Astro Forecast 3.12.25: Eclipse Season is Here and Holy Shit We're Fucked
Oh, were you afraid of eclipses? Mercury stationing retrograde? Oligarchy? Buckle up, Buttercup - because they are all happening.
What is happening?!
That rough beast, a.k.a. all of humanity is slouching toward the end of Pisces season, which closes out the zodiacal wheel and represents a brutal turning point for those of us lucky enough to experience this foul year of your lord, 2025. The sun, Saturn, and Neptune are all preparing to exit symbolic winter and the Temple of The Fish, a gentle place that goes with the flow, smokes weed, and connects us to the primordial darkness we experience before we are reborn. Winter is yielding to a transitional mist and nurturing newly emerged buds, despite the chilly caprice of March. It is an embryonic moment, one in which we’ve been floating, static and insulated from the bright severance of birth and the full volume of existence. We think the womb is our world, all of us, until we are thrust out of it, and suddenly everything we thought we knew is gone. Like a caterpillar oblivious to his next phase, we have been under the illusion of strict boundaries and certain that we understood the shape of our existence, which means minds will be blown when our collective chrysalis splits open. That brutal midwife, eclipse season, has arrived.
Astrology is just an ancient method for marking and experiencing time, and in the PNW my people* recently endured something we refer to as ‘false spring’. Our daytime precipitation had taken a powder and given way to bright blue skies, a gentle breeze, and something warm and yellow beaming down on our faces. Even my neighborhood crows seemed confused; they hop-waddled in my embarrassingly akimbo garden like feathery cops investigating a crime scene. Winter has been cruel to the flora, it turns out.
As I write this, desiccated stalks of last season’s lemon balm stick out of the dirt like abandoned wires, the strawberry box is a desolate compost heap save a tiny, mint-infested corner, and my vegetable box houses one ragged champion - a collard plant so massive that it may as well be from the Pleistocene era. His leaves are rough, dog-eared things that flap from stalks as high as my shoulder, and I swear he backed himself up to the corner of my house so that he could glare at the smaller plants and dare them to fucking try it. If Clint Eastwood was a plant, he would be this one.
Leaving the exposed ruin of my garden for another day, I walked through the neighborhood and marveled at a cloudless blue heaven, curled foliage, cautious squirrels, and tangled landscapes coming into stark relief via our relentless sun. I hated it. This is not the weather for Pisces season, I thought. A perfect sky is unnerving the way a diamond or an ocean is unnerving; it is an ancient void that remains cold, vast, and absolutely merciless in its indifference to human life. There’s a hardness to clear skies, a ruthless drive to strip us naked and inspect our wobbly bits. I rounded a corner and caught a hawk gliding in a nonchalant circle above a brick chimney before he dove behind the house, presumably toward something he could eat, and spotted two more birds of prey wheeling in the distance. There was a renewed vigor to the flap of their broad wings as they dove toward some poor creature, easily spotted without the camouflage of cloudy, misty drizzle. Our usual canopy in the PNW is dour, but insulating. It keeps things quiet and obscured. This, though, was a sky for being loud. For killing.
*Whenever I say “my people”, I am of course referring to hipsters in beanies with cups of sour coffee in their bike baskets, aging indie rockers with rare acoustic Martin guitars slung over their backs looking for kombucha on tap, and elder goths lurking at tattoo shops and galleries in between marathon clove-smoking sessions; basically, everyone in the PNW who doesn’t work in the tech sector. Don’t ask me to describe tech people, I have no idea what the fuck they do with their time! I assume they simply power down once Jeff Bezos’ muscular tentacle unplugs from their surveilled bio-port at the end of the workday.
Pluto in Aquarius is really cranking the volume on death, so far; Ukrainian and Palestinian civilians, homeless and poor Americans, Sudanese women and children in all countries are getting shoved across the border of this plane to the next, their bodies crushed under the twin apparatus of industry and empire. The current month has been cited as an astrological conflagration by wiser, more learned people than myself, but it doesn’t take a genius to anticipate escalating global chaos that, unfortunately, will have an impact on most people’s daily lives. Historically, unrest occurs when every single outer planet changes signs, as they do this year. Venus, the planet of social justice and Mercury, ruler of travel and communication, are both retrograde in violent Aries during a solar eclipse. This is happening at a moment when air travel, once an extremely safe method of transportation, will become less safe now that at least 400 FAA employees have been fired. Teachers, charity workers, and weathermen have been fired. They fired the weathermen, for god’s sake. The next step will be to privatize the whole shebang, including things like school and air traffic control, which will become options only for those who can pay. This quid pro quo mentality that the rich have for years applied to transport, housing, business, and other luxuries like healthcare is bleeding down to the very foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy so that, soon, we will only have access to drinkable water, oxygen, and carbon-based food if we can pay handsomely and eternally. We aren’t just witnessing a corporate coup; this is the opening salvo of a new economic order, one which will further calcify our social caste system, sequester all power among the top ten percent of our populace, and substantially increase the mortality rate of the remaining ninety percent.
Westerners have been slumbering beneath corporate tyranny for decades now, but our ruling class, long desensitized and sequestered from the consequences of their own actions, have cranked the volume on “The Greatest Hits of Fascism!” to an eleven in an attempt to keep their capitalism dance party going. They fail to see the rest of us clutching our heads, squeezing our eyes shut and frantically looking for a way to feed our kids and quiet the noise, so they are going to crank that knob until it breaks. Unabashed and unconstrained cruelty has been the calling card of the wealthy since humans invented wealth, but our ghoulish ruling class been adept at hiding their modus operandi until quite recently. They’re flying their fascist freak flag right out in the open now, dancing badly and throwing Nazi salutes with glee.
In America, our government is hosting a going out of business sale and everything must go - the public safety net, the social contract, and the principles of our constitution. This is because we have been bought and sold by private equity, who will now liquidate our country and our lives in order to appease the shareholders. They’ve been doing this to other places for centuries; gutting their governments and installing Western thralls as leaders who will open the doors to the likes of BlackRock, Dupont, and Exxon-Mobile in order to suck as much money and resources out of the Global South as we can before shrugging our shoulders and leaving a plundered populace to violence, which is inevitable when people are kept poor, starved, and angry. The blowback chaos we’re currently experiencing is part of a classic imperial boomerang and it has reached the point of its trajectory where it turns back to us and accelerates toward a messy collision. The encroaching lunar eclipse marks only the first major acceleration; astrologers will be tracking the upheaval of our Pluto return for at least the next twenty years, which means we need to pace ourselves for decades of combat instead of one measly battle. Most of us haven’t even started fighting yet.
*Whenever I say “my people”, I am of course referring to hipsters in beanies with cups of sour coffee in their bike baskets, aging indie rockers with rare acoustic Martin guitars slung over their backs looking for kombucha on tap, and elder goths lurking at tattoo shops and galleries in between marathon clove-smoking sessions; basically, everyone in the PNW who doesn’t work in the tech sector. Don’t ask me to describe tech people, I have no idea what the fuck they do with their time! I assume they simply power down once Jeff Bezos’ muscular tentacle unplugs from their surveilled bio-port at the end of the workday.
Why would this affect me?
Eclipse season affects everyone at varying degrees. Individually, we can expect difficult transitions and conflicts in the areas of our natal charts that contain Virgo, which can be amplified or mitigated by Mercury because they are the ruler of this eclipse. If Virgo rules your second house of wealth creation, for instance, this eclipse may reveal all the bad habits and mistakes you’ve been making in an effort to save money. If Virgo rules your ninth house of education, you could find multiple inefficiencies in your college application process and need to revisit your approach, or perhaps need to rethink institutional education altogether.
For good or for ill, the real stinker of this planetary conflagration probably won’t be a personal reckoning, but a collective one. The United States is rounding a dangerous civilizational corner, and the geopolitical power of my nation, unfortunately, means the entire world must come along for the ride.
In mundane astrology, countries have their own charts and significations, and they can give us hints about what to expect in the same way your natal chart can hint at auspicious times for job searching or speed dating. Virgo rules the tenth house of the U.S., which broadly represents every branch of our government, administrative agencies, the legal system, policing, and foreign relations; every place that Elon Musk and other grifters have been wreaking havoc. These are the areas in which secret knowledge and hidden agendas may be revealed, causing upheaval, conflict, and systemic breakdown once Mercury, who, it bears repeating, is the ruler of this eclipse, stations retrograde on March 15th.
An alarming* picture emerges when we look at how these transits and planets are dealing with each other. In the U.S. chart, Mercury resides in the eighth house of national mortality and foreign debt, and from there the busybody planet will control a very ominous eclipse in the tenth house of government. My country’s natal Mercury, Sun, Jupiter, and Venus all reside in an eighth house ruled by Cancer, which is where Mars has been blazing like a pissed off fireball since autumn. In summary, the planets have been having angry, contentious meetings about the state of the world, particularly The Unites States, and Mercury is about to broadcast the top secret minutes of those meetings to everyone. In a burn book. Probably on TikTok.
*I’m sure you are screaming in your head right now, “Alarming, Cranky? Just alarming?! That sounds like a fucking understatement, asshole. In fact this all sounds pants-shittingly terrible. Why do I read this goddamn thing?!” I agree, it sounds horrifying and I don’t really like drawing these conclusions, but I’m the sort of person who likes to be prepared for many possible scenarios. I’m also a cynical pessimist, so my scenarios tend to be rather dark. We don’t really have a choice other than meeting the moment we’re in, you know?
When do I have to deal with this?
This week’s eclipse is the second in a series of seven on the Virgo/Pisces axis, which means we will be dealing with the polarity of reality versus illusion until February 20th, 2027. Pay attention to the news and social channels, and stay wary of the end of March; multiple planets in Aries during eclipse season foreshadow conflict and instability. Have I mentioned that Neptune is passing through the final, gnarly degree of Pisces as we speak? He will move into angry Aries on March 28th, and for the love of all that is good and holy, do not go near water until mid April. (Unless you’re a billionaire, in which case you should absolutely go in the water, ideally to test out your new prototype submersible or dangerously speedy boat. I doubt anything bad will happen. You’re too smart for that.)
3.9.25 - 3.15.25 Mercury Conjunct Venus in Aries Lends Us Courage and Eloquence for Truth Telling
THE LIGHT
When Venus is retrograde, she forces us to examine our past and present in order to make decisions about the future regarding everything she rules - money, art, beauty, justice, and social connectivity. Melding with loquacious Mercury will give all of us a chance to tell our ride or dies just how much they mean to us, or, on the flip side, how much they annoy us and make us want to flee the country. We’ll be feeling vocal and emboldened, which could manifest in a number of ways; love letters to paramours, angry calls to senators, or full-throated screaming at clueless stragglers of the professional class as they waltz up to a Tesla showroom for their Cybertrucks Swasticars. Venus in Aries doesn’t play around or pretend to be coy, rather, she wants action and will tell us so straightforwardly. This is a moment to let people know how you feel about them with your whole fucking chest.
Considering Venus recently stationed retrograde herself, it seems as though Mercury is following her like an eager intern, hoping to gain knowledge from whatever she learned when she met up with the sun for her cazimi. What could that be? Well, this Venus signature is known to coincide with protests, provocative new art, the expansion of sexual boundaries, air travel disasters, military snafus, financial upheaval, and (whispers in case we’re bugged) government assassinations.
THE SHADOW
The Temple of The Ram is not the most sensible, circumspect place in which to engage conversationally, because in addition to bravery and passion, Aries has a tendency to be bold, brash, zealous, and immature. If something feels good in the moment, Aries wants us to do it, future consequences be damned. One night stands, the abrupt quitting of jobs, and violent, unreasonable outbursts often occur during retrogrades through martial signs, especially in connection to past issues or relationships that we thought we had closed the book on. Old frenemies and exes will undoubtedly sneak back into our social sphere, showing us where we have unfinished business. Personal circumstances will dictate whether ancient, crumbling bridges get rebuilt or burned anew. When it comes to bad blood, old partnerships, and old financial entanglements, some of us will be better off setting fire to the whole scene and salting the earth. That’s what Aries does best.
3.9.25 - 3.15.25 A Delusional Sun Conjunct Saturn in Pisces Crushes Egos and Plunges Us Into Shadow
THE LIGHT
Daaaaaamn, this opposition. The sun was Apollo or Helios to the ancient Greeks, and he represents all the ideal, masculine, authoritative energy we can muster. He’s a perfectly illuminated douchebag. He is all of our leaders, fathers, CEO’s, our imaginary gods on high, and our ego rolled into one blinding luminary. When I pull The Sun for someone in a tarot reading, I know they are in a moment of confidence and charisma, feeling smarter and happier than anyone else in the room, which can often be a well-deserved consequence of effort and toil. This aspect can bestow rewards, relaxation, and illumination to those of us who know our limitations and have been laboring diligently to surpass them.
Saturn is everyone’s favorite evil granddad, Kronos, and he is glaring at the sun right now demanding evidence that this confidence has been earned, because The Great Ringed Peepaw gives nothing up for free. He will inspire us to renew our standards, clarify our expectations, and pull our egos from the bring of narcissism, so if you’ve been wandering around thinking the sun shines out of your ass, Saturn is about to give your butt hair a solid yank.
THE SHADOW
Illumination is all well and good for those of us who have been working transparently toward our goals, but Saturn doesn’t stop there. Solar figures who have been operating under delusion, in bad faith, or engaging in obfuscation might see each devious plan explode in their smug little faces. I personally imagine Elon Musk as shiny, stuck-up Apollo getting a face full of cannibalistic Titan teeth during this transit, but that’s probably too much to ask for. (Please, Kronos, bite his face off.) Nonetheless, reckonings are waiting in the wings for people drunk on power and ego, so it’s possible your bitch manager will be outed as a thief and fired from her position, or another CEO will be publicly indicted for doing crime. This is a volatile time, so if you need to laugh loudly about someone’s deserved downfall, go do it in a broom closet or something, because you never know who might be listening. (Yes, you do. It’s the government. And Alexa. And our phones. And Elon fucking Musk.)
3.14.25: The Full Moon in Virgo Gets Eclipsed, Turns into a Blood Worm, and Smashes Our Delusions
THE LIGHT
Shadowy truths, personal revelations, and moral reckonings are all possible beneath this charmingly titled moon, and though this discomfort is necessary, the transition might feel sticky and unpleasant. Eclipses reveal our secrets and dirty habits, like skittering cockroaches that we are normally, blissfully unaware of during the day. Think of a lunar eclipse as the moment you walk into a dark garden apartment and flip the light switch to reveal an active biosphere that otherwise operates unseen. We will be forced to face the following inconvenient truth; our daily mopping wasn’t doing anything. That organic bug spray that costs thirty bucks a gallon and has cinnamon or some shit in it wasn’t doing anything. Keeping clothes, shoes, and food off the floor wasn’t doing anything. Vacuuming like a crazy housewife from the 1950’s wasn’t doing anything. In fact, what we will come to understand in that millisecond of rogue illumination and rustling carapaces, is that all we were doing was lying to ourselves. We wanted the false agency of our delusion and to believe that we had beaten the cockroaches with a mop and some cheap disinfectant, but they never went away. They’ve been here the whole time, and boy, have they been busy.
THE SHADOW
Well, now we have to deal with these cockroaches. We have to face the fact that our mechanisms for ousting them were bullshit, and only designed to manufacture the illusion of control. In a personal way, we have to examine our lives and be honest about the places we are deluding ourselves, which will depend on the Virgo placement of individual natal charts. Maybe you take a look at your housekeeping routines, realize that you are an insanely disorganized person and it’s been negatively affecting every area of your life. Like a pile of laundry that spills out of the bedroom and flops down the stairs, bad habits cascade. Or, given the activity of Venus, you might take a hard look at certain relationships and realize you’ve been sleepwalking through them, letting other people do all of the emotional labor. If Virgo rules your tenth house, you could get knocked down a peg or three at work via difficult, but ultimately honest feedback from your superiors. Wherever it lands, expect to be faced with aspects of your life that need cleaning, mending, and purification under this moon, thanks to prissy Virgo and her perfection kink.
In a collective sense, information might emerge that blows our current paradigm out of the water; how we perceive, participate, and synthesize world events could shift drastically once our collective kitchen light gets flipped and we see the bugs. Mercury is the ruler of this eclipse, and Hermes never keeps his mouth shut, so expect controversial developments to be broadcast to the collective. We are going to be flooded with new, significant data. Chaos will inevitable follow as we try to wrap our heads around a grave misrepresentation, as will nasty arguments about how to proceed, but such is the way of messy transition.
3.15.25 - 4.6.25: Mercury Follows a Retrograde Venus to the Underworld and Ruins All of Our Plans, Makes New Ones, Then Ruins Those Too
THE LIGHT
The combination of lush Venus and chatterbox Mercury points to social media as ground zero for this retrograde; who uses it or is allowed to use it, who controls it, and the messaging that emerges from within it’s smarmy, digital confines. The viral nature of the internet, once imagined as a democratic force for human connection, could play an enormous role in the aftermath of this eclipse as people share critical information and amplify important messages; messages like, “Holy shit you guys - our government is actually run by alien cockroaches and I have video. Now, smash that like button!”
THE SHADOW
The downsides of digital connectivity will certainly be on display through this retrograde; remember, Mercury in Aries is not going to be delicate or diplomatic. We could be absolutely bombarded with threats of violence, false flags, fake evidence and conspiracy theories. Platforms may be altered or taken offline, fueling more vitriol and paranoia, and tech problems are certainly going to multiply. It seems as though our Mercury issues through April 6th will be a direct result of this revealing, destabilizing eclipse, which means everyone will have a lot to argue about. Don’t get sucked into spats and conspiracies - that is the way of the old paradigm. Debating bots isn’t only pointless, it’s missing the forest for the trees. The communication and travel snafus that are about to occur should lead us to think on a far grander scale than we have been, and we certainly aren’t going to expand our perspective by calling someone a shitlib in a reddit thread.
I love your writing! Your voice is acerbic but clear and very fucking funny!
Cheers from a writer/sometime astrologer also in the PNW (PDX)
Another corker, Cranky! I like to characterise the outers: Pluto as Dark Daddy, and Uranus as crazy / black sheep uncle but you're totally right about Saturn there. Evil Grandpa - not sharing any sweeties. What a meanie.