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 this planet has an unusual willingness to leave that comfortable zone and start asking questions. Mercury in the sky right now is physically closer to earth than normal. It is having one of its retrogrades again. We won’t be in easy territory for Mercury but we’ll get some motivational aggression mid-April to finally apply all that we’ve been thinking so hard about.
When Mercury is retrograde, it is waylaid. It is digging around investigating and following its curiosity. Retrogrades also conjure a visit to the underworld. This particular basement, however, 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. What could we find in his corrupt basement hmm?
It’s all very well and good for Mercury to go investigate the business of other planets, but Jupiter and Mercury hatched some of these plots together. There is a strong element of following fools into darkness and then feeling our way out through a different passage. 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.
Mercury says that we can only trust information that verified by consensus. When the largest structural impact-makers take orders from criminals, consensus will not necessarily identify who is trustworthy from each planetary place, but it can help us reach out for the handholds on the dark and barnacle-encrusted wall of our current labyrynth. The journalists who were martyred are greatly missed, and we will keep finding different ways for information to move.
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.
We should hold onto a Mars version of discernment, and a Mars version of honor. The best people for the moment may have been submerged all the way up to their necks in things you’ve never had to do or understand. This conjures something like a Graham Platner figure, a Marine with a penchant for community organizing. But it calls in anyone who really wants to build things. Effort for Mars CAN be constructive, it just takes some 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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