You’re on the free list—thank you! To support my work and receive new and full moon horoscopes, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for $77 per year or $7 per month. If you would like a subscription but can’t afford one at this time, please let me know.
Happy Venus Day, my loves!
As some of you may know, there’s a rare astronomical event happening right now. In the morning sky, just before sunrise, you can see a lineup of the five visible planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn—in that order, East to West! And for the next few days, you can see the Moon in the lineup as well, hovering between Mars, Venus, and Mercury as she wanes toward her new phase.
This morning (June 24) was the “best” time to view this extremely rare event—the last time all five planets lined up like this was in March 2004—but you can catch it in some form through the end of the month. Just head to a spot with unobstructed Eastern views (both Mercury and Venus will only be visible very close to the horizon) about half an hour before sunrise in your location.
Now you might be thinking, what does it mean that the planets are all lined up like this in the morning sky?
To briefly rant for context, I want you to remember that before pop astrology, memes, ephemerides, and astro software, ancient star gazers drew their interpretations from what they were actually looking at in the evening and morning sky. I find that the stargazing part of astrology is often what gets lost in translation. Astrology is light. Your birth chart is not a cosmic rolling of the dice, or planetary paint by numbers. Your birth chart is breath poured into a moment on the cosmic clock. Astrology—like astronomy, which it was once inextricable from, and mathematics—has a divine order. It reflects a specific and choreographed movement of the celestial bodies through space and time. Often what we think is “mystical” is extremely mundane. Magic is hidden everywhere in plain sight.
So that being said, now I ask you, how does seeing those planets all lined up in the pink, hazy morning sky make you feel?
(I’m not quite ready to astrologize current political events (nor do I think it will be helpful for anyone to hear my nerdy, bungled thoughts) but, there is heartbreaking poetry in that this cosmic lineup comes on the same day that SCOTUS votes to overturn Roe v. Wade.)
If we want to check in with the ancients themselves:
“From an interpretive standpoint, morning stars were thought to become more masculine, active, and to produce the things they signify sooner or earlier in the life of the native rather than later,” writes Chris Brennan in Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, pulling from Ptolemy. Morning star planets are up before the sun, unapologetically going after the things that they want.
Venus in particular as a morning star was known as the “warrior goddess” to the ancients (whereas her evening counterpart was known as the “love goddess.”) The Greeks called morning star Venus Aphrodite Pandemos. Pandemos meaning “of the earth” or “common to all the people.”
Arielle Guttman writes in Venus Star Rising,
“The Morning Star Venus may be instinctually more capable or being a war goddess when the situation arises—that is, expressing her anger or rage, becoming an activist for causes, and fighting for what she believes in—but she is also capable of being a love goddess.”
How does it make you feel that warrior goddess Venus is ready to fight in the morning sky? She has her whole cavalry with her: Mercury (mind), Mars (action), Jupiter (belief), Saturn (structure), and the Moon (changeability). Though this full lineup of planets will only be visible for a brief moment in time, Venus remains a morning star through the end of August when she will move under the sun’s beams, ready for her renewal and next phase.
In many ways, this lineup of planets makes me think of what Dean Young wrote in the Art of Recklessness,
“Some people try to convince you they love poetry by showing you how bad all the poetry they ready (more likely don’t read) is, just like those who love love so much they’ve come to the conclusion that nothing and no one deserve to be loved.”
Let’s not do this.
Let’s not make what we want, what we love, what we crave so precious that we put it on a pedestal.
Morning star times are not precious.
It would be a shame not to fight.
It would be a shame not to shoot your shot.
It would be a shame to let Venus, our laughter loving queen, down.
Let me know if you get to see the lineup this weekend and how it makes you feel! Despite *gestures wildly at everything* the astrology of this weekend is actually very sweet. The moon is waning to her balsamic phase, connecting with Venus and Jupiter along the way. Take some time to rest, hydrate, cry, and donate to abortion funds in states that really need it.
I’ll be back early next week with horoscopes for the New Moon in Cancer (a v sweet one) for paid subscribers.
xoxo, J