September 2021: Horoscopes for Moderns

“For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.”

PUT UP A CHART WHEEL for the month of September and the first thing you notice is how all of the big-player planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto are retrograde. This means they are all closer to the earth than during any other time in their orbits around the Sun. Interesting too is how they are positioned into one half of the solar system as demarcated by the nodes of the Moon.

What all this translates into is something akin to: Half of the solar system (all of those large planets) is devoted to jostling the shit out of our conventional, quotidian notions about life and the world we live in. Not the most earth-shattering revelation, but, well—there you go.

Everyone knows the beats of our current Kali Yuga libretto: wildfires, pandemics, sinkholes, COVID vaccine lunacy, hurricanes, Afghanistan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, melting polar caps, a new Katy Perry album.

But this isn’t big news. Life is a continual process of mostly awful surprises. And then you’re dead.

What’s di…