Astro Forecast 4.18.25: Our Planets Illustrate How The Little Things Add Up
Mercury and Mars make small, but important moves this weekend. They are jockeying into position for something far more dramatic, just like us.
What is happening?!
It is officially spring in Seattle; the birds are chirping, the rain is hiding, the pollen is pollinating, (oh gods, is it ever pollinating) and the sun, in all his irritating, golden glory, is staying out until 8pm for maximum annoyance. Needing shades to sit in my garden one hour before bedtime lest my eyeballs sizzle and pop is just chicanery, plain and simple, but the weather gods that sit atop Mt. Rainier never ask me for my opinion, so we in the land of coffee and puffer vests must endure. We’ll be gifted intermittent drips and drops of precipitation as we hobble toward May just to keep fashionistas on their toes, lulled in to a sense of normalcy and cable knit by the cool, misty mornings only to sweatily curse the blazing sun by late afternoon, but for the most part, this strange spring of 2025 has arrived. Seasons do this here; they creep up in mincing little steps, delaying full arrival until abruptly smacking you in the face with histamines like a seventeenth century aristocrat with a fan. One grey day, we’re dreaming of paddle boards and sunscreen, and the next, we’re hissing at our newly exposed pastiness and counting down to Samhain. It would be so much easier if the weather lords picked a date on the calendar to announce their arrival so we could shift our expectations like the tracks of a train. Attention! Attention! From this point on, until October 31st or so, we’ve got only clear skies, a light 68 degree breeze, and allergies up ahead. Please dress accordingly and mind the gap, thank you. Weather, like astrology, chronic illness, and fascism, never announces itself all in one go. It sneaks quietly and inconsistently toward us until one day, we blink and open our eyes in a totally different world.
We are always sleepwalking in small steps toward a precipice.
I was a new voter in Chicago when Al Gore conceded the presidential race to George W. Bush sometime after preppy Republican thugs broke into a Florida election center and halted an official recount. Mercury stationed direct on Election Day, ensuring high level communication trickery that prevented us from knowing the election outcome for weeks. Despite the fact that every normal citizen had only just been introduced to the perversely titled “hanging chads” upon which the fate of the free world rested, Gore conceded and the recount was halted when a simpering Supreme Court demanded it. Once the twin towers of The World Trade Center were demolished by hijacked airplanes in 2001, Bush was able to lay the foundation for all manner of ethnicity-centered travel bans to the U.S., which didn’t strike many people as fascism at the time so much as it seemed necessary and patriotic. It wasn’t difficult for legacy media to manufacture consent to bomb the shit out of Iraq, so they did, and we did. The dissenters marched, like we always do, but even then, the people in power weren’t particularly concerned with what the rabble thought. I remember freezing my ass and thumbs off amidst a crowd marching down Devon Ave., shouting slogans while picturing the warm masala tea that waited for me at the end of our route. We were unsettled, but not despairing. Not yet.
When friends and family in Louisiana lost homes and lives to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, that unsettled feeling developed its own heartbeat in those of us paying attention. Uranus was in watery Pisces, and when the rubber met the road we had the money to muck around with billion-dollar bombers in the Middle East based on spurious evidence of malfeasance, but not to save men, women, and children in our own country from drowning or starving. In fact, according to our befuddled leader’s matriarch, shoving thousands of people into a football stadium with no electricity, running water, or waste management for weeks should have been thought of as a boon. More people were unsettled by this, but not enough. Not yet.
By the time the Citizens United decision was handed down by our Supreme Court in 2010, it became clearer to a few of us that, Black president or otherwise, we were headed solidly in the direction of corporatocracy. The sun, Mercury, Venus, Pluto, and the north node were all gathering strength in materialist Capricorn, setting us up to prioritize money over good faith governance. The Occupy Wall St. protests that followed were a retaliation of sorts, though obviously insufficient in sounding the death knell of a doomed democracy - neither the professional nor upper-class neoliberals responsible for President Obama’s hope and change were anything other than annoyed at the disruption of their brunches and dog park dates. Nobody was poor enough or upset enough. Teeny tiny steps.
As homelessness increased visibly across the country, President Obama spent his second term drone bombing the shit out of Afghanistan and the liberal majority loved him for it. They also loved him for watered-down health care plans, impressive oration, and the relative youthfulness he brought to U.S. leadership, while the increasingly unhinged Conservative Party practically declared Hawaii to be a third world country in order to accuse him of lying about his citizenship. Our first Black president had to show official copies of his birth certificate to the public because Donald J. Trump, reality television blowhard and useful idiot/bagman to the Russian mafia, started the rumor that he was not an American citizen, which everyone from Republican congressmen to legacy media outlets ate up with a fucking spoon. This is the country, remember, that we were and that we are; the one that thinks all dark people are foreign, and all foreign people are criminal aliens.
When Republican Senator Mitch McConnell stonewalled a SCOTUS seat appointment by President Obama as a gift to Trump, the world was treated to a hammy performance of frat boy outrage by noted beer connoisseur Brett Kavanaugh after hearing a perfectly calm woman recount the evening he assaulted her in high school; a woman who, to this day, must keep her address secret due to doxxing and death threats. When he was confirmed, Venus was retrograde in her fall, Scorpio, and a decent number of American women knew which way the wind was blowing; past unsettled and into full-blown terror. There weren’t enough of us terrified, though. We continued taking small steps, asleep.
It shouldn’t have been a shock when a racist real estate criminal with a misogyny fetish became President of the United States in 2016, and that it was to many underscores how much Americans enjoy lying to themselves. Every distasteful element of the 2016 election was true; people hated Hillary Clinton because she was a woman, and people hated her because she was a warmonger. People liked Donald Trump because he was racist, and people also liked Donald Trump because he wasn’t a typical, ass-licking politician. There was anger at the cost of living and anger at the prospect of another leader who wasn't a white man, and all of it added up to a grifter in office who may as well have sat on his ass noisily scarfing horse paste for all that his leadership was worth when a novel coronavirus shut the globe down in 2020. By the time police murdered George Floyd on May 26th of the same year, people who had been righteously pissed for decades met up with people who were latecomers to being pissed. Welcome to the revolution, Becca, better late than never, etc., etc. The moon was opposing both Jupiter and Pluto, who were conjunct in devilish Capricorn. Social media made activism viral, and real people on the ground were beaming protest footage and cop brutality into our brains via smart phones. Still, there weren’t enough people terrified when Elon Musk bought Twitter, buoyed by nebulous investors to bring down the platform that expanded awareness of our police state all over the world. There should have been. We took a few more steps.
When Supreme Court Justice Ruth-Bader Ginsburg died in September of 2020, Pluto and Saturn were conjunct in Capricorn. An unqualified church camp leader was installed on the Supreme Court, adding panic and anxiety to women’s terror, but that miserable cocktail remained collectively un-drunk by people who said we were hysterical and unrealistic. Legal precedent, they all chanted, like a spell to ward away reality. They told us not to overreact, but to keep going to work, paying taxes, and trusting the system. My business partner at the time scoffed at my own despair and told me I was an idiot. I was in a blue state, he said. I would be fine. When Roe was officially repealed, upending the precious, magical shield of precedent that so many men told me would hold, he repeated the same rebuttal. Too many like him had no reason to be terrified, and they wouldn’t allow us our terror, either. They still won’t.
Trump’s first term was riddled with incompetence, but the Biden Administration gave him wide legal birth, acting simply as a placeholder presidency whose sole purpose was to acclimate America to strengthened corporate feudalism and mass death. Trump incited an embarrassing riot outside the halls of Congress and was rewarded a second term for it, as he was always meant to, thanks to controlled opposition in the form of gutless Democrat worms and a liberal bourgeoisie that simply wasn’t terrified enough to ask why. Why was justice being slow-walked? Why could we not charge, try, and imprison a seditionist? Why wasn’t anyone doing anything? Why wasn’t anyone sufficiently terrified?
We weren’t terrified enough when Joe Biden stepped down and Kamala Harris stepped in, we weren’t terrified enough when Israel began bombing Gaza and killing kids, journalists, and U.N. workers, and we certainly weren’t terrified enough when a hurricane ripped through North Carolina and forced thousands of people to live rough in the aftermath. We weren’t terrified enough as wildfire decimated L.A., we weren’t terrified enough of Project 2025, and we weren’t terrified enough when Trump started announcing the most laughably incompetent and sadistic wack jobs he could scrape out of the rancid corners of the real estate business as cabinet leaders.
These unelected psychopaths speak of immigrants and activists in slurs and spread rumors of their ungodly behavior in terms of filth and animal husbandry, emulating the propaganda strategies of Germany’s Third Reich. Traditional signatures of Mars in Cancer (whose shadow period we’ll not exit until May 4th) like xenophobia and nationalism are flourishing as government officials refer to entire classes of people as dirty, just as American protestants labelled Irish and Italian immigrants at the turn of the nineteenth century. They call them vermin, just as Hitler referred to Jewish people in 1930. Has it been too long for people to recall such recent history? Are we too illiterate to be terrified anymore?
Our outer planets are moving into frightening formations, wartime formations, while deportations from the United States to a penal colony in El Salvador, without due process, have begun. I’m getting the sense that more of us are terrified, but it might be too late. Our terror muscles have atrophied, I think, which is exactly the outcome these criminals, masquerading as a government, have been laying the ground work for since at least the turn of the millennium. Likely earlier. I was a self-absorbed idiot child in the nineties, so I don’t remember much about the Clinton years, but I remember the years after. I remember drunkenly mourning Gore’s loss in a bar on Clark St. while my fellow Chicagoans screeched at the television and left piles of money for tips before weaving precariously across the street, and I suspected a seed of terror was being planted that would sprout slowly and determinedly over the coming years. A weed in the cracks of well-intended pavement. It takes the right circumstances - a strong breeze, a temperate clime, a distracted citizenry - to acclimate a country to fascism the way my respiratory tract acclimated to spring allergies, which is to say quietly and steadily. In my youth, I would frolic in midwestern ragweed without a care in the world, and today, I search pollen counts and gobble Sudafed just to function, but I couldn’t tell you the exact moment it all changed. Just like I couldn’t tell you when spring started in North America, but I know that it’s here now. And I know that suddenly, many of us are terrified at the yawning abyss to which we have walked in our sleep, but I’m not sure we’re terrified enough.
Moves the planets are making will start small, then get big. Really big.
4.15 - 4.21: Mercury forms a conjunction with Neptune, gets angry and says weird shit
Mercury in Aries - Tasmanian devil that has been genetically engineered to speak human and win popular game shows
Neptune in Aries - Normally taciturn longshoreman who snaps once he’s finally had it, gets drunk and sets fire to all the boats
Fiery illumination is the theme of the weekend, what with Mercury and Mars making ingress into Aries and Leo, respectively. Neptune figures heavily into the astrology, too, as the representative of our collective subconscious. As an outer planet with a lengthy orbit, Neptune affects us more broadly than the speedier personal guys like Mercury and Mars, so as he engages with our more personable space objects, he brings communal issues to our individual experience. I always think of Neptune as Poseidon in Clash of the Titans, who didn’t do much except swim around in a dress underwater and release a giant crocodile monster, which, actually, is a pretty accurate assessment of his influence. Good old Swimmy McTrident is unseen until he is; until he’s pulled a scaly horror out of our subconscious ocean and thrown it in our face to say, "AHA! Is this what you wanted? What do you think of it now? Is it enough? Are you terrified*?”
*As previously stated, no, I do not think we are terrified enough, despite Swimmy McTrident’s efforts.
4.16 - 4.24: Mars moves into Leo and immediately trines Neptune in Aries, ramps up the persuasive shit talking
Mars in Leo - Formidable class bully who also happens to be extremely good looking and charming; also, psychopath
Neptune in Aries - Normally taciturn longshoreman who snaps once he’s finally had it, gets drunk and sets fire to all the boats
Mercury will be translating Neptune’s message from dark trenches because both planets are newly energized in Aries, the martial, do-everything-right-now-before-I-explode home of Mars, who has finally, finally left the weepy confines of Cancer. If you have felt stuck, moody, passive-aggressive, or emotionally volatile since December, you have Mars to thank, because he is very uncomfortable in the moon’s watery domicile. Zeus’ asshole son does not want to connect or intuit, he wants to act, sever, burn, and destroy, and he has finally moved into a place that will be more than happy to let him; the sun-ruled sign of Leo.
The bright side to this astrology is a new sense of vitality and zest when we face obstacles, because Cancer made Mars turn the other cheek all winter, but Leo will have none of that shit. The shadow side is, well, Leo will have none of that shit. Things might get volatile and people are fucking angry. Immediately after his ingress into Leo, the Milky Way’s bad boy makes a trine to Neptune as though he, too, needs to exchange information with Poseidon about something, and knowing Mars, he’s talking war plans. He’s tired of sitting on his ass and crying, so expect to feel mobilized and antsy for action as he shouts at Neptune and forms a triangle of fire.
4.17 - 4.24: Mars in Leo and the sun in Taurus start throwing things at each other, forming an aggressive fixed square
Mars in Leo - Formidable class bully who also happens to be extremely good looking and charming, also; psychopath
Sun in Taurus - Normally chill class president with a sweet tooth and a hidden temper, does not like competition
Not content to simply rile up our subconscious, Mars will get into a pissing match with the sun on Sunday, and we will need to be very careful with our new, zesty rage. Apollo will have just entered stubborn Taurus, where he doesn’t appreciate being pushed around by his hot-headed sibling. Zeus always favored Apollo and shunned Ares for his impulsive dickishness, so we’ll probably experience hostility from leaders, patriarchs, and other men who are the earthly representatives of our yellow dwarf star. These two will never compromise with each other; their egos are too large, their approach too fixed. Expect to play defense, bide time, and wait, as opposed to jumping head first into conflict - it may be digital, it may be physical, but fighting is definitely on the menu. Walk into the weekend knowing that something is going to piss you off. People are going to be jerks, but we need to be sensible with our reactions, because believe it or not, this is the pre-game for a much more impactful aspect that will start to affect us as early as Monday; Mars and the sun forming a fixed t-square to the Lord of the Underworld, Pluto. Cool. Cool, cool, cool.
Culmination of Spring Astrology with a T-Square Heard ‘Round the World
4.21 - 4.25: The sun in Taurus squares Pluto in Aquarius as they grapple for control over the rest of us
Pluto (Judgement) in Aquarius - Campus criminal, has a bone to pick with authority, keeps dirt on everyone
Sun (The Sun) in Taurus - Normally chill class president with a sweet tooth and a hidden temper, does not like competition
Mars (The Tower) in Leo - Formidable class bully who also happens to be extremely good looking and charming; also, psychopath
We aren’t walking into a perfect t-square on Monday, but it gets close enough for government work. The three planets squaring each other, Mars, Pluto, and the sun, occupy key places in the major arcana of tarot, and since squares are already difficult aspects, and these planets will all be in fixed signs, we can anticipate dramatic friction from now through early May. Fixed signs anchor the center of each season, and people with heavily fixed charts are usually loathe to change their minds or cede control, which can lead to powerful clashes of will. On an individual level, the houses where each of these planets land in your natal chart will determine how directly these angry, fixed influences are felt, but the inclusion of Pluto leads me to believe much of this noise will be in the collective.
In that vein, we can use the natal chart of The U.S. as an illuminating example of what we might expect over the next couple of weeks. Per the Sibly chart, the U.S. is a Sagittarius rising, which would place Pluto’s transit in our third house, facing off the sun in our sixth house and a Mars in our ninth house. A super simple breakdown looks like this:
Pluto (perversion, obsession, control) wandering through our third house (neighbors, media, transportation) under the influence of Aquarius (collective solutions over individuation)
The sun (ideals, perfection, leaders) in our sixth house (public health, workers unions, military) under the influence of Taurus (creation and ownership)
Mars (desire, action, violence) in our ninth house (churches, the legal system, universities and schools) under the influence of Leo (individuation and admiration)
When these three planets square each other from the above positions, we can anticipate conflict between those houses. As far as what this might mean…fuck if I know. All the tiny steps we’ve taken toward tyranny since the turn of the millennium make violence at schools and universities likely; we’ve already seen it in the form of protestor-bashings and school shootings. A brief glance at both the tenor and ownership of legacy media between that time and now makes it clear how messaging has been manipulated and controlled, and we know from recent headlines that public health, and the agency tasked with enforcing it, is in peril. These forces could butt heads in any number of terrifying ways; the military could clash with learning institutions or labor unions, or we might see the constitutional conflict between the executive branch and the judicial branch reach a nasty apex. Equally terrifying possibilities include military deployment to borders we share with other nations; not just to keep foreigners out, but to hold citizens in, likely achieved though questionable legal maneuvering and activation of emergency executive power.
It’s all well and good to be terrified, of course, but terror isn’t productive unless it spurs action. Yes, we’ve been inching toward oppression and tyranny for a while, but that doesn’t mean we have to stop moving; the planets certainly won’t. Like Zeus’ violent, brave, disfavored son, if we can muster up the courage to lean in to terror and keep walking, we’ll come to the place we should have been headed this whole time.
Rage.
You are a fantastic writer. Thank you for this great overview, brilliantly summed up!
Amazing summary and helpful to have these transits summarized 👏