In trying to make some sense out of current uncertainty and turbulence, it can help to check out what the planetary cycles are saying. Here are some brief notes summing up the essence of the present day planetary picture.

Carl Jung “In all chaos there is a cosmos,

 in all disorder a secret order.”

We know several things astrologically at the moment which describe crisis in the world in general :

We are moving from one world era to another: from a period between 1803 and 21st December 2020 when the twenty-year long Jupiter/Saturn conjunctions were travelling through the Earth element  – describing (in shorthand terms) the era of capitalism. This era, simply put, owes its ‘success’ to heedless exploitation of our mother planet, and a way of living which is increasingly obviously no longer sustainable as we continue metaphorically to saw off the branch on which we are all sitting as the climate crisis takes off.

That conjunction’s journey shifted to the Air element for the 200+ years following 2020’s Winter Solstice, when Jupiter and Saturn met at 0° Aquarius: early evidence being an airborne covid 19 pandemic which has upended the way we live, and the fact that our culture is taking a major shift into conducting itself on Air e.g. via zoom, proliferating social media, and increasingly sophisticated advances in Artificial Intelligence or A.I. 

This first 20 year cycle of the Jupiter Saturn combination through the Air element between 2020 and 2040 is going to be critical in setting the terms of reference for the new world order into which we are moving. 

The USA is currently undergoing its Pluto return at 27 Capricorn in 2022, with attendant turmoil, and there is a major war taking place in Ukraine which began in the Spring of 2022, showing no sign of coming to an end any time soon. Pluto’s cycle is around 248 years; we have seen, since his entry into Capricorn in 2008, every institution on the face of the Earth dredged and purged with all its unresolved crap coming to the surface. Until Pluto finally settles into Aquarius on 19th November 2024 – just after the next USA Election on 5th November 2024 – the purging and dredging which began in 2007/ 2008 will continue. From all of this you can see that the time over this winter is going to be especially critical worldwide as the Lord of the Underworld returns to Aquarius on March 23rd 2023, for the first time since the revolutionary decade of the 1770s. Astrologer Jessica Davidson has done a fine historical survey of Pluto’s Aquarian ingresses – and impacts – over a long historical timeline. Read it HERE

 However, I take comfort from my knowledge of that historical timeline, however sketchy it may be – cultures have always alternated between periods of chaos dominating, out of which of arise new ways of humans organising themselves – as order gradually reasserts itself.

Learning to live with uncertainty, trying to find our personal balance in an era in which chaos (Neptune) is increasingly more evident than order (Saturn) seems to be what we are all challenged to do at present. 

My personal motto is ‘start where you are and do what you can’ as positively as possible, in order to make some small individual contribution to the birthing of a more constructive world order from the old one: an order which is clearly deeply corrupt and well past its sell by date…