I’ve written at length about the Jupiter-Uranus cycle in past posts on this site and elsewhere, but I keep coming back to it because, of all Jupiter’s cycles (with the remaining 4 outer planets),
this one with Uranus always feels the most hopeful to me, and hope is a precious resource for the days ahead.
With this cycle, we must press forward or miss the entire point.
Of course, that can be daunting during any cycle’s balsamic phase—the final, most deeply waning phase of a cycle—and that's been our reality since May, 2022 when Jupiter first transited into its waning 45° degree aspect with Uranus (315° from the cycle’s inception point).
To be fully transparent here, what follows is modified and adapted from a longer study I’ve been working on for some time now, regarding all ten outer planetary cycles.
Why talk about the Jupiter-Uranus cycle today when there’s so much else going on? Because waning phases often coincide with and reflect stressful times in societies—they certainly have proven to do so over the course of American history—but somehow, today’s Jupiter-Uranus-related stressors seem to warrant closer attention. Our U.S. news is a bit too brimming over with discord, extremist rhetoric and threatened catastrophe to simply ignore.
Too many innocent mistakes have turned fatal. Assumptions we might think are safe seem to be anything but—that people are basically looking to be good neighbors, that democracy is an unshakeable feature of American life, that capitalism can “lift all boats,” that hatred can be contained to the "free speech zone" of the Internet and won’t spill over into the streets, that white supremacy and anti-semitism are relics of the past, and more.
To repeat, the balsamic is the final 45° phase of an outer planetary (or lunar) cycle, and as such it functions like a transition period between two subsequent cycles. It’s a time for slowing down, letting go and letting “be,” which can be difficult for our Jupiterian, goals-and-progress-oriented society, but it provides an essential break for clearing out any old, outworn energies and preparing ourselves for the new cycle launch looming ahead.
In this instance, we’re primarily concerned with the transition between the waning 2010 and the new 2024 Jupiter-Uranus cycles—meaning our current, very consequential cycle will blend into the next over the coming year, naturally stimulating disruptions, breakdowns and challenges in the areas that concern this cycle.
Let’s consider what those areas of concern might be: Table 1 lays out some keyword phrases that pertain to Jupiter and Uranus. Operating together, their cycle interlaces and blends their respective tendencies, mindsets and areas of focus. As we can see, this cycle touches numerous areas of social, economic and political concern, so possibilities abound for this balsamic phase.
Table 1. Basic concepts, qualities and areas of concern attributed to mundane Jupiter and Uranus
Jupiter (mutable) | Uranus (fixed) |
Social agendas driven by the generally short-term quest for growth and expansion; a tendency towards excess and overshooting limitations | Promotes change by deliberately disrupting the status quo, usually in the name of liberation or freedom |
Ambitious, strongly opinionated, potentially self-indulgent | Encourages mental detachment and potential lack of empathy; may be emotionally aloof; promotes unconventional or unique perspectives |
Generous and optimistic: can tend towards “bigger is better” individualism and status-seeking mentality | Potentially humanitarian and oriented towards collective solutions for social change; can be especially focused on labor issues and related unrest; seeks to liberate from old systems and to privilege new ones |
Thrusting forward, adventuresome spirit | Rules the natural force of electricity and lightning; stimulates “electric”/erratic emotional tone in society; promotes inventive, “futurist” perspective |
Aligned with social institutions and power centers involving religion, philosophy, higher education and publishing/media | Promotes linear “Enlightenment” thinking (the primacy of Reason as the basis for self-governance); looks to Science and Technology as the source of human progress; likely to embrace human-centered, as separate from Nature-based perspectives |
The “perennial student;” excels at abstract thinking | Liberty-minded yet can embrace ideological rigidity and a “Law and Order” approach to governance which can become oppressive and controlling. |
Politics and ethics informed by philosophy and ideology | Politics and ethics informed by a “systems engineering” approach to society and a desire for change; in extreme cases, revolutions or coups may result |
Foreign travel, diplomacy and relations | Depending on orientation, may promote radical or extreme views about international relations, globalism or nationalism |
Avoids limitations and commitments; exploits perceived opportunities | Tends to break down systems, possibly by sudden force, for the sake of reform; seeks breakthrough “Eureka” moments |
Avoids responsibility and regulations; potentially duplicitous and promiscuous | Embraces responsibility as an abstract concept but may lack empathy. May pursue a reckless, technocratic vision of progress |
Wilderness-minded; open to "roughing it” and risk-taking | A non-conformist, eccentric mind-set |
At home in Nature and open spaces; rules Sagittarius and co-rules Pisces with Neptune | At home in the Sci-Fi world of futuristic invention and “superheroes;” rules Aquarius |
Related professionals: professors and lecturers; philosophers; clerics; spiritual leaders and missionaries; travel agents; explorers and adventurers; foreign relations experts; publishers and media professionals | Related professionals: engineers, inventors, scientists and technologists; systems analysts, AI technicians; logistics designers; electricians; activists; humanitarian leaders; revolutionary politicians, freedom fighters, artists with an “edge” |
As the end phase of any natural cycle of growth, the balsamic phase oversees the gradual breakdown of the spent “crop material” and—if it’s allowed to compost—its transformation into the humus that will nurture the next round of growth and fruition. Balsamic phases thus promote the shedding of outworn realities and the clearing out of toxic energies that would inhibit the birth and development of new realities. In the context of national affairs, the flaws and excesses that naturally come to weigh down a society’s systems, institutions and civic discourse—and thus its innovative spirit—will be magnified and ideally, refreshed and re-energized for the new cycle ahead.
For instance, the current balsamic state of this cycle may explain why the widespread adoption of electric vehicle (EV) technologies seems a bit stalled at the moment, why trains seem to be derailing in record numbers, and why banks that have served their purposes well but have perhaps allowed their ambitions to get ahead of their substance (both Jupiter and Uranus are now in earthy Taurus) have been failing lately, with First Republic bank’s failure this week ranking as the 2nd largest in U.S. history. All of the systems underlying these concerns need serious re-engineering, as do so many other systems at work in society.
So this balsamic clearing-out process can be quite painful, and with Uranus involved, it can be potentially shocking as well. When Wall Street crumbled in 2008, late Sagittarius Pluto had entered the balsamic phase of its return to our national Sibly Pluto in late Capricorn and Jupiter was transiting in its balsamic phase with Aquarius Neptune, which naturally resonated with Uranus (Uranus and Neptune were in mutual reception from 3/2003-3/2010).
This resonance produced the impact of a double-barreled assault on the world economy in 2008-09, but some important financial reforms and a more sane approach to globalization seemed to come out of this period as well. Silver linings are possible with this cycle.
So one key takeaway here is that, to understand how a new cycle is likely to unfold, it helps to look back at the cycle leading into it with a discerning eye. No two cycles express themselves identically in society, of course, but paying attention to the balsamic “bridges” between them can tease out important connective themes and directions.
Bridging two cycles
So, this post will consider the inception chart for our current Jupiter-Uranus cycle, which launched on June 8, 2010, at 0°+Aries, and along the way we’ll consider how this cycle has been expressing itself since waning into its balsamic phase in May 2022.
In the next post here, we’ll continue this story, looking forward to the 2024 Jupiter-Uranus cycle conjunction and examining that chart with an eye for ways the current balsamic cycle might influence its direction and focus.
As I write this in the first week of May, 2023, we are almost exactly one year away from the current cycle completing and that new 2024 cycle beginning at 21°+Taurus. Let’s begin.
Chart 1. Jupiter conjoins Uranus, June 8, 2010, 6:57:23 a.m. DST, Washington, D.C. All charts cast on Kepler 8.0 and courtesy of Cosmic Patterns Software.
At 0°+Aries, this cycle conjunction was elevated just beyond, but not conjunct the 9th house Pisces MC of this chart (moving counterclockwise). The cycle point forms several significant aspects, signaling the key role this cycle would go on to play in social and technological developments between 2010 and 2024. A few highlights tell the story:
Jupiter-Uranus conjunction opposes Saturn (Virgo) and this axis t-squares ASC-Juno conjunction (Gemini-Cancer) and DSC-Ceres-Pluto conjunction (Sagittarius-Capricorn). There was a strong sense here of transitional times, of being at a crossroads that forced us to adjust to new realities even as the times seemed to accelerate and become markedly more aggressive. Relatively new cell phone technologies (the Apple iPhone was released in January, 2009, the 1997 cycle’s nearly exact 3Q waning square) were at the heart of a tech boom that probably helped the world overcome the 2008 Wall Street debacle, housing crisis and ensuing recession.
Even so, those crises fueled a backlash in American society, where the divisiveness was becoming more entrenched. Barack Obama was in the White House, and the Tea Party movement—the remnants of which exist today as the extreme right-wing “Freedom Caucus” in Congress—was gaining strength by challenging his every move.
In his own words, Obama took a “shellacking” in the 2010 midterm elections, largely due to the rocky roll-out that October of his Affordable Care Act (the ACA or “Obamacare”). In this chart, Jupiter ruled the 6th house of health and Uranus co-ruled the 8th house of government funding with Saturn, so the ACA was the perfect foil for the tensions underlying this cycle launch. At the heart of the arguments in favor of the program was the almost globally-accepted premise that healthcare coverage is a human right (Uranus), not an ever-more expensive luxury item.
Brandishing the alternative Uranian notion that our freedom was at risk in adopting a national health care plan, the Aries energy of this cycle unleashed a barrage of legal challenges to the ACA, some of which forced modifications, but even with a GOP-dominated Congress after the midterms, the overall program persisted; as imperfect as it still is, it fills a need.
Of course, the Jupiter-Uranus cycle conjunction is a singular moment with at least 14-year relevance, so it’s not surprising that the early trend towards aggressive divisiveness in this 2010 instance only became more entrenched between then and now (2023). Despite this and Donald Trump’s “birtherism” campaign questioning his citizenship, Obama managed to win a second term in 2012, but looking back, it seems that now-Sen. Mitt Romney’s (R-Utah) loss to him drew a line in the sand for GOP strategists, who were scrambling to make sense of the party’s future. Trump was, as we learned just months before the 2016 2Q opposition point of this cycle, waiting in the wings.
In retrospect, we can also see that the 9th house placement of this Jupiter-Uranus cycle conjunction, which falls sextile Mercury in late Taurus, was highly significant. The 9th house, in concert with the naturally Neptunian 12th house (Mercury rules the 12th here), covers the issue of immigration, a perennial hot button issue that gained traction with the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks. Shortly after this 2010 cycle launch, the issue became even more urgent and divisive.
Beginning in 2010 and reaching a critical threshold between 2013-15, during this cycle’s waxing square (1Q) phase, a severe European migration crisis was sparked by conflicts in Syria and in the Middle East and Africa. It should be noted that, in general, immigration and migration are more related to Neptune in character than they are to Uranus, so the cycles that involve Neptune (Jup-Nep, Sat-Nep, Ura-Nep, Nep-Plu) usually speak the loudest about these issues.
However, as a phenomenon that often has its roots in people fleeing social unrest in their own countries, and one that has deep ramifications for immigrant-dependent industries, for automation decisions and more generally, labor issues and unrest, we can also see the Jupiter-Uranus cycle at work in this issue.
The GOP’s 2010 anti-immigration platform carried into that decade: the flow of would-be migrants over the U.S. southern border had become a highly visual target for their campaigns, and it didn’t help that the Obama administration had to deal with a serious spike in unaccompanied minors attempting to enter the U.S. in 2013 and 2014. Despite all this, and despite some credible attempts, Congress was unable to pass coherent immigration policy reforms, despite Obama’s repeated insistence.
So, when all seemed to be lost for immigration reform in 2012, he issued an executive order allowing the American-born children of undocumented immigrants to apply for deferment from deportation (the DACA program), granted they met certain strict qualifications. Despite multiple court challenges to this and related immigration bills, this program has also somehow persisted.
In 2016, as the Jupiter-Uranus cycle was quickly approaching the 2Q threshold (opposition), Trump fervently leveraged the immigration issue to his benefit, driving a “Wall”-sized political wedge into our politics that also persists today.
Indeed, this cycle launch signaled that a dicey time for We the People, immigrants or not, lay ahead: Jupiter-Uranus fell quincunx Mars-Vesta (Virgo), with Mars disposing the Aries cycle and Moon, which in turn, ruled this Cancer rising chart and formed its own complex web of associations, as follows:
10th house Aries Moon rules Cancer ASC, sextiles Neptune-Chiron (Aquarius-Pisces), trines Ceres (Sagittarius), squares Venus (Cancer) and quincunxes Saturn (Virgo). As I write this in 2023, it’s obvious why there's also been such an aggressive focus on containing feminine energies over the life of this Jupiter-Uranus cycle. And not just on containing their energies, but on effectively forcing many women back into what conservatives consider the nostalgic ideal of “a woman’s place” by curtailing their reproductive freedom. Has this been blowback for the “Me, too” movement that also transpired during this 2010 cycle? Or is it just the logical extension of the “grab them by the P**sy” culture that is on full display in E. Jean Carroll’s case against Donald Trump these days?
E. Jean Carroll (foreground) outside NY Court. |
In fact, a preview of that decision was leaked more than a month prior, just as the balsamic phase kicked in (see post on that day’s chart here). For an earlier post regarding the New Moon underlying this period, see here. The importance of that decision is difficult to overstate—let's take a quick look at the chart for its June release (Chart 2).
From protests after Roe was overturned. |
Chart 2. SCOTUS issues Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, June 24, 2022, 12:00 p.m. DST (no exact time known), Washington, D.C.
On that day, Venus was in early Gemini and the Moon conjoined Uranus in Venus-disposed Taurus, semi-sextile Chiron in Aries. Also on that day, Saturn, potent in Aquarius (co-ruled by Uranus), squared Uranus and Pallas (also in Taurus) and t-squared the Taurus-Scorpio Nodal axis and Pallas. The Court’s action constituted a shocking upheaval of long legal precedent. Jupiter was revisiting early Aries on that day and squaring the Cancer Sun, as well as (not shown here) the Sibly Jupiter-Venus conjunction.
An emboldened Mars packed a punch in Aries and fell neatly sextile that potent Saturn, with Neptune (Pisces) very near their midpoint5. The Court—reflected that day to my mind by the cardinal Mars-Pluto square (Aries-Capricorn), effectively decided to throw the fate of women’s reproductive rights to the states like a zookeeper tossing red meat into a lion’s cage.
Those who were unhappy with this outcome signaled as much in the 2022 midterms, elections that didn’t turn out to be the major “red wave” that many in the GOP had predicted—perhaps thinking they were about to recreate that 2010 precedent. To millions of unhappy voters, the Court’s startling overturning of women’s rights represented a major threat to not only women, but to American democracy itself, and the harsh aspects to Pallas already mentioned confirmed that fear. If the Court could simply overturn such a long precedent, what could it do next?
Returning to the 2010 cycle chart above (Chart 1), the Moon-Venus square and Moon-quincunx-Saturn aspects already noted have certainly enabled the ideologically rigid view of motherhood and the Feminine that the religious Right has been pushing with its so-called “culture war” ever since. The 2022 backlash at the polls has some less extreme GOP voices sounding more interested in meeting women halfway lately, with abortion bans of 15 weeks or so, as opposed to 6 weeks, when women barely know they’re pregnant.
The fear is, extreme candidates may win primaries, but they won’t win the presidency. In other words, they know they can’t appeal to the American people more broadly with such extreme positions, so we can probably expect deflections galore.
This willingness to tell people anything to produce the desired effect is reflected here by Mars in the mutable “yin” sign of Virgo, exactly opposite the Chiron-Neptune conjunction (Pisces-Aquarius), with Mercury (Taurus) t-square this opposition axis.
This configuration might also explain the wave of anti-Trans legislation that has been passing in state legislatures lately, not to mention why the most punitive and wounding impulses of these laws—banning transgender youth from playing sports--seem to be directed at birth males who have transitioned.
Neo-Nazis protesting an Ohio drag event. |
The Moon-to-Neptune-Chiron sextile here has perhaps soft-pedaled the serious nature of this stressful situation for women and trans individuals, but the wide Venus quincunx to Neptune (Aquarius) certainly picks up on the stress. The 10th to 3rd house Moon-quincunx-Saturn (Aries-Virgo) noted above also reflects the fact that many women were forced to leave careers and family-sustaining jobs to stay home with their children during the COVID pandemic, not only because childcare was often unavailable, but because their children needed to attend school (3rd house) online/remotely, and supervision at home was essential. Juggling all those roles during the two stressful years of the pandemic was for many quite a wounding experience, especially for those women who routinely live with domestic abuse or violence.
Twisted notions of freedom hampered the U.S. COVID response. |
Jupiter ruled the 6th house of health in this 2010 cycle chart, while Uranus ruled the 8th house of death: over one million Americans died from the highly communicable disease, and even Dr. Anthony Fauci, the now-retired White House chief advisor on the matter, says openly that mistakes were made.
We were ill-prepared for such an onslaught—domestic investment on the scale demanded by COVID is rarely allocated ahead of a crisis, so the government was caught playing catch-up and it took a while to achieve a seamless response across the nation. Of all the shortcomings revealed, however, none was likely more damaging than the flagrant politicization of the mask wearing and vaccinations that were such vital aspects of a national response. Had we approached the disease from a united, all-hands-on-deck perspective, how many people could have been spared?
If we had had “eyes to see” at the time this 2010 cycle launched, we might have noticed that 8th house Neptune conjunct Chiron (Aquarius-Pisces) pointed to this massively wounding collective failing. Many attempts have been made to pin the blame on Dr. Fauci or others, but these points and their quincunx to Saturn in health-related Virgo suggest that this was on us, as a dysfunctional (“out-of-sign") society, unwilling to cooperate, because to cooperate was twisted into an affront to “freedom.”
Also embedded in this complicated network of energies is an out-of-sign grand trine between Moon (Aries), Ceres-Pluto (Sagittarius-Capricorn) and Mars (Virgo). Grand trines typically reflect a flowing relationship between the various energies, but the fluidity of this configuration seems to be hijacked: by the frustrating Jupiter-Uranus semi-sextile to Chiron-Neptune; by the stressful Yod these pairs form with Mars (Virgo); and by the fact that Mars is relatively weak in mutable Virgo, doubly significant because Mars also disposes the key Aries points at the top of the chart. All of this would tend to encourage a state of uneasy stagnation and/or anxiety in our public discourse and institutions which can be (and has been) exploited for divisive purposes.
Aptly-pictured influence pipeline! |
So, as we’ve seen, Mars played a major role in this Jupiter-Uranus cycle launch: quincunx the cycle conjunction and trine the Moon and Pluto (Aries, Capricorn), it seems to have stimulated a love-hate relationship between public officials and We the People that has permeated our political narratives and public policies. We’ve witnessed masterful manipulations (Pluto) of the American people over the life of this cycle, and the privileging of deep-pocketed influence peddlers (Pluto) has often fueled these efforts.
This cycle was ushered in on that influence dynamic, in fact: on January 21, 2010—deep into the balsamic phase of the 1997 Jupiter-Uranus cycle, with both Jupiter and Uranus in Pisces—the Supreme Court decided the Citizens United v. FEC case. A quick summary is warranted:
“January 21, 2020 will mark a decade since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a controversial decision that reversed century-old campaign finance restrictions and enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited funds on elections.
While wealthy donors, corporations, and special interest groups have long had an outsized influence in elections, that sway has dramatically expanded since the Citizens United decision, with negative repercussions for American democracy and the fight against political corruption.”
So, the privileging of deep-pocketed influence has been a prime example of a critical “thread” connecting subsequent Jupiter-Uranus cycles: returning to the 2010 chart, Jupiter-Uranus (Aries) squares Pluto and Ceres (Capricorn-Sagittarius) while Mars (Virgo) and Pluto (Capricorn) are tightly trine; this has allowed public officials to channel any Mars-related dysfunction into this cycle’s broader, collective narrative of change and growth. How this cycle might ultimately transform our politics is yet to be determined, although there are disturbing signs aplenty: as always, we probably need to “follow the money!
The story about the state of American justice doesn’t end there, of course: recent revelations about outlandish gifts from Conservative donors accepted by more than one Justice, suggest that the Supreme Court’s friendliness towards deep-pocketed influencers has corroded their personal ethics as well. Court decisions have long demonstrated that such influence on our elections, for instance, is “politics-as-usual” for them, so why should these recent revelations—during the 2010 cycle’s balsamic phase, in fact—the House Judiciary Committee is investigating the Court’s ethical standards or lack thereof, and there’s a lot of talk about the Court’s “legitimacy” being in question.
As for how the two most recent cycles (1997 and 2010) bled into each other, Mars seems to have been a key player: it exactly sextiled Pluto (Libra-Sagittarius) in the 1997 cycle chart, and as noted above, it tightly trined Pluto in the 2010 chart. This might explain why power struggles and maneuvers during this 2010 cycle seem to have intensified, become more aggressive and more armed to the teeth (Nazi rallies protesting drag events come to mind) than anything we experienced during the 1997 cycle.
Despite federal push-back against militias like the Proud Boys, thug power in the name of some white supremacist American ideal has become almost ubiquitous, and the politics of gun rights have become shriller and more twisted than ever. The FBI has been warning for years now that domestic terrorism is the greatest criminal threat we are presently facing as a nation.
Given all this, it’s sobering to realize that Mars plays a similarly complicated and aggressive role in the upcoming 2024 Jupiter-Uranus cycle—a story we’ll unravel in the next post.
Final thoughts on the big, tumultuous picture of our times
It seems to me that so much of the divisiveness and crazy “hall of mirrors” approach to reality that has dogged our political discourse in the past several years has been an outgrowth of this 2010 Jupiter-Uranus cycle’s “origin story.” It’s easy to forget that this cycle launched just a couple months after Uranus ingressed Aries, thus ending the 7-year mutual reception it had been engaged in with Neptune (from Pisces to Aquarius) since March 2003, the month George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq on what turned out to be false pretenses that were somehow uneasily justified in the public’s mind as a necessary part of a larger “War on Terror.” The war that resulted was still raging on in 2010—how could it not, with all the Aries energy this cycle unleashed?
Maintaining the pretext of a just war in this case was difficult, of course—Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential run benefited from the nation’s frustration over it, but his administration’s efforts to draw down our presence in both Afghanistan and Iraq were continually undermined by extremist turmoil that spread across the Middle East, some of it heightened by the so-called Arab Spring of 2010-11, which also coincided pretty closely with the launch of this Jupiter-Uranus cycle.
So, the astrology of the 2010s was incredibly complex and certainly reflected those war-torn geopolitical times, but it would take until August 30, 2021, with Mars opposite Neptune (Virgo-Pisces) and the Jupiter/Saturn midpoint (Aquarius) square Uranus (Taurus), for the last U.S. troops to exit Afghanistan. The exit was far from glorious or victorious feeling: sadly, the few hopeful signs of democracy that the U.S. had brought to Afghanistan—especially regarding women and education for girls—were immediately squashed by the resurgent Taliban, which had already assumed control by that point.
Unfortunately, leaving Afghanistan didn’t end the wars we would be touched by during the final years of this Jupiter-Uranus cycle: in February, 2022, Russia’s Vladimir Putin decided it was time to invade Ukraine to finish the job it had started with its militarized annexation of Crimea on March 18, 2014, with Jupiter and Uranus still in their nearly exact waxing (1Q) square.
Putin has long had his eye on reclaiming the whole of Ukraine for his Russian/Soviet “empire,” but even though Ukraine has never been admitted to NATO, U.S. and NATO nations (and others) have mobilized arms and assistance for Ukraine, have sanctioned Russia in various ways for its aggression, and are treating Russia’s war against Ukraine as the urgent threat to world democracy it is.
Much more could be said about all this in reference to the Jupiter-Uranus cycle, but to focus on this one cycle in this instance would miss the proverbial “forest” for the “trees.” In fact, the “new world order” that seeded today’s intractable conflict in the late 1980s and early 1990s has its roots in the balsamic phase of the 1821 Uranus-Neptune cycle (Capricorn), which suggests that the independence of former soviet states was a matter of stripping away the tired, outworn ideological rationale for their “Union,” which had kept them all in thrall and was ready to crumble around them.
In other words, that balsamic period that enabled the dissolution of the Soviet Union provided a transition between the 1821 and the 1993 Uranus-Neptune cycles (both in Capricorn), a long story for another day about that cycle. The point here is that it’s important to broaden our focus when it comes to global-order-shaking events like Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine—suffice to say here, the chart for that invasion reads like a test case examining the ways in which all 10 outer-planetary cycles can coordinate to create massive geopolitical shifts.
For our purposes here, however, it’s notable that Russia invaded Ukraine with Jupiter just past an exact waning sextile with Uranus and by May, 2022, that cycle then proceeded into the balsamic phase (the final 45° we are now experiencing, with Jupiter steadily catching up with Uranus in Taurus. Even China’s Xi Jinping is getting involved in diplomatic efforts as both sides seem to be gearing up for a protracted new offensive. It would be surprising if anything feels truly “new” about this conflict until after the 2024 cycle kicks in, but democracy loving nations everywhere have a serious stake in this struggle, so despite what feels like deep inertia this spring, there’s no room for complacency.
Because of that inertia, the precious liberatory impulses of the Jupiter-Uranus cycle need protection from undermining forces during this balsamic phase and they will continue to do so into the next cycle. The challenges to democracy in the world are everywhere, but I keep reminding myself that there is also great hope with this cycle, and that will carry us forward. We have far better things to do than fight each other, don’t you think?!
With that in mind, in the next post we will shift our focus to the new Jupiter-Uranus cycle that will be launching on April 20, 2024—right around the corner!
Raye Robertson is a practicing astrologer, writer and retired educator. A graduate of the Faculty of Astrological Studies (U.K.), Raye focuses on mundane, collective-oriented astrology, with a particular interest in current affairs, U.S. history, culture and media, the astrology of generations, and public concerns such as education and health. She’s published articles on these topics in several key astrology journals over the years, including most recently, the TMA blog. For information about individual chart readings, contact: robertsonraye@gmail.com.
© Raye Robertson 2023. All rights reserved.