The Astrology Of September 2021: For Fight Or For Flight
Untangling The Inter-Relational See-Saw
As the big wheels of the riverboat 2021 are beginning their wind down towards the end of the year, we can begin contemplating what happened. We might think about 2020 as when your desperately outdated computer crashes and hopefully freezes, no longer able to compute. 2021 begins the reboot, knowing that you need a complete system update to go on. This is easier said than done. While all intentions being what they are, you ok the OS upgrade, and the machine restarts, is quiet for a moment, then begins to come back to life. You are not emailing and word processing and data streaming instantly. The beachball spins and spins, and the bar at the lower end of the screen creeps along with an outrageous prediction schedule scaled out of proportion for how long the procedure will need to complete. You check on its progress every so often. 20%, 45%, 68% etc. Here we are in September. Things are majorly different from how they were back in January, although, not too much has advanced at the same time. We are poised and ready with our fried fuses and improvised new circuitry, but have yet to take the hot road out for anything beyond a tentative road test. This will vary nativity to nativity, as 2021 is Saturn square Uranus’ story and what happens along the way is a series of episodes that jolt with Frankenstein levels of electricity or halt progress with THX 1138 levels of control. Where you are personally at in the process of updating your existence might be either one or the other side of a breakdown at any given point, we’re not on entirely parallel conveyor belts, but ones that drift slantwise and intersect on the other end of the sphere at some point, we just don’t know when, why or how we are to navigate the unknown territory around the bend.
What we do know is that our actions and our desires keep chasing each other round in and out of sync like cartoon cat and mouse episodes. This shift from the world stage to the personal stage has a lot of 2022’s DNA in it, but we are receiving doses of it along the news streams of 2021 as our society is still being reprogrammed by networks unseen. Specifically I’m referring to Venus and Mars’ dramatic team up and lock step march through Capricorn between January and March 2022, and how that might reflect their conjunction in Leo in July 2021, and then be also present in some form throughout September 2021 as planets string through Virgo, Libra and Scorpio. Namely Venus in rulership followed by detriment, but serving up intensest of desires with Mars in her sign in blind mutual reception. In all cases there is a highlighted dynamic relationality between what we are doing, our tactical manuevering, the surgeries we’re performing on our lives, and the way in which we drift towards what we are resonating which and are attracted to. Expect this to become very majorly a theme when the Nodes begin pinging Venus ruled Taurus and Mars ruled Scorpio this fall. The plot synopsis on the back of the book reads the struggle to innovate, upgrade and revolutionize the norms of our societal framework but the subplot which caries the themes across the narrative is what we as characters desire in our lives and what the fuck we are going to do about it, and what challenges we face to arrive at our loves and what bridges we must burn to realize what we resonate with in our yearnings. Check back to mid July, journal through September, reference the integrative Full Moon in Aquarius in August, and look ahead to February 2022 for some heart wrenching machinations on the chess board of personal affairs. A redesigned world shuffles the circumstances of life, this both strains the parts of our creative, romantic, and erotic existences that are steadfast and hardwired, as well as contorts elements of these expressions into both exciting and excruciating new forms. A lot to process, and of course the trail of planets across Virgo are busy sorting through the pieces making us feel both more emotionally efficient as well as hopelessly fretful.
Eugene Berman
It's A Process: Planets in Virgo
Virgo is a sign that doubles down on the details in a profound way and is keen on tunneling into investigation. It is known for being a bit dry in this regard, as you need relative moisture control if you are going to get granular and analytical, but there is still a kind of sorority with Scorpio just a leap over in the zodiacal neighborhood from Libra, making Virgo and Scorpio sextile, and able to traditionally collaborate. Translate this back to secondary motion and voila, you have what is being sorted through and processed in Virgo setting the stage for the edgy and moody nocturnal affairs once planets arrive in Mars’ sign down stream, and in the context of September, that is what Venus is getting up to for the latter two thirds of the month. On that context, we might wish Virgo was a bit less emotionally invested, just a calm and organized scientist or specialist going about its business— but that’s not typically what happens. Virgo can certainly zone out on deep engineering, but it also at the same time experiences often excessive worry and anxiety about any many of the stray details at play at any given time. So, what we are spinning in our minds at 3am might have something to do with what also is brewing in our libidos as well as our fight or flight instincts— some pretty text book psychoanalytical stuff.
We roll right into the month with Mars in Virgo opposing Neptune in Pisces, where our efforts to get down to it and account for all the nuts and bolts outlined in the instruction manual come with equal measure of escapism and exhaustion. We might don the just right bad ass outfit and careen to town in a sinisterly tuned up sportscar streaming some very specific microgenre of harsh electronic music just to end up dockside sipping cocktails and yawning the day away. No matter how swashbuckling efficient we are the hallucination haze doesn’t subside, they are side by side.
Aruna D'Souza
Four days later Mars trines Pluto, and the foreshadowing of mysterious sleuthing is palpable as atmospheric clouds gather. The presence of men in black and the whiff of abduction conspiracy serves only to wet our appetite for deep and exceedingly specific research. No hesitation, swipe the microfiche, down the rabbits hole we go. Venus also trines Jupiter here, so why not, this is an opportunity to advance and update our relations, and with a New Moon in Virgo occurring on the same evening, the liminality of initiating a new emotional cycle between lunar stellar cycles is just the serving of absolute unknown that keeps the detective scanning the seemingly meaningless for something worth stumbling upon. What are we even looking at? Could be anything. Which doesn’t exclude exactly what we don’t even know we are looking for yet. This lunation being trine to Uranus strikes up a kind of potential eureka waiting to happen. Cue the stumbling upon something curious and out of the blue that changes everything. Enough to keep you up at night. This in a way is a kind of call and response to last month’s New Moon square Uranus, which rumbled a lot of stomachs and strained a lot of eyes with nervous nervous energy— in this case, the cool, mysterious mood, though a bit neurotic, is right on board with discovering a plot twisting factor to experiment with.
Mid month the Sun trines Pluto. Again, how we’re seeing tying up our operations and bringing a close to the procedures on hand are in harmony with ultimate unknowns, and proceedings through tunnels of darkness. The result of bringing things to an ultimate completion is an acceptance that absolutely anything can happen from here. There is a surrender, the letting go of something you organized and created then letting it take flight into existence, its out of your hands at last, liberating and terrifying at once, but that’s the natural and organic way the world works, and it feels heavy and right. Death is an ending but is not ultimately the end. It’s actually never ending. Mystery expands before you no matter how much you investigate. Initiation is eternal.
Eugene Berman
After which the Sun sails through the separation of this aspect towards new themes in Libra, the final statement being the Full Moon in Pisces on the 20th around 8pm Eastern. This is the day Mercury trines Jupiter, so general coherence will be translatable as the objective Sun finishing up the sorting process of our lights on Virgo themes fills the subjective experiences of the Moon in free flowing, empathic, romantic and holistic Pisces with realizations on that end of the spectrum. We can expect intuitions and premonitions, precognitions, visions, psychic realizations to abound, some may be drug induced as she will be separating from Pisces, and others will be mere hallucinations and delusions. Although this is a climax of emotional intelligence, and the microscope and the telescope will be thoroughly harmonized for the occasion, like the climax of any entheogenic experience, might be best to record your visions, sensations, synesthetic connections and impressions to immerse with and digest later. Neptune advice goes like this, don’t deny your fantasies, indulge them with some compass, or else they stew into neurosis, but that being said, treat the trip like a trip, don’t over invest and lose your sense of the experience. The acid trip is not subject to the same parameters as regular waking life. Engage and experience both as they actually are. No need to drag regulations into the imagination and vis vers, no need to insist everything that happens in the psyche’s animations is as rationally real as ground beneath your feet. Use Jupiter and Mercury’s relationship here to get depth perspective of the field and its inter-relations.
Peter Schoolwerth
It's All Related: Planets in Libra
Speaking of inter-relations, everything that is being processed and sorted in Virgo is being sensed and communicated from Libra, where Mercury transits across all September and beyond. So if the mechanics of the transits I described above are the operations, the considerations from here on that occur in Libra are the data sets and particular components fed into the analytical machine. Mercury trines Saturn on the 4th of September, which brings two forms of coldness and dryness into harmonious relationship spanning two varied layers of life. Communication and exchange in relationships, in cultural dialogue, or in the measure of balance and equality of things in general reflects the new boundaries assembling around updated systems and cutting edge constructs. The month is host to more than a few trines, although more than a couple of them involve slow moving players that are reshaping our lives, on personal as well as global levels. Our syncing up to these movements and working in concert with the wider narrative, even if this is a temporary ease, might help to realize our desires when life hands you monolithic terrifying scifi Orwellian lemons.
Venus squares Pluto the next day, so in one sense we might be able to talk ourselves through a brave new world, although the heart is not as easy to convince that everything is ok when the system obviously is broken and there are crater sized holes in the official story. We might be feeling, quite naturally, as we rush around restoring a sense of harmony in our social strata and elsewhere that we are of two minds, and certainly of more than one desire, as the lurking fear is jarring our symmetrical preferences all we have to do is look to Jupiter for aesthetic coherence, sometimes we might have to make room for more conceptual and avant garde formats, if aesthetics are going to survive the frontiers push then we might have to arrange our creative compositions outside of anything we’ve previously expected. Pioneer fashion in this sense could be balancing ripped and torn garments with adornments picked off the prairies. Artistically, romantically and socially here we may find that going with the new flow and adding to it artfully could bring in the most benefit, a kind of advancing into hypothetical territory with a mind for artful embellishment. This, the 6th, is the very day the New Moon in Virgo sets its silent seeds, and does so with a Mercury embedded in Libra. These cultural, creative and romantic considerations incept a process that begins quietly but goes full saturation later in the month, and extends in expression until the other end of the year, like the scene you didn’t even thought mattered so much early in the season but turns out is the pivot point of the series as the narrative unfolds. As Mercury opposes Chiron only a couple days later, we find our conversations attempting to keep their equilibrium through discomfort and conflict, which becomes a theme not long after, as Venus ingresses Scorpio on the 10th and Mars ingresses Libra on the 14th. At first there might be only touchy subjects being breeched, but the motif keeps gaining traction as needing to follow our desires and collateral damage needing to be managed as we do so becomes more and more of a very real thing. Here’s where we end up with Venus in Mars’ house and Mars in Venus’. We might imagine the host of the Ball in the dark depths of the secret hide out and the Assassin himself weaving through the throngs at the civilized social function. They have left resources for each other, and can be connected remotely to fetch navigational device from each other, but both are simultaneously also out of their depths, in a way that you might not expect them to function, although having each other just a text away keeps them both afloat, and in some sense maybe even more equipped than if they were in their strength and doing what they do best. Venus will not be hesitating to realize her deepest desires and Mars will be handing her the ammo and tactical instincts to actualize her conquests, meanwhile, Mars becomes the socialized assassin, still with a conflict to contend with but in this case can use grace and balance as his tools and charm and artfulness as his weapons. A saucy combo. Counter intuitive to say the least, but exactly the wool next level dramas are spun from.
Megan Clay
Cue Venus square Saturn. Apparently our desires drunk on passion crash up against consequences in the world of new restrictions and protocols, what a surprise. Expect to be in deep shit for episodes of animal lust expressed and also to maybe not give a fuck. Not giving a fuck doesn’t make the trouble go away though, you have to walk through it anyway. The Moon is siddling up to the Saturn end of the spectrum for the square so some emotional alienation might go a long way, probably some shaming from the collectivist networks will be up on the chopping block. Luckily Venus in Scorpio has no apologies for her fixations. It’s just natural. Buuut, here we go with more of the theme of shit hitting the fan then profoundly balancing out. Mercury trines Jupiter the day of the juicy full Moon in Pisces only three days after Venus and Saturns sonorous clash. Whatever went down on the way up the emotional ascent it sprays copiously from the tops and everything somehow makes a dizzyingly amount of sense, it’s truly surreal. Sometimes fact is weirder than fiction and life can be actually wet and wild.
And following suit, Mercury squares Pluto on the autumnal equinox the day the Sun enters fall in Libra. Yeah, fine, throwing ourselves into high saturation fantasy does reel things in to perspective and we again feel the ominous super gravity of a society in crisis and there is nothing we can think or say to stop it. We might be subject to cultural dialogue versus plutochratic machination here, and with the Sun heading into the Scales, how one person’s agenda effects another’s becomes a focus. Drama. But perhaps on the epic saga catalyzing scale. Whispers on the wind are crows wings across the dropping temperatures of oncoming winter. Day and night come together to meet. A liminal place where nothing is so simple as endless sunshine. Good and evil are here not polarized, there simply is a balance to keep clear.
Emma Cousin
More scale swinging seesaw as now Mars trines Saturn, and our secret assassin’s attempts to tactically operate through the social strata finds ease in the emerging landscape of updated societal systems. Not really surprising. Making the kill remotely through a digital medium seems to be the preferred method to the killers of today rather than face to face. But on a personal level, we might be able here to at least disarm some uncomfortable set of sparring by dealing with opponents from either side of a newly installed barrier out in the agoraphobic ideosphere. Two days later on the 27th Mercury comes to a full stop and stations retrograde. This isn’t an instant flip of a switch. The planet of analytical ability, intellect, and communication has been slowing down increasingly for weeks, and by the time he turns tail and returns to degrees he previously tread we will have an awareness that some backtracking is necessary. It seems that somewhere in the sequence of oh fuck, wait no its ok, oh fuck, wait no its fine actually, oh fuck, nevermind, etc, some social, romantic, creative or other relational balances got smeared over and nuances fell into the cracks for which we’ll have to search for. A Mercury retrograde is not a thing to be feared, and is really a time when corrections are made to the information which makes our exchanges clear and functional, and in the case of Libra also fair, although, it is a time when we’ll have to return to the drawing board more than we had anticipated previously. An interesting plot point is this is Mercury square to the degree that he’ll conjoin Pluto in Capricorn at the end of December, just as Venus passes over him retrograde from the same conjunction and Jupiter returns to Pisces. I’d say there is something going on here with the phenomenological clockwork to pay attention to. Consider September 27th a moment to watch as our lives unfold that awards us certain freedoms loosening from the locks of winter as Jupiter returns to rulership and re evaluations of how we feel about old structures in our lives as Venus reverses direction in Capricorn. Needing to rethink relationships and cultural balance the end of September is an episode that contains unpacking considerations for the wrap up of the year and what follows into the next.
The Sun trines Saturn by the end of the month, suggesting we leave at least the story of September on the upswing on the seesaw, satisfied with how things look objectively in light of the updating society scape and how we personally orient into it. This is the same day that Venus trines Neptune, so our detached intellectual optimism might in reality just because we are on drugs, but in a time period where pessimism is driving the norm, I think we just take the uplifting perspective, even if it is delivered via intoxication.
Eugene Berman
Desire for action: Venus in Scorpio
Venus plunges into the main arterial of Scorpio by the 10th of September, from which point our desires are no longer interested in playing nice and nothing short of all the fucking way will be satisfying enough. With Mars meanwhile in her sign of Libra at this point there is a bit of a conspiracy going on between the planet of yin and that of yang expressions. Behind the scenes they are in cahoots and communicating secretly, passing notes, attempting to covertly take action to actualize desires. As noted, expect this dynamic, which we were already introduced to when they conjoined on July 13th, to become pretty much what is up by the time the North node moves into Taurus and the South into Scorpio later in the fall, and as I’ve been mentioning, the pair rides across Capricorn in unison the beginning of 2022. Here, with them in mutual reception we get a version contained in the multiple act play and plot dynamics are getting set into motion for what is to come.
Eugene Berman
Venus enters just after the Moon so we know we will feel this ingress viscerally, and what we need and what we desire will be on the same register for a few days, in not fucking around Scorpio, where we might be yearning for things too intense to tell most people about. Mars will be busy getting around this problem in Libra maneuvering through the contacts and connections who can remain balanced within proximity to these more animalistic urges. Venus spends the next couple weeks applying to an opposition with Uranus. This is an important aspect, as Venus looks directly at the mad science laboratory lodged in her domicile, radicalizing our grooves and rhythms and the methodologies of our life and sensory experiences. Although, she does so in an intensified state, and we will be trying to keep in equal measure our uncontrollable fixations and yearnings for deep creative and romantic impact with urgencies to up end sensual experience and modify the pattern of regular existence. This might a flash point for some, as we’re juggling torches and blades here rather than apples and oranges. That being said, these are fixed signs, so instead of revolutionary change you might get a lot of growling guts and rumbling grounds— but insights of how you can jazz up what you resonate with in a meaningful and real way will be on the table, the fiery salamander igniting beneath the overturned rock.
Chun Lo
Her next big expression comes at the very end of the month, when she trines Neptune on the 29th. There is certainly a narcotic vibe to this combination. This could be literal for many and metaphorical for others. But the just can’t get enough, I’m a vampire for your love, totally drowning in the depths of fantasy and sexual abandon lace this configuration, vampire blood laced with acid, or maybe empathic medicine which has just as a hallucinatory of an effect. Mind you, not everyone is as geared to participate, so while some might be allowing themselves a blindfolded plunge into the deep end, others might be more than daydreaming about what that might be like, but either way, being preoccupied and not able to operate as normal because of what the heart as well as the loins are saturated with here is at play, action taken or not. This is when the Sun is also trine Saturn, so somehow the new societal protocols allow a certain slipping through the cracks here, or at least don’t look that bad from this vantage point or state of mind. Venus squares Jupiter the next day. Hard aspects between benefics don’t tend to be problematic, but perhaps instead they are a still notable ironic juxtapositions. How could the opportunities to be more detached, dispassionate and intellectual somehow lead to the pleasure of such intense over indulgence? We’ll have to see how it all plays out to find out. But squares, even between benefics are energizing and productive. They are alarms that say something is wrong something must happen. Not surprising, the vampire’s kiss being far too sweet leads to a burning agitation that things are not right in their current formation, and perhaps never will be again. Scorpio’s deal with a tendency to never be satisfied. Especially with Venus this can be a stoker of creative states. When Venus says “unacceptable!”, Venusian excess beyond reason is pursued to no end. Deliciousness reigns, and blood thirsty beasts awaken from the creative and cultural starvation a dispassionate approach to public safety cooked up by collectivist societal posturings assembling systems from abstract data. We are within our bodies still animals, and if kept from our primal selves by our brain cages to such extremes, things will get wild. Instincts are in-ignorable when they kick in. Welcome to the jungle baby, you’re gonna die.