds of life alongside with the protective energy of the discarded uterine lining.
The entire experience was yet another lesson in learning how to trust and listen to my insights, visions and intuition. For a while after that, I was kind of afraid of re-watching Nosferatu because I associated the movie with getting ill and did not want to repeat the experience. Nonetheless, I decided to face my fear and saw the movie once again, at the end of August this time, projected onto the barren wall of my bedroom. Alone, in stillness, only disturbed by a cool breeze from the summer air wafting through my room, the slow sound of traffic and the crickets outside, I finally enjoyed the movie. I also did not catch a cold or argued with strangers and I saved my pocket money for candles and crystals.
Just as a sidenote, having lived through a lot of things in life and travelled extensively, I generally recommend solitary experiences to collective ones. Solitude truly is a gift and we should learn to value it and appreciate it more. That being said, this post is about love 🙂
Or better said, it is about romance and the way it blends with love at the level of our unconscious dark fantasies under this blissful astrological configuration covering the months of November and December of 2025.
Jupiter, the Quirky Dark Romantic
When two of the planetary giants of our solar systems (Saturn and Jupiter) find themselves shining through two of the most sensitive, soft and romantic Water signs, a deep rollercoaster of emotions is unleashed onto the collective. Socially, we find ourselves at the mercy of attachment triggers, insecurity hot-spots and conflicting emotions. Much of the anger we get to experience in the collective, has at its root a terrifying sadness and fear of abandonment.
Despite, their romantic nature, sweetness and adaptability, Cancer and Pisces can be the bringers of great suffering and pain in their lives and the lives of those they come into contact with. This happens when instead of understanding, accepting and mastering their emotionality, they succumb to it or they repress it (by pushing what they feel deep in their unconscious), thereby fuelling their Shadow Selves. People who succumb to their Shadow and live governed by their unconscious desires, become that very thing that they fear: the monsters, those with a great capacity for harm and psychological damage.
Since Jupiterian matters are simultaneously light-hearted and yet filled with rich meaning, I need to say a couple of words here about the wonder-fest that Lisa Frankenstein is. I discovered this Diablo Cody creation this year and have already seen it thrice, I just love it so much! Flipping the script on the male-dominated plot of Frankenstein, this movie has a certain unique, camp charm combined with female ingenuity on the background of an 80s synth-wave trip. The plot revolves around strange Lisa who lives with her father, her step-mom and step-sister in a sleepy, suburban neighbourhood. Her life is marred by a gruesome event that traumatised her childhood and makes her rather reclusive. She takes her social awkwardness and fantasizes in a bachelor’s cemetery about her ideal boyfriend while dabbling in some light witchcraft.
Then on a stormy day she accidentally brings to life a young noble-man who zombies his way to her house to profess undying love to her. He is disabled and smells awful but his heart seems in the right place. To make him human-looking again she has to come up with some creative ideas, and thank God she knows how to sew! Chaos ensues in the sweetest and most psychotic way possible, and I guarantee you will find it hard to guess the ending.
The fascinating thing about Lisa Frankenstein is how her rage and overall teen angst is somehow projected onto the Creature, who ends up putting into action her murderous intent and sadistic fantasies, especially geared towards her borderline step-mother. By falling in love with her, the Creature somehow redeems Lisa of her lowest desires and darker feelings. Their weird, beyond-the-grave love has therefore, cathartic properties, reminding us (again, from a flipped gendered-perspective this time), that love has the power to quench rage and transform death into life again.
This is a delightful movie, considering how low on romantic outputs the past few years have been in Hollywood. I also love the trend of 80s inspired dark romances and slashers. Inevitably, this movie sent me thinking of Totally Killer, a movie I added to this year’s Halloween list of recommended frights.
Neptune or When you Love the Monster
Judging by the rising popularity of creepy, dark romance content on Book Tok, I think it can be said that this year, under the wounded and distorted, paternal energy of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction and Chiron in the sign of Aries (which I wrote about in a previous post), we are all unconsciously processing our strained relationship to men and masculinity, and especially to our fathers, the first men we loved.
Increasingly, it seems that the fine line between the sado-masochistic content of personal fantasies is pervading the collective, who find enjoyment and liberation in stirring up social discoussion around these darkly, ecstatic experiences. This is also driven by greed, a typical manifestation of Uranus in Taurus energy, because what is taboo, forbidden or mysterious usually sells really well.
Nonetheless, I wonder what this form of dark consumption is doing to our psyches in the long-run? Like a Halloween Bacchanal taking place in the privacy of your home and on your phone’s lit up screen, a gallery of perversions and dehumanising acts are misinterpreted as sexy and romantic to rather cringe-worthy heights. Could this be a marker of our sexual appetites changing or of a collective call for desensitization brought about by the transit of emotionally detached and freaky Pluto in Aquarius?
In all honesty, I’ve also been consuming this year a lot of analogue horror content and I began listening to heavy metal. With Jupiter’s transit into nostalgic Cancer, and at my therapist’s request, I started looking for ways to consume the pent-up rage I have been feeling towards my mother in the wake of my father’s death. Taking walks at night-time, drawing monsters and shadow figures, cursing people who harmed me and listening to heavy metal were such sublimation strategies to process my anger. And I admit that as time passes, these sublimation strategies are working and I felt lighter. My mind is also remembering the background to my teenage years, mired in the foreboding sound of bands like System of a Down, Korn and Slipknot. Paradoxically, hearing men scream feels like they are screaming for me, in my name, in the name of the soul inside of me grappling to catch light again.
However, using creepy symbols, scary masks and war paint, dancing and shouting were also survival strategies our ancestors used when faced with the dark forces of disease and violence. Sometimes you become scary when you feel at your most vulnerable and are frightened yourself. As a protective strategy – you become that which you fear in an effort to push back on the energy crossing your boundaries and consuming your identity. This is where the fathomless creatures of Neptune, the God of the Sea, rear their ugly heads, in the realm of dreams and in the silent waters of our inner emotional reservoir. We sometimes reach down inside this fantasy realm to gather the strength to fight the beasts surrounding us, whether human or imaginary. And sometimes to overcome the darkness, we must become it, this being the behaviour encouraged by the camouflaging tendencies of Neptune, domicile in the sign of Pisces.
Recently in the second season of Wednesday, we’ve seen the overt conflict between Tyler and Wednesday, as it is now revealed that he is indeed the Hyde and therefore highly dangerous. Tyler is locked away in an asylum, seething in his rage at being betrayed by the Addams family prodigy, he once felt so attracted to but also attempted to murder. Although both Tyler and Wednesday are exploring their difficult attachments to their mother figures in this season, the overall feeling I had while watching the narrative unfold is the terrible weight of loving somebody who is overwhelmed by their Shadow, to the point of having a monstrous alter-ego.
From a paternal point of view, I also found it interesting that Tyler’s father is ashamed of his son, while Wednesday’s father is proud of her. Could this psychological resource determine the boldness that Wednesday shows in directly facing Tyler in Hyde form, the monster she loves? (it is to be assumed that love is involved, since Wednesday so obviously displays psychopathic tendencies which normally inhibit affect).
Although Tyler is the one in visible chains, Wednesday is the one having to deal with the emotional repercussions of loving someone monstruous, someone who consistently helps her and also harms her. But this tendency exists inside of herself too. Underneath her amateur detective Persona, Wednesday harbours towards Tyler the simultaneous desire to help him while also fighting with him.
In general, it seems that in the absence of meaningful myths to guide us we have been seduced to fall into the cesspool of dark fantasy images produced by contemporary culture and social media. It could be an act of creative absolution to reclaim myths and fairy-tales that align with our values and personal identities and use these as meaningful shields against collective dissolution, meaninglessness and cheap thrills. Maybe experiencing dark romances or exploring our Shadow aspects in love connections, could be the liberating way forward, where instead of pressuring each other into unsustainable, positive ever-afters, we process our pain and wounding into powerful and energy-giving, romantic transformations.
Happy Halloween! If you’re like myself, alone for Halloween and need some cultural stimuli to pass the cold, dark hours of the night then I’ve got your back with this post. Here is a mix of genuinely frightening and gently spooky resources which have proven to be oddly comforting to me in this period. Sift through them and perhaps you will find something that has a chance to become your latest obsession.
The topic of witchcraft is probably the most over-used Halloween theme of all, but in this movie it is handled in such a strange and innovative way, through the medium of a classroom of children who dissappear one night, leaving the members of a small suburban community to rage among themselves as to where they could’ve disappeared. Reminding me a little bit of the weird tension contained in the movies “The Sweet Hereafter” or even “The Leftovers“, this movie doesn’t contain the same emotional depths but it is eerie and highly watchable, entertaining and in equal parts brooding. I loved every minute of it! And Amy Madigan’s interpretation of a part witch/part clown madwoman is masterful.
After watching ‘It follows’ and really being pulled into that movie more than I would have imagined, I can safely say that Maika Monroe is slowly growing on me as a scream-queen presence. Different from that movie, the evil presented in Longlegs is bone-deep frightening and not necessarily related to sexual diseases. What makes the evil in Longlegs so suffocatingly awful is that it’s not something you can prepare for or defend yourself against, as it is all-pervasive. It’s also an interesting tale about appearances which can be deceiving: Are your parents good, kind people? Are you actually safe in the house in which you grew up for years? What determines a family member to turn against their own? And what would you do if Evil wants to strike a deal to keep your child alive?
Aside from the rather funny and dramatic make-up that Nicholas Cage is clad in, throughout the entire movie, the story is not really about him but it is about what drives him and uses him. It’s his passion for bonding with the darkness that sets the story alight and the lead detective is merely someone waking up to a truth that is so harsh and shocking that it destroys whatever security she ever felt in her life. It’s also a well-filmed and perfectly executed movie, which lingers in the mind. I slept with the light on, the night that I saw it.
I wouldn’t have imagined that a movie about zombies would make me cry, but somehow this understated European movie did exactly that. In its original depiction of dead people literally rising from their graves and coming back to life during a hot summer day in a non-descript Danish city, this movie is strangely grey, heavy and also weirdly funny in parts. The brilliant Renate Reinsve creates with very little, such an emotional atmosphere around her relationship to her undead son, that by the end of the movie my face was soaked in tears. All, I can say is that I agree with her difficult decision which the movie ends on, and I hope I that I’ve made you curious enough to watch it now.
Since we are still on the topic of small, understated, atmospheric movies that induce subtle chills, I felt like including the debut feature film of Icelandic director Helena Stefansdottir in the list, a little movie called “Natatorium”. The kind of evil present in this movie is subtle and it feels familiar, domestic even. Very much in line with the tales of Shirley Jackson about the family being the epicentre of some truly horrific thoughts and emotions, Natatorium shows the viewers what happens when a family member has a dark ‘hobby’ that she can’t get enough of, a hobby that can be both purifying but also murderous. In certain circumstances, keeping your relatives at arms length can be a life-saving decision and this movie brings this point home like none other.
If you are looking for a vintage thrill, then I suggest a dive into the film adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s book ‘Something wicked this way comes’. It’s a sumptuous and well-acted piece that has a big heart at the core of it, that being the relationship between a father and his son, laced as it is with guilt and redemption. The Devil is a showman in this story, and he rules over a spooky circus storming into a little American town during a period reminiscent of the Great Depression. As the Devil does its best to fulfill everyone’s deepest desires at a cost, ghosts from the past also begin to emerge and haunt the lives of the townsfolk. The cinematography is really beautiful and the special effects, although incipient for that time-period, are not that bothersome. On the same note, if you want to explore the “creepy circus” theme a bit more in-depth, then I recommend the heart-breakingly disturbing series “Carnivale” (2003-2005).
This one is not so much a frightening watch, as it is a ruthless one. I was completely surprised by this awesome movie, involving colourful and spunky scenery and pretty sarcastic dialogues making fun of the Gen Z, Millenials and Gen X divide. I also love to finally see Kiernan Shipka’s talent utilised well (after the fiasco that the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina sadly was), but she really pulled her strength in this one and gave one of the best performances of her career so far (in my view). Although the movie is pure 80s nostalgia (remember a time when people didn’t have smartphones to interact with each other?!), the killings are pretty brutal and they happen at such a rapid pace that it keeps things interesting and …well, thrilling. You should definitely give it a watch, if you are more of a light-horror/thriller fan. Oh, and there’s also time-travel involved.
From the cut scene that ushers you into this game all the way to its sad denouement, Nightmare Frames is such a treat, in terms of story and character portrayals. The dialogues are interesting and often sarcastic, the twist in the plot is kind of unexpected, and the atmosphere is split between the sunny vibes of the 80s Hollywood scene to that of a creepy, rain-afflicted, poor town in the middle of nowhere, in which the haunting elements of the game really come to life. I felt like I was playing two games in one to be honest, much like how our protagonist is split between his real life and that of the stories he builds in his mind through his scripts. I played this during a hot August weekend with the curtains drawn over my bedroom windows and made such a cool memory of the whole experience. Highly recommend.
I have never resonated with a game more than with this creepy little cozy game, that appeared in my life during the summer of one of my deepest depressions. Losing my father this year was a shock to my system that kept me crawling through the last months, devoid of the pleasure of doing anything. As I was healing, I felt increasingly drawn to horror movies, dark tales, murder mysteries and crime thrillers, as if to balance out or maybe to reflect in the exterior my crippled inner world.
When I stumbled upon Welcome to Elderfield, it was like that moment when I discovered Stardew Valley in 2021 and my life changed for the better! I dedicated countless hours of my life playing that chill game as it lowered my cortisol in the morning while I had my coffee. But I could no longer enjoy playing Stardew Valley this year, as all that sweetness and positivity felt like a hoax seeing as I was at the mercy of raging emotions and dark thoughts. So finding the twilight equivalent to a farming RPG was right up my night-striken alley.
The game also began blending with my reality, as I found farmer Hans a comforting presence like my father’s ghost, the tentacled creatures that attack me in the game the same as all the people billing me during a time of economic crisis, the zombies attacking me in the spooky mall, very similar to mindless shoppers bumping into me on the streets of Bucharest. Welcome to Elderfield feels to me like waking up to a world of horrors that I gradually had to adapt to and make some sort of weidly beautiful sense of. This game means so much to me and I highly recommend that you try it out, at least for the awesome soundtrack that it comes with, if not for the story or the excellent atmosphere it brings to the table. I cannot wait for this game’s full release and also for Concerned Ape’s “Haunted Chocolatier” too!
TAROT & ORACLE DECKS
Lastly, I wanted to share with you some of my favourite divinatory resources. As a tarot reader, I like to celebrate Halloween or Samhain by using these decks: 1) Ghoulish Garb’s Terror Tarot, a deck composed of delightfully drawn major arcana cards; 2) the Horror Oracle, a deck I received as a gift from a subscriber, and was pleasantly impressed to find out that it depicts classic horror movies; 3) the very cute and colourful Halloween Tarot (get the tin box edition, for extra ASMR appeal and a sensual experience when you unbox and shuffle); and 4) the one with the most spiritual potential, especially at it can help one confront their Shadow Self, this is the Deep, Dark and Dangerous Oracle, an incursion into creepy mythological Archetypes. I’ve been using it with my clients for a while now and it always gives us something special to think about during each reading. And last but never least, I need to mention the Seasons of the Witch: Samhain Oracle, which is already a cult classic in the spiritual community and it ignited my love for this holiday.
That’s all from me. Remember to eat some pumpkin soup, drink cinnamon-flavoured coffee or have a hot chocolate with some spicy chilli, record the dreams you have during Halloween night and sit and have a meal with your dead ones, honor them by their name and light candles next to their portraits on a home altar.
Movie still of Rebecca Hall as Margaret from Resurrection (2022)
I think by now it’s obvious from the content of my articles, that I have a soft spot for intense individuals who border on the insane. I’m fascinated to see how people cope with duress, with the challenges life throws at them, and most often the pressures that they place upon themselves. I think this is why I have always been attracted to psychotherapy and I’m actively involved not only in my own healing but in that of those who I am fortunate enough to cross paths with.
In 2025, I randomly saw a large number of movies which involved dark, intense and rather disturbing topics. I think I was drawn to them because it was a way to safely and creatively experience my own private wrestling match with some dark and heavy emotions. It’s as if what I was feeling inside was spilling over into a warped, emotional reality, enhanced in its dream-like quality by my viewing of so many movies. I blame the transits of Saturn and Neptune for putting me in this state, and while I understand that there is an underlying logic to this sullen cosmic energy, I still cannot bring myself to enjoy the process. Around May of this year, when dad died, I started sleeping during the day and getting up around evening time to then sit all night and watch movies, read, cry and pray.
I lost so much this year. Despite my resistance, 2025 vacuumed me of pleasure, joy, hope and faith. I felt in equal parts, shame, guilt, intense anxiety and despair. Some days I struggled to get up and when I did, I was struck by how pointless doing anything was. I often didn’t know what to do but to put on a movie with my projector, curl up in a foetus position, sip cold, black coffee and see the stories of people whose fates are worse than mine.
During a couple of such sedated days, I got a chance to watch two rather niche but equally powerful movies. I saw Resurrection (2022) with Rebecca Hall directed by Andrew Semans, and Antiviral (2012) with Caleb Landry Jones directed by Brandon Cronenberg. I personally felt like I couldn’t shake these movies off of me, long after I finished watching them. The first movie made me weep so hard as the credits rolled in, and the second was more of a mindfuck that made me press replay, just so I could understand what I had just watched. One thing I knew for sure was that the impact of the stories I just saw was exactly what I needed: a cure for getting out of my life and my wounded Self; a fascination for trying to understand two fictional characters with fucked up fates. I felt suddenly inspired…
Both movies display difficult subjects. In Resurrection, an abusive ex returns to torment a woman who just managed to build a better life for herself, but for most of the movie you find yourself doubting her sanity rather than believing that the villain’s comeback is doing any actual harm. In ‘Antiviral’, an employee working for a high-tech company is obsessed with a celebrity to such an extent that he injects her diseases into his body just to feel close to her.
The movie posters for the two films I discuss in the article
Antiviral is the debut feature of Brandon Cronenberg, the son of famously weird Canadian director, David Cronenberg (who created Existenz, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Crash etc.) Compared to his father’s work, I find Brandon’s movies to be unique and mesmerising, but even more ruthless and clinical than David’s movies are. if you are to consider Infinity Pool and what a distorted ride that movie was. I guess it’s just the astrological difference of their solar imaginarium, seeing as David is a Sun in Pisces and Brandon is a Sun in Capricorn.
Coming back to Antiviral, I have to say that I really liked the idea which was a direct critique of our obsession with celebrities, amplified as the story was by the excellent acting. Even if the movie was engrossing, certain gory scenes could’ve been better polished if not altogether scrapped out; also, the movie did lack a certain empathy and emotionality. On the other hand, Resurrection was so tightly controlled and filmed that it made you feel slightly claustrophobic, thereby matching the viewer’s complicity with Margaret’s own palpitating and overwhelming emotions. I think I’m saying that this latter performance made me feel more, while the first experience was intellectually interesting but too clinically delivered.
Superficially speaking, I think that what mesmerised me so much about both of these performances is the fact that we are looking at two flawed but also gorgeous people who were filmed with such a dedication that it felt their connection with the audience almost became tangible (for example, at a certain point I am pretty sure I was more familiar with Rebecca’s snot and sweat and Caleb’s bloody gushings more than with my own bodily fluids).
Movie still of Caleb Landry Jones as Syd March from Antiviral (2012)
Antiviral doesn’t pack an emotional punch like Resurrection does, a movie at the end of which I felt shattered seeing how simultaneously soulfully free and yet physically condemned Rebecca Hall’s character, Margaret, was. In Resurrection the psychological unravelling she experiences as a result of years of cruelty and gaslighting was masterfully done. The entire movie rests heavily on Rebecca’s acting chops and mad presence, at least up until the point where she shares a couple of scenes with Philip Roth and you feel your blood curdling in your veins as you witness their back and forth and find out what traumatized her this much that she is losing control at the mere sight of this small and insignificant man.
Since these were two tough viewing experiences, demanding a lot from their audiences – even if the acting was so unhinged it was close to perfection – I was vibrating with curiosity to look into the natal charts of both Rebecca and Caleb and see if there were certain energies they disposed of which made them gravitate to these stories. You may be aware that we tend to play out the inherent astrological energies we contain inside, through the work that we do. Actors and performers in general do this in a very visible and public way, which provides countless study cases for interested astrologers to explore, seeing as the world of film – or the land of Neptune – is a giant projection screen for what lies within.
Let’s first look at Rebecca’s chart. Born on May 3rd 1982 (age 43 years) in London, UK, Rebecca is a Sun in Taurus and a Moon in Aries. You can see her birth-chart below:
Her Moon is conjunct Venus in her fall in Aries, her Taurean Sun is conjunct the Wounded Healer asteroid, Chiron, while her destiny points are a South Node in Capricorn (her comfort zone) and a North Node in Cancer (her growth area). With a witty and domicile placement of Mercury in Gemini and an almost perfect conjunction between her natal Neptune and Lilith (the Wild Feminine asteroid) in freedom-loving Sagittarius, this is a woman who can think for herself and someone who gains her sense of freedom in life through martyrdom, escapism and acting. Although her fierce core brings a lot of determination and grit to the table, while her Saturnian comfort zone makes her a natural stoic and professional, what really gets her to gravitate towards harrowing tales and emotionally-intense roles is her natal Jupiter in Scorpio and that North Node in Cancer, placements which tell me she just finds so much joy and pleasure from bringing to life twisted stories and exploring deep emotions.
Catharsis, rebirths and life-and-death experiences are her happy place. In addition to this, with a stellium of planets in the beautiful, relationship-prone and justice-driven sign of Libra, involving Saturn, Mars and Pluto she is a force to reckon with, both on screen and outside of it. As a sidenote, her husband is a fellow actor: Morgan Spector, a Sun in Libra man whose solar energy touches upon Rebecca’s stellium in Libra, letting me know that their relationship is anything but easy but it can also be quite hot and stubborn in its longevity and perseverance.
Now, let’s explore Caleb’s chart. Born on December 7th 1989 (age 35 years) in Garland (TX) in the US, Caleb is a Sagittarius Sun with a Moon in Aries, as you can see below:
Caleb was born with a Jupiter conjunct Chiron in Cancer (a marker for painful success or fame that wounds the soul), a South Node in Leo and a North Node in Aquarius, and what is perhaps the darkest and most fascinating part of his chart comprising of a close conjunction between Mars and Pluto in Scorpio (further enhanced by a nearby Lilith) and a stellium in grounded and restrained Capricorn. Having just one of the Saturnian or Plutonic energies can severely weigh down and intensify your chart, but Caleb has them both! His Capricorn stellium includes the planets Venus, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus and Mercury. With Saturn almost perfectly conjunct his Neptune in the sign of Capricorn, he is an almost walking-and-talking embodiment of the collective energies we are at the mercy of in 2025, a year which is marred by the conjunction between these two giants of our solar system and the ensuing chaos that they are creating in our lives.
Although Caleb’s Saturn is domicile – which means that it functions better than the current Saturn in Pisces transit – and some would argue that his Venus is not conjunct his Saturn because it is so far apart by degree, but being in the same sign makes the planet function in a similar way. We see here the roots of intense emotional deprivation and a need to mask it with toughness, rules, rigidity and calculation – similar traits he displays so well in his character, Syd March from Antiviral. His energy is further darkened by the stealth ruthlesness and volcanic desires cloaked within the Mars-Pluto conjunction in Scorpio. No wonder that more recently, he starred in Dracula: A love tale (a dissapointing and unwatchable adaptation, in my view).
One thing that stands out is that both Caleb and Rebecca share in common a Moon in Aries placement. Aries, being the first sign of the zodiac is usually associated with new life, vitality, lifeblood and the forceful rebirth of Nature after the dead of winter. When Aries energy exists in the Moon position of a native, this primal fire energy works at a deeply unconscious level, and it is somehow softened but also even more subtly powerful as it pervades a person’s complete aura and sense of being, especially when they rest and relax. Here is how astrologer Donna Cunningham describes this lunar position in her book “Moon Signs: The Key to Your Inner Life”:
Aries is the best Moon sign, at least according to those who have it. They have to be the best at nearly everything they do – otherwise it ruins their whole day. They’re not always aware of this instinctive competitiveness, for the Moon’s traits are often unconscious. Nonetheless, Aries represents the urge to be out in front of the pack, so many Aries Moon natives display outstanding leadership and pioneering abilities. Active and vital, they’re easily bored by routine and want to be busy all the time.
— p. 142
It’s fascinating that these are not the only two creepy roles that Caleb and Rebecca decided to take on, since I still have on my watchlist The Listeners and Nitram; the first movie is about a woman hearing strange noises no one else can hear and the latter about a man who committed a massacre in the 90s, a script based on a true story. I also need to say that I loved Rebecca in the Night House, but I am saving my thoughts on that movie for an upcoming post on Pluto and 4th house matters.
The crux of this article is basically just me saying that as a depressed Sun in Pisces woman who struggled to get out of bed and continue to live this year, getting in touch with the work of two Moon in Aries performers who literally electrified the screen with their presence and passion for their craft, woke me up back up to life.
So, if you are doubting your energy and your work, please don’t. The way you are and the effort and passion you put into your craft and into your work can be so important to someone out there, in ways you may not even be aware. Inspiring a resurrection, passioncan literally bring people back up to life, as it tends to be highly infectious… and against this type of infection, I don’t think we need any antivirals.
Let me tenderly start off by clarifying that I fucking adore Gena Marvin! And one thing is the core of my intense love for her, something that runs so thinly in society at large but oozes out of her as easily as she breathes, and that precious soul element is: courage. Gena has heaps of this rare substance called bravery, despite the fact that she appears as a soft contrarian, a vulnerable artist, someone who seems more of a passive masochist than a tough fighter. The martyr quality that emerges from her character is given by the fact that Gena was born a Sun in Pisces. By her birth name Gennadiy Chebotarev, a Russian artist born in one of the most unwelcoming places on Earth, Magadan, a remote city in Siberian Russia, known for its harsh winters, famous prison and strong gender normative culture, Gena is currently living in exile in Paris, France, after a lifetime of quiet resistance.
The other element of my intense love for her is that she is so creative. Creativity and courage when functioning optimally inside an individual result in the most irresistible charisma. This is the magical stuff of an individual who had to work at it, and unfortunately this work came about through withstanding intense violence and hatred related to her sense of self. Gena was born with a very interesting conjunction in her chart: a trifecta which involves a Saturn in Aries at a later degree conjunct a Jupiter in Aries at an early degree and in the heart of these powerful outer-planets, lies a Moon in Aries, a fire lighting the dark.
I have started this website writing about the painful karma of being born with a Moon conjunct Saturn so I won’t insist on the subtleties of this placement in this article, (it’s just important to know that Gena carries within a deep maternal wound), but I do want to focus on the loose conjunction between her Saturn and her Jupiter in Aries. This is an astrological aspect which usually denotes a lifetime of having the harshest tests related to one’s identity and then these are shortly followed by the biggest blessings. This punishment and blessing cycle brought on by Saturn and Jupiter, touches her emotionally in a very profound way (because of the presence of the her Moon sandwiched between these significant outer planets).
Alternatively, you could also see the Saturn-Jupiter astrological aspect as a lifetime of taking on tests and limiting situations in a willing way, and feeling the fear and doing it anyway. The pressure which Saturn stirs in the mix eventually eases into the most surprising growth and self-confidence, courtesy of Jupiter. And with the Moon in Aries left to do the emotional work, self-belief is the resurrection card. Through hardship, a link to the Divine within gets activated, much like in the martyr effect, or the idea that the more persecuted that you are the more your belief in the Divine is strengthened. Such beliefs fit with someone’s astrological energy when they have an abundance of planets and points in Pisces and Aries.
Here is how Sue Tompkins describes the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction: “Saturn will tend to define, restrict, restrain and add an element of fear to all those things we associate with Jupiter: namely faith, meaning, joy and enthusiasm. Jupiter expands, enlarges and increases the Saturnian principles of order, responsibility, discipline and caution. Jupiter and Saturn together usually yields great persistence, patience and perseverance. Nevertheless, this is perhaps the combination associated with solid material success, and the easy aspects especially seem buffeted in this area of their lives (…) The Jupiter-Saturn individual often craves, and frequently reaches, an influential and executive position in the world.” (Aspects in Astrology, p.227-229)
** I’ve generated Gena’s chart based on disparate and incomplete birth-information so the natal map above may not be accurate
To be fair, the whole collective has been soaked in these astral influences because since 2022, the transiting outer planets Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune together with the North Node and South Node axis have been touching upon the Alpha (Aries) and Omega (Pisces) of the zodiac, the first sign and the last sign of our equatorial constellations. We are all on some level having to let go of a part of our lives we grew attached to, in favour or staring anew and rebuilding everything with courage. Gena knows this process intimately, as her chart portrays such ending and beginning energies which she carries within and from which great creative ideas and potential spark out of. What I love about her is just how determined she is to keep pushing preconceived gender norms and to risk her physical safety as she does so. She inspires me to be less afraid to pursue my own self-expression, during a period in which most of our role-models and heroes are either strangely silent or dead.
I will admit that writing this article proved challenging. Especially because I can’t help gendering her, even when the whole purpose of her art and self-expression is to go beyond gender. Gena is trying to help us understand how to live outside of gender, in a very physical and practical way. The sumptuously filmed documentary about her life, her art and her resistance (and which inspired me to write this article), a film called Queendom, details the lived aspects of crafting an existence outside of gender and how painful, frightening and exhilarating the whole process is. I highly recommend watching it and if you do, please let me know if you manage to get Sevdaliza’s song ‘Human’ out of your mind. It still haunts me to this day, it’s so powerful.
I ultimately decided to include the ‘she/her’ pronouns since it appeared to me that in her artistic journey Gena moved from the masculine principle (within which she was born) into the feminine one, but without making her body’s transformation the core aspect of her journey. I see her message as being broader, and while deeply embodied and political, her story transcends the usual narrative of “the person who shifts genders and is oppressed by traditional gender norms in society”. Gena uses her body as a tool to subvert authoritarian politics in society. She advocates for courage and freedom, especially the freedom to dress as you please and to express who you are without fear of violence or being excluded from the benefits that other gender-confirming people enjoy in society. Her protest is not just queer and concerning identity but it is also political, as Gena is actively and dangerously resisting being part of the populist collective that advocates for war and the domination of other countries, much like we are seeing in the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war.
Simply existing in the world, especially as a woman and then as an artist, as a creative force is seen as threatening at the moment in time, as something that needs to be controlled or treated with corrective violence. And this medieval mindset has long expired and has to change. The hopeful silver-lining comes from the strangest of places: the symbolic rumbles and metaphorical earthquakes brough about by Pluto’s transit through Aquarius, which has already begun to create social chaos in order to consistently normalize what has been seen as ‘weird’ or ‘outcast’. Give it a couple of years (and the trine between Uranus in Gemini and Pluto) for the ‘weird’ to find out just how much they belong.
It’s Spring, and to detract from the heaviness of my previous post here’s a playlist for romantic renewal. Because love, this invisible energy binding us all, continues to matter and to exist. And it can be found inside of you. However, if you’ve been feeling like I have recently, despondent and melancholic, let’s resort to some readily available auditory medicine.
The following songs from these amazing alternative artists work heavily on your heart chakra to make you feel good and get you…in the mood for love. Adorned to the titles themselves you will also find small snipits of my favourite lyrics from these songs (most of which are also great dance tunes…) :
“Love is raised by common thieves Hiding diamonds up their sleeves Always I did it for you Never felt so sure You’re my best machine You’re my midnight sun”
“Well, I love you, imagine a world without you It’s only ever you, I only think of you And if it’s a blessing, I want it for you If I must have a future, I want it with you”
“Corner in your converse Living on the outskirts Trying just to figure it out Talking like a deadbeat, I just wanted you to see Everything that I could see Walking in the night sky, I’m always on your side You were really saving me”
“Picked me up and drove by the light of the moon Four hours to the desert from the drawing room This year’s wine tasted suspicious but just enough like love God must be with the outcasts ’cause when I call, you come”
“I need you to understand These are the earthquake drills that we ran Under the freeway overpasses The tears behind your dark sunglasses The fears inside your heart as deep as gashes Walk beside me, not behind me Feel my unconditional love”
A couple of hours just shy off the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump’s second chance at ruling the US, I was looking into the Elon Musk and Asmongold drama, replete with leaked DMs, removed gaming credentials and some direct accusations of Musk being a fake gamer. I found it hilarious and somehow in my weird astrologer’s brain something clicked; something I noticed a while back and I feel the need to unearth in this article and to get deeper into. I vaguely remembered that both Trump and Musk shared a really interesting astrological aspect in common: they both have a Venus conjunct Saturn in their natal charts! Normally, this aspect would portent an individual destiny marred by financial limits, setbacks and struggles, so how come these two men were put in charge with rescuing the economy of one of the biggest country’s in the world and the literal birth-place of capitalism to add to that?
As the current planetary transits also involve the conjunction between Venus in Pisces conjunct Saturn in Pisces in the month of January 2025, I thought that the synchronicities were too good to miss out on. So, as I lie in bed covered in tissues and sipping from hot tea in a desperate attempt to get rid of a flu that is kicking my ass for a week now, allow me to entertain myself and potentially you as a valued reader with an analysis of the chart of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. It will be a light-hearted analysis, focused mainly on the weird astrological connections between these two goofy, powerful men who have the potential to really mess up world politics in the next 4 years. We truly live through magical times, and magical thinking is required now more than ever to survive…
In my opinion, Elon Musk is a good example of what stress, power, over-fucking and a poor diet can do to a man’s brain. A man who had the potential to be great, in culturally significant and invention-empowering ways, but who sadly got lost in the hubris of making money for the sake of making money, and acting out in super-sensitive ways if things don’t go his way. These characteristics all feed into the creation of the super-villain, a man who ends up sitting on the wrong side of history due to an unstable character and the misuse of ridiculous financial and political power. And the saddest part is that he could do so much good with this power, as long as he remembers to be grateful for his power and to use it wisely. But attaining wisdom is not really Musk’s destiny..
His chart shows me that Musk was born with a sensitive Sun in Cancer in the softest house of the zodiac, the 12th house. So, he is a Cancerian who borrows traits from a Piscean (jeez talk about being super sensitive!) Not only that but his Ascendant is in Cancer with Mercury perfectly conjunct it, adding a Geminian vibe to any first impression he makes, and thereby adding to this super brainy persona that he likes to indulge in, but keep in mind that this is just a front as the Ascendant is not who he really is at the core. His core comprises of a Moon in Virgo conjunct the Part of Fortune and Pluto, as Musk, it needs to be remembered is a Gen X-er. Due to all of this more or less conscious Mercurian energy surrounding his lunar placement and his Mercury conjunct the Ascendant, Musk identifies with his thoughts and wants to come across as a youthful, vibrant, funny and smart lad. In reality he is an anxious and obsessed, control-freak who is struggling to keep up with the times. This aspect is further emphasized because Musk was born with a South Node in Leo in the first house, so therefore his comfort zone is being himself and this Self is rather poorly placed in the least modest sign of the zodiac: Leo, the ruler, the playful but belligerent and self-aggrandising big baby of the zodiac.
This placement puts his growth zone in the opposite sign of Leo, that being Aquarius and to add spice to this, the Universe decided to have Musk’s Mars placement conjunct his North Node too, a fact I immediately attribute to Musk’s obsession with conquering and exploiting the planet Mars (as we know, the North Node is a point of excessive growth and obsession). Furthermore, Musk’s Midheaven is in Aries, a sign ruled by Mars, and another sign of how the public perceives him: as a pioneer, as a brave and bold guy who takes risks and chances, as someone who fucks around a lot and has a lot of children (even if he is trying to intellectualize his lusty appetite by saying he is helping to repopulate the planet; I attribute his high libido and pleasure in procreating to his natal Jupiter in Scorpio conjunct Neptune in Sagittarius in the 5th house, the house of fun and children). As we see that his Midheaven is conjunct Chiron, the Wounded Healer, there is tinge of woundedness and super-sensitivity that makes him come across as a man who is more vulnerable than we would like, a leader who suffers and is not necessarily physically ill but in terms of the fragility of his Ego, since as we know Aries rules the Ego and the Self. Ideally, he would learn from life’s challenges and spread wisdom to the masses, a wisdom that can be deeply healing and inspiring. I mean he does have the power and the platform to do so; however seeing as his internal astrological chemistry contains so much Air (North Node and Mars in Aquarius, Gemini Venus and Saturn, Uranus and Lilith in Libra), he seems to be taking a superficial and technological approach to how he is handling his Chiron and therefore misses the chance for true emotional growth through processing the real pain of feeling less worthy than other men around him.
As Musk has been experiencing his Chiron return since 2018 and has been having the transit of Jupiter and then the North Node moving across his highly visible 10th house and the Midheaven in the last 3 years, more of this under-utilised and misinterpreted Chirotic energy made itself know to the public. It will be fascinating to see how the public’s perception of Musk (already at a considerable low) will change in the next two years and a half as Saturn and Neptune will enter Aries and begin affecting his professional legacy, as it will bring up some more of his deeply painful Chirotic energy to the surface.
I think the interesting aspect to Musk is that he tends to make a likeable supervillain, one who can be cool and down with the kids, goofing around, acting nerdy and speaking in boyish and charming ways that put a comic intent on most of his affirmations; affirmations that have the potential to considerably change the course of the stock market. A powerful man who wants to look like the eternal cool teenager, the nerd who outsmarted them all and built a technological empire and is now impregnating the world to preserve the human race. Allegedly 🙂 I attribute all these qualities to what I consider to be the key to his sudden rise to success and maybe even the reason to his future downfall: his Venus in Gemini loosely conjunct Saturn in the 11th house.
Let’s have a brief look over Donald Trump’s chart now:
So Trump was born as a Sun in Gemini in the 10th house conjunct the North Node & Uranus, two aspects which make him highly volatile and unpredictable! He has a Moon in Sagittarius conjunct the South Node and Lilith and sitting opposite the Sun, which means that he was born during a Full Moon and he is someone who is lucky with partnerships and needs to be in a stable and long-term connection because he is quite inter-dependent. His Moon sits in the 4th house the place of roots, family, nation – a nationalistic house, so I don’t doubt him when he says he is a patriot. He has an Ascendant in Leo (conjunct Mars in the 12th house & loosely conjunct Pluto, cause he’s a Boomer). The current transit of Jupiter in Gemini is harmoniously helping him with being seen in a positive, funny and helpful light, but this transit is frustrating his Saturn, Venus and Mercury. Nonetheless the current transit of Saturn in Pisces is supporting his inner planets especially that Venus in Cancer conjunct Saturn in Cancer in the 11th house (conjunct Venus almost perfectly and loosely conjunct Mercury). Trump has Neptun conjunct Jupiter in Libra so people born with a Sun in Libra, like his daughter Ivanka, in a weird way make him happy and bring him prestige and good luck. He also has the 7th house in Aquarius and the generation born with the Uranus, Neptune in Aqua combo may idealise him (1998 – 2003).
But let’s return to his Venus conjunction to Saturn in the shy and sensitive sign of Cancer and compare it to Musk’s Venus conjunction to Saturn in the brainy and speedy sign of Gemini. In her book on Saturn, Liz Green describes Venus-Saturn contacts in synastry as:
This is the aspect par excellence of emotional rejection, and it is a difficult one to deal with unless it is taken as an opportunity to discover whether any reality lies behind the projections of the relationship. We know that Venus is the chief significator or symbol of affection, love and harmony, and the urge for companionship. As a reflection of the individual’s capacity to relate to others, Venus expresses with charm, grace and ease those qualities which Saturn cannot freely demonstrate. She will also often suggest a sense of taste and refinement in those areas where Saturn finds himself clumsy, inept, inhibited and cramped. Venus is the eternal lover and the eternal youth and this can very naturally upset Saturn, who may have a tendency to react with jealousy, possessiveness, suspicion, and a feeling of unattractiveness or social ineptness. But it seems to be an empiric fact that Venus-Saturn contacts, whether they appear on a natal chart or in the comparison of charts, have the tendency to bring first, great unhappiness of a peculiarly personal kind and second, great opportunity for the establishment of an honest relationship – something which is rarely seen. A relationship may occur out of expediency, out of a need for financial security, or a general loneliness. It may also occur because an additional responsibility such as a child makes it impossible to consider any alternative situation. Some relationships occur under family pressure or for religious or moral reasons. Often Venus-Saturn contacts will be seen in these situations, for the other side of this tie is the duty-over-love side, and it will frequently occur in relation to money. There is frequently a tie of financial obligation involved with Venus-Saturn contacts which binds two people long after the affection has ceased to exist.
In my experience, I noticed that it was usually people who were single for a very long time who sought my astrological services and had this Venus-Saturn aspect in their chart. Saturn tends to freeze or dry up whatever it sits near to and when it embraces Venus to such a close degree, it tends to dry up a person’s love life and personal love energy; in this context, giving and receiving love tends to be an awkward process, filled with blocks and inhibitions that lead to romantic rejection and disappointment. Both Trump and Musk have this aspect which would explain why they are so weird and gauche with women, benefiting from either the attention of a lot of low-vibrational women and lewd liaisons that end up harming their reputation or coupling with high-vibrational, intelligent and beautiful women who they don’t know how to treat, appreciate and respect, so those connections end up in painful and public separations. Venus-Saturn doesn’t only affect in a negative way the way they love others, but also the love and respect they show themselves which is relatively low in both cases: Musk is known for skipping sleep or sleeping on the floor of his work office in an effort to show how committed he is to his innovative work, while Trump is a big lover of junk food and has shamelessly admitted to this several times. Eating poorly, not getting enough sleep, not valuing the way they look or dress not only changes their brain chemistry for the worse and gets them to declare stupid things in the press but it has ripple consequences on the way in which others perceive them; both Musk and Trump seem to think that only money and power will grant them the respect they would normally achieve by simply taking better care of their bodies and their health and feeling through reality in a more sensual and present way. Paying closer attention to details, slowly, carefully and patiently working through their duties rather than simply winging things all the time and declaring themselves geniuses for how fast and decisive they work, may help them both to improve a lot of ongoing issues in their lives and reduce personal and public dramas.
Sue Tompkins, reflecting on the Venus-Saturn aspect in the book by the same name, describes this energy as:
For some reason, it seems that those with Venus-Saturn contacts come into the world feeling unloved. For many, it takes years for the penny to drop that the issue is really self-valuation. Before that realization dawns, Venus-Saturn people tend to believe, though not always consciously, that it is others that don’t care, others that don’t love them. Saturn will always delay the development of whatever planetary principle it touches, and for Venus-Saturn types it takes time for the individual to learn about giving and receiving – and especially giving and receiving with no strings attached (…) these types almost expect rejection and are very sensitive to, nay listen out for, any clues which might herald the fact that the other person’s love has waned. And the constant demand for proof of affection and for the other person to continually define their feelings often does put a considerable strain on the relationships as does the continual saying of ‘I’m sorry’ which is often very much a Venus-Saturn phrase. Venus-Saturn men often find themselves doing all the loving of seemingly cold women. The Venus-Saturn person often attempts to make themselves indispensable to their loved ones and especially ever willing to give of their time or their money and this is how Venus-Saturn controls the relationship. The issue of love and time is often a very big one with Venus-Saturn. You can tell that a Venus-Saturn person cares for you if they are prepared to give you their time and similarly, they use the time-factor as a yardstick of your affection. Lack of time and subsequent denial of affection was often an issue in childhood. Issues of denial of love, control and love, and love and punishment are also pertinent here. At worst the person builds a wall around themselves and wails because nobody loves them. Saturn always give endurance and thus the Venus-Saturn person can describe the one who holds on through thick and thin and through doing so, really does make a relationship work, really does learn to give and take. People with these contacts do better after the initial attraction and illusion has worn off.
Seeing as Trump is about to begin his second term as president, and his relationship to the USA has ripened, it may very well be that trying again could work in his favour this time. Although this may make sense emotionally, from a logical point of view I still wonder why Americans have given their vote of confidence to a man who went bankrupt thrice in his career and they expect such an individual to rescue their economy? It’s like getting your stylist to take care of your taxes or hiring an illiterate person to read you bed time stories. Nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind that the president won’t fulfill his duties alone and that there are other powerful men sitting in the shadows and guiding Trump towards making the decisions that need to be taken, and I attribute this love for his flexibility to why he has won the second term in the first place. His Venus-Saturn contact shows that because of inherent father issues and feeling unloved at a deep level, he will continue to bend over backwards to please the men in his life, no matter how outwardly confrontational he may come across when talking to them (don’t be fooled by that Mars in Leo on the Ascendant, who is all roar but no bite). And an example of this is getting Musk to rule alongside him by conferring him the power to organise the Department of Government Efficiency, a right-wing sounding branch of the future Trump administration.
Voices in the world of journalism say that the bromance between these two Venus-afflicted men will not last long, but my opinion is that as long as they both continue to make decisions that profit them, and continue to raise their assets and investments, then there would be no logical reason for why they should call it quits. In the absence of love, both these men will continue to fill the voids in their hearts with the comforting zing of green dollar bills, and spread similar materialistic values into the society, poisoning it from within. One of the reasons, why we have reached this point may very well be that with their powerful and low-vibrational Venus-Saturn contacts they are simply mirroring the unconscious projections of society at large gone wrong, in these brave two thousand twenties times. As ‘beacons of light’ in a cold, cruel and loveless world, both Trump and Musk blare out from our screens with messages of progress and finding all the comfort you need in making money, because if you think that people won’t love you, the heavy-handed arm of capitalism will always make you believe that at least you are just as worthy as the things that you purchase.
Hello, welcome to 2025 friends! I’m sick with the flu, lying in bed trying to get some rest, but I’m also restless. I have so many ideas that my mind finds it hard to fall into some deep sleep. I keep falling asleep for about an hour and a half and then waking up to do astrological research. This is because I can feel the energy of this year and it will be a pretty glorious one on many levels, both seen and unseen, but especially in terms of the planetary astrological transits we will be collectively experiencing. First of all, we entered the year with a Mars retrograde and will continue in March with a Venus retrograde in its exaltation and superimposed on a Mercury retrograde. Retrogrades are times of realignment but they are also times of sensitivity and emotionality, as logic tends to take a backseat for a while. March will also bring with it eclipse season, another reason-blocking period, so be careful what you schedule for that month as many plans could go awry in the last minute. But before March we have super-hot January, made so by the closeness of Mars retrograde in Cancer to the Earth on the 12th of January, and a mere two days after the nodes of the Moon will have shifted into Virgo and Pisces, changing the themes of our collective desires and obsessions; I am so happy to leave behind the North Node in Aries as masculinity was taken to extremes and armed conflicts and violence and hatred against women has been so intense in the last 18 months. February will be quite lovely and quite slow and sweet, almost as if we are entering a really comforting bumper zone right before we are pushed into the chaotic and flowing action of March. If you want to understand how March will play out just reflect on what went down in your life in the last week of November and first week of December of 2024, as the themes will repeat.
The highlights of the second month of the year will be the lunar occultation of Saturn in Pisces on February 1st, the Moon at perigee on the 2nd (perigee meaning closest to the Earth), Jupiter going direct in Gemini on the 4th (which is always a lucky day, so mark that in your calendar), and then Mars going direct on the 24th of February. The most beautiful aspects is given by Venus, who plays a star role this year, as she will shine at her brightest in the night sky in between the 10th and 16th of February. Valentine’s Day will be quite special and karmic this year, as Venus is also wrapped up in her closeness to Saturn and Neptune so basically the love you give is the love you will receive; but schedule a lovely trip or getaway, a pampering treatment or make something nice to eat and even share it with others, as Venus in Pisces is altruistic and loves sharing gifts, making donations and giving comforting hugs to those in need.
I also feel that with the combined efforts of Venus being exalted and remaining in Pisces up until April and with the Moon making so many aspects to Saturn and Mars and literally standing in between them and the Earth during its growing phases, that a wave of softness is coming over the collective, marking for a hopeful closure to the violence, hatred, selfishness and restlessness that has marked the previous years. The Moon will also occult Antares, several times in Winter and Spring of 2025, and it being the brightest star in the constellation of Scorpio, you can expect some intense and deep feelings to rise up to the surface of our lives. The best way to harness their energy is to put them into creative work, because this is the year when individual, creative and imaginative efforts done solo will sky-rocket your career if you put a lot of heart into them and you dare to do something different and to challenge people’s habits. The collective mood will be quite dark, grunge and modest but also incredibly sexy and romantic at the same time (like a 90s rock music video playing on MTV late at night). This is also because Lilith, the Wild Feminine will also switch signs from Libra and into Scorpio on the 28th of March.
As the rings of Saturn will be at their thinnest that they have been in 14 years and as the Earth is closest to the Sun this year (in combination with the Sun’s barely decreasing solar maximum from last year’s peak), we will begin to experience less restrictions and become more emotional. Expect some epic warm showers this spring and summer as well. In addition, there may be more public outpourings of emotion involving music, dancing, peak religious and spiritual experiences and chants of free love. The social situation of the poor, the environmentally afflicted, the outcasts will continue to feel tense or blocked by the clutches of the past up until the end of March, when Neptune will enter Aries, and then momentum will begin building up as Saturn will enter Aries on the 26th of May. Slightly edgy but also pretty fun, June will be tense up until July swoops in and brings with it the movement of Uranus from Taurus and into Gemini. This will be a sky lit up with Fire and Air signs energy, after so many years of Earth and Water signs dominating the sky! You could call the summer, a period of a return of reason and illumination. Ideas will flow to us with more ease and communication will be prioritized above action. At the same time, the best Water energies which will remain will be the romantic and heartfelt dance that Jupiter in its Cancerian exaltation will make with the North Node in Pisces (finally released in the summer from the clutches of Saturn!). July will certainly be an excellent month to launch artistic projects, get married, fall in love or procreate. The downside will be that as Saturn and Neptune will be in a loose square to Jupiter in Cancer there may be issues of homeland security, displaced homes and mass migration that will have to be dealt with.
The friendly energies between Uranus in Gemini, Pluto in Aquarius, Saturn and Neptune in Aries will light up our July and August, ushering in a completely different mood of courage, action, intensified speech and passionate commitments. The energies will calm down and fall back into the moody darkness towards Autumn, as September will come with its retrogrades and eclipses, pulling us one final time into a past we will slowly start saying goodbye to. Seeing as we have so many planets in two highly emotional and impulsive signs (Pisces and Aries), and that the Moon and Venus are doing a lot of work this year, as Saturn will also be in an uncomfortable Martian energy and Neptune in a weird semi-sextile to its domicile placement, this year will be emotional in both the worse manifestations of this word and its highest. Personally, it may seem weird but I’m looking forward to feel more freely and to cry again, as Saturn in Pisces has ‘iced’ me out in recent years and it was so hard for me to release toxins through crying. Crying brings relief to the body; it cleanses the eyes and disburdens the soul. Asking for forgiveness can also repair relationships that were once broken and filled with enmity. All these beautiful manifestations of Piscean energy, softened as they are by Venus in the first part of the year, means that we can fix and repair what we destroyed because of pride and ego in previous months. A softly assertive approach will get you the desired results rather than a fearful or strongly aggressive approach. As the saying goes you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Saturn in Aries will get us to face our fears of each other and ram our heads into the unknown with confidence and a sense of adventure, while the North Node in Pisces will bring about some softness, some sweetness and a spiritual approach to the outcomes of each individual act of killing fear. It’s truly the year in which we can embody that old saying ‘make love and not war’, as long as we stay true to our hearts.
The Spiritual Social 
