Welcome to the hallowed month of October, my babies.
This month kicks off with a Full Moon in Aries on October 6th.
On the same day, Mercury, our planet of the mind and the mouth, moves into the subversive swamp of Scoprio, lending our cognition and communication a new level of depth. Here, our intuition is sharpened and our suspicion heightened, making it challenging to discern the former from the latter.
On October 13, Pluto, our planet of death and rebirth, goes direct in Aquarius after spending the past five months in retrograde.
Aquarius is associated with the collective, and Pluto with endings. In kind and in the name of change, this is a period where we may become increasingly aware that collaboration and the championing of the common cause of humanity (Aquarius) is our best defense against literal and metaphorical annihilation (Pluto).
On the same day, Venus, our planet of attraction and attachment, slides on a smoking jacket and a pair of rose colored glasses, persuading us all to believe that love can live betwixt the least likely of partners.
To that end, we’ll spend the bulk of this month, through Oct. 22, under the velvet-clad, beauty as balm, romance as anesthetic influence of Libra.
Symbolized by the scales and balances, Libra is the only zodiac sign represented by an inanimate object. As a sign of partnership, Libra defines and expresses itself through its relationships with others.
On the 22nd, the Sun moves into the carnal cave of the scorpion, setting the stage for stillness and reminding us of the rewards reaped from going in and digging deep, clawing for truth and source until our eyes cross and our blades find the pain of paydirt.
Also on the 22nd, Neptune, our planet of dreams, drugs and delusion, sleep and other altered states, begins its retrograde in Pisces.
At the end of the month, we observe the thinning of the veil and the pagan celebration of Samhain. Ancient Celts believed that during this auspicious time of year, the divide between the living and the dead, the godly and the creaturely, was at its most permeable.
This celebration and this season remind us that death is necessary, new life is imminent and honoring what has been ensures the arrival of what is yet to come.
Read on to see how the weeks ahead will affect your sign.
Read for your sun and rising sign.
Good luck out there.
The Sun in your opposite sign throws a light on your seventh house of trust, ties and relationships, Aries.
Asked about his decades-long marriage to Joanne Woodward, the actor Paul Newman shared,
“There was a glue that held us together then and through the rest of our lives together. And that glue was this: anything seemed possible. The good, the bad and the wonderful. With all other people, some things were possible, but not everything. For us, the promise of everything was there from the beginning.”
I hope these words are a ballast to you in the weeks ahead, Aries. As you tread the uneven terrain of the human heart, may you seek not a perfect companion but a comrade of endless possibilities.
Hello, Taurus!
The Sun in Libra highlights your sixth house of ritual and the temple of the body.
As both Libra and Taurus are ruled by Venus, the luminary of love and beauty, I encourage you to romanticize the mundane this autumn and connect to and revel in the simple, primal joys of the body.
The writer D.H. Lawrence venerated what he called the “dark gods” of nature, sexuality, instinct and emotion. For him, regular and sacred contact with these forces was essential to living fully.
He writes,“This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest…That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed.”
May you be and bend to a wild god.
Libra season breaks down the door of your fifth house of creativity, self-expression, risk and romance, Gemini.
This welcome reprieve comes after a solar eclipse in Virgo last month that activated your fourth house of home and its hauntings. You may have experienced a significant shift or revelation related to your past or family of origin and odds are it was not gentle or settling.
Now that the Sun is singing in a fellow air sign, it is my hope that you can transmute this new information into personal expression.
The poet Kaveh Akbar writes, “Art is where what we survive survives us.”
May what you make, make gold of the lead of living.
Ahoy, Cancer!
The Sun in Libra lights a lamp in your fourth house of home and history.
In an essay about his departed mother, my dear friend, fellow Cancer and the brilliant writer Richard Goodman writes, “When we no longer talk about someone, when we no longer conjure their beauty and the good things they did — their laughter, the way they walked, held their fork, brushed their hand through their hair, the way they drove a car, sat and read a book, argued with us, cried tears and slept — then we are co-conspirators in their vanishing.”
I hope, as we enter the season of the thinning veil, memory will be your miracle.
Welcome to October, Leo!
This month, Mercury and Mars in Scorpio are tag-teaming in your fourth house of roots and apron strings, which could inspire a kind of interrogatory energy in you.
This may express itself as wanting to know more about where you come from or the circumstances that have made you the way you are.
This is an excellent time to invoke an elder, book a past life regression, or experiment with EMDR therapy. The point is to dig past the simple story and the easy remembrance toward the beating thing beneath it. You don’t want comfort, you want clarity.
Push your parents for clues if you are in contact with them, ask for spare details and see what kind of sail you can sew out of the loose bits of your history.
Welcome to October, Virgo.
I recently had a conversation with my sister, a fellow Virgo and a brilliant astrologer, who shared that she has a bone to pick with the concept of karma.
“Life is not a lesson, it is a gift,” she argued, “and it is way more psychedelic than linear. We keep having agency in the situations we choose so that we have opportunities to heal. You can have a beautiful trip or a horrifying one, but the overall theme is healing.”
I hope, as the Sun in Libra shines in your second house of wealth and worth, that you greet the gifts of beauty and horror as equal co-conspirators in your own consummation.
Happy return of the Sun to you, Libra!
It was during Libra season in 1955 that James Dean was killed. I recently read something of a eulogy about him by the screenwriter Stewart Stern, who writes,
“So few things blaze. So little is beautiful. Our world doesn’t seem equipped to contain its brilliance too long. Ecstasy is only recognizable when one has experienced pain. Beauty only exists when set against ugliness. Peace is not appreciated without war ahead of it. How we wish that life could support only the good. But it vanishes when its opposite no longer exists as a setting. And Jimmy stands clear and unique in a world where much is synthetic and dishonest and drab. He came and rearranged our molecules.”
It is my profound hope and wish that your birthday gift this year is a brief, brilliant reminder of the existence of beauty and polarity and a similarly sudden, irrevocable rearranging of what you are.
Ahoy, Scorpio! The Sun in Libra activates your twelfth house of endings, the subconscious mind, shadow work and hidden enemies.
Pain is a process and release is never a one-act play.
Yung Pueblo writes, “If the pain was deep you will have to let it go many times.”
I hope this truth is a balm to you as you prepare for your solar return. There is no timeline for healing, and we, and especially you, my friends, do not “get over” things; you get underneath them, move through them, and reach back toward them when you need to remember that grief is the tax we pay for being alive.
Welcome to October, Sagittarius
In Chuck Wendig’s recent horror novel “The Staircase in the Woods,” he writes,
“Friendship is like a house. You move into this place together. You find your own room there, and they find theirs, but there’s all this common place, all these shared spaces…Friendship, like a house, can go bad, too. Dry rot here, black mold there, and if you don’t remediate, it just grows and grows. Gets bad enough one or both of you have to move out…Another ruin left to the force in the world that wants everything to fall apart. You can move back into a place like that, sometimes. But only if you tear it all down and start again.”
In honor of Pluto going direct in your third house of communication and the Sun in Libra shining in your eleventh house of community, I urge you to take your friendships down to the studs. Address what needs repair and what must be leveled to abet new heights.
Hello, Capricorn!
An African proverb states, “If the young are not initiated into the village, they will burn it down just to feel its warmth.”
As death daddy Pluto turns and burns in your second house of wealth, and the Sun in Libra lights the lamps in your tenth house of work and legacy, I encourage you to consider how you can enrich how you are remembered by supporting someone else’s ascent.
A leg up, an open door, a lent ear, do what you can to include and advance, and you will prove to be not just a good steward of the future, but of your future self.
Ahoy, Aquarius!
I recently read an interview with hostage negotiator Chris Voss, who employs a technique he calls “tactical empathy” in an attempt to make any adversary feel understood.
“What’s your definition of empathy? If it’s being able to articulate the other side’s point of view without agreeing with it or disagreeing with it, it’s not a weakness. It’s a highly evolved application of emotional-intelligence analysis. Now, is it manipulation? Similar to a knife, in one person’s hands it’s a murder weapon, and in another person’s hands it’s a scalpel and saves the life.”
As the zodiac’s resident cult leader and with the world admittedly on fire before us, you’re more inclined to galvanize than empathize. Still, with Pluto going direct in your first house of the self and the Sun in Libra amplifying your ninth house of expansion, I encourage you to explore how the tactics of empathy and your own potential for understanding can be put to peaceful use.
Libra season activates your eighth house of sex, transformation and other people’s resources, Pisces.
In her poem “The Window,” Lynda Hull writes,
“making love was a way of saying yes,
I am here, these are my borders, hold me down
a little while. Make me real to myself.”
I hope Hull’s words serve as inspiration for you to explore others as an inroad to understanding your own topography.
In the blurred edges and borderlands of intimacy, I hope you are made real and realize where you begin.
Astrologer Reda Wigle researches and irreverently reports on planetary configurations and their effect on each zodiac sign. Her horoscopes integrate history, poetry, pop culture and personal experience. To book a reading, visit her website.
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