Today we're going to take a look at all of the major astrological events of this week, from January 6 through the 12th.
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Transcript
Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology. Happy Monday, everybody.
Today we're going to take a look at all of the major astrological events of this week, from January 6 through the 12th. That's Monday through Sunday. I will preview for you what is to come and tell you a little bit about the specific content that I'll be rolling out this week.
Most of you know that we just completed our Kickstarter campaign. I record things about a week in advance, and so right now I am smack dab in the middle of completing the Kickstarter and fulfilling rewards for over 2000 people.
So usually, this first week is a little… the content is not on our typical production schedule. This week, I am rewinding a few episodes that are very relevant and should be poignant episodes for the astrology of the week. But I am letting you know that the normal content and production schedule will resume next week.
So next week, when you tune in, you'll see regular, new, fresh content five days a week. You won’t see me plugging holes with rewind episodes. I have to do this at this point of the year because we are a little bit overwhelmed with the amount of work that happens just this particular week of the year with reward fulfillment.
So hang with me. Be patient, and thank you so much for your patience as we do our best to get out all of your rewards and set everyone up who supported us. We really do appreciate that.
On that note, there are a bunch of transits this week that we're going to be looking at. I’ll tell you exactly what kind of videos you can anticipate, what rewind videos we’ll be doing, and stuff like that too. We are looking at the 6th through the 12th.
Let me outline for you the transits we’ll be looking at this week on the channel, starting today. Mars is retrograde and takes it back into the sign of Cancer. This is a big deal because the majority of the rest of the Mars retrograde between now and late February will take place in the sign of Mars's fall in Cancer.
We’re going to be looking at that this week, and we’ll also be looking at some rewind episodes exploring Mars in Cancer. By the 12th, the end of the week, Mars retrograde in Cancer will take it backward into a trine with Neptune.
This trine is something we explored earlier in the fall in its direct motion, so I’m going to replay that episode. We’ll look at it now from the context of it being back in that dynamic through retrogradation. That video should hold up really well in terms of exploring the archetypal combination of Mars and Neptune.
Then, as the early part of the week unfolds, on the 6th, Mercury also squares Neptune. We’ll talk about that a little bit today. We’ll also be looking at this through the lens of the archetypal combination of Mercury and Neptune.
Mercury will enter Capricorn this week and finally leave the sign of its detriment in Sagittarius. That shift of Mercury into Capricorn will be explored in a rewind episode exploring the archetypal combination of Mercury in Capricorn.
It’s a little bit of a quiet week astrologically. There are only two major aspects this week: Mercury square Neptune and Mars trine Neptune. It’s kind of a Neptunian week, so we’ll spend most of our time re-examining Mars in Cancer, its placement there, and through some rewind episodes in that respect.
Then we’ll look at Mercury into Capricorn and Mars trine Neptune as well.
Now let us take a look at each of these and preview a little bit about each of them here to start the week. Here is our real-time clock, and we’re going to start here on January 6. At the start of the day, we’ve got Mars retrograding back into the sign of Cancer.
Let’s take a look at how long this is going to last if we take this forward. Mars goes through the last decade of Cancer, the last 10 degrees, between now and the end of January. It enters the second decan of Capricorn, the middle 10 degrees, around the beginning of February.
By late February, Mars will station in Cancer, around the 24th. It will then turn direct, and its direct motion will carry it back through the final two decades of Cancer—the middle decade and the last decade. It will finally leave Cancer on April 17 or 18.
So, between today and April 18, we have Mars in one of its more difficult sign positions. We need to understand the archetypal tension here. This tension is what led to the creation of the dignity category in the first place.
I recently saw a letter from a prominent modern astrologer trying to do away with malefic and benefic distinctions and dignity categories. There’s just a real ignorance, unfortunately, around the ancient philosophical rationale behind the existence of dignity categories.
These categories are actually extremely important for understanding the underlying archetypal philosophy of our language. It doesn’t mean that nothing good can come of Mars in Cancer, but it does mean that there are inherent kinds of tensions we need to pay attention to.
Did I say Mercury? I meant Mars in Cancer. Let’s go back to our moment right now and take this forward. Here we are on January 6, with Mars in the sign of Cancer.
Why is Mars in Cancer considered to be in the sign of its fall? This has to do with the fact that Mars is exalted in the sign of Capricorn, where Jupiter is in its fall. And Jupiter is exalted in the sign of Cancer, where Mars is in its fall. The contrary, archetypal qualities of Mars and Jupiter are therefore at work in these dignity categories.
Jupiter refers to the proliferation of life and the descent of spirit into matter, which is depicted through the sign of Cancer and the annual descent of the Sun toward the Earth. That was a literal astronomical picture—a symbolic picture, I should say—of the descent of spirit into matter in the world of embodiment, and the myriad number of forms that come into being and pass out of being. This is the manifest universe.
Cancer was called the gateway of mankind. You’ve heard me say that many times. For this reason, Jupiter, a planet associated with the proliferation of life and fertility itself, was exalted in the sign.
Now, in Capricorn, Jupiter is in its fall. That’s because we’re at the darkest point of the solar year, the dimmest point of the year. From that point forward, the ascent of spirit out of matter—the path of transcendence—begins. The slow climb up the mountain, which the Sun takes, metaphorically represents the ascent from matter toward spirit.
That rising out of matter, which begins in matter but has to work in it and through it in order to transcend it, takes place at the darkest, dimmest point of the year. This perseverance and pushing upward and out of matter, out of the world of forms, was associated with Mars.
So, Mars, the planet associated with transcendence, a desire to transcend material entanglements, finds itself at odds with the sign of Cancer. Cancer is naturally about entangling with the world that we need, love, value, and cherish.
One of the major reasons Mars is considered fallen in Cancer is that it has to deal with the frustrations of worldly, emotional, bodily entanglement. Where Mars seeks to cut the cord and transcend, we have a sign that demands engagement, enmeshment, attachment, bondedness, and involvement in the world.
This combination can present us with things like the desire to protect, defend, and advocate for things that are material, like the body, mothers, and family. It’s a kind of guardianship energy. A guard dog is a good symbol for Mercury or Mars in Cancer.
Not surprisingly, we, during Mars in Cancer, know someone who dealt with a break-in and then had this whole conversation about getting a guardian dog. We were talking to them because Hilda, who can't be seen here, but she's laying on the floor behind me, is a guard dog. That’s her instinct; she’s a guardian breed.
So we were talking about this, and I just couldn’t help but notice the entire conversation was very Mars in Cancer. Mars in Cancer, however, can also bring up all of the things that are vulnerable: conflicts within the family, trying to rise above or transcend things that are very mortal or physical, physical limitations in the body, and the difficulties we have in addressing them when we wish we could rise above them.
There are all sorts of tensions held in the exploration of Mars through the sign of Cancer, many of which are beautiful things. You know, the mama bear energy of Mars in Cancer has been well noted, as has the impulse to protect, defend, and advocate for things that are vulnerable.
Those are great qualities of Mars in Cancer, and many natives with that placement will have those qualities on display in their life. There’s a concern for those who are suffering, protection, and advocacy for those who are vulnerable—a guardianship quality. But also, there’s the vulnerability and hostility that can enter into fragile or sensitive places, as well as some of the complications of things like emotions, anger, violence, and safety.
Well, we will be exploring that more as the week goes on. At the beginning of the week, we also have Mercury squaring Neptune, and this is a very quick transit you might be noticing today. Mercury square Neptune can give us a mental or intellectual preoccupation with otherworldliness, mystical things, philosophical matters, and the imaginative.
It can also tilt the mind toward grandiosity, exaggeration, inflation, or the tendency to preach or be dogmatic or somewhat fanatical. On the level of mind, thought, communication, belief, and ideas, it is also the mind attuned to other worlds—something of the imaginative, romantic, and artistic qualities of the mind that, for example, you’ll see at work in the lives of singers, songwriters, or mystic poets.
So, an interesting little Mercury transit to Neptune to start the week. Be careful of the tendency to get caught up in illusions or fantasies. But also, sometimes the romantic, imaginative impulse is exactly what we need to free us from the traps of literalism, being overly concrete, or too practical.
Sometimes, the Mercury-Neptune dynamic comes along at just the right time to save us from the worst, most practical parts of ourselves. Of course, this is interesting because on January 8, just two days later, let’s fast forward this. You’ll see that Mercury will enter the sign of Capricorn, and as Mercury enters Capricorn, we’re going to be pausing to reflect on the meaning of Mercury in Capricorn.
This is the morning star Mercury in Capricorn, and a shift in dignity that is worth mentioning, since we’ve had Mercury in Sagittarius for quite some time. Now, if you back this up and watch how long it’s been that Mercury has been in Sagittarius, we’ll go back through its retrograde and direct motion. This takes us all the way back to Mercury entering Sagittarius around November 3 or 2.
So, from November 2 into the 3rd, Mercury has been in Sagittarius up until January 8. That’s quite some time that we’ve had Mercury in the sign of Sagittarius. For that reason, this week, we’re going to take some time to explore Mercury in Capricorn, because it’s a nice moment whenever you’ve had a planet in a sign for a long time.
One of the things I’ve observed as an astrologer is that it’s remarkable how distinctly the dignity and sign change will stand out. Since you’ve been in Mercury and Sagittarius territory for a long time, all of a sudden you move into a new space. It’s a great time to pick up on the nature of the sign and the archetypal combination of the planet in a new sign.
So we’re going to take a look at Mercury in Capricorn this week as a rewind episode. For that reason, it’s a really nice moment to distinctly notice Mercury changing signs. So that happens on the 8th—Mercury in Capricorn. We’ll say more about that.
But one thing that’s interesting is that Mercury will now be configured to its host, Saturn, in a sextile in the mystical domain of Pisces. So we have this kind of Capricorn-Pisces vibe going on. We’ll probably explore the sextile between those when they form in a little bit of time. That’ll be next week.
Then, on the 12th, at the end of the week, I already mentioned this, but Mars will trine Neptune. We visited this earlier through Mars’s direct motion. If I take this back in time, you’ll see that Mars trined Neptune just before Halloween, in late October.
This was October 27 into the 28th. If I slow it down a little, it’s like the 27th through the 30th. So just before Halloween, right into the time of Halloween, that Mars-Neptune trine was active. We’re going to be revisiting that through a rewind episode, where I’ll replay for you what we said about that trine during late October when it happened.
You can revisit it and see how that retrograde is triggering a revisitation of the themes of late October, but I’ll lay out for you all the archetypal dimensions in that video too. I’ll give you a special intro with a few ideas for what to think about, given that the retrogradation is part of it. That’ll be a rewind episode.
So anyway, that takes us through the week. This is what we’re looking at for the week to come. Again, please bear with us as we are just fulfilling rewards. Make sure you check your spam folder if you haven’t heard from us, because we’ve sent out emails to absolutely every soul who donated through the Kickstarter with instructions for how to receive your reward. If you haven’t gotten it, check spam.
And by the way, if you're struggling to receive it, you can email us at info@nightlightastrology.com. There will be some rewind episodes this week as we catch up, and the normal production schedule will return next week. I promise you won’t have to deal with rewind episodes for a while.
Okay, on that note, again, a big thank you to everybody for supporting the channel this year. We really appreciate it. The only other thing I can mention coming up is, if you go to the—I'll plug this more as the week goes on—but next week, we have our first monthly webinar of the year on the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Aries.
You can check that out under the "Live" or "Events" page in the webinar series. You can register for that. I’ll tell you more about it later in the week. Alright, take it easy, everyone. Bye.
Josie Aprahamian
Thank you for a year of inspiration and insight! Please take the time you need to rest and recover, you are a consistent and reliable force every week for so many of us and it’s greatly appreciated. Happy New Year!