Mars conjunct Saturn, Venus conjunct Jupiter: Horoscopes for the Week of August 22nd

Collage of 15th century painting of the cosmos by Chani & Sonya

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Monday, August 22nd

2:05 AM PT – Mercury conjunct Jupiter at 26 degrees of Virgo

Wednesday, August 24th

4:27 AM PT – Mars conjunct Saturn at 9 degrees of Sagittarius on the fixed star Antares

Thursday, August 25th

11:57 PM PT – Mars in Sagittarius square Neptune in Pisces both at 10 degrees

Saturday, August 27th

3:29 PM PT – Venus conjunct Jupiter at 27 degrees of Virgo

Sunday, August 28th

11:32 PM PT – Mercury conjunct Venus at 28 degrees of Virgo

This week is one to watch.

In one corner of the zodiac, the Virgo corner, we have the most helpful planets, Jupiter and Venus gathering together with their current ruler, Mercury. These three spend the week assisting each other’s agenda. Venus brings connection, beauty and grace; Jupiter brings opportunity, expansion and luck; Mercury brings information, communication and messages to decode. It’s a pile up of goodness in the part of our chart that contains Virgo. It will help us to see the possibility of our current situations, take up the opportunities that come our way and connect to what we find inspiring.

However, that isn’t the whole story. This is a complex situation.

For one thing, Mercury is extremely slow moving right now. Stationing retrograde on August 30th, Mercury’s movements at this stage of its cycle are fascinating and worth taking note of. Because pop culture has an appetite for sound bites and simplicity, we’ve boiled the importance of Mercury’s movements down to its retrograde alone, as if it isn’t linked to any other aspect of its cycle. But the speed of a planet tells us a lot about its current temperament and maybe even its effect on our lives.

Mercury slows down to an apparent stop before it appears to turn backwards in the sky. This movement is akin to how we would slow down to change directions ourselves. We are off in one direction and then something occurs to us, we forgot our phone, we slow down to stop before going back to get it. Mercury, the messenger, the psychopomp, is in that predicament this week. Something has called its attention. Something needs correcting. Something needs retrieving. Something from the past is in need of attention. This week we might start to sense that we need to slow down in order to turn around and retrieve, correct or review something that we skipped over.

As Mercury stations retrograde in Virgo on August 30th it does so under the best conditions possible, being hugged or bonafide by Venus and Jupiter. This means that our review process starts out being extremely assisted. Not only that but Virgo is in one of the signs it rules making this an intense retrograde but one that has the power to help us retrieve the most critical pieces of information available to us at this point. Two days later, September 1st, there will be a solar eclipse in Virgo. This area of our chart is being intensely activated and calling for our attention over the next couple of weeks.

While all this is occurring in the thoughtful, work-oriented earth sign of Virgo, the inspired, philosophical, far-reaching fire sign, Sagittarius, is having its own wild ride.

This week Mars will conjunct Saturn in Sagittarius. These are the two tough-cookies of the solar system. When they make moves we feel it. Mars is the soul’s desire. Mars is the courage the personality needs to live out those desires. Mars is the soul-on-fire kind of passion that we need in order to push through life’s most frustrating limitations.

Saturn is life’s most frustrating limitations.

Saturn can be cruel, crushing our spirit through imposing traditions that impede our ability to freely express who and what we are. Saturn can bring on depression as it represses the impulse for life. But Saturn is also the force that we need in order to temper the hot-tempered urgency of Mars. Saturn is the wise old elder, the master teacher, the Crone. We need both passionate bursts of energy and an understanding of how to forge these fires into sustainable modes of transportation in order to make the most of this life.

When we use this combination to understand the limits we need to respect as well as to encourage our ability to break the boundaries that keep us living in too small a way, we can accomplish amazing amounts of long-lasting progress.

Back in April, Mars stationed retrograde at 8+ degrees of Sagittarius. This is the first time it is re-crossing that threshold. This is the official end of the Mars retrograde cycle and the actions that we take have an impact. Saturn has a way of setting in stone all it touches. Through this connection with the limits we have to work within, Saturn is an extremely helpful guide in terms of learning how to manifest long-term.

This week there is no sweet without the spice and salt.

Take these lessons to heart. There may be tough decisions that you have to make or thick barriers you have are trying to break through. Remember to do so with a respect for your physical limitations and your spiritual limitlessness. Both Mercury’s slowness and the conjunction between Mars and Saturn tell us of the importance to take our time with the bigger, more laborious tasks at hand.

*Horoscopes are meant to be read as inspiration. If you know both your rising sign and sun sign, please read both horoscopes. They both contain important information. You’ll know which resonates more for you from week to week. Take what works for you, leave the rest. If you find inspiration here we love and appreciate donations. If you want to share this work you must quote it and link it to this post and website. Thank you for your support and for spreading the work around, we really appreciate it and you!

Aries & Aries Rising

Your big plans, long travels and lofty studies might be reaching a climax this week. Recent adventures will have shifted your perspective or will have tried to. How open you have been to to the wear and tear of your current path will also reveal your success so far on your journey.

We are supposed to be changed by life.

The winds, the peaks, the feasts and the famines are all supposed to leave their marks upon us. Skin stretched from holding life, love, loss and everything our body bears. Mind opened from witnessing the millions of ways that humanity fumbles, tumbles and trips towards ecstasy. Heart reshaped from all the different ways it finds love and its many manifestations.

Life lessons don’t come without their cost or their rewards.

No matter the roads you’ve traveled down recently, this week might pose a kind of test in terms of wanting to know all that you have learned, integrated and made yours. This isn’t a multiple choice pop-quiz. This is a self-mastery exam. Do your daily activities align with your larger beliefs? Do you find that you live out of sync with what you worship? Do your beliefs need to become more practically applicable or do you need to practically apply your beliefs?

The goodness this week comes to you through the work projects and daily efforts that you engage with. Make all your lofty ideals into practical altars that you can pay homage to daily. Work humbly in great ways. Do great works through small, humble actions. Keep your spirituality as close to your humanity as possible.

God is in the details, but She is also in our flaws.

Join me for How to Thrive in Eclipse Season, an in-depth look at how September’s eclipses will impact each sign and how best to work with their powerful energy. I’ve got ritual suggestions, ideas for altars, and a look at the best days and times to work with through the solar eclipse in Virgo, the lunar eclipse in Pisces, and Mercury retrograde.

Taurus & Taurus Rising

This week reveals much about the investments that you have made into the relationships, projects and shared life goals that you have been developing with others. Which projects energetically have the best checks and balances? Which relationships are you still paying interest on that are actually just closed for business? Which of your resources are being replenished and which are being depleted? Who do you owe and what part of that debt can be paid off at this point? Who do you think owes you and do they really?

While this week highlights the give and take of your life, it also can help you to bring closure and a certain amount of understanding about the necessary endings that need to happen in order for you to maintain balance. When we leave energetic lines open for relationships, partnerships and collaborations that are no longer viable, we loose our most precious resource. We leak energy when we keep trying to make something work that just doesn’t.

It’s time to take your energy back.

Call it in. Bring it home. Reclaim it for yourself. Don’t leave it hanging around, dangling about. You need it. More than anyone. You need all of it accounted for, ready to re-invest into new love.

Because it is calling you too.

The other part of your chart that is in living color right now is your 5th house of love, romance, creative energy, children and all the different kinds of offspring that one can produce. Invest your energy here. Let the past profits fertilize this new growth. Give yourself the growth edge you need to make the most with what you’ve got to work with.

Gemini & Gemini Rising

With your ruling planet, Mercury, slowing down and preparing to go retrograde at the end of the month, this is the perfect time to take stock of where you have come from, what you’ve done and what might need redoing, rehashing, reworking and reviewing in regards to your home life. Starting the process before Mercury actually stations retrograde can help with the transition. Start clearing out, cleaning out, reorganizing and reviewing what you have collected that lays in wait of your attention in the deep recesses of your closets.

Physical and emotional.

While there is a lot to feel good about in your home-space and living situation, Mercury’s retrograde will still want you to review some fundamental elements of your life. It’s good to know which part of the ground that you stand on is solid. It helps heaps when looking back on the times in our lives that were not so.

Standing on solid ground also helps when dealing with the relationship issues that are the most difficult to digest.

Enter the Mars/Saturn conjunction. This week helps you to wrap up a long-standing relationship issue. Be it about boundary, independence in partnerships, working through anger, crossing the thresholds that have had you stuck or respecting the limits of certain relationships, the next week has a way of clarifying and making real both your progress and your potential in partnerships. But you’ll need to be willing to work with present-time realties, not get stuck in pastime pains, refusing to grow into the potential of the moment. Let the pressure open you to feelings that you may have forgotten about so that you can consciously take care of you, here and now.

Cancer & Cancer Rising

This week works on your ability to slow down enough to consider the messages that are making their way to you. This week wants you to consider what it is you are saying and what is being said to you. This week wants you to receive the message, but you’ll have to make yourself available for it.

Anger usually overrides our fear. It convinces us to rush over details in hopes of protecting ourselves. It can inhibit us from really listening. It tells us that we need to go faster, stay ahead of what startles us, outrun the sabertooth tiger. It tries to convince us that we should protect ourselves rather than be curious about what mystery is at work in our lives.

Stay out of rushing. Side-step the fast lane. Savor this moment. Even when it’s painful. Get curious about what your brothers/sisters/cousins/aunties/uncles (and folks that feel like they are) have to say to you. Notice how you are hearing it. Hearing is often half the battle.

Speak up for yourself when messages go awry. This week’s Mercury/Venus/Jupiter situation is a major help to all your communications. Use this help to get clear on emotionally charged situations. Use this help to stay vulnerable enough to communicate honestly so that you can remain available for true connection.

While your websites, essays, newsletters and messages of all kinds that you put out into the world will be well-received and wide-spread due to this pile-up of planets, there is a deeper meaning to this streak of good-luck. Getting to the bottom of our communication issues is no small feat. It is a never-ending unraveling of the ways in which we tie ourselves up in knots over our unprocessed fears, grief and past pain.

This week’s Mars/Saturn situation has some hefty work projects for you to finish. It has some deadlines that will most likely come deceivingly quickly. Try to be diligent about the work that needs to get done and take care of your body in every way you can while you are doing it.

Leo & Leo Rising

This week the pressure builds in the area of your chart that deals with your creativity, your children, love lessons and the duty that you have to use your creative energy to build the life you want to live.

What you do with your creative energy is important. How you manage it is everything. The belief that you have in it and your willingness to keep trying to learn how to work with it is your struggle and your sacred duty.

Sacred duties don’t ask us what we want, however. They demand that we show up for them, serve their needs and put our pride aside. If you haven’t been able to produce exactly what you have wanted to lately, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth continuing to work on. Right now you might be tested in ways that seem hard to fathom or hard to be happy about. That’s OK. It’s just par for the course. Take any setbacks in stride, but also get curious about what the frustration can do for you. Is there a way to reposition yourself so that your efforts have a greater impact? Is there a way to struggle less? Is there a way to contain more of your energy by giving less away to situations or projects that aren’t actually yours to do? Do you need to reassess what is your duty to do and what is simply not about you?

Children grow up and no longer need us in the ways they used to. It’s healthy and it’s hard to deal with at times. Some of our creative projects won’t end up living the life we wished for them. Note the changes and address them with as much maturity and wisdom as you can muster.

The big gifts of the week come through the financial sector of your chart. Even though Mercury will be retrograde there for most of September asking you to review and rework your financial situation, it’s a review that is well-supported. Just as you are being asked to understand what you are creating and what your responsibility is to that process, so too are you being asked to understand the value of what you have to work with and how to work with it in ways that keep your creative juices flowing and your financial pockets running deep.

Virgo & Virgo Rising

This week is host to some of the best and some of the most difficult astrology of recent times. Especially for you. With Venus and Jupiter surrounding your ruling planet, Mercury, you have an epic planetary entourage around you. This will help you to find solution swiftly and to come back to love and relatedness readily. There is no greater antidote to fear, anger or hostility than a humble heart and an eagerness to learn all we can from every situation.

And you have this in epic proportions right now.

But there are also some old bones to pick. Past the ghost stories, underneath the age-old narratives, off the tracks of the old railroad that keeps you going to the same place time and time again, lies another story. Another account. Another ending to your tale.

Healing can’t come without moving through the fears that seduce us into staying still. We must teach ourselves to find a way through the fear into self-care and advocacy. We must find our voice, precisely at the moment that our fear tries to snatch it from our throats.

This week, snatch back.

With Saturn and Mars meeting in your 4th house of foundations, family, roots, ancestry and age-old childhood triggers, there is bound to be a reincarnation or two of what you wish would stay dead and buried. But these old feelings are supposed to arrive. These situations are the perfect solution to the problem that they pose. The cure is in the illness.

This week is here to help you heal. It is here to remind you that things are different now. You have a voice. You have choice. You have your relationship to yourself.

Libra & Libra Rising

The best bits of this week will be felt internally. The victories you seek should be sought with yourself. There is no competition here. No gold medals given out for this kind of win. Just an experience of being at peace with yourself, at peace with your actions and at peace with the ways in which you are handling the issues that are arising,

Take actions that will help you sleep well at night.

Speak the sentiments that you most mean. Threats won’t help you here. Neither will promises that you know you can’t keep. Neither will gossipy shade that sinks you below the level of your integrity. Pick yourself up. Lift yourself and those around you up with honest, respectful and intentionally impactful language. Your words carry extra weight right now. Your communications carry extra significance. Set boundaries in your communications. Refuse to tear others apart. Use your conversations as a practice and as an invitation to see each other with respect and dignity.

The next couple of weeks bring a lot of goodness to your door. You’ll have more than one reason to feel like things are going your way, like you are back on your game and like you’ve got the hang of this life thing.

But before we can get to the party, we’ve got to get ready.

This week gets you prepared by reminding you what boundaries you need work within. All magic is done inside of a container. Knowing and respecting your personal boundaries will make your witches’ brew all the more potent.

Scorpio & Scorpio Rising

Hard won lessons about what you have to work with and how you work with it come to a climax this week. Your internal passion meets the external limits of your physical reality and you are left with the profits and losses of that equation.

Because we spend the majority of our lives making a living, how we do what we do is more important that simply what we do. This area of your life has been tested recently. Don’t take it personally. But do take it on in a professional manner. Show up to the challenges in your financial life or your work life as if that itself is your job. As if the difficulty itself is your mission to work through. As if working with the challenge that it possesses is your paycheck.

The real gold that this week is dolling out however is to be found with friends. You have a fantastic pile up of planets that are begging you to remember the art of reaching out and staying available for social gatherings and get togethers. Your people will help you get it together. New folks that come into your circle can bring much needed energy into your stuck spaces.

This week offers you a sweet situation that can bring you a tremendous amount of luck and love through those that you hold court with. Ask for help when you need it. You don’t have to go this life alone. You don’t have to brave every bump in the road by yourself. You don’t have to pretend to be tougher than tough. You are fragile and resilient. You are a being with many strengths and many needs. You are a human who will need to be helped from time to time. It’s OK to reach out for us.

Sagittarius & Sagittarius Rising

Sometimes we need a limit, a constriction, or a boundary to push up against. Sometimes we need an external definitive, or what appears to be one, a no, a rejection, a line we cannot cross in order to experience how the same thing manifests on an internal level.

What internal voice stops you? What old attitude do you need to burn through? What external experience is making you pause? And are you claiming that pause as a failure?

Why? Pauses aren’t failures. They are opportunities to go deeper.

Get down with what you feel is a drag. There is information there. There is drive locked up in fear. There is energy stuck in the too-tight tubes of your constriction. There is wisdom in your frustration.

Don’t get mad at the situation appearing as it does, get wise to it. What is life trying to teach you?

Success isn’t outside right now. Although many wonderful connections can be made in your career and many fortuitous situations are occurring, they aren’t for free. These take your effort to make really and useful. Yes, take in feedback. Yes, take the constructive criticism into consideration but be very careful not to take the hardest thing that you are learning right now at face value. Get under your fear to the meaning of the situation. You aren’t meant to stop right now but you are meant to take a moment to receive the lessons that you would normally rush through.

Capricorn & Capricorn Rising

When we make it a priority to live our life in integrity, then we aren’t afraid to review our choices. Not because we get everything right all the time. Far from it. But because when we don’t get it right, we actually look forward to being able to course correct to the extent possible. It’s part of keeping ourselves in check. Part of the learning process. Part of what deepens our connection to ourselves and to our lives. It’s good to know when and where we have gone off track, been an asshole, made a mess of things or just did wrong by ourselves or others.

Getting off-track is part of learning how to stay on one. It keeps us humble students of life. Mercury’s upcoming retrograde may have you reviewing an aspect of your journey, course correcting and making certain philosophical adjustments. Enjoy them. See what the experience brings up for you. Seek to be a better pupil of your own life. With Venus and Jupiter also in this area of your chart there are many gifts to be received, most likely spiritual in nature, when you you are willing to make the journey of self-discovery.

This week’s Saturn/Mars conjunction may have a way of bringing to light the aspects of your life that are a little more nuanced. Notice ways in which you still fall into self-sabotaging paradigms. Or better yet, notice the moment right before you do. Try to develop an ability to pause when you feel pulled towards what leads to a little self-destruction or general destruction. What are you wanting to obliterate? What’s the fear? What do you feel will get the better of you if you don’t stomp it out? Try to be more curious in these moments and less reactive. Try to be more aware of what there is to gain through the experience than what there is to get rid of. There may be things/people/places to part with, but make sure endings are made from a place of clarity not a place of desperation.

Aquarius & Aquarius Rising

You’ve learned some tough lessons lately about who is in your corner and who isn’t. The issues that you have dealt with in regards to defining the terms and conditions of your friends and allies might not have been your first choice for summer curriculum but the lessons that you have learned are important ones.

We have to know who can show up with heart and integrity no matter the kind of publicity they’ll get for it. Real friendships aren’t forged on Facebook. They are solidified in the unseen places of life’s difficulties as well as the well-photographed celebrations and good times.

The future is a daunting subject. But your astrology has been venturing there. Asking you to spend time defining your ideas, hopes and dreams for it. You might have come up against a couple of boundaries, borders or barriers lately, or had a better look at the shape of the ones that lie in front of you. You might feel the need to meet these walls with the sheer force of your will, your determination and your courage. It’s commendable but it’s not necessarily recommended. If you are going to win this battle, it should be a long-haul play that you make. Something that can set you up for success in the long-term. You’ve got some seriously good things going on in the part of your chart that has to do with sharing your energy with others, and while this is an area of considerable weight right now, it’s important to understand the opportunity that is present. Find those that can help you build your dreams in a sustainable and intelligent way and don’t worry about the set-backs. Just keep your eye on the collaborations that keep giving your dreams life.

Pisces & Pisces Rising

There is so much beauty to experience through your intimate relationships right now. There is so much to learn through them. There is so much reflected back to you through the most intimate moments. No matter how scary. No matter how imperfect. No matter the mishaps. No matter even the absence of what you most wish would be there.

Look for what is there.

Even when you have to relive old relationship fears. Even when you have to go back over the more sensitive relationship topics. Even when you have to face the aspects of intimacy that make you want to run for cover. Even then. Look for what is beautiful. Don’t miss the love that is there for you. Don’t miss the call to love beyond your own expectations of what your life should be like.

Your life is so much more than what you expect it to be. Show up for the life you most wish to create this week, especially in regards to your work and place in the world. This week has us all crossing a threshold of difficulty but also one of triumph. For you this takes place in terms of your career and your life’s calling. This is no time to give up. This is a time to raise yourself up. Up to the task. Up to the way in which you most wish to live your life. We don’t just get the life we want because we want it. We get to experience our lives the way we live them. Live yours like it’s the one you want.

Mars conjunct Saturn, Venus conjunct Jupiter: Horoscopes for the Week of August 22nd

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