What does the world need from astrologers?
“Medicine”, 1900-1907 by Gustav Klimt
What’s the sense in pouring into a cup that is already full?
For several years, and especially since 2020, astrology has served a very distinct function: helping people through a very frightening time in history. It has been a comfort. There is still so much horror, but the intensely pressurized feeling has lifted for a lot of us, and I feel very “what is the point of this?” — a question that has never not been haunting, but has become louder again more recently. It’s a major Saturn in Pisces mood.
Right now, looking out the window, I’m starting to see nothing but a big, glossy 1950s smile built to survive the threat of bombings. That smile was once a necessary, stress-releasing sigh, but now, every word I hear is one of those droning tones that sits just below the frequency registered by the human ear fully alert; for the most part, I scroll through things that are supposed to be somehow significant and meaningful and roll my eyes at how bloodless they feel. For awhile, I started to write something myself and I roll my eyes too. What need are we meeting? What is the point of talking about any of it right now? Is there a purpose to this?
the rise of present-day astrology
The rise of mainstream astrology began in the mid to late 2010s, once smartphones had become unavoidable, and while Saturn was in Sagittarius (and Neptune was in Pisces, where it remains today) and around the time of the 2016 presidential election here in the US — an event that marked a significant upswing in collective stress and bewilderment, both because it was actually disturbing and absurd and because the media <3s keeping us anxious. Maybe the timing is just a coincidence, but it aligns too beautifully with the one of greatest purposes of astrology: the small comfort of context when we find ourselves at a place that either is or feels like the ~threshold of the beast.~
This kind of intense mainstreaming of astrology couldn’t have happened in the past because astrology wasn’t readily available to the average person. Between the general cultural climate, the internet & social media’s capacity for circulating and spreading information (honestly, big shout out to early IG meme accounts for making astrology feel so accessible to the average person), and the proliferation of apps and websites that can calculate one’s birth chart, we could finally hold and follow the cycles of time in our palms and navigate our (and other people’s) innards with a few taps of an anxious finger.
The terrors of 2020 rapidly amped up the worldwide need for astrology and there was a distinct shift from CoStar and memes to what I’ve been calling Doomsday Cosmology – predicting the levels and layers of hell we might unwittingly travel to as the worldwide descent into hell raged on, blended with rampant fear mongering re: the pandemic, the United States’ Pluto return, and whatever the fuck else TikTokers (of which I am one – no shade, unless you’re one of these clawed ghouls, in which case lots and lots) could sink their blackened talons into.
As we can see in the graph below, interest in astrology reached an all-time mainstream peak in June 2021. (Google doesn’t seem to accurately calculate the ‘field of astrology’ as being on the rise, but a pattern similar to the search term ‘birth chart’ emerges when searching for any other specific astrological term).
Alongside the very new & necessary normalization of working entirely from home, the swelling of this cosmic wave opened the door for many astrologers to turn our passion into a profession, and deeply meaningful work, too. It gave us the opportunity to do something that actually had a purpose. There was so much purpose to the work we were doing during the crest of the pandemic that I personally burned myself out, to put it lightly, because my astrology business began to grow and I’d never had a job I loved before and I didn’t realize that even if you love it, you can still overdo it; it can still wreck you. I talked and thought a lot about the turmoil of the present and future, the US Pluto return, the north and south nodes in Gemini and Sagittarius respectively, and the way that we as a world had co-opted a disfigured Neptune-in-Piscean take on our reality. (I’ve been working on a workshop on Neptune in Pisces and the future of Neptune, so stay tuned for that, hopefully.)
next?
Since January 2022, the north node has been in Taurus and the south node has been in Scorpio and we have needed this exhale. There has been little collective clinging and clawing to the south node side of the axis this time because we had seen enough and needed not to focus on darkness, turmoil and upheaval for a while. We needed to recover. The north node emphasized and swelled the need for Taurean things like rest, comfort, and simple pleasures. This period is serving a beautiful purpose.
But in mid-July of 2023, the north node enters Aries and the south node enters Libra. This is a drastic change. The north node in Aries turns up the heat on our sense of urgency, our actions, and our impulses (obviously there’s lots of potential for this to be stressful). We may want to stand up again and make something happen, even if we’re standing alone. The creative spark becomes an important and impassioned part of the creative process once more. The blood rushes back to our sense of justice. Our teeth are more easily bared; our faces are hotter. More on this soon too.
Part of being a good artist or thinker or nurturer or lover is knowing what is needed and when. It’s understanding timing, when to strike, when to idle, what space needs filling, where to put your tongue or your hands and when and for how long, and listening.
We’re of little use to the outside world without a good sense of timing and a want to fill aching vacancies. What’s the sense in pouring into a cup thats already full? It’s more purposeful to just spend time splashing in our own nectar & keep an eye out for any glasses getting empty.
What place is empty?
What will not make me roll my eyes because it all tastes so stale, pointless and monotonous?
What serves a purpose beyond the purely ornamental? That’s where I am. I’m always there. I’m looking for the empty spaces. The point. Saturn in Pisces will continue to ask for the point for the next three years, and the north node in Aries can give us the drive to find it. When what we’re doing becomes pointless, it’s time to evolve.