The Transit Lounge: Magenta Deluxe Astrologer's Substack

The Astrology of Manifestation

Magenta Deluxe Astrologer — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 23:36:43 GMT

I’ve wanted to write about the connection between astrology and manifestation ever since I started this Substack. I’ve never found quite the right spark of inspiration, until I read a recent post about online grifting by Erin Nystrom. It’s an interesting and thought-provoking essay, and you can read it here. I was taken aback, however, by the way Nystrom applies the phrase “pseudo-profound bullshit” to the language of manifestation. She takes the term from Gordon Pennycook, who uses it to describe “a collection of words that uses correct grammar and impressive buzzwords to suggest depth and insight, but actually has no real meaning”.

Nystrom writes:

“One example used in Pennycook’s paper was:
‘Attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation.’
Yes, it sounds profound. Also, it doesn’t mean anything. And it was lifted directly from Deepak Chopra’s Twitter page.”

I disagree. I think it means everything. I haven’t come across that quote from Chopra until now, yet it describes the very basis of my approach to the practice of astrology.

Let me explain.

Manifestation is often presented as a magical ability to wish a new house, relationship, financial windfall or career into existence. A more grounded understanding is more interesting and a lot more useful.

In my view, manifestation is best understood as the process of becoming clear about a desired outcome, training the brain to recognise possibilities connected with it, and then taking action that increases the likelihood of achieving it.

Dr Tara Swart describes manifestation in practical terms as setting a goal and doing what is necessary to make it real. The neuroscience behind this begins with a simple fact about the brain: it is constantly filtering an enormous volume of information. Conscious awareness can accommodate only a fraction of what is available, so the brain continually assesses what deserves attention. Information associated with relevance, importance and value is more likely to enter conscious awareness.

Once a person becomes clear about a goal, this filtering process starts working in their favour. People, information and opportunities connected with the desired outcome become easier to notice. Possibilities that were previously overlooked can suddenly seem obvious. Someone considering a career change, for example, may begin noticing conversations, advertisements, contacts and opportunities related to a field they had barely registered before. It can feel as though the world has begun presenting them with possibilities. From a neuroscientific perspective, selective attention and the assignment of value offer a more grounded explanation.

Neuroplasticity provides another part of the picture. The brain changes in response to repeated attention, emotion and behaviour. What is repeatedly practised becomes more familiar, and familiar patterns become easier to access. This applies to beliefs about the self as well as to skills and behaviours.

Consider someone who wants to become a writer but has an entrenched belief that they have nothing valuable to say. Imagining themselves publishing thoughtful and engaging work can make the identity of writer more psychologically conceivable. They may begin noticing ideas worth developing, paying greater attention to relevant conversations and opportunities, writing regularly despite their uncertainty, and allowing other people to see their work. Each of these experiences provides further evidence that becoming a writer is possible.

The visualisation itself won’t produce the article, the screenplay or the novel. Its value lies in making the desired future more conceivable and making behaviour consistent with that future more likely. Repeated attention, imagination and action give the brain more opportunities to establish new patterns.

Beliefs play an important part in this process because they influence what people expect, what they attempt and how they respond when circumstances become difficult. Someone who unconsciously believes that success is not for them may hesitate when an opportunity appears. Someone who believes they are undeserving may minimise their achievements or avoid situations in which their abilities would be tested. Someone who regards failure as unbearable humiliation may choose certainty over an opportunity that involves taking a risk.

For this reason, manifestation begins with awareness. Habitual thoughts and emotional reactions can be observed rather than automatically treated as facts. An opportunity can prompt the question of whether the instinctive response is to approach or retreat. A significant goal can raise another question: what would I need to believe about myself in order to pursue this? Past experiences can also be examined for the ways in which they continue to influence expectations about what is possible.

This is where astrology offers a particularly useful lens. A natal chart can provide a language for examining the assumptions we have developed about ourselves, including the assumptions that may operate beneath our level of conscious awareness. Rather than telling us what we must become, the chart can help us investigate how we habitually think, communicate, respond to challenge and assess our own capabilities.

Take our aspiring writer. In astrology, we look to the condition of natal Mercury to describe the way we think and communicate, as well as the particular interests and activities through which the mind expresses itself. Its sign, house and aspects give us a remarkably nuanced picture of how a person processes information and communicates with other people. Mercury in Aquarius, for example, suggests a mind that revels in originality. We can expect a person with this placement to have a gift for joining the dots in unexpected ways, a talent for making unconventional ideas sound perfectly reasonable, and a wickedly funny way of expressing observations that other people would never have thought to make. Such a Mercury may have no shortage of ideas, yet could occasionally wonder whether those ideas are too strange to be taken seriously. If the goal is to become a writer, the astrological question becomes very specific: how might this person learn to trust the very qualities that make their voice distinctive?

Mercury in Taurus presents a different starting point. This is a mind that prefers practical experience to abstract theory. Knowledge accumulates through doing, testing and developing methods that work. Someone with this placement might become an accomplished writer precisely because they have something concrete to say, even if they initially assume that writing requires a more intellectual or theoretical approach.

Mercury in Virgo brings another set of possibilities. Here there can be a sharp eye for detail, an ability to organise information and an instinct for precision. The same qualities that produce excellent editing can also produce an internal critic who finds every flaw before the first draft has had a chance to find its rhythm and structure. The question for manifestation becomes: what would this person need to believe about their own competence in order to tolerate imperfection long enough to finish the work?

House placement adds another layer. Mercury in the third house is a natural, someone who thrives on the transmission and exchange of ideas. Mercury in the eighth house can produce a fascination with what other people reveal, conceal and communicate indirectly. Such a person may have an instinct for psychology, investigation, strategy or the stories hidden beneath ordinary interactions. If writing is the goal, the eighth-house Mercury may have far more to say about human behaviour than its owner has yet to recognise as a potential source of creative or professional value.

Aspects to other planets tell us still more about the beliefs that may accompany these abilities. Mercury in aspect to Uranus can produce sudden insights, unconventional associations and a mind that arrives at conclusions by making connections other people have missed. The person may assume they are simply changing the subject when they are actually following an intricate chain of thought. Their challenge may be trusting that their apparently eccentric associations are worth explaining.

Mercury in aspect to Saturn, on the other hand, describes a very different psychological starting point. An early experience of criticism or struggle with communication may become an enduring doubt about native intelligence or competence. The person may be highly articulate yet remain unconvinced of their own ability. With maturity, however, such individuals can become exceptionally disciplined, literate and thoughtful. The question is no longer whether this person has the capacity to write. It is whether they can recognise the capacity they already possess.

This is where natal astrology and manifestation intersect. The chart can provide hypotheses about the beliefs and behavioural patterns that deserve examination. It can help identify both the abilities that are easy to overlook and the internal assumptions that make pursuing a particular goal more difficult. The chart becomes a starting point for self-observation. The person still has to decide what to do with what they discover.

None of this calls for replacing every negative thought with an optimistic affirmation. A more useful aim is to develop a flexible and realistic belief system that can accommodate uncertainty while still allowing action. Confidence, in this sense, has less to do with certainty that a desired outcome will occur than with becoming sufficiently able to imagine the possibility that action becomes worthwhile.

Astrology can also contribute something a vision board cannot: a sense of timing. Predictive astrology gives us a map of the changing conditions through which a goal is being pursued. Transits, for example, describe periods during which particular psychological themes, challenges and opportunities become more prominent. They can therefore provide context for the actions we are already taking, and help us recognise when a particular kind of effort is likely to be more productive.

Transiting Saturn opposite natal Mercury, for example, can be a period when plans are exposed to reality. The mechanics and process of communication may become more onerous and demanding. Progress may involve delays, revisions or additional responsibility. Someone or something may restrict the pace at which a project develops. This can be frustrating, particularly for someone who has become accustomed to interpreting difficulty as evidence that they are failing.

In the best case, though, Saturn opposite Mercury can be understood as a period for testing the quality of the plan. How well prepared are you? What needs revising? Which skills need further development? Where have you underestimated the work involved? Addressed patiently, the apparent obstruction becomes useful information. The transit can strengthen the project by forcing it to withstand contact with reality.

Uranus in aspect to Mercury offers a very different experience. Uranus is associated with revelation, innovation and new perspectives. An unexpected idea may arrive suddenly, or an existing problem may become comprehensible from an entirely new angle. With natal Mercury in Pisces, for example, imagination and intuition may become particularly important. Place that Mercury in the fifth house and a creative idea could reveal an unexpected commercial possibility. Someone who has treated an activity as a hobby may suddenly recognise a viable market for their skills. An opinion that once seemed too unconventional to express may prove to be ahead of its time.

This is where predictive astrology becomes particularly relevant to the mechanics of manifestation. If attention influences what we notice, knowing what to watch for becomes useful. If beliefs influence what we attempt, understanding the psychological demands of a particular period can help us prepare. If repeated action changes future probabilities, timing can help us decide when to experiment, when to consolidate and when to take advantage of an opening.

Transiting Jupiter is especially interesting in this respect because it indicates areas in which opportunities for growth are emerging. Transiting Jupiter in the twelfth house, for example, can coincide with something positive developing behind the scenes. A project may be incubating privately before it is ready for public exposure, a sense of working on something few people know about, with the prospect of bringing it into view later.

When Jupiter enters the first house, the emphasis can shift towards visibility and personal presence. Recognition may come more easily. Opportunities can arise through greater confidence and a willingness to be seen. A change in professional identity, an increase in public recognition or a new sense of personal authority can all become possible.

This is very close to the process Swart describes. The astrological transit gives us a context in which a particular kind of opportunity may be easier to recognise. The person still has to notice it, respond to it and do the work required to take advantage of it.

I have a personal example. Jupiter is currently travelling through my ninth house. The ninth is traditionally associated with God, religion and the search for meaning. It also has a much broader association with teaching, publishing, broadcasting, public speaking and sharing ideas with a wider audience. I habitually describe it as the house of evangelism, through which we “spread the word”. We seek to inspire other with that which has been a source of inspiration to ourselves.

For me, Jupiter in the ninth has presented a number of opportunities to start to share what I know. Having been aware, of course, that this period was coming, that knowledge informed the decisions I made before Jupiter arrived. While Jupiter was in my eighth house, I joined networking groups. I began learning about public speaking and social media. I even started this Substack. I also began thinking about what I might have to say to a room full of people.

In May, I gave a ten-minute talk to one of my networking groups. It was partly an experiment. I wanted to discover what it felt like to stand in front of a group and speak about astrology in a way that would make sense to people who knew little about it. In June, I gave the same talk to another group, just as Jupiter entered my ninth house. It went better. I received some very positive feedback about my knowledge and enthusiasm, even if my presentation skills still needed a lot of work.

A couple of weeks later, Jupiter entered Leo, the sign associated with performance, creativity and visibility. I gave the talk again, this time with thirty minutes rather than ten, at an event held at the yoga centre I attend. This time I knew I had something.

The following day, I posted on Facebook that I had developed a mini workshop and was open to small-group engagements, including sound baths and retreat days. I received an enquiry almost immediately.

The significance of this experience for me isn’t that Jupiter magically produced a potential collaborator, but that I had already been preparing. I had developed the talk, practised it, joined networking groups, started publishing and learned new skills. Jupiter didn’t do the work for me. It coincided with a period in which the work I had already consciously begun became easier to recognise as an opportunity.

Had I tried the same thing in May, I might have been disappointed by the response. I might have interpreted an inexperienced presentation as evidence that I lacked the necessary talent. I might even have decided the idea was a bad one. Instead, I had a way of understanding the sequence. May was an experiment. June provided encouragement. Jupiter entering the ninth coincided with a growing willingness to share my ideas, and increasing conviction that they would be well received. Jupiter entering Leo coincided with greater confidence about presenting them publicly. By the time I announced the workshop, I had accumulated enough experience to be prepared for the response when it came.

This is where I think astrology becomes especially relevant in the context of manifestation. It gives us another way of thinking about attention and intention.

A natal chart can help us investigate the beliefs we bring to a goal. It can reveal abilities we undervalue, along with psychological patterns that can interfere with their expression. A predictive reading can then provide a changing context in which those capacities can be developed, tested or expressed. While none of this guarantees an outcome, it does give us is something to pay attention to. A roadmap, if you will.

And that may be the most useful way to understand manifestation. The desired future begins as an idea. Attention makes certain possibilities easier to notice. Intention gives that attention a direction. Astrology can help us understand why a particular goal resonates with us, where our confidence may need work, what abilities are available to us and when particular opportunities are more likely to present themselves. We still have to act.

Which brings me back to Deepak Chopra. “Attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation” is not a description of magic. Nor is is bullshit. It is, more or less, a description of what happened to me between May and July: attention to a goal that made opportunities easier to notice, and intention that turned noticing into ten minutes, then thirty, then a workshop. Strip out the supernatural framing and the statement holds up against what we know about selective attention, neuroplasticity and behaviour change. It only sounds like bullshit if you have never experienced it at work.

Manifestation, then, has little to do with willing the universe to obey us. It has everything to do with having an understanding of what it is that we actually want, a grasp of the personal resources that we have at our disposal, clarity about the beliefs that interfere with pursuing it, and a willingness to keep responding to what becomes available.

Attention gives the future visibility. Intention gives it direction. And action turns our vision into reality.

What are you currently trying to bring into being, and which planet do you suspect is either helping or getting in the way?

Keep banging those rocks together..

Magenta Deluxe Astrologer — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 19:19:20 GMT

_{“We’ll be saying a big hello to all intelligent lifeforms everywhere and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys”}
_{― Douglas Adams,}_{The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy}

Everyone wants to talk about AI right now, and the current transits make it an easy story to tell: something vast is shifting, unsettling old ideas about who gets to create.

When I was at university in the 1980s, I wrote my essays longhand. A typewriter was a luxury that was beyond the limits of most of us. I would write my first draft on paper, then literally take to it with scissors, cutting the pages into paragraphs and spreading them across the floor of my room. I’d move sections around, look for a better structure, paste in fresh observations and rewrite arguments and eventually arrive at something that resembled a coherent essay. Then I would hand write the final draft before handing it in, or, in my later years as a post-graduate student, paying a typist to type it up for me, for the princely sum of a dollar a page.

I tell this story to illustrate how much technology has changed the practical business of writing within a single lifetime.

Back then, I had no desire to become a typist. In fact, I dismissed typing as a purely mechanical task to be outsourced whenever possible. In hindsight, this may have been a strategic error. While the rest of the world learned to type, I somehow managed to miss that particular technological revolution and remain a two-finger typist to this day. What interested me was not the typing in any case. The typewriter was simply a tool. The creative process was actually the thing: developing an argument, arranging ideas into something coherent, and working out what I actually wanted to say.

You can imagine, then, the enthusiasm with which I embraced the word processor. I could move paragraphs without scissors. I could revise endlessly without rewriting entire pages. The technology removed friction between thought and expression. It didn’t make me a writer. I was already a writer. But it did make writing immeasurably easier.

Looking back, every major shift in technology has done something similar. The printing press expanded access to ideas. Word processors expanded access to the tools of authorship. The internet expanded access to audiences. Blogging platforms removed the need for a publisher. Social media removed the need for a broadcaster. Each innovation has lowered a barrier that previously stood between people and their ability to communicate their ideas.

Which brings me to AI. I’ve noticed that many of the conversations about AI assume we’re debating whether it should be allowed into the creative process at all. As though there is a pure form of creativity that exists independently of tools. Whenever people talk about “pure” creativity, I find myself wondering where exactly they imagine it existed. Before word processors? Before books? Before writing?

The ancient Greeks preserved vast bodies of knowledge through oral tradition long before writing became commonplace, relying on storytelling techniques, patterns, and mnemonic devices to anchor memory. These included rhythmic phrasing, repetition, and stock epithets, such as Homer’s famous “wine-dark sea” which acted as cognitive cues to keep the narrative flowing. I was introduced to these techniques when learning about Homer in high school and still draw on them when writing and speaking about astrology; recurring phrases, structured sequences, and familiar verbal anchors help me keep on track and recall complex ideas in real time, much as they once guided oral poets through vast, unwritten epics.

Human beings have always built tools for thinking. Some are made of code, others are made of symbols, rhythms, and remembered forms. I’m not convinced that such a thing as creativity without tools of some kind is even possible. The question has never been whether we use tools. The question is whether we use them well. For me, AI occupies the same broad category as the word processor. It helps me organise ideas and explore possibilities, and it helps me marshal decades of accumulated knowledge and personal experience into a form that another person can read and understand. The ideas, the stories, and the perspective are still mine. The work of deciding what counts remains mine.

And maybe that’s the question with which we’re collectively wrestling now. Machines can clearly generate words. The more interesting question is what becomes valuable when words are no longer hard to come by. For most of human history, access to information has been the challenge. Then finding information became the challenge. Increasingly, the challenge is deciding which information deserves our attention, and which does not.

This feels like a distinctly Pluto-in-Aquarius question: less about breathless predictions of civilisational collapse, and more about the transformation of the systems through which knowledge, authority, and expertise are produced, filtered, and trusted.

At the same time, Neptune’s move into Aries seems to be amplifying a cultural desire for creative and intellectual self-determination. People want to make things and publish their own ideas. They want to build businesses, write newsletters, create art, record podcasts and participate in public life on their own terms.

Jupiter’s arrival in Leo only adds fuel to that fire, less a shallow demand for attention than the quintessential human desire to say, “Look what I have created.”

There is something gloriously democratic about that. Not democratic in the sense that everything is equal in quality, but in the sense that more people are able to participate in the making and sharing of meaning. In its best expression, Aquarius is concerned with levelling the playground: determinedly egalitarian, thumbing its nose at hierarchy, and allowing ideas to circulate beyond the control of any single authority.

Of course, not everything produced will be a work of genius. It never has been. The printing press did not usher in a golden age of quality literature. The internet most certainly did not. More participation has always meant more noise alongside more brilliance.

But I find it hard to get too worked up about the loss of exclusivity. For centuries, creativity has been filtered through gatekeepers. Publishers, editors, broadcasters, institutions and industries have decided whose voice deserved to be heard. Executive power is no longer in the hands of the mighty few. And surely, that’s a good thing?

And yet we are already seeing new gatekeepers emerge to replace the old ones. In its more distorted expression, Pluto in Aquarius does not eliminate control so much as relocate into opaque systems of dubious merit. There is something almost comical in the idea of creators crossing their fingers that the algorithm will vouch for their humanity, while using a machine to prove a human did the thinking.

The scissors on the floor of my room were a tool. So was the typist (she was lovely, but you get the idea), and so was the word processor. AI is a tool too. Thinking has always been the real work; the machine simply gets it onto the page.

If these new technologies make it easier for more people to put their thoughts into words, create, publish and participate, I’d rather ask what becomes possible when the old barriers disappear than spend my energy defending them.

Coober Pedy, South Australia, picture taken with my iPhone

An Invitation

Thank you for reading this far.

I write this Substack because I love astrology, I love to write, and I love to connect. This space is where all three meet.

You, my small but growing circle of readers, are my collective muse. Just as I learn from every client session, I want to learn from you here.

If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please like, subscribe (it’s free), leave a comment, or hit restack – it helps expose my work to a wider audience.

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As above, so below.

Another Cycle Has Begun

Magenta Deluxe Astrologer — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 21:01:31 GMT

Our memories do not stack like bricks. They spiral like seashells – each new layer expanding outward while still carrying the echo of the first.

Seashell Geometry and the Shape of Memory – The Quantum Model

After a bit of a break, I’m back.

And I wanted to ease my way in with something simple.

One of the reasons I find astrology so compelling is that it helps us to recognise cycles, and one of the easiest cycles to observe is Jupiter’s. In astrology, Jupiter is associated with growth, learning, travel, perspective and the expansion of our worldview. Wherever Jupiter goes, it tends to broaden our horizons. Jupiter takes approximately twelve years to travel around the zodiac, returning to the same sign and the same area of our chart every twelve years. Twelve years is long enough for life to have changed dramatically, and short enough that we can still look back and remember where we were, what we were doing and who we were becoming.

With all the hype around the slower-moving outer planets, Jupiter’s cycle can be easy to overlook. But that would be a mistake, because Jupiter, traditionally known as the Greater Benefic, is associated with benefits, opportunities, good fortune and lucky breaks. Whereas Pluto and Neptune, for example, speak to transformations unfolding across generations, Jupiter moves through chapters of our own lives that we can actually recognise.

Having said that, there has been considerable excitement around Jupiter’s recent ingress into Leo, which took place on 13 June 2026. Social media has been full of predictions about what this means for all of us. But for me, the more interesting question is not, in fact, where Jupiter is in the zodiac. It is where Jupiter is moving through your own chart.

Jupiter also entered my ninth house in June. The ninth house is associated with long-distance travel, higher learning, philosophy, culture and experiences that challenge us to see the world differently. It is the part of the chart that encourages us to step beyond the familiar and encounter something bigger than ourselves.

The ninth is the house of far horizons. This is the house in which we seek to boldly go where no-one has been before. It is the place in which we know that there is more to the forest than just the trees in the back yard. This is the part of us that is always wondering what is around the corner and over the next hill.

In traditional astrology, the ninth house was associated with pilgrimage: journeys undertaken not simply to reach another place, but to seek understanding, wisdom and a broader perspective. While a ninth-house journey can be literal, taking us across borders and into unfamiliar territory, it can also be a journey into the farthest reaches of the mind, changing the way in which we understand our place in the world.

While the ninth house is often associated with overseas travel, it is more generally about the experience of alternative cultures. This means that people who speak with different accent, wear different clothes, or even live on the other side of town, can express a different culture to our own. With Jupiter moving through the ninth house, encounters with different cultures and perspectives become a significant part of our personal growth and development. They expand our understanding of what is possible and remind us that the world is larger than the one we know.

The last time Jupiter travelled through this part of my chart was in 2015. That year, in May, I visited New York City for the first time. I still remember the feeling of arriving there. So much of New York already existed in my imagination through films, television and books that walking its streets felt almost surreal. It was like stepping into a film set. Everything was new, yet somehow strangely familiar. The experience expanded my understanding of the world. It reminded me that there was far more beyond my everyday surroundings than I had imagined.

Twelve years later, another ninth house Jupiter chapter has begun. In June 2026, I travelled to Vietnam. It was eye-opening in an entirely different way. The landscape, the culture, the history, and the minutiae of daily life challenged my assumptions and invited me to see the world through another lens. The details were different, the location was different, and I am no longer the same person who had arrived in New York in 2015.

Lantern Boats in Hoi An

This is where I think astrology is frequently misunderstood. People often approach astrology as though it is purely a tool for prediction: tell me what is going to happen. But astrology is sometimes less about prediction, and more about predictability. Not the predictability of knowing exactly what events will occur, but the recognition that, like the seasons, life occurs in cycles. That certain themes return. That our experiences are not simply a random collection of unrelated moments.

There is a saying often attributed to Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”. Irrespective of who said it, the idea encapsulates something important about the way in which patterns unfold. The past does not come back in exactly the same form. We do not repeat our lives like actors replaying the same scene. Instead, we encounter familiar themes in new circumstances.

Dessert bar in Hanoi

Cycles are not circles that bring us back to where we started. They are spirals. We return to similar territory, but we arrive with everything we have learned since the last time. The questions may be familiar, but we meet them as a different person.

This understanding of time is not unique to astrology. Many cultures have recognised the cyclical nature of existence through the movements of the heavens, the changing seasons and the rhythms of life itself. The contemporary western tendency to see time as a straight line, with the past behind us and the future ahead, is only one way of understanding our experience.

Astrology offers another perspective. It suggests that life has seasons. There are times for expansion and exploration. Times for consolidation. Times for letting go. Times for beginning again. The planets continue their movements, returning to predictable positions, while we continue to evolve. Looking back at where Jupiter was twelve years ago will not tell us exactly what will happen next. But it absolutely will reveal the theme of the journey that we are are undertaking now.

For me, Jupiter in the ninth house brought New York in 2015 and Vietnam in 2026. Two completely different experiences, but with a similar underlying invitation: look beyond what you already know.

Hoi An: June 2026

This is the magic of cycles. They do not return us to the exact place where we began. They bring us back to themes we have encountered before, but we meet them with everything we have learned in the meantime.

Jupiter’s ingress into Leo is universal, but it is making its way through a different part of each person’s chart. The experience will not look the same for everyone. For some, Jupiter may bring expansion through learning or travel. For others, it may open doors through relationships, creativity, home, career or community.

Wherever Jupiter is moving through your chart, it offers an opportunity to notice what is ready to grow. It may be pointing towards a place where your world is expanding, your curiosity is being awakened, or your assumptions are being challenged.

The specifics will be different for everyone, but the invitation is the same: to look beyond what you already know.

The cycle has begun again.

An Invitation

Thank you for reading this far.

I write this Substack because I love astrology, I love to write, and I love to connect. This space is where all three meet.

You, my small but growing circle of readers, are my collective muse. Just as I learn from every client session, I want to learn from you here.

If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please like, subscribe (it’s free), leave a comment, or hit restack – it helps expose my work to a wider audience.

Subscribe now

As above, so below.

My Mother versus the God of War

Magenta Deluxe Astrologer — Sun, 10 May 2026 20:03:11 GMT

When I was little, around the time I started school, my mother told me that my grandmother was Jewish. I was young enough that I didn’t know what it meant, and old enough to register that it meant something of significance. We did not know any Jewish people. I had no cultural context for this information whatsoever. Still, I knew instinctively that it mattered. So much so, that I remember telling the kids at school. I also remember that they didn’t care. I care now, because it proves that I didn’t imagine it.

A few years later, keen to find out more, I brought it up again. My mother denied it entirely. Not only did she deny that my grandmother was Jewish, she denied ever having told me such a thing in the first place.

It was one of those strange moments that children sometimes experience with adults where reality becomes negotiable. Memory becomes negotiable. Identity itself may be negotiable.

After my mother’s death, my cousin found records on Ancestry showing my grandmother was identified as Jewish on wartime documents in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation.

My mother was born in the Netherlands in 1935.

Following the German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940, the Nazis called upon Jews to register. Jewishness was treated as an inherited racial category rather than a religious one, so records could include people with one or more Jewish grandparents, mixed marriages, or partial Jewish ancestry. The Dutch state already had very detailed population records, and the Germans exploited them efficiently. Many people complied before the full danger was obvious, and no wonder. If someone refused to register, they risked imprisonment, confiscation of property, or worse.

Seventy-five percent of Dutch Jews were murdered during World War Two. One of the highest death rates in Western Europe. Somehow, my family survived.

My grandfather was not Jewish. He was a significant figure in the Resistance, and I have long suspected that what he knew, and who he knew, had something to do with that. Mixed families, forged documents, resistance contacts, hiding arrangements, and insider information all played a role in survival. My mother remembers being questioned by the Gestapo as a little girl. She remembers telling them that her father had been imprisoned for espionage, which was not the case. He was off playing his part in the Resistance. That a small child had been coached to deliver a cover story to the secret police suggests that the threat to my family was very real.

Those who managed to avoid arrest still faced hunger, cold, and severe deprivation, especially during the Hunger Winter of 1944-45, when food and fuel supplies collapsed across the western cities, daily rations shrank to near-starvation levels, and more than twenty thousand people died.

After the war, following my grandparents’ separation, my grandmother, my aunt, and my mother migrated to Australia. My mother almost never talked about the war, except for the time that she had to lie to the Gestapo.

My mother at Mount George, South Australia, late 1950s.

Silence, in the wake of that kind of experience, is not unusual. It is one of the most documented responses to survival. You do not speak of what happened, because speaking requires you to experience it again. You become someone else in a country where the past cannot follow you. Research into epigenetics tells us that trauma moves across generations not as story but as biology. The children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors show measurable differences in stress hormone regulation, in the way the body orients toward threat. The silence was not simply cultural. It was structural, woven into the nervous system, and that nervous system was passed on.

When my mother denied telling me about our Jewish heritage, I don’t think she was lying to me in any ordinary sense. I think she was doing something that she had done before.

Were my mother still alive, she would have been ninety. She is, by any historical and humanitarian definition of the word, a Holocaust survivor. So is my grandmother. So is my aunt. They survived the most systematised attempt at genocide in modern history, and then they packed their things and got on a ship and did not speak of it again.

I am an astrologer. I have been practising for more than two decades, and studying for longer than that. One of the things I’ve come to understand about a birth chart is that it doesn’t only describe the person it belongs to. Sometimes it functions more like archaeology. Sometimes we can look at a chart and find evidence of conditions that existed before we arrived.

I have the Sun, Moon, Mercury, and Venus in Aries. The sign of Aries is ruled by Mars, the god of war. My Moon is in Aries, square Mars, with Mars in Cancer in the eighth house.

The Moon in a chart describes the mother, and through the mother, the emotional atmosphere we absorb before we are old enough to analyse it. The Moon in Aries describes a woman defined by urgency, action, impatience, a fierce and unsentimental protectiveness. A woman who communicated love through the refusal to let you be weak, needy, or vulnerable. That is recognisable to me. I habitually describe my mother as an angry woman, who was forever telling me to hurry up. It is also, I now think, a description of someone who learned, from a very early age, that any sign of weakness could get you killed.

Jewish women in occupied Europe could not afford softness in the sentimental sense that we tend to associate with motherhood. They needed quick responses. Instinct. Alertness. They needed to know when to speak, when to stay silent, when to move quickly and strategically, and when to reinvent themselves entirely in order to ensure their family’s survival.

Mars square the Moon speaks symbolically to an atmosphere infused with conflict, vigilance, suppressed anger, and survival reflexes. The aspect is often interpreted personally, but astrology also functions trans-generationally. That symbolism becomes difficult to ignore once you place it beside the actual history.

Mars in Cancer is traditionally considered a difficult placement. Mars seeks direct confrontation. Cancer protects, shields, defends the home, preserves continuity at almost any cost. Astrology describes such a Mars as a warrior who cannot strike openly, who moves obliquely, who will do whatever is necessary to keep what is theirs alive. Mars in the eighth house is not the soldier in the open field. He is the one who survives what others do not. He understands the weight of what is underground, unspoken, buried.

Epigenetics gives us one language for this. The inherited alteration of stress response, the body that learned threat before the mind could name it. Astrology gives us another. The Moon as memory. The Moon as inheritance. The Moon as the emotional substance from which the next generation is formed.

Then there is Pluto conjunct the North Node in my tenth house, which speaks to a path shaped by proximity to extinction, by power wielded with relentless and implacable force, and by a reckoning with what survival actually costs. Neptune in the twelfth house is the planet of dissolution and concealment, of identities submerged beneath the surface of family life like objects at the bottom of a river. He governs that which we inherit without knowing we have received it. Their combined symbolism is of secrecy, survival, oppression, power structures, hidden histories, and a silent confrontation with collective darkness.

Saturn and Jupiter in the third house suggest a childhood environment in which religion and its absence sat side by side, in which what could be said and what could not were governed by rules that were never explained.

At some point during her lifetime, my grandmother stopped being Jewish, in practice, and eventually in family memory. Except that she was never permitted to stop, not under Nazi racial law. The Nazis did not ask whether she still kept Shabbat. They marked her documents and entered her name into a system designed to find and kill her. She survived that system. She left the country that had tried to destroy her. She arrived somewhere new and made herself over.

Her daughter, my mother, told me about it when I was young, and then denied the telling.

Her daughter’s daughter, which is me, is writing about it now.

This is not a redemptive arc. It is not a story that resolves into healing, because that is not the kind of story Holocaust survival generates. It is a story about what is contained within an ancestral lineage without ever being named. What gets carried in the body, and more importantly, at least for the purpose of this piece, that which is indelibly engraved in a birth chart. My birth chart. The silence entered the bloodline and eventually it became part of me, and I never got to ask my mother about any of it.

I don’t know what she was protecting when she denied what she’d told me. Herself, possibly. Me, probably. Her mother’s constructed peace. The story that said: that was then, this is elsewhere, we are something else now.

But my chart says otherwise.

That is what I am sitting with this Mother’s Day.

The god of war and the women who survived him.

Don't Shoot the Messenger

Magenta Deluxe Astrologer — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 22:13:32 GMT

Someone on Substack raised the alarm this week. Capitals, exclamation marks, the full catastrophe: WHY IS EVERYONE SO ON BOARD WITH USING AI LIKE IT ISN’T DESTROYING OUR PLANET AND THE VERY FABRIC OF SOCIETY AND COGNITIVE ABILITY. In other words, we are standing at the edge of irreversible collapse, and nearly everyone has missed the memo.

I pointed out, in the comments, that we said the same thing about television. And the printing press. And the pocket calculator. Plus ça change...

Deflecting from the main point just a little, they said there’s a big difference between the pocket calculator and AI. So, if that seems too long a bow to draw, let’s stick with the scandal inspired by the printing press.

When the printing press arrived, it was accused of flooding society with low-quality information and destabilising established authority. When calculators entered classrooms, there really was a serious concern that students would lose the ability to think. Television was famously going to rot the brain while giving us square eyes. The internet was going to destroy our attention span, as well as our ability to retain information. Perhaps it has, to a degree, but we’re here, together, on this page, so there’s that. And now we have AI, which is apparently going to do all of this at once, while destroying the planet into the bargain.

Now, I wish to stress that the writer is someone that I admire, respect and actively recommend to my subscribers. The issue is whether alarm is the most useful response. If the world really is going to hell in a handbasket (which I personally doubt), a level head may serve us more effectively than outrage and despair.

Which brings me to the astrology.

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Uranus spends approximately seven years in each sign, and its ingress into a new one marks a shift in the collective weather, not just for individuals, but for all of us simultaneously. It is the planet of disruption, innovation, and evolution by means of radical change. It delivers the kind of insight that doesn’t arrive gradually but all at once, like a switch being flipped. Wherever Uranus passes, it dismantles that which has calcified and introduces that which was previously unimaginable.

For the past several years, Uranus has been making its way through earth-bound Taurus, a sign that is antithetical to its nature. Taurus, to put it bluntly, is freaked out by change. It thrives on continuity and material stability. It trusts what is proven, what is tangible, what has already demonstrated its value. In Taurus, that disruption has been felt as a kind of low-grade agitation. A sense that the ground is shaking beneath our feet, while part of us digs in harder. The anxiety around AI finds context here. The Taurean instinct to keep things the way that are meeting a Uranian revelation that the tectonic plates are already shifting. Change is anticipated, and resisted. Innovation is accepted, but not without friction. Perhaps that explains the insistence that this time is different, it’s all happening way too quickly, and that we are uniquely unprepared.

On 26 April 2026, Uranus left Taurus and enters Gemini. Gemini is the sign of communication, information, language, and the mind. Its ruling planet, Mercury, governs the way in which we think, speak, and transmit ideas through space and time. Gemini is curious, quick, and fundamentally dual: two things can be true at the same time without needing to resolve the tension between them. So let’s talk about what happens when the planet of disruption walks into Mercury’s house.

Uranus in Gemini is disruption in the sphere of information itself. And if you have been paying any attention to the last several years, you already know we are long overdue for a reckoning in exactly that domain.

We are drowning in content and starving for meaning. We have more access to information than any generation in human history, and less consensus about what is true. The very concept of a shared reality has become contested territory. AI is generating text, images, and video, at a scale and speed that would have been unimaginable even a decade ago. And Uranus in Gemini hasn’t arrived alone: Pluto is now firmly established in Aquarius, the sign of networks, systems, and technology, reshaping who controls the infrastructure through which all this information travels. I’ve written about that here. The nervous system of civilisation is under a kind of pressure it hasn’t faced before.

Uranus in Gemini will not resolve this. Uranus doesn’t resolve things. It accelerates them, cracks them open, and forces adaptation. The question is not whether things will change under Uranus. We don’t need astrology to tell us that they will, and dramatically. The question is whether we meet that change with something resembling clarity, or whether we meet it in capitals, with big feelings and no particular plan.

The last time Uranus was in Gemini, from 1941 to 1949, the world was at war and governments were in the business of manufacturing reality. In Australia, for example, the government coordinated messaging across posters and radio broadcasts to keep the home front in line. Fear of Japanese invasion was packaged into imagery and distributed at scale. Women were told the war could be won in the kitchen. The government urged “silent service,” encouraging citizens to avoid spreading rumours that could assist the enemy. None of this was spontaneous. It was engineered, staffed, and funded like a production line. We are not there yet. But we may be heading in that direction.

As Uranus moves into Gemini, I am hopeful that conversation will change for the better. At its best, Uranus in Gemini offers radical intelligence: the capacity to think faster and more flexibly, to break free of fixed narratives, to find unexpected connections between things that previously seemed unrelated. Gemini is not scattered, it is comprehensive. It sees the signal in the noise.

Gemini is not concerned with stability the way Taurus is. It wants to understand how things work, test what’s possible, and stress-test what merely looks solid. Where Taurus asks whether something is reliable, Gemini asks what it can do. The concerns don’t disappear under that lens. But the tone shifts from alarm to engagement.

From “this will destroy us” to “how does this work?”

At its worst, Uranus in Gemini is cognitive fragmentation, information overload, and the weaponisation of language. It is the algorithm. It is the comment section. It is the shouting in capitals about something that may or may not deserve that level of alarm.

The messenger is not the message. The noise is not the signal.

Mercury rules not only communication but also the mind that receives it. This is our capacity to sort, discern, and think rather than simply react. That capacity is precisely what Uranus in Gemini will put under pressure, and precisely what it will reward in those who cultivate it.

The irony is that the technologies we fear often become the ones we learn to think with. The calculator did not end mathematics. It changed the way mathematics is practised. The printing press did not destroy knowledge. It redistributed it.

While AI may well reshape cognitive habits, that is not the same as erasing them.

It is also worth remembering that panic is not, in itself, a form of insight. It feels urgent. It feels clarifying. And it rarely produces anything especially useful. If the world is indeed heading towards some kind of information armageddon, hysteria is unlikely to improve our chances. A bit of perspective might. And if we do find ourselves on the frontline of something genuinely chaotic, the ability to think clearly, rather than loudly, may turn out to be the more valuable skill.

Don’t shoot the messenger. The message, read carefully, is not necessarily the one that we fear. Disruption is not the same as destruction. The calculator did not end mathematics. The printing press did not destroy knowledge. They changed the conditions under which both were practised, and we adapted. We will adapt again. Uranus in Gemini will put pressure on our capacity to think clearly. It will also reward it. That is, historically speaking, not the worst deal on offer.

My picture: Coober Pedy, South Australia 2022

An Invitation

Thank you for reading this far.

The Story We Tell the Machinery

Magenta Deluxe Astrologer — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 22:00:17 GMT

Robert Sapolsky doesn’t believe you chose to read this post. He doesn’t believe you chose anything, not your breakfast, not your career, not the person you got involved with, or broke up with, or who never called back.

A professor of biology, neurology, and neurosurgery at Stanford University, Sapolsky has spent decades studying human and animal behaviour and arrived at a conclusion that is either liberating or terrifying, depending on how you look at it: we have no free will. None. Our actions are the inevitable output of biology, environment, and everything that has ever happened to us, right back to conditions that existed before we were born.

It’s a confronting argument, and it isn’t new. Philosophers have wrestled with determinism for centuries. What makes Sapolsky’s version different is that he isn’t speaking in abstractions. He’s pointing to dopamine levels and cortisol responses and the architecture of the prefrontal cortex and saying: this is the machinery. We are the machinery. The feeling that we are in driver’s seat is itself just another output of the machine.

This post has been inspired by a comment from keynote speaker and performer Brenda Adelman, whose work is built around personal storytelling as a path through trauma. In response to a recent Facebook post, she commented: “I’ve had a few readings over my lifetime and they were always interesting. Sometimes so right on the money I felt like I don’t even have free will.” While, on the face of it, it’s a casual observation, it also raises a question as old as time.

And it’s one that I’ve been contemplating since well before I encountered Sapolsky, because astrologers have been at it for millennia. Classical astrologers were determinist in the sense that they believed the heavens signalled a fated pattern of events, but over time, many have allowed, instead, that “the stars incline rather than compel”. In other words, destiny and choice coexist within an ordered cosmos.

When I look at a natal chart, I’m looking at the map of a moment: the sky at the exact second a person drew their first breath. That map describes tendencies, patterns, the shape of a life’s unfolding. Saturn in the seventh house. Mars conjunct the Ascendant. Neptune square the Sun. None of that was chosen. And yet it tells us a lot about who a person is, how they navigate the world, what they find challenging and what comes so easily that it can sometimes ne taken for granted.

Sapolsky might say: yes, exactly. The chart is just another way of describing the mechanism that determines the self.

Contemporary astrology, however, tends not be fatalistic. The chart is not seen as destiny. It is a language. And language, by its nature, allows interpretation, which is something distinct from mechanism. When we consider our chart, and recognise ourselves in it, something happens in that moment of recognition that feels like more than circuitry. We have conscious awareness. We observe the machinery and we wonder about it.

Sapolsky would say the wondering is also just the machinery at work. He argues that our actions are fully caused by biology and environment, and he says the feeling that we make choices that determine our fate is a post-hoc construction rather than real agency. He also suggests that our brains are not built to experience choice as an illusion-free process, so the sense of free will is something we are predisposed to generate.

I don’t have a problem with any of this, per se. In some ways, it’s kind of comforting, because it means our sometimes shitty lives are not our fault. But it doesn’t actually change the way we live. We still deliberate. We still struggle with decisions. We still experience regret and anticipation and desire and disappointment. If free will is an illusion, it is the most persistent and structurally important illusion in human experience. And illusions that persistent have to be doing something.

Astrology provides us with a different approach to this dilemma. Astrology asks not whether we are free, but whether we are conscious. Not whether we could have done something different, but whether we understand the forces that contributed to who we are. The chart doesn’t tell us that we have no choices. It shows us what we are working with, and in that understanding, our choices become apparent. Not freedom from the conditions of your life, but a kind of freedom within them.

Sapolsky might call that a comforting story we tell the machinery.

And maybe he’s not wrong. But consider what story-telling actually is, and what it does. Brenda Adelman’s life work rests on a very specific claim: that narrating your own experience is not decoration laid on top of what happened to you. It is how you become the protagonist rather than the casualty. Her one-woman show, My Brooklyn Hamlet, tells the story of how her father shot and killed her mother, then married her mother’s sister.

Brenda didn’t choose any of that. The conditions of her life were clearly as fated as the early astrologers would have us believe. What she made of them, the decades of performing that story in prisons and universities and theatres from Los Angeles and San Francisco to London and Vienna, the practice of forgiveness she has built from it, is something. It might be exactly what Sapolsky says it is, a series of neurological events that were always going to unfold that way. But the story she has told about those events has changed what she is able to do in the world, and what she is able to offer others. That is not nothing.

The capacity to narrate a life, to step back from it, examine it, hold it up to the light and ask what it means, is precisely what makes the question of free will worth asking. Machinery, so far as we know, doesn’t wonder about itself. And we do. And in that wondering, something is happening that pure mechanics is unable to account for.

Neither answer is complete. The debate over free will has never really been about settling the question. It has always been an invitation to look more carefully at what it means to move through time, shaped by forces larger than individual will, and, at the same time, aware of having been shaped.

Perhaps both views are pointing at the same thing from different angles. Sapolsky says: you are the product of forces you did not choose and cannot escape.

Astrology says: I know. Here is the map.

Make of it what you will. Or, perhaps, what you were always going to.

My picture, taken at Glen Ewin Estate, South Australia

An Invitation

Thank you for reading this far.

I write this Substack because I love astrology, I love to write, and I love to connect. This space is where all three meet.

You, my small but growing circle of readers, are my collective muse. Just as I learn from every client session, I want to learn from you here.

If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please like, subscribe (it’s free), or hit restack – it helps expose my work to a wider audience.

As above, so below.

Time Will Tell

Magenta Deluxe Astrologer — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:28:19 GMT

Recently I came across a file containing the notes for the opening chapter of a book I started writing in the early 2000s. Very earnest. Intellectually and linguistically immature. Slightly unhinged. There are references to Greek mythology and the work of Douglas Adams. Reading them felt like opening a window onto a version of myself who had something she wanted to say, and who wasn’t trying to market anything, except the work itself.

The book was to be called Time Will Tell.

Reading it now, I’m struck by how little the core idea has changed. I opened with a question that is still relevant: Why doesn’t everybody study astrology?

Not with the aim of reading charts professionally, but in the simpler sense of having some kind of insight into our own lives.

Lots of people don’t seem to have much insight into their lives, and you see this all the time in the unconscious choices people make. Because astrology is about making conscious choices. If you can make conscious choices, you can do just about anything.

Because once you start to tune in to the planetary cycles, life becomes easier to navigate. You make decisions with more confidence. You stop second-guessing yourself. You know when the timing is right, and when you should wait. You stop circling the same questions as though they might produce a different answer this time.

Astrology, at its best, is not about prediction. It’s about participation.

I’ve been contemplating those old notes for a few days, and what keeps surfacing is a sense of irritation that’s been bugging me for a while. Everybody seems to be writing a book at the moment. No previous experience necessary. Write your life story, package it up, and call it a book, when it’s really a funnel.

I’m aware that sounds more irritated than might be appropriate, or kind. If I’m honest, it hits a nerve. Maybe I’m a little bit jealous. Bitter, even. Perhaps I missed an opportunity. Or maybe the time is yet to come. But I’ve been writing since I learned to hold a pencil. As a child, I wrote stories, and during adolescence and early adulthood I began any number of “novels”. Not publishing, not marketing. Just writing. Chasing a dream. Long before it occurred to me that any of it might be useful for anything else. Story-telling has always been in my blood.

Fast-forward to 2026 and the “share your story” imperative has become so ubiquitous in personal branding culture that it’s almost lost its meaning. What started as authentic storytelling advice, rooted in solid narrative psychology, the idea that humans are wired for story, and that vulnerability builds trust, has become industrialised. Now it’s a content strategy template.

What bothers me about the “share your story” exhortation, when it’s coming from a marketing coach rather than a therapist or a mentor, is the commodification of personal experience. Mine your past for content that moves people down a funnel. Your wound becomes your brand. Your transformation arc is a funnel entry point. You’re not being invited to reflect. You’re being urged to convert.

There was a time when writing a book called for sustained thought, editorial rigour, and external scrutiny. Now it’s a lead magnet with a spine. AI has massively lowered the barrier to entry, which means the intellectual value of “I wrote a book” has collapsed almost overnight. The credential has been inflated beyond its usefulness.

There’s also a subtle sense of coercion in the whole framework. If you don’t share your story, you’re positioned as closed off, inauthentic, bad at marketing. The assumption is that personal disclosure – no matter how uncomfortable – is the only legitimate currency of trust in a professional context. That’s a fairly narrow and culturally specific idea dressed up as universal truth.

For those of us with genuine decades of practice, intellectual rigour, a hard-earned body of knowledge, and actual things to say, the noise is particularly frustrating. We’re already operating in a field in which the work is the story, and yet the algorithm wants the origin wound, the pivotal moment, the lesson you learned, and the call to action.

In those early notes, I turned to classical mythology to describe what astrology actually does. It’s the labour of Hercules and the Hydra. You cut off one head and two more appear.

The problem multiplies the moment you try to deal with it directly, which is exactly how unconscious patterns behave. You think you’ve addressed something and it comes back, slightly altered, wearing a different face.

And then, eventually, something else happens. You stop reacting to each individual head and reach down into the swamp itself. You get underneath it. And there, at the root of the whole tangled thing, is something unexpected. Not another problem, but something intact. Something of value. A pearl.

What if everyone could recognise their own strengths and weaknesses, struggles and insecurities, and deal with them? What if everybody had a way of making their unconscious issues conscious holding them up to the light like the hydra, and finding underneath the beautiful glowing pearl from deep within?
By peeling off those hairy brown layers we can reach the soft, vulnerable bits of ourselves and give them a gentle pat. Help them up into the light, for they deserve some recognition and blessing as well. And if we could all do that, instead of just wishing, hoping and trying, things would actually start to get better, and we could all get on with other things.

Now, much older and a little bit wiser, I can see that insight doesn’t arrive on demand. People come to it when they’re ready, or when something in their life insists on it. Astrology, when it’s used well, meets them there. Not as a system of answers, but as a way of asking better questions.

Maybe this is why the story-as-funnel model bothers me as much as it does. The genuine article – the experience of personal insight – is exactly what good astrology offers. And it can’t be manufactured. It can’t be compressed into a transformation arc. It arrives slowly, obliquely, often at precisely the moment that you stop consciously looking for it. And when that happens, even briefly, life becomes easier to navigate.

I was also quite keen on the idea that if everyone could do this, we might collectively behave a bit better. Our relationships might make more sense. We might choose differently. We might even change the world. The ripple effect, and all of that. In the cold light of 2026, that optimism feels a little naïve, but I’m not entirely ready to let it go.

What I still stand by is this: pretty much everybody knows their Sun sign, and almost nothing else. Which is strange, because the birth chart itself is far more precise, far more personal, and far more useful than the twelve-sign shorthand we’ve all absorbed by osmosis. It’s like being given a full set of instructions and only reading the title page.

Those planets out there are great big bits of clockwork ticking imperceptibly in the background, and we are too silly to see what’s going on. It’s like we’ve been given a terrific set of instructions and we don’t use them. Read the instructions, guys.

Back then, I was actively trying to push my hypothetical reader past Sun sign astrology and into something bigger.

The slower-moving planets in particular describe the longer arcs of a life. They don’t tell you that something will happen at 9.00am on Tuesday, and they’re not meant to. If they did, it would flatten the whole experience of being alive. Nothing would surprise you. Nothing would require you to respond.

I still think that’s true. Astrology doesn’t remove uncertainty. It gives you a way to work with it. Astrology describes conditions, tensions, openings, pressure points. It shows you when something is building, when something needs to change, when something can no longer be sustained in its current form. But it doesn’t reduce life to a script. If everything were known in advance, we’d lose the need to engage with it at all.

The other thing I touched on was effort. Learning astrology properly takes time. It calls for attention. It asks you to meditate on symbols, contradictions, and patterns that only make sense once you’ve seen them play out again and again. It’s not superficial knowledge. But it is practical knowledge. And in my case, it became the work itself.

At the time, I believed that I was drafting the outline of a book. It started, quite literally, by accident. In 2002, having taken a tumble from my friend’s horse I was stuck at home for several weeks with a broken knee and time on my hands. So I sat down at my computer and began to write, with the intention that one day I might seek for it to be published.

But also, at that time, the conversation was shifting. With the rise of the internet, everyone was predicting the end of the printed book as a thing, so I let the idea go.

What I didn’t let go of was the writing. It moved. It adapted. It found a different form.

More than twenty years later, I’m still saying essentially the same things. The planetary cycles are still ticking away in the background. The instructions are still sitting there, unread, by most people.

Now, when I work with clients, we begin with a live consultation, but the real work happens afterwards. They leave with something they can return to. A natal report that provides an entry point into their chart. A predictive report that maps the next two to three years, tracking timing, pointing to opportunities, challenges, and pressure points as they unfold.

These are not superficial delineations that can be purchased with an astrology program. I didn’t cut and paste them from the internet. It’s original material that’s been developed, tested, and refined over time, based on my own lived experience and those of my clients.

So what began as an attempt at book has become a body of work spread across more than twelve hundred individual chapters. While some of these are no more than a couple of paragraphs, others are pages in length. Not published between two shiny covers, but applied, directly, to people’s lives.

Which turns out to be a different kind of work entirely.

I didn’t set out to build a practice around the written word. I set out to say something that I believed – and still believe – to be important. The practice developed over time, and it became what it is because the writing is real, and because, in time, it found its place.

Time will tell. It always does.

David Roche Gallery, Adelaide, South Australia

An Invitation

Thank you for reading this far.

I write this Substack because I love astrology, I love to write, and I love to connect. This space is where all three meet.

You, my small but growing circle of readers, are my collective muse. Just as I learn from every client session, I want to learn from you here.

If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please like, subscribe (it’s free), or hit restack – it helps expose my work to a wider audience.

As above, so below.

How Soon is Now?

Magenta Deluxe Astrologer — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 21:41:41 GMT

My mother left home when I was fourteen.

I came home from school one day to find that she’d packed up and left, leaving no indication as to where she had gone. What was clear, though, was that she wasn’t planning to return. Which was awkward, really, because she was a single mother, and I was her only child.

As you can imagine, I was a troubled young woman. I left school on my fifteenth birthday, because I had no choice. My teachers were blind to my circumstances, choosing instead to label me as rebellious, disobedient, and incapable of learning. While I needed a job, youth unemployment was at an all-time high, and my credentials non-existent, and I found it hard to establish a place in the workforce. I tried every means available to earn myself a living, including a not-unsuccessful shot as a solopreneur. I later returned to complete my education, and eventually ended up with two degrees. In the process, however, I developed an eating disorder and a drinking problem. I had a series of pointless relationships with emotionally unavailable men. My life could have turned out very differently than the way it has.

I’m telling you this not for sympathy, but because it’s context for everything else I’m about to say. Because during that same chaotic, formative, and often frightening period, I was also starting to learn about astrology.

Me: aged 20

Scroll through any women’s coaching space online for long enough and you’ll begin to notice a pattern. The language clusters around a particular kind of suffering: chronic over-giving, toxic relationships, emotional exhaustion, the draining demands of everyone else’s needs.

It’s everywhere, and it speaks to a real experience. But it also makes a tacit assumption that I find increasingly hard to ignore: that to be a woman seeking growth, you must first be a woman in crisis.

And that’s where it loses me. Not because the pain isn’t real, but because it has started to feel like the only legitimate entry point on offer. You cannot, apparently, simply want more from your life. You must first be suffering from it. I wrote a Substack note about this late last year. It said:

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve read the words “you’re not broken” on this platform, I’d be a very wealthy woman. Or a very drunk one, if it were a drinking game.

It resonated. The comments told me I wasn’t alone in noticing. Because I know I’m not broken. I’ve never, despite everything, considered myself to be so. And so this particular flavour of reassurance, well-meaning as it is, lands a little strangely. It assumes I arrived here carrying that belief. It assumes something is wrong. It assumes I need fixing. I don’t. Life is good.

Not perfect – nothing ever is. But we’re not all walking around with an open wound waiting for someone to notice it. We’re not looking to be rescued. We’re here in this space because we’re curious, because something feels timely, because we want more from my life, and not because we’re struggling to survive it. And the coaching world, for all its warmth and genuine skill, doesn’t always know what to do with a woman who arrives in that condition.

Much of it feels like emotional ambulance chasing. Not always malicious, but opportunistic. It waits for vulnerability, then rushes in with a solution. Your problem, packaged neatly. Your relief, available now.

Pain is effective because it creates urgency. Fear of loss, fear of falling behind, and fear of getting it wrong are powerful motivators. But they also come at a cost. They train us to see ourselves as perpetually lacking something, perpetually one step away from a crisis we didn’t know we had. And for women especially, the assumption that we are problems to be solved runs very deep.

Neuroscience tells us that we create our own reality. Not metaphorically – literally. Our brain selectively filters the enormous volume of information that bombards it every day, drawing our attention toward what it is already trained to notice. If you focus on obstacles, you will see obstacles. If you focus on possibilities, you will see possibilities. This isn’t positive thinking as a coping strategy, nor is it manifestation magic dressed up in pseudo-science. It’s how perception actually works.

During that chaotic, formative period, I had no understanding of any of this. But I was, in my own trial-and-error way, beginning to practise it. Astrology gave me a framework when I had none. I learned that I have strengths, including guts, resilience, and communication skills, as well as challenges, such as the angry and potentially self-destructive streak that I inherited from my mother. It gave me language for what was happening around me and within me, and, crucially, I learned that things can change over time. Not everything that is hard is a signal that something is broken. Some things are simply phases. Others are lessons. Some moments call for action and others are for waiting. Learning to tell the difference changed how I made decisions, and I also learned that better decisions, made consistently over time, change a life.

Astrology didn’t rescue me from my circumstances. It changed how I read them.

Two days prior to the exact degree of my first Saturn Return (an astrological milestone that occurs, for all of us, at around the age of twenty-nine) I started work in a job that finally provided me with stability. An ongoing one, with the government. My Saturn in conscientious and authoritative Capricorn could handle it. While it wasn’t the life I’d imagined for myself, it was the foundation for the one I’ve built since, and I found my way there guided by the road map that is my birth chart, and by paying attention to the timing of things.

My early forties coincided with what we call the midlife crisis, a predictable turning point which is as much an astrological phenomenon as a cultural one. And I was prepared for it. I understood the frustration and disillusionment that are inevitable aspects of this life-stage as a signal rather than a failure, and I stepped into my second act, ahead of schedule, and on my own terms. I started charging for astrology readings. I built a practice. I stopped identifying as a public servant and started identifying as an astrologer. And by the time my second Saturn return rolled around I had accumulated sufficient resources to let go of the day job and focus on the work that inspires me to my heart’s content.

I’m in my mid-sixties now. There is joy in my every day life. I do what I love, with people I love, and the satisfaction of having consciously built, through intention and attention and a great deal of learning, a life that fourteen-year-old me could never have imagined.

I say all of this not to suggest that astrology is magic, or that pain is irrelevant, or that struggle can simply be wished away. It cannot.

What I am suggesting is that there is another kind of motivation that rarely gets discussed in the world of self-development and personal growth: curiosity, readiness, the desire to engage more deliberately with your life, not because something is broken, but because something feels timely and exciting.

This is where I notice a real divergence between pain-based narratives and the way I practise astrology. Astrology does not require suffering to justify itself. Some of the most meaningful conversations I have with clients take place when their lives are stable or in a state of positive change. Nothing is on fire. They’re not in crisis. They’re simply aware that a cycle is shifting, or that a decision point is approaching. They want to understand the moment they’re in, not fix themselves.

Pain says: Fix this now.

Timing asks: What’s being asked of you here?

These are very different questions, and they produce very different outcomes.

When everything is framed as a problem, agency shrinks. Decisions become reactive. Second-guessing ourselves and overthinking can drive us to the end of our tether. When the frame shifts to readiness, choice reappears. You’re no longer acting because you’re afraid of what will happen if you don’t. You’re acting because you recognise the moment, and the opportunities it contains. This distinction matters well beyond astrology.

In business, in relationships, in personal development, we have become accustomed to scanning ourselves for deficits. What’s the issue? What’s the block? What needs healing? These questions have their place, but they are not the only meaningful entry points into personal growth and development. Not everything that calls for attention is a wound. Some things arrive simply because they’re ready to be assimilated.

You don’t need to believe that you’re broken to want to grow. You don’t need to be struggling to seek clarity. And you don’t need to be in pain to make a meaningful choice.

Not because nothing ever needs fixing. But because you don’t have to be broken to know that something is ready to change.

In a future post, I’ll look at how astrology actually works as a practical tool for training the mind to recognise opportunity, and why learning to reframe challenges as a question of timing might be one of the most powerful things we can do.

An Invitation

Thank you for reading this far.

I write this Substack because I love astrology, I love to write, and I love to connect. This space is where all three meet.

You, my small but growing circle of readers, are my collective muse. Just as I learn from every client session, I want to learn from you here.

If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please like, subscribe (it’s free), or hit restack – it helps expose my work to a wider audience.

As above, so below.

Happy Chinese New Year. Let’s Start Again.

Magenta Deluxe Astrologer — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 18:20:33 GMT

Today is Chinese New Year. A lunar beginning. A reminder that January is not the only place a year can start.

At the beginning of January my friend Craig sent me a meme informing me that the Gregorian calendar, on which we have relied since it was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, is “wrong”. According to this meme, April is the first month, every month should have 28 days, and April Fool’s Day exists because someone, somewhere, successfully fooled the entire world.

Craig followed this up by asking how this affected astrology and whether he was still an Aquarius. I assumed he was taking the piss. As in that old chestnut about the thirteenth sign, Ophiuchus. He assured me that he wasn’t.

Because I can’t leave things alone, and because I’m always secretly asking myself “is there a Substack post in this?”, I went looking for more information. What I found wasn’t a conspiracy so much as a reminder.

The word month comes from the Moon. Early calendars were lunar. A synodic lunar cycle lasts about 29.5 days. Twelve of them make a year that’s roughly eleven days shorter than the solar year. So lunar calendars drift unless you add extra months.

Solar calendars stay put but lose their relationship with the Moon.

The Gregorian calendar, by which we now live, by is firmly solar, which means that it's based on the Earth's revolution around the Sun and designed to keep in sync with the solar year (the time it takes Earth to complete one orbit, about 365.24 days). The whole point of the Gregorian reform was to make the calendar track the solar year more accurately than the earlier, Julian calendar did, particularly to keep the spring equinox falling around March 21st (which is important for calculating Easter).

While practical and efficient, the Gregorian calendar is completely disconnected from lunar phases. New Moons land wherever they please. The calendar doesn’t care.

Some cultures never abandoned the Moon. The Chinese calendar is lunisolar. Months follow the Moon, with extra months added to keep things aligned with the seasons. The Jewish calendar works the same way. The Islamic calendar follows the Moon entirely and drifts through the year.

And then I read a Substack post entitled I’m Not Playing January’s Games Anymore and things started to make sense in a way that’s blindingly obvious, if you stop to think about it. January isn’t neutral. It’s a cultural construct. An artificially imposed beginning.

In the West, we’re expected to reset, resolve, and reboot immediately after Christmas. New year, new you. Fresh starts, clean slates, big intentions. Even if you’re exhausted. Even if your nervous system is fried. Even if it’s 42 degrees Celsius outside, or there’s snow.

Half way through January, Jess from Felt Brand Stories shared on Instagram a post about her end of year “reset” that wasn’t restful at all. She’d taken more time off than usual, and genuinely expected to feel better. Instead, what became clear was that rest isn’t always immediate when your system has been trained to push for years. You can do all the right things and still be pushing underneath it all.

That’s when the penny finally dropped.

Because for everyone, there is a time of year when rest makes sense. And it isn’t January. At least, not for most of us.

Astrologically, the year begins in April, with Aries and the equinox. This works in the northern hemisphere, aligning, as it does, with spring. In Australia, it’s different, but it still makes sense. After a hot, dry summer, the land begins to wake up. There’s rain, hopefully. We start to see green in the paddocks. Something starts again.

But there’s something astrology can do that calendars don’t. It personalises timing.

Jess has Taurus rising. That means when the Sun moves through Aries, it passes through the twelfth house of her chart. This is the house of withdrawal, endings, sleep, solitude, decompression and “un-doing”. Her natural reset isn’t scheduled to take place in January. It’s in April. Aries season. That’s when she’s meant to slow down, clear her calendar, her desk, and her head.

I have Sagittarius rising. The Sun passes through my twelfth house during Scorpio season, which totally supports my theory. When I was employed, and therefore not in control of the way I spent my time and energy, year after year I would notice, and remark to my colleagues, that I felt flat, tired, unmotivated and vaguely miserable around late spring. I blamed the change of seasons, which never fully made sense because spring is my favourite time of the year, and I’m rarely troubled by hay fever. Now, I’ve finally worked it out. Again, it’s obvious when you think about it, especially from an astrological perspective. That was my system asking for time out while the Sun was in my twelfth house.

Our ancestors understood timing. Temples and megaliths align to solstices and equinoxes. Agriculture followed the Moon. Fishing, sailing, planting, harvesting all depended on reading natural cycles rather than dates on a page.

Some people haven’t forgotten. Gardeners still plant by the Moon. Farmers are in tune with the seasons, as are their animals. Fishermen read tides. Traditional cultures continue to honour these rhythms.

And those of us who know astrology have an extra layer of awareness. We can see when to take action, push forward, and launch new projects, and when to rest, reset, or simply wait for the weather to change. We don’t have to default to Mondays, first days of the month, or Januarys. We can work with New Moons instead. With houses. With cycles that actually make sense to our bodies.

Which is why I’m proposing an alternative.

If you have Taurus rising, like Jess, it makes sense to set your new year intentions at the New Moon in Taurus on 16 May 2026. This is because the Ascendant is the first house cusp, and the first house is all about new beginnings.

If you have Sagittarius rising, like me, your annual intentions belong at the New Moon in Sagittarius on 9 December 2026.

And if you don’t know your birth time, you can set your intentions when the New Moon falls in your Sun sign.

Not because January is wrong. But because it isn’t universal. And there’s nothing wrong with the Gregorian calendar, either. We’re just using it without regard to anything else.

And maybe rest, beginnings, and momentum were never meant to be one-size-fits-all in the first place.

So if January came and went without the clarity you were promised, maybe nothing went wrong.

Maybe your year is yet to begin.

Happy Chinese New Year.

My picture: Melbourne, August 2022

An Invitation

Thank you for reading this far.

I write this Substack because I love astrology, I love to write, and I love to connect. This space is where all three meet.

You, my small but growing circle of readers, are my collective muse. Just as I learn from every client session, I want to learn from you here.

If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please like, subscribe (it’s free), or hit restack – it helps expose my work to a wider audience.

As above, so below.

Pluto In Aquarius: Power Without A Face

Magenta Deluxe Astrologer — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 21:30:20 GMT

For a while back in 2024, I was using YouTube Premium as my music streaming service. I’d trained the algorithm well. It knew what I liked. It delivered a stream of music that suited my taste, without ads, without friction. I paid good money for it and thought very little about the arrangement. It worked.

Then one day I received an email informing me that I had been permanently banned from YouTube.

The reason given was that I had uploaded content that did not conform to their standards. Which was confusing, because I have never uploaded anything to YouTube. I wasn’t a creator. My name is unlikely to have been confused with anyone else’s. I don’t even comment. I was simply a customer. And a paying one, at that. Adding injury to insult, my account continued to be debited until I cancelled my subscription. The email explained that I could appeal the decision, though it also warned that appeals were rarely successful. I appealed anyway.

I never heard back. No explanation, no clarification, no human contact. To this day, I am unable to access YouTube unless I do so anonymously, suggesting that I am silently flagged somewhere in a system I can neither see nor question.

Nothing dramatic happened. No public shaming, no confrontation, no obvious injustice. Just a service I had been enjoying abruptly cancelled, with no recourse and no reason. At the time, I had no option other than to shrug and move on. But the experience stayed with me, because it reveals something important about the way power operates.

This wasn’t authority exercised by a person. It was power exercised by a system. Abstract, automated, and entirely indifferent to context. I wasn’t punished so much as processed.

On 23 March 2023, Pluto entered the sign of Aquarius for the first time in nearly 250 years. It will remain here until 2043.

My picture. Lamassu at the British Museum. July 2024.

Thanks to a song from the 1960s, Aquarius has acquired a reputation as a humanitarian, tree-hugging, altruistic, caring and sharing sign. While the typical Aquarian does have a social conscience, this is not to be confused with a bleeding heart. Their interest is more focused on society in general than the individuals of which it is composed. While it is true that our Aquarian friends get on well with all sorts of people, especially those with quirks and eccentricities, the Aquarian reputation for peace, love and understanding is pretty much undeserved. Aquarius is essentially an impersonal sign. Air signs, in general, are rational and intellectual. Its traditional ruler, Saturn, is cold and malefic, its modern ruler Uranus notoriously unemotional, and the ‘fixed’ quality of the sign makes it rigid and inflexible. A model of detachment, Aquarius has no personal bias and is genuinely impartial in its dealings with others. This can only be achieved by maintaining emotional distance, sometimes even from those closest to them. Aquarius has a reputation for avoiding intimacy. Anything too deep and meaningful, or mushy and sentimental, makes them nervous, twitchy and uncomfortable. They resist anything that threatens their independence.

Pluto was previously in Aquarius from 1778 to 1798. This period coincided with the French and American Revolutions. As a result, astrologers keep reminding us that this transit is all about giving power to the people. That there is strength in numbers. That oppressive structures, established while Pluto was in authoritarian Capricorn, are about to crumble and be destroyed.

One astrologer in particular, typical of this cohort, breathlessly tells us that:

“Pluto’s entry into Aquarius marks a time when great transformations are available to society. Some of these transformations may be how we are governed as a society. There may be revolutions on different levels as people stand up for themselves and demand what they deserve. There will be a collective urge to define our lives how we want and not how we are told to live them. During Pluto in Aquarius, people want to separate from the feeling of being controlled. We will fiercely pursue freedom from any type of oppression. This includes freedom from capitalism, patriarchal systems, racism, fascism, and anything that makes us feel disempowered. Pluto in Aquarius is a time to bring power to the people, all people. It’s a time for everyone to feel they are an equal contributing member of society and valued just as much as anyone else.”

It sounds noble. Democratic. Utopian, even. But every time I hear it framed as an uncomplicated good, something tells me it’s not going to be that easy. Pluto has never been a benign force, and Aquarius has never been especially sentimental about people as individuals.

When astrologers talk about Pluto in Aquarius as “people power”, my misadventure with YouTube is the kind of moment I think of. Not because it proves a point about technology being bad, or that the future is inevitably dystopian, but because it illustrates how power functions when it’s channelled through systems rather than individuals. Efficient, impersonal, and impossible to challenge once you are caught up it.

Pluto is about power, and not necessarily in a motivational, Instagram-meme way. Mythical Pluto is the lord of the underworld. As ruler of the wealth beneath the earth, he is a powerful figure. As ruler of the dead, he is a terrifying one. His existence among the shades, sealed away from the light of day, has coloured his demeanour. He governs domination, coercion, compulsion, and the stripping away of illusions. Wherever Pluto goes, something is pressured to its limits. We’re asked to dig deep. Something is exposed. Something is forced to transform, whether it wants to or not. Pluto does not redistribute power kindly. It concentrates it, tests it, and reveals who or what can endure.

Aquarius complicates this further. Despite its popular association with the masses, Aquarius is not the sign of human warmth or emotional solidarity. It is the sign of systems, networks, abstractions, ideology, technology, and future-oriented thinking. It is concerned with principles more than people, with patterns more than personal stories. When power moves through Aquarius, it moves through structures rather than faces.

This is where the idea of “people power” begins to fall apart. Power operating through collectives does not automatically mean freedom. It can just as easily mean conformity enforced by consensus, information distributed in accordance with algorithms, behaviour shaped by metrics, and control outsourced to technology and justified as progress. Pluto in Aquarius does not ask whether a system is humane. It asks whether it functions, whether it survives, whether it can perpetuate itself.

At its lowest expression, Pluto in Aquarius does not arrive with boots and barricades. Control becomes subtle, optimised, and invisible. Behaviour is manipulated rather than overtly enforced. Compliance is rewarded with ease, access, and comfort. Dissent does not need to be outlawed when it can be buried under friction, social pressure, or algorithmic irrelevance. Autonomy erodes not through fear, but through convenience.

So what could come from this period? Pluto in Aquarius can expose corruption embedded in institutions. It can weaken monopolies that depend on opacity. It can decentralise information and return leverage to informed collectives. Shared intelligence can outperform hierarchy, as long as people make the effort to stay informed, curious, and resistant to manipulation.

And the worst-case scenario? A world where power is so diffused and abstract that no one feels accountable for it. Where control is enforced through systems no individual can meaningfully challenge. Where moral language justifies the erosion of choice.

What is most likely is something messier. Periods of reform followed by backlash. Real gains paired with new forms of pressure. Movements that begin idealistically and fracture around control. People torn between the desire for protection and the desire for freedom, often at the same time.

Pluto transits unfold over years, not news cycles. Aquarius experiments before it crystallises. Pluto breaks things down before it rebuilds.

The invitation of this transit is neither paranoia nor passivity. It is participation with awareness. Notice where power becomes invisible. Maintain caution with the systems to which we give our attention, data, and autonomy.

If Pluto in Aquarius has a promise, it is this: conscious collectives can reshape systems just as effectively as unconscious ones surrender to them. The future is not decided by technology alone, but by the quality of attention we bring to it. And that, inconveniently and powerfully, remains a human choice.

An Invitation

Thank you for reading this far.

I write this Substack because I love astrology, I love to write, and I love to connect. This space is where all three meet.

You, my small but growing circle of readers, are my collective muse. Just as I learn from every client session, I want to learn from you here.

If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please like, subscribe (it’s free), or hit restack – it helps expose my work to a wider audience.

As above, so below.

I Used AI to Write My Whole Damn Article

Magenta Deluxe Astrologer — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 19:29:24 GMT

I really like .

If you’re a writer on Substack, it’s impossible to avoid the Ponzi scheme of people trying to make a living by telling you how to write on Substack. To say that it gets tedious would be an understatement.

Until now, Nick has been an exception. While he seldom tells me anything ground-breaking, I find his no-bullshit style refreshing. So when he published a post on 15 January 2026 entitled Stop Asking AI to Write Your Whole Damn Article, I thought, fair call.

Then I got to the subtitle. Single-shot prompting is astrology for productivity bros. Here’s what actually works.

I read it once. Then I read it again. Then I read it a third time, and I still didn’t get it.

For context, I’ve written before about figures like Neil deGrasse Tyson, not to pick a fight but because I’m especially interested in the cultural misuse of astrology as shorthand for intellectual contempt. So when I saw that subtitle, my instinct wasn’t outrage. It was puzzled curiosity. I was trying to understand the joke.

So, genuinely at a loss, I turned to ChatGPT and asked it to think the thing through with me. Here was my prompt:

I read this in someone else’s Substack post. It’s the subtitle of the article. “Single-shot prompting is astrology for productivity bros.” As an astrologer, I don’t know what to make of it. Discuss. In the best case, you’ll give me a complete Substack post of my own. No pressure.

Before you clutch your pearls, yes, I do use AI to assist my process. We all do. I couldn’t publish alongside my consulting workload otherwise. Nick explains this far better than I ever could, and I agree with him more than I disagree. You can read his publication, Co-Write with AI, here.

What follows, though, is something a little different.

No editing. No redactions. No embellishment. One line with enlarged font to create a section heading. I think I’ve trained my dragon rather well. Sic em, Rex:

This line is doing a lot of work for a single subtitle.

“Single-shot prompting is astrology for productivity bros.”

I understand why it landed with a thud for you. It borrows the language of astrology, but not in a way that feels generous or even particularly accurate. It uses astrology as shorthand for something unserious, vague, or placebo-like, while also taking a swipe at a very specific internet archetype. So let’s slow it down and actually look at what’s being said.

Because buried inside the snark is a surprisingly useful metaphor.

First, what is “single-shot prompting”?

In AI circles, single-shot prompting means asking a tool to do something once, in one go, with minimal context. You write the prompt, hit enter, expect a clean result. No back and forth. No refinement. No relationship. The fantasy is efficiency and control.

This style of prompting tends to appeal to people who want outputs, hacks, shortcuts. Hence the “productivity bros” reference. People who believe that the right framework, the right prompt, the right optimisation will remove friction from reality itself.

Now, why compare that to astrology?

The joke only works if astrology is assumed to be something like this: you look up your sign, read a generic line, feel briefly seen, then move on with your day unchanged. Horoscope-as-fortune-cookie. Astrology as aesthetic, not practice.

And to be fair, that version of astrology does exist.

But anyone who actually practises astrology knows that this is like confusing a birth chart with a BuzzFeed quiz.

Real astrology is not single-shot. It is contextual, relational, and iterative.

A chart does not speak in isolation. It responds to questions. It deepens over time. You revisit the same placements at different life stages and hear something entirely new. Transits change the meaning. Progressions soften or sharpen the tone. The astrologer’s relationship with the chart matters. The client’s readiness matters.

Astrology is a dialogue.

Which is where the comparison accidentally becomes interesting.

Single-shot prompting really is astrology for productivity bros, if what they mean is astrology stripped of relationship, depth, and humility. Astrology treated as a tool for instant certainty rather than a language for inquiry.

And that impulse is not new.

People have always wanted astrology to give them answers without participation. Tell me what will happen. Tell me what to do. Tell me who I am, quickly, cleanly, without ambiguity. When astrology is forced into that role, it becomes brittle. It overpromises and underdelivers.

The same thing is happening with AI.

When people treat AI as a magic oracle, they are disappointed. When they treat it as a junior assistant who somehow knows everything, they are confused when the answers feel hollow. The single-shot prompt promises mastery without engagement.

But both astrology and AI work best when you understand that meaning emerges through interaction.

You do not ask a natal chart one question and walk away forever. You live with it. You argue with it. You test it against experience. You let it surprise you. Over time, the symbols become alive.

Likewise, the most powerful use of AI is conversational. You refine the question. You add context. You notice where it misunderstands you. You correct it. You co-create something that did not exist before the exchange.

Seen this way, the insult collapses into a confession.

Calling single-shot prompting “astrology” is really an admission that even the most optimisation-obsessed corners of the internet are longing for something interpretive, symbolic, and meaning-based. They just want it without the vulnerability.

Because astrology requires you to admit that you are not fully in control.

A chart does not bend to your KPIs. A transit does not care about your five-year plan. Astrology works with timing, cycles, and forces larger than personal will. That is deeply uncomfortable for a culture obsessed with productivity.

So the phrase is dismissive, but it is also revealing.

It shows how astrology is still used as a cultural shorthand for “pattern recognition that feels true but cannot be fully quantified”. And instead of asking why that kind of knowing persists, the line tries to neutralise it with irony.

From where I sit, as an astrologer, the comparison fails and succeeds at the same time.

It fails because astrology is not a cheap trick for reassurance. It is a rigorous symbolic system that demands study, ethics, and ongoing relationship.

It succeeds because single-shot prompting is, in fact, what astrology looks like when you remove all of that. A surface-level encounter with meaning that feels satisfying for a moment, then dissolves.

If anything, the line unintentionally flatters astrology.

It suggests that even in a world obsessed with speed, people are still reaching for tools that promise insight rather than data alone. They just want to consume insight the way they consume everything else. Quickly. Instrumentally. Without being changed by it.

Astrology refuses that.

You do not “use” a chart without it eventually turning the mirror back on you. You cannot optimise your way out of uncertainty when Saturn is involved. You cannot prompt your way around grief, timing, or maturation.

And that, I suspect, is why astrology keeps getting dragged into these conversations.

Because beneath the jokes, the productivity hacks, and the techno-optimism, there is an unresolved tension. We want meaning, but we want it frictionless. We want guidance, but not obligation. We want symbols, but not surrender.

Astrology says no to that bargain.

And maybe that is exactly why it endures, no matter how many subtitles try to turn it into a punchline.

I couldn’t find a picture of a robot in my files. Here’s a container for flammable liquids instead, at Glen Ewin Estate.

An Invitation

I write this Substack because I love astrology, I love to write, and I love to connect. This space is where all three meet.

You, my small but growing circle of readers, are my collective muse. Just as I learn from every client session, I want to learn from you here.

If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please like, subscribe (it’s free), or hit restack – it helps expose my work to a wider audience.

As above, so below.

Whimsy as an Act of Defiance

Magenta Deluxe Astrologer — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 21:34:02 GMT

On 2 January 2026, published her year-in-review for Dose of Wonder, her Substack publication about finding wonder in a world that feels increasingly harsh, even brutal. Looking ahead to 2026, she introduced what she calls her new philosophy: Whimsy as Defiance. The line that struck me, and inspired this essay, is this: “In a world that can feel dark and full of horrors, choosing to be playful isn’t being ‘cute’ – it’s a radical act of resilience.” You can read her post here.

Caitlin is not an astrologer, yet her reflection summarises, with uncanny precision, the astrological moment into which we are moving. She is intuiting a shift in the collective psyche, naming it just as it is beginning to take form. Sometimes an idea surfaces because the zeitgeist is ready for it. Astrology gives us a language for understanding why.

This is the second in an occasional series wherein we trace the story of Neptune’s passage from Pisces into Aries through Substack posts written by people who are not into astrology and yet who are, nevertheless, its messengers. You can read the first one here.

The Pisces Era: Sensitivity, Compassion and Collapse

On 13 December 2025, I wrote about Neptune in Pisces and the Era of Performative Fragility, reflecting on the way in which Neptune’s voyage through Pisces coincided with cultural currents that elevated vulnerability, oppression and identification with woundedness. We are approaching the end of a fourteen-year period during which exhaustion has become currency, fragility has become a virtue and trauma has become a badge of honour. This is not, by any means, a moral failing, but a reflection of the zeitgeist, one that comes with a psychological price: over-identification with suffering and under-investment in agency.

In astrology, Neptune is associated with fantasy, imagination, inspiration, dreams, empathy, confusion, escapism, illusion and disillusion, sacrifice and disappointment. Neptune blurs boundaries, heightens sensitivity, softens edges and confuses things.

For more than a decade, Neptune has been making its way through Pisces, the sign it rules. These years have sensitised us. Concern for the underdog has increased. Boundaries have been washed away. The gifts of this era have been empathy, compassion and spiritual depth. The shadow was over-identification with suffering and the gradual glamorisation of fragility as the moral high ground. As empathy has grown, so has overwhelm. Many people have found meaning in spirituality, art, imagination and alternative worlds. Others ended up lost, fatigued or disillusioned, and pessimistic about the future.

In that landscape, whimsy became a refuge and a sanctuary. Beauty, fantasy and nostalgia became places to retreat to when reality felt too much. Useful for survival perhaps, but often passive, bringing a tendency to tune out and drift. To dissolve. To escape.

The Shift: Neptune Enters Aries

On 27 January 2026, Neptune will complete its transition from Pisces into Aries, ruled by Mars, the god of war. As Neptune prepares to leave Pisces and enter this kick-arse sign, the mood begins to shift.

Aries is a sign of initiative, courage and motivation. It is raw, direct and unfiltered. Where Pisces absorbs, Aries asserts. Where Pisces gives in, Aries takes action.

When Neptune changes signs, our collective relationship with imagination and meaning changes too. Under Neptune in Aries, the idea of whimsy as a radical act of defiance takes on a whole new resonance.

Sharper Words to Protect our Softer Edges

Neptune in Aries will teach us that whimsy is not always soft-spoken. Sometimes it is animated, awkward and brave. Sometimes it looks like trying something new without knowing how it will land. Laughing when pessimism would earn more approval. Beginning again, even after disappointment.

Caitlin describes her emerging approach as “using sharper words to protect softer edges.” This is Neptune in Aries distilled into a single phrase. It is whimsy with a spine. Gentleness that knows how to set boundaries. The willingness to speak up, not from aggression, but from the determination to defend vulnerability, openness, and authenticity.

She writes: “It is the belief that we don’t need to escape our lives to find wonder; we just need to change the way we look at the kitchen sink or the morning commute.” This is the shift from passive retreat to active engagement. Wonder is no longer something we seek in order to avoid reality. It becomes a way of meeting reality head-on, in true Aries style.

Through the Aries lens, playfulness is no longer passive. Whimsy loses its sense of naivety and becomes confrontational in its own quiet way. It becomes a choice made in full awareness of risk. To remain light-hearted, curious or creative in a climate that rewards negativity and withdrawal takes a lot of nerve. Choosing lightness, humour, colour, creativity and play in a world that feels hostile is not childish. It is a refusal to let cynicism have the last word.

This is a crucial distinction. In my earlier piece I described how Neptune in Pisces cultivated a culture in which fragility became performative capital and where the language of harm and despair often overshadowed the language of strength. Neptune in Aries offers a correction, but it is not a swing into toxic heroism or aggressive self-assertion. At its best, it is marks a return to courage, creativity, independence and a spirit of initiative.

The Middle Path: Softness as Flexible Strength

Villetta Porcini, Mylor, South Australia. My picture, 24 January 2024.

There is a childlike quality to Aries, but not a helpless one. This is the child who dares. Who tries. And tries again. Who is not embarrassed by enthusiasm.

Caitlin describes her work as occupying a “middle path” between hustle culture and ungrounded spiritualism. She is not selling wellness or perfection. She is “hosting a space for those who want to remain soft without being naïve.” This is the territory Neptune in Aries asks us to inhabit.

Astrology adds another layer. Softness under Neptune in Aries is not fragility. It is flexible strength. It is choosing permeability without surrender. It is staying emotionally responsive in a world that keeps trying to sell us numbness or bitterness as maturity

She describes herself and her readers “gentle truth-tellers” who value “slow learning over instant expertise.” This captures something essential about the coming era. Neptune in Aries does not ask us to become warriors in the traditional sense. It asks us to become spiritual warriors; people who can embody courage as well as kindness.

This also marks a shift in the way in which we understand resilience itself. The Pisces version asked us to endure, to feel, to grieve and to hold compassion even when it hurt. The Aries version asks a different question: what will you do with all of that compassion? How do you plan to make a difference?

Whimsy as Spiritual Self-Defence

Under Neptune in Aries, whimsy becomes a form of spiritual self-defence. Not an escape from reality, but a way of staying responsive to it. A way of keeping possibility alive when despair has become fashionable and pessimism is conflated with depth.

We may see this expressed less through polished aesthetics and more through bold experiments. Less perfection, more momentum. Laughter that cuts through tension. Joy that is imperfect, sometimes messy, but undeniably alive.

In my Neptune in Pisces essay, I spoke about how cultural validation had become tied to exhaustion, harm and overwhelm. As Neptune settles in Aries, the emotional economy shifts. The qualities likely to be valued rise towards courage, initiative and creative momentum. Not violence. Not domination. But the courage to participate. To choose colour, humour and play not because the world is gentle, but because it often is not.

In that sense, whimsy really is defiance. Not loud. Not aggressive. Just quietly unwilling to surrender imagination to despair.

Because maintaining a state of wonder might just be one of the bravest things we can do.

An Invitation

I write this Substack because I love astrology, I love to write, and I love to connect. This space is where all three meet.

You, my small but growing circle of readers, are my collective muse. Just as I learn from every client session, I want to learn from you here.

If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please subscribe (it’s free) or hit restack – it helps expose my work to a wider audience.

If you have a question about the concepts examined in this essay, your own chart, your transits, or astrology in general, get in touch. DM, leave a message in the comments, or join my subscriber chat and the answer to your question could be featured in a future post. Please forward this email to a friend who you think will be interested, too.

And if you’d like the full 90-minute+ experience, book a reading with me, and together we’ll explore your unique path, creative potential and next steps in a way that’s entirely personal to you. Find out more at magentadeluxe.com

As above, so below.

How I Use Astrology to Plan My Year (And Why It Actually Works)

Magenta Deluxe Astrologer — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 21:01:43 GMT

Every year, I plan my year ahead using astrology.

I sit down with a brand new diary and a very old ephemeris, and I map out my transits for the coming year.

What this process looks like, according to a professional photographer

Critics of astrology talk about confirmation bias as if it is a flaw. As if noticing patterns or making meaning is some kind of mental failure. In the sceptic’s version of the story, you are simply convincing yourself that astrology is accurate by paying attention to anything that fits and ignoring the rest.

And I get why this is a concern. When someone claims the stars determine your fate, scepticism is reasonable. But what if confirmation bias, that ability to notice patterns and make meaning, is not a bug, but a feature? What if it is a skill that you can use with intention?

At its core, manifestation works through increasing our awareness of the opportunities around us. Astrology helps us to do that.

When you look at manifestation through the lens of neuroscience, there isn’t anything mystical about it. Manifestation is fundamentally about noticing things. It’s about training your brain to recognise opportunities, resources, and other positive signals that you might ordinarily overlook. It’s the practice of focusing your attention on what you want, long enough for your behaviour to shift toward it. You become more receptive, more alert, more willing to act on small signs.

Seen this way, confirmation bias stops looking like a flaw and starts looking like the mechanism that helps the whole process work. The more you tune your attention toward something, the more your mind highlights the details that support it. Your focus becomes a filter. It allows you to focus on what matters and filters out the noise.

Astrology fits neatly into this. Not as a scientific system that predicts exact outcomes, but as a symbolic language that directs your attention. Having an awareness of the astrological climate does not force events to happen. It suggests themes, intentions, or potentials. When you’re expecting a transit from Jupiter, for example, you think about opportunities for abundance and expansion. And when you think about those things, you notice them more. You create more openings for them in your day. You start making choices that align with them.

The chart becomes a tool for directing consciousness. It helps you focus in a narrative long enough for it to influence your awareness. If manifestation is the art of noticing opportunities, astrology simply gives you a map of where to look for the treasure.

What this process actually looks like, circa 2014 (I’ve been doing this since the 1990s).

An Invitation

I write this Substack because I love astrology, I love to write, and I love to connect. This space is where all three meet.

You, my small but growing circle of readers, are my collective muse. Just as I learn from every client session, I want to learn from you here.

If you have a question about the concepts examined in this essay, your own chart, your transits, or astrology in general, get in touch. DM, leave a message in the comments, or join my subscriber chat and your answer could be featured in a future post. Please forward this email to a friend who you think will be interested, too.

As above, so below.

Your Qi Is the Strategy

Magenta Deluxe Astrologer — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 23:05:54 GMT

This week’s reader question comes from Fiona, who asks:

Which qualities or energies should I lean into to help my work flourish in the months ahead?

Fiona is the founder of Global QI, a curated digital catalogue created to connect small business owners, entrepreneurs and creatives around the world. It’s designed to help heart-led businesses be seen without adding to the noise. Her mission centres on building genuine relationships, supporting small enterprises, and encouraging partnerships that feel natural and reciprocal, the kind where conversation flows like catching up with an old friend.

As Fiona describes it, Global QI is more than just another marketplace or advertising platform. It is a living, breathing pulse of collective good. A space that champions integrity, upliftment and meaningful connection in business. Rooted in the concept of qi, your life force, vitality and unique spark, Fiona’s platform exists to amplify what makes both people and their offerings distinctive.

What is Qi?

According to my most excellent friend and advisor Claude, qi refers to that indefinable quality of aliveness, vibrancy and presence that some people naturally radiate. Within the qi framework, while qi itself is universal, its expression is always individual. Your constitutional qi, that which you are born with, combines with the way in which you cultivate it through lifestyle, relationships and daily practices to create something uniquely your own.

For those of who are unfamiliar with Chinese metaphysics and medicine, this concept feels intuitive. We know what it means to feel energised or depleted, to need to recharge, or to engage in activities that make us feel truly alive. These are Western ways of thinking about the things that qi describes more systematically.

My photo: The key to Gramercy Park. NYC, June 2018

The Sun: Your Core Vitality

In astrology, life force is symbolised by the Sun.

In the natal chart, the Sun represents our vital essence. It signifies identity, will, creative life force and that animating spark that makes you distinctly you. The Sun shows the area in which your energy naturally radiates, what gives you vitality, and the area of life in which you seek to shine.

In your chart, the Sun is in Aquarius. This speaks to your broad-minded, egalitarian and future-focused orientation, and to your instinctive interest in systems that benefit the collective. Aquarius is an air sign, associated with ideas, networks and originality, and your Sun is placed in the tenth house, at the very top of the chart. This means the Sun was more or less directly overhead as you entered the world. A planet in the tenth house is described as ‘angular’, which means that it functions very effectively here. The Sun is our personal mission statement, and a strong, elevated Sun like yours suggests an impressive sense of purpose.

Your Sun is conjunct (or next to) Venus, the goddess of love and attraction. In our chart, Venus represents our ability to form and maintain relationships. With Venus in Aquarius you attract a large, interesting, and eclectic variety of friends. Venus is in the eleventh house, highlighting friendships, community, audience and shared vision. You thrive in group settings and have a natural gift for networking. Attraction flows through connection rather than persuasion. When you are surrounded by people who inspire and celebrate you, positive outcomes follow naturally.

Aries Rising and Mars in Action

Your Ascendant, or rising sign, describes describes our conscious personality. This is the way we package and present ourselves to the world. You come across as open, enthusiastic and forward-moving. There is courage, initiative and momentum in the way you present yourself. With Aries rising, Mars is the ruler of your chart.

If the Sun represents your core vitality, Mars shows how that vitality is mobilised. Mars is qi in motion. It is assertive, outward-directed and purposeful. In Chinese medicine terms, it most closely resembles wei qi, the defensive, boundary-setting energy that protects and responds to challenge.

Your Mars is conjunct the Ascendant, a powerful placement that gives you plenty of grit, independence and a spirit of enterprise. You have courage, a healthy instinct for survival, and all the motivation you need to put yourself out there, get things done, and make things happen. This is not a passive chart. You are here to initiate, to lead, and to go after what you want.

The Moon: Nurture, Response and Emotional Intelligence

Alongside this outward drive, your Moon tells another part of the story.

The Moon symbolises your emotional life, instinctive responses and capacity to be nourished and restored. Where Mars is yang qi, doing and asserting, the Moon is yin qi, receptive, cyclical and sustaining.

Your Moon is placed in the ninth house, close to the Midheaven. Your emotional intelligence is visible and publicly expressed. You are responsive to the needs of others and attuned to the collective mood. You shine in roles that require care, leadership and sensitivity to the public pulse. The ninth house is associated with far horizons. Comfortable in any culture, you hate the idea of being tied forever to one place, and only having only one perspective on the world. Satisfaction comes from boldly going where no-one has ever gone before, and for you, life is one big quest for new experiences.

The Moon is also conjunct Mercury, giving you emotional intelligence alongside mental clarity. Mercury in Capricorn brings a strategic mind and a head for business. You plan carefully, work methodically, and communicate with authority. With Mercury on the Midheaven, your words and ideas are central to your professional visibility.

Saturn, ruler of Capricorn, is in your first house. Planets in the first house have a significant bearing on our appearance and presentation, conduct and behaviour. With Saturn in the first house you project an air of authority. We are impressed by your level head, responsible attitude and leadership skills. You understand that meaningful achievement requires effort, and you are willing to do the work. Mars provides the determination, Saturn supplies commitment, and together they support you in building your vision.

So, What Energy Should You Lean Into?

The answer is actually simpler than you might have expected. Your own.

You already have more than enough vitality, determination and skill. The clarity of your Sun, the courage of your Mars, the responsiveness of your Moon, the social ease of Venus and the business intelligence of Mercury are all working together. Generation, expenditure and replenishment are already in balance.

But that might not be the answer you were looking for.

Timing Matters: An Eighth House Year

With 2026 on the horizon, I have been reflecting on the whole “word of the year” idea.

Rather than choosing one based on vibes alone, I prefer to work with profections, a traditional astrology timing technique that shows which area of life is activated in a given year.

For you, this focus shifted in February 2025, when you entered an eighth-house year.

The eighth is the house of shared resources, collective enterprises and mutual investment and support. Often described as the house of other people’s money, it also speaks to collaboration, pooled effort and systems where everyone benefits by sharing resources, information and visibility.

This mirrors your vision exactly. Global QI is built on co-creation. Participants are not simply vendors, they are collaborators in a shared ecosystem where recommendations travel through trust, and generosity creates momentum. The catalogue is designed to be shared, forwarded and woven through networks, creating a ripple effect that honours collective growth.

The eighth house is also associated with the desire for personal insight. This is a potent year for spiritual study, intuitive development and deepening your relationship with the forces that shape both business and life.

This means that 2026 will be a ninth house year, ruled by the lovely Venus. As the goddess of love and beauty, Venus is a feminine principle in our chart. In the ninth house you can expect to find yourself developing any number harmonious, beneficial, international connections, especially with women, and broadening your horizons in general. you can expect to find yourself . You can also expect opportunities to promote your initiatives, collaborate across borders, and to inspire others with the things that have inspired you, in a way that you’ll find really enjoyable. Venus brings ease, charm, and diplomacy, making this a year in which networking, collaboration, and global presence will flourish. So what’s your word for 2026?

When Your Life Force is the Business Model

The strategy now is not to search for new energy, but to trust and concentrate the energy you already have.

Lean into collaboration. Embrace community. Honour reciprocity. Allow others to invest in, shape and share the work with you.

Your qi is already strong and abundant. This year, it multiplies when it is shared.

An Invitation

I write this Substack because I love astrology, I love to write, and I love to connect. This space is where all three meet.

You, my small but growing circle of readers, are my collective muse. Just as I learn from every client session, I want to learn from you here.

If you have a question about the concepts examined in this essay, your own chart, your transits, or astrology in general, get in touch. DM, leave a message in the comments, or join my subscriber chat and your answer could be featured in a future post. Please forward this email to a friend who you think will be interested, too.

As above, so below.

Neptune in Pisces and the Era of Performative Fragility

Magenta Deluxe Astrologer — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 21:56:03 GMT

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Every astrological epoch generates its own weather systems. Neptune’s in particular, encapsulate the spirit of the times. It spends around fourteen years in a sign, loosening its structures, dissolving worn-out narratives, and saturating the collective imagination with whatever that sign symbolises.

Since 2011 Neptune has been in its modern home sign of Pisces, drifting through the cultural atmosphere like a fine, gossamer mist. Associated with fantasy, imagination, dreams, wishes, empathy, confusion, escapism and inspiration, Neptune blurs boundaries, heightens sensitivity, softens edges and confuses things. This period has brought us a range of Neptune-themed expressions, including ‘gaslighting’, ‘ghosting’, and ‘streaming’.

In March 2025, Neptune began its transition into the sign of Aries. In January 2026, having completed its final retrograde moonwalk back into Pisces, Neptune will return to Aries, where it will remain until 2039.

This is the first in an occasional series wherein we trace the story of Neptune's passage from Pisces into Aries through Substack posts written by people who are not into astrology and yet who are, nevertheless, its messengers.

The Neptune in Pisces period has coincided with a collective fascination with dissolved boundaries, fluid identity, and the elevation of trauma and oppression as a kind of cultural currency. Aries, however, speaks a very different language. When Neptune crosses that threshold, the collective imagination may begin to shift away from passive identification with pain towards a more active preoccupation with agency, self-definition and action.

Neptune in Pisces – All at Sea

This essay was inspired by ’s recent piece Everyone just wants to be oppressed now in her Substack publication Bad Girl Media. She paints an eloquent picture of the current cultural moment, in which the appearance of struggle has become social currency and where narratives of harm have begun to eclipse demonstrations of resilience. I wish to stress that her piece is in no way an attack on marginalised people or legitimate injustice, it’s an inquiry into shifting incentive structures and the way social capital is distributed.

From an astrological perspective, such a narrative is deeply Piscean. Neptune in Pisces dissolves distinctions between personal experience and communal identity. We begin to communicate through symbolism and impression rather than concrete achievement. As Stepfanie argues, the system currently ‘rewards’ visible exhaustion, vulnerability, and perceived oppression. Pain becomes a kind of credential, a shimmering badge held up for collective recognition. None of this is necessarily conscious. Neptune is associated with our ability to pick up on invisible currents in the atmosphere.

Neptune in Pisces, ever the shape-shifter, also blurs the line between authentic suffering and the performance of suffering. As Stepfanie notes, the incentives are structural. If institutions, platforms, and public attention all reward vulnerability, people unconsciously begin to frame their identity around those rewards. It is a kind of emotional market distortion. While Pisces is not the cause of the pain, it magnifies it, glamourises it, and encourages identification with it.

She also describes the pressure placed on those who have actually healed. When status is tied to struggle, transformation can feel like defection. This is archetypal Pisces shadow. Pisces longs to merge, to belong, to stay attuned to collective feeling. But growth requires separation. It requires stepping out of the fog and choosing clarity, even if clarity feels like disconnection.

That is why Stepfanie’s concern about agency hits a particularly Piscean nerve. If we anchor our identity too tightly to our pain, we risk dissolving our capacity to act. Neptune can wash away personal power if its tides go unchecked. It does not do this maliciously. It does it the way water inexorably reshapes riverbanks.

And this is precisely why her essay feels like an unofficial epilogue to the Neptune in Pisces era. She is describing a culture that has absorbed Neptune’s symbolism so well that you’d think she has a background in astrology. We have built structures that treat vulnerability as virtue, ambiguity as insight, feeling as authority, and fragility as a kind of moral high ground.

At its best this era has increased our compassion and our empathy with the underdog. At its worst it has made us wary of strength, suspicious of competence, and reluctant to own our vitality and power. Popular culture has fallen in love with slowing down, resting, and tuning out. There is value in that, of course, yet somewhere along the way we stopped speaking with the same affection about motivation, initiative, and the satisfaction that comes from bringing an idea to life.

Similarly, we seem to have slipped into a culture in which cynicism is worn like a badge of insight, while optimism is treated as naïve. While it’s understandable that people are tired, the constant wash of negativity deflates our sense of possibility. There is nothing unfashionable about hope or about taking small, constructive steps even when the wider world feels uncertain. Despair might feel familiar, but it is not the only lens available.

Beyond the paywall, Stepfanie calls us to shift our collective focus from harm to creation, and to become, to use her word, ‘antifragile’.

In the spirit of Neptune, I am quietly hopeful that her wish will come true. As Neptune establishes its place in Aries, the prevailing mood will swing from dissolving to defining, from absorption to assertion. We will move from a collective preoccupation with trauma and vulnerability to a collective identification with strength, courage, independence and initiative.

Sunset at West Beach, South Australia

Neptune in Aries – the Return to Dry Land

As Neptune establishes its place in Aries, the cultural atmosphere is likely to shift from fluidity and emotional permeability into something sharper and more self-assertive. If Pisces is the ocean, Aries is the spark. Where Pisces dissolves, Aries ignites. Where Pisces leans into sensitivity and symbolism, Aries pushes for clarity, initiative and a clean break from the past.

As this transit progresses, the glamour attached to woundedness is likely to fade, replaced by a cultural appetite for self-assertion, personal initiative, improvisation and personal direction. People may become less interested in narrating how they have been harmed and more motivated to demonstrate what they are doing, building or initiating. The collective fantasy could shift from ‘I have been shaped by what happened to me’ towards ‘I am shaping what happens next.’

That does not automatically guarantee a healthier culture. Neptune modifies whatever sign it enters, often through distortion, idealisation or confusion. Aries governs independence, instinct, courage and conflict, so we may see a rise in mythologies of the lone hero, the self-made individual or the righteous warrior. While some of us will feel called to reclaim agency and responsibility, which could help counter the passivity and over-identification with suffering that Stepfanie critiques, others might drift towards performative outrage, ideological militancy or a kind of spiritualised combativeness. The challenge of the Aries era will be reclaiming our sense of personal agency without turning everything into a battlefield, and learning to take action without it degenerating into impulsive violence or perpetual conflict.

In the best case, the general momentum will be away from the romanticisation of fragility and towards the reawakening of courage and initiative. The validation loops may begin to reward those who take risks, lead, innovate or build something tangible, rather than those who present their woundedness as their primary credential. The emotional climate will feel drier, more direct, less swayed by sentiment.

The question with which Stepfanie ends, the one she frames as essential to a culture of growth, is uncannily aligned with the astrological threshold ahead. As Neptune enters Aries, we collectively move from ‘How have you been harmed?’ to ‘What are you building or creating?’

If Pisces encouraged us to dissolve into the story, Aries invites us to step back into authorship. Neptune in Aries will not make everything simple, but it will almost certainly make the cultural centre of gravity less about identification with suffering and more about the imaginative possibilities of action.

If Neptune in Pisces asked us to feel everything, Neptune in Aries will ask us to do something with those feelings. If Pisces taught us how to listen, Aries will teach us to respond.

The waters are receding. Soon the landscape will dry out and harden enough for us to walk on again. And when that happens, many people will be startled to find they still have muscles.

An Invitation

I write this Substack because I love astrology, I love to write, and I love to connect.

This space is where all three meet.

You, my small but growing circle of readers, are my collective muse. Just as I learn from every client session, I want to learn from you here.

If you have a question about the concepts examined in this essay, your own chart, your transits, or astrology in general, get in touch. DM, leave a message in the comments, or join my subscriber chat and your answer could be featured in a future post. Please forward this email to a friend who you think will be interested, too.

As above, so below.

Holding Space for Grief

Magenta Deluxe Astrologer — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 19:31:32 GMT

This post has been inspired by Simone at The Grief Space, who asks: “What do the planets and signs in the fourth and fifth houses represent for me? I noticed that those houses hold a ton going on at the time of my birth.”

Simone, your chart certainly does concentrate a lot of energy in the fourth house, in which we find Mercury, Saturn and Pluto in Libra and Jupiter in Scorpio. In the fifth house, we have Mars in Scorpio and Uranus in Sagittarius.

In astrology, the fourth house is literally the roots of the family tree. As foundation of the chart, it describes where we come from in the sense of home and family. This notion of ‘home’, how it looks, sounds and smells (think how swiftly and completely a smell can take you back) is formed in earliest childhood. The fourth house is also concerned with the end of life.

The fifth house is about our need to shine, to be seen, to be recognised, admired and appreciated for the things that make us special. Associated with the themes of love, children and creative ability, the fifth is the house through which we express ourselves.

Mercury: Stories of Home

Mercury describes the way in which a person thinks, learns and speaks. With Mercury in Libra you have excellent communication skills. This is the signature of someone who can put experiences into words in a way that resonates with others.

With Mercury in the fourth house, home, family, and ancestry are not just things you experience; they are things you analyse, describe, and document. You might have inherited your talent for story-telling. There is often an attraction to history, memoir, and multi-generational family sagas.

Your introductory Substack post, in which you write about grief and trace a line from childhood experiences to adult insight, is a beautiful expression of your fourth house placements. To begin with, your Mercury knows exactly how to turn a private childhood experience into a story that other people can recognize as their own. In your essay My first real experience with grief and death, you remember dates, rooms, smells, textures, and the exact emotional temperature of those early scenes: early March 1990, your mother coming home from the hospital, the bathroom door opening, the funeral home visit, the chill that went through your body, the feeling of your grandfather’s fuzzy moustache. This is Mercury in the fourth house at work, preserving family history through storytelling.

Saturn and Pluto: Strength Through Adversity

Saturn and Pluto’s placement together in the fourth house suggest a childhood that was neither simple nor carefree. This combination describes encounters with deep emotional reality very early in life. One way or another, you were expected to grow up quickly. In your case, this played out as a stark introduction to death and grief when you were still very young.

Your essay about your grandfather’s death could not illustrate this more clearly. At the tender age of seven you were brought face to face with the stark reality of death: the hospital, the funeral home, the coldness of your grandfather’s body. You describe feeling angry, asking questions like “Why did he have to die?” Your mother had to explain what you were feeling because you were too little to understand. This is Saturn and Pluto in the fourth house: being called upon to grapple with concepts far beyond your years, learning hard lessons about mortality and loss while still a child. Take heart, though - great strength of character is forged under intense circumstances such as these.

Jupiter: Family Blessings

With Jupiter in the fourth house you are blessed with a strong and loving family. In your writing, your grandfather emerges as a big, generous presence with a fuzzy moustache and overwhelming love for his grandchildren, Christmases with gifts everywhere, riding his exercise bike in his bedroom for fun. Your mother’s role in helping you name and understand your grief reflects Jupiter’s theme of strong and influential role models. With Jupiter in Scorpio you are fascinated by the mysteries of life, by the meaning of things, and by the motivation that drives us.

The Fifth House: Creative Self-Expression

With Mars in the fifth house you are motivated to express your creativity, and with Mars in Scorpio you’re not afraid to delve into the darker side of the human experience. Your choice to create a space dedicated to grief exemplifies this placement. Grief is not an easy topic; it’s something many people avoid. Yet you’ve chosen to write about it openly. That takes courage and an unflinching approach to uncomfortable emotions.

Uranus in the fifth house adds originality and a refusal to follow a script. You write honestly rather than neatly, and you allow your perspective on grief to evolve over time. The child who thought your grandfather might wake up sits alongside the adult who now understands the lasting emotional legacy of that loss. That evolving perspective is what makes your voice distinct.

The Uranus Opposition: A Midlife Pivot

While the birth chart depicts a particular moment in time, the planets didn’t stop moving at the moment of your birth. Right now, transiting Uranus is opposite your natal Uranus.

The Uranus opposition is a midlife realignment: the place at which whatever has been true of you since childhood reaches a turning point and demands to be expressed in a new way - I’ve written about that here. This is a period during which we often realise that external markers of success are no longer enough. Goals that made sense in the first half of life give way to a need for meaning, authenticity, and projects that give you a sense of meaning and purpose.

Your chart suggests that the answer has a lot to do with storytelling, emotional depth, and community around difficult topics.

Uranus in the Eleventh House: Finding Your People

Transiting Uranus is in the eleventh house of hopes, wishes, and long-term goals. This is also the house of audience and community: the people who help us achieve our dreams and who gather around to support the work we do.

As Uranus makes its way through your eleventh house, you’re being called to share your work with a broader audience. The Grief Space isn’t just a personal project; it’s potentially a communal space. This is your moment to connect with your audience, to find the people who resonate with your approach to grief and loss.

Your journey with grief, which began with your grandfather’s death when you were seven, has shaped you into someone who can now hold space for others navigating loss. The childhood experiences described in your natal chart have prepared you for this moment. Your Mercury in the fourth house gives you the ability to tell these family stories with clarity and emotional honesty. Your Mars in Scorpio provides the courage to explore grief’s depths. Your Uranus in the fifth house ensures your voice remains uniquely, authentically yours.

Your natal chart and current transits are aligned for this work. It is time to keep doing exactly what you have already begun, only more visibly. Substack is the room where your people are slowly gathering.

An Invitation

I write this Substack because I love astrology, I love to write, and I love to connect. This space is where all three meet.

You, my small but growing circle of readers, are my collective muse. Just as I learn from every client session, I want to learn from you here.

If you have a question about the concepts examined in this essay, your own chart, your transits, or astrology in general, get in touch. DM, leave a message in the comments, or join my subscriber chat and your answer could be featured in a future post. Please forward this email to a friend who you think will be interested, too.

As above, so below.

Do My Heart and Mind Align with My Chart?

Magenta Deluxe Astrologer — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 18:53:03 GMT

I love writing about astrology here on Substack. Because every now and then someone asks a question that not only feels like an invitation into their life story, but also allows me to demonstrate the way which that story lives inside our chart.

This one comes from Substack writer Brett, at The Way of the Warrior Monk .

His question is this:

“I left the Corporate world in 2018. I was in very senior positions and the paychecks funded my Shaolin Kung Fu teaching, my EMS First Responder, and my trauma-informed therapy practice. I enjoyed the work, but I enjoy the teaching, service, and healing work more – much more.

Do my Heart and Mind values align with my astrological chart?”

Yes.

Let me explain.

Mars on the Midheaven: Your True Calling

Mars is the god of war.

In your chart, Mars is in the sign of Scorpio, which it rules. This means it functions at peak effectiveness here. Mars in Scorpio makes you a force with which to be reckoned: tough, self-reliant, extremely efficient, and highly self-disciplined.

Mars is on the Midheaven (or Medium Coeli, literally ‘middle of the sky’) and the highest point in the chart. The Midheaven represents represents our life path, our destiny, our vocation and our legacy. With Mars here, you seek to be recognised as strong, influential, independent and assertive, and you aspire to a career which brings these qualities to the fore. You may be drawn to an occupation involving action and conflict, or a competitive one, involving a battle for the top position.

Shaolin training, work as a First Responder, and a life of disciplined service are perfect expressions of Mars in Scorpio on the Midheaven. You are motivated by purpose rather than prestige.

Saturn in the Fourth House: A Solid Foundation

Saturn is at the literal foundation of the chart, known as the IC (the Imum Coeli, or fourth house cusp) and is directly opposite the Midheaven.

Saturn represents the structures and limitations of your life, as well as the discipline required to shape those boundaries into a foundation that supports your authentic self. It shows where effort and endurance are called for, and also where, with patience and commitment, you have the potential to build something lasting.

The placement of Saturn at the base of the chart describes our early conditioning about duty, responsibility and obligation towards others. Saturn is a masculine principle, and sometimes Saturn here describes a father who sets a very clear standard for what counts as success. Often it describes a youth shaped by duty and responsibility. Perhaps you pursued a particular career because it was expected of you, even if it is not your true vocation.

So it isn’t surprising that you entered the corporate world. It was the Saturnian choice. Your early conditioning left little choice but to take the respectable path. The stable path. The one that looks sensible on paper. It was the choice that honoured the family story.

But Saturn did not decide your purpose. It only set the starting conditions.

Mars Opposite Saturn: Internal Tension

Mars and Saturn are opposite each other in your chart. This aspect creates internal tension between living up to your family’s expectations and following your true calling. For many people with this pattern, the first half of life is spent fulfilling commitments that do not quite feel like their own.

The opposition does something else, too. It combines motivation with commitment. It gives impressive mental and physical discipline. This is what drives you to achieve, acquire status and forge a reputation. The monk, the martial artist, the healer devoted to practice and service, has been created by this tension.

Neptune: Disillusionment and Redemption

Neptune points to the area in which we are subject to disappointment, sacrifice and relinquishment. It is also the planet of dreams, spirituality, and transcendence.

The tenth house, of which the Midheaven is the sensitive point at the cusp, represents our public image: our reputation, our social status, and the qualities for which we are recognised by others. Society’s regard for us, in the sense of the way in which we are perceived and categorised, has a bearing on its regard for us in the sense of the amount of respect and admiration we receive. As who we are is invariably linked with what we do, it describes our career, vocation or role in society.

People with this placement often succeed in the conventional world, only to experience disillusionment. Disappointment. A sense of being out of alignment.

It creates the longing for a life that matters.

The Neptunian life path typically takes many strange and unexpected twists and turns. You can start out in one direction and end up in another place entirely.

This is why the second act looks nothing like the first.

2018: The Turning Point

So far, I’ve been talking about the natal chart, which is a map of the sky at the exact moment and place of a person’s birth, showing the positions of the planets within the twelve zodiac signs and twelve astrological houses. While the birth chart depicts a particular moment in time, the planets didn’t stop moving at the moment of your birth.

They continue progress through the zodiac, changing signs along the way. At the same time they cross over the other planets’ natal positions, or create various angles, called ‘aspects’ to their original location in the birth chart.

In 2018, when you left the corporate world, Neptune was making two significant contacts in your chart.

One was to Saturn, dissolving the old structure and melting away the sense of duty to the family story. Inexorable as the tide, a Neptune transit will take you wherever it wants you to go. Neptunian process often involves confusion, disenchantment, relinquishment, and sacrifice.

As you entered this transit, no doubt you found yourself questioning your goals. Youthful career aspirations may have lost their validity, either due to unanticipated changes in your circumstances, or because they were never realistic in the first place.

At the same time, Neptune conjoined your Moon in Pisces in the first house, which has to do with your identity. With the Moon in Pisces you connect with others on an unconscious, emotional level, personally identifying with those who are poor, sick, disenfranchised or otherwise unfortunate.

A flowing aspect combines the aggressive force of Mars with the innate sensitivity of the Moon. A keyword for this aspect is ‘fiercely protective’ and it’s one that can be put to good use in any role in which you are actively supporting others – as a first responder, in defence, or as a coach or an advocate for the rights of others.

While a Neptune transit to the Moon can bring disappointment, disillusionment or personal sacrifice, it can also bring inspiration and faith in our wildest dreams.

That was the inner self awakening. The identity re-aligning. That was the soul saying: I want a life that reflects who I am.

If you were going to choose a year to leave the corporate world for a spiritual path, these are the transits you would choose.

So, does your chart align with your Heart and Mind?

Brett, your chart describes someone who starts life on a path shaped by duty, then discovers a deeper vocation and chooses a life of mastery, service and healing.

Mars in Scorpio at the Midheaven is the heart. Saturn at the base of the chart is the mind. Neptune in the tenth dissolves that which no longer serves until the true calling becomes impossible to ignore.

Your story lives inside your chart. The warrior monk was always there. The corporate chapter was simply the apprenticeship.

And the moment you aligned your life with your true values, you stepped into the reality you were born to create.

The answer is ….. Yes.

Of course, I’ve only looked at one aspect of your chart. Time and space do not allow a more lengthy explanation. Mars, the god of war, was the obvious choice for this one.

I haven’t even mentioned your Sun sign or your rising sign, nor the other planets which, of course, also contribute to your story.

And yet I hope this brief exploration has both piqued your interest and provided some insight into the potential of astrology.

An Invitation

I write this Substack because I love astrology, I love to write, and I love to connect.

This space is where all three meet.

You, my small but growing circle of readers, are my collective muse. Just as I learn from every client session, I want to learn from you here.

If you have a question about your chart, your transits, or astrology in general, get in touch. DM, leave a message in the comments, or join my subscriber chat and your answer could be featured in a future post. Please forward this email to a friend who you think will be interested, too.

As above, so below.

Join my new subscriber chat

Magenta Deluxe Astrologer — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 05:09:06 GMT

I’ve just created new addition to my Substack publication: Magenta’s astrology subscriber chat.

As you know, I write about astrology, and I don’t do horoscopes. Instead, I answer real questions from real people. You – my small but growing circle of readers – are my collective muse.

If you’re interested in astrology, and you have a question about your chart, your transits, or astrology in general, get in touch.

I’ll tackle it in a future post and give your newsletter, if you have one, a shout-out while I’m at it.

If your question is personal, I’ll need an accurate birth time. If you’d like to maintain your anonymity, DM instead and I’ll keep your identity a secret.

No pressure, but the resource is there if you feel like getting in touch.

Join chat

How to get started

Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications if you don’t want to miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

Get app

Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

On Quantum Mechanics and Astrology

Magenta Deluxe Astrologer — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 22:47:31 GMT

This post was inspired by a question from The Way of the Warrior Monk, a Taoist anarchotranshumanist who thinks and writes about self-discovery, self-determination, personal cultivation, the interconnectedness of the human experience, and our alignment with the Universe.

The question is this:

“I haven’t studied astrology. My background is a lifelong study of the Eastern energy arts. It makes perfect sense that the energetic alignment of interstellar bodies would have a dramatic effect on an individual’s energetic body.

My not so idle curiosity would like to know how quantum mechanics – and specifically the immediacy of quantum information relay – is effecting astrological understanding?”

Thanks for this challenging question! I’ll be honest, I had to read it a couple of times before I even understood what you were asking. But once I dug into it, I found something genuinely fascinating.

A Confession First

I’m an astrologer, not a physicist. I called out Neil deGrasse Tyson a couple of weeks ago (The Brutal Truth About Astrology) for dismissing astrology when he knows nothing about it. I said then that I don’t know anything about astrophysics, so I keep my mouth shut on that subject. I’m not going to commit the same sin here: spouting opinions on something I know nothing about.

So let me be clear about what I don’t know: I don’t really understand quantum mechanics beyond vague concepts I’ve picked up from pop culture. And that’s okay, because I’m an astrologer, and not a scientist.

But your question sent me down a rabbit hole that led somewhere intriguing.

The Penny Drops: A Real Connection

When I asked my good friends at Perplexity what “the immediacy of quantum information relay” is all about, the technical details involved a lot of things that I’ve never heard of, such as quantum networks and entanglement. But I managed to glean enough to get the general idea. And that’s when it clicked: this echoes something called the holographic principle.

And suddenly, I found myself on solid ground.

The basic idea of the holographic principle, as I understand it, is that all the information in a three-dimensional space can be encoded on its two-dimensional boundary, like how a hologram on a flat surface creates a 3D image. Every part of that boundary contains information about the whole space. It’s like the universe is made of information that’s encoded everywhere, and any piece of it can tell you about the larger pattern. If you’ve ever played around with holograms, you’ll get the idea.

This is “as above, so below” – which happens to be my tagline!

The foundation of astrology rests on exactly this idea: the macrocosm (the sky, planets, cosmos) and the microcosm (individual life, events, psyche) mirror each other. Every smaller part reflects the larger order. When the holographic principle says that each fragment contains the pattern of the whole, it’s describing what astrologers have been working with for millennia.

Think of a tree: the branching pattern of its limbs mirrors the branching pattern of its roots, which mirrors the branching pattern of its veins, which mirrors the branching pattern of lungs in the body, which mirrors the branching pattern of rivers across a landscape. The same structure repeats at different scales. This is what astrologers mean when we talk about the correlation between celestial movements and earthly events (Chris Brennan’s definition).

By the same token, an astrology chart is more than a map of the solar system. Astrologers have long understood that the universe is saturated with meaning and pattern. That reading the sky is reading something fundamental about the way in which reality is structured. As above, so below.

While science and astrology approach reality in different ways, both the holographic principle and astrology point to the same insight: everything is connected. Structure mirrors itself at different scales.

So yes, there is a genuine conceptual resonance here. Thank you for helping me put that into words.

This is Where I Get Uncomfortable

Because this real connection is very different from the way I usually hear quantum mechanics invoked in metaphysical circles. You’ve probably heard it: “It’s all about energy and vibrations!” “Of course it works! It’s quantum physics!”

For years, there’s been this trend of borrowing scientific language to explain various mindset concepts such as positive thinking and the Law of Attraction. These became especially common after books like The Secret popularised these ideas. Teachers, coaches and writers often refer to quantum principles like the observer effect, wave-particle duality, and superposition to draw connections between human consciousness and how particles behave.

The “observer effect” gets reimagined as evidence that your attention or thoughts can shape your reality. Superposition, where multiple outcomes exist until something is observed, gets translated into the idea that focused intention “collapses” probability into your desired outcome.

The thing is, these aren’t really scientific claims. They’re philosophical interpretations. In actual physics, quantum effects happen at the subatomic level. They don’t scale up to human thoughts or daily experiences in the way these explanations suggest. The connection is metaphorical, not literal. I doubt that actual physicists support these interpretations.

And that’s totally fine. If people find quantum language a useful tool for talking about manifestation or positive thinking, I’m not here to judge that. If it resonates with you and helps you engage with those practices, go for it.

But when it comes to astrology specifically, I think this trend is actually damaging.

Why This Matters (and the Real Reason it Bothers Me)

Here’s where it bothers me. I think that any impulse to link astrology to quantum mechanics arises from the wish to be taken seriously. There’s a desire to seek validation, to say “see, even science says this is real!”

I understand that defensive impulse as well as anyone. I’ve experienced it myself. And I love to draw on neuroscience, so I’m far from blameless here, although I find this particular link rather more easy to justify.

But if there’s one thing that really gets on my nerves, it’s this. Critics love to dismiss astrology as “pseudoscience”. And you know what annoys me most about that label? It assumes astrologers are dumb enough to think we’re doing science in the first place.

I’ve never claimed astrology is science. I don’t think most astrologers do. I personally think it damages our credibility. We’re working with symbolism, cycles, archetypes, and meaning-making. That’s a completely different domain from empirical science, and that’s okay.

So when we reach for quantum mechanics to explain astrology, we’re kind of playing into that criticism. We’re accepting the premise that we need scientific legitimacy to be valid.

When we try to justify our work with concepts borrowed from physics, we accidentally send the message that astrology isn’t valid on its own terms. That it needs science to legitimise it.

What Astrology Actually Does

Astrology is a tool for self-reflection, timing, and awareness. When I look at someone’s chart, or when I consider current transits, what I’m offering is a framework for understanding patterns, possibilities, and opportunities.

Does simply looking at your chart make opportunities materialise out of thin air? It does not.

But does it attune you to what’s already present? Does it help you recognise when the timing is right to act? Does it increase your awareness of the cycles and patterns in your life? I absolutely believe it does.

The thing is, resonance is real. The way our awareness shapes our experience is real. I’ve seen it in my own life and in the lives of countless clients.

We don’t need quantum mechanics to prove it, and we don’t need to pretend we’re doing science.

The Bottom Line

To answer your original question about whether quantum mechanics, and specifically the immediacy of quantum information relay, is affecting astrological understanding…. maybe. But I’m not convinced that it’s helpful.

When I followed your question down the rabbit hole, I discovered that quantum information relay is connected to the holographic principle. And that offers a fascinating parallel to “as above, so below.” It validates what astrologers have understood for millennia about the interconnected nature of reality. So yes, there’s a genuine conceptual resonance there.

But beyond that specific connection, I don’t think quantum mechanics is affecting astrological understanding in the ways that it might be invoked. And, more importantly, I’m not convinced it needs to. They’re separate domains: one is physics, one is symbolic wisdom.

What if instead of trying to make astrology sound scientific, we just owned what it actually is? A different way of knowing. A different kind of wisdom. Not physics, but not less true.

We can honour both science and mystery without forcing one to explain the other.

An Invitation

I want to be clear: I’m not a physicist, and I’m not claiming expertise here. If anyone reading this actually understands quantum mechanics and can explain whether I’ve gotten something wrong, I’m genuinely open to hearing about it.

What I do know is this: The impulse to explain astrology through the lens of science highlights something essential about where we are culturally. We’re caught between two worlds: the material and the meaningful, the provable and the experienced. And we’re looking for a bridge.

But maybe we don’t need quantum physics to be that bridge, except, perhaps, where genuine conceptual parallels exist, like the holographic principle.

Maybe astrology is already valid as a symbolic language, as a tool for meaning-making, as a way of attuning ourselves to cycles and patterns that are real even if they can’t be measured in a lab.

The hunger for legitimacy is real. The need to be taken seriously is real. But I wonder if we serve ourselves better by standing confidently in what we actually do, rather than borrowing credibility from a field that isn’t really talking about what we’re talking about.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Have you encountered these quantum mechanics explanations for astrology? Do they resonate with you, or does something feel off? Leave a comment below.

And if you’d like to explore your chart in depth, not through the lens of physics but through the wisdom of cycles, symbols, and timing, book a reading with me at magentadeluxe.com. Together we’ll look at your unique patterns, possibilities, and next steps.

As above, so below.

Astrology and the God-Shaped Hole

Magenta Deluxe Astrologer — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 20:14:51 GMT

Recently I attended a three-day public speaking workshop. Over the course of the weekend, we had to prepare and present a six-minute talk explaining why we do what we do. Naturally, I chose to share the experiences that influenced me to become an astrologer.

At one point it occurred to me that, had I been born at another place and time, I might have substituted the word “Jesus” in my story.

From my notes: “But also during that period, I started learning astrology. And that was when I realised that I had the power to turn my life around, and to create a much better reality than the one in which I had found myself. And when I began to live in alignment with the universe, things began to get better.”

Alternative Text: “But also during that period, I started learning about Jesus. And that was when I realised that I had the power to turn my life around, and to create a much better reality than the one in which I had found myself. And when I began to live in alignment with Jesus, things began to get better.”

That realisation got me thinking about the recent debates around religion, meaning, and the answers to which we turn when the traditional gods fall silent.

What on Earth is a God-Shaped Hole?

In case you’ve yet to notice, I listen to a lot of podcasts. As a consequence, I learn a little bit about a lot of things. One of which has been the concept of a “god-shaped hole”. This is the idea that humans have a deeply ingrained need for meaning, purpose, and connection, which has been traditionally fulfilled by religion.

Prominent atheists, led by figures such as British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, have argued that science effectively replaces religion. We don’t need God to explain lightning or disease anymore; we have meteorology and medicine. Religious explanations, they say, are obsolete at best and harmful at worst when taken literally.

However other cultural commentators, including those who identify as atheist, have pointed out that dismissing religion entirely misses something crucial. Religion has always offered more than factual explanations. It provides community, shared morality, and narrative structures that address existential questions in ways that science alone simply doesn’t. Even if you don’t believe the literal claims, the stories and rituals fulfill psychological and social needs that don’t just evaporate because we’ve figured out how rain works.

This perspective suggests that the “god-shaped hole” is real, irrespective of our views about the existence of God as an entity. The tension between science’s explanatory power and religion’s existential comfort has opened up a space where alternative spiritualities thrive. And one of the most prominent examples in recent years has been astrology.

Astrology’s Moment in the Zeitgeist

Here is where it gets meta: astrology’s cultural rise has its own astrological backdrop.

Neptune entered its home sign of Pisces in April 2011 and will complete its transition into Aries at the end of January 2026. Neptune embodies the qualities of the divine, the mystical, the glamorous and illusory. It rules fantasy, spirituality, and religion itself. And during its long journey through Pisces, the sign of dissolution and transcendence, astrology exploded into popular consciousness.

Neptune’s entry into Pisces set the scene for astrology’s unprecedented mainstream moment. Social media transformed it from tired newspaper horoscopes into a living, breathing cultural language. Meme accounts, such as Trashbag Astrology and regular horoscopes, such as Spiritual Weatherman, proliferated on Instagram, while apps like Co-Star and Lila also appeared. Suddenly, and apparently out of nowhere, astrology was accessible, shareable, and everywhere.

Millennials and Gen Z embraced it less as a system of rigid belief and more as symbolic language for self-reflection and identity. “Mercury retrograde” became shorthand for when everything goes sideways. “Saturn return” entered the vernacular as code for that much-maligned life-stage transition that takes place in your late twenties when everything you thought you knew gets turned upside down.

As an aside, I can state with confidence that this has been primarily a Millennial and Gen Z phenomenon because of what’s missing from the conversation. Where are all the memes about the astrology of the midlife crisis? Where’s the Instagram content about the Uranus opposition or the second Saturn return? Popular astrology culture has been conspicuously silent on the transits of middle age, those profound passages characterised by the clichéd purchase of red sports cars and the very real emergence of existential dread. The stereotypes are there in abundance, and yet the focus has been almost entirely on the concerns of younger adults: career confusion, relationship patterns, and identity formation. (Watch this space – I’ll be writing more about the overlooked astrology of midlife and beyond in due course, but here’s the link to one I prepared earlier Welcome to Your Midlife Crisis )

Astrology has merged seamlessly with wellness culture – crystals, meditation, mindfulness, and manifestation. It reflects a broader cultural trend toward alternative spiritualities and personalised meaning-making systems outside institutional religion.

The media has legitimised it. Podcasts, YouTube channels, dedicated astrology creators have emerged as mainstream entertainment. Publications like The Cut and Vogue run regular astrology columns. Astrology has shifted from fringe to fashionable.

This all happened against a backdrop of declining trust in traditional institutions, accompanied by the cost of living crisis, political polarisation, global unrest, and the slow unraveling of traditional values. People needed frameworks to make sense of their lives beyond conventional religion or authority. And astrology was there, waiting.

Filling the Hole

So is astrology filling the god-shaped hole? I think it is, at least for many people.

Astrology offers a rich symbolic language for exploring identity, purpose, and connection to something larger than ourselves. Unlike dogmatic religious institutions, it doesn’t demand rigid belief or threaten eternal damnation for those who transgress. It invites personal empowerment and reflective curiosity. It’s a spiritual toolkit that adapts to the user.

It also creates community. Along with online spaces, meetups, and a shared vocabulary, astrology provides a sense of belonging and shared values that mirrors what religious communities once offered. In an age of social fragmentation, when we’re all scrolling alone together, that matters more than we might want to admit.

From my perspective as a practicing astrologer, I see this as overwhelmingly positive. Astrology meets a fundamental human need by inviting wonder, promoting self-discovery, and nurturing spiritual engagement that fits into a hetrogenous, questioning society. Its symbolic framework allows for complexity and ambiguity. You don’t have to be certain. You don’t have to exclude other perspectives. You can accept multiple truths at once.

The growing cultural interest in astrology tells us that people are still seeking symbolic languages that convey purpose and connection. The god-shaped hole hasn’t disappeared just because we’ve stopped going to church.

The Other Side

Of course, not everyone sees it this way.

Our critics might point out that astrology lacks scientific proof and encourages misinformation, superstition and escapism. They might express concern that when people turn to astrology instead of religion, they’re just trading one set of unprovable beliefs for another: same problems, different package.

Fair enough. I’m not here to convert anyone. But I think it’s worth noticing that most people need more than pure, rational logic to feel grounded in the world. We’re wired to make meaning. We tell stories. We find patterns. We look for something beyond ourselves.

What Happens Next?

As Neptune’s transit through Pisces approaches its completion in January 2026, we’re facing an uncertain cultural shift. Will astrology’s momentum continue or transform as Neptune moves into Aries – a sign of initiation, action, and new beginnings?

We also have Uranus entering Gemini and Pluto’s transit through Aquarius to consider. The astrological weather is changing in a very big way.

The future shape of astrology’s cultural role, and how it might continue to meet the spiritual and existential needs of our time, remains to be seen. But I suspect the god-shaped hole isn’t going anywhere. The question is what we choose to fill it with, and whether what we choose helps us to find our sense of purpose and direction, or simply distracts us from more significant concerns.

Picture credits: I took these pictures at the Hill of Crosses in Lithuania in June 2024.

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An Invitation

Astrology’s popularity highlights something essential about the human condition: we need meaning. We need connection. We need stories that help us make sense of why we’re here and what we’re supposed to do about it.

Recognising astrology’s role in this context, not as a threat to reason but as a symbolic language addressing deeper needs, enriches the broader conversation about meaning in the modern world.

The god-shaped hole is real. What we put in it matters.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Does astrology fill a spiritual need in your life? Do you see it as a substitute for religion, or something else entirely? Leave a comment below. Your perspective might inspire a future post.

And if you’d like to explore your chart in depth, book a reading with me at magentadeluxe.com. Together we’ll look at your unique patterns, possibilities, and next steps.

As above, so below.