The New Moon in Leo arrived at 3:11pm EST this afternoon, July 24th, 2025, Luna and the Sun implicitly brought together, here just two degrees into Sol’s home in the tropical sign of the Lion.

This lunation also constellates around the Sun’s opposition to Pluto in Aquarius, our first since the Hadean planet entered Aquarius to stay last November, as it spends the next 18 years traversing the sign’s cool expanses and archetypal ‘bird’s eye’ perch.

With the luminaries opposing underworldly Pluto, the Sun and Moon stare down the planetary pantheon’s ‘Prince of Darkness’ if there is any.  Far past Saturn’s bringing of sorrow, hard limits, restriction, destruction and decay, the sharpening block whose taskmaster prompt can wrangle gold from the darkest mines, Pluto is the hidden, the underworld, the withheld pathos, perversions, addictions, societal taboos… control complexes of personal psyche and sociopolitical pathology, that stem from the parts of us which are often hardest to speak of without laying uncomfortably bare the fodder for transformation, metamorphosis.

Pluto too holds its own riches for those willing to do the painful work of integrating that which the inner eye might not so eagerly turn on itself.

Pluto is often postured as the humanist era ‘transformational’ pivot point of the solar system.  Furthest planet from our Sun, or regarded as such in its archetypal stature — it is ‘that which is yet to be made known’ and still out of sight, far past the boundary between seen and unseen worlds found in the wizened and threshold-guarding ways of Saturn, furthest planet from our Star readily visible to the naked eye.  Both are death planets; both destroy in manifold ways and provoke a reorienting of psyche around that which was negated or denied.

While the Moon’s fleeting movement brings it quickly to and from any lasting aspect to the planets, the Sun’s opposition to Pluto marinates for a few days… and it is something we’ll behold the symbolic complexity of each year for nearly the next two decades.

Themes of the Leo/Aquarius axis will arise when any planet’s transit through the Lion opposes Pluto in Saturn’s yang home of Aquarius — the Leo part of us radiates from the inside out, while Aquarius looks from the outside in.  Matters of identity in which Leo might more readily feel spiritual birthright, Aquarius might feel the divine outcast.  One warms at the center, the other feels alienated at its core.  One nourishes in the closeness of burning starlight… the other carries a wintry torch across chasms that seem to separate the self from the collective.

On the world stage, one might see the solar flame of identity set alight, staring down unexamined baggage… political war criminals and operators of subterranean crime rings being wrung out — having their shit, their dirt, their psychological detritus dragged into the open for all to see.  The Sun staring at Pluto’s far perch, a seething cauldron of that which is suppressed, swept under the rug, or covered up under deliberate Machiavellian architecture.

On the other hand, there is an increasing amount of spin on ‘both ends’ of every seesaw.  We can see this in the scandal, lack of / lots of surprise, desire for further cover-up, and manifold string-pulling across the twisted puppetry of global politics — from POTUS and an old friend of his, to fever-pitch maiming of innocent humans, the majority of them women and girls, across one particular sovereignty in the Middle East.  These matters may even be intertwined, atop bipartisan corruption stretching back decades.

In another way entirely, it’s fitting as I alluded earlier that the ‘Prince of Darkness’ himself, Ozzy Osbourne, would depart under a dark moon on the first day of Leo, as the Sun applied to stare down Pluto and all its other-side associations.  Bringing light to human ills, through poetry and philanthropy alike… a farewell show that at $190 million smashed all prior charity fundraising records accomplished through a single concert.  A person whose life was often marred by chaos, confusion and self-undoing behavior — perhaps that of a 12H Sun in Sagittarius — Ozzy departed with the dark moon as far from the Sun as the new moon was on his birth, leaving a legacy of equal parts healing and public joy… writing the finishing touches of a nuanced narrative that held many questionable and electric twists and turns.

While these are just some of the transits’ more observable reflections on the western world stage, they hold the tension of the solar identity and the plutonian mucky-muck begging to be integrated… across an axis of light fading and returning, of heroes and anti-heroes, valor and villainy.

Atop the pulse of this plutonian new moon, Venus in Gemini is moving past a square to Mars in Virgo, which is separating from a conjunction with the South Node.  Any of the more frictional aspects between Mars’ blade and Venus’ desire for coherence tend to feature creative and erotic tension prominently — high desire, high inspiration, and even the pressing matter of integrating and moving on where discord has held us back.  With a retrograde Mercury in Leo ruling them, we may find that reconsideration and revisal play a role in how we act on desire… at what relative speed or carefulness.

With Mercury having stationed retrograde in the center of Leo’s second decan, we might experience encouragement in the virtue of efforts made in the face of adversity.  This lunation also takes place at a trine to Saturn and Neptune in Aries, who are separated by just one degree… where shadow material is examined and new momentum gathered in time, there can be a sense of wistfulness surrounding obstinance and obstacle encountered.  It’s a much more alerted kind of melancholy, perhaps one that can be greater mobilized into action what with all the outer planets occupying yang signs now!

Just some of the themes to feel around for…

* ‘owning our shit’
* emerging from an enclosure, stepping into the light with greater clarity as to what one feels they must do
* refining or revising; purging things which take away from the singularity of individual purpose
* examination and integration of the dark, the hidden, the underworld; the withheld pathos, perversions, addictions, societal taboos… control complexes of personal psyche and sociopolitical pathology
* taking responsibility for where we have contributed to strife, misunderstanding, combativeness, divisiveness
* weighing what is central to our direction, versus what is peripheral or a distraction
* tensions between individuals / points of view depending on what one is willing to admit or to examine
* high desire, high inspiration, the pressing matter of integrating and moving on where discord has held us back
* healing processes affecting the tempo of our interaction with changing desires, environments and relationships, perhaps at conflicting paces
* the ‘big yearn’ might start to feel more mobile now, and less like treading water

More in the days to come… as always, swim well stargazers.

—A.B.