The Astrology of May 2020: Headsplitting

May’s transits and configurations form a complicated interwoven mechanism of activity that chews and snags on the narrative that gets fed into it and might come out the other end different than how it came in. There is a strange quality of new clarity, curiosity and inspection mixed with major hang ups, hold ons and wait a minutes amidst considerable reevaluation. The themes interlace along multiple lines, which is perfectly fitting for such a Gemini heavy month, a sign rife with multiplicity and paradox. We begin with Gemini’s ruler, Mercury, in Taurus and Taurus’ ruler, Venus, in Gemini, so let’s begin with these two signs.

Venus Ruled Taurus

Right of the bat Mercury conjoins Uranus upon the threshold of May, exciting the mind and shaking up how things are traditionally thought to have been prepared and planned. Suddenly creative ideas are ejected into the air, realizations and discoveries about embodiment and how the cyclical and sensual world lays itself over the lands of both time and place, and what fertile properties might be ripe for rearranging get announced. As this was overnight between April 30th to May first you might have woken up from a deep sleep and texted someone an important idea for the project you’ve been setting up all winter that came in a dream, or maybe the electricity to the logical and analytical mind had you in the laboratory till late, experimenting with new ways to sigilize seed samples and splice and graft saplings in radically new ways which might revolutionize how people even talk about orchards in the first place. May initiates with something abuzz on how we talk about the manifest layer and creative potential.

The insights continue to roll in if only on the more internal and depth oriented dimension by the 4th, with Mercury coming to conjoin the Sun in forward motion. We might find out about something too detailed to normally notice, or remember something we long ago forgot or somehow neglected to see. This is a good spot to interrogate for elusive details amidst a disruptive time which can click some kind of solutions into place which calm down the unwanted excitement and channel potential creativity into the manifest mix by turning down the squelch and achieving more signal than noise. Taurus’ ruler, Venus squared Neptune on the early am hours of the 4th, mixing realizations about relationships and social dynamics and a wide variety of polarities and curious desires with the vastly mysterious and hallucinatory dimension of the mystical and emotionally ideal in a way that calls us into action or attention, no matter how drowsy and dissolved of a state we showed up in. This square to Neptune contextualizes much of May, so what we think and want or are attracted to in an urgent state of fantasization should be approached and engaged with in a mode to widen our wisdom on our dreams and visions rather than to flood our identities and identifications with reality. Our fantasies and dreams for better social circumstances and togetherness are not negative, but they are urgent. We should hear and heed this call. Culture and contact and connection are not secondary issues and their health and well being are important. No emergency is so dire that the walls between us can’t be ultimately dissolved.

So why not flood the mood board with more intensity and depth at this point and throw in a Full Moon in Scorpio, where the Moon is receiving into her Mars ruled body the Venus ruled light of the Sun in Taurus. Our over the top needs for intimacy and connection are beginning to boil and reach lycanthropic levels. The Dionysian need for a cathartic bacchanal set into a social satisfying context of boundary melting sensory experience oriented in the physical and tactile sphere might send people escaping out their windows and prowling through the night. There is wisdom to be had even in the most enraged rapture of your libidinous register. Give the sky a guttural cry and pay close attention to the visuals which flash before your mind’s eye as you howl into the Moon from the depths of your sexual stores. You might learn something about being a human animal that is smarter than science, especially when that discipline is itself currently drowned in confused ineffectiveness.

Why not follow that up with Mercury sextiling Neptune and completing the receptive circuit. It feels good to allow your mind to entertain itself with the cool shadows of night, and speak the stories of cool stones and fertile soils, and pour Steiner-like, enchanted elixirs from horns of bulls into the earth to further fertilize it, and with these myths melt the mundane media program and replace it with some more naturally inclined logic, some wider and more grounded and directly helpful perspectives. What does your own body say? What do the plants say? How does that go hand in hand with your spirit? Your memory of myth? Your intuition? It might clash considerably from what the television and radio and stream of babbling statistics tumbling out as memes and tweets drowning themselves into complacent sleep.

But this is a deadly sleep. This is the place where Mercury comes to conjoin Algol, the Gorgon’s head, the feared Head of Medusa. Our Messenger collaborates with Neptune and then harmonizes his songs with Pluto in Capricorn followed by Jupiter also in the Goat’s sign in his traditional Fall. There are many dark and manipulative maneuvers and motivations and desperate, heavy handed agendas and unfortunate ops upon the game board and yes the system is changing. Our fantasies and mythopoetic perspectives need to be as weaponized as the pressure they apply upon our platforms. We must turn the Gorgon’s visage around and direct it at our enemies rather than face the wrath of primal destruction ourselves. As they did in ancient times, we must embrace the wrathful and terrible aspects of the natural world and wear it upon our aegis. Blight and famine and even virus are natural conditions of the living earth upon which we inhabit and may integrate into the ecological whole. If we decide to fight nature we are doomed. We will not win, we will perish. We need to negotiate with the earth for health, not with authorities.

By the 10th the Sun begins the same series of aspects that Mercury has just moved through. What we are thinking and considering and maybe slowly beginning to speak about in early May we might find we identify with more and more over the course of these coming weeks. Interestingly, as some of what we see actually happening in reality settles upon us, what our senses can actually assess themselves versus the math we’re being fed, Saturn stations retrograde and starts to backtrack from the progress he’s recently made in Aquarius which dreams of altogether new systems and loves to proceed into dispassionate, conceptual intellectual territory to quickly install new systems that might replace the old ones. This is an enormous theme of 2020 and beyond, but its a good moment mid May to consider if the unfamiliar drastic measures our world has recently rushed into are even effective at all and if they are worth the damage they do by uprooting us and our bodies from an actual and tactile experience of our life and prevent us from physically experiencing our world. Saturn plans to go back to the drawing board in Capricorn by July and then will move once more into Aquarius in December. In the meanwhile take some time to consider if what went down throughout March and April was really the world you want to inhabit for the rest of your life or if you might want to design it differently in any way.

On the way out the door of Taurus and into Mercury’s rulership in Gemini he squares Mars in Aquarius, striking a jarring chord mentally, the voice that describes what it feels and can touch and knows physically from connecting with what is in proximity meeting critical aggression to something that is mental only and an utter projection only of what might or could be, rather than what is. This resounds with the previous notions of which world do we want, the one we are getting to preview or one we might want more control over conducting. Mars came into Aquarius with Saturn in late March. There was no time to design sound new systems, we thought we were in crises and we had to react in the moment, we needed tactics to fight the fear of exponential numbers over night. That leg of the story is coming to a close. Nothing occurred as it was described or predicted. We were more scared than anything else.

Mercury ruled Gemini

Gemini this month hosts the movement of the nodal axis into a new pair of signs. The North Node into Gemini and the South Node into Sagittarius. This is a lot of Gemini as May sees the Node, Venus turn retrograde, Mercury and the Sun all passing through the realm of the Twins. Multiplicity, paradox, polarity, everything at once, many layers, no in depth information, abundant curiosity, double speak, tricksters abound, cleverness, and excessive attention to how we socialize and think and identify with forms of media and communications. Mercury will conjoin the Node by the tail end of the Month before he moves into Cancer, and as he does we might get to see a real read out on what will be developing out of the tunnels of life’s hidden layers over the next 18 months. Keep your eyes and ears peeled for some curious clues; this is a time to pay very close attention, especially to buzz words and the language people choose to use, as it codifies something that might be on the other side of the cipher.

Mercury comes speeding into his home sign on May 11th abuzz with things to say and investigate and much more cross pollination than we’ve experienced for quite a while is likely to ensue. He trines Saturn at the door, so the new systems and restrictions and laws and concepts and proposed plans and designs are likely to be quite a key topic of conversation, and considering their harmonious aspect, social media platforms are likely to be for the most part supporting the prospective limitations on our lives.

Social Media is a perfect set of words to frame what Mercury in Gemini is set up for, so as Venus turns retrograde on the 12th its most likely the very nature, existence and function of social media in our lives that will be getting the re-evaluation. Do we even like it? Does it deliver us to our desires? Are we even attracted to it? Do we appreciate its aesthetics? Can it help us connect? Are we bonding on its channels? Has it hooked us up to romance? Can it be a place for us to create? Normally restaurants and bars become abuzz with social exchange and laughter during Venus in Gemini periods, but there are no more restaurants and bars so Venus’ reconsideration of what she even loves about being social and connecting with people is more than apt. Gemini is an air sign, and thus sanguine and accustomed to culture in some sense. Perhaps not as much as arts oriented Libra, although, all the air signs form enclaves of communication and support social scenes. We might want to consider what the inversion of our desires and aching off our hearts might be saying this month and next. Can we live without a social stage and is the digital alternative we’re being offered to us, by corporate conglomerates and technocrats, really a viable replacement for life on the outside? Wheres the love, where’s the sex, where’s the art, where’s the pleasure and the satisfaction with life, the human bonding? To what degree do we need the open air marketplace in our society? The culture of the cafe? Are we satisfied with all of that being purely virtual, or are there some mistakes in that design and some oversights in the plans that have gripped our world?

Venus squares Neptune a second time in reverse motion by the 20th. Urgent escapism from the weight upon our hearts and the rawness of our desires throws us into hallucinatory emotional waters. With Pisces ruler in Capricorn next to Pluto these are likely to be as much nightmares as dreams. Mercury conjoins her and with his dignity in his domicile hooks her up to streams of information, some much needed lucid clarity, ok says our desires and creative centers, this is the report I needed to read, and then Mercury himself squares Neptune directly after. Nothing makes sense. Despite Mercury’s attempt to gain clarity and investigate every piece of curious information which remains after March’s tidal wave of February and March’s misinformation, still, the mess has been made and no amount of memes is going to clean it up. Curiously, from Gemini he moves into Cancer, where our thoughts turn from everything that’s being said and everything that everyone is reporting and what all of the social options are available to us to thinking about what we need to be safe, supported, healthy, fed, nourished and how to incubate a smarter world.

The Sun ingresses Gemini on the 20th and a New Moon is seeded in the paradoxical, oscillating multiplex of ideas and opinions. Maybe there’s potential to revive and re awaken the dimension of social exchange and info pollination. This lunation comes as Mercury is tightly square Neptune, a planet that scrambles the message and though good for poetical readings of whats printed on the paper is too inebriated to come up with a correct solution to the equation. The best we can get out of this is that the media is flooded with misinformation and lies and serves only to deceive us and instead direct our attention to a quiet contemplation of what communication and information actually is and what might be dreamed up for how it could alternately function. The lunation is also trine Saturn, so considerations of conceptual system design are in harmony with the seeds being sown. This could be a good time to start to consider, once more, what kind of systems you would design to improve our world from scratch rather than what you are told by the media we must comply to.

Saturn Stations Retrograde

The simultaneous ingress of Saturn and Mars into Aquarius in March following Saturn’s dubious conjunction with Pluto in January really made a malefic mess of the world, throwing us into quite the nightmare. Saturn now is retracting from his progress into a new system of laws and restrictions and dispassionate mathematical designs and projections and models. Headed back to old foundations, old systems of management, old historical narratives and how it’s always been. The shift is slow, a turning of the tides, for now at least. There will be less of a focus on new things being erected and constructed and more of a gathering of discipline to pioneer and exist in the cold harsh place we’ve been delivered to. We might now be asked to go without many things we are used and accustomed to. As Saturn will return here in December in cahoots with beneficial and enthusiastic and optimistic Jupiter we might want to really prepare ourselves in the meanwhile for what kinds of positive outcomes and we might hope for at this time of tidal shifts. Many pieces have been swiped from the board. We’re out in no mans land. Why not a mutiny? Our leaders plans don’t seem to have our best in mind; why not start considering what we might draft into the blank page they’ve handed us. Turn the bogus document around and draw a diagram of what you want upon the other side.

Jupiter Stations Retrograde

Jupiter also turns tides to retract from the shores mid month, as growth ceases and new territory no longer is gained, but instead we may pause in our advance and take the temperature on where we’re at. What are we currently holding? What power do we have? Things are bad, but what is the advantage of the territory we hold? What moves might we have on the game board? How does the whole thing hold together? What upward leaps can be made from here? Who has the power? How can we get it from them? How can they be outwitted? Who is in control? Why are we trapped? What’s the plan?

Mars ingresses Pisces right before Jupiter reverses motion. This greatly diffuses Mars and has him more concerned with poetic action and spiritual tactics as well as benefiting others with your energy and efforts. It’s a needed turn as it puts the malefics at last in separate signs. Saturn is moving back upon what he’s built and testing its structural integrity, the malefics separate, the crisis is no longer at such a fevered pitch. Jupiter wants to become wise on what the plan is and how the power game has gone up till now. There is not much to currently gain but the volume has come down considerably on the evil channel. Take some deep breaths. Collect yourself. Direct your energy and efforts towards mystical, spiritual, and holistically beneficial support. Everyone has already been infected; whether it’s by a virus or more likely something much more dangerous that doesn’t plan on going away, ever. We’re all in danger and we have to respond as a whole. Things may recede and lighten up for a few months but this is only a break from the peak intensity. Don’t lose sight on the game being played.