Just as Spring’s inhalation swells into Summer’s held breath — Leo’s chest filled with lungfuls of that which breathes across the light-fed earth — so Virgo sits at Summer’s end, the threshold of Libra’s balance bringing Fall’s exhalation, ever the promise of Winter’s empty lungs to come.

In the self-similarity of many a cycle, this divine image descends from head to toe, Aries at the commencement of Spring and the natural year down to Pisces and the feet.  I speak now of Leo’s rulership of heart and spine, Virgo of the stomach and those systems which separate nutrient from waste where Summer and Fall meet.

The first decan of Virgo, which deals much with the instinct of discernment, has felt ever colored by the planetary cycles surrounding, much like the dignity of our exalted Jupiter still answers to fleeting movements of the Moon ruling it.

It is Jupiter, now a couple months into its exaltation of Cancer, that makes all the difference in this week’s most prominent transit prior to the first of two upcoming eclipses: September 1st saw Saturn reenter Pisces, for one last processing of loss and obstacle across this place in our charts until February 13th.

It’s been curious tracing the emotional complexion of this lunar cycle, now more than a day past First Quarter, as the new moon happened so soon after the Sun’s entrance to Virgo and we’re not a week from the Full Blood Moon Lunar Eclipse in Pisces coming September 7th.  In fact, the New Moon in Virgo on August 23rd was a Black Moon, the third of four new moons taking place inside of Summer’s measure.

Luna waxed into Libra, meeting Mars there in its detriment, a guest in Venus’ home.  The Star of Aphrodite entered Leo not two hours later on the 25th, bringing high passion yet also perhaps the most glamorous of masks… internal and external relationship arbitration abound, courts of varying drama with Venus in an increasingly magnetic place through September 19th.

Where stronger Libra placements might see Lady Justice come to set things aright, Mars in Libra often tasks itself with bringing knives to the banquet, or a gavel to the gunfight.

The Moon then entered its fall of Scorpio, ruled by the debilitated Mars whose question of diplomacy in Libra is, with a Scorpio Moon, sometimes contorted into covetousness and obsession with power dynamics.  The Moon in Sagittarius brought that ‘I wanna get free’ restlessness to close out August — and, as I write this on the night of Monday, September 1st, Luna has entered her detriment of Capricorn.  

Jupiter’s hyper-idealism is cradled in Cancer, its vision well incubated if we also choose to ‘do the thing.’  And with Saturn’s seemingly backward drift from its fall of Aries to Pisces’ ocean floor once again, this last five-month stretch of Saturn — which originally entered Pisces in March 2023 to leave late May of this year — in the mutable water sign might just hold more faith than confusion.

More in the days to come... until then, swim well starlings ~

—A.B.