The Astrological Conversations We Could Be Having

In the fall of 2019, I took a class with a woman who called herself a “trauma-informed business coach”. The course was for online entrepreneurs/coach types, with six weeks of basic lessons on branding, marketing, getting your financial shit together, and making plans for the coming year. One part of the last session was a guided meditation where we were invited to visit with ourselves 30 years down the road, and receive inspiration from tapping into our future accomplishments.

The expectation was that we would all envision a future that was moving towards some kind of utopia. But although I had powerful meetings with some future selves during that meditation, the overall imagery coming through to me was scary. It was climate collapse, desperation and chaos.

After the meditation, we were invited to share in the chat, and I shared that I’d had trouble envisioning a happy future for the world. One or two other folks expressed agreement.

But the coach read my comment and essentially shamed me. I can’t remember her exact words, but they were something along the lines of “why would you focus on that? I was thinking about all the innovations that can make things better, like scalable permaculture.”

In the chat I shared that I felt okay with what I’d seen, that actually it felt healthy to be in touch with scary future potentials, and that I called the process “leaning into the apocalypse” (a concept I’ve since fleshed out). She didn’t respond, but less than a week after the class, this woman — who knew the basics of what my work was about, and knew that I was in the early stages of building an IG following — sent an email out to her list, with the subject line “Unfollow the Apocalypse”. In it, she sounded off about… well, you know the drill. How we shouldn’t be focusing on negative potentials, because then we’ll definitely create them.

That was almost four years ago. It was before the pandemic, before the 2020 uprisings, before January 6th. It was before fall of Roe, before the empty library shelves and perverse anti-trans laws, and before July 2023, when the hottest three weeks ever recorded took place on earth. And in the mainstream, the conversation has shifted. There’s more use of the accurate word “fascism” to describe what’s rising on the right in America. There’s more consciousness around our historical wound. And there are more people acknowledging the existential climate threat breathing down our necks, as well as more science telling us it’s only going to get worse.

And talking about this stuff is really, really hard. The coach who shut me down wasn’t open for a convo, but even for folks who do want to go there, these depressing subjects are hard to broach, and can sometimes leave you feeling worse than before you touched them.

Yet… as James Baldwin, an astute observer of the United States, noted: “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

I believe that the astrology can function as a psychological support structure for each individual, and give us a common language — that isn’t inherently religious or political — for understanding and discussing our moment in history. As I wrote in my essay on the US Pluto Return, the framework is “like a bridge over a lava field, or a glass-bottomed boat through which we can peer down into shark-infested waters. It can provide safety, a way to grasp what’s happening without needing to walk on the lava or swim with the sharks.”

Moreover, I’ve found that there’s something deeply regenerative about facing some of the scary stuff directly. It’s described really well by Pluto’s archetype. In mythology, visitors to the underworld (which Pluto rules) usually return with some sort of a treasure. In my experience, the treasure is a renewed will to survive, a soul-level determination to do my part in the bending of history’s arc towards justice.

I’ve got to call it out, though. In the astrology industry, I see denial, similar to what I experienced with the coach.

I’ve never been overtly shamed by another astrologer, but at this point, it is blowing my mind that no other astrologers, even/especially the ones whose brands lean progressive, are linking the current mundane astrology with the multiple crises creeping on humanity. If you’re not familiar with my analysis, here’s the summary of the themes I see:

• Uranus in Taurus (2018–2026) describes the consolidation of wealth and resources (Taurus) by the tech companies (Uranus).
• Neptune in Pisces (2010–2026) describes the climate crisis, the rising oceans and temps, and humanity’s delusion around it.
• Pluto’s transition from Aquarius to Capricorn (on the heels of the US Pluto Return) is about the collapse of American empire and shifts in geopolitical power balances around the world.

If you look at the combination of archetypes — these themes are almost too obvious to state. They are all things that countless non-astrologers, specialists in those subjects, are already saying. Why has no one else pointed this out yet? Even though astrology is exploding in popularity, why is no one making these obvious correlations?

I supposed you could also ask the opposite question: if the correlations are so obvious, do they even need to be talked about? Do they give us any useful information?

I don’t really have any answers to the first set of questions. I think I’m pretty good at trusting that my time for recognition will come, but recently I feel a frustrated urgency. Because, I mean, the crisis is hitting. It’s not like we just have to go through a few rough years and then get back to normal. It’s only going to get worse from here, at least for a long-ass time.

But I do think that astrology can give us useful information. What astrology offers is a map of what’s coming, and the terrain and weather we might encounter. It affirms what we already know is happening, in complex, nuanced ways — and it lays out some timelines for us. It’s not about predicting exactly what will happen in the future. It’s about knowing what’s happening in the present, and letting that inform our impression of the future. It’s about using the map to anticipate the journey. The journey will still be hard. But it’s better to have a map, and better to look at it before you’re already lost in the wilderness.

Imagine if whole communities were tuned into these frameworks and timelines. Imagine if we used personal astrology to keep healing ourselves and tapping into our truths… and political astrology to read energies, to help shape movement strategy, to add a new layer of narrative onto our understanding of this moment in time?

On the other hand: another obvious but obscured fact is that astrology does not have the “answers”, or even the strategies, for working with humanity’s predicament.

Sometimes when I tell people lightly about my work, they say something like, “well, I hope there’s some good news coming for us in the future!” But astrology doesn’t create the good news. That’s humanity’s job.

Astrology is like a map and weather forecast rolled into one. It can help us know what to expect, but it doesn’t have solutions to the specific questions we might face along the way. Astrology can’t feed us. It can’t teach us how to build communities. It can’t help us resolve trauma in our bodies, or develop wilderness survival skills. It has no politics. It isn’t Love or God (though maybe, like almost anything else, it can be a bridge).

What astrology can do is tell us the truth, if we dare to look. It can support us in the essential facing, named by Baldwin above. And in the struggle against the destructive side of humanity’s nature, this behind-the-scenes glimpse at the cosmic order might even give us an edge.

Here’s what I still believe: If humanity is going to save itself, it will happen by us accessing our higher spiritual potentials. Astrology is one of many many different ways to do this. But maybe it’s an essential place to start, a framework that can support revolutionary strategy and camaraderie, while also helping us take a hard, unflinching look at where we’re really at.

For a deeper dive into the long-term astrology and overlapping socio-political shifts, check out my ebook, Astrology for Apocalypse. You can also read the entire intro to the ebook here.

Thanks for reading! Find more content here on Medium, on IG @collapseastrology and on YouTube at Collapse Astrology. If you resonated — support all my free offerings by buying me a coffee ❤