Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I'm an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I'm going to give you your weekly horoscope and no-bullshit mystical advice for living your very best life.

Welcome back to Ghost of a Podcast. This is a very special episode because I'm going to talk to you about the astrology of the year ahead. We are looking at the astrological highlights of 2024. But before I do that, I'm going to be candid with you. I've dedicated my life to astrology⁠—not just to astrology, but the practice and study of astrology has been essential for my life since the early 1990s and what I've done for a living for about 30 years. I love it. To say I love it is an understatement. It's my lens and context for the world and the people in it on a collective and a personal level.

And I'm about to give you this look at 2024, but before I do, I feel like I need to be clear that, in a way, it really doesn't matter. I mean, of course it does; that's why we're here. But we're all living here on this spinning rock that feels like it's crumbling from the inside in a lot of ways, right? There are so many things in this world that are struggling and painful in so many ways that we are experiencing that struggle and pain individually and collectively.

But certainly, collectively, we are at a meaningful crossroads. Our planet, our society, our communities⁠—we're at a crossroads. And the astrology matters so much. It can speak to it. But also, it doesn't matter, in a way. Being able to predict what's going to happen next is only helpful if it's useful. And to be honest, it's not always useful, and it's not useful to have prediction for all people, depending on your nature.

The longer I use astrology and the older I get, the more convicted I become that it is our emotional presence, our empathy, our kindness, our willingness and our ability to align ourselves with the power of love, as cheesy as that may sound to some of you, but the incredible power of love as an action and as a motivation and source of resiliency. That is what is authentically important in life, both on a personal level and as agents of change in the world, as co-creators of this world.

We need to be able to be kind to ourselves, to show up and be better neighbors, partners, parents, friends. And also, having love as a core motivation and a place that we can return to in ourselves helps us to sustain our activism and engagement with the world, which quite desperately needs those things from us. I really believe that we must be agents of peace. We must figure out how to be agents of peace in our own psyches, in our own hearts, in our own relationships, in our own lives, as well as within the world.

To do that, we must have access to love. Being able to feel love means we have to be able to feel grief because grief is the deep and often lonely shadow cast by love. Our ability to feel, to have emotional resiliency, emotional strength, emotional adaptability, is essential for weathering hard times personally and collectively. Now, I know that might not resonate for everyone, but I deeply and truly believe this and do my best to organize myself and my life around these beliefs.

I'm going to break down the astrology of the year ahead, and there's going to be some predictions in the mix. But I want to remind you that it is your ability to be present in your life wherever it's at, whatever is happening. It's your ability to be present and to show up. That's really what empowers you to co-create whatever it is that you want to co-create. And your motivation matters. Your access to love, your capacity to experience peace⁠—these things matter. Prediction and over-intellectualization⁠, things of this nature⁠—they can rob you of the present moment and your ability to live within it. But don't let it.

The way that we make the most of life always, and certainly in 2024, is by finding ways of getting and staying present, and to not lose our access, our willingness, our ability to experience the beauty and the peace that love can bring, the passion and intensity that love can bring, but also the pain and the grief and loneliness that we can experience when our hearts are wide enough to love.

I want to give you the heads-up that in 2024, we are going to continue to live through a time of paradox and struggle as we are confronted with uncertainties, ambiguities, conspiracies, and cults. I'm going to get into the details in just a moment; don't you worry. But I want to say that, for now, in 2024, these themes are going to be percolating and are likely to get pretty damn explosive and dramatic. Thanks to Saturn and Neptune meeting up in Aries in 2025 and 2026, those will be the years that things get really hot, and transformation and change⁠—they will be unavoidable. And whatever it is that changes will be meaningful. I don't say this to frighten you at all. But when we're reading astrology for the future, we gotta be willing to see whatever we see.

So, again, I want to reiterate, how we show up and participate in 2024⁠—it will lay foundations for that time. 2024 is when you imagine, you collaborate, you build community, and you plan so that you have the resources and strategies for the coming times. This perspective that I'm sharing, I want to encourage you to apply to your personal healing journey, your personal life, your plans⁠—however that plays out in your career, with your friends, your family, your creative pursuits⁠—whatever it is. But it also applies to our communities, or societies, and the world that we live in.

There are going to be plenty of astrologers who are going to tell you what the world is going to be, what's going to happen. But the truth of the matter is that we co-create the world. Astrology articulates the energies that are running through the world, like the astrological weather, if you will. And inevitably, this is a time of revolutionary developments where, in some ways, anything is possible, even the least likely things. And again, I'll get to that in a moment.

But what remains to be seen is whose revolution is happening and how it will play out. And so, whatever predictions you hear from me, from anyone else, I want you to remember your agency as an individual, our power as a collective. We co-create the world. Don't rest on predictions, because as much as probability shapes so many of our choices, so many of our decisions, so many of our attitudes, there's always possibility. And if enough of us share a vision for what is possible and we put our heart and our sweat into making that happen with each other, for each other, beautiful things are possible. Beautiful things can happen.

So this isn't a time to check out. I want to encourage you, regardless of⁠—I don't know⁠—what the astrology says or what you fear, I want to encourage you to practice showing up in the most fundamental ways that you can. From my perspective, one of those fundamental ways is with your heart, with empathy and patience and grace for yourself and others, to participate in your life in ways that reflect who you want to be and not just your circumstances, to remember that you have choices and to do your best to make the best ones you can in this moment. That is a life-affirming way of living.

And you know what? You're not going to be perfect. Your community members are not going to be perfect. None of us are going to be perfect. We will all make mistakes, and we will all have to deal with those mistakes, collectively in a community, in a family⁠—the effects making a mistake has on yourself. That's life. We don't want to allow perfection or perfectionism to become the enemy of progress. Progress can't be perfect. Progress is not about perfection. Progress is about mobilization in the right direction, in a new direction, in a better direction. That's progress.

By the end of the year, we will have the 2024 presidential election in the United States. And whether or not you live in the U.S., what happens politically in the U.S. is of great importance to the world. And I'm not going to lie to you: the astrology is a little shit for that time. Very early in 2024, Pluto moves back into Aquarius. It spends the bulk of the year in Aquarius but just fucking moves back into Capricorn in time for the U.S. presidential election⁠—not great news.

And there's a bunch of other stuff happening. But we are living through times that are dynamic, where things are uncertain, where they will remain uncertain, and yet things are not yet decided. Things are not yet decided. Burnout is real, and the astrology of 2023 and 2024 is pretty good for creating a lot of burnout for a lot of people. So you gotta take care of yourself. You gotta find the right ways of taking care of yourself based on your situation, your resources, all those things.

But we don't want to conflate self-care with sticking our head in the sand, ignoring the very real issues that need dealing with in our personal lives. It's like your self-care means you don't pay your bills because you're too busy self-caring. Well, that's not really self-care, is it? Likewise, turning away from the world and calling it self-care⁠—well, that's only true if you find a way to come back to the world and do your part to participate in, hopefully, the co-creation of a more loving, peaceful, and just world that we can inhabit and share with each other.

Okay. Let's get into the nitty-gritty of astrology. Now, the first thing I want to share with you⁠—and I should preface this by saying this episode, like every other episode of Ghost of a Podcast, will have a transcript. So, if you have a hard time keeping track of any of the details I share, don't worry; there will be a transcript available for you on my website over at ghostofapodcast.com.

And I want to start off by telling you about 2024's Retrogrades. We're not going to go into detail about it because we don't have anything too bananas to share. Mercury goes Retrograde several times a year every year. And this year, we start off with a Mercury Retrograde. Mercury goes direct on January 1st of 2024 in Sagittarius, and then we won't have another Mercury Retrograde until April. It'll only be two weeks long, and that'll be a Mercury Retrograde in Aries from the 1st to the 15th. August 5th, we'll have another Mercury Retrograde. And then, finally, towards the end of the year, November 25th, we have Mercury going Retrograde in Sagittarius again, just like it ends in Sagittarius on the 1st of the year. And then it will go direct December 15th.

So we've got our regular host of Mercury Retrogrades. We have also got a Mars Retrograde, but that won't happen until December 26th of 2024. And it's not terribly long. It's going to last until February 23rd of 2025. Now, Mars Retrograde will overlap with the last Mercury Retrograde of the year, and there will be lots to say about it. But it's just a good thing for you to know, to mark your calendars for. But don't overthink it, because Retrogrades are really a good time for review and reflection. So you don't have to plan for them, unless of course it's not planning major events during them.

Now, something to know about the astrology of this year is that the outer planets are not making any sudden moves. Jupiter will move into Gemini around the middle of the year. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune⁠—they're all staying in the same sign all year long. Pluto does move into Capricorn from Aquarius for a couple months, but that's the only major shift with the outer planets. And so what this means is that a fair amount of the outer planet energy, which can be very personal to us but also is very much societal energy, is a continuation from 2023.

So Saturn moved into Pisces on March 7th of 2023, and it will stay there until February 13th of 2026. Neptune, by contrast, has been in the zodiac sign of Pisces since April of 2011, and it'll stay there until January 26th of '26. So it's a much longer transit. And 2023 and 2024, and then off and on through 2025, we have Saturn and Neptune both in Pisces. Now, this is something I've talked about in the 2023 year-ahead forecast, which, again, you can listen to or read the transcript of at your leisure if you like going back.

But the thing that I think is really important to remember about the planet Saturn, which is the form-bringing planet of the zodiac, and the planet Neptune, which is the planet that dissolves form, is that having these two bad boys in Pisces can lead to a lot of confusion, idealization, fanaticism, anxiety, disassociation, and kind of cultish religiosity. It can be a mess is what I'm saying. It can also help us to better organize our lives and our psyches around empathy, care for others, generosity. This energy can also support us in cultivating a more responsible relationship to nonattachment, to letting go of our need to control and predict and contain things, but instead to surrender to the things that actually mean the most to us, to be willing to give things up for what we really care about.

Unfortunately, these two planets together in Pisces will activate anxiety. And when humans experience a good deal of anxiety, what we will often do is seek simple, easy answers, somebody to take away the pain, ideally a pill⁠—something simple, something that takes no effort on our part. And I'm not shitting on pills. Take your pills. Pills are not inherently bad or good. But this energy can have us looking for really one-dimensional answers to complex and nuanced questions. And this is what makes us more vulnerable to cults and to snake oil salesmen and the like.

What we need is to be able to take responsibility for ourselves on a spiritual level⁠—Saturn in Pisces. And this is really hard because what it requires is having an embodied awareness of where you begin and end, of where you are right now, and to have healthy boundaries around that on a spiritual level and then on the behavioral level. What Neptune in Pisces tends to do is it makes us feel a little bit like a balloon untethered to this earth, and it's really hard to feel that way. It can make us feel isolated, exhausted. It can have us just endlessly scrolling through social media, wasting our time numbing out because, really, we're just burned out.

And this is the thing. When a human is burned out, which⁠—I'm sure a ton of you can identify with the feeling⁠. Numbing out doesn't actually help you to recover from burnout. Numbing out⁠—it's a stopgap measure. It kind of stops you from feeling terrible in the moment, but it doesn't bring any healing or resolution to the feelings and reality of burnout in your psyche or your body or your situation. What becomes really important under this influence is our ability to have energetic boundaries, spiritual boundaries. When I say energetic and spiritual, that can mean a lot of different things, depending on how woo you go, how religious you are, that kind of thing.

Ultimately, what I'm trying to get at is this. There's your psychology. There's your emotions. There's all that stuff that's underneath it that's like⁠—its roots go deeper than your psyche. They go deeper than your heart. That's the spiritual stuff. That's the energetic. That's what I'm talking about. That's what the Saturn and Neptune in Pisces transit is trying to get us to be able to access. And that's hard work. It's internal work. So, from the outside, it can look like no work because what you're doing is not lifting heavy boxes or getting out your label maker. You're reorienting really important things on the inside.

As you do that work, what ends up happening is, inevitably, your psyche shifts, your heart shifts, and your behaviors, therefore, shift. Really, at the end of the day, our behaviors are like a⁠—⁠what do they call that⁠—a lagging indicator. They're oftentimes the last thing to change when we're doing the healing work. And so, this year, with Saturn and Neptune both in Pisces, it is our reminder to continue to do the internal work that needs to be done.

Now, these transits of Saturn and Neptune in Pisces trigger tension between the material and the spiritual, form and structure, capitalism and socialism, if you will. And we will be dealing with this both very much individually but also politically through society. And within all of that, the question will loom heavy, what is and isn't real? Can we agree on what is reality? Part of the chaos that is being sown by the systems that are running so much of the world is casting doubt on everything through the use of propaganda, which⁠—very Piscean⁠—so that we really don't know who to trust. We can't quite figure out what is real. And maybe millions of us are positive⁠—we're just positive⁠—that A is real while millions of other people are absolutely certain to the core of their being that A is false.

Now, we've been living through this for a long time. It is not going to get better on its own in 2024, my loves. It's just not what's up. This is, again, where we need to stay associated, where it's important that we don't act and react exclusively from burnout, from disassociation, or from a place of just needing things to be more simple, like easy answers. It is important to understand mental health/emotional health struggles in the context of systems and to extend that same understanding of reality, that same, essentially, empathy, but also structure, to the struggles of others, not just your friends and community members, but the people who are on opposite sides of the aisle from you, as it were.

If you study astrology at all, you've probably heard of this concept of undoing, which is related to the twelfth house, which in astrology is ruled by Neptune and Pisces. The concept of undoing is a very real one. Now, I personally don't fuck with that term. You've never heard me say it before. But a lot of astrologers do, and certain kinds of astrologers do a lot more than others. But I do not, and I will tell you why.

The whole concept related to that Neptunian/Piscean twelfth-house undoing is really about having spiritual and mental health struggles that undermine you, where you end up kind of not knowing how to navigate around those vulnerabilities. And so you maybe do things to harm yourself or you become too self-sacrificing. There's a lot of ways that this undoing can play out. But we're living in a modern world with endless healing modalities, endless resources, including pharmaceuticals, including therapies, including the ability to build community with people who live across the globe from us.

We have access to so many resources so that we can better understand ourselves, so that we can come to greater healing with ourselves, to work with our spiritual health as well as our mental health and our emotional health, to understand that in a Venn diagram, they're connected. They're overlapping. But they're not the same thing. And so, yes, some people may struggle with a tendency to do things to cause oneself harm. It's absolutely a thing that people deal with. We have resources. Throughout this transit, which basically means throughout 2024, I want to invite you to remember that you have access to resources. You do. Depending on the many different details of your situation, you may have a lot more or a lot less resources. But you have access to resources.

And a huge part of moving through this Neptunian/Piscean energy is being a part of your own rescue. It's about choosing yourself, choosing life, whatever the hell that means. And maybe what it means is choosing love. I don't know what it means for you. But I do want to invite you to contemplate this throughout 2024. Now, like I said, in '25 and '26, Saturn and Neptune are going to meet up at 0 degrees of Aries. And this will be, my friends, very consequential.

When Saturn and Neptune meet up, it's always consequential. It happens approximately every 36 years, 37 years. The last time was in 1989 and '90. So, if you're gen X or older, you may want to look back at what was going on in your life around that time. This will be a transit that I will predict much closer to the date, but I'm bringing it up because I want to use the astrology in a way that is helpful.

This transit of Saturn and Neptune in Pisces⁠—no one alive will ever experience it again. This is the last year of it. And so it is wise to be aware of the struggles and pitfalls, but it's so helpful, so useful, to be able to be aware of what the potential is, of what, essentially, the assignment of this energy is. Whatever your goals are for your life, whatever your situation, whatever your values, whoever you are, we all struggle with our mental and spiritual health on some level or another. We all struggle with our emotions, and we all have choices to make.

And within that, we must all be able to tolerate uncertainty, ambiguity, not knowing, not having control. And this transit of Saturn and Neptune in Pisces is here to teach us about that, sometimes through handing us our ass, sometimes through things working out. But I think it's a great thing for you to keep in mind throughout this year and to bring your self-care strategies and your spiritual work back to these things so that you're working with the energy of the stars instead of against it.

Now, I want to speak briefly to COVID because it is still an ongoing pandemic. And now we know that COVID is not a pulmonary disease but a vascular one. And so having it can land you with diabetes and heart conditions and all kinds of other serious shit, even if the short-term disease is really just like having a cold or the flu. And so I think it's a really important thing for us to continue to talk about and be educated about in general. That's just my personal take.

And also, I understand that as it is related to the astrology of this time, our willingness and ability to live by our beliefs, to center disability justice in all that we do, in the way that we live day to day, is really important because COVID has been and continues to be a mass-disabling event. COVID is not over. And I, as an astrologer, do not expect that to change, based on the astrology of 2024. But related to the astrology of 2024, we need enough individuals to prioritize community care and to practice healthy boundaries. What is a healthy boundary if not a mask? But this is unlikely to happen unless a lot of people change a lot really quickly. But you can't control anyone but you.

Uranus in Taurus, which we're going to talk about in just a second, is related to who we value and how we express that value. Neptune and Saturn in Pisces is related to how we practice community care, whether we do it for show, for clicks and likes, or whether we actually just do it because we want to protect those amongst us who are the most vulnerable. Now, the other way that this could change, of course, is if infrastructure is created and implemented by governments and corporations, which⁠—between Pluto's ingress into Aquarius and then backslide into Capricorn, it is possible. Of course, it's possible. But there's no evidence that we see currently that would suggest it's probable unless things get so dramatically worse that it's unavoidable.

But I expect none of that to happen because I am not an idealist. So I will say I want to encourage you to continue to take care of your health and to understand that in an airborne pandemic, masking is an important part of disability justice, of community care, and of staying associated with the realities, no matter how exhausting and unfortunate they may be, but the realities that we are living in.

That said, let's talk about Uranus in Taurus. Now, Uranus has been in Taurus since the spring of 2019. And it will stay there until the spring of 2026, so it's a nice, long transit. And again, you heard me talk about this one a lot. I may have talked about it more in the earlier years of the transit than in this past one. But what I have said many times over and I will say many times again—the core of this transit is all about value.

Uranus in Taurus always teaches us who, as a society, we value and how we hold and express that value. On a very literal level, it materially coincides with changes of currency. I'm talking about dollars and pounds and franks and such. So the Uranus in Taurus transit tends to seek major shifts in economy and even in currencies. So this may mean further changes with cryptocurrencies and other forms of digital currencies.

Uranus in Taurus always coincides with women's rights and, as we understand it now in the modern world, also the rights of gender-nonconforming people, and that is a very wide umbrella that includes a lot of different kinds of genders. And so, when I say Uranus in Taurus brings up the issue of our rights, it doesn't mean that things get better for us. It doesn't mean they get worse. It means that the issue of our rights, our ability to self-determine and have liberty⁠ and freedom, is up.

And so, within societies where those things aren't happening, there is the struggle for freedom. And as we have seen, in societies where those things are happening, sometimes we see that revolutionary energy of Uranus, meaning that the status quo, people who are against women's rights, people who are against Trans and Nonbinary people's rights, are like, "Oh, hell no. We're going to have a revolution. We're going to fight that. We're going to bring them down." And so it has already begun. So it continues.

Now, this issue around basically the rights of everyone who are not a cis male are going to become much more intense as we have the overlap of Pluto in Aquarius, which also can bring up these issues, and Uranus in Taurus. So that'll only be a couple of years, but those couple of years are this year/next year. So we definitely want to pay attention to that space and do what we can to be agents of progress.

Learn with me. Whether you missed my December 30th class, Constellations and Crystals: Tools for 2024, or you want to learn astrology, manifestation, and all kinds of other woo stuff, you can check out and purchase my classes over on my website at lovelanyadoo.com/shop. And join me on Patreon for weekly content to step up your astrology and woo game.

And that brings us to the other thing that is always worth mentioning when we look at Uranus in Taurus, and that is that the last time Uranus was in Taurus, we had World War II. We had the rise of strongmen, fascistic leaders across the world, failing economies, suffering people, and genocide. We are living through, to that description, the same circumstances; are we not? So I'm not saying we're in World War III or that World War III will happen. But the broad strokes are pretty similar to what was happening last time Uranus was in Taurus, which was 1934 until 1941.

And in this period of 2019 through yet-to-have-happened 2026, we have seen the rise of dictatorships and fascism. And this is always related to the scapegoating of certain populations, a devaluing of certain demographics of humans, and the bulk of the population going along with it. This is where we must⁠—we must⁠—center our humanity. We must be very careful whenever we think any group of people deserves to be punished for who they are, where they live, how they pray, who they fuck, how they express their gender⁠—whatever it is.

Now, the transit of Uranus in Taurus is⁠—it is a very explosive one. And when Uranus leaves Taurus, it's not like things just magically get chill. I'm afraid not, my friends. But I will say that on a more personal level, with Uranus in Taurus, we are being invited to change the parts of ourselves that we would rather have stay the same because we are scared of instability and change, not because we're perfectly satisfied.

The difference between stability and a rut is that a rut doesn't serve you; stability does. Uranus in Taurus, on a very personal level, is an invitation to look at where we are stuck because we were once safe, or we once thought we were going to be safe or stable. But in fact, we have compromised our own economy, our own freedom, in order to get that little piece of security.

Because of this, because of Uranus, this can be a really hard time on the nervous system. And we happen to be living through a time where we don't just have the internet; we have social media⁠—it's just constant and noisy⁠—and AI, which is developing faster than most humans can keep up with. I am recording this at the end of 2023, and I am no expert in technology, trust. But I think, this time next year, AI will be such an irrevocable part of our lives that we are unlikely to have legislative protections or the infrastructure to properly deal with it, to protect vulnerable people from technology, from deep fakes, from propaganda⁠—all manner of risks that can come from all of that. All of our faces and our voices can be replicated by AI.

Things can move really fast during Uranus in Taurus, and things always move fast with technology. And that can make, on a personal level, us feel obsolete, like, "What can I do for living? What am I going to do with my life?" These are very, very personal questions that happen to us as a collective, which means they're both personal and societal at the same time.

Now, that all said, let's not forget Jupiter is also in Taurus⁠—not for the whole year, but what happens this year is that we enter into the beginning of a new 14-year cycle. And it will mark an electric time where the only thing you can expect is the unexpected. It'll be exact at 22 degrees of Taurus on April 20th⁠—21 degrees and 50 minutes, to be specific. Now, there will only be one exact hit. And we're going to be feeling this transit from April 3rd until May 7th. We may feel it, in fact, for a larger period than that, but I'm using that tight orb.

So Jupiter conjunction to Uranus is a very big-deal transit. It brings us what we do not expect. So, in regards to American politics, we may see new candidates. With Jupiter/Uranus, we're more likely to experience something that comes straight out of left field where we did not see it happening. The energies of this transit on a collective level can be really revolutionary, really revolutionary. This energy is inherently rebellious, futuristic, revolutionary. It brings up upheaval. And because of Uranus's placement, this can have major effects on STEM, AI, social media, the economy.

And because we're looking at the zodiac sign of Taurus, this may impact the real estate market, farming, insurance issues⁠—all kinds of real, material stuff like that⁠—again, as well as the rights of women and the large umbrella of Trans and gender-nonconforming people that exist. We may also see a rise or something unexpected within the New Age woo space. It's a very big space. Again, it's an umbrella term that encompasses a lot of things. But Uranus and Jupiter, to a lesser extent, are related to New Age and woo. So we may see some major developments there.

This can be a time where people come together and find radical new ways of looking out for each other, building community and networks with and for each other. This may be mutual aid. This may be finding ways of keeping each other safe. And also, it may just be like things are explosive. Uranus is literally related to explosives, things that go boom. So there's a lot of ways this transit can play out. In regards to the presidential election, I'm particularly curious because it's literally not predictable. That's the whole point, is it's not predictable.

Now, on a more personal level, this transit is particularly enlivening. So, if you have anything at around 22 degrees of a fixed sign⁠—so that's Taurus, and it's also Leo, Aquarius, and Scorpio⁠—you're really going to feel this⁠—or of a zodiac sign that is aspected by the sign of Taurus. If you have anything there, you're really going to feel this. And on a personal level, this transit is enlivening. It reminds us that we are alive. It can have you reconnecting or connecting with your [French language 00:41:54], your values, your visions for the future. And it can also mess with your nervous system and make you feel like you're zing-zing-zingy.

This transit triggers optimism and faith and hope. It incites excitement and imagination and inspiration. It can bring about a sense of the tide turning, the dawn breaking, that kind of beautiful, life-affirming stuff. This transit, this period, is exceptionally good for spiritual work that is life-affirming. What we should not do is try to contain, control, predict, or limit things in our life or the world around us. It's a huge waste of your fucking energy.

This transit brings about potential impossibility. It invites innovation and experimentation. And so don't try to make your life more secure and stable at this time. Explore what's possible. And on a more practical level, if you're a betting person, I wouldn't bet anything on anything at around this time because we can expect the unexpected. The key is to protect your nervous system so that you can ground all that electrical energy, all that exciting potential, so you stay in your body and then you can access and utilize the energy for good, for expansion, for whatever you need it for.

And honestly, if you are dealing with burnout, if you have just been fucking⁠—just tapped, this is an enlivening transit. So it's excellent for reinvigorating you psychologically, physically. For you to kind of refill your energy coffers at this time is just a really good move. Now, again, we can't count on anything, exactly, here. But inherently, Uranus and Jupiter are concerned with freedom, liberation, autonomy. So much progress can be made in our individual lives, in our relationship to our own wounding, our own trauma, and also in the world around us for the people and causes that need it the most. I am cautiously optimistic about this transit. And I'm a Capricorn; I'm not inherently an optimist. But this transit⁠—it has a lot of exciting potential.

One more thing I'll say about it is that it can create chaos. Uranus and Jupiter together, yeah, can create chaos. And so I want to bring you back to center, your center, to remember that when things are chaotic around you or even within you, when you have an anchor into your own value system⁠—Taurus⁠—when you have an anchor into your own heart, your own emotional integrity, your capacity to experience emotions, even the hard ones, to experience ambiguity and uncertainty, even when it provokes anxiety⁠—when you can experience those things and tolerate them and allow them to exist within you without attaching to them or acting on them, there's often wisdom on the other side of that noise, on the other side of that mess, if you can simply practice tolerating the feelings, thoughts, and impulses that we are habituated as humans to act on out of fear. Sometimes fear is there to keep you safe, and sometimes fear is there to keep you limited. And it's a practice to be able to determine which is which.

Now I'm going to kind of jump in time a little bit because I want to talk about the presidential politics for a second here. So March 5th is Super Tuesday in the United States. While it is a month out of the Jupiter/Uranus conjunction, my Spidey-senses say we can still expect the unexpected, that the influence of the Jupiter/Uranus conjunction is worth paying attention to. Now, I'm jumping in time, and then we'll go back to be little more chronological in a minute. But on November 5th of 2024 is election day here in the U.S. Closer to the date, we can talk about it a lot more.

But I do think it's important to say that Pluto is back in fucking Capricorn. So Pluto in Aquarius is quite revolutionary. It's a big change, really big change. And Pluto in Capricorn⁠—well, that's the old systems that have got us into all the messes we're in right here and now. So the fact that Pluto moves back into Capricorn for this election unfortunately means that we may see a continuation of the old guard of the way things have been.

So, if we want to see change in this country on the presidential level, we are going to have to make big fucking moves before November of 2024. It means getting engaged in presidential politics and activism straight out the gate in this new year, or expect things to go as they've gone before, the system to stay entrenched.

On the election day, we've got a Mars opposition to Pluto. This transit kicks up fights and power struggles and things around coercion and abuse of power and, basically, old-school patriarchal bullshit⁠—patriarchal, hierarchal, capitalist bullshit. It's a bit of a violent transit, Mars opposition to Pluto, and it's a deeply disruptive one. Now, we will also have Venus and the Moon conjunct each other and opposite to Jupiter on that day. So I do think that women's rights and Trans rights will very much be on the ballot.

But here's the fucking kicker. It's that Moon conjunct Venus⁠—it's a little bit lazy. It's a little self-indulgent. It, unfortunately, suggests low voter turnout. And whether or not we have an actual functioning democracy when enough people vote, it does move the needle. But I will say that there's a real risk of low engagement and apathy around this election at the exact same time that there is an indication for passionate and aggressive engagement⁠—Mars opposite Pluto versus the Moon/Venus conjunction opposite Jupiter.

Another thing worth noting is that in the Sibley chart⁠—which is the chart that I, and I think most astrologers, use for the United States of America⁠—transiting Neptune conjoins the IC of the United States' chart. This transit of Neptune to the Sibley chart kicks up suspicions and ambiguities in election denial and fraud or claims of fraud and conspiracy theories and religious extremism and cults, domestically speaking, so domestic cults, domestic religious extremism, propaganda, propaganda, propaganda in every direction, in every way, just fucking⁠—a mess.

And so I expect things to be real fucking messy around this presidential election, and that's not definitively bad or good. I mean, I think there's major risks with it. But it's certainly something I want to pay a lot of attention to, and you may, too. This is in no small part because Pluto enters into Aquarius January 21st of 2024. It stays there for the bulk of the year until September 2nd of 2024. Pluto then moonwalks back into Capricorn September 2nd through November 19th of 2024, just in time for the fucking election, like literally. That's it.

And then, on the 19th of November 2024, Pluto enters back into Aquarius, where it will stay until 2043, '44. So it's a long time. We got 20 years here of Pluto in Aquarius. When we see Pluto's last hurrah in Capricorn for the next 250 years, we are living through really meaningful times. I think it's very important to consider how you are here, I am here, we are here, now. And what are the chances that all the things would line up for you to be exactly who you are, exactly when you are, exactly what you are? I don't know. Maybe there's no meaning in it, but I do believe there is meaning to it. And when we find meaning within it, it becomes a lot easier to show up in ways that reflect who we want to be and the world we want to help co-create.

Pluto's last hurrah in Cap will have us seeing old hierarchies do their utmost, their very most, to hold on to power, as they do. As they do. Major hierarchal and patriarchal institutions/corporations will double down, and many may fail, honestly. Pluto's final moments in Capricorn are a meaningful part of the Pluto Return of the United States, which⁠—at the end of the day, this Pluto Return likely means the fall of this empire. Either this empire will fall, or it will be rebuilt. It will be reborn. It will be restructured in a way that is meaningfully different, powerfully different, because it's Pluto. So it's not going to be aesthetic. It's either going to fall, double down and become something else, like some sort of heavy, fucking evil version of itself, or it will come to greater healing. It's going to go in a very Plutonian one direction or another, a every good one or a very bad one.

The problems with the systems that we live in, that we have been struggling around⁠—with Pluto in Capricorn⁠, they get lit up. And there is energy for us to reinvent, to innovate, with Pluto in Aquarius. Pluto's still temporary shift into Aquarius at the start of the year, in January of 2024, marks the start of a new era. From technology and AI to women's rights, to airborne viruses, to decentralization, revolutions and rebellions, uprisings, mutual aid, back-to-land movements, communities breaking apart and coming together, Trans rights, major changes or challenges to borders⁠—I mean, all of these things are likely to get lit up through Pluto's transit over the next 20 years through Aquarius.

For sure, there will be shifts within governing power structures. But we cannot forget that Aquarius is not just a sign of humanitarianism and hippies and all that kind of shit. It's a fixed sign. It's fixed. And so we are likely to see, at least in some ways and at some times, the rise in fanaticism. We run the risk of descending into fascism around the world, or radical ideas that are theoretically good⁠—on paper, they're good⁠, but are inherently lacking in empathy and in humanity⁠—get applied to societies that don't bring progress for us all; they only bring a theoretically good path. That is very possible with the transit of Pluto in Aquarius.

And of course, technology, including but not limited to AI, will be a massive part of all of that. In the words of Malkia Cyril Devich, freedom is a practice; it's not a destination. And with the transit of Pluto in Aquarius, it is not inherently going to be easy or good or bad. It is going to be an opportunity for us to transform ourselves, our communities, and the systems that govern us and provide for us, to transform them to be more humane, more just, and kinder.

But in order to get there, we need to make it a practice. We need to make it a practice and not be so impatient for the results, for evidence and proof, that we miss out on the point, which is that Pluto in Aquarius has so much to do with the power of us coming together as a collective with each other, for each other. The practice of coming together as a collective is its own power, and power is not inherently bad, especially when power is an honest byproduct of impact, and the impact of us building communities and coalitions that are imperfect, that are with people who are different than us, maybe more conservative than us or more progressive than us or just fucking different than us, but we build communities where we practice freedom and we practice love and we practice peace.

That shit is actually possible under the transit of Pluto in Aquarius. But in order to do that, so much has to fall. So much has to break in our own minds, in our personal lives, in our relationships. We may have to give up some things. It won't be easy because Pluto's never easy. Even when Pluto's easy, it's not easy. But this is⁠—it's not meant to be easy. This year, with Pluto in Aquarius, I think it's really important for us to pay attention to the ways that technology empowers us to both be more connected and further apart, to recognize the power of telling our own stories, of being connected to other people in their own world, in their own truth, the ability for each of us to self-publish and be counted.

Within that, through technology that is ultimately owned by corporations and governments, we have unwittingly, and may continue to even more so, become unwittingly exploited because we are being tracked at all times in all locations. We are often telling on each other and forgoing personal privacy, which is directly connected to personal liberty, in exchange for conveniences and our interconnection. And all of this happens at a great cost to the planet because it's so easy to forget how much power technology takes, like physical power in the earth⁠—water, electricity, power.

We do not want to allow convenience or technology to replace our ability and willingness, or drive and practice, of connecting with each other, of innovating with each other. Pluto's in Aquarius. Again, this is a fixed air sign. And so people may get really stuck in their own ways. People might end up in camps, really just not listening to anyone else, not willing to change. But what's possible is innovation and problem-solving, community-building. But we must be adaptable in our thinking and patient, which is really hard for the zodiac sign of Aquarius.

Aquarius also has a hard time with tolerance. I think the stereotype of the zodiac sign of Aquarius is all about tolerance, and Aquarius can be very progressive and tolerant. But again, fixed air tends to be pretty rigid a fair amount of the time, too. And the way to navigate this is through the heart. When there is no heart involved, we run greater risk of moving towards fascistic and dangerous thinking, fanatical thinking. So, again, I want to bring the energy and attention back as we sort through the astrology of these times, to the need for us to take heart, to allow ourselves to center our heart, and to have empathy and care for the people and places and issues around us.

Now, again, I will reiterate here that we are living through a time of transformational revolution. In 2024, that transformation, that revolution, can be in the name of liberation. But it won't happen on its own. And so, whether or not you are trying to liberate yourself from family patterns, trauma patterns that are inherited back generations, you're trying to break through your own limitations around your identity, around the things you do, the habits you keep, whatever it is, or we apply this to more social and political conditions that affect us all⁠—wherever this lands for you at this moment, but throughout your year, it is important with this energy of Pluto in Aquarius, but also Uranus in Taurus, to remember that none of us are an island. We need each other. We need each other.

And personally, me, I'm kind of a hermit. I need people, but also, I need a lot of alone time. But I'm not talking about it on that literal and granular of a level. What I'm talking about is how much we need each other as a species⁠—we rely on each other⁠—and how healthy that is. And so, within that, we get to learn from each other. We get to share with each other. We get to take care of each other sometimes and lean on each other at other times. And for all of that to be sustained, especially when entrenched systems would have us turn our backs on each other, shutter our blinds, and lock our doors to keep each other out, that requires heart. That requires love and care and willingness to experience grief and loss and fear as we center and prioritize love and care.

Now, listen. There's going to be Eclipses this year. They're going to be emotional. I don't really see the value of predicting, in advance in a meaningful way, into the Eclipses. And the reason why is because Eclipses are Lunar transits. They're Moon transits, and the Moon is about the heart. And the heart is about presence. So I promise I will, as I always do, create a lot of content for you about the Eclipses closer to the date. But I don't want to encourage you to get in your head about your heart because that's not it. Our minds and our heart are different parts. And this year⁠—and probably every year, but certainly this year⁠—I want to encourage you to center your heart as a part worth not just protecting but investing in. And as you do that, it will be really hard to not invest in other people's hearts, as well, because kindness has a way of catching.

All right, my loves. That is it. That is the astrology of 2024. And if you would like to learn more with me, please do consider joining me over on Patreon, where we get into all manner of spiritual and astrological content. And on the 1st of every month, I drop a month-ahead forecast, so you get extra Ghost of a Podcast for your month. Also, if you liked this episode or you get value from the podcast in general, please do consider giving us a five-star rating and writing a positive review. It really does help, and it also just means the world to me.

I wish you the transformation you need and the support and inspiration that you most desire this year. Take good care of yourself and others, and I will talk to you soon. Buh-bye.