The Astrology of October 2023

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology, and today, we are going to take a look at the major astrological transits of the month of October. This will be our monthly overview, and as you guys know who watch my channel regularly, we preview the major transits of the month, and then as the month goes on, we generally break those major transits down into a video or sometimes two videos that really unpack each aspect in particular.

So, the purpose of this video is just to give you a kind of broad overview of where things are going in October and what we're going to be covering in depth as the month unfolds. It's a big month. We have two eclipses this month, a lot of Pluto transits, and a lot of Mercury action this month, so it'll be interesting to take a look at what's happening. That is our goal for today, and we will likely have horoscopes tomorrow, so you will get some horoscopes for all 12 signs picking up, especially on the eclipses. So that's our that is our agenda for today.

Don't forget to like and subscribe before we get going; it helps the channel to grow. Share your comments and reflections, especially if you have any stories to tell this month. Drop them into the comments section using the hashtag #Grabbed. Hopefully, we'll be putting together a storytelling episode at some point this month, and your stories are the ones that make those episodes really fun. If you prefer to email us, you can send us your story to grabbed@nightlightastrology.com.

The ancient name for the planets in Indian astrology is grahas, which means grabbers but can also have the dual meaning to grasp or to understand. So we think of the planets as things that can kind of show up and grab us and as something coming up from the unconscious. But also as things that help us to grasp at a deeper level what's going on and what we're here to learn at any given time. So that series has been really fun. I hope to continue with this month.

You can find a transcript of today's talk on the website nightlightastrology.com, and as you guys know, we are in promotional mode right now for the upcoming program, Ancient Astrology for the Modern Mystic, which begins on November 18. If you go over to the Courses page and click on the Courses tab, you'll see in the drop-down menu a first-year course tab; you're going to click on that. We start again on November 18.

The class is one year long, it's 30 classes, and we have units that work from the foundations of ancient Greek Hellenistic astrology upward. The class is also infused with a kind of modern archetypal sensibility. I have been trained and practiced in both modern and traditional forms of astrology. So you'll find that the class is really kind of a fusion of both.

The 30 courses are held through live webinars. They're also all recorded. So, if you're in a different timezone, or you can't attend the live courses, you can follow along and download all of the material through a course website at your own pace, and you can also watch on any kind of device through the class website. So it's all there for you, a very accessible program.

We have tutors who help you in and outside of class with questions, we have a discussion forum staffed with tutors, and we also have breakout study sessions that our tutors lead to help you integrate the material and of course, you can email me throughout the year. At any point, if you have questions as well.

At the bottom, you'll find registration options; early bird payment saves you $500 off the cost of tuition, there's a payment plan, you can spread the tuition out over 12 months, and then I want to be sure that everyone checks out need-based tuition. Those are filling up as we get closer to the time of enrollment. So, there is still plenty of time to apply for and receive some help.

Tuition assistance is there for people who need a little bit of help to make it happen. Where there's no real requirement other than you can't stretch yourself beyond your budget to pay for the full tuition, you have to work with a modified price scale to make sure that you're not, you know, pushing yourself to an extreme financially, that wouldn't be healthy for you.

One of the big missions of my school is to make sure that nobody's priced out of an astrological education. So, if the tuition assistance could help you for whatever reason, please take advantage of it. We have 50 to 60% of students taking our programs who are on some form of tuition assistance. So check that out. Apply now, and we'd be glad to work with you. Any questions about the program or anything at all on the website readings or courses? Email us info at nightlight astrology.com. Okay, well, let's get into it.

Today, we are going to look at all of the major Astrology of the month of October. Now, what I do is pick out those transits that I think are going to be the most dynamic. Most of these I will end up covering in subsequent videos on my channel as the month goes on. But it really depends some transits are bigger, more important than others and I'll spend more time with some than others. So, generally speaking, these are the transits that I think we ought to pay attention to for the month of October. So, let's get into it and see what October has in store for us.

I'm going to put the real-time clock up on the screen. We're starting here on October 1, but the first major transit of October happens on October 2, the transit of Mercury opposite Neptune. So Mercury opposite Neptune starts the month of October, and this is a transit that can bring up the interesting distinction between the rational, organized, earthy, practical mind and the more elusive, inspired, imaginative, romantic, mystical, and other worldly mindedness of Neptune.

When you put those two in an opposition, it can feel like we're being forced to choose between, you know, a fantasy, a hope, a wish, a dream, and the grounded, practical thing. It's never that simple, though, because opposition's always present an opportunity for some kind of synthesis or some kind of holding of the tension of opposites that ends up being creative, somehow creatively useful.

So how can we hold the kind of skilled, crafty, organized, practical, earthy, intelligent Mercury alongside this otherworldly boundaryless Neptune that'll be the question at the beginning of the month. That's really the first major transit.

We have so much Mercury action this month. Right away, the very next day, Mercury will trine Pluto. So, if we advance this by just a day, you'll see that Mercury from Virgo goes right into a trine with Pluto in Capricorn. It is as though we move from this kind of mystical fluid oceanic space of mind into the mining of deeper unconscious subterranean material, which should be very practically useful and beneficial because the two planets are connecting in a trine, which means that we may be able to use our analytical minds in order to dive deeper and excavate things or solve problems that require a deeper level of perception or some kind of comfort with intensity.

This is a kind of serious minded Mercury coming out of the oceanic space of Neptune. It's like immediately Mercury is saying, okay, whatever I pulled from the deep sea of Neptune, I'm immediately putting to some kind of deeper transformational effective use through the trine to Pluto; that's maybe just one way of looking at it.

But I like the sequence because at least you're going from an opposition into a trine with two outer planets that are also sextile to one another, Pluto and Neptune. So it feels like Mercury is bringing the depths of Pluto and the sort of otherworldliness of Neptune into focus in a constructive way.

Well, the Plutonian theme continues as the month goes on because we're going to see that on October 8, arguably one of the biggest transits of the month alongside the eclipses is going to be Mars in Libra, squaring Pluto.

Now, this is something that I've done a separate video on for this week because this is going to be happening over the first weekend of the month and into the early part of next week. You should be feeling it by the end of this week into the early part of next, and the Mars-Pluto square is about the, you know, kind of eruption of Mars energy. But this is a Mars in Libra that's more capable of being diplomatic or that's capable of making hard decisions between competing themes or values or virtues.

So, I can think of it almost like a diplomatic crisis, but with a Mars, that's a little bit more willing to work harmoniously with others. It may take a little bit of doing like, you know, something that you're confronting comes up, but you're equipped with the wisdom of the past. Mars has just crossed the south node of the moon. There's an eclipse coming in this sign.

It's like whatever we're facing right now, whatever we're being confronted with, which is a Mars word, especially stuff that comes up from the unconscious, which is a kind of Plutonian way of looking at it. We're going to be able to look at the past, look at how things have gone before, and handle the situation in front of us with a kind of tactfulness that Mars in Libra will often provide, however tense it may be to do so because the general Mars theme will be to take action to plow ahead with a head you know kind of head full of steam and the individual will leading the way not as much concern or care for diplomacy does Mars have.

Let's go ahead to the 10th. We get, again, the idea of a kind of relational tension around this part of the month because then we have Venus going into an opposition with Saturn. Venus's opposition to Saturn presents us with different kinds of tensions in the relational world of Venus. Nonetheless, stress or tension in relationships is now a recurring theme this month, and we have an eclipse coming up in Libra, the sign of Venus as well.

Venus, of course, went through a long retrograde over the summer; Venus is now in its fall in Virgo a little bit more, a little bit more challenging space for Venus at the moment. But Venus opposite Saturn can be about the maturity of relationships and love, growing up, and having to face hard facts and bottom lines.

The feeling of separation, heartache, loneliness, kind of melancholic themes around art, beauty, love, friendships, women, and as also like the theme of the elder woman or the woman who has had time and experience and is almost like the crone archetype, where Venus as the maiden is meeting Saturn in the exultation of Pisces and you're almost seeing like a mentoring type of relationship but also the tension between maybe a young woman and an elder woman as an archetypal theme, like a daughter and a mother or son or daughter and a grandmother.

Either way, the tension in relationships is peeking around this time, and there are hard lessons to learn but also wisdom to be gained from the encounter here; this could also carry over into any area of Venus-related symbolism, again, like art, beauty, style, fashion, sex, et cetera and just, the harder, deeper, longer-lasting maturing that Venus is doing around any of those topics is indicated by the opposition to Saturn.

So that takes us into about the middle of the month, on October 13. I like this transit, just kind of a little a sneaky little transit that comes through, which is the trine between Mars and Saturn. So Mars is now in its own domicile and has picked up a lot of strength by entering into Scorpio. Although Mars is now under the beams of the Sun and is about to go through this kind of late-life transformation that comes when the Sun eclipses Mars, which will happen down the road a little bit.

So it's like a late-life Mars that's going through a kind of deep watery space as it transforms, and it's just going to be protected by being in its own domicile a little bit from the beams of the Sun that's called being in its own chariot. But anyway, the first thing that really happens as Mars enters Scorpio is it creates the trine to Saturn, and that trine to Saturn is, first and foremost, it creates this kind of resilience and a stick-to-itiveness, a kind of where there's a will there's a way; I have the maturity, the discipline, the effort and the energy to do things, especially when there's you need a kind of emotional fortitude to work through something that's deeper and requires more of you more emotional maturity to get through. But you should be able to do so with the kind of effective, hard-working, and positive connection between Mars and Saturn that's happening in these water signs.

So that leads us up to the 14th, which is probably the biggest transit of the month, arguably maybe the 28th of the second eclipse, but this is the solar eclipse in the sign of Libra. This eclipse is brought to us by Venus, right? This is a Venus-ruled sign Venus is in her fall, and so it's very possible that there are harder Venusian lessons or turning points that are happening for us. It could be around things like love, sex, marriage, relationship style, beauty, friendships, love women, sisters, et cetera.

So you think about Venusian things going through like a transformation of value or, you know, relationships transforming. You think about harder lessons that are being learned, a balancing or tempering of extremes, or a kind of karmic tipping point with respect to relationships and sexuality and love. So this is, you know, I would say, probably the biggest transit of the month, the south node.

If you listen to a previous video that I think was last week or the week before, we did a video talking about what kind of eclipse a south node solar eclipse brings, and I would say the simplest way of putting it is that we're either going to try an old thing again in a new way or we're going to do something different because an old thing has sort of expired.

Those are two very basic ways of thinking about this, the solar eclipse, which brings about something new along with the south node, which usually brings us back into the past somehow in a very meaningful way. So think about that as well, and we'll be doing more with this when we get closer to the time.

October 28 Mercury is cazimi; it's a kind of transformative moment for Mercury. You can see Mercury there crossing over the Sun and the late degrees of Libra. It's right there. So it's a kind of a moment of empowerment for mercurial things. I like this as a moment of diplomatic harmony because Mercury's able to communicate at the heart of the Sun was such generosity, clarity, and light, and it's doing so on behalf of a fallen Venus. So, I feel like this is a moment of a truce or of something reaching a place of understanding or harmony. So I really liked the Mercury cazimi this month.

Now, on the same day, Mercury is going to be square to Pluto, and so this is not only a Mercury cazimi but a Mercury square Pluto, which further suggests to me since Mercury is in a Venus-ruled sign that, we're talking about a powerful moment of addressing something talking through something working through something that has a deeper unconscious history behind it right in keeping with the Sun crossing the south node with Mercury having crossed the south node with the south node solar eclipse.

So this is about excavating unconscious material and working through it, especially around Venusian things; on the 21st, the Sun squares Pluto, some more of the same. The idea of a transformation of understanding clarity, a hard bottom line, a diplomatic turning point.

Then we go to October 22, and Venus is trine to Jupiter. Now, this is where I think things start to get a little brighter because we start focusing now on almost like the beginning of a positive transformation for Venus I think starts occurring as soon as she hits the trine to Jupiter, and we're also intimating that there's a lunar eclipse coming up in Venus's other sign of Taurus, which sort of seems to bring something around Venus to conclusion and acts as a very positive point of letting go surrendering and starting fresh.

Anyway, October 22, Mercury trines Saturn, again, you think this month for Mercury that there's a lot of like getting real, it's like, let's get real, let's be really honest, and there's almost like the requirement this month is for tremendous emotional maturity. Then, on the 24th, the Sun trines Saturn, and now we're getting into Scorpio territory, so that the kind of deeper waters of Scorpio running into Saturn in Pisces, there's almost a kind of a spiritual and emotional signature of tremendous maturity.

Again, that's the word that keeps coming to my mind because as these planets enter Scorpio and, they trine Saturn in Pisces, who is also, by the way, preparing to turn direct. It's like there's a turning point happening where we're really growing up and becoming wiser and more solid, and maybe better communicators are better at effectively communicating what we need and what we feel or being more aware of unconscious motivations within us that have shaped or even brought about certain conflicts that we've had to work through this month.

On the 28th, Mars opposes Jupiter, and I like this as well because you know the Mars-Jupiter opposition is often a signature of victory and facing hard things but finding the spirit and the energy and the optimism to do so.

So I like this because later in the month, Venus trines Jupiter, then you start getting all these opposition's to Jupiter from Mars, and then the, you know, Mercury opposite Jupiter. Like that and, you start getting the feeling that things are lifting. We're finding some way of working through the earlier conflicts of the month indicated by all the planets in Libra hitting Pluto and eclipse and the Mars in Libra square Pluto and so forth.

On the 28th, then, we also have the lunar eclipse in Taurus, and you can see that depicted here. Now, this lunar eclipse in Taurus is coming as the moon is going into the conjunction with Jupiter. So, I really like this eclipse because it seems lunar eclipses bring things to a place of culmination and resolution.

It's like the karma is blossoming and then the cycle is completing itself, and with that around with the moon in its exultation, and going into a conjunction with Jupiter, in a trine configuration to the fallen Venus, it feels like okay, Venus has had to go through a lot the retrograde and then the Eclipse and Venus a sign and another Eclipse and Venus the sign and Venus being in its fall, you start to get the feeling that okay, Venus has got the message downloaded. You know, it's like, if you've got the message hang up the telephone, and you can feel that this is a positive turning point where Venus is not only getting the message but taking it forward and ready to do something probably more constructive with it, or at least move forward and let things go.

Mercury opposes Jupiter on the 28th. I already mentioned that Mercury will conjoin Mars on the 29th, and again, one of the things I like about this signature is that you get the feeling of okay; it might not be easy to speak certain things or to deal with certain things. But you get the feeling that you know where you need to go, especially in key relationships or with respect to your desires and values, and all Venus symbolism is going through this transformation, and there's this once again a signature of emotional maturity and wherewithal to do the hard but right thing emotionally.

Then, at the end of the month. Venus trines Uranus. This is the very end on the 31st, so it'll be Halloween, so I feel like that could be really fun for Halloween. So Venus trines Uranus, and that could be fun for Halloween because you think of all the quirky, fun costumes that could be out when Venus trines Uranus. But the Venus trine to Uranus also suggests a breakthrough. The idea of liberation for Venusian things.

Again, if I had to put it simply, I'd say this month is all about Venus and the emotional maturity required to go through the final stages of a Venusian transformation that have been in the works since Venus was retrograde over the summer. Now we're getting these eclipses in Venus's sign while Venus is in her fall. But by the later month, you can see she's picking up; she hits the trine to Jupiter.

There's an eclipse with the moon exalted in Venus assigned going into a conjunction with Jupiter. Venus then, later, toward the end of the month, hits the trine to Uranus.

So all these Scorpionic themes, watery themes that, suggests the need for tremendous emotional maturity as a way of reconciling ourselves to what all of the Venetian symbolism has been telling us. But if we've got the message, we hang up the phone, and we're ready to put our big boy and girl pants on and do the hard but right thing, especially on an emotional level and perhaps within the sphere of Venusian people and places then I think we're going to be all right.

Well, that's my kind of broad interpretation of the month. It's very impressionistic when you're working with trying to describe the archetypal, you know, confluence of all of these different things, but what we'll do as the month goes on is we'll break down the individual transits and unpack them one at a time, the eclipse, the Mars-Pluto square and so forth.

So stick around; I hope that you will enjoy where we're headed this month. If you've got really good stories to share, don't forget to share them using the hashtag #grabbed. I look forward to seeing you again soon. Take it easy, everyone. Bye