May 25, 2024 to June 9, 2025
(fish out of water/centaurs teaching kindergarten)
Jupiter gives us the general state of all meaning-making on a massive scale. In the tropical zodiac, Jupiter is our mood board. When Jupiter moves, the vibes of the masses move with it. Our collective “why” transforms.
On May 25, 2024, Jupiter moved into Gemini and brought all of our vibes with it. As a terrain, Gemini is the part of the sky that lives 90° from Pisces.
Astrology tracks cycles. Real events are waypoints on a timeline of 72 overlapping cycles. Each cycle describes beginnings, opening crises, outcomes, deconstructions and endings that lead to new beginnings.
Of those 72 planetary relationships, Jupiter and Saturn are the one pair that has the most to do with the worldwide collective experience.
Saturn is structure. It corresponds to systems, hierarchies, borders, entropy, infrastructure, bureaucracies, mortality, and all rules of cause and effect. It is heavy, leaden, and chronic. It is binding, concrete, and foundational.
Jupiter is meaning. It corresponds to accumulation, ideologies, groups of people, faith, reason, medicine, cohesion, repair, inspiration, and all potentials of philosophical synthesis. It is buoyant, uplifting, and resourced. It is motivating, resilient, and purposeful.
Neither set of planet correspondences can work without assuming a whole spectrum of possible harm and benefit. There are negatives to Jupiterian group-think, to ideologies of growth and accumulation. There are positives to Saturnian boundaries and solid structures and pursuits that take time. What we do know is that they work in concert. It’s hard to build without purpose. It’s nearly impossible to inspire hope in others without real knowledge of despair.
In 2020, the Jupiter Saturn cycle came to an ending and a new beginning with the conjunction between them (closer in true astronomical distance than any of the 26 Jupiter Saturn conjunctions we’ve had since 1623). We are now immersed in a year of opening crisis that shows us what has come into being and will define our world until the next major waypoint in 2031. You could say the shape of the vegetation is emerging from that particular seed.
A populist response that acts on the solidarity between struggles has a real chance this year. This is a major defining point in our efforts to build a better world.
This current window of time addresses many of the same puzzles we’ve wrestled with since the summer of 1965. The point now is to interrupt harm and meet the real needs of complex people suffering in an abusive state. Anti-Fascism, Prison Abolition, Transformative Justice, the Anti-Rape Movement, and Anti-Imperialism that we see today is nourished and fed by thinking with the opening up of these movements in the 1960s.
Zooming in on right now.. from May of 2023 to May of 2024, we had one kind of Jupiter. From now until May of 2025, we have another. And it’s QUITE DIFFERENT. We’ve had a set change.
See, since May of 2023, Jupiter has been a HELPER to Saturn’s constrictions, to Saturn’s denial, to Saturn’s despair. That looked like a lot of shoring up Saturn with literal funding. Vast resources were expended on personal and group endeavors in that first half of Saturn’s journey. But now we’ve made it beyond that.
Saturn has entered year TWO of being in the tropical sign of Pisces. Pisces is a mutable sign, a place where big story arcs immerse us in the varied mutations of the global conscience. Saturn taking up space here means there’s something that chills us, that looks like chronic grief and fear in the collective emotional waters.
To astrologers, this was a promise: the biggest stories of structural oppression will HAVE to work within the substance of belief, of mass movements, and major evolutions in narrative. The systems will be overwhelmed and can only subsist on the masses of people’s beliefs in them, and ability to tangibly benefit from them.
Saturn tells us hard and chronic truths about the integrity of literal structures. For its two years in Pisces, Saturn doubles down on this story. Not only is our tangible infrastructure leaky and prone to flooding, but this carries over into the structures that beliefs are made of. Saturn drags the foundations of concrete reality into a sea of experience that contains a dense core of suffering.
Jupiter in Gemini however, brings us collective pushback on Saturn’s leaden weight. It is a time of friction between structures and ideals, between faulty dogmas and the murmuration of many issues-based struggles.
Jupiter has us less focused on currency now. Instead, we’re prioritizing information. Sound bytes. Spoken word and rap. Conversations between people we find interesting. The reset of the Jupiter-Uranus cycle in Taurus in April 2024 injected a concern for authenticity into the next 13 years of meaning creation. With AI, the thought “but that might not be real,” is now a persistent conundrum.
The value that Jupiter is amassing now looks more like what we find in Cancer, the sign second from Gemini. In any birth chart, we look to the sign that comes after any placement to describe what that planet will amass, what has real value to sustain it, what it cares to collect. Cancer is all about protecting babies, having access to places that are the right temperature for fragile, vulnerable life.
Jupiter in Gemini is clowning. We face the persistent challenge of hardship, of being exiled from positions of official status while being under-resourced. Saturn is in a dominant position spatially, so the systemic picture is oppressive and overwhelming.
And Jupiter is looking up at Saturn as the symbol of what to fight, what is attacking. There is value in this constant interplay between Saturn in Pisces and Jupiter in Gemini. Together, they produce something we need right now: the virtues of skepticism.
The bulk of the people now see Saturn as a problem, a chronic thing that needs addressing. Why is this good? So many things are wrong with the current power structures that single-issue organizers are arriving one by one at the same conclusions, even though different paths are taken.
Gemini isn’t only two faces. It is always a multiplicity.
The most recent historical moment that echoes where we’re at today astrologically was the summer of 1965. But the differences are stark. The cycles that show movement towards real racial justice against the abuses of empire were explosive then, as now. But in ’65 the student movements showed up in the geometry of the planets as a face-off against immovable scientific power. Cooperation between struggles was knowingly blocked in ’65. Triangulation was constant. THREE sides of the clash were imaged in the astrology, where now there are only TWO.
The populism that Jupiter in Gemini supports NOW is a far bigger tent. One difference is the location of Pluto and Uranus. They were their own force in ’65, angling to shatter and transform bureaucratic Saturn while the People were caught in the cross maneuvering between them. In the time since, you could say that Lucifer ate Goliath. The exploitative ecosystem is one cohesive thing right now, where visible power structures of government are either operating as a husk vehicle for corporate power or are simply not included, spat upon and shunned as illegitimate. The helms of nations are weak, their systems corroded. This is fall of empire stuff.
And THAT harkens back to the last few ages of Air, an entirely Jupiter and Saturn based way of dividing eras. The Ages of Air correspond to the most active periods of plagues, structural failings, and decentralizations of power in known history. It was during one such time when my favorite ancient author, Firmicus Maternus, was serving a population of clients during the fall of the Roman Empire, concerned with many of the same things as the people of today.
It’s not a stretch to say that the months of April and May have been fraught. How do we grieve when we’re looking for survivors and bombs are still dropping? The more the storms rage, the more energy we expend to help ourselves and others from devastation, the more opposition our best laid plans face. But Saturn in Pisces is NOT about already knowing the way. It’s about feeling it out. It’s about building things based on human needs and about giving a shit about the well being of people far away. We’re seeing more on the ground educating.
This IS the time to push back on all the wrongs. We’re armed with our multiplicities of wisdom and care as the crushing structural weight descends against it. It’s enough. It’s working. Our willingness to take responsibility and action against structural exploitation is loud and gaining traction. And those shapes reproduce from the macro to the micro.
You wonderful people are all doing the best you can with what dry land you have to work with as the metaphorical and literal waters rise.
In our daily lives and our inner worlds, we aren’t going to be the same.
Jupiter in Gemini says: like it or not, we’re doing populism against the bureaucracies. And in our own charts, this year tackles our deeply held beliefs for really good reasons. There are a lot of chances to align with people in a functional way. We wont want to swallow their whole world view and they wont swallow ours! Because at the end of the day, we don’t actually need to do that.
This transition to summer is a time to confront what ails us, inside and outside. We can change the things that want us to think they’re too big to move. We have to. Jupiter in Gemini isn’t about getting top-down agreement. It’s about the murmuration. Believe each other. Believe in working together. No real care can emerge from any hierarchy of deserving vs undeserving. And care is on the way (but more on that another time).
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