The New Moon in Sagittarius exacts the evening of December 19th, 2025 at 8:43pm EST, soon after setting with the Sun in this sign of fervent aspiration.  Also with them in the sign of the Archer, Mercury and Venus follow close behind the Lights in searching strides, moving across the goddess’ joy at the moment of the Moon’s renewal.

The Sun and Moon at 28° Sagittarius both square Neptune at 29° Pisces; between this and a square to Saturn in Pisces lingering, there is a felt sense of gridlock and spiritual quicksand as much as joy or transcendence.  It can spell a difficulty in grounding Sagittarius’ desire for upward motion while feeling one’s way through murky depths.

While the aforementioned planets in Sagittarius and Pisces — yes, all six of them — answer to an exalted Jupiter in Cancer, the traffic between these three signs is more frictional than Jove’s blessing might seem to augur.  The tension between inner vision, emotional gravity and outward manifestation is palpable.

Cancer and Sagittarius cannot see each other by any traditional aspect, which has always made for curious reception when Jupiter in Cancer rules a Sagittarius placement — Cancer incubates Jupiter’s greatness, and the big planet lends that to those visiting its homes… yet the risk is that Sagittarius will not see the shadow of its own swelling growth, prone to excess and ideological drunkenness, with the manic crashes that follow.

Before entering its exaltation of Capricorn earlier this week, Mars squared Saturn and then Neptune just as the Sun and Moon presently do.  For me, hard contacts between Mars and Saturn often evoke the aphorism mirrored from Stoicism to Zen Buddhism, ‘the obstacle in the path becomes the path’… but these weeks closing the Gregorian year seem to task us with holding an internal hope through obstacle even when the path is partly obscured.

This New Moon in Sagittarius is an opportunity to hone our intentions for the new year, following the questions posed by the Full Moon in Gemini two weeks ago — but it also gives space to acknowledge the murky disillusionment, the crisis of faith and futility, brought by successive squares from Mars in Sagittarius to Saturn in Pisces and Neptune in Pisces before the red planet’s ingress into Capricorn earlier this week.

We know that as much as cool risk-taking, Sagittarius can be prone to inflammatory impulses, high-handed moralism and manic lows when external events contradict the singular inner vision… when ‘the arrow’ inevitably misses its target some of the time.  

But the dark funhouse of mirrors that Saturn in Pisces met Neptune to pose following the pandemic, the unsureness as to what is real… since Saturn’s retrograde back into the mutable water sign these last few months, with the trident-bearing god as company to further befuddle, we’re asked again to feel for the shoreline, to make sense of sodden terrain such that we might even plant our feet and take aim.

As ‘the outers’ go direct across the first months of 2026, and cement their varyingly epochal stays in new signs... Saturn and Neptune in Aries, Uranus in Gemini, and Pluto further along in its upheaval of Aquarian matters… unsureness may not fade, but some of it will give way to clearer pictures of just what dreams we’re up to and obstacles we’re up against.

Swim well stargazers,

—A.B.