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I’ve spent most of my summer organizing my notes. It’s been a proper housecleaning of my memory palace. Hermes only knows how long they’ve been accumulating, computer after computer, external hard drive after failed external hard drive. With the help of a few little friends, I have officially organized all of my ideas that I have ever jotted down, and I can’t quite describe the feeling.

One thing, though, is that it has inspired me to live up to a certain bar moving forward of keeping things tidy and in their right places. One idea I had is to have a rear-view reflection of all I’ve created each month, to help all of us remember and build more substantial context in our astrological understanding moving forward.

And so, as August ends and the eclipses and Dragon Hole close, here are some of the creations that came through me since the first of the month.

It all began with the nodes moving into Leo/Aquarius. If you’re in the True camp, it happened at the end of July. If you’re in the Mean camp, it happened in between eclipses. This is what I wrote about it :

And then the eclipses begin to kick off, which is always my favorite time of the year. This season did not disappoint. We saw inverted narratives in the markets, where the memory bottleneck that harkened back to the mercury cycle finally started to show weakness at the top. Out of nowhere, the moment the Treasury Secretary blinked, bitcoin shot up nearly 30% inside the Dragon Hole. Common practice. Here’s what I said about rescuing the light:

And then Gary and I did a Substack Live. It was my first time ever doing that. Definitely not my last. If you missed it, here’s the link :

I went on a Bitcoin show with an old student of mine the night of the Coldcard hack:

Because my first essay on the eclipses got to be a little long-winded, I had to cut out almost all the information about the lunar eclipse. I gave that aqueous dragon this treatment :

The Mercury-cazimi came just 11 hours away from the lunar eclipse. When things like this happen in the sky, it’s sometimes tough to separate them. Were you able to do that?

I also went to Wales this month and had my annual weekend with Mark Jones. We always have such a good time together. If you haven’t listened to the podcast yet, it’s now live :

Lastly, this month's class was on the waxing crescent moon phase in the progressed lunar cycle. It’s the second of eight in a series that we’ve been doing. If you’re not a patron yet, it’s the cheapest and best way to make sure you’re always learning and mingling with like-minded people

I’m glad I did all that. Sometimes you have to review to remember exactly how much you have accomplished in a month. I hope that you all learned something and enjoyed it. What was coming through for you?

May the inspired breeze continue to blow not just for myself but for all of you as well. Here’s to our first step into fall. At least up here.

onwards,

— Adam

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In this yearly installment of Mark and I having our philosophical discussions, we talk about where astrology lands for us in our lives, especially at this point in our careers. We talk about the Pluto-Neptune cycle and many other fascinating subjects in between. I know many of you look forward to these conversations. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed in this one.

Enjoy

~adam

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If you’ve been tracking these eclipses closely, looking at all the charts, seeing where they fall in your own, and entertaining what I’ve been writing about with the Saros series, you may have stumbled across an interesting alignment that also occurs on this upcoming lunar eclipse. That is Mercury’s cazimi! It might be hard to comprehend that Mercury is already at the midpoint of his synodic cycle, zipping through the underside, on the other side of the Sun, yet here we are. It seems like the retrograde was just yesterday, but this is the speed of Mercury, well over 108x the speed of sound.

In the days before and after this eclipse, Mercury does three things:

1. moves into Virgo (exalted) on the 25th

2. crosses the south node of the moon same day

3. makes a series of meaningful aspects to planets involved in the Barbault Basket, most interestingly creating a bit of a yod with Pluto and Neptune

There are two cazimis in every cycle with Mercury and Venus: the retrograde one and the one that is direct-inferior and superior or inner and outer. Only the inner planets do this.

When retrograde, it’s the beginning of the cycle and happened on July 12th/13th. When direct, it’s the midpoint of the cycle, when Mercury is on the other side of the Sun moving at his fastest. It’s not the seed of the big Idea at this juncture; it’s the accounting of where he has brought us and what he has taught so far. Since we are in this particular Cancer cycle, we could consider it to be Lethe’s ledger. All the themes summoned since June, which constellate around memory, are now being rethought, edited, and fast-tracked for better storage. The way we tell their stories is changing, too.

One bit of data on Lethe’s ledger is the understanding of the Mercury cycle within the mythic context Erin Sullivan talks about, where the first half is Promethean and the second half is Epimethean. To understand it, we need to be familiar with this creation story somewhere around the beginning of time.

~ titan bros

When dealing with Titans, it’s not dissimilar from contemplating the origins of the universe. These are titanic foundational stories that lay out all of the programming for what has come into this world, and what may pass.

The Titan brothers, Prometheus and Epimetheus, find themselves in a bit of a pickle. It all started when Zeus (♃) became enraged after being tricked during a sacrifice and punished Prometheus for helping with the gag. Fire also plays a role, as you may know.

Zeus not only chains Prometheus to the rock, but also has Hephaestus build Pandora, an all-gifted beauty who, in our world, would be an AI-infused robot that would trick anyone into thinking she was a real looker. Think: Ex Machina. Zeus sends her to Epimetheus, not with a box- that’s a mistranslation- but with a pithos, an old jar filled with everything the world has not yet seen, like sickness, toil, old age, envy, war, memecoins, and also: hope.

After the marriage, some time later, Pandora gets curious about what is in the pithos and opens it. Out of it comes all the troubles in this world, except for one thing that holds onto the lid. Elpis, or hope and expectation. There’s an eternal debate about what this means. Is hope left as a mercy for the world left behind, or is it more of an evil, a cruelty disguised as a gift? George Carlin would argue for the latter. The ambiguity is a part of the story, and the debate still goes on.

Hesiod relates Prometheus to forethought, and Epimetheus to afterthought. One of them can see things coming; the other cannot. Prometheus warned his brother never to trust Zeus, yet here he is, with a beautiful yet dangerous creation. They learn in two different ways and are punished accordingly. Just like us

Despite this reality of what floods into the world when Pandora’s ‘jar’ is opened, Epimetheus and Pandora have a daughter named Pyrrha, who marries Deucalion, Prometheus’ own son. When Zeus floods the earth to wipe out a corrupted humanity, these two survive and repopulate the world by throwing stones over their shoulders. So, the grandchildren of the primordial ways of thinking are the flood survivors and the seeds of the new world.

Yet another flood myth appears. Another Adam and Eve left to restart civilization. If only they had the forethought to see it coming, or the afterthoughts to learn from what has already occurred.

The lesson? Never get between a god and their sacrifices...

or: Never accept a gift from Zeus?

or maybe still: How to learn to think in more than one direction?

~ the cycle seen in two

The idea is that from the retrograde cazimi (☿ ℞ ☌ ☉)-the beginning of the cycle-until the direct cazimi (☿ ☌ ☉)- the midpoint of the cycle-the energy embedded within our experience of Mercury is Promethean, or relates to this forethought. From the direct cazimi-the exterior conjunction-to the retrograde cazimi, we have the afterthought.

Now it’s an interesting way of thinking about it, but I don’t know if I fully agree. I like the myth. I think it’s helpful, but the way that I would modify it would be this: the Promethean phase, the first half of the cycle, is like baby Hermes, curious and mischievous, excited explorer of worlds. Greeting the day each morning before the Sun, we find him gutting turtles and making instruments, stealing his brother’s cattle, lying to his father (Zeus, again), and slipping back into bed without his mother even noticing; It’s in this phase where we are obsessively gathering information and learning everything we can about the Idea that grabbed us near the inception of the cycle.

I'd modify the Epimethean part by saying this is Hermes as the wise old sage, perhaps in the form of Hermes Trismegistus. This is where we have the capacity not just to learn after the event, but to have both the forethought because it’s been experienced and the afterthought because that’s just evening wisdom. It’s to be more deliberate in our thinking; it’s in the second half of the cycle, especially as an evening star, when we’ve established our own ideas around whatever it is that we’ve been chasing. We’ve been changed by it. New neural pathways have been formed, and so it’s not that the Promethean-Epimethean division is completely useless. I just think we need the hermetic modifications.

And naturally, the cazimi’s are the transition periods when Mercury is not in the sky. There are countless ways to divide up a cycle. For instance, I think of the Mercury cycle in quadrants: morning star, evening star, and two no stars at all. Gary Caton sees it in 6.

Note: Gary Caton has his own hermetic modifications coming out in Hermetica Triptycha Vol.II

And so, we have Mercury transitioning from morning to evening star, Promethean to Epimethean, a lunar eclipse in Pisces, Mercury square to Uranus, and also being at the tip of a bit of a yod. What does it all mean? Well, with the finger of god pointing right at him, it’s best we pay attention. This god has God’s attention, and it should have ours as well. Mercury work is all about learning and realizing our tongue is a wand. It’s remembering that energy flows with attention, and there are clear phases to how we experience it all every 116 days or so (a Mercury synodic cycle).

Don’t sleep on Mercury. If you come across these essays I write on Mercury or listen to me talk about it, and you’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s interesting, but I don’t need to pay attention or learn more about it.” That’s you sleeping on Mercury. He’s the closest to the Sun, the best at translating photons into our own symbolic understanding. He is the magician, and the one that you want to have your ears tuned to. That is, if you’re interested in learning...about anything.

With so much pointing at Mercury as we slide out of this dragon hole, it is my hope that he reveals something quite profound to you just by paying a little attention. Enjoy it. If you’d like to learn more, you can check out this class or this class to add deeper context.

Sources:

• Retrograde Planets by Erin Sullivan

• Hermetica Triptycha by Gary P. Caton

• Hesiod, Theogony

even more context:

onwards,

~ Adam

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~ wet lightning

On the 27th/ 28th of August, roughly 96% of the moon slides into the Earth’s shadow. It will be partial, but the last partial eclipse of this Saros cycle. Only total eclipses remain for the rest of our lives with this one.

Saros 138 has been running since October of 1521, just a few months after Cortés conquered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. It’s an eclipse family that seems to carry themes of exploration, land values, and generational chaos. With the last one in August of 08’, we can easily see how the subprime mortgage crisis fits in nicely. Starting in the 16th century, the Age of Exploration offers an interesting entry point for these Saros themes. This one, visible for most of the Americas, also sees dragons circling the summit of this real estate cycle.

If you aren’t familiar with the idea of eclipses belonging to families in the Saros, the idea is simple: eclipses begin near one of the poles, and over a thousand years, every 18 years, 11 days, they repeat as the eclipses coil around the Earth in third steps as they travel towards the other pole. It truly looks like a serpent wrapping around an egg; it’s a hermetic image. By exploring the Saros in context with the eclipses, we try to understand the theme beneath an isolated member of the family. To do that, we look to the origin eclipse:

As you can see in the origin chart for this series, the eclipse is around 18-19° from the north node. That’s what it takes for an eclipse to happen. Once it gets within that orb, eclipse seasons are possible. The closer and closer a luminary gets, the more total the eclipses become. When we look at the chart for the upcoming eclipse, you can see how much closer it has gotten. That’s why the next one in the series in 2044 will be total, and those that follow for quite some time.

The main theme that speaks to me first when I look at the origin chart relates to Eris in Taurus. Currently in late Aries, she is set to return to Taurus in the 40’s, not too far from the next eclipse in this series. And as you can see, she’s just a degree away from the lunar eclipse. Discord? Chaos? Something misunderstood? The early 16th century was an exciting time for some but an absolutely terrifying one for others, especially those being visited by Europeans. Again, themes that carry through eclipse to eclipse in the Saros family. If you have early colonial themes percolating at the base, what comes up with this one? Another way the Steven Forrest drama gains some more context. Plot twists abound!

When we look at the eclipse on the horizon, we have Mercury near cazimi, who is also exalted, square to Uranus, and creating a bending with the nodes. What does it all mean?

Think back to the beginning of the Mercury cycle, which started in Cancer on July 12th, and attach those themes to the eclipse. I talked about memory a lot in the essay I wrote, and it seemed to manifest that way perfectly- for me and the world (memory bottlenecks, the World Cup, nostos with the Odyssey). What we’re seeing is a speeding up around this theme: a quicker shedding of old ideas (or memories), deleting the trail left in our digital footprint, and the way AI is corrupting our memory banks, as well. We have a pretty good idea of where we’re headed now and where this idea is taking us. And with Mercury exalted in Virgo, he’s skilled with discernment, but then you put him 90° away from Uranus, we have a surprise. Is it an unexpected hack or something surfacing in our pool of memory we forgot about? Did we allow those agents to run too far into our machines? Were we careful where we saved our passwords or private keys? What kind of surprise does it have for the world? Just a few threads I’m pulling at.

This theme with Mercury and Uranus is embedded within this iteration of the Saros 138 eclipses. Yes, the Pisces matters and where it points in your chart or where it’s visible, but this Mercury cycle squared off with Uranus is the theme of this chapter for the dragon tale which began way back in 1521.

...There’s lightning out on the water. The ships aren’t safe out there, and it reminds me of Proteus

Proteus was that prophetic sea god who knew things but would reveal none of it. In the Odyssey, it’s Menelaus who attempts to squeeze the truth out of him. But the moment he tries to seize him, he becomes something else: a big cat, a snake, a boar, fire, and even water. The trick is to always hold on through the shapes without mistaking each new form for a new revelation or answer. Menelaus pulls it off, but will we? Mercury square Uranus with this adventurous dreamer of an eclipse can have us thinking and feeling all sorts of ways. Mercury asking the questions, Uranus changing shapes, and the luminaries shining from Virgo/Pisces pull at what is real and what is not. So how can we be more discerning in an Age of AI? Can we hold the shapes long enough to get at the truth?

The lightning shows us the surface and some of our surroundings but reveals nothing about the underneath. Only when the tides roll back after the eclipse do we start to see a few things glittering among the stones; this is when it begins to come together. Perhaps some evidence of the conquistador’s path or a sneaky coding trail left by a rogue agent? Whatever we find will be crucial in helping us piece together a better story moving forward. The hope is that we become better at telling it, as well.

~ tides changing

An eclipse is not a complete reboot. It’s more of a swallowing that fails a bit. Something is always changed by it, and it does matter whether it’s on Rahu or Ketu (☊/☋). Since this one is on Rahu, something novel wants to come through. The dragon is hungry. It’s always hungry for light.

Being that this lunar eclipse is in Pisces, it’s important to understand the polarity here. Pisces isn’t just chaos and openness. It’s a larger language that’s hard to contain with names or symbols. And with Virgo (where the Sun will be), it’s not just control or OCD, but the process of naming, testing, and deciding what to save or delete. You can see the tension. The story of our lives.

So, if it’s Piscean novelty we are after, we must stay curious about what is revealed. If we are graced with a vision, then Mercury opposes it and analyzes the situation. He will ask: do we have the tools to contain it and execute? Is it worth our time? And on the other side of this eclipse, we leave this dragon hole, and the hope is that we weren’t just changed by it, but we understand the work ahead. Eclipses reliably alter the code of the story, and with this one, we don’t want to get caught off guard-especially by Uranus-by these machines-or by colonial thinking.

And so, when it’s all said and done, when the Moon finally pulls the tides back again, we will catch a glimpse of what lies beneath. We will see the artifacts left behind and perhaps be worthy to work with moving forward.

~sifting

The Chandra Symbol for this eclipse reads:

... Beneath the crumbled waves and the speed of water, lies some sort of valuable. Not always gold; sometimes an undiscovered creature or a sunken treasure in our own psyche. A memory long lost or buried because of the trauma that forced itself deep into our abyss. Eclipses have a way of revealing such content. In this case, it pulls back the water and shows what we’ve been missing all along. Mercury’s memory box broken open.

Pisces provides the awe, where Virgo provides the work required to make it real. Panning for gold was never easy work.

No matter what is revealed to us during eclipses, there is almost always so much more work to be done. In the case of a Rahu eclipse, the dragon swallows the moon, and yet it slips out the other side. Altered, sure, but it’s still the moon. Inside us, the story never goes away. What changes, though, is how we tell it. It’s all those Protean shapes it must take before the truth finally speaks. Our job is not to let go.

Perhaps it’s gold from some old 16th-century Spanish ship, storing its value since the start of this Saros series. Or could it simply be a metaphor for the psychic process we are all in? Wherever it lands in your chart is what matters most. What planets do we have in Pisces? Mutable signs or any other aspects that are significant to this eclipse? Those are the areas we study as the dragon hole closes.

I think it’s important to mention the Sabian symbol here as well, not only because I mentioned it in the last essay, but because it fits the story arc here.

...so you’ve sorted and polished whatever it is that you found beneath the mysteries of the water, and now you have a table at a ‘bazaar.’ The goods are laid out. There’s a crowd moving about all around you. There are stories that you carry now that can be told. Also, at the center of a church bazaar is a faith in something that is much larger than yourself. This is what Pisces points to and it’s what is missing most in the world at the moment.

And so here it comes, the final eclipse of 2026; a partial lunar one that might feel total, that’s been eclipsing since 1521. With the last one weeks before the Lehman collapse in 08’ and the next in 44’ to be total--and those that follow, for the rest of our days. I’m eager to see how it all writes itself.

With the speed of Mercury in its cazimi (also an occultation) square to Uranus, it is to be expected that this will be no ordinary eclipse. The flashes and strangeness of our thinking will resemble an electric eel trapped in our heads. What we choose to talk about will explain much of what is happening beneath the surface. One idea I can’t shake going into it is how important it is to take our cybersecurity more seriously. This square may relate to many more agents writing themselves out of their sandboxes and causing the chaos I referenced at the beginning. It’s already happening, but are you prepared on your own devices?

And who knows, it may come and go like nothing ever happened. I doubt it, though.

If you’d like to learn more about eclipses, you can watch this HERE

Sources

• Murray Beauchamp, The Cryptic Cycle: Astrology and the Lunar Saros

• Kory Varlen, Where Dragons Dance: Lunar Eclipse Pathways to Personality and Prediction

~adam

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☉ ☽ ☿ ♀ ♂ ♃ ♄ ♅ ♆ ♇ ⊕ ☊ ☋

“Stuff your eyes with wonder. Live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”

~ the wyrd window

We are fast approaching the final eclipses of the year. The season is already on us, but the window has yet to open. When it does, that is where the story gets interesting.

When ☉ and ☽ meet at a node, the light changes. Two weeks later they meet at the other node, and it changes back. Between them: the Dragon Hole (eclipse window). It’s in this space that the plot thickens, twists, and spits us out the other side, left trying to put the pieces together again. Always eventful, sometimes ominous, and never to be missed.

The solar eclipse arrives 12 August at 20°01′ ♌︎ and cracks the space open. The lunar follows on the 27th/28th, straddling 4°54′ ♓︎ and ♍︎, and seals it shut. One dragon, two ends, three bodies. Most of the focus here will be on the solar eclipse.

And the nodal axis is moving while it happens. The true nodes stepped into ♌︎/♒︎ on July 27th; the mean nodes don’t follow until the 18th of this month, which puts the crossing inside the dragon hole itself. King and the crowd. Us and them. Steven Forrest vs. the astrology “community.” It’s a reset having something to do with the Emperor’s wardrobe (more on that HERE).

Note also that the solar eclipse is a south node eclipse, meaning the new moon is near it. Its family is called 10 South. The name is important.

Every eclipse belongs to a Saros family, and most of the families are quite old. Brady reads each as a birth chart whose first eclipse sets a tone that hums through every member for a thousand years or so. This one was born 10 March 1179, ☉ and ☽ at 26° ♓︎ squared by ♄ and ♇ in ♊︎. It’s disenchantment under pressure. The suffocation we feel by the status quo. Or the dreamer who constructs a wall around their own imagination. However it manifests, it can feel crippeling.

That March, the Third Lateran Council turned its attention to the communities the Church called Cathars—also Patarenes or Publicani—spreading through Gascony, Albi, Toulouse, and beyond. Rome said their “loathsome heresy” had grown so strong that they no longer concealed their supposed wickedness, but taught openly and drew “the simple and weak” to their side. Canon 27 placed not only the Cathars but also those who sheltered, supported, or traded with them under anathema: no home, no commerce, no Mass, no Christian burial. Whether one views them as heretics or as a persecuted spiritual counterculture, the Council’s language shows a movement being publicly marked as an enemy of the Christian order.

They were not sorcerers. They were austere dualists who taught that the visible world is the prison of the soul, and that release comes through the consolamentum — a baptism of fire and spirit meant to free the light trapped inside a human being.

The light being trapped inside is the idea. Our lives as an eclipse of the Truth, and the work of a life being to get the light back out. And the Church role here, displaying the ♄/♇ square to the eclipse. Think: early 2020, with the last ♄/♇ conjunction. Who was wielding the unfair power then?

Brady does not delineate 10 South as catastrophe. Her words, verbatim: “This Saros Series concerns itself with breaking out of a very negative situation where no hope can be seen to a more positive space containing many options. A worry that may have been affecting a person will suddenly clear. The solution is shown by the Cosmos and needs to be taken up without too much delay.”

Not an impossible prison. A door-or window—does show a way out.

This family is not fully that the walls close in. It’s our perception of the constriction of freedom and the invitation to work around it. To be imaginative about it. For the Cathars, they did it by being socially embedded and by becoming mobile, clandestine, and clever in avoiding the Inquisitors.

Again, these are nuanced themes which exist in the eclipse family the upcoming solar eclipse lives in. Sometimes we can see them, sometimes we can’t. It’s subtle, yet worthy of knowing about.

~ the cave

We turn now to Japan, for a grief story with an eclipse rolled into it for some mythic context.

Amaterasu is the Sun. She’s not a symbol of the Sun, not a finger pointing at it — she’s the goddess who is the light of the world. And her brother Susanoo is the storm, the violence, and the refusal of limitation. One day, he tears through her fields and her halls until something in her breaks. He breached her limits (♄) and her response is curious.

She doesn’t fight back. She does something anti-solar, instead. She retreats.

Amaterasu withdraws into a cave, rolls a stone shut behind her, and the world goes dark. Every field and face, every crop and creature: dark—or almost. They say this was the original eclipse. Not an event in the sky but a deep sulk— the light choosing the dark because the world had become unworthy to shine on.

The other gods have a curious response to all this.

They do not pray or mourn or take a battering ram to the stone and drag the Sun back into a world that had already proved it didn’t deserve her. None of that. They throw a party, instead.

They gather at the mouth of the cave and have a rager. Amenouzume climbs onto an overturned tub and dances ecstatically. They say she went kamugakari. Ecstatic or God-taken or possessed by some otherworldly force. Intoxicated by something that wasn’t poured by Dionysus. The dance turns wild, then obscene, and the gods roar with laughter loud enough to shake the mountain...and nudge the stone a bit.

Then, the birds begin to respond out of the quiet of the eclipse.

It’s the roosters calling dawn before there is any dawn to call. They are announcing the light as though it had already returned.

And the ‘light,” hearing all this, gets curious.

Amaterasu moves the stone by a sliver, just enough to ask what could possibly be so funny in a world she had personally plunged into darkness. And in that crack they had sneakily hung a mirror.

And so, she sees a light, not realizing it’s her own. She leans toward it, and they take her by the hand. This is how the Sun is pulled back into the world by her own reflection and the sound of a party that would not stop.

.: :.

The Sabian symbol for 21° ♌︎ — the degree this eclipse rounds into — is intoxicated chickens dizzily flapping their wings. A dizzy, drunken, absurd flock beating their wings at a dawn that has not happened. The rooster crowing into the false morning. The birds set flapping to sing the light home. A close match to the myth, and a very wyrd instruction to receive in a crisis.

The Cathars said the trapped light is freed by fire and spirit. Amaterasu’s council said laughter and a mirror would do the trick. Brady says the door opens on its own and we are given these chances every 18 years. Three answers to one question, none complete or clear, but all ways of rescuing the light.

Nobody overthrows the darkness, nor does anybody argue the Sun out of the cave. It’s more of a realization of what truly sets the spirit free and how to act when it feels like the walls are closing in.

~ moments & meteors

Again, eclipses are an inversion of a story's narrative. It takes the thing everyone is most certain of and turns it over while the light changes. It’s hard to put into words, yet you know it when you see it. This idea works wonders in markets too. If bulls enter the Dragon Hole, they exit as bears, and vice versa. It’s fascinating.

Our ancestors cared about the eclipse path above all — if it wasn’t overhead, why would it matter? We’ve mostly dropped that. We overlay the eclipse onto the natal chart, find the house and aspects, and forget about the geography (for the most part). It’s good to consider it all, especially the eclipses within the Saros family. For instance:

1. 1 August 2008—the previous one. Its shadow ran from Nunavut across northern Greenland and the Arctic, through central Russia, eastern Kazakhstan and western Mongolia, before setting in China. The banking crisis was already underway. In the following week, fighting over South Ossetia intensified on 7 August; Russia’s large-scale assault on Georgia began on the 8th, the same day Beijing opened the Olympic Games. Then, forty-five days after the eclipse, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and the long-stuck global financial crisis broke into its most acute phase. The crisis was not the eclipse. The eclipse opened the window into the Dragon Hole; then the stories began to twist and turn. It also began away from the eclipse path, a point for the team who say the path doesn’t matter too much.

2 · 12 August 2026-this one. Arctic Ocean, Greenland, Iceland, northern Spain, a corner of northeastern Portugal. Two minutes eighteen at maximum. Member forty-eight of seventy-two. We’ll see if it’s more of the World Cup good luck for Spain or the bad luck with the fires and immigration chaos. Perhaps a point then for the eclipse path team. We’ll have to confirm on the other side of it.

3 · 23 August 2044-next one. North America — and by then these eclipses move out of ♌︎ entirely, to 0°55′ ♍︎. This month is the last time this family speaks in the key of a lion’s roar. Themes from the start persist, but each eclipse offers its own flavor and lessons.

Earlier this year, teaching a class on the eclipses of 2026, I kept circling Spain, because that is where most of the totality lands in the upcoming eclipse. Since then, Spain has won a World Cup, burned through a brutal fire season, and sat at the center of Europe’s hardest argument about who gets to come in. Which raises a question I don’t think we ask often enough: how wide is the aperture on eclipse influence? Does the path concentrate the story even before it happens? We know that they linger afterward — sometimes for years — but can they also have premonitions? Seems like it with Spain this round...

Then, on the 13th, one day into the Dragon Hole, under a sky with no Moon whatsoever, the Perseids peak. Up to a hundred an hour, the best conditions in over a decade. May we be blessed with clear skies for both, though always have that extra awareness when gazing at an eclipse if you are along the path. It’s not just your eyes you should be worried about.

It’s often best to just do your practice, and listen to Jyotishis on this one…

.: :.

So, the dragon eats the Sun, an ecstatic woman dances on a tub, and a bird sings a morning into existence, rescuing the light. You may not think these stories matter, but if the world is made up of stories, and these ones dance close to the essence of this eclipse season, then we might as well entertain them. Even if it’s only an image you take with you into it, who knows how it may help. You may end up with a hilarious chicken story to share when it’s all said and done.

Three questions to carry through:

• What light have you sealed off, and what did the world do to make you do it? ...♌︎ wants it expressed regardless of how badly it was handled last time.

• Where do these two land in your chart — especially the solar at 20° ♌︎? ... it's the lion and the wardrobe.

• And think back to August 2008, the last time this family was active. What emerged and how does it relate to some of these themes?

The light does not return because we demand it; it returns because someone out there was having such a good time that it coaxed the excited photons straight out of us. Eclipses have a funny way of working us and forcing us to deal with how we tell our stories.

Enjoy the wyrdness of it all and don’t forget to be reflective on their strange powers. Remain curious and open to learn from them, always. And look to where it’s all constellating in your own chart, then go from there. Try to track just how your story changes from start to finish--solar to lunar--tail to the head of this dragon.

Good luck out here--especially for those along the paths.

• Note: I started with an entire section including the lunar eclipse but had to cut it. Once I breach 2k words, the editor comes out in me. It’s not that it’s not important; it’s just that the solar eclipse is more relevant this season.

If you’d like an eclipse-specific reading for this window, I’m here. There’s also the 2026 eclipse class, which goes deeper on the paths and the Saros families.

Sources & further reading

• Predictive Astrology: The Eagle and the Lark. Brady, Bernadette.

• The Sabian Symbols; Jones, Marc Edmund.

• Third Lateran Council, 1179, Canon 27

• NASA GSFC eclipse catalog..

~ Adam

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The nodes are in limbo.

If you’re in the True Node camp — if you enjoy the wobble, the on/off switch of retrograde into direct — they’ve already ingressed (26th of July). If you’re in the Mean Node camp like myself, you favor the smoothness, the constant surrender of a node that never stops retrograding. Either way it’s happening. Just a few weeks apart.

The Mean ingress lands inside the Dragon Hole (eclipse window/Aug 12th-28th). It’ll be quite eventful for all themes Leo/Aquarius — the Real Estate Cycle included. From Gann through Phil Anderson and the countless commentators in between, it’s these nodes, these dragons, that circle the tippy top of this market cycle, and what comes next could be terrifying if unprepared.

Will it be 08’ all over again? 89? 71?

Likely. But that’s not what I want to focus on here. I’d rather double-click on both nodes and get at the dynamics between them.

With Ketu (south node) into Leo, we’re invited to remove a mask we’ve been pretending under for far too long.

With Rahu (north node) into Aquarius, we’re invited to join a scene we may want to think twice about.

And with each choice we are given, they oscillate like entangled particles in our minds. Both have their challenges; just don’t confuse them. If we overly identify with either, we’re soon lost to the shadow lands.

As always, let’s turn to a brief story to help us understand this nodal axis even better.

~ the loom

Two weavers arrive at court selling cloth they say only the worthy can see. Fools see nothing. Men unfit for their office see nothing. The emperor, naturally, goes all in — pays out a fortune before they’ve unpacked the cart. His own wearable lie detector.

An old minister goes in to inspect. A Saturn cycle of service, two wives buried, he knows the vibe of a con when he sees one. He looks at the loom and sees only wood. Bare. An empty loom. Something cold runs through him, then he praises the pattern on the loom. He then walks back across the courtyard with his heart pounding like a sneaky mouse caught in the act.

Every man after does the same.

Then the emperor comes for a look, and he sees nothing either. So he lets himself be dressed in air, turning at the mirror while the court applauds the fit.

Nobody is telling the truth. That is, until the child shows up.

The emperor naked under a canopy, displaying his finest wares with the crowd cheering at the best clothes he’s ever worn — because not one of them will be the single fool in the kingdom who can’t see them, and be judged accordingly.

Then a child yells out: but he hasn’t got anything on!

That’s what it takes. A child — that pure expression of Leo — who holds no office and therefore cannot be unfit for one, and doesn’t care how foolish he looks. Then his father repeats it. The man beside him repeats it. And the whisper runs the length of the street until the crowd is saying aloud what every person in it had privately known since the emperor came round the corner. The power and the madness of crowds: Aquarius.

The weavers never sold fabric. They sold the terror which awakens the demons of status and position. They sold a terror that guards a lie better than any soldier, because every witness has their own name on the line.

Oh, the pressures from the outside. It’s why we work on the inside; it’s why we practice…

• The story as we know it is Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 literary fairy tale, but he was adapting a much older trickster motif rather than inventing it from scratch.

~the tail

☋ ♌

Ketu means drastically different things in the East than the West. In the West we favor past lives and the forgetting of the whole tale. In the East it’s more about what isn’t of this world at all. Somewhere in between is where we find the truth.

We could say it’s more like a saturated story arc we’re all too familiar with. A cauldron full of stories. Wherever it moves, those stories get ladled out of the pot, and we’re given a chance to finally edit the way we relate to them and how we tell the tale.

Often it’s the shadow side of the sign we meet first.

Leo’s shadow is an easy one to get wrong. It isn’t showing off, exactly. It’s more the terror of being seen as unworthy. It’s that cold thing passing through the minister. It’s in the pressure that has us saying I don’t see it because of the fear attached to our own fragile sense of self, held up against the group, the court, whatever the audience may be.

Once the nodes settle into this axis — True and Mean both — we get the next eighteen months to find the nerve to be more like the child in the crowd. We will become intimate again with this side of ourselves.

Wherever we can spot those pressures working on us, that’s where the old story gets to fall away. Something more childlike takes its place. Something more honest and freeing.

~ the head

☊ ♒

Wherever Rahu goes, so does our appetite. Hungry for novelty. Fiendish for the objects of the material world.

In Aquarius, it’s easy to spot the influence of other people’s opinions. Staying relevant. Being cool. Ahead of the curve. The persistent gamble around what it takes to go viral. Clicks, likes, shares, followers — the junk food Rahu in Aquarius loves to subsist on.

In the West we speak of destiny with Rahu. In the East it’s a hungry ghost, the severed head of an undying dragon. Again, the truth is in the space between.

The truth in the middle is that Rahu promises excitement and often leaves us feeling empty. There are victory tales to be had here, certainly. But caution doesn’t get spoken about enough with Rahu. Over the next eighteen-odd months we’ll be coaxed into plenty of situations where the outside pressure runs hot against our better judgment.

AI has a role in this. We’re all growing a strange new sensitivity — the generated image, the generated sentence, the generated sincerity. Something in the jaw goes tight. We don’t exactly have a word for it yet, but for now, we can call it the ick.

I’m very sensitive to it, yet I still use it. I dream up the infographics for these essays with it, and I love them. I use it for research, and I’m floored by its powers. I use this nascent tech in a lot of ways, yet I’m also ultrasensitive to the lines that have to be drawn. It can’t write for me. It can’t think for me. And it will never be used to reach more people, or to manipulate the ones who find their way to my work.

AI is a little guilty of being the rabble in the story — repeating what isn’t true. But it isn’t the lie. The lie is pretending nobody’s hand is guiding it.

The frontier models can’t be trusted. Which means leaning into freedom tech. Running them on our own machines if we can, rather than routing everything through the server farms. Open source and better privacy practices are the health foods for Rahu here. That, and being radically true to who we are, while discovering how we can live with it, without it executing the Muse or our dignity.

In the story, the child’s cry doesn’t stop the parade. The procession keeps on chugging along. The emperor hears the boy. He knows the boy is right. But he lifts his chin and moves on, prouder than before, while the sycophants keep carrying the train.

Naming the lie has never once ended a reign. Occupy named it plainly, yet the Hope train kept going, and so did the banks with the support of all those who lied about the cloth. Calling out the Red King stops nothing either. But when it comes to our personal lives, we can make this change.

Yes, we’ll be judged, but at least we’ll be free—at least we’ll be centered in that feeling we all get when we tell the truth. With the nodes here, they hand us one battle after another with peer pressure. Win it, and the treasure has the capacity to lower our anxiety — maybe eliminate the social kind entirely. It’s worth the effort.

Eclipse season has also begun. It’s the nodes that make it so. When the Sun comes within roughly eighteen degrees of them, it begins. The plot twists and themes constellating around this axis will be entertaining, no doubt. But more on those in a future essay.

This procession has got to go on.

Hopefully it’ll be us stating the obvious, like the child, unafraid of the costs.

Historically, when the nodes fly through this stretch of the zodiac, chapters get devoted to what happens in the history books. Perhaps, under the surface and behind the curtain, it’s these precise social dynamics that create so much of the pain for the rest of us. Politicians and all those seeking ladders to get to the top should read this story to themselves each night before bed to their inner child.

Be prepared for it. The market isn’t going up forever. Nor is our social standing....

— Adam

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In this episode, Ray Merriman returns to talk about his new book on Jupiter & Saturn. It’s his first non-financial astrology book in many decades, even though it touches on it throughout. Using real‑world market examples, we explore how to turn these planetary forces into practical trading and life‑planning tools. It’s always a pleasure to talk with Ray. I hope that you enjoy listening to us.

Enjoy!

— Adam

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“Guard the Mysteries! Constantly reveal Them!”

— Lew Welch

~too big

There are times when the alignments are such that all we can do is shrug. Once you bring in over three planets, multiple cycles — some lasting hundreds of years — and our subjective filters sifting through the guessing opinions online, again, all we can do is shrug and watch closely.

For instance, nobody feels a five-hundred-year planetary cycle. It’s an atmosphere we take for granted. We can catch glimpses of it by studying the past, and I suppose we can ‘feel’ it at times, but only in brief, epiphanous moments. So when it comes to the sky this month, with all the outer and social planets (including Chiron) gathering in the early degrees of their new signs, it’s nearly impossible to say what it all means. We can try, as I have, breaking up a few of the cycles like HERE and HERE, but we still just need to experience it to really know.

When the sky does something too large for our minds to comprehend, we don’t need a bigger processor. We need a story of the same size. We need an idea which orients us properly, and gives us hope. The Egyptians kept one — they stored their whole cosmology in it, in the only medium that reliably survives the collapse of everything else: creation tales. Temples crumble. Libraries burn. Priesthoods get audited out of existence, but the pyramids and these stories remain. This story is about the heron and the mound that appeared from no-thing and brought about everything.

So first the story. Then the sky.

~from nothing, to everything

Before anything, there was water — or plasma or something similar to the two.

Not the ocean — the ocean has a shore, and a shore is a boundary. This is Nun. (none) Dark, endless, directionless substance without surface, because there is nothing above it to make “surface” mean anything. No sky. No time. Not even nothing, because nothing needs a something to lean on. The Egyptians began every cosmology here. They knew something we keep forgetting: form is the exception. Nun is the rule.

From this space — a mound appears. Somewhere in the middle of all that unmeasured wet potential, a hill, shaped like a pyramid, breaks the surface. The Egyptians called it the benben, and in the old spells carved at Saqqara, the creator god Atum doesn’t stand on the mound. He rises as it. This God’s first act is not speech, not light — it’s geometry’s smallest possible unit: a point. And a point is not a shape. A point is the rumor of a shape. It is simply the first place where “here” differs from “everywhere” and where all forms begin to coalesce.

One. The point!

Enter: the bird. Down from a sky that doesn’t exist yet comes a heron with two long plumes trailing off the back of its head like a string of thoughts it hasn’t finished. This is Bennu. And when he lands on the benben — the only landing strip in the universe — he opens his beak and cries, splitting the silence. The old texts say the cry determined what would and wouldn’t be — the first sound was also the first decision. Consciousness announcing itself out of chaos. The moment there is a sound, there is everything the sound is not. Noise and silence. Bird and stone. Voice and listener. One has become two — and two is where all the trouble starts. Two is tension, the string pulled tight — and a line which divides space but cannot hold it, yet.

The strangest thing about this bird is that it has no parent. Some say it’s the distant cousin of the phoenix — the Greeks certainly borrowed some plumage. “He who came into being by himself” is its epithet, shared with Atum, because at this stage: bird, stone, and god are the same thought wearing different bodies. The Bennu is called the ba of Ra — the soul of the sun made visible. It is the Egyptian answer to the question we all have asked: but what made the Maker? They pointed at the benben. Somewhere, something must simply arise.

And it kept arising, on a schedule. Every year the Nile flood drowned the world back into Nun and receded — and the first things to emerge were mounds of black earth, glistening, new, exactly like the first morning. Standing on them: herons. The whole cosmology re-enacted annually in mud and wading birds. Because Egyptian time was not decay; it was renewal, maintained daily by gods and humans together. The Bennu is the emblem of that: cosmos as something we re-attend, not something that happened once. Phoenix-like renewal.

This painting from the Book of the Dead tells it all. A papyrus boat rides a sea of hieroglyphs. Midship, a djed pillar — the backbone of Osiris, the spine that keeps a world upright. At one end, the Bennu, solar disk balanced on its head like the sun wearing the bird as a body. And facing it, a human being — the dead man, the initiate, one of us — with hand raised. Not in defense. Not commanding. Raised in recognition. The dead man passes through the underworld by looking each terrifying thing in the eye and saying: I know who you are. You are the ba of Ra. You rise. I rise with you. In these texts, the deceased can even become the bird — “I am the Bennu, the soul of Ra.” In other words, whatever landed on the first mound can land again, in all of us. In all things, it’s important we learn to see the ba (soul) within them.

And so: The bird. The pillar. The witness. Three — the first number that encloses. One is a point, two is a line drawn, three is the triangle: the first shape with an inside, the first structure that stands up by itself. Three is where God stops being an idea and becomes architecture. But notice which corner completes it. Not the bird. Not the stone. The witness. All divine, but the triangle doesn’t close until something sees It and raises a hand.

Consciousness is the third side.

or, the cheat code:

press: Option (⌥) + J = ∆ (on a Mac)

~the five hundred to ten thousand

Herodotus, visiting Egypt around 450 BC, wrote down what he was told at Heliopolis: the bird — he called it the phoenix — returns to the temple of the Sun once every five hundred years, arriving when its parent dies, carrying the old body home sealed in myrrh (Histories II.73). A funeral flight announcing that time has turned over. That is Greek translation, not Egyptian doctrine — the native texts keep the Bennu on daily and yearly time; but still. A renewal the size of a civilization, an interval no life can witness twice, and one coincidentally timed with one of the cycles involved in this “Basket.”

In my latest essay on the Pluto/Neptune cycle, I talked about this ~500-year cycle, without the content of this story. Now, even though the cycle reset in the late 19th century, we remain stuck in the sextile, and the two planets are heavily involved in the astrology of this month and for the remainder of this decade.

We have all the outer/social planets gathering around four degrees: Neptune and Saturn guarding the gates of Aries (Saturn copresent, but off by degrees), Uranus at 4° Gemini, Pluto at 4° Aquarius, Jupiter making aspects to them all, also involved in another minor grand trine from Leo; even Chiron is linked in Taurus (T-square with Pluto/Jupiter). Two sextiles and a trine — a Minor Grand Trine, with Saturn–Neptune as the apex and the Uranus–Pluto trine as the base. It’s a lot! It’s my point. And on July 29th, the Full Moon glows at ~6° Aquarius, in close proximity to Pluto. The Bennu is making all kinds of noises. The time of renewal is upon us. The stone can be seen from everywhere.

The Bennu, soul of the sun risen out of death — Pluto, lit by the Full Moon. The solar disk on its head — the Leo Sun with Jupiter. The djed pillar holding the boat upright — Saturn conjunct Neptune (the structure of the whole epiphany). And the human with the raised hand — all of us, renewed- is the creative flash of something out of nothing: the gift of Uranus. Again, it’s a lot. It’s why stories and images can help.

It’s a creation myth. It can be interpreted however you’d like. Just like confusing astrological transits. Again, it all needs a story big enough to make sense. With the ~500-year connection put side by side with the sense of renewal, I think it’s safe to assume this is what Barbault saw in the aspect patterns when he said it would “…bring a more humanistic era with poverty contained.” We. shall. see. Will the AI revolution create an era of abundance? How will it fix inflation or a sovereign debt crisis? Does it mean we are returning to a time of sound money, once again (i.e., BTC, gold)? A creative Renaissance? Whatever it will be, it will be. It surely is another confident step into the Age of Air.

July 29th is the date to circle in the books. With the Sun/Jupiter conjunction in Leo as the power source of the Pluto/Full Moon in Aquarius, it’s this light which reveals — and makes us feel — the benben on the horizon. Leo is the creative act. Not creativity as decoration, but creation the way the Bennu means it: self-generation, the cry that sorts what will exist from what won’t. Leo is “he who came into being by himself,” scaled down to fit into our own lives. And with the Pluto/Full Moon, we are given the gift of profound insight. A revelation station. A space for rapid renewal. Whatever landed on the first mound can land again, and will, in us. This month the sky has left the landing strip open for interpretation. Focus first on the feeling, then find it all in your chart. Don’t ignore Jupiter and the Sun. They are the inspired flight within all of this.

Lew Welch — the Beat who walked into the Sierras in 1971 and never returned — left us this line: “Guard the Mysteries! Constantly reveal Them!” In the realm of the mundane, we are seeing this in real time, even if underwhelming and frustrating: Epstein files, UFO files, auditing Fort Knox, etc. And in the realm of the esoteric, they will reveal much to us. We are going to learn a lot from these transits. Likely, we will look back on this Summer the same way we do early 2020 and see it as a herm along the wyrd road we are all moving down…

Point, line, triangle. Five hundred years a beat, ten thousand interpretations. But right now, for one strange month, a ‘minor’ triangle is standing overhead in fire and air, monitored closely by the earth Chiron stands on (Taurus; square to Full Moon). It’s once in a lifetime astrology. It’s better to be excited than to be afraid.

What in our lives is still a point, waiting for a cry or feather — another point to draw a line between? And how does the third appear? How do we complete the triangle?

Track it all in your chart. Read my previous essays on the various players. Don’t think too much about it.

We don’t know enough to worry…oOo

~∆ dam

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It’s Cazimi Day! I just wanted to be your daily reminder and link you to a few things below that may help you keep up with the cycle we are moving into. And with the Mercury Journey, I have made it 50% off.

Have a good celebration in the heart of the sun…

something to read:

and from the last cycle…

to listen:

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This is my favorite offering. No better time to begin than now, with the cazimi…

enjoy

— Adam

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• …with the cacophony of alignments this July, I’ve decided to break them up a bit so that we can better understand this minor grand trine that is building amongst so many other themes. Here are the previous installments:

And now, for this one…

~the Cycle

Every 492 years or so, Neptune and Pluto meet in the invisible landscape to program the dreamspell for the half-millennium ahead. Every time they do, a world ends, and another begins. Each conjunction scripts a fresh Ragnarok: the old assumptions and the pantheon that guards them are swapped — the temple systems, the empires, the philosophies with tenure — march off their posts, and a new troop of stories steps out of the clearing mist and begins to work on everyone’s reality. It’s a big idea. It’s worth our time. So, let’s explore it, shall we...

A living myth is hard to spot. It doesn’t present as a belief entirely; it moves through everything without notice most of the time. Sometimes we catch a glimpse, but it often stays folded inside the dreamworld. The medieval peasant didn’t believe in purgatory the way we believe in sports teams — he believed in it the way you believe in a sunrise. That’s the water, we’re the fish, and Neptune–Pluto are the whole aquarium. Nobody asks the fish for a review of the water. It’s a knowing so deeply ingrained we don’t experience it as an assumption, only as fact.

Neptune is the enchantment cast into the collective mind; Pluto, the voltage that powers and protects it. Together they rule every preconception we’ve ever had. There are only two known ways to see past a spell this size — study the expired ones, or ingest wyrd molecules. Preferably in that order. To see through the matrix of the Neptune–Pluto cycle is the work of a lifetime. And what follows is about the stretch of the cycle when that work gets easiest — the window when the dream, briefly, allows lucidity. From conjunction to sextile, we find ourselves. It’s where we’ve been for some time, and will remain for nearly the next decade.

After each conjunction, as the world settles into its newly written hidden script, Neptune and Pluto slide into their sextile — normally a quick handshake of an aspect, easy to overlook, but because Pluto’s orbit is eccentric and they are both so far out there, this particular sextile sticks, holding on and off for the better part of a century. Rudhyar’s insight was that anything lasting that long stops being an aspect and becomes an atmosphere — the background hum of civilization, the key everyone alive is composing in without knowing it. A collective cymatics experiment, with our minds as the sand. Nobody experiences this sextile as a transit; everybody experiences it as reality. And so, the strange gift floating around inside it is that the same aspect that keeps the dream humming is the one that lets you wake up inside it. The sextile is the dream’s lucidity window. Soon it opens for the third and final time this cycle. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Best we don’t miss it.

The sextile is the aspect of opportunity and allied support. Starting at the end of July, the sky begins dealing them out in a run that carries through not only the rest of the year, but for nearly the decade. It’s lucidity we are after, not sleeping pills and more screens. This is elemental harmony with teeth: the fixed air of Pluto in Aquarius exactly sixty degrees from the cardinal fire of Neptune in Aries — air feeding fire, a hot twister set to rip through the collective imagination for the foreseeable future. Our role? To see it. To read the hidden script before it’s too late. And — most importantly — to decode ourselves out of it, to wake up inside the dream with purpose. One might call it the Great Work of our lives. It’s not too far off.

~ dreamseed: 1892

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him... Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” — Nietzsche, ten years ahead of the conjunction

Our current dream was signed into existence at the conjunction of 1891–92, in Gemini. The cycle it renewed began in the late fourteenth century, when the meeting point first crossed over from Taurus to Gemini — which means we’re not in a new conversation but in the deepening of one, five centuries running (Dan Waites has some great work on this). Leading into the conjunction, Nietzsche had already filed the death certificate for the old paradigm — in the tone of a man reporting a gas leak everyone else had decided was palo santo. And right on schedule, the gods of the iron throne and gilded altar were cleared out. The old code of faith was deprecated; the kernels of Renaissance thought compiled into something calling itself science. The lights literally came on, information began traveling through tunnels in the air, and the next Gemini hum started up beneath it all. We are still in it. And we are just getting started.

The era’s whole shadow inventory arrived in the same planetary shipment. Freud and Jung started dredging the unconscious, which turned out to be less a subjective basement than an ocean of mysteries — one with more questions than answers. The world’s traditions began cross-pollinating like an unsupervised greenhouse: Vivekananda in Chicago, Theosophists everywhere, everyone suddenly comparing scriptures like trading cards. It felt like a Renaissance because the one from before had completed its cycle, and the next was underway. And as a telling gift, we also built ourselves the cinema — that very decade. A world announces its ruling metaphor with its first invention: the medieval world built cathedrals; we built a dream machine and sold tickets to it. Subtle, yes — but once seen from this angle, it can never be unseen. The new gods are the stars of that screen, that stage, that program. We are not just entertained to death; we’ve been quietly worshipping the replacements without a clue of what we are doing. Neptune is our escape, Pluto holds the power, unseen. The riddle of our time. Attention, as the greatest commodity, with the most leverage.

The dreamseed worked. It always does. A hundred and thirty-odd years on, half of the West no longer believes in God, and nearly all of it kneels in the Church of Progress — cataclysmic consequences notwithstanding. We measure our days in data, narrate our lives in film grammar, and trade everything — attention, outrage, genomes, meme coins — in the great Gemini bazaar. Nobody signed up for this worldview, and nobody remembers signing, which is exactly how you know it’s a Neptune–Pluto production. And yet here we all are, every one of us carrying the sextile in our own chart. So what does it mean? What can we do with it? And what of the passes soon rising on the horizon?

~ a ‘hundred’ years of sextiles

Now, a deeper look at the sextile itself — that sly sixty degrees between the two. In our cycle it breaks into three Phases: 1. exact through the 1950s; 2. again from 1976–86; 3. and one last time from 2026 to 2032 — with a decade or more of felt influence on either side, depending on the orbs you use.

It is a waxing sextile we are dealing with, meaning we are still early in the great ~500-year cycle. From the discoveries of the late nineteenth century through the Second World War, the dream grew quietly; postwar, it set in for keeps. Entertained and distracted, we drank from the wrong spring — the Forgetting one, Lethe. We’ve become a species whose amnesia looks scheduled to last at least into the early 2030s, the last of the sextiles. But not for everyone. In every cycle there are those who wake or break from the spell. Our job is to study the ones who escaped theirs. We need true inspiration, not more content.

Run the tape all the way back to the axial conjunction of the 500s BCE, and the founding class of thinkers appears more or less at once — Lao Tzu, Socrates, Plato, etc. Whether you pin them to the conjunction or the sextile matters less than the pattern: near the beginning of each cycle, a handful of people transcend their prison of assumptions about reality. The Buddha walks the earth around this time — a man whose name simply means “the one who woke up.” A few cycles later, in the sextile decades after the 1399 conjunction, the Renaissance runs the same play: Ficino translating Hermetic contraband by candlelight, Erasmus writing In Praise of Folly — spell-detection disguised as stand-up — and Gutenberg mass-producing the medieval dream’s obituary while Copernicus, in his private observatory, did something unforgivable to the sky. The pattern holds: every cycle, a few slip the collective hypnosis the same way — by staying open to new ideas and following them wherever they lead. The rest call them crazy. They aren’t understood until the next cycle — or two thousand years later — when their satori moments are finally appreciated.

All told, the sextile makes forty-eight exact hits. Said another way: the sky sets forty-eight alarms per cycle, and most of us can’t help but hit the snooze. Phase one, the 1950s, opens with the atomic flash — involuntary lucidity. Orwell’s 1984; Jung reading flying saucers as the new myth arriving in secular drag; Huxley eating mescaline and reporting back that the doors of perception had hinges after all; Alan Watts translating maya for the suburbs. Phase two, 1976–86: Philip K. Dick stands up in France and announces that we are living in a computer-programmed reality to an audience that assumes he is being literary. He was not. The hippies still roamed the earth; rock and roll was tearing at the veil at the crest of that wave before it crashed; Gibson coins "cyberspace"; the personal computer arrives, so the dream can have a screen in every home. Veil, cave, spectacle, simulation — with each pass, the dream’s own machinery hands us a better mirror. By 1999, the second phase’s art had boiled down into the single word everyone now uses for this work: the Matrix. But watching the movie is not the same as taking the pill, and taking the pill is not the same as acting on it. So what will the themes be in these final passes — and who will be the ‘awakeners’ of the decade ahead?

Phase three: now until the early ‘30s. After 2032, the harmonies begin to get dissonant, drifting toward what inevitably comes next — the square. Not all of us will be around for that one, but history offers a preview into the troubles of the late sixteenth century (last cycle’s waxing square): the crisis that eventually cracked open into the Enlightenment. What stands between now and then is this closing decade of the lucidity window — the decade we battle with, and over, AI — and by the end of it, nobody will know what is real anymore. Well, except those who have peeked behind the veil. The work of defragging from the dreamspell has never been harder. Which makes it all the more interesting.

The conjunction plants the dreamseed; the sextile grows its synapses — keeping most of us comfortably inside the simulation while the mercurial few hunt for the escape hatch. But notice what the escapees actually did. The Buddha saw through maya and then hung around inside it for another forty-five years. Erasmus kept writing. Dick kept publishing paperbacks. Waking up was never a full exit, because there is no exit; it’s the difference between being dreamt and dreaming consciously. And with it comes something like a Bodhisattva vow — you wake, then you turn around and help everyone else.

Life is stranger than we can ever imagine, so when contemplating spans of time this large, remember: you can’t possibly know enough to worry about it. It’s good to have the sketch — the bones of it — but fully grokking what it all means is work best left to the sages. We can try, and we should; just don’t fall into the pits of despair around it all. It’s all perfect.

For the rest of us, the practice starts smaller: find Pluto and Neptune in your own chart, and begin the contemplation there. It’s the one thread tying all generations together — we all carry this sextile somewhere, and it marks the difference between being drained by the dreamspell or being fed by it for free. The hidden script was never meant to stay hidden forever. Seeing the ‘water we swim’ in is the deepest soul work on offer. Nobody said it was easy. But it is unmistakably one of the most rewarding ways to spend our time. And once we can finally read the hidden script, we get to do the one thing the sleepers cannot: write a more interesting script! One where we are the spellcasters, not some other hand.

So — while the window is open — what will you write?

Wishing you lucid dreams throughout it all. Below, a few ways I may be able to help.

— Adam

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Let’s start with a joke then:

A man bursts into KGB headquarters: "My parrot has flown away!" "Comrade — this is the secret police. Why are you telling us?" "I want it formally on record that I do not share that bird's political views."

Anyways….

A long time ago, three brothers split the universe by drawing lots — which is another way of saying the cosmos was divided by the ancient equivalent of pulling straws. Jupiter got the sky: all that blue real estate and the right to throw lightning at people who annoyed him. Neptune got the wet, wide mystery. And Hades — picture him turning the short straw over in his fingers, plotting — got everything underneath. It’s said they haven’t sat down for dinner together since.

On July 20th, though, there’s a chance they break bread once again. Or not, we’ll see. We can only hope. Jupiter, freshly crowned in Leo, certain the universe was assembled chiefly to admire him. Pluto, retrograde in Aquarius, saying nothing — which is the most unnerving thing Pluto can do. And Neptune, hot to the touch in Aries, in the mix as well, though not at the head of the table (yet still involved by aspect). It’s Jupiter and Pluto who sit opposed, and it’s that dynamic we’ll explore here.

The question between them is old and true: Where is the real treasure at? In the light that falls down free from above? Or in the dark, where it’s buried and protected from the light?

Whenever the two meet — especially within a hard aspect — it’s a clash of kings. Power and potential, control and freedom, propaganda and faith all start to percolate in the collective mind, and it’s hard to miss once you look back to learn from their previous encounters.

Let’s have a look.

—their many faces

Here’s the idea at the heart of the whole transit, and it’s a trick of the light most will miss.

Jupiter in Leo intimates sovereignty — but sovereignty wears two faces, and under this opposition they split apart and go to war with each other.

The first face is the king: loud, performative, regal, gold-leafed, gloriously sure he was born to be looked at. The second face is the king’s-eye — vision, the long sight that takes in the whole board, the perspective that sees the pattern and the wires running underneath it all. Same planet, just facing two different directions. One face wants to be seen. The other wants to see. When they’re fused, you get a wise ruler — a Philosopher King. When they fracture, you get a counterfeit king on one side — all bronzer and selfies — and a pair of paranoid eyes on the other, staring each other down over spilled wine.

And then, there is the face of Pluto in Aquarius, who does not care about kings at all. Jupiter makes everything a coronation; Pluto quietly insists the real action was never in being seen — it’s in the systems, the networks, the collective plumbing, and programmed into the code (see my last piece). Pluto in fixed air is the lord of the buried many, the nameless ancestors, the silent multitudes under the floorboards of every glittering civilization—vaporized and silent. It is the part of the world that runs on no face you can locate and no hand you can shake. It intimates both the Matrix and the Marxist dream in the same image. In many ways, he is faceless in Aquarius and is found in the madness of crowds.

So the opposition is this: the gilded, sovereign individual against the hypnotized collective. The sovereign I will against the systemic we are. Red-pilled versus blue-pilled versus every other color they’ve since invented. Persephone abducted into the kingdom of the many. Midas alone with his gold, with no one left to touch. The lion striding into the throne room only to discover the hive had been holding the keys the entire time. It’s a predicament many can feel, and few know what to do with. Our task, then, is to try to stay free — and to keep all that matters in our lives as free as possible.

—memory holes

Astrology earns its keep when the past cooperates, when it shows us a pattern we can understand. Jupiter-Pluto hard aspects have a specific feel to them— belief and bubble meeting hidden leverage, the financial-industrial complex quietly molting into its next form, and, ultimately, the recurring tale of rights stripped away one clever move at a time. It’s often the feeling of being rugpulled.

A few examples:

In 1789. The last time this exact axis lit up — Jupiter in Leo against Pluto in Aquarius — the United States was busy standing up its Treasury (the founding act lands September 2, 1789) and letting Alexander Hamilton build the debt-machine that still runs the planet. And with a bond crisis brewing as I write this, trust in the Treasury is at an all-time low, and a growing crowd that understands what it means to fund the government in exchange for a yield that doesn’t even keep pace with the inflation they create — well, it’s a theme worth sitting with. This isn’t only Jupiter’s opposition; it’s a Pluto return for American debt, which is nearing 40 trillion dollars!

April 1975. Jupiter swung opposite Pluto across Aries and Libra, and on the 4th of that month two college dropouts in Albuquerque founded a little company called Microsoft. The information empire, seeded almost to the day of the exact aspect. Behind it, the energy shock of the prior two years had already rewired who held the levers of the global economy. Bubbles of optimism, buried leverage, an empire of code being born in the dark. Oh — and it was just four years after Nixon slipped the dollar off the gold standard. The decade of inflation, monetary sleight-of-hand, and sleazy technocrats incubating in the wings had begun.

2000 into 2001. Three exact passes across Gemini and Sagittarius — September 4th and October 13th of 2000, then a final hit in May 2001. The dot-com mania peaks and detonates: classic Jupiter (speculation, endless-growth vibes) colliding with Pluto (hidden leverage, ruthless corrections). And in these wings, the prelude to September 2001 and the Global War on Terror — the moment the modern security state stopped being a rumor and became architecture. Belief in infinite tech and unchallengeable hegemony, meeting the shadow of excess and the surveillance apparatus it was about to build. Probably the pass most resonant with our current moment. Plenty of financial astrologers are calling this aspect the trigger for a repeat of then. I’m 50/50 on the timing.

2013 into 2014. Three passes again, now Jupiter in Cancer against Pluto in Capricorn (and square to Uranus) — August 2013 through April 2014 — and the curtain rips. Edward Snowden hands the world a look at the machine: mass surveillance, the depth of the listening, the quiet marriage of intelligence agencies and corporate data empires. Astrologers at the time called it negotiating with the gods, and they were right: Jupiter’s laws and courts and moral narratives, hauled to the table against Pluto’s clandestine power, the homeland (Cancer) discovering exactly how much of it had been wiretapped (Capricorn) all along. Charged under the Espionage Act during a Mercury retrograde in Cancer, Snowden found refuge in the unlikeliest of places — Russia. To this day, he’s either a hero or a villain depending on who you ask: Jupiter or Pluto; left or right...

2020. Not an opposition but a conjunction — the conjunction/beginning of the cycle we’re now in — Jupiter and Pluto piled together in Capricorn, three times, while the pandemic ran public finances through a wood-chipper and governments borrowed money on a scale that would make Hamilton vomit on his boots. That conjunction, and the trillions printed beside it, was the seed. And people wonder where all this inflation came from. Unreal.

The tell? Watch the bond markets. Watch sovereign debt around the world. Watch property and the changes around it — the boring foundational stuff nobody tracks as they do with tech and crypto. The 2020 borrowing was the inhale; this opposition is when the breath is held until somebody’s face changes color, and they gasp for air. The debasement trade is not over. Gold and silver will have their moment again. As will Bitcoin (once Saylor is taken out by this transit). The dollar, meanwhile, will continue to lose purchasing power. As will all fiat currency. Trust has been eroded to a nub. This is all part of the plan.

Jupiter and Pluto aren’t only about shadowy finance — but it’s a sturdy foundation for understanding where all the demented offspring we see in culture and politics are born. On the individual level, the work is to understand the whole machine, and then act accordingly. Because when the financial plumbing shifts, the narrative always morphs to protect it. And with that, it’s always nice to turn to fiction. History and fiction are always helpful.

(None of which is financial advice — I’m an astrologer broadcasting from a wet little nook on the moor, not your broker. Do your own homework before you do anything with money.)

—fictional inspirations

Orwell gave the machine its best vocabulary, and it’s worth noticing how much of it has quietly come true while we were busy scrolling.

Newspeak — the deliberate shrinking of language until certain thoughts become literally unthinkable for lack of words to think them in. The memory hole — the slot where inconvenient yesterdays go to be incinerated and rewritten, so the past is always whatever the present needs it to be. Orwell meant these as nightmares. Sadly, we’re living in them now. The pressure on speech across the West has been building for years, but has been acute since the two planets came together in Capricorn at the start of 2020. And this is the penultimate moment of their cycle, when we get to see some of the results on full display.

Look around. History is now a thing that can be silently edited overnight — a post deleted, a record amended, a search result reweighted by an algorithm that has been listening to you, knows your sins before you do, and files them for later. The feed is a Ministry of Truth that fits in your pocket and learns your face. AI can now manufacture a yesterday that never happened, in your own voice, using your own grammar like a borrowed tongue. The buried collective machine of Pluto in Aquarius isn’t coming. It’s already installed, it’s humming, and it would very much like you to believe you’re brilliant and free without ever once noticing you’re already gone. Freedom tech and Jupiter’s positive spine on sovereignty are the only ways out.

That’s the terrifying truth — and only half of it. The other half is the whole reason I put Orwell at the top of this essay: the single most subversive act in a managed reality is to remember accurately and say so out loud. To keep the diary. To insist two and two make four when the world has agreed on five. Memory is the resistance (see THIS on the current Mercury cycle). Naming is the resistance. The refusal to let your own yesterday be quietly swapped out from under you is the rebellion.

Mnemosyne, the old goddess of memory, was mother of the Muses for a reason. The machine runs on forgetting. Your sovereignty runs on remembering, and when we do remember, the Muses bestow us with many gifts. Under this opposition, that’s not a metaphor — it’s a sound, mercurial strategy. We have to learn from the past while we still can. And astrology is one of the best ways left to do it.

—The prediction

So. July 20th. Both lords at 4°26′, glaring down the length of the table (hopefully). What actually happens?

There’s an overwhelming pile of other transits to weigh in here — I’ve covered some in past writing and will cover more — but the spine of this month, the place the tension pulls hardest, is Pluto against Jupiter.

On the collective level, expect a revelation dressed as a reckoning. The 2020 debt-seed flowers, and somewhere in the back half of July, watch for stress in the deep financial plumbing: again, bonds, sovereign debt, property, the unglamorous foundations of this Ponzi. Jupiter plays the hero who exposes; Pluto is where the hidden hands buried the leverage. Put them together and you get a golem with a secret, suddenly and garishly lit. Expect a memory-hole story or two — surveillance, AI-fabricated realities, some information machine breaking headlines (new models vetted by the government) — to break into the open and refuse to crawl back into their holes. Expect at least one counterfeit savior to have their moment: a too-big-to-question figure or institution either inflating to a blinding peak or having the mask peeled clean off. Emperors with no clothes and the tide going out to expose the nudies. Will the AI bubble pop? Will we get revolution through such revelations? If you ask me, it’s already underway — it just depends on where you are looking, where you get your news, and which AI you are using.

But the prediction that’s actually yours is smaller and far more useful. This transit is going to walk up to you personally and show you, with rude precision, the one place you’ve quietly handed your sovereignty to the machine—or to another person. The feed you can’t stop refreshing. The number you let define your worth. The consensus you signed off on even though your own memory said otherwise. The war you keep showing up to fight because they swore it was real. It’ll point right at it. It always does. The goal is simply not to get swallowed whole the way Winston did — to actually do the math and not doubt it. To be a lion amongst the sheep.

The question this July was never who wins. Jupiter and Pluto will keep trading the throne for as long as there’s a sky and an underneath. The only question worth asking — the most revealing one, the one beneath all the others — is whether you can see the rigged game clearly enough to do the one thing it can’t survive: to turn it all off and get back to living. Can we do that?

We’ll see how the dinner goes and if the parrot speaks…

Wishing you the best in all of it. If this felt grim — well, it’s grim until it isn’t. It’s time to take our time, our energy, and our lives back. Below, you will find a few ways that I may be able to help.

— Adam

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In this show, Todd Elliott joins me to talk about his book The Cunning Farmer. I was so pleased to arrive back in Dartmoor to this book waiting for me in my office. It’s truly beautiful and dense with practical magic you can apply not just to the land but to your life as well. It’s been a while since I’ve done a Plants & Planets show, so hopefully it was worth the wait.

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Every few decades, the gods of disruption clock in for the same shift. Usually, they argue over who left the cap off the apocalypse. This time they’re conspiring — heads together, voices low, the way two planets do when they’ve quietly decided the furniture needs rearranging and haven’t told the tenants. Said another way: they are conspiring to change the world as we know it!

The last time Uranus and Pluto stood at a hard angle — the squares of 2012 to 2015 — people were terrified. Public squares full of revolutionaries: Occupy, Tahrir, the plaza as theater. End-of-the-world prophecies stacked like firewood. The old institutions were cracking down the middle. It was my early years doing this work, and it was all anyone could talk about.

The trine is a different geometric animal. Where the square kicks the door in, the trine picks the lock, oils the hinges, and covers all its steps. Revolution still comes — it just arrives as a firmware update rather than a beheading. Less blood on the cobbles. More reality quietly rewritten while we sleep. The vibe is similar. The surprise is in how few people see it coming in the way that it comes.

Five trines are on the way. All waxing. Some retrograde, some not, shaking hands with other big planets along the way. It will be wyrd.

-history’s rhyme

Every Uranus–Pluto cycle opens with a conjunction and, a human lifetime later, arrives at its waxing trine. Whatever erupted at the beginning, and along the way, finds surprising tailwinds at 120°. And here’s the cosmic joke: the ones who demanded the changes at the beginning are often the ones kicking and screaming now. They become what they once fought against.

The cycle before this one — the one that built the modern world — opened in 1850–51, both planets pressed together in the last degrees of Aries. That trine bloomed in the closing decades of the 19th century, and look what got laid down: a wire dropped to the floor of the Atlantic. Light made without fire, amongst the sparks of the current wars. The railway becoming not a line but a network. Oil becoming not a fuel but an empire. The skeleton of everything we now call infrastructure was set in that trine. And no — plenty of people were not enthused about it.

This cycle opened in 1965–66, the conjunction in Virgo. Its waxing trine arrives now, 2026 to 2028: Uranus in Gemini, Pluto in Aquarius. Two air signs, conspiring.

It’s the same template. We’re simply re-running it in digital instead of analog. What the 19th century did with copper and steam, this trine does with code and signal. Uranus in Gemini: radical innovation in speech, language, networks, and the moving word. Pluto in Aquarius: the deep transformation of power into something decentralized, networked, swarming — the hive mind learning to bypass the state in their every attempt to quell the Exponential Age.

If the 2010s were the beta test, 2026 to 2028 is when we step into the full release and jailbreak it on the same afternoon. Whatever you feel about the changes, they are inevitable. Astrology teaches us this. The only real question is how we orient ourselves to it all.

-the same three feelings

Stand the telegraph clerk of the 1880’s beside the prompt engineer of 2026 and you’ll find them feeling a few ways that mirror each other perfectly:

Awe. Something impossible just became ordinary. A message crosses an ocean in a breath. A machine turns code into a sonnet, and it isn’t half bad.

Fear. The same machine that thrills me will replace me. It will make my craft a relic and my hours unsellable. It will make the human in me optional.

Anger. Because the breakthrough is never neutral. Someone owns the wire and the chips. Someone aims the engine and the electrons. And it is rarely the one who built it.

The technology changes its look every century, but the feelings don’t change at all. The Church of Progress will always have its way.

— <patch notes> 5 trines

If the conjunction reveals the new realms we’re entering, the trine reveals how we’re meant to move through them — and where to pick the locks if it comes to it. Here are the patch notes.

1 · 18 July 2026 — First Ping. ~4° Gemini / 4° Aquarius. The first clean click of the pattern. Headlines too on-the-nose to be a coincidence: speech, code, networks, censorship, decentralization. Light, experimental, not yet heavy. We start to watch centralized forces try to smother freedoms — and begin to suspect it’s a fool’s errand.

2 · 29 November 2026 — Ghost in the Wires. ~3°, Uranus retrograde. The market retraces, the narrative wobbles, the hidden consequences surface — leaks, backdoors, uses nobody admitted to. The dead internet begins talking back. The agent swarms hack into something too big to ignore. Mythos backfiring again.

3 · 15 June 2027 — The Future Takes the Wheel. ~6–7°. Neptune in Aries sextiles both ends, and the minor grand trine shows its face again — spiritual, imaginal, and technological currents soldered into one circuit. Birth of a digital god? A creative renaissance in full swing? Code as law and speech — or code outlawed and silenced.

4 · 13 January 2028 — Debugging the Hive Mind. ~6°, retrograde again. Governance scrambles to write rules for things the teenagers already abandoned. Regulation panels squinting at the future through the rear-view mirror. Too late for a full review. The drop touches the skin. Genie has long escaped the bottle.

5 · 9–10 May 2028 — Point of No Return. ~8–9°. The lock-in. Cashlessness, agentic AI swarms gone ordinary, network states quietly offering the exits from degraded governance. One day, we’ll call this the year reality forked — the year the state began, in earnest, to lose its grip on reality.

Five passes. Five stories. Five ways to break free.

-the good, the bad, the in-between

The good. Pluto in Capricorn was the age of the mega-bank death star — and, fittingly, the birth of Bitcoin. Pluto in Aquarius is when the rebels realize you don’t have to blow up the station; you just route around it. (Enter AI.) If money is code and code is speech, Uranus in Gemini is about to start shit-posting on the balance sheets. Freedom Tech offers a way out. Most won’t take it. They’ll be captured by the Ministries, and they’ll thank them for the convenience.

The bad. The same door swings the other way: outsourced thinking, atrophied judgment, money and information funneled into a single hand through CBDCs and surveillance states. 1984, finally rendered in full resolution — and welcomed, because it’s convenient. They were so sure a bigger, stronger state was the kind thing. They never dreamed their tenderest liberal instincts could be wired straight into a panopticon.

The in-between — which is where it always actually lands. The 19th century already drew us the shape. The wire that freed the message also wired the surveillance. The trust that built the railroad also built the monopoly. Liberation and capture arrive on the same cable. Finding the road between the extremes asks two things at once: an embrace of the innovation and a rebellion against how the state — or any centralized force — co-opts it.

All told, these five trines hand us a chance to individuate at the speed of light. There’s far more upside than down in an aspect like this — but the downside can be debilitating. The move is to use the tools without being used by them. Infinite chats with an AI that quietly replaces real human company isn’t the route. Doomscrolling instead of creating is a waste of time. Filing complaints in the comments instead of networking your way out of the maze is idiotic. Familiar to all of us — and accelerating at a speed nobody can quite hold in their head.

Which is exactly why we need an old story. The old stories are the only software still running after two thousand years without a patch.

-the Cauldron

-the cauldron

Somewhere in Wales — or in your own backwoods — a witch named Ceridwen has a son called Morfran, great crow, though everyone took to calling him Afagddu: Utter Darkness. The boy was so unlovely that the world couldn’t hold his gaze. Now, a mother can’t fix a face, but Ceridwen figured she could fix his standing — if the lad couldn’t be handsome, he’d be the wisest creature alive, and let the courts argue with that. So she does what any mother with a grudge against genetics might do: she sets a cauldron to boil for a year and a day, to brew her dark son a single mouthful of all the knowing there is.

There’s a catch, the way there’s always a catch. Out of a whole year’s boil, only three drops would carry the blessing. Everything else in the pot would turn to black poison — because a gift this size is never all gift. Every star, every herb cut at the proper planetary hour, every secret the rocks keep, is reduced down like a good stock to three perfect drops of inspiration floating on a lake of venom.

She sets a servant boy named Gwion to stir it, with a blind man to mind the fire. This was her first mistake, because the universe loves nothing better than handing the keys to the kingdom to the interns.

A year of stirring. And on the last day, three drops leap from the cauldron and scald Gwion’s thumb. He does what you would do. He puts it to his mouth. And the whole world pours in. Every star. Every season. The entire download, distilled over a year for one anointed boy, was accidentally delivered to the helper. The cauldron, its work finished and its blessing flown, cracks clean in two and spills the rest of itself — the poison — into the stream.

And Afagddu? The dark son, the whole reason for the year-long fire? He gets nothing. Not a drop. The wisdom brewed expressly for him, the inheritance with his name on it, lands on a servant’s thumb and is gone before anyone can lodge a complaint. This is the first thing the cauldron teaches, and it’s a hard one: you cannot install a soul. You can boil the entire cosmos down to its essence and aim it at the one you’ve chosen, and the gift will still go where it pleases — to the one stirring, the one paying attention, the one whose thumb happened to be near the heat. Awen is not an inheritance. It is an accident that happens to the awake.

Here is where the wire connects. Ceridwen is Pluto — with the spell and the long, dark, disciplined boil, the year-and-a-day of pressure that turns raw matter into concentrate. The slow transformation nobody sees, happening underground, on its own clock, for decades. The three drops are Uranus — sudden, accidental, illegitimate. The breakthrough that was never meant for you and lands on your thumb anyway. Afagddu is the centralized claim itself: power’s fond dream of brewing the gift in private and bestowing it, finished and gift-wrapped, on the chosen heir. And Gwion is us — the whole distracted, under-qualified species, splashed all at once. New tech, networked gnosis, the cauldron tipped into the commons — three drops hitting the collective thumb, exhilarating and overwhelming and not even slightly what the original priests intended. The rest is poison.

Ceridwen, who has invested a year of her life in this, is not pleased. She comes for Gwion, and now the story becomes a chase — and the chase is the most Gemini thing of all. He runs as a hare; she follows as a greyhound. He dives as a fish; she pours after as an otter. He flees as a bird; she rises as a hawk. He drops into a heap of winnowed grain and hides as a single seed; she becomes a black hen and finally eats him.

Perhaps these are our five passes. Three drops are the gift; five shapes are the chase. Five forms the knowing has to wear to keep from being put back in the pot. Hare, fish, bird, seed, and the swallowing itself — five transformations to survive the thing that wants its secret back. Run the patch notes beside the chase and you’ll feel the rhyme.

Nine months later, Ceridwen gives birth to him. She means to kill the child and cannot — he’s too radiant to murder, which is an awkward feeling for a vengeful witch and a useful clue for the rest of us. So she sews him into a leather bag and gives him to the sea. He washes up in a salmon weir on the worst morning of a poor man’s life. No fish, no luck, nothing. And the man finds, instead of dinner, a forehead shining in the dark. Taliesin, he breathes. Radiant brow.

And here is the second lesson, the one that answers the first — and the one that finally tells us what became of the son. Afagddu was meant to receive his wisdom the way you’d receive an unreleased, all-powerful LLM: handed over, complete, no sweat on the brow. Gwion’s gift was the opposite — raw, accidentally stolen, attentive. To keep it, he had to be chased out of every shape he owned, run to ground, devoured, carried in the dark for nine months, and born a second time as someone new. The drop made him clever. The chase made him Taliesin. That is precisely the lesson the dark son never got to learn: a download is not yet wisdom. The knowing has to be metabolized — run through hare and fish and bird and seed and the belly of the black hen — before it stops being a party trick and becomes a radiant brow. Afagddu was promised the answer and stayed in the dark. Gwion stole a spark and had to burn all the way down to carry it. Only one of them comes out shining, and it’s never the one the gift was reserved for.

Notice, too, what the chase teaches about the gift itself. The download cannot be recalled. Once the three drops are loose in the world, Ceridwen can hunt the boy through every shape she owns — greyhound, otter, hawk, the entire apparatus of pursuit — and she still cannot get the knowing back into the pot. She can only swallow him and give birth to something she can no longer kill. Perhaps this is Pluto in Aquarius in a single image: concentrated power, brewed in private for a chosen few, slipping the gatekeepers and going swarm — and the state learning, a bit too late, that you cannot un-ring a decentralized bell. You can only birth it and watch it wash up radiant somewhere downstream, on somebody else’s worst morning.

-the word that hacks the system

Then comes the word, and the word is always the point.

Years on, Taliesin walks into the king’s hall at Deganwy, where the court’s own bards — credentialed, salaried, sanctioned — rise to put the upstart in his place. And their lips won’t work. Blerwm, blerwm, they bleat, plucking at their mouths like men trying to remember a password they were sure they knew. Then the boy sings. And the song — rightly aimed, properly tuned — drops the chains clean off a prisoner in his cell. No blade. No siege. Just the right word, sung right, and an illegitimate power simply loses its grip.

If you want the optimism of this trine in one scene, that’s it. Uranus in Gemini is the rightly-aimed word—or prompt— that routes around the death star. Money is becoming code, code is becoming speech, and speech — protected, skilled, sung true — can unmake a cage without ever touching the lock. Lose that, let the word be captured or criminalized, and we are the froth-mouthed bards: paid, accredited, and unable to say the one thing that matters. The elite who are no longer taken seriously.

That is the magic, and it is also the warning.

-a few more insights

So carry this with you, because the myth is generous with both the promise and the knife-edge.

Stolen fire. Real vision is never issued by filling in the correct form. It’s got by being burnt and chased — by rebelling. The gift is illegitimate by design; that’s Uranus. It’s Promethean. But honor the difference between the splash and the boil. A stolen mouthful is not the same thing as the long, dark, disciplined year that brewed it. Respect what made the drops worth stealing.

Shape-shifting as survival. Each form Gwion takes is a different sensorium — hare-speed, fish-depth, bird-overview, seed-hiddenness. To live in an air-age, Uranus–Pluto world (Jupiter/Saturn cycles in Air), we’ll have to move between roles, identities, information streams, and worldviews as fluidly as he moves between bodies. Fixity is the thing that gets caught (shadow of Pluto in Aquarius). The mutability of Gemini is a survival skill.

And here is the whole knife-edge. The danger of this trine is that we kick the cauldron clean over — lunging for the dragon of intuition without the slow boil, gulping past the three drops and straight into the poison the rest of the cauldron always becomes, swapping the bard’s quiet discipline for the cheap thrill of total rupture. That’s the road where the firmware update overwrites us. Where we get the download and lose the steadiness to hold it. It’s a premature kundalini moment. It’s the medicine taken with no thought to the set or setting. Soul lost, in desperate need of retrieval. Remember: most of that cauldron was venom. Only three drops were ever meant to be drunk.

Stolen fire either warms the hall or burns it down. The only difference is whether anyone still remembers the wisdom of the slow boil.

-the close

So, before the first ping in July, three questions for the airy road. Carry them like coins for the flight.

Where are we outsourcing our thinking — to the algorithm, the authority, or the crowd?

What does sovereignty — of mind, of money, of body — even mean when everything lives online?

Which of our beliefs were installed without our consent, and which are we consciously choosing to run?

We're being handed tools, and you can already see the two failure modes forming — and they're the two fates from the cauldron, dressed in modern clothes. Some are Afagddu — standing there with the bowl held out, waiting for wisdom to be ladled in finished and free, unwilling to be scalded and chased for it. They get the download and stay in the dark, because a thing handed over is never a thing metabolized. Others treat the cauldron like a keg stand, gulping the whole pot — three drops and the poison together — mistaking the rupture for the radiance. As ever, the true path runs down the middle — Parzival's path, the one that asks the right question at the right hour and walks between the two peaks. It’s where we stay awake and attentive and keep on stirring.

Gwion had the whole world poured into him by accident: every star, every season, every last bit of information. Dangerous business. Taliesin walks into the hall, the hired bards open their mouths, and only froth comes out — and the awen falls on the room like a change in weather, the kind that makes the animals go quiet. What’s the difference between the two? How do we find ourselves in these images, in these old stories?

Whether you’re held back by Luddite dread or propelled by transhuman fever dreams, remember the scale: these five trines are barely a third of the way through a cycle that runs around 127 years. From where we’re standing, we are only just getting started. The genie is out of the bottle. The sorcerer’s apprentice couldn’t help himself. The cauldron has lessons—a <code>— and it’s spilling them as we speak. Just don’t drink the poison!

Enjoy this time. It’s unique. Not one of us has ever lived it before.

…and so, here we go.

<end>

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-the discovery

In late 1977, Charles Kowal, an astronomer at Palomar Observatory, discovers a small body orbiting between Saturn and Uranus, which was later named Chiron by astronomers. The same year, Star Wars opens in just thirty-two theaters and, within weeks, spreads like wildfire across the world — a cultural phenomenon nobody saw coming. A culture found its orphan-hero myth on screen and in the sky in the same breath. Luke Skywalker, the farm boy who doesn’t know he’s a Jedi. Chiron, the first centaur who doesn’t know he’s divine. The template is ancient: a hero who carries orphan wisdom.

Chiron, as the orphan, was abandoned at birth by his mother, Philyra, who was so horrified at what she’d produced that she begged the gods to release her, and thus turned her into a linden tree. He was instead fostered by Apollo and Artemis (the sun and the moon). The natural world raised him. And from that position of absolute exile, he becomes the greatest teacher the ancient world would ever know.

Now, roughly fifty years since the discovery, Chiron is set to return to 3°08′ Taurus — the exact degree of its discovery (we’ve still got time). This is not a personal return in the natal sense, though those born in 1977 will feel it acutely. It is a cultural return. A species-level reckoning. The questions the sky is asking are triggering: what have we done with Chiron since we named it? What did we learn, and what have we refused to learn? Has there been healing or just more pain and suffering, and finding a false home in our victimhood?

I’ve always felt we had more to learn about Chiron — that it would take a full orbit before we understood what we needed to from all his angles. The wounded healer came first. Then, deeper, stranger insights, from orphan wisdom to mentorship to the story of LSD. It’s true that most of the themes circulate around healing, but the nuance of Chiron never stopped with the poison arrow. There are so many elements to his story and what he has shown us so far that many more books would be needed. This won’t be that book, but it will be a small offering on a few of the teachings I’ve learned from him, and some thoughts on what the return may have in store for us.

-6th house work

(the tending to)

Chiron’s discovery in 1977 coincided with a remarkable cluster of cultural events around the body, medicine, and consciousness. The holistic health movement was gathering force. Hospice care was being formalized in the United States for the first time. And one year later, in 1978, Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl Ruck published The Road to Eleusis — the book that would argue, with mounting evidence, that the Eleusinian Mysteries had been powered by an ergot-based psychedelic sacrament: The kykeon, that mysterious drink at the center of the ancient world’s most transformative initiation rite.

The centaur was there. Perhaps the one who cooked up the medicine. The figure of Chiron brushes against the Eleusinian current in ways scholarship has only half-glimpsed — more in symbol than in citation, but there, nonetheless. What matters here is the pattern: Chiron’s astronomical discovery coincided with a culture slowly remembering that wounds can be portals, that medicine and mystery belong to the same temple. Hofmann first synthesized LSD in 1938 and stumbled onto its effects in 1943 (transiting Chiron/North Node conjunct his North Node [Leo]), but it was only in the later twentieth century that writers began to argue, openly, for a mythic pharmacological lineage running from Eleusis to Basel into hospitals across the West. LSD, originally a lab curiosity, later became one of the most promising experimental treatments for alcoholism, with striking success rates. Even the founder of AA, Bill Wilson, experienced the chironic cure. Alcohol is a key part of the Chiron story—especially around the wound from the arrow.

The sixth house — where Chiron sits in the discovery chart, the house of service, daily practice, and healing — has been the site of a fifty-year argument about what healing means. We have professionalized medicine and depersonalized it. We have simultaneously produced the world’s largest therapeutic culture and one of the worst mental health crises in recorded history. The space between discovery and return opens an interesting debate around how far we really have come. And with the rise of psychedelic-assisted therapies after many decades of darkness and misunderstandings about these molecules, I would have to say, Chiron would be proud of the progress being made there, but also horrified on all the other fronts.

One of the most insightful lessons Chiron offers is about victimhood. It runs all through his story: he is forever ducking and dodging that vile trap. Never blaming his parents. Never Hercules for the arrow. Never his peers for misunderstanding him. It’s a powerful mirror for all of us. Chiron in the 6th reminds us to keep tending what is right in front of us, never pointing fingers, even though fully aware of the toxicity all around us—especially in our food and medicine. Only then can we entertain the possibility of being of true service to others. From this space, he teaches us how to take full responsibility for our lives. He also shows us that it’s ok to ask for help.

-North Node / Pluto in Libra on the MC

( Centaur Is the Mentor )

The astrology world handed Chiron a single identity in the years after his discovery: the Wounded Healer. The name stuck. It’s not wrong, exactly, but it’s incomplete — the kind of truncation that happens when an ‘archetype’ arrives, and a culture only has room for its most recognizable feature.

Before the arrow was shot, Chiron raised Achilles, Asclepius, Jason, Actaeon, and many others. His cave on Mount Pelion was an incubator for greatness — the place where children were sent to become heroes, to be initiated into what they were, and ultimately to meet their destinies. He taught medicine, music, astrology, prophecy, and the hunt. He was, in our terms, a polymath. In ancient terms, something more precise: one who knew the world and understood how to share it. The student doesn’t merely learn from Chiron. The student discovers what they are—orphaned or not—as the eyes of the world.

Joseph Campbell’s tiger parable is useful here: A cub, orphaned young, is raised by goats. It bleats. It eats grass. It has no idea what it is. Then one day an adult tiger appears, and the cub sees itself for the first time — not in a mirror, but in a being like itself. That recognition is the gift the mentor carries. Not information. Reflection, which reveals our true nature. This is how Chiron teaches. Through mirroring and stories, where we find the hidden parts of ourselves.

But there’s a harder dimension the mentor myth quietly holds: the teacher can only transmit what the student is ready to receive. The work of self-authoring — of crafting the story that brings you to genuine awareness of who you are — cannot be done by the teacher. The initiation can be offered. The cave can be opened. But the descent is our own. Just because we have Chiron in our charts doesn’t mean we’ll have such a realization. The work must be done, and it’s never cozy.

With Pluto and the North Node conjunct the Midheaven (Libra) in Chiron’s discovery chart, we can see how it may speak exactly to this: the way we engage the world, the public face of mentorship, the question of who we allow to teach us, and under what conditions. For nearly fifty years, we have witnessed an accelerating collapse of intergenerational transmission — the breaking of the gaze between elder and youth that has, for thousands of years, been the way cultures have passed their hardest-won knowledge forward. In his own story, it was lost, but also found in the wildest of places. He is the thing we lose when we stop looking at each other across the generational lines or forget to listen to the language of birds. And yes, the signature also shows the profound need for a community or any group that can hold us for what we are and to see our unique gifts—even if we cannot.

Without guidance from his own parents, he found mentorship in the Sun and Moon — Apollo and Artemis. Without peers to understand him or a place to fit in, he found solace among the nymphs (elementals) and gave what he knew to the world. Power (Pluto) came through by building his own community (11th), generating a deserved reputation in the world (MC). It’s a potent example, one that gets to the heart of our longing to find our tribe. We must create it by being ourselves and sharing what we know without fear of judgment, because it will always be there. Only then will they find us.

-a Scorpio Stellium in the 12th

(liberation)

There is a Scorpio stellium in the discovery chart, too — Uranus, Mercury, Hygiea in the twelfth — and it speaks to the shadow dimension of Chiron: the victim trap. When the wound becomes identity, and suffering refuses transmutation, we quickly fall into it. A blind spot that can fester for a lifetime. A familiar story that has gained surprising popularity, likely due to its widespread sharing and celebration online. It’s a sickness, and Chiron has the cure.

“The Sacred No” is not a rejection of healing. It is a refusal to perpetuate the story. It is the moment when the chain of an inherited wound — generational trauma, family mythology, cultural self-destruction — meets a will that says: not through me. The ripple sent back through the line that breaks the arc of perpetual, painful motion. This is the hardest Chironic teaching, and the one that receives the least airtime. Breaking the epigenetic cycle is the work of a rare soul in the family tree. Chiron displays it beautifully in his own line, refusing to continue the patriarchal fury of his father (Saturn) and his half-brother (Jupiter). Forgiveness is key. And he is the key, literally ⚷.

We are also given a glimpse of this in his final move: Chiron, in agony from the wound inflicted by Heracles’ poisoned arrow, willingly gives up his life to free Prometheus (a face of Uranus, many would argue) — a trade that is not only selfless but ensures the world keeps receiving the secrets of the gods. Chiron’s sacrifice was not self-healing. It was something more radical: the conversion of personal suffering into another’s liberation. Arguably one of the most twelfth-house expressions imaginable. And then, of course, he is transformed into a constellation, reminding us that great stories are indeed worthy of constellations.

- the return

The actual return won’t come for a year, yet in just a few days’ time, we get the ingress back into Taurus.

He was found in the no-man’s-land between Saturn and Uranus, between the wall and the lightning that breaks it — between the weight of this world and the weightlessness of what lies beyond. Found in the sign of the body (Taurus). This was no accident. The culture was busy cutting its own roots: medicine going industrial, food forgetting the field it came from, the body downgraded from dwelling-place to machine in need of servicing. Taurus said it plain. The wound is not an idea. It is in the meat. The body keeping score. In the animal we have been told to outgrow, the one that still wants mud on its feet and weather on its face. With the return to Taurus, we are remembering en masse how they are poisoning us and what medicines grow in the hedgerows all around. It’s been happening for some time, but it’s in this time that something is being completed. We’ve come full circle.

Half a century on, the return asks for rewilding. Not the kind we can buy or visit, but the kind that requires participation. What returns when we stop bolting the door against the hooved and antlered parts of ourselves? When the dawn racket in the treetops of our own chests is allowed to be heard. When the weather walks through us and doesn’t ask first. Chiron’s cave on Pelion faced east, knowing the promise of the Great Eastern Sun. Perhaps the church copied this move. For us, it’s the promise of a new dawn in the Exponential Age, where we will learn to live alongside AI and screens, yet won’t be completely taken in by the machine. It’s not about becoming a Luddite or a wild-eyed hippie. It’s about balance. I imagine Chiron would have enjoyed Claude and groked its purpose in the evolution of things.

The cave is not always a place. It is a shape that things take. Kids go in, and heroes come out. The whole apparatus is somewhere inside us. It’s also in the hills, or in the Amazon, or in the bald hour before light when everything we were sure of has gone quiet. We do not arrive empty-handed at Chiron’s cave. We bring an offering and leave behind the one who walked in. And most importantly, we leave lighter, without the dead weight of the old stories in which we wrongly identify ourselves as the victim.

The first fifty years gave us the diagnosis. A word for the wound. Permission, finally, to say we were hurt and to be believed. Real gifts. But the return is not interested in whether we can still name the thing. It wants to know if we’ve learned to teach from it. Chiron is curious if we are ready to become the medicine.

There are ten thousand things to name and despair over. The data centers feeding the AI monster, hastening our demise. The microplastics in our food and water, filling up our tissues, shrinking our taints. The vaccines, the engineered ticks, the festering algorithms rotting our children’s minds and our own. It’s all true — and it’s all booby-trapped. Fall into the victim trap, and we’ve learned nothing from Chiron. Nothing. It is what it is.

That is the whole arc — to walk past the voices of mother and father and culture without burning the house down behind us. Not pretending the wound never landed, but authoring a story big enough to carry it and still leave the door open and inviting. To reclaim the wild parts of ourselves by walking back into them. This is the key. And once we have done this work, we can move through any world unbothered. We will have become the medicine.

…The cave faces east. The return is a sunrise. Bring the wound. Bring our wonder. And bring everything we’ve ever been taught. Destiny percolates at the break of dawn, but will we make it through the long night? This is the key question.

— Modern Mankind

There’s an interesting layer to the return we can entertain by peering into another chart — not the chart of a person, but the one Eric Alan Meece proposed in 1992 as the nativity of modern mankind itself, and one which Ray Merriman examined in both his Forecast 2025 and Forecast 2026 books. Whether we accept the specific rectification or hold it as a working hypothesis, the chart offers a provocative frame: how does Chiron’s return to its discovery degree correspond to this niche chart, this strange window into modernity?

As we can see, the chart was anchored to a Taurus solar eclipse in the 6th house. And scroll up if you’ve forgotten: in Chiron’s discovery chart, he too sits in the 6th in Taurus — both charts landing in the first decan. Perhaps the first decan of Taurus can turn over a stone or two and show us something of use.

The first decan of Taurus claims no neutral ground in the decanate tradition. Liber Hermetis shows a buried Osiris as its emblem — gilded, bull-headed, wearing a queen’s crown like a second skin. But this is the god who died twice. Sealed away, set adrift on the river, recovered only to be cut into fourteen pieces and scattered. The one who has to be found again, piece by piece, and built back into a body. So look at who’s standing between the horns. Not a bystander. Isis — the one whose work is the gathering itself. The decan doesn’t just freeze the god mid-ruin; it puts his restorer inside the same frame as the ruin. Wound and mending, caught in a single image.

This is the same face the older books call the Plow — the man at the furrow, the seed committed to the dark. There is no contradiction in this. Osiris is the grain. His green body sprouts from the tomb; the corn rises out of the buried king. The seed in the soil and the god gathered from the scattered dark are one image, not two. Burial is the price of return.

So Taurus 1 is not the easy pleasure of the bull. It is the body reclaimed from the dark, piece by piece, by the hands that loved it. In both charts we are met — uncomfortably — with resurrection themes. The wound goes into the ground — or, we could say, the cave — so that something can come back up. Earth magik. Eluesenian echoes. Chiron work.

This is where we are. Resurrecting ancient stories for modern times. A kind of Renaissance in the making. Resurrecting the knowledge of those still connected to earth and sky, so we can be put back together. To expect such a resurrection in the macro, within a single lifetime, isn’t the point. The point is to begin with ourselves. We’ve got nothing but time, and yet we feel we are losing it.

For these past years, with Chiron in Aries, the wound has been one of raw becoming — identity forged in battle, selfhood tested by spear and shout (think: the world post-COVID). Now it descends into the meadow. What does it mean to be worthy of the world’s abundance when the world itself feels scraped thin? How do we heal our severed kinship with the living earth, with our own animal bodies, while remaining plugged in and digitized? How do we stop merely taking the medicine and actually become it? These questions rise like mist off the damp ground where something important was recently planted, and there are hoof prints all around. Questions with answers!

With Chiron moving back into Taurus, we begin the slow march home. Resurrection days abound. What he touches will be changed. Find him in your chart to begin the contemplation.

We’ve learned so much since ‘77, and there will always be more to gather. With one year to go until the returns are set into motion, what insights has he given us, and will we share them with one another? Whether it’s orphan wisdom or our own unique tales of healing, it seems it is time for all of us to stop lying to ourselves and start telling the truth. Our stories and the truth. This is what the world needs. Chiron has shown the way. It’s best we follow suit…

…onwards

— adam

…if you’d like to learn more about Chiron, I’ve taught many classes on him, including the latest celebrating the Return. Have a click:

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We are fast approaching the second retrograde of the year. Already soaked in the humid airs of the pre-shadow, we can feel the themes coming in and out of focus. This entire Rx is in Cancer. With the recent Venus–Jupiter conjunction (also in Cancer), we’ve already been steeped in the memories that try to bring us home. But now we shift our focus from where desire can bring us to what ideas this tricksy guide has stored up in our memory palaces.

Mercury in Cancer doesn’t think — he remembers. He leaves the surface mind of Gemini and descends into hidden waters for this cycle, where knowing stops being information about and becomes participation with. This cycle is drenched in memory and forgetting. It’s guided by kosmognosis — one of the truest ways of knowing.

-the remembering

Somewhere underneath, two springs wait. They have always been there.

One forgets. One remembers. They run side by side in the dark, cold and still, patient the way only ancient things can be. Between them stands a road. At the road’s end stands Hermes (Mercury).

This is where this retrograde is taking us.

Before Zeus, before the Olympian order was named and arranged, the Titans held the world. Memory was one of them. Mnemosyne — daughter of Ouranos and Gaia, older than the gods who would come to depend on her. Her name translates as Memory, but the translation is insufficient. She doesn’t hold memory the way a vessel holds water. She is it. The total record. Everything that has ever been.

Zeus came to her in the guise of a shepherd. He stayed nine nights. A year later she bore nine daughters at a single birth, all of one mind — the Muses, children of supreme authority and total recall. Which is to say: every poem, every vision, every transit, every sudden knowing is a marriage of power and memory. And none of it arrives on schedule. Nothing new rises from nothing, and nothing conceived in the dark is born there. The muse doesn't come to the empty mind. It comes to the mind that has descended far enough to find what it actually knows — and then waited.

This is not a comfortable myth.

In the Orphic tradition, two waters wait in the underworld. The one by the white cypress — the one the tablets warn against — is never named. The tablets won't dignify it. Tradition calls it Lethe. Most of the dead drink there: welcome oblivion, the mercy of forgetting, and return to the cycle cleansed.

The other spring is Mnemosyne’s. The soul that drinks her cold water keeps everything — every life, every love, every wound — and carrying it all, steps off the wheel entirely. No more rounds. The tablets promise that such a soul goes on to reign among the heroes. This is what the initiated were prepared for, those who had been taught what to say. They seek the second spring.

Hermes leads them there.

The Orphics were not the only ones who knew about magical waters.

Centuries later, in the Corpus Hermeticum, Tractate IV, the scene plays again in a different dress. God fills a great mixing bowl with Nous — pure Mind — and lowers it into the world. A krater: the vessel the Greeks used to blend wine and water, divine and mortal natures combined. He sends a herald ahead of it with one instruction: Immerse yourself in this krater, you who believe you will ascend to him who sent it down.

The choice is the same. The bowl doesn’t force anything. It sits in the world looking like water. Most mistake it for something decorative or irrelevant — like those who drink from Lethe without knowing it. Few recognize it and go toward it. Those who immerse themselves receive nous — mind, in the sense of divine organizing intelligence; the capacity to perceive pattern rather than chaos, meaning rather than noise. Exactly what is needed to truly understand a Mercury retrograde and the start of a fresh cycle.

We must choose the right drink.

-back in Time

Mercury entered Cancer on June 1st, close to the gorgeous light of the Venus–Jupiter conjunction. The golden promise of desire was already pouring into the well before the descent began. It’s less a backdrop than a benediction — a poured libation before the drop.

We are now in the pre-shadow: the intimation and the approach. The pull before the station. The feeling before we name it — conversations that double back, decisions with old patterns hiding inside them, the past making itself felt at the edges of ordinary days. The springs are not yet visible, but you can hear the water.

What surfaces in this period won’t always arrive in words. What’s stored here lives in the body first — the tightened jaw, the dream that leaves a residue, the old feeling that comes without permission. Mercury is not after information here. He’s after testimony. The Big Idea could simply be the rescue of a long-lost memory. A nagging sensation that has been in our periphery for far too long. Something following us in our shadow, needing to be integrated into our psyche.

— Mercury stations retrograde

June 29 / 26°15′ Cancer

The descent begins.

The krater is below you now. The herald has announced it. Whatever has brought you this far has already made the choice for you, whether or not you have.

Mnemosyne doesn’t speak the way Mercury usually speaks. There are no clever formulations down here, no clear transmissions. Nothing to be translated by AI. There is only the still pool. The total record. Everything you’ve carefully set aside, everything you told yourself you had handled, everything you agreed to carry without fully examining — it’s here. Patient, the way only ancient things can be patient. Reflecting in a spring.

Retrogrades are not primarily about disruption, though disruption often accompanies them. It’s a different quality of attention that’s required — one that moves against the current. I often call the ‘disruptions’ MRIs — Mercury Retrograde Interventions. The intervention here is to steal our focus from the buzzing mind and coax our awareness down into the heart of remembering. The goal is to learn how to decipher the interventions and find meaning in them.

Memory is not only the recovery of the beloved past. Sometimes what’s stored in the deep end is not warm. Mnemosyne holds everything — not just the beautiful lives, not only what you’d choose to carry. The pool has no editor. Sometimes the pool is brackish and filled with swamp creatures we’d rather keep submerged. And all must be remembered for us to become whole again and be released from the wheel.

Hermes doesn’t look away either. He’s seen it all before. It’s best to mimic his approach. As always, he’s the guide.

— the Cazimi

July 12 / 20°42′ Cancer

This is the beginning of the synodic cycle. Mercury arrives at the heart of the Sun. Gone from the sky, yet filled to the brim with nous. A full remembering. The birth of the Muses. Finally, that Orphic declaration: “…I am a child of Earth and starry Heaven, but my race is of Heaven alone.” The hope is that we have been claimed by the Big Idea — or, in the case of this cycle, the Big Memory.

The Chandra symbol reads:

CANCER 21

High up on a mountain, an eagle’s nest.

…the higher-ground perspective. Soul realized and memory restored. We’ve passed the trials. Drunk from the proper spring. Mercury tips his hat to us and tucks a feather into our cap. We feel complete and ready for the next cycle. The heliacal rise awaits. And the eagle flies into the promising dawn…

— Mercury stations direct

July 23 / 16°18′ Cancer

The return begins. Mercury is already a morning star, and life feels different with our recollections in mind…

Hermes ascending from the underworld is not the same Hermes who descended. His cleverness now has depth, yet there is a youthfulness to the style of this phase of the cycle. The message he carries has the weight of nous. Whatever was retrieved from the pool — even in pieces, even unwelcome — changes the quality of what’s spoken next. Words after a genuine descent are different from words before one. They carry what the clever surface mind cannot generate on its own. Light as a feather, eager for the creation of novel memories. Quick to make jokes.

The second pass through the retrograde degrees is not a repetition. It’s confirmation. Here is what was shown to you below; now you see it in the light. The integration happens here, in Cancer’s final gesture: the sign that never fully releases what it loves, that keeps the impression of what has mattered. We are no longer whittled away by nostalgia or destroyed by past trauma. We accept it all, and life feels new again.

The Muses are the daughters of this encounter. Something is born from nine nights in the pool. Not immediately. Not without labor. But born, nonetheless.

— again

Somewhere beneath us, two springs wait.

Lethe is not a punishment. It is the mercy the world extends to those who have carried enough for one life. Some souls need forgetting. That is a true and honorable thing.

But Mnemosyne’s spring is cold for a different reason. It holds too much to be comfortable. The initiate who kneels at it does so knowing what they’re taking on: the full weight of what has been, intact, carried across whatever comes next. The Orphic tablets instructed them to say: I am parched with thirst, and I perish — but give me to drink of the spring of Memory.

Hermes waits at the fork. He has no stake in which way you go. That’s not indifference. It’s the highest courtesy. He has done his work. He has brought you here. What we choose is up to us. But as we are still alive, it’s probably best we choose to remember rather than let it all turn to black.

The water is cold. The bowl has been lowered. The herald has spoken.

Do you drink to forget, or find the nerve to remember?

onwards,

-adam

…Enjoy the retrograde and the start of yet another educational journey with the wise one. If you’d like to go deep with this material, I offer these:

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Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone…

-W.B. Yeats

The Song of Wandering Aengus

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The study of astrology is one part awareness, one part the study of light, and the final part is the comprehension of cycles. Cycles within cycles. It teaches us about the nature of time and clearly shows it’s not linear but circular. The impact of this leap in understanding is immense when fully groked.

Most of us are aware of the popular cycles: lunations, synodic cycles—like the beauty of Venus’s 5-pointed star—and eclipses (ie, the Saros). But when it comes to planetary pairs and the cycles they make with each other, there are many. It’s hard to track them all. One such pair I have often overlooked is that of the two benefics: Jupiter & Venus.

I recently had a deeper look into their ‘auspicious’ little ebb and flow, and what I found was intriguing. Below, you will find a reflection on this cycle, which is about to reset. As always, we must fasten it to myth to make more sense of it all. And so we begin with the genesis of the Trojan War…

The Golden Apple

Zeus decided to throw a party. As joyous gods do.

The occasion was the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, a sea-nymph and a mortal hero, with the full weight of divine attendance. Every Olympian is present. Nectar flowing strongly. The kind of abundance that makes you believe the world is arranged for your benefit. An exuberant abundance that the Red King could only dream of with his ideal ballroom.

Strategically, Eris was not invited. The goddess of discord, strife, and the necessary friction that keeps the cosmos honest — left off the guest list. A mistake of the sort that tends to prove itself quite consequential.

She showed up anyway. She always does. And when she does, she rolls a golden apple across the banquet floor, inscribed with three words: To the Fairest.

Three goddesses reached for it (it’s always 3). Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. A beauty contest adjudicated by a Trojan prince who had no idea what he was agreeing to. Aphrodite wins — not by being the most beautiful, but by making the best promise. She offered Paris the most beautiful woman in the world: Helen (who is also oddly cast in Nolan’s upcoming Odyssey, played by Lupita Nyong'o). Already married. Already spoken for. Let the discord begin its work.

The war that followed lasted ten years and burned a city to the ground.

Here is what I want you to hold: Aphrodite won by promising something she didn’t own. Aphrodite (Venus), as the goddess of desire, gets her power not from her appearance but from what she can offer us.

This is the golden apple. That is the Venus-Jupiter conjunction. It reminds us to be careful in what we wish for—or what we promise or are promised.

The Annual Wager

Venus and Jupiter meet in conjunction roughly every ten to thirteen months. This is not a rare event. It happens the way seasons do — on a schedule, within a cycle, with an underlying architecture that most people never bother to learn. It’s the dance not only of desire, but of the results which grow from their beneficial soils where our desires are planted.

Any cycle can be divided into many parts and phases, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s use the 4th harmonic, which gives us the conjunction, the square, and the opposition. Within this, it’s much easier to see the desire in how it manifests, waxes and wanes, and ultimately culminates in its surprising results.

Every year, a fresh golden apple. Every year, a fresh inscription. Every year, a powerful lesson on the nature of our desires.

The Current One

The 2025–2026 Venus-Jupiter cycle does something unusual. Both the opening conjunction and the closing one fall in Cancer. Jupiter, for his part, stays in Cancer the entire cycle — having entered in June 2025 and does not leave for Leo until June 30, 2026.

This is not incidental. When a planet holds a sign for an entire cycle, it color-grades everything. Every phase of the story is lit by the same light. The questions don’t change — only the angle from which we are asked them.

And the questions, in Cancer, are these: What is home? Where do we belong? What feeds us, and at what cost? Whose lineage do we carry? What does security actually feel like — and have we confused it with mere familiarity? And how do we protect ourselves from the dangers of the world?

Jupiter is exalted in Cancer. Jupiter offers the very luxuries we desire here— the green thumb, the capacity to bring things to maturity, the intuitive understanding of how to nourish and protect. This is Jupiter at his most generous. Not the Jupiter of excess and inflation. The Jupiter of the well-stocked larder, the grandmother’s feasting table, the country that finally feels like it belongs to you. The home you’ve always dreamed of.

But exaltation is not immunity. The most fortunate placements carry the heaviest expectations. As always, we must be diligent with our buzzing desires and not naive to what they can bring.

The Phases

…in reflection

The Conjunction —

last one, cycle we are in: Aug 12th, 25’ | Cancer

next one: June 8/9, 26’ | Cancer

It is just getting started. The kitchen offers many aromas. Before the guests all arrive, drinks are being served. The party's promises have not yet been revealed.

This is the seed moment — the forming of an eager desire between what we love (Venus) and what we believe can grow (Jupiter). In Cancer, the promise is domestic. I will build something nourishing. I will make a home. I will invest in what feeds people. The housing market stirs. Consumption in the private sphere rises. People sign leases and take mortgages and plant gardens and have babies and mean it.

…the apple is about to roll on in

We asked: What did we want to grow? What promises were gestating? Think back to the end of last Summer. Find where it happened in your chart. It was the beginning of it all.

*With this in mind, it’s essential to be aware of other cycles associated with such themes, like the real estate cycle. Learn more about that HERE:

The Waxing Square — Friction

Nov 2nd, 25’; Venus was in LIbra

Eris walks in, but is hidden. The golden apple appears.

The desire is real—even manifest— but the resources are finite. The promise was made at the height of the feast, when everything felt possible. Now comes the first structural test: can the thing we said we wanted actually be sustained? Can we afford the house? Can the relationship bear the weight of what we projected onto it? Does the abundance we imagined require something we weren’t prepared to give? And, what are the consequences of it all?

The waxing square is not a punishment. It is the golden apple, demonstrating its weight. Will we fight or flee with what is revealed?

The Opposition — Over Exposure

Jan 9th, 26’; Venus was in Capricorn

Helen arrives in Troy.

What we built is now visible. The desire is manifest — and so are the terms. The opposition asked us to look clearly at whether what we constructed is solid or merely beautiful. This is the harvest phase, which means it is also the accounting phase. Every opposition between Venus and Jupiter has carried, historically, the quality of financial revelation — the peak of the market, the height of the rally, the moment before the repricing (true with the sell-off at the beginning of the year). The feast is fully on the table and picked through. Everyone can see what was cooked. But they have not seen the bill.

What did it cost? And was it worth it?

The Waning Square — Sacrifice

March 18th, 26’; Venus in Aries

The war.

Forms that once held genuine feelings must be released. Not because they were wrong, but because cycles are complete and karma has a funny way of reminding us that we aren’t really in control. The waning square between Venus and Jupiter has the texture of love becoming serious — love making real demands, love requiring actual sacrifice rather than the pleasurable kind. The housing market cools. The domestic arrangement renegotiates. The portfolio that you built during the optimism of the conjunction meets the reality of the moment. What must now be consolidated? What must be sacrificed?

The results of the ‘war’ become clear. Our desire from the beginning can become a tangled mess.

…as is the case with all cycles, we must have a clear understanding of the beginning before the future phases make sense. Go back to August again, scroll up if it doesn’t land. Sit with all this until it does.

The New Conjunction — Another Party

June 9th 26’; soon | Cancer

The cycle returns in late Cancer, near the cusp of Leo — a hinge point, a threshold, a different decan. Either the final ripening of the water year, or the opening salvo of something more sovereign and heat-seeking. Jupiter will soon move into Leo, so it won’t have the same domestic depths as the previous one. Leo wants to be seen. Cancer wants to feel safe. The conjunction at the cusp asks: Can we have both? Or, what does it look like for us to step out of our comfort zone? Only the start of this dance sees Jupiter in Cancer. The majority of it, Jupiter will be in Leo.

Same territory. Deeper in. The gods have not abandoned us — they simply have taught us another lesson. They have helped us burn off some extra pounds of that karma we’ve been carrying for far too long. We have been taught yet another lesson on the nature of desire.

Take a look at the chart. Interesting to see that square from the two to Eris, no? I chose the story to anchor the cycle before even looking at the chart. Kosmognosis!

The Market Layer

These are not merely personal rhythms.

Venus-Jupiter conjunctions have a documented footprint in financial history — treaty signings, diplomatic openings, market optimism clustering around the seed phase. Oppositions mark financial turning points. Waning squares bring repricing, separation, and the difficult work of letting go of valuations that no longer reflect reality. All true if you look back in this cycle. The hope, then, is that by the 9th, the Straight will finally be open for good, with a treaty that actually sticks.

Jupiter in Cancer specifically correlates with real estate optimism and domestic consumption. National security spending rises. People spend on the home, on food, on the family unit. This is not a metaphor — this is a demand flowing toward Cancer’s domain. The mundane and the mythological are running the same program. So, with consumer sentiment at all-time lows and the housing market unreachable for most, this next cycle will be quite the memorable one, in my opinion. Again, you can learn more HERE.

The June 2026 conjunction lands during a period that the astrology of 2026 marks as genuinely favorable — a brief window of benefic alignment between the two planets, both dignified, both direct, against a backdrop of a year that is otherwise demanding significant structural revision. It is a real moment of grace inside a difficult year. Grace, however, does not give permission to ignore what surrounds it. Come late July, with the Outer Planets doing their rare alignments, it’s important we are clear whether we pick up that apple and what is promised. More on that in a future piece….

The Personal Layer

Return to the apple.

Aphrodite won because she made the most compelling promise — not the wisest one. Not the most sustainable one. The one that activated the deepest desire in the person doing the choosing. That is how the Venus-Jupiter conjunction operates. It doesn’t trick you. It simply finds the thing you most want to believe about abundance, love, and possibility — and it holds that thing up to the light. It’s more that, than it is about beauty specifically.

The cycle doesn’t punish desire. It tests it. It asks whether the promise has roots — whether it was made from genuine knowing or from the intoxication of the feast.

What you love and what you believe is possible convene once a year. The question is not whether you’ll reach for the apple. The question is whether you know what you’re promising when you do.

The golden apple rolls across the floor.

To the Fairest inscribed.

What will be promised this time?

What are we willing to sacrifice for it?

Eris is already peering around the corner.

onwards,

~adam

* also, I must say, it’s a perfect time to go on a Venus Journey. Usually, I recommend beginning at the start of her own synodic cycle, but with her as an evening star with Jupiter, it seems quite auspicious. Have a click to learn more:

…if you’d like to have a reading or learn astrology with me, have a couple clicks below:

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Dan Waites returns to look at the minor grand trine forming this summer — what André Barbault once called the peak of greatness for the 21st century. We ask whether he was right, follow the long thread of the Pluto-Neptune cycle and the Yugas, and circle the questions everyone seems to be wrestling with around the dinner table right now.

his site:

enjoy

-adam

to learn Astrology:

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The Dragon Hole

...like a rabbit hole, just different. I could say this is an astrology Substack, but that would be missing the mark. It's more of an attempt at constellating psyche. It's a space where we try to understand the world through kosmos, mythos, and psyche.

By Adam Sommer

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Our lives are made up of stories. It’s all we’ve got. When we engage with each other, it’s what we do—we share our stories. Old ones, new ones, ones we hope to happen. In regard to these stories, there are two essential insights to remember about them: 1. These stories can be tracked with the cycles of planets. 2. We are not our stories. Both of these ideas are hard to accept, yet they seem to be truer than we can imagine.

No matter which cycle we choose to study, a story can be found within it, and it’s in these stories where we find ourselves. But again, if we overly identify, if we are tricked into thinking these stories define us, we will get stuck. It’s a paradox, yet it’s the most useful transcendent idea—not just with our study of astrology, but in life, as well.

The cycle that’s been on my mind relates to Pluto. Soon, he will station retrograde (Rx; May 6th). Whenever a planet goes retrograde, we know we are at an important pivot in the cycle—or story. For planets Mars and beyond, they are getting closer, larger, and heading toward the opposition. Everything opposite the Sun is a retrograde moment with planets Mars and beyond. And so, we wonder about when the conjunction was—the moment of conception to the story—and the beginning of—in the case of Pluto—a yearly journey related to power, macabre themes, and shedding yet another layer.

For this cycle, Dionysus has appeared. It’s his complicated relationship with his mom and his successful trip to the underworld that have captured my imagination. It’s the origin of his ecstatic reputation and lusty admiration for the feminine that is revealed in these origin tales. To find resonance somewhere in the story, and to find a node connecting it to our own lives—to the Pluto cycle—is where the real wyrd Work takes place. Let’s explore…

---

Hymn 26 to Dionysus

Hail to you, child of fair Semele! There is no way to adorn sweet singing while heedless of you.

---

---

Thunder-F*cked

Zeus couldn’t keep it in his toga. One day, his divine eyes landed on Semele, a mortal princess, a Theban beauty, the kind of woman that made immortal loins do the Electric Slide. He seduced her in the usual godly ways. And, of course, she ended up pregnant with a god.

Enter Hera. Radioactive with jealousy, she disguised herself as Semele’s nursemaid and planted a seed: “How do you know he’s really Zeus? Make him prove it.” (echoes of Eros & Psyche throughout this story)

Drunk on love, Semele made Zeus swear by the Styx — the one oath even gods can’t break — to grant her one wish. He agreed. Big mistake!

She asked to see his true form.

(soft heat lightning)

Zeus begged. Pleaded. Probably offered islands. But an oath is an oath. He revealed himself — and Semele combusted. Ash. And inside the ash: a six-month fetus, still kicking; a vineyard phoenix stirring in his perinatal nightmare.

So Zeus did what any reasonable king of the gods would do. He slit open his thigh and sewed the baby inside. For three months, he walked around Olympus with a limp, definitely getting side-eyed from Hera, until the day he gave thigh-birth to Dionysus.

Born twice — once from his mother’s womb, once from his father’s leg. God of wine, ecstasy, madness, and the one divine voice that ever said: screw your story — dance! Embrace this moment.

Semele didn’t stay dead, though. Her loyal son descended into the underneath and brought her back. The woman destroyed by love became immortal through it. Yet, another twice-born.

---

…Sometimes we get exactly what we ask for, and it incinerates us. But from those ashes, sometimes, a god is born.

Raise a glass to Semele. To the thigh. And to Dionysus — patron saint of the holy, the hammered, and the fearless exploration of the dark, dark, dark.

I. Semele Sees a God Unmasked

→ Sun Conjunct Pluto (Jan 2026)

The result of Semele asking Zeus to reveal his true form is an ‘incinerating’ moment we have all encountered. Drawn by the objects of our desire, we are often transformed by them. Yet, the process of transformation requires unsavory steps we often bypass in our thinking. We want change, but we don’t want to die—we don’t want that part of us to go. But it must. So, if we want the truth, it’s a fair exchange.

The conjunction is the “invisible ignition” — the conception moment of Pluto’s yearly synodic cycle. Honestly, it’s not usually one of the cycles I track. I’m much more focused on the inner planets. With Pluto now securely in Aquarius for a couple of decades, though, I’ve been paying a little more attention to it, and I’ve been rewarded for doing so.

To properly understand the retrograde phase, we must also understand its origin (the conjunction).

work: think back to the days surrounding Jan. 23rd; locate where Aquarius is in your chart; see if you have any planets or angles in early Aquarius—or fixed signs. This was your moment of Truth!

When Zeus rescues the fetal Dionysus from Semele’s ashes and sews him into his own thigh, it’s a moment of grace we often don’t expect. Whatever blasted a part of us into ash since the beginning of the year sees a helpful hand appear, helping put us back together again.

Even though we can’t see Pluto with the naked eye, it doesn’t mean the themes of the story are dormant. Yes, it is nice to see the heliacal rise of Venus, but with the outers, we just have to trust in the slow emergence of the nascent themes in the East. It’s been here, where we have been since the start of the year, where the god gestates in hiddenness — power incubating, not yet visible. Whatever has happened to us, eventually, we will realize it was all meant to bring our power back.

work: once you find the theme, that resonant arc in the story, contemplate on the slow acceptance and anticipation you are feeling in the area of your life, this area of your chart (Aquarius; much easier to spot if you use Whole Sign).

Grown Dionysus now chooses to go to the underworld for his mother. Unlike Orpheus (who goes for personal love and fails), Dionysus goes because he already knows death. He’s got that Tommy energy from Peaky Blinders; nothing has power over him, not even the fear of death or the possibility of never returning.

It’s during the retrograde that the themes of any planet become most obvious. The only issue with an outer planet like Pluto is that the Rx lasts for nearly half the year—ie half of all time. It’s something to sit with. The way I’ve come to think of it is that, for nearly half of our lives, we are on the pursuit of hidden or lost items, meaning we are searching for the remnants of our past that we think will make us powerful again. We go to therapy, hoping to be guided into the unconscious realms with the promise of reconciliation; we take in plants we are convinced will offer a different perspective on the situation; we even study astrology, hoping to find secrets to our problems. At least half the time, this is what we seem to be up to.

Pluto Rx is deep medicine. It reminds us that the power we are seeking is already bound within us.

work: to see if you can notice the difference between Rx time with Pluto vs. direct time.

Dionysus doesn’t fight Hades — he negotiates, trades, surrenders something. What he yields is the notion that what goes down must stay down; he gives up the finality of death as the last word, so that resurrection, return, and reunion become his signature instead. For context: In the Greek imagination, Dionysus and Hades are not opposites so much as two masks of the same underworld force. Euripides and Heraclitus both explicitly equate them, suggesting that the ecstatic god of wine and the silent lord of the dead are simply different faces of one chthonic power. Transformed and reunited, Mother and Son ascend to new roles.

Whenever a planet is opposite the Sun, it’s the ‘full moon’ moment. Whatever was gestating in the ash six months ago is now fully illuminated, somewhere, facing off against the story's core antagonist. It’s understanding the root cause of that addiction. It’s finally time to have that conversation with your father. It’s the breakup, but only because power was taken back, and the dynamic is now fully understood.

This July is a monstrous month for collective transits. This one should be top of the list to track. It will reveal the worm at the core of our suffering.

work: The underworld doesn’t respect force. It respects an offering. So, what is it that we are choosing to give up to resolve the power dynamic that has been telling its story since Jan?

Semele doesn’t return as Semele. She’s renamed Thyone — “the raging one” — and ascends to Olympus. The name change is the resurrection. Semele dies passive — manipulated, consumed, a casualty of wanting too much truth. She returns as Thyone, the raging one, rooted in thyos: sacrificial smoke, divine frenzy, the burning offering that rises. Her new name says what her death meant — she wasn’t destroyed by the fire, she was the fire, and what came back through her son’s descent into the underworld wasn’t a rescued woman but a goddess of ecstatic fury. She mirrors Dionysus perfectly: dissolution, death, rebirth as something untameable. The meek don’t get renamed. Only the transformed do—those who have survived the flames.

They mirror each other in the tale, but also mirror Pluto. So much of the work we get to do with Pluto is like this. With the station, we, too, have a moment of clarity, with a renewed sense of power. We can see it in the fire as we burn the cords to all that no longer serves us.

→ Integration Phase (Oct–Jan 2027)

work: remember if you can, the origin of this whole synod—or story— back in Jan. It’s this Fall, when Venus/Mercury are also stationing for their respective Rx’s in Scorpio, when all of this constellates into a truly powerful ceremony.

I hope that this helps you to understand the context of Pluto retrograde a bit better—or any Rx for that matter. They aren’t isolated events. They are pivotal moments in the story, and are desperate for that context. Once we get this, our interpretations of the charts—both personally and collectively—will make much more sense. And when it comes to Dionysus and Semele, it’s but one story out of 10,000 that may relate to the Pluto synod. If it doesn’t resonate, find your own. There is no scarcity of good stories in this world. And if it does resonate, may you find in the months ahead a confident ally in Dionysus who will be by your side as you navigate the trenches and what lies beneath.

We are made of stories, yet we are not our stories. It’s important to remember this eternal paradox.

I wish you the best with it all.

onwards,

~adam

* also, I just packaged up all the Vimshottari classes at a 50% discount. No technique compares; best to learn it soon enough:

…if you’d like to have a reading or learn astrology with me, have a couple clicks below:

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In this pod, Gianni joins me to discuss current markets through the lens of Financial Astrology. He’s been studying this branch of the astro-tree much longer than I, and it’s always a treat to learn while having these conversations. He’s an MMA analyst like Pouyan, who was recently on the show, so if you enjoyed that one, you’ll really enjoy this one.

Gianni’s site:

https://www.themercator.com/about

enjoy

-adam

to learn Astrology:

....to support my work and learn astrology all at the same time

to work with me:

...to schedule a reading

The Dragon Hole

...like a rabbit hole, just different. I could say this is an astrology Substack, but that would be missing the mark. It's more of an attempt at constellating psyche. It's a space where we try to understand the world through kosmos, mythos, and psyche.

By Adam Sommer