Astrological news this week: Mars in Pisces and stationary Pluto
Astrological update for the week of April 18-25, 2022
Mars in Pisces.
As I wrote in last week’s update, Mars entered Pisces on April 14th just before the Libra Full Moon on April 16th. That was a highly potent Full Moon, with the Sun and Moon both in a square aspect to powerful Pluto. Unfortunately it did not lead to a peaceful Easter weekend, with three mass shootings in the US, riots in Sweden and Jerusalem, and the bombing of the wonderful World Central Kitchen in Kharkiv Ukraine.
Astrology cannot prevent global disaster and war, but knowing where there might be land mines can help us in our own small ways to promote peace and healing. Mars will be in Pisces until May 24th, and when Mars is in Pisces all of that aggression tends to be driven into the underground of the psyche. In Pisces, the sign of the artist and the mystic, Mars can be compassionate and fueled by creativity and a yearning for spiritual connection. But the drive and motivation of Mars doesn’t do well when subsumed by the passivity of Pisces and it will take more effort and conscious intention to express and assert ourselves where necessary.
Repeating what I wrote last week, during this time Mars will conjoin Neptune and Jupiter, which may exacerbate the fuzziness of planetary energies. We can ameliorate this somewhat by enhancing our own physical energy through physical activity – always an excellent way to stimulate the chi and activate our intellectual energy as well as physical. But in the end we will just have to be patient and wait for the Piscean clouds to lift, utilizing this […]
I don’t know where this image came from but I found it here. Having just completed a retrograde turn of Mercury, and just coming out of the retrograde period of Mars, you may not be overjoyed to learn that now Pluto will turn retrograde. However, like everything else astrological, retrograde Pluto serves a higher purpose. The outer planets travel retrograde for about six months every year, and for the last 30 years or so they have been retrograde in the summer (northern hemisphere). When a planet changes direction it is like a car that makes a U-turn, it’s motion appears to slow down and it becomes what we call “stationary” in the sky. Pluto has only moved two degrees since January and it will remain between 7 and 9 degrees Capricorn until the end of the year. No planet is better at completing old patterns and clearing away the leftover detritus than Pluto, and when Pluto is retrograde, as it is for about half the year, we are forced to look backwards at our successes, our mistakes, our plans, our relationships – anything in our lives that has unfinished business will be re-examined during this time and anything that we are carrying around that is no longer needed will be swept away like the pollen after a rain. Pluto is the planet of destruction and regeneration, and it also deals with issues of power and its uses. Its not surprising that now, with Pluto having been stationary in the sky (from our perspective here on earth) for the past few weeks as it prepared to change direction, things have been so intense for so many of us. When a planet is 