Well friends, we are now in the thick of it.
The planet Venus wrestles openly with the inertia of a heavy and brutal wheel. She has been consumed and also spit back out by the relational project of violence.
The landscape flickers rapidly between the rot of the utterly profane and the sharp relief of the sacred. Venus visits an already excavated site. Since March 4, 2026, she has been seeking out and stitching life into all viable green edges. Even as the ground quakes and the smell of neglect drifts in and out of awareness.
Since her last death/rebirth in March of 2025, Venus has traveled all the way around the sky, with whispered messages of urgency to all the other planets.
I’m sure you don’t need an astrologer to tell you that the world has changed, or that it’s going to keep on changing. Yes, I’ve put some words together here, writing in the early morning of March 18th, trying to give us all a sense of which way the story is turning. General astrology forecasts are written and read in a vague and gestural way. Conversely, I am quite specific in client sessions because there is a clear perspective to address.
For back story, I explained much of what makes 2025-2026 a unique time 34min into THIS RECORDING (80 Nights With Venus, 2024).
On March 20 2026, I will share the most useful things I can say for sure about the 2026 Aries ingress charts. This talk is live for CBJ members, with a recording available after. If there is a city/country you want to make sure we cover, please reach out to me before Friday. (Current charts: Iran, Israel, Haiti, USA, Rome, Mexico, Texas, Greenland, Venezuela)
The sign of Aries reminds Venus of the particular kinds of violence that go along with being far from home or holding down an “exiled” position. For the detained or enslaved children, parents, the missing and murdered and deported, the timeline is clear: this March and April will mimic much of what stressed us last year in those same months. But now, there is far more willingness from the average person to take helpful paths towards action.
Venus and Mars describe the spectrum of human passions. We all have intensity. We all have desires. These two planets cover the range of experience from utter pleasure and devotion to force and obliteration, from all that comes together to all that splits apart. As with all the visible planets, each one of us stands in this sharp underworld of Mars and Venus to some extent, submerged up to our ankles at the very least. The more Mars and Venus have claimed you, the deeper under this water you tend to live; hair triggers attuned to threats and cravings that we don’t tend to offer up to polite company. Mars understands that the gentler realms are not necessarily more safe for him. His is a more private independent survival world, and it has an underbelly of danger.
I’m sorry to report that we do not arrive on an easier path to accountability when we suffer more. We all have shadow behaviors and reasons to protect ourselves with them. It may be tempting to see the naked horrors as something outside of ourselves. But since the future depends desperately on us taking care of one another, many more intense and unacceptable experiences and feelings are still due for airing out and alchemizing. The goal to is to keep our fangs but learn how to sheathe them.
A society that stays in stubborn refusal to believe in the healing work of taking accountability is a society that refuses care for one another. And we have the most urgent opportunities to try for care.
The artist, the sex worker, the domestic violence survivors and perpetrators, stalkers, assassinations, covert trafficking rings with mutually assured complicity, the single bad actors, the military, gang violence, the police force, the weapons, the athletes, the dangerous ones, the mobsters, crime, exploitation, manipulation through desire.. all of these things belong to the realm of Mars and Venus.
Jupiter and Mercury lord over the more temperate zones of society: the middle class, the merchants seen selling wares in broad daylight, the councils, the games, the pursuit of knowledge, the ones who don’t need to question whether they belong in society, those who study. The sun also lives in this middle realm, showing us that truth and illumination and bringing something to light is often the best way through.
The third realm is given to far away Saturn and the Moon lives there as well. The moon represents material needs. It is associated with feelings in our modern world. But this ancient rationale evokes the blamelessness of the needy, the helplessness of children, and the vulnerability of those who are subject to a force as strong as Saturn.
Saturn welcomes all of us into the world and ushers all of us out. Time is salvation and time is an enemy. Saturn is just as happy to work systemically as she is to be a figure, a stern grandmother who reminds you to close the door. Some of us forget that children face a brutal passage just trying to be born. Being embodied at all is an experience of need. The inevitable forces of entropy are all experiences for Saturn to watch over.
You know who won’t be allowed to drop their standards for operating in a rule abiding society? Anyone born:
October 8 1921 – December 20 1923; November 21, 1950 – March 7, 1951; August 13, 1951 – October 22, 1953; September 22, 1980 – November 29, 1982; May 7, 1983 – August 24, 1983 ;October 30, 2009 – April 8, 2010; July 22, 2010 – October 6, 2012
You are the group of folks who have Saturn in Libra, who have now entered the 3 year phase of life known as “the Saturn opposition”. For you: the strategies that require you to take personal accountability, and to act with more and more awareness of your own limitations were necessary to develop. But ever since Saturn’s last most challenging aspect (from Dec 21, 2017 to Dec 18 2020), you have been honing that discernment into a powerful fairness that others are now hungry to encounter.
The brutal short-sightedness in the world around us right now is imaged as Saturn traversing the sign of Aries (May 26, 2025 – Sept 1, 2025; Feb 15, 2026 – April 14, 2028). It is an unfair fight and we need you Libra Saturns to keep calling it like you see it. The realms of Saturn now answer to an unjustified and defenseless illegitimate thuggery. But that can also be the bravery needed to embark with a beginner’s mind into tough and active terrain.
The beauty and the detail of astrology lies in its usefulness. It is a map that helps us abstract the complexities of life. A clear geometry of overlapping systems of power is a useful map indeed.
When I say that the realms of Saturn, with their heavy, structural inevitabilities, are currently giving their fealty to Mars.. I mean that the heaviest weights land in the world of military actions.
What that means is that our infrastructure and bureaucracy are not under the control of a planet from “respectable society”. We are going to need Martial leadership. Is it the veterans for you? Recovering alcoholics? Someone with head trauma? An older athlete? Saturn shows up as someone who will already have fallen a time or two.
Now, no chart lives all the way in the underworld, and all of us have some path or another up into the light. But the more submerged we are the less capable of delivering a message in daylight we become. The underbelly of society is not somehow less decent or human or worthy of respect. But it is more dangerous. Those of us who are from there understand it.
Mercury is a planet of the middle realm; the temperate zone of society. But among the planets, Mercury also has an unusual willingness to leave these approved zones and start asking questions. Mercury is physically closer to earth than normal. It is having one of its retrogrades again. This means we won’t be in easy territory for the press and all things scientific and data driven. We’ll get some motivational aggression or passion mid-April to finally breach the stormy mind-container (shock? dissociation? substance? grief?) that we’ve been knocking around inside of.
When Mercury is retrograde, it is waylaid. It is also subversive and irreverent. It is digging around investigating and following its curiosity. Especially in the context of Jupiter’s 2026 themes, we can expect to continue exposing commerce narratives with more and more mind bending false equivalencies between spoken words and actual violence. We must adapt our personal narratives but never away from our most sacred core principles. Retrogrades of Mercury (and Venus) always conjure a visit to the underworld or literal understories. This particular basement belongs to an extremely well funded Jupiter. He is the most honored guest, the one the moon welcomes and heaps praise, riches, and honor upon. We can unearth corrupt receipts from the obscene hoards of private and trans-national corporations. We can also investigate the weaponization of words and the unsatisfying misapplications of technology. Either way, this is fodder for the energy needed ahead. Ask what matters to you. Ask who your actions serve and make sure you like the answer more and more rather than less and less. There is room for new tangible efforts to take root but we all know less than we’d like to.
It’s all very well and good for Mercury to go investigate the business of other planets, but Jupiter and Mercury did hatch some of these plots together. Complicity is near to universal. There is a strong element of following fools into darkness and then feeling our way out through a different passage with different guidance. We are going to need to rearrange our concepts of safety. It is both devastating and so utterly necessary for the people of the various planetary realms to put their heads together. Remember that the people you knew in 2018 who are still with us have been shaken loose from at least as many personal moorings as you have, in one way or another. We can’t afford to make assumptions about the path ahead. So what do we hold up to see by? To speak with? To move under the rapids?
Those of us who live in the underworld regularly understand that our next leaders cannot be the same as the ones who got us here.
In Pisces, Mercury says that we can only trust information verified by wide consensus. Consensus is not a trustworthy source, unless we’re talking about eye-witnesses on the ground, etc but it can help us find the handholds on the dark and barnacle-encrusted wall of our current labyrynth. The journalists who were martyred are greatly missed, and for us and for them, Mercury will keep finding innovative and different ways for information to move. After April 20th 2026, we will know better what we’re saying “no” to, each in our personal ways.
The second half of April and on through mid-May has a war-focused action pressure to it. In our personal lives, it’s an appropriate response to any confused avoidance of real situations at hand. But be kind to one another. Clarity is still not easy.
So what is a Mars version of discernment or a Mars version of honor? It’s about taking action, even while hauling the rusty anchor of material consequences and our current reality along. The best people for the moment aren’t the ones who are only aesthetic. They need to possess real martial strategy. How do we enact the sowing, the burning of fuel, of calories, of dividing and tilling and eventually severing fruit from wilting vines? Mars is not abstract. It commits. It burns. It paces the perimeter, puts ink under our skin, beats drums, and yells at us to keep learning what actually makes for a satisfying and efficient personal conflict.
Mars people may have once been submerged all the way up to their necks in reprehensible things, perhaps things you’ve never had to do or understand yourself. This conjures figures like Graham Platner, a Marine turned small-town harbor master turned populist redneck candidate and likely winner of the Maine Senate seat in the midterms. He was a machine gunner who walks into venues with Dropkick Muphy’s playing. Yet, the aesthetic of what he represents is not enough for people who aren’t present to quite understand or be able to articulate the coalition that he represents.
This is a good time to listen to people in recovery. It calls in anyone who wants to build things, especially when they believe that it’s more meaningful to build than to destroy. Effort for Mars CAN be constructive. It takes some work. But it loves work.
The other kind of leadership on the menu looks more like a call-back to Mr. Rogers. We need more Jupiter in Cancer people. We certainly have some! They look like Miss Rachael and James Talarico right now, and any preacher with the integrity to defend their neighbors and any teacher who is steadfast in their care for children, and any judges who honor the oaths that they give and you, my friend, you are all of these people. Each chart is a whole internal society made of the vulnerable Moon, the centering Sun, and all the chaos and grace of the planets around them.
Some of you may be new to the level of austerity that you are facing right now. I want to tell you about a useful friendship between two planets that can help us through this: Venus and Saturn.
When we point out the true location of consent, when we see the real boundary between what we have control over and what we do not, we are seeing Saturn and Venus. When a loved one hears and honors a boundary that you’ve set, that is them. When a plant grows in response to a decently lofted soil, that’s them too.
Venus will be in the terrain of war, in the sign of Aries through March 30th, constrained by a slowly burning denial of fairness from overwhelmed and under-equipped Saturn.
For the rest of this month, I want you to know that we are all over our heads in the land of Mars and Venus together and we’re only going to get more acclimated.
Your challenge is to build and affirm and connect under fire.
The people here are brash. Your assessments of valor are no longer happening in the same world that raised you. That’s a good thing. We all have our individual tools of assessment. Use them. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: De-escalate all conflict that is not with the enemy. Solidarity is the biggest and best thing we have.
Readings are open!
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