This week begins with an opposition between Venus in Libra and Chiron in Aries, bringing up activations around self and other, such as how we bring our whole selves into relationship (as opposed to abandoning ourselves) and how we actually transform as an individual because of our connections.
Mercury in Virgo will trine Pluto in Capricorn before Mercury enters Libra – this could be a window into realizing more concretely how we have aligned ourselves into certain states of conformity – altering or adjusting ourselves to fit conventions (however minute or grand in scale). Pluto in Capricorn (since 2008) has been a descent process around unravelling social conditioning and our deepest enmeshments to the status quo.
Then as Mercury enters Libra, we have the opportunity to re-balance our ways of being in social connection and relationship. Due to an upcoming retrograde, Mercury will be in Libra for a couple months. As I believe I first heard astrologer Colin Bedell say, Libra relates to the “intellectual arts of love” as a Venus-ruled air sign. The way that we develop communication skills to enhance our relationships becomes important under this extended Mercury in Libra transit. As Mercury enters Libra just following the Venus-Chiron opposition and this Mercury-Pluto trine, this could represent that newer realizations about ourselves and our values are also inviting the development of new skills in relationship to match these revelations.
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.
Watch this week’s forecast on YouTube, or keep reading below:
Here’s our week after a few announcements!
The upcoming Evolutionary Astrology Intensive is now open for enrollment! It will be the ninth run of this program 🖤 It is a comprehensive entry (or deepening) into the world of soul-based Plutonic astrology. As I get to see students respond to this material, I’m reminded every time about how Evolutionary Astrology is truly a wisdom tradition. I’ve had the pleasure of developing as a human alongside this material since I was 21, and it’s one of my biggest joys in life to share it and invite others into it. The course consists of pre-recorded content (that you can continue returning to indefinitely) and live sessions weekly to discuss as a group, and five culminating workshop classes.
In the last year or so students of mine have repetitively commented on the field or group dynamic that is created in our spaces. I just follow the lead of my favorite teachers – classes I had where everyone bonded. I watched how they did it, and figured out how to recreate that in my own way – I like my classes to be engaging and world-opening, initiatory experiences and a place to make real friends. I also sincerely think the content shared in this course is profound (the lineage I am a part of is profound itself) and when a group of people come together to attune to that and share how it lands for them, we do weave a beautiful community inevitably.
Enroll here. Apply for scholarship here. Read the testimonials on the course page. Reach out sabrina@monarchastrology.com if you have personal questions about the course that aren’t answered on the course page and we can discuss if this class is right for you.
My debut novel, The Garden of Sleeping Hammers is out and available for purchase!
Katerina is twenty-one when meets a spy twice her age who offers to teach her anything she wants to know about spycraft and magic. This apprenticeship plunges her into an unconventional romance and a heightened state of psychic awareness. Her new identity inspires complete strangers, who are sure Katerina is destined for fame, but scares those who know the old Katerina. Katerina’s family believes she’s mentally ill and forces antipsychotic, antidepressant and mood-stabilizing medications upon her at the advice of a psychiatrist. The novel follows her struggle to maintain the heightened state of awareness and aliveness that she suddenly feels after years of depression, in the face of her family and friends urging her to come back down. What happens when a massive opportunity for personal growth is seen by others as a dangerous mistake? In the hope that she might be able to return to an extraordinary life, but with no guarantee, Katerina has no other choice than to use her recent spy training to play the game, and to get an up-close, inside look at the state of mental health in mainstream America.
Order paperback // Order hardcover
Here’s our week:
August 26, 2021
Venus in 12 Libra opposite Chiron retrograde in 12 Aries: 6:24 AM PDT
(Image: Coven of the Cloven Hoof)
- This synodic cycle began with Venus and Chiron joined up in Aries, both conjunct the Sun at 8 degrees, on March 28. It was also a Full Moon in Libra. You might consider how you were feeling around matters of the heart at that time, what seeds were being planted, and how they are more visible now at this symbolic Full Moon moment between Chiron and Venus.
- Venus-Chiron themes relate to heart-healing. It relates to the wounding we already have that gets activated/triggered in relationship with others. It can also relate to the opening we feel when we experience love in a place we are not quite used to it – we are initiated into deeper mysteries of the heart.
- With Venus in Libra opposing Chiron in Aries, there may be an activation around choice. The conditions do not have to be any certain way: we make choices with the options available to us and the options we can imagine. Choices reflect our values and being self-aware of our choices allows us to see how we are acting upon our values, and where we are coming from a more unconscious place.
- Not being aware of our choices is a little like being drunk, blacking out, and not remembering what happened or why we got there. Being aware of choices is like being lucid – we can track cause and effect.
- In relationship, accessing one’s choice and allowing the choice of others makes way for connection. Suppressing our own values to appease another or attempting to dominate others are both ways that we do not respect choice, and try to use force (inwardly or outwardly) to extract a result.
Mercury in 24 Virgo trine Pluto retrograde in 24 Capricorn: 7:23 AM PDT
- Pluto in Capricorn points to a larger excavation process around conditioning: what we personally and socially accept as reality because it has been the cumulative experience or teaching, but not because it is actually the truest thing.
- Pluto in Capricorn could also relate to historical wealth from deep time: gifts or forms of adaptation that have evolved over long swathes of time.
- Mercury in Virgo could represent skillfulness: having the precise language, tools, means.
- Mercury and Pluto are at a disseminating phase trine, a phase which emphasizes sharing information. In some settings, the information being shared is about how to be a skillful participant (Mercury in Virgo) in a larger system that is not necessarily true. In other contexts, truly evolutionary information is being disseminated around how to align (Virgo) with a deeper source of integrity or groundedness in reality with a much more expansive/primordial context (Pluto in Capricorn).
- Consider the difference between information that helps you assimilate more with patriarchal conditioning and do a good job in that world versus information that leads you to tap in more with your emotional/primal/erotic body. And where you have deeper wisdom of the latter kind, where you are being invited to share and/or embody that.
August 27, 2021
Pallas Athena retrograde in 22 Pisces conjunct Neptune retrograde in 22 Pisces: 2:24 AM PDT
- The asteroid goddesses (like Vesta, Pallas Athena, Juno, and Ceres) are situated between the inner planets and Jupiter and Saturn, representing social archetypes that bridge the personality (the inner planets) with a greater social context (Jupiter and Saturn). Pallas Athena specifically helps with strategy and visualization: having a personal vision that becomes expressed and materialized in a social context, like advancing to prominence in one’s field or successfully furthering a cause in community. Pallas Athena relates to the process of having goals and having a brilliant strategy for reaching those goals – she is an internal savviness in this regard, or the appearance of guides/coaches who favor the hero along their journey. Athena may be contacted directly as in prayer – I love working with her. She may also be contacted indirectly by being committed to a vision and seeking and applying strategies for bringing the vision to fruition.
- With Athena conjunct Neptune, there can be ways that our process of materializing a goal through strategic measures is connecting us further with the fabric of the Universe – there are synchronicities, or maybe even just a faith that is guiding us through the early stages of a dream. We feel a greater sense of meaning by being on this path.
- Or, we may be experiencing an effacing of a particular strategy (Neptune dissolves). This can also be spiritualizing: say a person stops working so hard to fit in somewhere they don’t belong – that energy is now freed up for cultivating their truer nature and pursuing more resonant environments or relationships. One of the most humble parts of the Athena archetype can be the relinquishing of certain forms of strategy when we have had a paradigm shift – that just because we can use our intelligence to ‘get’ somewhere, doesn’t mean it is where we ultimately want to go.
August 28, 2021
Sun in 6 Virgo square the lunar nodes in 6 Sagittarius (south) and 6 Gemini (north): 11:56 PM PDT
- Life is very likely giving us opportunities to see ourselves and our experience through new angles: we are getting new pieces of information (Gemini) that are not necessarily fitting into the existing narrative. We can resist this by trying to rationalize new information to fit an older paradigm, thus collapsing that moment of unknown into a known, which is another way of talking about dogma here!
- There is a subtle invitation to feel into who we are when we are exploring new thoughts/ideas and new possibilities, without knowing why or what ultimate end they will lead to. Just to feed our curiosity, and see what moves and shifts inside of us.
August 29, 2021
Mercury enters Libra: 10:10 PM PDT
(Image: unknown)
Mercury will retrograde in 25 degrees of Libra on September 26, station direct in 10 degrees Libra on October 18, and finally leave Libra on November 5. Due to the retrograde we have a longer stay of Mercury in Libra and more time to get to know this placement.
- Mercury in Libra highlights our mental register of social dynamics and social graces, and our understanding of cause and effect in social spheres, and the general capacity to read the room. Perhaps you have noticed that sharing a photo of you and your puppy elicits warmth and friendliness from mostly everyone, but sharing your thoughts on current events is a stickier territory. Libra is our awareness of social cause and effect. It can even be the agreeing and contesting voices we hear/imagine in our minds in response to something we would say – our awareness of how something might land in a room.
- Mercury in Libra may be partially concerned with harmony and things feeling smooth or going over well (Libran peacemaking) but definitely that is not all there is to it. Mercury in Libra can also be interested in sharing ideas or thoughts that contest the peace in the room – showing up with something more loaded than a picture of you and your puppy. If this is territory that you feel like exploring (bringing up the unpopular thought, saying something that could disturb the room) there is also an art to this that Mercury in Libra finds compelling.
- One way this shows up is smoothing out an idea before it is shared. Generally whenever someone is extreme in their perspective in a way that feels one-sided or a little bombastic, someone in the room will compulsively feel the need to balance them with their response. (If you’re this person, it might be interesting to consider why this compulsion and where it is valuable versus where it is not.) On the other hand, a carefully deliberated or ‘balanced’ thought may land softer in the field.
- In a more all-encompassing way, ‘reading the room’ becomes another way to see ourselves in the mirror – facing how people respond to us and then letting those reflections move us. Whether we decide we don’t care about these opinions from others (i.e. people are projecting their values onto us and we don’t wish to accept those projections, and how we might navigate those projections such as informing people to counter those projections), or we adjust ourselves to harmonize more in our social environment, we are allowing these reflections to help us shape our values and our communicative capacity.
- Mercury will retrograde in this sign suggesting it will be a time to internalize and go within related to how we pick up the reflections from others in the practice of reading the room. If we repetitively get a kind of reflection from the external that we don’t like or agree with, there may be an alchemy that comes from sitting with that and feeling into where we could make different choices, and create a different musicality in our life than the notes that are already being played.
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 is now open for enrollment, 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!
With love,
Sabrina Monarch
No Comments