Writing is a prayer. Art is a prayer. Yet, I am afraid we have been taught to pray to the wrong god. A god that has built homes, dungeons and caves so deep and wide into the interior of our psyche, that its roots stretch out into the dawn of time. Before hunger was exiled from the garden of Eden. Before we knew that our teeth existed, so that we can take a bite out of life. It’s difficult to know how far into the pie of your life this force had already helped itself to the moment you vomited yourself into this world. The false god that you meet at the threshold of change, the one that says your desires, thirst and creativity are dangerous. It needs to be regulated and needs permission from an outside source to exist. That you must not be inside yourself, otherwise you risk stumbling into death.

But what is it you will die towards? What is it that this god, who is merely a collection of thought forms that crystallised into a brutal dictator inside you, is afraid you will sacrifice at the altar? What is more dangerous than the rotting life that has squeezed you out like the final drop of a week-old lime that makes it into your warm water? What is this god afraid you will become when you no longer tremble at its presence? What you were born to be: Alive.

Plutonian activations demand your whole presence. You are forced to petition the goddesses and gods of the underworld with everything you’ve got. The snake is wrapped tightly around your throat, and your breathing is unstable. There is a rapid fire coiling from the base of your spine, and the heat and pressure of the lie is slowly killing you. You beg, please, whatever it is, take it. You see, you don’t make it out of purgatory without giving something up. What lies about yourself and the world are you going to throw into hellfire? What scandalous truth that was slithering around your back is now ready to show its face? What has been lurking beneath the psychodramas and projections that this false god used to keep you asleep, appearing during key stages of transformation, to drag you back into hell, in the name of shadow work?

This god uses the language of transformation but knows nothing of it. Because real transformation opens a third way. You queer into a mode of being that diverges from the old, even if the old sometimes knocks on your door. When it comes to Pluto in astrology, cookbook words we hear thrown about are destruction and extreme. There is a polarised way this archetype is spoken of, which in a sense is true to its nature, but also not helpful because humans are complex creatures. Our waters often run somewhere between hot and cold. Life is inherently a mystery and unknowable, but I am beginning to believe that this false god, in the midst of a Plutonian activation that wants to bring some powerful life force from the unconscious, cockblocks this activation from completing itself, because it fears the mystery. You do not know what this life force will turn you into. What kind of hungry, uncontrollable being with a large appetite you will become. The Midas touch that the forces of the true goddesses and gods possess may begin dripping from your pores.

I’ve always been surprised at how Pluto is called a mystery, but never alive. The process to reach this aliveness is messy and pretty dark, but all matter and all living beings go through this non-linear seasonal shift of decay and growth. We, humans, are not that special. The aliveness we have been taught to fear, that this fake god gate keeps, is where the answers to your biggest questions lie underneath. I am beginning to believe that uniting with this aliveness is a process worth suffering for, because Plutonian activations force you to get low into the ground so you can excavate trapped life force. So you can exit the artificial reincarnation cycle of constantly dying meaningless deaths and waking up to the same rotting life. The same power struggles, projections and leaving the driver’s seat empty for random shit to get in.

Pluto understands that not all deaths are equal, but they are all painful. The difference is that one is worth suffering for because you get to meet life. You get to be the author of your book and not a side character. Plutonian activations, though triggering, want to get the blood running again in your veins.

The fake god ushers you into a different kind of death. To illustrate, if you lock up a human body in a freezer while the blood is still running hot and the breath is moving, it will eventually freeze. Humans and neighbouring mammals are different from food. You can’t microwave them and bring them back to life. I know this image is macabre; we are in Plutonian domains after all. My point is Plutonian activations, as grim and gnarly as they are in the moment, visit us from the trenches of our psyche, the part of us that refuses to die a meaningless death.

In mytho-poetic-esoteric discourse, we often hear this reductive, toxically positive and polished narrative of how, after every death, there is new life. Yes, death is an alchemical process that ultimately begets new life. However, there is a lot happening during this transition. Sometimes the gap between death and new life is many years, and sometimes lifetimes. The length of time the transition takes is unique to each individual and is completely valid. Another Plutonian word is shame. How can we take off the veneers of an incredibly vulnerable, confronting and difficult process that many don’t survive both literally and figuratively and stop pretending that death and rebirth is another Tuesday at Taco Bell. This discursive nonchalance is a collective shadow that stems from spiritual and moral bankruptcy. We don’t have the language and the due process in place to help people die well from an old life or self. We don’t know how to be there for someone in the thick of complex grief because no one attended our funeral.

All that to say, there is a death that is generative, that yes, begets new life, but the truth is often we don’t know what the new life will look like; that’s why we ignore the pomegranate. We cling to the old life because the deathly screams of our psyche are unbearable. We want change, but we are afraid of the fake god we will meet at the liminal point. It is at this point that the fake god attempts to induce you into an anti-life death. One that locks you up in a freezer and convinces you that this is it. That was your shot at life. Just stay small, cold and lifeless, and you will be safe and free from danger. I will be on the lookout, so no one with the slightest bit of heat or blood comes near you lest you wake up to this lie.

This is a god of fear, apathy and resentment. A man-made construct that has now grown legs, a loud, abusive voice and a figure that towers over you. It gives you two choices, always. Never more. If you manage to outsmart it, it wears the mask of a person you trust with your life and spews the things you fear the most through their mouth. It distracts you by bringing “justice” to the other person in real life and “levelling the playing field”. In the eyes of the fake god, you can’t trust yourself. There is always danger and deceit lurking somewhere. Better to be malnourished and hungry than to risk being hurt. While you are distracted with this projective episode, it takes the mask off and wraps itself around you from behind like an old fan who turned into a creepy stalker whispering in one ear, “Yes, accuse them, tell them how terrible they are. Set yourself free from their tyranny and control. They don’t understand you, your demons and the messy parts of you. Only I do. Destroy the connection and run away to this freezer, where yes, it’s cold, but at least you are safe. No one can disturb you from this sleep.”

As you get lulled into this illusion, the dissonance grows wider, and the words of the living and fake god are not in congruence. I have noticed the fake god never reveals its true colours. They masquerade as your wounded inner child, ancestors, guides, higher self or a being in line with whatever cosmology resonates. Fill in the blank. They are constantly beckoning you into a death that keeps you forever stuck in purgatory and pain. They are summoning you to a grave that is your final destination. They are hypnotising you into a deathbed of regret where you will be taking your last breath thinking, “ what if I rode the wave of that anxiety spell and didn’t neatly fold the charge into the back room of my psyche? What if I didn’t believe that the creative power to direct my life was in someone else’s hands?”

This fake god will catch you where it hurts the most. If your identity is built around either being defined by this pain or being exiled from it, this can feel like you are being buried alive. This fake god will attempt to distort and fill the spaces in your psyche that have been left vacant because it wasn’t safe to exist in them. It will convince you in one way or another that safety is to remain exiled from yourself even when you have the tools and support to move through the threshold. I know this because I have been at a confusing threshold since 2024. There is always some random interruption or trigger that hijacks the momentum I build to begin something that I deeply desire. I am in the thick of four once-in-a-lifetime Pluto transits. As I have been digging the ground for clues, I have found hidden roots and networks of this threshold I am only now discovering, and it is extremely confronting.

I shaved my head a few weeks back when transiting black moon Lilith was exactly conjunct my natal Pluto and south node conjunct my ascendant. I may not be able to throw everything out now, but something had to go.

My question is: What kind of death is pursuing you? What voice appears at the threshold of your adjacent chapter ( because life is circular, not a straight line)? Who interrupts the ceremonial rites of passage that your ancestors and higher self are holding for you as you respond to the cosmic initiation of the present moment?

Often, during the heat of transition, when you are on the verge of throwing something old into the fire, the fake god will appear and use what you value against you. If you are someone who is dedicated to your healing journey and radical self-acceptance and honesty, it will mistranslate your attempt at changing an old internal scaffolding, as you are abandoning your shadows or not processing your pain thoroughly. It will accuse you of abandoning yourself because you are aligning yourself to a different timeline. It says you cannot be in multiple timelines at once. It locates peace and contentment as an empty ghost belonging to an undefined future. You must stay faithful to the weapon that wounded you. You must stay loyal to the strategies that once saved your life. It translates desire for growth and individuation as self-betrayal. The fake god wants you to become a more sophisticated version of your past self, armed with therapy lingo and journaling prompts, but without risking getting burnt by your own heat. By the living uncontrollable creature inside that is a reincarnation of the true goddesses and gods. It wants you far away from the empty rooms you were taught to fear. That way, you pull in dramas and distractions as a way to get a taste of the fire and heat that’s locked inside of you. As long as you’re pointing the finger outside of you, this suffering will loop and steal your life. The fake god wants you to prepare your funeral when, in the eyes of the universe, you are still a newborn.

Plutonian activations, which are unusually visceral during Pluto transits, bring forth dissonance you have danced around before, in full scorching heat. The “small” things you brushed under the carpet begin to feel like a tornado. The magnification of previously ignored patterns and spillages is not to punish you, but to initiate you into this central question: Do you want to Live (capital L)? Are you ready to walk on all fours on the muddy waters of the earth and listen to the heartbeat of your deepest desires? Plutonian activations ask: Which god are you praying to? If you’re going to pray, then pray to the creative energy that brought you into this world. Pray to the sensation that makes you froth quicker at the mouth than milk simmering above 100 C. Pray to the words that are crossing oceans to meet you. Pray to the art that is waiting to be made by you. Pray to the art that will help you get around the fake god. Pray to the art that will sing to the aches and the scared children inside of you.

Plutonian activations want you to meet the extreme moments of fear, trepidation and sorrow with tools that can help you transport life back to where it belongs. To muster the courage to open the doors of those hidden rooms that the fake god convinced you were too dangerous to enter. Tell the fake god, “ I am the captain now”, and I’ll take liberty in re-arranging the furniture in my house; hell, I’m throwing them all out.

Pluto is slow and goes retrograde half the year, so a single Pluto transit lasts almost three years. During a Pluto transit, different faces and angles of the same activation will likely show themselves. Trying to make it appear less intense ( or keeping up appearances, period) will only prolong the suffering and keep you exiled longer from the life that’s trying to emerge. Pluto also governs defence mechanisms that emerge from a deeply unconscious level. Sadly, and I know this intimately, sometimes we are defending ourselves from, through projection, the very freedom and space we wish to occupy in our lives. You must see it, dance it, talk it, write it and create through it. Do not be swallowed by the fake god.

I am an astrologer who is not a fan of answers, partially because I don’t have them, but also, I don’t believe they contain the life we think they do. I believe reassurance, sacred witnessing, and co-regulation from a trusted and safe person are valuable, but not answers. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke said in letters to a young poet, you must live your questions, and maybe someday, far in the future, you will find yourself living the answers. I am interested in questions that create a before and after. I am salivating for questions that split timelines open with a sharp, hungry knife, while my knees buckle from the pressure and my stomach makes backflips. In my previous essay for the Taurus New Moon, I wrote about a taboo question I asked a friend at 16 that I am living the answer to today.

Yes, these bloody oppressive systems live inside us too, but that’s only one part of the story. You have more than two choices. Don’t listen to the fake god who’s tempting you with the fast life of freezing to death. The difficult work of reuniting with the part of you that knows it has more than two choices is fruitful and generative. The most valuable riches in the world can’t be seen. I read somewhere that diamonds are so rare that all the real diamonds in the whole world can fit into one London double-decker bus. Be a diamond. Be the rare thing that crawls out of the soil after the house is burnt to a crisp from the fire of your transformation. The most valuable things live underground, bursting and pulsating in the molten lava core of the earth. Find your riches. Find yourself.

Subscribe now

“I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Letters to a Young Poet”

New Moon in Taurus will be occurring at 9PM (BST) Sat 16th May

There’s a part of you that knows what it wants. It knew the moment it could grasp things with its small hands and taste its favourite food. There is an area in your life where your taste is refined and dripping with sensuous groove. These desires have been living in your throat, waiting for you to greet them and ask them questions. How do you like your toast in the morning, and are you a coffee or a tea person? Taurus’s insistence on the physical senses is not minuscule or infantile; it’s where the rest of your life begins. If you can name your food preferences and not be swayed by others, then you can sit anchored in your taste for how you want the larger infrastructure of your life to feel. We are living at a time where many people are returning to earth-based practices and embracing animism, which is wonderful, but I fear we are getting lost in another binary. It’s either I am grounded into the earth and into the body and the mind is of no importance. Or I try to figure everything through mind alone. Let’s start with the former.

the body is both a complicated and simple organism. It digests what it is fed. But it also has its own needs and preferences, and we need critical thinking to interrogate if our desires are a mimicry of what we were fed that wasn’t our choosing or if it’s rooted in an ancient yearning that the body was born into this world tightly holding. Critical thinking utilises the mind, but it’s reflexive in nature. It requires curiosity, a flexible ego and intuition to question your own thinking. That is a mind making discoveries and not in a state of trying to control outcomes beyond its remit. But what is critical thinking without feedback from the sensorium field of the many layers of the body?

What I love about astrology as a cosmological framework is the dialectical component of how zodiacal archetypes do not just succeed one another linearly and take over from their preceding sign. Yes, Gemini gives language to the desires that Taurus was yet to name as Taurus governs the throat and neck, so many of our desires and needs live in this grey zone between the unconscious and conscious. Between the lump in our throat that tightens like a noose around our necks, and the accidental word vomit (Gemini) when we realise that our own desires have betrayed us. They grew legs when we were too busy denying them, and ran out of the baby crib walking backwards with a bunch of cattle. You ask them how they got out, and they respond, “ How can I walk when I was born yesterday?” Does this story sound familiar? This is Hermes in the greek pantheon as a newborn growing legs, leading Apollo’s cattle away from him by walking backwards.

This is the archetype of Mercury, Gemini’s ruler, the wordsmith and trickster. Gemini uses words to breathe life into the desires that Taurus was too stubborn to admit. The bull is sometimes too grounded, lacking the fuck it energy that Gemini revels in. Yet, they need each other. Yes, we need to name our desire, give it language and form, but we also need to live them. Taurus wants material proof, through the body, that our lives mean something. This is where the linear succession of signs to the next sign doesn’t work. When we get to Gemini, it’s all words and no action. It’s all curious exploration but no grounding into what can materialise into form and can hold us in moments of uncertainty. I am not strictly talking about material possession; I am talking about values. When you skim the fat of ideals and schmoozy philosophical ideas, what three things do you value? I will be generous and let you have four. Values are simple, yet they hold the antidote to most of our confusions, dilemmas and mental gymnastics. It’s a place that the body naturally arrives at when all the mental noise is turned down. The conversations between the neighbouring zodiacs are a dance; it’s a being-with; we all bring something tasty to the dinner party to make a delicious meal. Every ingredient is vital for the final dish. Yes, I am indeed hungry as I write this, not just for food, but for a world where our desires don’t feel so taboo. Where we are allowed to build lives that prioritise the natural rhythms of our bodies. Where it’s not a luxury to take a midday nap or a 5-day menstrual leave. Where we don’t have to be hit with a chronic mental or physical illness before we take our bodies seriously. To live inside your body and move according to its ever-changing rhythm, you need to ask it intelligent, probing and interesting questions. Don’t search for the answer. Trust your body, which is an extension of nature, to live into the answer.

Your life right now is probably an answer to a question you posed many moons ago. I know mine is. I grew up in a cult-like religious/cultural community, and many of my immediate friends were from that community. I had never entered a high street clothing store without supervision in my life until I was 16. I was with a friend from the same community, on our way home from sixth form, we snuck into a H&M for the first time with the license to window shop at whatever clothing section we wanted to. I proceeded to hit my poor friend with — who, like me, was covered head to toe, with no agency over our bodies— “Do you think we will ever get to wear mini skirts like this?” pointing innocently at the lifeless mannequin. I still remember how pale and sickly her face went. I asked a question that either of us could return from. Life could not be the same after that moment. My question escaped from a 16-year prison cell to tell me that my body was not free. That we have to ask the questions now so that one day we can live the answers. I am indeed, 14 years later, living the answers to the brave question 16-year-old me asked. I don’t particularly like miniskirts as we speak, but it took five years after that question to try it on.

When people think about mercurial energy, they think of the wordsmith and the bright, mischievous twinkle in the eyes of a comic or someone who plays with words for a living. But mercury is also a psychopomp. It’s the only archetypal god in numerous ancient myths from around the world that can translate the language of the dead to the living. Mercury walks alongside the parts of us we haven’t even met yet because we have presumed they are dead. And in a way, they are because they were exiled before they could talk. This is the lump in the throat that Taurus feels. The desires that show up as aches and symptoms in the body, as they kick and scream for attention, but their disruption feels rude and personal. Why now, when I have built a life of comfort and stability around pseudo-desires that work “just fine”? Yes, I have mysterious aches, and I feel the occasional envy towards people who appear free in their bodies, but isn’t that just life? Gemini steps in and says you’re asking the wrong questions. Ask: Is this the life I came here to live? Is this the life I ache for every minute of the day to the point of harrowing sorrow for when it’s about to end? Does my life taste delicious, and can I live inside of it completely as myself?

The answers, as Raine says, are not important. It’s the doors these questions open up inside of you that induce metanoia: a transformational change of heart and mind. Mercury oversees alchemy and magic. Questions cast spells over our lives in ways that answers never can. Because once you incarcerate yourself with an answer, you eliminate the abundance of possibilities and fertile space for new life to grow from. The opening Raine excerpt quietly expresses the dialectical interchange between Taurus and Gemini, because this new moon is ruled by Venus in Gemini, which is ruled by Mercury in Taurus. This is a circular configuration, not a straight line. To be fair, nothing about life or astrology has ever been a straight line. This new moon is very queer. Venus is asking loads of questions, and Mercury in Taurus is passing the memo over to the body (moon) so that new seeds of possibility and hope can be planted.

This new moon takes place less than half an hour after an exact conjunction between Mars and Chiron in the final degrees of Aries. Many of us are exhausted and want to raise the white flag. Many of us have been running on fumes, and capitalism loves this. It loves the cortisol and blood sugar spikes and how your hormones and sleep get all fucked up from stress. Then, like a rat, racial capitalism sneaks in and exploits your insecurity and body shames you for cortisol-induced weight gain and tells you through some white skinny influencer on the internet that you “should regulate your nervous system”. It’s a vicious cycle. Never in that rhetoric is your body’s natural intelligence, rhythm and shape honoured. Not to digress, but Taurus is all about the body and within racial capitalism, the propaganda we are fed is that white skinny bodies is what a healthy body looks like. This is less about weight but about the psychological injury that cements internally that stems from these systemic ideologies. Forgetting this can keep you at war with your body. The reality is our bodies are not meant to look the same, not just in comparison to others, but in the course of our lives. seasons change, so do our bodies. We need to ask ourselves, when does my body feel healthy and energised and incorporate routines that affirm this. Sometimes this means doing nothing and indulging in your favourite snacks. And sometimes it’s going on a lovely hike. We are all weary and suspicious about our own bodies. They are so unruly when they refuse to conform to being workhorses or fit in smaller frames. Mars is like a child and will continue touching fire until it burns itself. Don’t wait until you injure yourself to pay attention to your body. A better use of Martian energy in this new moon is to cut your losses. Use your sharpest knife ( Mars rules knives and sharp objects) and cut that bitch in half. Get angry if you need to and scream into your pillow. Then cry angry tears until you get hungry and bored. Then go say hi to a daisy or a poppy in the back street of your neighbourhood, or snack on some juicy mango chunks like I am.

This is a mercurial new moon as much as it is Venusian. In the midst of your busy life, shock yourself with sneaky questions and see the utter deviance that is born. Either way, it’s you vs you. So befriend yourself, live your questions and plant seeds for a juicy life.

Subscribe now

“A simple spark in May means lovin’ in June, all underneath the light of the flower moon” Durand Jones & The Indications, Aaron Frazer

The Scorpio Full Moon will be taking place on Friday, 1st May 2026 at 18:23 (UK time). This is a flower moon, which happens once a year on the first full moon of May. I really like this full moon because the Greek goddess Maia, the mother of Hermes (Mercury), had the month of May named after her. Bonus that I found out me and this goddess had the same name not too long ago.

Maia symbolises creation energy, youth and fertility. She is a patron of feeding mothers and all those who need extra support with what they are nurturing. This full moon is a continuation of the new moon in Aries, as the ruler of this full moon, Mars, is currently at home in Aries. It is also completing something that began when the new moon was in Scorpio in November 2025.

During this full moon, we are being asked to witness where the creative charge in our bodies is directed and what knots and entanglements emerge when the scorching heat of our passions has nowhere to go. How can we hold destruction with the same tenderness and care that we hold creation? Our desire to create is sacred, but so is our desire to destroy. We must know what we don’t want clearly so that we stop giving it energy.

Flower moons are a point of release but with a celebratory twist. How can you celebrate the internal leaps and bounds you have made in the last 6 months, and how all the hard parts of your life you thought would be the end of you, ultimately made your eyes sharper and more aware? This is a very earth-based full moon (HAPPY EARTH DAY!) where the bounty of the earth and the consciousness of Mother is blooming. Even through sadness and overwhelm, there’s a ripening in the body and soma for releasing an old way of being into the earth with full trust that the intelligence of the soil will produce an outcome and a shape that is perfumed with love, care and hope. Be kind to your body this full moon and mind your cravings. If you’re craving something “random”, give yourself the pleasure of receiving it. The goddess Maia oversees braided and knotted items. When you untie your shoelaces and walk barefoot, only then in the sensorium field of being, does the ancient calling of freedom make its name known to you.

Here are some journal prompts to help you move through this full moon. Read for your rising sign.

Aries:

-What has transformed in your collaborations and intimate partnerships in the last 6 months?

-What healing journey have you embarked on, and what has shifted inside you as a result?

-How has your relationship to giving and receiving help changed, or what do you feel needs to change?

-How can you be more honest about the limits of your capacity with yourself and explore how seasons of grief may need a different pace?

-If your relationship to your resources feels blurred and fuzzy, what actionable steps can you take to gain more clarity?

Taurus:

-What aspects of yourself have you abandoned that you admire in others?

-What kind of shame do you hold about your intensity, and how can you create room in your life to surrender and let go of needing to know what will happen next?

-How can you celebrate that there is no one like you on this earth, and what feelings emerge when you entertain the idea that you can be a separate, whole individual with divergent needs and preferences and still be loved and respected by the right people?

Gemini:

-What daily habits and routines need to go?

-What has your body been trying to tell you about pacing and structure, but you have been too distracted to notice or listen?

-How can you recalibrate output and examine the quality of energy each endeavour needs from you?

Cancer:

-How can you incorporate more fun and frivolity into your life?

-Is there a shame narrative around play and creativity for its own sake? If so, what does it sound like and what is its overall texture?

-What seeds of joy can you plant in the garden of your life so that you can feel resourced during moments of dull adulting?

-If you are a creative, what project or endeavour has reached completion? Even if it’s difficult to let it go, how can you reframe that endings are always a doorway into new beginnings?

Leo:

-What expectations that are rooted in the past are still running in your interior world? How has your default to carry the burden of being a joymaker meant that your more reserved and questioning nature gets repressed?

-If there was no role to perform, what would a day in your life look like?

-Is there something you hunger for that feels shameful to admit?

Virgo:

-What about your oracular gifts are insisting on being shared with the world?

-what long term plans and projects have now become distilled into everyday actions you take and, in a sense, absorbed in your daily life? Are you happy with this? Or do you need to zoom out into the big picture for a bit?

-In what ways are the fears you may feel about using your voice a fear of your own power?

Libra:

-What old and outdated values around money and resources are you ready to burn to the ground?

-How have you been nurturing your talents and gifts in the last 6 months?

-How can you trust that your body knows what it needs and that you may need to use a different ear to listen?

Scorpio

-What old part of you is ready to die?

-How can you incorporate rest and restoration into your transformational journeys?

-What part of you that lay dormant is ready to emerge?

Sagittarius:

-In what ways can you carve out alone time to process the internal and psychological journeys you have taken in the last 6 months?

-What spiritual and creative foods can you feed your system to feel a sense of oneness and belonging to All That Is/ Divinity/Life?

-What have your dreams been telling you about seasons in your life that are wrapping up and what needs to be released? How can you be gentle with yourself with the information that emerges from your unconscious?

Capricorn:

-In what ways are group think dynamics beginning to bore you?

-How has your definition of community changed in the last 6 months?

-Are you tired of social scripts that dull your creative juices? How can you bring more of your authentic self to causes and efforts you are a part of? What boundaries may you need to communicate around capacity and the fine lines of engagement with groups projects or friendship circles?

Aquarius:

-What parts of your career life require transformation? How can you alchemise any endings to create intentional space for something new to emerge?

-What seeds you have planted in your career or work 6 months ago have now borne fruit? In what ways has your thinking shifted around whom you want the world to know you as? Does that sort of thing even matter to you?

-How has embracing change freed you from your and others’ outdated expectations of the path you should pursue? How has listening to your intuition helped you make more aligned career choices?

Pisces:

-What learning or travel plans have begun to stir up your imagination?

-What beliefs and ideologies are becoming tasteless and need a good palate cleanse?

-What projects have reached a peak and are ready to be published and released to the world? How can you embrace that You, your essence and spirit, are bigger than the biggest stages on this planet? How would this knowledge expand your view on how far you can go in this life?

P.S. What’s your rising sign and what has been swelling up inside that you are ready to let go of this full moon?

Your deviant astrologer⚡,

Maiia

Other Astro goodies you may want to read:

The Writer's Brunch

Is Dating That Boring Man Equivalent To Dancing With The Devil?

Read more

a month ago · Maiia Mariiam

Subscribe now

The focus of this essay is to use Black Moon Lilith’s ingress into Sagittarius to explore the chart of Chanté Joseph’s viral article in British Vogue, “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?”

I will touch on what led me to write this essay, how I generated the chart of the Vogue article and some astronomical and astrological archetypes associated with Lilith, the Goddess of the hour. I will be exploring the work of brilliant writers and thinkers to give social context to the themes in the chart and springboard into examining what the chart is trying to tell us about the quality of time we find ourselves in. What is at stake when women and femmes blindly enter relational dynamics that have centuries of oppressive scaffolding built into them? In what ways does the public discourse’s stuckness in the same old soupy syrup of semantics and whatabousim, around gendered violence and bodily autonomy, demonstrate a dying paradigm that is desperately trying to save itself from its ultimate demise? Lilith’s ingress into Sagittarius on the day this article on British Vogue was released is a prayer for a world where women’s creative and psychological lives are no longer hijacked by men and the patriarchy, who insist we give up our Aliveness in exchange for a life filled with confusion, erasure and self-abandonment.

But we have a long way to go, and the first step is to no longer hold on to this dying paradigm. With the ruler of this aspect and the entire chart, Jupiter, in the 8th house of secrets, power dynamics, sex and death, this is cautious optimism that signals that some things are indeed beyond repair. They are rotten at the core. This line we are drawing in the sand is an answer to a prayer our foremothers made under the ancient stars.

What led me to write this essay

I had no idea this article existed or went viral until the beginning of this month. I didn’t have any social media accounts until about 3 weeks ago, when I made an IG account to promote my writing. Shortly after, I was scrolling through a random Reddit forum about singlehood, and I saw this essay referenced, and the title, just like most people, caught my eye. It was a delightful read, and I let it marinate in me deep into the evening here in the south west of England. Suddenly, I had the first thread of an astro download, and a voice inside of me said that Lilith is breathing down the neck of this article’s chart. I had no idea when this article was released, let alone the chart of the article(for my non-astro friends, everything has a birth chart, not just humans). I was sceptical and decided to do “light research”. My research was not light after all. I held my breath as I opened the chart of this article, and Lilith was right there, arms crossed, looking me up and down, exhausted. Her message was simple: I told you.

On a normal Friday when there isn’t a new moon in Aries, including 7 planets in the same sign ( never have these exact planets lined up in the sign of Aries before) i am a pretty fast writer. Aries fiery athletic instinct is second to none. Hence, you would think I would whizz through this essay with unusual gusto and speed. Not at all. I felt the energetic force and weight of this article’s chart sit on me like a hot, wet blanket that wants to burn ferociously but is instead imploding beneath its own fabric. It felt like trying to hike up a steep mountain with combat boots, only to realise the entire trail is muddied and each step in and out of the muddy ground feels like eternity. I persisted anyway.

A Summary of the British Vogue article

Writer Chanté Joseph’s viral British Vogue article “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” speaks to how women are beginning to decentre men for different reasons. This is because the identity of women in heterosexual relationships has become centred around a man, and rarely is the reverse true. The article further argues that women are rewarded for keeping or finding a man, and many women leverage this for engagement and financial gain. Chanté notes that there’s been a shift whereby women want the best of both worlds: The social currency of being linked with a man while also appearing single. The strange straddling of the two worlds can be seen by online posts where the identity of the man is deliberately obscured by inserting just his hand on the steering wheel or the back of their shadowy silhouette. This allows women online to appear non-male-centred while also taking advantage of “the clout that comes with” being partnered with a man. The article highlights that the facade of heterosexual relationships is slowly being unveiled, and the fantasy is dying. Women are less impressed by the mental, emotional and psychological gymnastics of heterosexual dating. According to Chanté, “it is no longer a flex” to be partnered. Heterosexuality is becoming politicised in ways that other sexualities have been in the past. People are waking and denouncing their blind allegiance to heterosexuality.

The timing of Lilith

Black Moon Lilith is not a planet or a celestial body; like the nodes, she is a point in the sky. The Moon has two main points in its wobbly elliptical orbit around the Earth: One is the lunar perigee, which is its closest orbit to the earth and the other is the lunar apogee, the Moon’s furthest orbit from the Earth. The latter, an empty ghostly point, is Black Moon Lilith(BLM). True to her wilderness, BLM stations retrograde every month and takes roughly 9 years to complete her journey around the entire zodiacal wheel. She doesn’t journey through a single sign linearly. At any given time, she is dancing between 3 zodiacal signs. Cue Ciara’s 1-2 step. The chart we are looking at today(see below), BLM ingressed into Sagittarius the third time since her first entry after 9 years, on June 16th 2025, at 07:51 am. She ingressed back into Scorpio at exactly 1 am on June 23rd 2025, and ingressed back into Sagittarius on July 18th 2025, at 18:13. She moved back into Scorpio on July 25th 2025, at 16:03 and then for exactly 4 months ( July 25th-October 25th, 2025) goes back and forth between Scorpio and Libra. On 25th October 2025, for the third time, she comes back into Sagittarius at exactly 05:36 am on 25th October 2025 (BST), the very same day the viral British Vogue article “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarassing Now?” written by Chanté Joseph was released.

How I was able to generate the birth chart of this article

The exact time this article was released is not publicly available, but after some sleuthing, I found that Chanté informed her audience that the article was out on her Instagram at around 12:36 PM UK time on 25th October 2025. The Ascendant was at 25 degrees Sagittarius. The Ascendant point shifted into the sign of Sagittarius at 10:25 AM that morning, and Lilith ingressed into Sagittarius at 5:36 AM earlier that morning. My hunch is that the article came out between 10:25 AM and when Chanté posted news of the article on her IG. So, I decided to go with the chart that has Sag on the ascendant at 24 degrees at 12:31 PM. Why 12:31 and not when it was posted on IG? I thought there would be at least a few minutes between the article being out and her announcing it on IG. With this article being a Sag rising, Jupiter becomes its chart ruler, placing Lilith in the first house of the self, body and personal identity.

Also, FYI, I use the True Black Moon Lilith point, not the “Mean” position, the asteroid or the million other astronomical Liliths out there. I also use the Whole Sign house system to read charts. So, let’s dive into Black Moon Lilith and the subsequent chart analysis of this article.

Lilith’s myths and how she moves through the world through an Astrological lens

There are many myths and origin stories of Lilith, but this won’t be the focus of this essay. My focus is to use Lilith’s ingress into Sagittarius to explore the chart of Chanté’s article in British Vogue. Some say Lilith was present in the myth of the Sumerian Goddess Inana Ishtar, as the snake, the Anzu bird and the violent storm that seized Inana’s hulupu tree that she was hoping to make her marriage bed and throne from. Some say that Lilith is the first wife of Adam, who was created as his equal, unlike Eve, who was made from his rib. Lilith wanted to be on top during sex, straddling him, and Adam refused because he felt superior to her. She took the matter to “god” and he took Adam’s side. She basically said fuck you, said god’s real name, which was forbidden and was thus exiled to Earth. god even sent angels after her to try and get her to conform, but she refused the golden handcuffs. There are many subsequent myths about what she does on earth from a patriarchal lens, but I will leave that part out for now.

Lilith is older than the Earth itself. According to Astrologer Tom Jacob (may his soul rest in peace), she predates the particular philosophical system of today’s world that is obsessed with logic. The nucleus of this system is one of social order and social control. The story of Lilith exists alongside the story of patriarchy, which became refined over 6000 years with the onset of monotheism and Abrahamic religions. Tom Jacob argues that the intention of patriarchy is the handing down and preservation of power and control, by ensuring property is only handed down through male lines of ancestry. Although this specific tradition may not be as strong in the current postmodern era, the fact that women could not open their own bank accounts until 1974 in America, the so-called land of the free, and in the tail end of 1975 in the United Kingdom, highlights a consistent throughline. I wonder, without the necessary disruption(Lilith) of the second wave of radical feminism in the 70s, if many of us femme-bodied folks would still need a male guardian to open a bank account?

Tom Jacob posits that patriarchy’s attempt to shape, direct and control women’s sexuality is an inherent judgment on feminine energy. Writer and somatic depth practitioner Alexandra Winteraven says that “feminine energy bleeds through thresholds and leaves teeth in whatever resists it. It’s pressure to the lungs, heat under the skin, and rot refusing to be deodorised. It’s silence that swallows language”. Tom Jacob argues that even with the decline of religion and rise of scientific advancement, the obsession with data and feeding of the logical mind is all an attempt to control the parts of reality that are emergent and invisible. This is why Lilith is demonised until today, despite advancements in gender equality, because, as Alexandra infers, the architecture in question often remains untouched while notions of gender equality are positioned outside of the structure that benefits from the extractions of resources that are possible when they are not named. Oppressive systems posit themselves as either a neutral witness to oppression or the benevolent saviour to the rescue. It, and people who benefit from the dynamics of oppression itself, can never be directly named, like the demiurge called “god”, otherwise you become Lilith.

Here are common Lilith projections: too much, crazy, promiscuous, rebel without a cause, hard to reason with, difficult, bitchy, spiteful, rageful, dangerous, demon, villain, femme fatale, succubus. However, these are the ways she often shows up in the personal and collective unconscious: protecting those on the margins and the silenced, the search for radical and total freedom, dedication to preserving one’s individuality and autonomy, deviance ( as in the root word, going ones own way, a path of individuation), independence, natural wilderness of the body and soma, embracing the unknown, listening to the animal instincts and biochemical-hormonal-endocrinological-guttural intuition over group think or what others think you should feel. Because of the cis-hetero-racisialised-patriarchal ableist culture we reside in, we often only feel her when someone’s right to fully exist in their body is under threat. We see her in opposition to order and harmony. We see her as reactionary because she is only ever allowed to exist on the margins, never the centre. Even if we don’t directly villainise her, we are often afraid of her unpredictability because we haven’t carved the space inside of us to have an emergent identity outside of the ones we have been incarcerated into due to primary and secondary socialisation. The degree to which you devalue the right for one to exist fully in their body, as they are, in total resonance with its intelligence and gifts, is the degree to which you will demonise Lilith and those who have answered her calling.

A psycho social exploration of the chart ruler and the ruler of Lilith in Sagittarius—Jupiter in Cancer— sitting in the messy 8th house

In the chart of this viral article, Lilith sits in the first house in Sagittarius at 0 degrees and 32 minutes, with the moon further along at 15 degrees and 24 minutes Sagittarius. They are not conjunct, but the moon is the ruler of Jupiter, who happens to be the chart ruler. Jupiter is in Cancer in the 8th house, which circles us back to the moon and Lilith. I consider—and this is different for every astrologer— the chart ruler as the most important planet in the chart, as well as any planet that it aspects. This is because it’s the internal GPS and heartbeat of a chart, so that, as we often do, get lost in the messy business of being a human; it’s the planet that brings us home to our Self. It’s the planet that midwifed us into this physical incarnation and body. In this chart, Jupiter, the chart ruler, forms a water grand trine to Saturn in Pisces and Mercury in Scorpio and forms an exact square to Chiron in Aries. More on that later.

To begin with, regardless of which house Lilith sits in, she will, according to Tom Jacob, bring the energy of the instinctive-wild, root chakra, primordial, visceral, intuitive, yes-no function of the body. He gives the example of someone speaking about a person they want to introduce you to, and they sound great on paper, but as soon as you meet them, there is a biochemical visceral non-resonance and disharmony you feel, and you feel it’s an immediate no. The gap between that immediate no and the logical mind is where inherited shame and judgment about this feeling take effect. Tom Jacob says that if we could learn to not shame this immediate no inside of us and simultaneously not degrade the person in question, we would live in a radically different world. Many of Lilith’s themes emerge when our right to make life-affirming, independent choices from this yes/no pre-logic place has been continually denied, gaslit or overridden. We internalise this shaming gaze and call it being practical, safe and responsible. As we will explore, this has been the case for femme-bodied people, that our right to choose who we enter a relational field with, such as dating, has been corrupted by an architectural overlay that insists we orient and shape ourselves around cis men and their desires.

Lilith in the first house of the body, personal identity, and the Self carries Divine disruption in the body and is very visible to the outside, even if unbeknownst to the Lilithian person or those who bump up against it. This is because there is an unconscious quality to this disruption, which often creates unease and panic in most environments that the Lilith person finds themselves in. These are often environments that are very saturnine in nature, with an organising principle of order, structure and stability. It is often the case in group settings where there is a lead facilitator who needs people to adhere to an invisible social script and, in a way, behave themselves. I’ve noticed the moral panic that infects the air when the Lilith person enters the “chat” is the same whether the Lilith person is in resistance to this force inside of them or has a conscious relationship with it. The difference will be how the Lilith person narrates the experience within themselves.

With Lilith in the first, Tom Jacob states that it’s like people are on a holy mission to feed the Lilith person their shame and make them ingest it in the body and carry it around for them. They are shamed for their visceral emotional reactions to circumstances that warrant this response. Their bodily intelligence and connection to the mystery are perceived as a threat because it’s a force that can’t be controlled or accessed through the rational mind alone. Lilith in the first house is often made to feel wrong for listening to their bodily signals over groupthink and for trusting what they feel over what they are told they are supposed to feel.

Lilith in Sagittarius often receives shame for their mutable nature and for changing the way they relate to their identity when it no longer aligns with their new beliefs. The zodiac sign of Sagittarius is a mutable fire sign, which represents growth, travel, expansion, spirituality, learning, teaching, divine intuition, wisdom, knowledge, the scholar/preacher archetype, faith, freedom, belief systems, philosophy and religion. Some Sagittarian attributes include truth-telling, passion, charisma, shamelessness, extroverted thinking, seeking, and wanderlust. Lilith in Sagittarius is often shamed for holding an emergent moral framework that rubs up against the status quo. The demand of Lilith in Sag when actualised is to be the one who chooses what moral framework, or lack thereof, she organises her body around. According to Tom Jacob, Sagittarius is also concerned with why things happen on a larger scale and the theories and the epistemological framing of how we understand the world around us.

But it’s a mutable fire sign, and so its pacing is quick. What is true today may not be tomorrow. For Sagittarius, this is a sign of growth. But when Lilith is in Sagittarius, it’s projected as being inconsistent and difficult to work with. With this combination, there is often an external repression that’s felt in the body, around a denial for one to have the space to explore and interrogate their belief system. When Chanté wrote this op-ed, talking about how she feels about the current heterosexual dating war zone, people could not get past the title. I do not doubt that at least three-quarters of people who shared their reaction online only read the title. I think it’s the word “embarrassing” and “boyfriend” next to each other that triggered something in the collective unconscious. For thousands of years, men were the prize, and a lot of brainwashing went into keeping this illusion alive. The economy and every other ideological state apparatus, from western psychotherapy to the medical industrial complex, the entertainment world, and the educational system, is built to reaffirm to femmes that their identity and core beliefs should be built around being desired by a man. This is a deep scaffolding that took more than 6000 years to lace itself into the bones of our foremothers and into us. This is an asylum we can’t see. It’s biochemical and endocrinological. So it is on this physiological level that the deviation from this scaffolding that Chanté is naming that the public reacted to. Like someone deep into an addiction being told they are addicted, the word embarrassing pressed against the wound of lifelong self-abandonment for women and anger for power holders.

Lilith in Sagittarius is uninterested in certainty, safety and structure at the expense of being Alive. How we respond to change and navigate repair and reimagination of bold new futures determines our ability to access this Aliveness. In a system that benefits from women being male-centred, codependent romance addicts, any force that rubs against this configuration becomes a dangerous force of destruction, even if that force carries the gift of Aliveness.

This configuration and dance bleed through into queer relationships, too. But that’s for another essay.

Lilith in Sagittarius reminds us that our core beliefs dictate the identities we perform. The Vogue article passed us a trailblazing memo saying that women are beginning to decentre men. But what does decentering men actually entail at the level of the body beyond the talking points?

Alexandra Winteraven argues that decentering men is not as radical as it appears. It is often spoken of as a phase, as something occurring in a vacuum. It is, in fact, “often repetitive, destabilising and unglamorous”. It is work that “continues long after the slogan stops trending”. Alexandra continues that within heterosexual dynamics, people mistake an imprint for desire. Truly decentering men rattles an old scaffolding that demands supply. So then the cycle repeats of seeking the drug of male validation.

I think seeking male validation doesn’t just begin and end in heterosexual dating dynamics. Women who chronically seek male validation often had fathers who benefited from their female partner orienting and shaping herself to his whims and desires. This is deeper than the classic heavily therapized “absent father wound” people are quick to reach to fill this gap. It’s one part of a much more complex story. One that I believe western psychotherapy is blind to due to weaponised incompetence. This is a term we see used vis-à-vis in heterosexual relationships plagued by patriarchal power dynamics, where the male partner refuses to carry their share of the relationship for all kinds of nonsensical reasons as a way to punish and extract energy and free labour from the female partner. The same goes for a field that was founded and dictated by straight, old white men. Even after their death, the scaffolding remains the same.

Western psychotherapy, as an ideological state apparatus, refuses to—beyond PR tokenism and cynical window dressing—meaningfully witness the trauma that systems of oppression perpetuate in the psyches of marginalised groups. Instead, survivors are encouraged to navel gaze at their wounds and strengthen the inner critic inside of them that tells them to pull up their bootstraps, to regulate and police themselves to the point that their selfhood disappears, and thus the pathologising loop of looking at the symptom and not the structure around the wound begins. We will save the patriarchal father wound and male-centred mothers for another time.

Alexandra reminds us that if you have only felt real and alive through a reflection, then without this mirror, a structural silence ensues, and decentering men begin to feel like a loss and a death.

Jupiter in Cancer, the ruler of this chart, is in the 8th house. The 8th can relate to areas of life where the following are concerned: power dynamics, loans, debts, intimate partnerships, financial contracts, shared resources (energy, money, time and any other valuable resource), grief, mental health, astral and ancestral realms, surrender, that which you can’t control, resources that you were given but often with strings attached like a grant, ego deaths, inheritances, intimacy, fears, forms of connectedness that trigger our deepest wounds, psychic phenomena, depth psychology(such as psychoanalysis), trauma work, death doula’s, end of life care.

Tom Jacob describes the preceding 7th house as the PR version of a relationship. In other words, it’s the familiar heterosexual choreography of projecting desire and organising your identity around being chosen and wanted. The 8th house is not just what is behind closed doors, but what is in the basement that no one has gone to. god knows what creatures live in there. The 8th house is where the power over and power under dynamics in a relationship are exposed. Jupiter expands whatever it touches.

Ancient astrologers call Jupiter ‘the great benefic’, which I agree with, but in the context of the 8th house and the overall themes of this chart, benefic sometimes means pulling out the weeds in the garden and getting rid of root rotting before planting new seeds, or having a scary operation that aims to remove a malignant tumour. The themes of Chanté’s article point to what’s always been there, lurking behind the scenes of the main play. The shock from the public ( Lilith in Sag in an exact opposition to Uranus in Gemini) surrounding this article was because the truth is uglier than the public is ready to metabolise. But that doesn’t mean the message isn’t pointing to urgent and important work that needs to be done.

Just over a year before this article was released, a poll went viral on social media called “The man Vs the bear”. The virality was due to the public’s shock that the majority of the participants, who were all women, felt safer to be alone with a wild, undomesticated bear than a cis man. Similar to this article, the public discourse got stuck in the same reactionary semantic soupy loop, like a software that’s refusing to complete its upgrade cycle. No one was interrogating why it is so difficult to hear that male violence is the norm? Why exactly is this revelation disturbing? Unsurprisingly, most of the people staging this vocal shock were cis men. Alexandra writes that whenever the oppressive architecture around a behaviour or imprint is named, men rush to write think pieces and moan over their podcast mics about how they need to do better and take responsibility. The staged horror and the performance of being one of the “good ones” is a way of avoiding how they are still inside the pattern they are condemning. The bar is very low with cis men. Alexandra says, “You don’t have to be drugging, hitting or raping your partner at night to be crossing lines all the time. You do it after you keep talking when a boundary has been set. You do it when you assume your presence is neutral and your presence is welcome.”

They continue that the performance of shock men display by condemning male violence that is more visible, is so they can “keep themselves clean from the rest of it”. However, locating themselves inside of it is something most men refuse to do. According to Alexandra, that would cost them something; instead, they are further capitalising on women’s pain through performative grief-stricken content in the form of likes and subscribers and social currency for sounding aware.

In Chanté’s article, it is mentioned that women are rejecting the current template of heterosexual relating that’s rooted in misogyny. Again, no one is asking why rejecting this template automatically means one has no desire to relate at all. And even if that is the case, who has more to lose?

Alexandra points out that heterosexual dating is less about desire and more about following a familiar choreography than an intentional choosing. True agency in heterosexualism is contingent on whether or not you can sidestep this dance and still make the same choice. Alexandra asks, “Do you desire men or do you desire being desired by men?” They argue that both produce very different sensations; one is in the body, and the other mirrors the male gaze.

When the ruler of Lilith in Sagittarius—Jupiter- is in the 8th house, we see a burgeoning anger around unequal power dynamics which begins to leak out into the public sphere. The first house is a visible and potent place for Lilith to reside. What was meant to stay hush-hush in the 8th house fugitively makes its way to the centre like a random gust of wind on a hot summer’s day. Ancient astrologers said that the 8th house receives no light from the first house. It is an idle place where no activity is happening. But this chart is different. The 8th is receiving plenty of light and divine disruption from the first house. The only thing idle about the 8th house in this chart is our ability to see the gifts it contains. With Jupiter, the chart ruler in the 8th house, subtle forms of manipulation, extraction of resources (energy, time, money, etc.) and abuse when it comes to shared resources in an intimate partnership become magnified. As mentioned, Jupiter enlarges issues that are already present.

When women speak about the unequal power dynamics in a relationship, specifically the implicit expectation that the emotional, psychological and physical labour of the relationship always falls on their back, they are slapped on the wrist and told to communicate more effectively, use “I” statements and try not to trigger her man-child partner because he is “traumatised”. In other words, women are expected to practice self-erasure in a heterosexual relationship and also become unpaid therapists, shouldering the burden of patriarchy’s enabling of infantile male behaviour. She is to ensure that he doesn’t feel the slightest bit of discomfort when being held accountable, while her mental and physical health deteriorates under the continual psychological terrorism she is subjected to. In other cases, couples counselling is suggested, and I find this route very tricky. I think the whole model of couples therapy is flawed, particularly in heterosexual dynamics. Not to digress, but it’s often the woman’s internal and external boundaries being gaslit and her being told to take her partner’s baggage as her own. Her communication, tone and choice of words are heavily critiqued, and the actual system creating the inequality in the first place that enables the man-child’s behaviour is never directly named. Perhaps they both could benefit from individual therapy and go their merry way. But I think there’s something insidious about creating a space where a potential victim of abuse lets their guard down and their abuser gets access to their internal world with the help of a professional, prompting both the therapist and the man-child to prey on the woman to get her to comply to the heterosexual script and continue self abandoning herself in the face of systemic harm.

Much of the backlash against Chanté’s article was the accusation of inciting a “gender war”. With Jupiter in Cancer in the 8th house of unequal power dynamics, intimacy and trauma, femmes have historically had to endure structural abuse in their intimate relationships because patriarchy has decided that their bodies exist to be used and discarded by men as they please. In this paradigm, women’s agency is a threat to the unregulated and free resources men have access to under normal circumstances.

Zawn Villines, in Liberating Motherhood, talks about the “myth of the gender war”. She argues that defenders of misogyny “love to pretend that the violence that is inflicted on women by men is a thing of the past or that it’s a mutual occurrence. According to this myth, misogyny and all that is left in its wake pertain to a small group of men and women. The goal is to create a false equivalence that conceals the truth: There is no gender war. There is no mutual hatred. There is widespread violence and misogyny against women, and there is a non-violent feminist movement seeking to end this abuse.” Zawn continues that equating feminism to violence or a mutual war is an attempt to silence dissent so that men can continue harming women with impunity, as they have done so for so much of human history. They argue that patriarchy insists that women need to take accountability for their abuse. What this means is that certain behaviours of women warrant abuse.

Furthermore, the Vogue article also received pushback because many (mostly men) were angry that men were being painted with a broad brush. The 8th house in astrology also governs sex in an intimate relationship. Zawn from Liberating Motherhood explains that this anger expressed by men towards feminist modes of meaning making is because it threatens the access to something they feel entitled to: Sex, obedience and a relationship. They know they don’t stand a chance in a dating market where they have to live up to any kind of standard, and women having true autonomy (Lilith) over their bodies. Zawn argues that the only way that the majority of heterosexual cis men have had any luck in dating or finding a long-term partner is not because they are good people or bring any value, but because of the free pass and immunity handed to them by the patriarchy. They are immune to accountability, ethics, and all moral standards.

In this mass heteronormative psychosis, the reality of male violence in intimate relationships is distorted, gaslit and slid under a very dirty carpet. Writer and blogger Chidera Eggeru says on her popular podcast show, “The Slumflower Hour,” that marriage is the lowest form of sex work. Professional sex workers have more autonomy as they selectively choose their clients, often going through an extensive screening process. Many provide services that do not involve sexual intercourse and charge a rate for their service that reflects the true value of their labour. However, it’s difficult to say the same for married cis women in heterosexual relationships. It is estimated that 80-90% of sex workers’ clientele comprises married men. Most of the reactions to this statistic were centred around body shaming women and them not being attractive enough for their cheating husbands. When light is shone on a startling statistic like this, the public discourse, similar to the reactions to Chanté’s article, is co-opted by men and male-centred women, who struggle to graduate from the school of semantics, logical fallacies and word play. As Alexandra writes, when a pattern or an imprint is named, women being conditioned to build an identity around male desire, the urge to widen the frame and call it refinement, is actually self-protection. They argue that the urge to neutralise specificity the moment it lands is a part of the architecture being named.

In heterosexual relationships, there is a hidden expectation for women to be a man’s personal, free sexual maid. Always ready, available and eager to give pleasure. You may ask: surely women have the option to decline sex in a heterosexual relationship? Well, if we are going to play semantics, we have the option to do many things. But often women are subjected to harm for exercising their agency to decline sex with their male partners. Zawn from Liberating Motherhood conducted a poll asking her 35000 readers, “What does your partner do when you decline sex?” The results were as follows: 73% of male partners sulk for days, 12% wave their penises at their partner, 10% try to force themselves onto their female partner, 4% become violent, and the remaining 1% threaten their female partner. The results of this poll show that even if women have the agency to decline, the vast majority will be emotionally manipulated into having sex with their male partner.

I think Chanté’s British Vogue article is a sort of pre-emptive dating risk assessment. If the system is set up to produce the kind of heterosexual relationships we have discussed, why would you willingly participate? This question is not an attempt to counter-shame, rather a part of a cost-benefit analysis that stems from a sober, clear mind, free from the hysteria of matrimonia and the comphet-induced brain fog.

The 8th house also governs the fine print of the contracts that we sign. With the ruler of Lilith in Sagittarius, Jupiter, located in this house, we can assume Lilithian footprints are all over the 8th house floors of this chart. Astrologer Tom Jacob says that wherever Lilith touches in the chart, disruption is necessary. With her ruler in the 8th house, the terms of all intimate partnerships come under scrutiny. When Lilith makes contact with the 8th house, there is often a person in the dynamic that carries Lilith’s influence. One partner may have a clear idea for the relationship, and the other partner isn’t feeling it. Lilith represents themes of exile and leaving the table when the terms of a relationships is not rooted in equity. The 8th house also governs the spirit of our ancestors and the ancestral realms. Many of our foremothers did not have the right to get up and leave when they were being treated as less than in their relationships. They were prisoners in their own marriages. They could not have property in their name or open their own bank accounts. Even though some legal advancements have been made, patriarchy is still leveraging whatever it can against women, such as traumatic child custody battles, regression in abortion laws and no-fault divorces, in an attempt to silence them. In many cultures, women who seek to divorce their abusive husbands are disowned by their families or subjected to honour killings.

The themes of the past merging and informing the present are exemplified by Jupiter being in Cancer. The sign of Cancer is described by Astrologer Isa Nakazawa as being the emotional historians and memory keepers. A cardinal water sign, ruled by the moon, it’s a sign that symbolises the idea of home, femmes, motherhood and safety. With the moon in Sagittarius next to Lilith in Sagittarius, there is residual anger meeting us from the past that is shining light on the present. The message is unapologetic and clear: Things will change. The sign of Sagittarius is hopeful and rooted in its optimistic visions for the future. Sagittarius is symbolised by the centaur, a half horse and half human entity holding a bow and pointing its arrow towards the direction of growth and expansion. Centaurs represent the wild, untamed, freedom-loving part of us, combined with our reason and intellect and the power of this unified intelligence. This isn’t blind optimism. It’s trusting that the tiny bit of space we feel in our bodies in between the horrors of witnessing violence is the future winking back at us. Progress is non-linear. This is not easy work, and we may have to wrestle with ourselves and the world around us to access this space inside of us.

Ending with a sensitive yet determined Water Grand Trine and an achy square from Chiron in Aries to Jupiter in Cancer

I believe Chanté’s article started a movement that was already being nurtured by the ancestors. They are fighting with us. This is because Jupiter is in a grand water trine with Saturn in Pisces in the 4th house and Mercury in Scorpio in the 12th house. A grand trine is an astrological configuration where three signs within the same element form a 120-degree angle to one another. It suggests an easy flow of energy between the planets, and their energy can manifest how it’s intended to without much contention. Because we are dealing with the element of water situated in houses that are considered unconscious in their workings, we may not see the blessings and rewards of this signature in a literal and tangible way. The gift may be a shift in the collective psyche, even if it appears volatile on the outside, that is re-orienting itself towards letting go of an old paradigm.

Saturn in Pisces in the 4th house signifies that the dissent in the collective imagination may be because the old structures of the past (Saturn) are loosening (Pisces). The old embryonic fluid we have been gestating in is slowly killing us. With this supportive trine between water signs located in watery houses, certain glasses need to be worn for our pain to be meaningfully witnessed. We need to be asking radically different life-affirming questions. The IC ( Imum Coeli), which in Latin means “the bottom of the heavens”, in this chart is located in the 5th house in the cardinal, Mars-ruled, fire sign of Aries. Chiron is present in the 5th house, making a close conjunction to the IC and an exact square to Jupiter in Cancer.

Before I continue i want to make a quick note to my Astro friends, that the IC in the whole sign house system can be located anywhere between the second and sixth house. Whereas, most commonly in other house systems, the IC is always located in the fourth house. In whole sign, when the IC is located in another house other than the fourth house, it provides additional meaning and context to the themes of the fourth house.

The fourth house is the womb, your birth family and ancestral lineages. The IC is a point in the chart that highlights what area of life rooted and grounded you into existence in your formative years. I’ve seen charts where the IC was in the third house, and the person was raised by their extended family and local community. With the IC in the 5th house in this chart, it speaks to themes around creativity, play, pleasure, children (inner child), self-expression, dating and individuality. With the IC in the sign of Aries, women’s autonomy to choose whether to partner or choose a creative and psychologically rich life is what is at stake here. Aries is ruled by Mars, and Mars in Astrology creates conflict of interests, division and separation. Sometimes it does feel like two realities are mutually exclusive because of the hidden strings attached to one choice, which would eventually demand you abandon your individuality and creative sense of self. In this case, and as echoed in Chanté’s article, women choosing to opt out of heterosexual dating is not due to a lack of desire for intimacy or love, but perhaps a preservation of the Self where all source of Love originates from. Without access to this part of us, which heterosexual relationships often demand we give up for a man, any cheap romance we may experience in dating will never be enough.

IC in the sign of Aries is speaking to a deep need to centre one’s pleasure, creative life force energy and expression of selfhood without men and the patriarchy interfering or dictating the terms. If women are as free as we are told they are, why did this article— by a writer doing her job writing about her acute observation of women beginning to decentre men—hit such a nerve? Surely women can express disdain towards boring heterosexual dating scripts?

Astrologer Melanie Reinhart on her guest appearance on the podcast “on the souls term, ep 96”, refers to the IC as “I can’t see”. I have come to see this in my own practice, whereby this part of the chart we can’t see due to social conditioning, early imprints from the family and other systemic and cultural patternings. We also can’t see our IC often because of other psycho social illusions that keep us—long into adulthood and old age— recreating from the same old amniotic fluid we were fed.

With the IC in the 5th house in Aries, we truly can’t see women as whole, entire people if men are not in the picture. Anxieties around “the clock running out” and matrimonia are all examples of the heterosexual agenda being shoved into women’s psyches. This is artificial and socially generated fear. One that has cost many women their lives and personal agency. In this act of emotional terrorism from the patriarchy, women struggle to find the internal space to ask: Do I want to shape and orient my identity around male desire? To what extent is the current dating culture supportive of the kind of life I envision for myself outside of the heterosexual protocol?

Society’s refusal to see women as whole people outside of their connection to men has created an unhealable injury that never closes until we properly face how women are socialised to abandon themselves, their bodies, voices and intuition to survive in a hostile male-centred world. I say unhealable injury because Chiron in Aries—the wounded healer—is closely conjunct the IC in the 5th house, also forming an exact square with Jupiter in Cancer 8th house— the ruler of this chart. Repair goes beyond institutional legislation or reparation. It requires an entirely new world order, new belief systems and moral frameworks (Sagittarius) to see shifts. With Saturn in the 4th house of Pisces, this injury is multidimensional and etheric. It is a direct assault and manipulation of earths frequency and heartbeat. Saturn in the house of ancestral lineage and the ground where the bones of our ancestors are buried ( yes—both 8th and 4th house deals with ancestral stuff, but in different ways), we have to walk back, trace the steps and look at the current architectural design with new eyes that can see ways in which the system keeps recreating itself through dysfunction with an illusion (Pisces) of order (Saturn).

What’s grounding this chart is the desire to embark on a path of individuation and collective sovereignty, but this path is intimately linked with Chiron’s unhealable injury of the centuries of being denied this right. With Chiron conjunct the IC in Aries, the heat, the pain and the inflammation that people are quick to dismiss as a “gender war”, needs a much larger container to be witnessed—beyond the rational mind. This is because the body has become the primary site for wounding. The pain is deeply somatised and cannot be neatly organised through cheap, performative and provocative talking points. What is needed is safety and courage, and that safety, at least at the beginning, will not come from groups or systems that benefit from this injury remaining intact. The primary forms of data that would help build a praxis of relating that isn’t designed to re-injure are ideational, anecdotal and symbolic ( Jupiter/Sagittarius/overall grand water trine). It’s important to build third spaces that celebrate the body and its desire to re-orient the old internal choreography and loosen its attachment to this dying paradigm.

Mercury in Scorpio is the third planet in this grand water trine, located in the 12th house. Mercury deals with communication, words, writing, teaching, learning, travel and the mind. The 12th is the house of spiritual retreat, hospitals, asylums, prisons, people who don’t fit into mainstream society, creative incubators(think photography darkroom labs), monasteries and other places of seclusion. Esoteric astrologers refer to the 12th house as the cosmic womb and the place we are all coming from before our physical incarnation. Jungian astrologers may refer to it as the collective unconscious, and the house where dreams and symbols emerge from the psyche.

When Mercury is in Scorpio, which is ruled by Mars and Pluto, it becomes a psychopomp, travelling between the world of the dead and living, collecting valuable insights that cannot be seen in the physical world or articulated with the human tongue. It is more interested in what is not being said rather than the decoration of words. It is interested in interrogating how words are often used as a defence to shield something that is often knarly and sinister. But Mercury in Scorpio’s obsession with the dark is so that it can transform the mind and arrive at a place of radical truth and honesty. There is an amplification of a Martian signature to this grand trine, as Mars, also in Scorpio, is loosely conjunct Mercury in Scorpio. This means Mercury is digging the ground, through all the dirt and camouflage, with some very sharp tools ( Mars rules sharp tools that are used to cut things), to find raw material to hand over to Lilith in Sagittarius, who sits in the succeeding 1st house. Here, Lilith is broadcasting to the world, through the body, the uncomfortable truths that Mercury in Scorpio dug from the collective unconscious.

Lilith, as an archetype, represents primalness, wilderness and authentic self-expression. She is deeply connected to her inner compass and the source of Life. Sagittarius marks grand entrances and long speeches. You will wait until Lilith in Sagittarius finishes speaking. The progression from Scorpio to Sagittarius represents something we thought was dead coming back alive and telling its story. Listening to the stories that survived the 12th house, especially in the sign of Scorpio, is as important as life and death. With Mercury and Mars conjunct in Scorpio in the 12th house, with the sun further behind also in Scorpio ( not conjunct), there’s been a mass distortion and psychic manipulation pre-dating our physical life that is resurrecting itself to grab the mic without asking for permission and will take its rightful position back into the body. Women’s rights movements have historically been dominated by privileged white women, and their focus has been to be picked by the establishment and ask nicely for their basic human rights. They were often waiting to be invited to the old boys’ club whilst disowning their wilderness and anger so that they didn’t appear divisive (Mars).

There is something in the collective unconscious (12th house) breaking out of the psychological asylum of respectability politics and coming, fully alive, with hunger, thirst and adult teeth, back to the body. Going back to the IC in Aries in the 5th house, conjunct Chiron in Aries—with Mars in Scorpio in the 12th house, ruling this aspect, in many ways, we are being asked to investigate why our knee-jerk reaction is to conclude that articles like the one on British Vogue are inciting a gender war. What deeper fear is being expressed by power holders through this false equivalence of power and theatrical victimhood? Why is naming gendered violence and abuse deemed as violence against a group that are the benefactors and often the perpetrators of it? What does this mass projection tell us about the collective core wounding women have to navigate daily just because of the bodies they inhabit? Why is choosing the self-protective option of remaining single seen as extreme (Scorpio), and enduring gendered abuse and the realities of rape culture is not?

Mercury in the foggy 12th house of Scorpio is relentlessly finding the words to express the violence women have to navigate daily, but are forced to remain silent about. But the words are still drenched in and furiously dripping with pomegranate juice. With a grand water trine that includes the ruler of the chart and the ruler of Lilith’s ingress into Sagittarius, Jupiter, we won’t ever find the right words. We may have to accept that a so-called “gender war” is a part of the collective healing continuum and cycles of change. What if we accept that there is a collective rupture in humanity’s psyche, that is beyond repair because the right soil and infrastructure have not been born yet that would meaningfully facilitate repair without re-injury. The priority for now is to stop resisting the ending of the architectural design that’s distracting us with slogans and podcast bros, which is just another effort to refine and shape itself around the continual extraction of women’s life force energy.

With a South Node in Virgo, the only earth placement in the whole chart, there is nothing to fix or change. The South node is a point of release and completion. There is an emptying and purification of the archetype with the sign inhabiting the south node. The public discourse around the impending extinction of heterosexualism shows a male-centred majority that is desperately trying to save, revive and hold onto a dead thing. Cis women quite quitting heterosexual relationships do not need couples therapy or to employ better communication skills. Cis women choosing to stay single do not need more self-love or inner child healing. WE NEED TO LET THEM BE WHO THEY TRULY ARE. That’s the healing, and that’s Lilith’s message.

The remediation offered by this beautiful grand water trine is to let the old go, internally first, and stop giving it energy and fuel. It’s not just about boyfriends being embarrassing as much as it is about the real cost—on all levels—of being in extractive, de facto nonconsensual arrangements within predetermined relational structures designed to slowly kill women.

I chuckled when I saw Saturn ( the planet of order and structure) in this grand water trine in the sign of Pisces of all signs. Even Saturn, the time keeper and task master of the cosmos, has no idea what the solution is. Pisces is a non-linear, mutable water sign that comes last in the zodiacal wheel. Some say Pisces carries the lessons of all the previous signs. This is a sign that represents non-duality, surrendering to the unknown and the Divinity in all things. Formulating language and new structures prematurely misses the point. We are in a sacred grieving process. Lilith’s story predates the conception of planet Earth. Pinning her down and incarcerating her with cheap words and theories is disrespectful to all that she has endured and survived. The elemental dominance in this chart is water. Feel your damn feelings. The body comes first.

Subscribe now