Happy New Year 2022
/OFF THE PLUMB TREE JANUARY 2022
As we welcome in the New Year, we find that The Giant Planet, Jupiter, has just entered the sign Pisces, where that planet is at home, and arrives just in time for a full-blown New Year’s celebration! This is good news as Jupiter loves to be in Pisces, rather than the constrictive sign of Aquarius, ruled by the “heavy” planet in the zodiac, Saturn. Jupiter takes about 12 years to travel around the Sun, and so stays in one sign about a year. Each of us have a year when Jupiter is with our Sun sign and so bestowing his largess on each in turn.
Pisces is the last sign of the zodiac and contains all the wisdom, compassion, sympathy, pain and suffering of all the other signs. It is symbolized by two fish each swimming in opposite directions, one swims towards heaven and the other towards earth. They are held together by a cord, thus insuring that for Pisces there is always a heaven.
We had Jupiter in Pisces for a brief spell May 14th -July 29th, 2021. As you might recall it was during that May period that quarantines started lifting and our daily life, after COVID restraints, opened up a bit more. There was a feeling of release from bondage. But as soon as Jupiter went back into the more restrictive sign Aquarius at the end of July, that loosening was withdrawn. The month of January will bring Jupiter’s opportunity to experience increased faith, abundance and a stronger connection to the spiritual world most especially to those born from the 19th-26th, of February any year.
Along with the beneficial influence of Jupiter in a sign it rules giving us the opportunity to experience its abundance, generosity, and access to the spiritual world, is the ongoing just past peak Saturn square Uranus, which we spoke about last month. This influence which will be felt all year and into 2023, intensifies the impulse for change, freedom, rebellion, the new, the desire to overthrow established structures coupled with a backlash, a suppression of rebellion, an oppressive reassertion of control, an attempt to censor freedoms, to go back to a reactionary and more conservative agenda. Sometimes Uranus will win and sometimes Saturn in the near term. But in the long term? The effect, anyway, this year is chaos and counterculture, as astrologer S.J. Andersen says.
This month is also presenting the ongoing Venus retrograde conjunct Pluto in Capricorn. Venus rules our desires, our values, our relationships, our money. Pluto intensifies, almost to compulsion those issues. The retrograde position of Venus when she is changing from a brilliant evening star, as we have seen her lately, to becoming a morning star rising ahead of the Sun involves Venus disappearing from the night sky and joining the Sun on the 9th of January, when we should have a clearer picture of what we want in the above areas of our life. Pluto requires a soul searching of sorts as does the retrograde, and extraordinary things can happen, like old loves returning into our lives unexpectedly almost like ghosts arising from the dead.
January brings a retrograde Mercury in Aquarius on the 14th and going back into Capricorn on the 27th of January just as Venus is turning direct. Both Venus and Mercury have a few turns at conjoining the planet of evolutionary progress, Pluto, not only intensifying our desires and compulsions, but our thoughts and communications. The news this month brings a period, when according to astrologer Pam Younghans, “life- altering truths may be revealed”. The Messenger of the Gods meets the God of the Underworld and dark stories, hidden out of sight, may arise to the surface. Because of the apparent retrograde motion, planets go over the same area of the zodiac many times thus accelerating and intensifying their messages to us.
