Elephants and perspective and Jupiter.
it's hard to know everything all at once and not fall over.
Venus and the night sky: I’m giving a lot of space to Jupiter’s movement into Gemini below, so I thought I’d touch briefly on Venus moving into Gemini here. This is less “significant” in the sense that it happens more often. But that’s not the definition of significant that I think we ought to be using with astrology.
With transits, we tend to give more space to the ones that happen less frequently. There’s nothing wrong with that. The movements of the inner planets mark the cycle of the year rather than the cycle of a decade or the cycle of a month like the Moon. What’s a little more intriguing to consider is the cycle of Venus’s dance with the Sun.
As she enters Gemini, she’s approaching the moment she’ll be Cazimi to the Sun, centered in the fiery heart. This marks her transition to being an evening star, though we won’t see her in the evening until she gets a little farther away from the Sun’s light. This is a more comfortable space for her to be, remaining in the sky after the Sun has gone down under the horizon.
This is an invitation to consider the ways that Venus’s significations of connection, intimacy, love, and pleasure are served by the quiet and dark of night. What “hidden” needs have you not been attending to in these areas? What can you give some extra attention to as Venus herself moves into the night?
Do you see a white and gold dress or an elephant?
With Jupiter finally moving out of Taurus and into Gemini on Saturday evening, around 8pm ET, we take a step forward within a long term astrological cycle.
I think Jupiter in Gemini is like that story of the blind mice trying to identify the figure in front of them. The first mouse says it’s a building, because he feels strong pillars. The second mouse says it’s a snake, because he feels a twisting, cord-like thing. The third mouse confidently says it’s a harmless paintbrush and that the other two mice are crazy.
In the end it’s revealed that the mice are each perceiving only a small part of what is in fact a whole elephant (pillars are legs, snake is trunk, tail is paintbrush) and the mice are lucky they have not been trampled. Gemini likes to focus on the smallest pieces (let’s say several billion of them all at once) and Jupiter is a big picture planet. To bring these two together is not a natural thing, but it’s part of living in a human context, especially in 2024.
It takes Jupiter about twelve years to make it around the Zodiac, swerving back and forth through the sky. Caution, this vehicle takes wide turns. Generally speaking it’s a nice thing to have Jupiter visit any focal point in your chart. Really whatever house it’s in is going to be one that the average astrologer will look at and say “hey, things might be hard elsewhere, but at least Jupiter is visiting your X house!” When trying to elect a time with a good chart to accomplish something you have work out countless important qualifications involving straight or crooked signs, time of ascension, and in which bound of a given sign the Moon and horizon lines fall into. Your other option is to ignore all that and just make sure Jupiter is in the First House. Then you should be good, mostly.
Astrologers often rely upon Jupiter to be a kind of get out of jail free card. This is interesting and I think a reflection of some of the ways that astrological significations have not kept up with culture.
It’s complicated, because I don’t mean astrology should grow to “fit” the capitalist society that we are in. But it’s undeniable that “growth” means something very different in a venture capital managed oligarchy than it does for an agrarian proto-empire in the first centuries CE. Some things are much better than they were then, but some are not. Some are just bad in a different way. Values change and values fall apart. The communal becomes individual and then the individual has to try and make sense of impossibly complex conflicting needs and wants.
We start to really see this in the hyper-individualistic version of astrology that started to pick up in the 80s and really thrived in glossy magazines in the 90s and early 00s. That same hyper-individualistic magazine astrology persists in a new and improved formula: social media and successful astrology apps dominate the story of astrology at the moment. While these sources do often try to recognize the tension and difficulty that the astrology might indicate, I still don’t think they’re successful enough.
Back at the beginning of May, Mars entered Aries. I have an Aries First House, as does a close friend. We both got a notification from CHANI that we were about to enter a moment where we could take on the world, be ambitious, and win a fight. I see the connection and I see how that notification is meant to be supportive, possibly. But Mars in your First House might equally suggest you watch out for fever and sunburns, be wary of men, and, depending on… everything else in your chart… death maybe? That’s even less helpful and, I assume, legally fraught to spit out of an app. But I am skeptical of any adaptation of a system, religious or not, spiritual or not, scientifically validated or not, that filters out the bad or reframes it to the point that it becomes a general wellness platitude. “Try not to overextend yourself and listen to your body.”
I am guilty of this (you could find this in soooo many of my newsletters—call it a growth area) as I think most spiritually inclined writers are. Part of it is laziness. These scripts resonate with people for a reason. Part of it is not wanting to put fearful thoughts in someone’s head, which is also fair, I think. I’m not interested in telling you that you should watch out for sunburn because Mars is going through your First House (though I am realizing I did get my first sunburn in a long time around when Mars was going into my First House). What I am interested in is doing my best to understand the spirit of the interpretation and updating it to work within our world. There are a lot fewer ways to die in 2024 than there were in the early years of the Roman empire, but that doesn’t simply turn a Mars transit into just a girl boss moment.
This is a blog post for another time, but, if I’m ranking the sources on your phone for astrology, I would probably put CHANI toward the front, but not in first place. I used to recommend her podcast most, and it’s still good, but I’d instead direct people to specific astrologers on social media or, I guess, me, at this point. Definitely would avoid co-star (you can now update it to use Whole Sign Houses, but I still haven’t ever been impressed with their interpretation). If you want to go hard, you cannot do better than the month ahead horoscopes put out by Chris Brennan on The Astrology Podcast. They are usually hours long and carry the spirit of really good, really complete astrology.
Whatever it is that you’re looking for in astrology or in other non-normative spiritual systems, I just encourage wariness of skimming the surface. It’s way too easy for anything to settle into the most superficial, most convenient version of itself until it’s some form of prosperity gospel, even astrology.
Stepping off my soapbox so I can talk about what’s happening in the sky a bit more: Jupiter’s movement out of Taurus and into Gemini.
At the highest level, Jupiter in Taurus evokes excess in the earth element, and optimism in the earth element. Especially with the addition of Uranus there, I’ve seen lots of astrologers share their hopes for innovation and progress with regard to addressing climate change. That’s the optimistic version of those two planets working together. There’s also the less optimistic concern that these planets together represent some kind of explosive event, or a sudden turning point into greater excess. Jupiter doesn’t do subtle and usually neither does Uranus.
Have we seen this bear out in the news since May 2023? I’ve liked the proposition that the orcas attacking rich people’s boats is a nice combination of Jupiter/Uranus in Taurus exchanging a supportive sextile with Saturn/Neptune in Pisces. There’s always plenty of techno-optimism encouraging us to trust the venture capital and wise men to save the world, but this amounts to letting the elite get together at the “Davos for the oil and gas set” to make decisions that “balance” financiers’ interests against the Earth’s. It doesn’t take much research to see that the answer is… no, no country has made significant or sufficient progress here. What we have seen is continued war and the genocide of Palestenians in the pursuit of access to land to build military bases that will protect U.S. oil interests.
Jupiter in Gemini suggests something else. Gemini is a mutable air sign. Excess in an air sign traditionally reflects social chaos, loss of control through networks, or false sense of knowing. Optimism in the air sign might be new uses of technology to help connect people or social movements organizing effectively and en masse. Optimism in any air sign is fundamentally about connection and about society.
Is there hope here? Always, I suppose. It’s been interesting and will continue to be interesting to see how the battle over access to different news sources, those generated by consumers (TikTok, etc) and those generated by traditional sources (thinking about Al-Jazeera being removed from Palestine by Isr*al), continues to evolve. As we develop more uses for A.I. and for other automation systems we’ll be faced again and again with the need to make decisions about human use—history indicates we will not make the right decisions, but history also indicates we have the choice to continue revisiting, continue revising, continue working to center the most affected. As Jupiter moves through Gemini over the next year or so, we’ll have plenty of chances to do this work, followed by his movement into Cancer, a shift into cardinal, caretaking energy that I think will be a necessary follow-up to this time in Gemini.
Pretty much every newsletter I send boils down in some way or another to the idea that astrology reflects the interlocked nature of people to each other and to the past and to the non-human. Gemini is a perfect reflection of this idea, representing a kind of fractal way of looking at the world, seeing the thing inside of the thing inside of the thing and so on.
To make this personal and direct: I think what this transit will ask of you and me and everyone, regardless of your chart or your place in the world, is to always try holding both the specific and the global at once. The argument you want to have might be with a single person but you are each carrying all the interactions and relationships you’ve ever had and the ways they’ve formed you. The disagreement you’re gripped by is real, but it’s also a product of “right now” and it will only live as long as you do.
You can’t know it all, you can’t hold it all, but you can start to recognize how much you aren’t holding and try to let that make you more compassionate.
This all makes me think about what Angela Davis has said about optimism in Freedom is a Constant Struggle: “I don't think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it's only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect.” To me, Jupiter in Gemini = optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect. It’s not an easy time, but it’s necessary.
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.
P.S. Send me your Enneagram and astrology and random questions why not?