Preamble:
In astrology, the solstices and equinoxes occur when the sun enters one of the four cardinal signs: Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn, and the cardinal signs act as doorways for metaphysical energy to more easily influence the field; they tend to initiate change. For this reason, much like with eclipses, which are also liminal magical gateways, we can use a chart cast for these days to gather useful information about human evolution and its affect on the world. I use the term magical in the sense of spiritual energy shaping matter, or the power of Mind to influence outcome, and in the case of the solstice for about 3-6 months.
The sun is central to the evolution of consciousness on the planet, and is directly linked to sun-spot activity and the transmission of visible and invisible light, and throughout the year, pulses of energy pour into the human collective field and the Gaian energy system, much like notes played on a piano generating a shifting musical chord over time. In this way the forecasts are best understood together and not just as sole events, but rather as energy downloads that mix and merge with those that came before.
Astrological symbols express quite differently depending on one's core vibration of consciousness, so there are numerous ways we each can experience how the cosmic energies in play move us. In addition I work increasingly with the newer archetypes correlating to new celestial bodies discovered since 2000. These newer archetypes operate at much higher vibrations than the traditional more personal ones, and this means that the more we ascend in vibration the more we become conscious of these newer cosmic players, and the more they influence us.
I write from an esoteric foundation and aim to decode causative patterns rather than the effects. I am not trying to predict exactly what will happen in the world, but rather to unveil the nature of the energy unfolding and the evolutionary opportunity available to all of us, so we are better prepared to respond individually.
After a very active last 6 months since the Cancer Solstice, the chart for the December Solstice forecast is a little calmer, suggesting a slight abatement in evolutionary stimulus at least until the New Year. I feel we could all do with a period of respite so we can integrate and process. Let's hope this proves to be the case at least for a while, but the potent energy waves initiated in 2024 will continue to stimulate a great deal of personal and collective change throughout 2025.
The chart cast for the December Solstice features a Grand Cardinal Square, a Grand Fire Trine and a Yod, with the evolutionary axis at the centre of the pattern for the next 3 months, so lets take a deeper look at the archetypal themes on offer as we move into 2025…
Chart cast for the Solstice on 21st Dec 09.20 GMT / 04.20 EST
For a guide to the astrological symbols click here
Astro-Technicals:
Conjunctions:
Manwë conjunct Lunar North Node in Aries
Chiron conjunct Hygeia and Eris in Aries
Quaoar in exact conjunction with Pholus in Capricorn
Venus conjunct Chariklo in Aquarius
Oppositions:
Solstice Sun opposing Asbolus
Saturn opposing the Moon
Orcus opposing Nessus
Pluto opposing Mars
Squares:
Solstice Sun square the nodes
Asbolus square the nodes
Mars square Haumea
Quaoar and Pholus square Salacia
A T-Square featuring Saturn opposing the Moon with Jupiter at the apex
Trines:
A Grand Fire Trine featuring Mars, Varuna, Mercury and Salacia
Pluto trine the South Node
Jupiter trine Venus and Chariklo
Inconjuncts:
A Yod featuring Venus and Chariklo sextile Chiron with the Moon and Orcus at the apex
Quaoar and Pholus inconjunct Varuna
Significant initiations into possible futures
For the last 18 months the evolutionary lunar North Node has been transiting the sign of Aries, which has energised a building impulse to break free from past patterns, in order to move into new pathways of development; we’ve been under evolutionary pressure to move into new growth territory, relative to the existing pattern of our own lives, via a rising sense of boredom and frustration. If we have been paying attention, most if not all of us, will have experienced new seed desires and visions for where we next need to go in terms of personal growth and new experiences. We will have been caught to some degree in a tug of war between the security of our well trodden habitual patterns of being, and the excitement and novelty of new possibilities and life experiences that lie somewhere beyond in the unknown.
The December Solstice this year occurs in a close square to the nodal axis, making this solstice energy wave energised toward personal breakthroughs; if we’ve been struggling to break free within our own situations, whether that be financial limitations, relationship troubles, health issues and so on, the new energy is going to push issues further in some way.
The Solstice Sun opposing Asbolus makes a Grand Cardinal Square with the nodes, emphasising a building internal pressure to overcome personal fears and move forward in some significant way in terms of personal growth. Asbolus presents us with an integration challenge: can we value and trust enough in future-forward visions and guiding messages or are we still flying blind wondering why we feel the way we do?
Manwë, the archetype of the spiritual warrior and protector of the light (resonant with Archangel Michael), is now in close conjunction to the lunar North Node, representing the frontier of our evolution, and pointing the way forward to where we each need to go. This suggests that there is a higher-purposeful meaning available to us if we are ready and willing to choose it; for many this new way forward can take us upward and onward into new higher frequencies of being, and a corresponding change in the way we pursue desires and dreams.
There is something waiting for our invitation, to be lived through us
My sense, over the last few years now, is that many of us are being subtly impulsed to begin generating a new personal reality on a completely new level than before. This has been showing up in numerous forecasts, where there’s been a clear indication of ‘thought-seeding’ taking place, where new thoughts, possibilities, ideas, and desires have been available to us, and in a sense we have been receiving and gestating them, and much like a recipe in progress, perhaps we’ve been slowly coalescing an emergent new vision for ourselves.
Asbolus is the “master patterner”; he's the part of each one of us that can notice the patterns as they unfold and learn to read them, and by extension to read in advance what is yet to come. In a sense he supports our inherent ability to navigate in accordance with the soul and higher-self.
Asbolus is in an exact square to the North Node and Manwë, and he’s also opposing the Sun. This affords us an opportunity to really see the patterns we each live; the patterns of the past we might want to move on from, and the future patterns we have the most desire to live through next.
A Grand Fire Trine lends additional support to this process. Mercury in Sagittarius trine Mars and Varuna, and also trine Salacia, puts the mercurial function at the centre, where we can more readily put the puzzle pieces of our intuitional musings together into a clearer sense of where we need to go.
Mars is opposing Pluto, so there is quite a lot of energy to evolve through an objective awareness of ourselves, and to perhaps even initiate outward into the social arena. His trine to Mercury implies an easy harmonious responsiveness to intuitive messages that arise, as well as thought inspirations. Salacia is currently encouraging us to dream harder and bigger and to get excited about possibilities rather than limitations.
This means that from December to March we may be finishing up reconciliations with the past, while also building more and more energy toward forward movement in our lives, in ways that will eventually manifest as significant changes in life direction.
If you are finding this hard to track in your own life, then I invite you to contemplate the everyday patterns that might have changed in the last year or so. Significant change doesn’t have to be dramatic, it represents changes that will have a cumulative effect over time such as eating healthier, or approaching relationships in a more elevated way. Even forgiving someone from the past, could liberate you from a limiting personal pattern and open you up to new experiences.
My sense is that we are approaching a threshold or window of time, when long held patterns can finally be released. This is a powerful possibility in terms of collective evolution, given our current global predicament.
The 2nd Jupiter-Saturn Square
The December Solstice also coincides with the 2nd of 3 Saturn-Jupiter squares (I cover this cycle in more detail in an earlier post: Shifts in Society - The Saturn-Jupiter Cycle). To understand the influence of this cycle on our personal lives, we need to reflect on the new seed impulses that were generated when Saturn and Jupiter first conjoined at 0˚ Aquarius in 2020.
For most of us the dominating environmental condition of that time was the Covid lockdown, which effectively forced many of us to slow down and move inward. There has been a lot of social adjustment catalysed by the lockdown policy. For example, in the UK fewer people are content to work a 5 day week at the office; they now prefer to work from home. Lots of people started reviewing their lives during lockdown, and of course the covid narrative, fuelling government over-reach, has radically changed the way many people view authority, now with growing distrust.
2020 initiated a crumbling of realities, and that has been ongoing ever since, but it's important to recognise that out of the rubble of an old way of seeing the world, at some point new life will emerge.
The Saturn-Jupiter cycle reflects the way we expand beyond the known, and its conjunction/rebirth in Aquarius, initiates changes in our own personal life structures, fuelled by an Aquarian impulse toward more freedom, more diversity, and more life equality.
From 2020 new seeds were activating deep within, and they have been gestating ever since, and now that we have reached the 1st square in the cycle, we are at a point where the beginnings of these new desire impulses will begin to emerge and take shape in our outer experience. This part of the cycle lasts about a year from Aug 2024- July 2025, so there aren't necessarily going to be sudden shifts until next year.
The solstice is a potent liminal gateway where cosmic energy patterns more readily penetrate the planetary field. The 1st Jupiter-Saturn square in Aug occurred exactly at the full moon, and the 2nd will occur on Dec 24th. This is a very powerful moment because the energy potential of the solstice is most potent 3 days afterward on the 24th! Coinciding with this, Pluto will be at 0˚ Aquarius and will therefore be re-energising the seed impulses linked to the original Saturn-Jupiter conjunction back in 2020.
What does this mean for us personally?
To summarise: 2020 ushered in the crumbling of personal realities, and the seeding of new potential futures, and since then we have been collectively involved with breaking away from old restrictive patterns and habits, to make space for entirely new forms and lifestyles to emerge. In my personal life I have observed this breakdown of the old personal structures within almost everyone I meet - we all have our own unique version of this going on.
The 2024-2025 Saturn-Jupiter square activates the birthing of something new; one might say we are altering course, and will be able to see this in action in the way we move in the world. The current Saturn-Jupiter square is part of a T-Square with the Moon (opposing Saturn), and that puts a lot of energy on the Jupiter 'right-brain' function.
Saturn in Pisces, on one level represents the dissolution of old structures, and the Moon in opposition generates a conscious awareness of this issue in our personal world, and it may well activate some insecurities:
Who will I be if I leave these old structures and ways of being "me" in the world?
Will this feel like a mild dose of crisis?
Am I willing to make the necessary healing or adjustment?
Jupiter in Gemini may activate a few things:
We might find ourselves intuitively knowing what our next steps will be without knowing why.
We may be ready to communicate our new life directives with others as a way to step forward; to communicate our ideas about new visions and life changes we want to make, is in effect a type of birth, which takes us closer to manifestation.
We may be flooded with new ideas or drawn to immerse in new information as a way to become clearer about what we most want and need to do next.
We might feel challenged to run with our intuitive ideas to see where they lead us.
The next 3 months should represent a significant step forward relative to the changes we have been gestating inside.
Initiations into greater life clarity and deeper purpose
Its typical, in my experience, for new seed impulses to take time to fully anchor within us, and quite often we only get a partial understanding of how these new impulses contribute to our personal unfolding. The soul releases new desire impulses almost on a need to know basis, and only later do we reach a more coherent sense of what is unfolding for us and why: periodically the mosaic pieces we are working with suddenly fit together to form part of a bigger picture of meaning.
The Solstice chart suggests the next 3 months as a time period when things may become clearer and make more sense than before; we might get an insight as to how the lessons of the last few years contribute to growth and future potential.
To explain this pattern, I’ll highlight some key patterns that dovetail with each other :
The T-Square with Saturn, the Moon and Jupiter at the apex (as mentioned above)
Jupiter is square to the Moon and trine to Venus and Chariklo
Venus and Chariklo form part of the Yod, sextile to Chiron with the Moon at the apex
In addition Orcus, close the Moon, exactly opposes Nessus
When we put all these patterns together, Jupiter and the Moon are the most energised. This means intuition and emotional security will be at the forefront of change and how we relate to it. Jupiter and the Moon are in square, so there is inherent tension between what we intuitively know about how we need to move forward in life, and our existing sense of who we are, that will inevitably change if we embrace new experiences and dreams.
A Yod with Chiron sextile Chariklo and Venus, speaks to the principle of initiation and new information arising from the personal unconscious into our internal conscious awareness, in ways that challenge the ego awareness to make adjustments, which link directly to letting go of the past. If we can make sufficient space within ourselves to receive and pay attention to new information arising within, then via the trine to Jupiter, we will be able to understand things about ourselves in new ways.
Revelation does however come with a cost; we cannot ‘un-see’ what we have seen, and so insight always leaves us inexorably changed, and this doesn’t always go down well with our ego and emotions - we can feel unsettled and resistant. With Orcus close by however, much of this new insight will pertain to the spiritual path and our relationship with it, and what we must sacrifice in order to stay in alignment with what is meant for us at the soul level.
To make space inside ourselves for this kind of change requires our ego-self to yield and adjust, and for some, this might not be easy or straight forward.
Finally…
Change and rebirth is still very much an active part of the times and I think all of us are either surfing the waves of change or grappling with change coming seemingly too fast. From December to March we may to some extent notice ourselves becoming clearer and more adjusted to the path moving forward: one that we may not have officially began, but know at some level is coming.
We can, if we don’t resist too much, cultivate awareness of this change we are in, and in so doing become more informed, adjusted and cooperative in ways that make the transit gentler and more harmonious.
We shouldn’t be too self-judging if we notice ourselves resisting, as resistance is part of the way, and awareness always enables a choice to align more, and move with more trust and faith in our own life path.
In some ways its like we are moving down the birth canal, and that is an intense and sometimes terrifying experience; we know stuff is happening but we are blind to the purpose and outcome - its only after we leave the birth canal that we can begin to know the new level of being we have attained.
It helps to realise that even if there is life turbulence, for most of us, these changes are the result of the global ascension process moving us collectively into a higher frequency of being; we can only truly do this if we let go of the old ways.
As we approach the Capricorn New Moon right at the end of 2024, the ascension energies will come momentarily to the forefront of our process, so stay tuned for that upcoming forecast just before New Year.
© 2024 Aquila Idha - all rights reserved. Please credit and reference me and this website when choosing to use any written part of this article.
Aquila offers Self-realisation mentoring, Evolutionary Astrology, and Tarot sessions for those awakening to their true potential.
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