Pallas Athena in Pisces and Chiron in Aries each station retrograde, infusing our sky with their archetypes. The Sun in Cancer will aspect outer planets Neptune and Pluto.
Athena is a strategist goddess – in Pisces she may point to our capacity to work with imagination-based tools like visualization to create shift in our lives. There may be important reasons to activate our imaginations currently, like a future is wanting to come forth that we have to dream of first.
This happens simultaneously as Chiron in Aries becomes a louder frequency (due to stationing) and may highlight an existential sense of loneliness or having to go things alone – or needing to source the courage to be the first, to take a step in a direction you don’t necessarily see anyone else leading.
And the Sun in relational, emotional Cancer aspecting the outer planets highlights a sense of potential emotional overwhelm (feeling larger flows of emotion that go beyond a conceptually proportionate context, like a tidal wave, something ‘larger than us’) as well as the opportunity to find a sense of home in the cosmos: to see how we actually aren’t alone at all but are part of a multidimensional ecosystem.
As much as the particular paint point of Chiron in Aries may feel otherwise (“I am alone” – and in some sense, we are), we are part of an interconnected web. Both the loneliness of being an individuated being and the connection of being one with the Universe can exist simultaneously. We’re all alive as individuals even, because of others, such as those who brought us through our infancy when we truly could not go it alone.
We can stay emotionally contracted when we try to hold everything for ourselves, but asking for help from loved ones or opening to spirit guides and angels in prayer can go a long way in creating community and wellbeing.
Welcome back! Or in case this is your first time here, I’m Sabrina Monarch and I’m a soul-centered astrologer. I love providing perspectives on the opportunities of transits and putting into words what the zeitgeist feels like at this moment in time, to support you on your path & open a dialogue between us and the cosmos. If you would like to receive these weekly forecasts to your inbox and be notified of upcoming educational opportunities, sign up for my mailing list here.
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Here’s our week after a few announcements!
Kickstarter to fund the seventh year of Monarch Astrology, as well as a year ahead of the Magic of the Spheres podcast!
Just days left! Monarch Astrology just turned seven! To kick of the seventh year of weekly content creation, I’m asking for your financial support for the year ahead. If you enjoy these forecasts and/or Magic of the Spheres podcast, please support them. They require hours of work a week, in addition to work I do creating curriculum, teaching, and working 1:1 with clients. Every single backer counts, so I ask you to take this message very personally 🙂 There are many exciting rewards – talks, courses, astrology readings – to choose from for backers! Check out the Kickstarter and pledge here. We have passed the push goal now, and let’s keep it going!!
🐝 Announcing IMAGE HIVE: a LIVE COURSE on creative writing available through the Kickstarter! Image Hive explores the craft of creative writing, drawing in influences from poetry and literary fiction. Image Hive derives its title from the idea that a writer is a collector of images: that it is our capacity to have vision (of all kinds) that underlies our word craft.
Image Hive is available through the Kickstarter funding the seventh year of content creation, Monarch Astrology and Magic of the Spheres podcast as one of the backer rewards. Read more about Image Hive here.
There are two writing states I want to highlight – effortless and effortful.
In the effortless state, you are not really trying at all – the words flow through your channel. You’ve already built that channel with your practice. Your eloquence is a result of your practice. You’re just picking the ripe fruit.
In the effortful state of writing, you are struggling to reach something more transcendent with your words. You don’t have the language yet, but you’re reaching for it. A lot of people will give up here, when this is actually the resistance training that makes you a better writer, just like we work with resistance in strength training for the body.
Now let’s take this a level deeper to perception itself: there is what you already see, and then there is what you could see if you reached a little deeper with that flame ever lit behind your eyes. 🔥👁🔥
Image Hive is about the craft of writing that is centered on the image. But it is also a course to practice the art of seeing. A valuable, often invisible skill behind beautiful writing. ✨
Only days left to join Image Hive via the Kickstarter. A life altering experience awaits.
Study Evolutionary Astrology with me! The new course dates have been announced. Catch a discount via the Kickstarter here. You can enroll early and get HALF-OFF through the Kickstarter currently. See the course page for more details and student testimonials.
Here’s our week:
July 14, 2021
Pallas Athena stations retrograde in 27 Pisces: 12:42 AM PDT
- The strategist goddess stations, and stationing bodies become louder or more present/focused energies in the sky and in our experience. Athena in Pisces could relate to more nuanced approaches to spiritual cultivation, one’s understanding of working with the flow/Tao, or the arts of manifestation and visualization.
- Athena herself (not simply when placed in Pisces) relates to our capacity to form an image in our minds and create and materialize that image in the world. This is like the business person who visualizes a seven year plan and the steps to execute it – and then sets off to do just that. Athena gifts us with the generative creative powers of mind.
- In Pisces, this Athena placement emphasizes the skill and intellectual understanding that accompanies spiritual development and awakening.
- There might be a component here of disillusionment regarding our ambition: realizing that we have lost our way or gotten too invested in the material world (results, ‘getting ahead’, accolades, status, etc.) and not as much the spirit behind the work. Once this occurs, not only is it harder and more effortful to be successful, but it is less fulfilling as well. This station/retrograde may promote a needed remembrance of the spiritual undercurrents in our pursuits, and the deeper connection of service that we have, beneath our most adept/keen strategies in the material world.
July 15, 2021
Sun in 23 Cancer trine Neptune retrograde in 23 Pisces: 1:49 AM PDT
(Image: Nathan Head)
- It’s Cancer Season, and this is a flood 🌊🌊🌊 of emotion. Be prepared to extend compassion to yourself and others. Throw out a lifeline and a call upon a loved one/ask for support if you are struggling. Offer your emotional waves as a prayer to Source or deities that you work with.
- Potentially the most difficult part of any challenging emotion is our resistance to feeling it – but a transit like this promotes surrender. Being able to hold and breathe into the waves and allowing others to meet us there may feel soothing in a transcendent way.
Chiron stations retrograde in 12 Aries: 9:41 AM PDT
(Image: C’s Illustration)
- It is interesting that this should happen around the same time as the Sun-Neptune trine, which can both emphasize our sensitivity to feeling the potential pain of this transit as well as our sensitivity to healing and dissolving layers of pain.
- Chiron correlates to pain points and wounds – things that live within the soul, and get activated when we are triggered, insulted, affronted. The pain point of Chiron in Aries could be our stories about loneliness, having to go at things alone (not seemingly by choice), or feeling like we’re having to fight for our seat at the table or more existentially fight to even just exist. (Not necessarily literally, but a felt undercurrent)
- The Sun-Neptune energy on the other hand is so universalizing. Chiron in Aries says “I’m alone”, but Sun-Neptune says, “I’m held by unseen forces in the Universe, or support materializes when I express my need.” Feeling of loneliness are paradoxically, universal. Loneliness can be caused by a lack of self-disclosure, putting on a false self, not approving of our emotional needs or allowing others to meet us there. So some of these feelings of loneliness may actually be able to dissolve if we have the courage to open up to people in places that we normally don’t.
- Alternately, sometimes during an initiation external support seems to dry up: we may be surrounded by people at certain chapters in our lives who don’t understand us, even if we reach out. If you feel alone at a level that is not just in your own head or by your own self-isolation (i.e. you reach out and nothing seems to catch you) I understand how difficult that is. During a time I felt this way and mostly only felt understood by professionals like astrologers, one of them told me that during a dark night of the soul, there are less people there to catch you because this initiation is yours. People will fall away because it is your initiation to hold. Trust that it will pass and get better, but it may be your strength that is called upon for now.
- And certainly, if you do have people to commune with who get it, consider your tendencies to self-isolate and where you are being called to open to being seen and loved.
July 17, 2021
Sun in 25 Cancer opposite Pluto retrograde in 25 Capricorn: 3:46 PM PDT
(Images: Virgin River)
I want to come back to a forecast I wrote last year for this same transit… you can read it here (https://monarchastrology.com/2020/07/14/new-moon-in-cancer-astrology-of-7-15-7-21/) I have thoughts in the introduction of this forecast of the primordial energetic gateway of tears/emotion. Some thoughts on the Sun-Pluto opposition is excerpted below:
Given that Cancer and Capricorn are an axis of care, and Pluto is so primordial and evolutionary, I want to share some thoughts on the deeper instinctual drives that come from wanting to offer or receive care and/or protection.
From a book Religion and Evolution, a passage from a section exploring the evolution of care and love in organisms –
“…But the origin of love he finds in parental care, which ‘unites the parents with their offspring and is clearly excellently united in reinforcing the bond between adults. We drew attention to the fact that only animals that care for their young have formed closed groups. They do it all by means of behavior patterns of cherishing which originate from parental care, and by making use of infantile signals which activate this behavior.”
Quick translation: in the evolution of mammals, the practice of being attuned to one’s young (sensing what they need and giving it to them), was adaptive for survival and so caring was evolutionary. “Infantile signals” from the baby mammals activates parental care. So the one with the capacity to care looks for need, and the one who needs care signals the need.
“He also notes that what he calls the flight drive, the natural response of a startled animal to seek refuge with a conspecific [same species], particularly the most powerful conspecific available, is rooted in the child’s rushing to its mother at the first sight of something unusual.”
- Our impulse to seek support and to be of support runs deeper than our lifetimes and even deeper than humanity – it is embedded into the evolution of mammals. (I am focusing on mammals here, but this is not to say other groups of species do not exhibit care/love) Mammals give birth to offspring which have to be nurtured and cared for for a time – offspring which are not ready to survive on their own, while they develop under the protection of more powerful/mature others.
- This underlying, primordial dynamic is powerful, and invites our development of maturity in learning how to navigate it. For one, being in distress and seeking support can induce love and connection. It can build family and kinship-like connections. It forms a bond that goes deeper than the mind or intellect, because it is literally so primordial. On the other hand, disparities of power are complex and tricky, and can be sites of abuse or abuse of power.
- So, more simplistically, vulnerability is a powerful connector and source of bonding and trust is important here. Do we trust who we are opening up to? Do we trust ourselves to be sovereign? Do we trust ourselves to be aware of our boundaries?
- Cancer and Capricorn are very protective archetypes, and they each have their own way of being guarded – with Cancer, it is the hard crab shell that protects the soft, gooey crab on the inside. With Capricorn, it’s walls, boundaries, and procedures that reduce ease of accessibility. Sometimes our work is lessening these defenses so we can be more open to life. Sometimes, we are already plenty open to life, and the work is having these defenses and boundaries because we are worth protecting and not everyone will treat our life-force with the respect we desire.
- Though these dynamics explored above are highly relational and often involve two or more beings, these dynamics exist internally as well. Self-care, self-parenting, self-soothing, self-protection, etc. are ways we draw upon these dynamics in our own being.
- Depending on the range at which we inhabit these themes, we might find ourselves on both sides of this axis – receiving support, giving support. It is community-building at this time and can increase love on the planet.
Thank you for meditating on the planets with me this week! If you would like further guidance, I have been increasingly focused on longer-term experiences in the form of the Evolutionary Astrology Intensive, higher level courses for alumni, and 1:1 mentorship – helping people form a depth relationship to their natal chart and personal transits over time, to develop themselves, to be in their power, and to reach their goals, all through the soul-making lens of evolutionary astrology. I would love to support you in building your relationship with astrology. The intensive is currently in session but will be offered again in the autumn, and I am to take on new coaching clients again in the future.
Find me on Instagram @sabrinamonarch, get on my mailing list to stay apprised of all upcoming offerings and events, and I’ll see you next week!
If you enjoy these forecasts, please help crowdfund a year ahead via the Kickstarter! Tuition for the next intensive is half-off though the Kickstarter campaign.
With love,
Sabrina Monarch
(Top image: C’s Illustration)
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