Astrology of 2/22 – 2/28: Mars-Pluto & A New Moon Eclipse

These are potent transits! There is a lot happening with Mars. When I think of Mars I think of a love for vitality and the ways that Mars can direct us toward our source of vitality. Mars is blunt in Aries where it currently transits, yet there is an innocent frankness here in which conflicts may be dealt with in such direct ways as to move it along – additionally meta meanings are more readily accessed when the matters become so basic.

It also came to my attention this week to point out that though I list exact transit times, these transits are building before the exact time and also echoing afterward. Their energies characterize expanses of time and the exact transit time is if anything the eye of the storm or the turning point in which the building becomes the echoing or when planets enter a new phase with one another. We go with our intuition and apply the knowledge of the transits as they show themselves to us in our actual lives.

(Top image: Gustavo Ortiz)

February 22

Mars in Aries square Pluto in Capricorn: 12:59 AM PST

(Images: Jean-Luc Godard – Le Gai Savoir 1969)

• Impulses may appear more intense or more volatile than usual, and shadow content is triggered. The impulse can be pointing to a dynamic process wanting to unfold.
• Transmuting unbearable intensity into something digestible and more innocent feeling.
• This transit also highlights the Uranus-Pluto square which is so much closer now in orb. There is a good amount of upheaval and shadow content arising to the surface in our personal lives and in the collective. Mars in alignment with Pluto after it crosses this exact square point speaks to a turning point in action. Solutions that worked in the past are ghosts. (Maybe informative ghosts, at best). The impulse truly relevant to the moment is transpersonally aligned. This is a time to be inventive.
• The impulse for freedom is building, as the cords or ties that limit our freedom (because they really do or because we let them) are coming into the light of consciousness. This may be a time relative to storylines of control or power where we initiate new choices.
• One indication of rage is how deeply we have let ourselves be disempowered on a psychic level by an external symbol or other. There are the outer storylines that mirror this, but I mean on the inside: the internalized oppression. There are ways to lift and transmute internalized oppression without further violence.

February 23

Mercury in Aquarius sextile Saturn in Sagittarius: 1:45 PM PST

• Liberating ideas that can change our world or the world deserve containers to exist through. Organization and institution are virtues which further the cause of any given group/ideology. Sometimes the ideas aren’t enough – it’s how we can commit to them and mobilize around them.
• Evolving the standard.
• Freedom and irresponsibility are not synonyms. It is sometimes attending to authentic, soulful responsibility that creates the greatest sense of freedom.
• There is much polarization in the social environment and in the current evolution of humanity. With that, we still have us versus them mentalities. These are current boundaries and limitations which are not however, impermeable. Truth and social movements can change minds and hearts. There is the work of speaking to our own people or our own tribe (nourishing our ‘own’), and there is the work of bridging gaps between groups of people. Both are so very important.
• Consider on the personal or collective spheres – how slinging animosity and hatred between sides only further entrenches the conflict, or escalates it. Anyone who feels resourced enough by their ‘own’ (their family and friends and people they actually feel safe around, by Source), may find themselves a psychopomp between worlds if they can forge friendships with people of radically different realities. Warring ideologies will rarely change minds. But a heart connection that rings truth at a deep level and is a total mindfuck as to what-is-real-and-what-is-arbitrary-if-this-thing-in-my-heart-feels-so-real? That changes minds.
• If a belief system others people so much as to make them static characters whose reality doesn’t matter and who this belief system holds authority over defining the experience or reality of that other, that’s shadow of Saturn in Sagittarius. Belief systems can isolate as much as they can forge friendships across barriers. People are the authority of themselves, and only if we are open to the radical beings of others can our beliefs be a living map rather than an archaic one.

February 25

Mercury enters Pisces: 3:08 PM PST

(Image: Abel Gance)

• Mercury-Neptune contacts or Mercury in Pisces makes speaking an act of inspiration. When the inspiration is not there (or the channel is not flowing), people fumble over their words or don’t know what to say.
• Mercury in Pisces speaks in image, like a lush theater of impressions collected over the experience of all of the archetypes before it.
• Well-made film is hypnotic enough to bring the viewer into any reality – the hypnosis simply allows it. We might argue that Mercury in Pisces does not discriminate in content, but instead in fascination. How much fantasy can we readily access?
• Mercury in Pisces can apply itself to understand anything, to have compassion or love for anything, if it can be mentally understood.
• Mentally understanding something in Pisces is like going underwater or lifting a series of veils and curtains (such as the ego). It sees without classifying or discerning and so its gaze may penetrate deep.
• Illusion and delusion are also languages of Pisces. So is imagination. And Mercury is a trickster. What’s what? is not going to be the easiest question at the moment. Yet clarity and lucidity are heightened aspects of the Piscean experience. The Universal Currents, the Tao – lead the way. One moment there are still seas and clear skies, the next a storm, the next you’re fighting to stay above water, the next you’re snorkeling in clear water looking at fishes and white sand in a tropical paradise.
• You can discern what your fantasies are (even as they change) by daydreaming and trancing out to things that make you feel blissed out. Or get out a big sheet of paper and write down all the things you find exceptionally dreamy. Articulating fantasies is a step of manifestation. People who live their dreams don’t often stumble into them by accident; they have drawn closer to them by their longing and their tangible steps to accommodate those longings. Some people have karmas of life being breezy (not many internal conflicts, they have what they want) and others have to forge their way through hell (they work and sweat for what they want). Either way, people still have taken steps to get to their dreams according to how their particular seas operate.
• If your mental spheres can access any place in the multiverse, why not choose imaginative neural pathways that set you up for what fascinates you (in your mind and in your mirroring reality)? Pisces can get in drowny ocean spaces (“no one loves me, no one understands me”), so watch out for that. Throw yourself a raft at any time or find resources that do.

February 26

New Moon in Pisces Eclipse: 6:58 AM PST

• See where it falls in your chart – the Sun and Moon are at 8 degrees 12 seconds Pisces, with Neptune in Pisces at 11 degrees 35 seconds.
• This is a New Moon (new vision, new cycle of manifestation) on the South Node of the Moon, the collective past. The South Node in Pisces is what many astrologers are correlating with the rise of political/social activity which mirrors old wounds and karmas which we are witnessing the triggers and reminders, as people on the planet are trying to stop the trainwreck. (And consider the luck/momentum of so many people focusing on these issues at the same time…) On a large scale, human evolution is happening. It’s opposite, the regression and the resistance to evolution, are also rearing their dragon tail (the South Node is the tail of the dragon).
• Suffering and illusion are intimately connected – this New Moon can shine light on where the illusions are so that they can be refined, articulated and evolved. But arm yourself with this: believing things at face value, that things are as they are, perpetuates karma. Karma is the gravity we give to certain experiences to the extent that they keep repeating themselves. To step out of a cycle of suffering, one has to stop believing the foundations the suffering is scaffolded upon. A simple spiritual bypass will not solve the problem (like plugging your ears and singing ‘I can’t hear you’ to problems). It’s more like seeing your life as a lucid dream and asking why a particular dream symbol keeps appearing: what is it trying to tell you at a deeper level?

Mars in Aries conjunct Uranus in Aries: 4:17 PM PST

• This is a pretty intense planetary combo – together with Mars squaring Pluto and Mars opposite Jupiter in Libra. Venus and Mars in Aries as well. Social landscapes are charged and electric – both in harmony and in discord. Finding likemindedness is really vitalizing; and feeling isolated or separate is really triggering.
• Social dynamics can be erratic right now. Giving space for inspired spontaneity and the unexpected/unusual can help this transmit move along through a heightened pathway.
• Discord creates connection when it can be talked through or create a bridge in the differences between people. A simple interaction of conflict can take on a larger, transpersonal meaning to be applied to the rest of life. Under this transit, some conflicts are gateways into higher knowledge if we listen again, to the deeper meaning.
• In the world of Uranus, the screens we surround ourselves with are little matrices, or higher mind download trainings. If you watch a whole TV series, you absorb the consciousness and archetypes that TV series presents. You might say we are attracted to the screen content which speaks to our impulse for destiny: that we train ourselves with stories. Like anything we do in this life, this TV or screen-based matrix training can be done unconsciously or consciously.
• Some freedoms are totally innate but require our will to access, and no one is actually blocking us from doing so.

February 27

Mars in Aries opposite Jupiter in Libra: 6:24 AM PST

(Image: Maxfield Parrish)

• Similar to Mars/Uranus above, conflicts and butting heads with people can be seen as learning experiences. We don’t have to all get along all the time. Sometimes we are resourced with people who rub us the wrong way just so that we can be illuminated about some aspect of ourselves that our more enjoyable mirrors wouldn’t show us.
• Conflict resolution is a vital part of peace. Our higher study of peace (Jupiter in Libra) may include the real nuances of conflict resolution, conflict deescalation, and meeting the place in ourselves where we feel the heat.
• Impulses and aggression bring messages about what is out of balance. It would be easy for the anger to be displaced (given that Mars is also squaring Pluto, the shadow, so defensive psychology is easily present here), meaning the anger is at something that is not the root cause. Anger might therefore, trigger some kind of seeking and questioning as to what is actually out of balance. Not the symptom, but the root. What can be balanced there?

• Anyone can retaliate. That’s basic. Finding relationship and harmony where there is present animosity? That’s a richness Mars offers this week. Chemistry between people IS chemistry; just because it is expressing turbulently does not mean that is its only potential. We might find our realties vastly expanded if we can find friendship where we least expected it.

Thank you for meditating on the planets with me this week! Please support the writing of these forecasts on Patreon – donors a the $5/month level or more get an astrology reading for signing up. Let me know how you’re doing this week in the comments! If you are new here or haven’t signed up for my mailing list, you can go ahead and sign up to get these weekly forecasts sent directly to your inbox by clicking here.

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With love,

Sabrina Monarch
Sabrina Monarch is a soul-centered Evolutionary Astrologer who publishes weekly astrological forecasts. She has been collecting astrological experience for over a decade. She also enjoys yoga, hiking and creative writing. You can subscribe to receive her weekly forecasts by email here.

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