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A personal note.
I don’t believe in determinism or using astrology as a fear-mongering tool. I’m most interested in helping readers provide context to current events by offering big-picture ideas. The Weekly Stars will mainly focus on retrospective analysis to help ground us (I have enough personal planets in Virgo to worry about the future more than I do). Even when I write prospectively, I always believe that astrology is like weather prediction: if it’s raining, you can choose to bring an umbrella. If it’s sunny, you can choose to bask in the Sun. Or wear sunscreen. Or stay inside and enjoy the Sun another day. And if it’s raining, let’s understand what an umbrella means as a metaphor in certain astrological contexts.
I’m not convinced that astrology is a causal system. I’m convinced that movements of planets correlate to events on Earth after studying western astrology for many years. The connections are too specific, frequent, and predictable to be otherwise. Perhaps some day we’ll find a reason for this correlation through quantum mechanics. Or maybe an AI algorithm will explain why Mars fuels conflict just like the Moon moves our tides. But I don’t need to understand or even believe in a causal system at this point — the correlative patterns are so helpful in providing us insightful context for current events. My hope and wish for The Weekly Stars is that understanding the cosmic patterns can provide you a sense of grounding as well.
What type of Astrology do you study?
I study a combination of classical Hellenistic astrology as well as modern astrology developed over the past two centuries.
First, it’s important to understand what astrology is. From our perspective on Earth, it appears as if the planets, the Sun, and other bodies are orbiting around us in a tight band of the sky that we call the Zodiac. The Zodiac, represented as a 360-degree circle around Earth, was broken down by ancient astrologers into 12 constellations of 30 degrees each. Some of these constellations may appear larger in the sky than others, but by the time the Zodiac (as we know it) was established, each one was cut down to an equal size for purposes of astrology.
Therefore, we can explain Astrology, at its core, as a math toolset to track the planets as they move across the circular map that we call the Zodiac. When someone says “My Moon is in Libra”, that means the Moon at the moment they were born was moving through the Libra constellation in western tropical astrology.
An arcane note: the Earth’s axis tilts over long periods of time, which causes our view of the constellations composing the Zodiac to shift as well. For that reason, the Zodiac as defined in other types of astrology, such as Vedic Indian Astrology, have a different Zodiac and a different way of calculating planetary movements. This note is, to be honest, inappropriately brief to describe a critical difference between astrological systems. However, for now, I’m sharing one of the differences between systems to emphasize how important it is to observe current events from the rules and procedures of one system as a whole — not combining systems.
Whether or not these ancient astrologers knew we lived in a heliocentric system, modern astrologers recognize that the power of astrology as a pattern recognition system connecting cosmic movements to Earth-bound events. Accordingly, we are intentionally using a geocentric model because we are curious about the relationship of celestial movement and events on Earth. I always raise this distinction with clients because I find it easy to hold both modern astronomy concepts and the pattern recognition tools of astrology in two hands — they serve difference purposes.
While I respect and value other systems, I have only a basic understanding of them — enough to get in trouble, as they say. I find it essential to stay within a framework that has its own set of rules and has been tested with its own logic for hundreds if not thousands of years. Accordingly, I will not be referencing other systems of astrology in The Weekly Stars, whether it be the sidereal Zodiac, Vedic astrology, Japanese astrology, or even the Chinese Zodiac. I hope to learn more about them some day, but for now, if my analysis appears different than a system you’re used to using, I welcome you to learn more about the type of western astrology I study.
What is Mundane Astrology?
Mundane astrology is a specific branch within western astrology that uses pattern recognition from planetary movements to analyze global events and trends that affect societies, nations, and culture — even weather. Unlike natal or psychological astrology, which deals with individuals and personal life events, mundane astrology interprets planetary cycles, transits, and alignments in relation to countries, governments, economies, and historical events. When working with mundane astrology, it’s key to understand a few matters:
Individuals have more agency than large groups of people. Or even public leaders.
Large groups of people do not have the same agency, generally, as individuals. This is a key concept. First, I don’t want anyone to take my discussion of the movements of the planets and fear the same impact personally. Every individual has freewill and agency, allowing that person to respond to the energies present or non-present in their life. The collective, on the other hand, may not have the same level of agency because it’s moving as a group.
Similarly, certain trends may show the movements of people who do not have the same level of agency as others — whether due to socioeconomic circumstances, education, or other reasons. I work with many individuals on a one-on-one basis and when I consult using astrology, we discuss each person’s unique chart in detail and options to respond to planetary movements.
Just because, say, an eclipse is happening in Libra, that does not mean you’ll be affected the same as others. In fact, two people born with the Sun in Libra may have very different experiences of the transiting planets. It’s all what time you were born, the degrees of the planets in each sign, and the proximity of a planetary movement.
Leaders and highly public-facing individuals often times can have different or more stark impacts from astrological transits than other individuals. I’m not entirely sure why this is the case, buy my guess might be something about the distinction between the individual and the collective above. It takes someone highly aligned and focused on their individual agency to avoid being impacted by collective energy. The more prominence someone has, the more energy that person may feel directed at them. This is not always the case, but I raise this issue to remind readers that just because your chart is exactly the same day, location, and time as Jennifer Anniston, it does not mean you will experience the astrology in the same way. We all have agency. Even Jennifer, I’d guess, especially based on her publicly-known use of astrologers.
If a planet is “retrograde” it does not mean anything bad, per se.
All planets appear to go backward at times — from our perspective on Earth at least. (While we often call the Moon and Sun “planets” in astrology, they do not go retrograde). We now know this appearance of planets moving backward is an optical illusion based on our own orbit around the Sun. But astrology is a system that seeks to connect planetary movements with events on Earth, so the fact that a planet appears to go “backward” from its normal march through the Zodiac is an important concept in astrology. Periods of retrograde often serve as a review of that planet’s themes. Mercury — the planet that most often retrogrades — represents communication and technology. When mercury retrogrades, we’re reviewing our steps, our missives, and our tech devices. This review can create a slowdown or even result in mishaps if we’re pushing forward too fast instead of reviewing matters at hand. The outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) appear to be in retrograde for large chunks of the year and so those periods are significant in impacting current events — except for a couple days around the time that they actually station retrograde or station direct and move forward. For our purposes, we can understand that a planet retrograding, and especially Mercury, Venus, and Mars, may have an impact on the type of news and quality of events we analyze.
Events do not always occur on a specific date; more often the energy builds and dissipates like a bell curve.
Any planetary movement or alignment between planets may have an impact before and after the exact date of alignment. In the case of eclipses, it’s typical that we can expect news plus or minus one week from the actual date of the eclipse. For other events such as one planet trining another or two planets coming together, the amount of time we should expect an impact can vary depending on how large the planet is and how fast it moves. When planets station retrograde or return to direct motion, I often see events reflecting those changes plus or minus two days around — but it can vary. Astrology as a pattern recognition system relies on the building energy and dissipating energy of any planetary movement or alignment, in essence a bell curve. Thus, when I’m analyzing news events, we should not always expect events to occur on exact dates but within a time band.
You can always have a great day, week, month, or year — do not take the analysis of global events and apply it to your own astrology chart.
One of the key ways to analyze a personal birth chart is took at the details. A Virgo sun born September 1 will be much differently affected by a certain event than a Virgo sun born on the 15th — even though they share the same sun sign! Precision, which is represented by “degrees” in astrology, is key. And even then, should you happen to share precise degrees with leaders or other persons in the news, your chart may have unique features that causes the events or astrological patterns to impact you differently. Never assume that the astrology of current events will affect you in a certain way; always best to work one-on-one with an astrologer.
To emphasize, regardless of the planetary movements, you personally can have a great, day, week, month, year, life. You can make progress when others are unable to do so; you may feel great in a period of mass suffering. This contrast happens because astrology is individualistic on the psychological level and broader at the “mundane” level I use in The Weekly Stars. I still find myself surprised by the movement of planets, expecting one thing and receiving another. I almost always find the energy or feeling of a transit to be as expected. I just can’t always predict the exact events that will occur.
What are aspects?
A guide to how planets interact in the sky and teach us about global events.
When reviewing the connection between planetary movements and world events, we first want to look at what sign each planet is moving through. As noted above, the planets are rotating around the Sun at different rates than Earth and therefore move across the sky in distinct ways. To track this movement with precision, the first astrologers created a system of 12 equal constellations (the Zodiac) through which the planets appeared to moved. According, when a plane is “in Taurus” or in any sign, it means the Taurus constellation is behind the planet we’re tracking when observing the night sky.
Second, when studying global events, we want to notice the interaction between planets in the sky. Any relationship between two planets is called an “aspect”. Because the Zodiac is a 360-degree circle, two planets in different places can make mathematical aspects to each other. I find that terminology confusing for non-astrologers, and I often used the word “interaction” or “relationship” between two planets.
A brief summary of aspects for our purposes is as follows:
Planets moving through the same sign come together and merge their identities in a way. This interaction is the easiest to see because you can literally watch two planets overlap in the sky — or one planet disappear into the Sun (even if that sometimes requires a telescope). This aspect is called a conjunction.
Planets moving through the same element (fire, earth, air, or water) generally have an ease or flow between each other. It’s often mistaken as a “positive” interaction by psychological astrologers, but, for global events, it’s not always positive. This interaction can simply represent an ease for the two planets’ energy to connect. Bad themes can flow together as easily as good things. This aspect is called a trine.
Planets moving through the same type of modality (cardinal, fixed, mutable) can have a difficult interaction. Or their interaction requires each planet’s distinct themes to be integrated — not an easy task. This aspect is a more complex one for our purposes because it requires understanding a planet’s modality. For ease, I’ll refer to this aspect as a difficult interaction or one that requires integration. If you want to learn more, try to remember that each element (fire, earth, air, and water) also has a modality, which represents whether it starts the season (carnival), sits in middle of the season (fixed), or ends the season and gets ready for the next (mutable). This aspect is called a square.
The above bullet points are an oversimplification, but a primary goal of mine for this Substack is to make astrology accessible and a tool to use for daily life.
The Lunar Cycle
A New Moon occurs when it orbits close enough to the Sun (from our perspective) to disappear. In astrology, that means the Moon and Sun are in the same sign. Conversely, a Full Moon occurs when the Sun and Moon are in opposite sides of the Zodiac (and thus opposite sides of the sky). The cycle of a New Moon in one sign to a Full Moon in the same sign is about six months.
While the above may be basic astronomy, I never followed the Moon’s cycle closely until studying astrology and offer the reminder to work with each Moon’s phase. I believe we can all gain immense benefits from doing so: on each Full Moon, at the least, we have the opportunity to observe the themes over the past six months.