TRANSCRIPT Episode 118 | Jupiter Meets Neptune: Anchors Aweigh! (Apr. 11, 2022)
Listen and read show notes hereWelcome to The Big Sky Astrology Podcast with your host, Astrologer and Author, April Elliott Kent.
April: Hello invisible friend, April here, and the date today is April 11, 2022. Welcome to Episode 118 of The Big Sky Astrology Podcast.
It is an extremely busy and very important week in the big sky, and there’s a lot that I want to cover in this episode. So, there will be no listener question or mini lesson this week, but I’m pretty sure I’ll have something for you next time.
Saturn squares the Lunar Nodes (April 11, 2022, 7:30 am PDT)
The Week begins with Saturn making a square to the lunar nodes on April 11 at 07:30 AM Pacific Time at 22° and 57 minutes of Aquarius. Saturn is now in that same position square the nodes as Mars was last week, Venus the week before. And we talked quite a lot about what it meant for a planet to be at what we call the bendings of the lunar nodes, making a square to the lunar nodes.
Because a planet at that point is impelling us, is moving us in the direction of one or the other of the lunar nodes. In this case, Saturn just as Venus and Mars before it, is making a closing square to the North Node of the Moon, which means it is northern bending, it is impelling us in the direction of the ever- fortunate North Node of the Moon. The North Node is at the Sabian symbol 23° of Taurus, “A Jewelry Shop”.
And, we know that Saturn always describes those processes that are difficult because they’re significant. When we are at the end of a Saturn process, we know we’ve really accomplished something that was worthwhile. And so, the vision that came to mind for me is of the enormous pressure and time that it takes to turn carbon into diamonds. Saturn at this square to the nodes is trying to turn us into a better version of ourselves and is also trying to move us in the direction of everything symbolized by that Taurus North Node, a sense of security, of prosperity, of feeling that we can trust the world around us.
But the process of Saturn is anything but comfortable. That’s not Saturn’s job. Saturn’s job is to make us work hard, and to earn what we want. So, Saturn impelling toward the North Node says, “Everything you want can be yours, but you’re going to have to really work for it and it’s not going to happen overnight.”
Jupiter conjoins Neptune (April 12, 2022, 7:43 am PDT)
The week’s biggest and most important aspect is Jupiter’s conjunction with Neptune on April 12, at 07:43 AM Pacific Time, at 23° and 58 minutes of Pisces on the Sabian symbol “An Inhabited Isle”. Jupiter comes together with Neptune about every 13 years or so. It’s not one of the rarest aspects we have, but it’s relatively unusual. And this year, it is really the biggest transiting aspect that we have between two of the outer planets. It only happens one time and this is relatively unusual when you have to have the big slow moving, what we call, outer planets coming together in an aspect. Because, outer planets are retrograde so much of the year, Jupiter I think is about four and a half months out of the year, Neptune nearly six months out of the year. So, to have them only come together once is actually pretty unusual. So, we’ll pay special attention to it and know that it is an influence that’s been building and an influence that will probably continue to make itself felt over the coming few months.
So, what is it about? Well, if we put together just key words involving Jupiter and Neptune, we could say it is about big dreams, big illusions, leaps of faith, but also the possible of misguided journeys. It can be a time of spiritual awakening and it can also be a time of giving into fanatical delusions. I think both of these planets as being associated with travel, with journeys, and not just journeys on the physical plane, but of course spiritual and even religious journeys as well. At a time when Jupiter and Neptune come together, I specifically imagine an ocean voyage where we are setting out to see the Neptune environment, and it’s a long journey, we don’t get any place really quickly by ship. So, there was a lot of time out on the water to think and to imagine.
Here are the most recent years when Jupiter came together with Neptune.
- Most recently, it was in 2009, at the end of May, early July and toward the December Solstice. These conjunctions came together between 24 and 26° of Aquarius, so in sort of the last part of Aquarius.
- Then back in 1997, there was a single conjunction between the two on January 9th, 1997, that was in late Capricorn, 27 Capricorn.
- Before that, it was January 19th 1984, another single conjunction between the two at 0° of Capricorn.
- Before that, you go back to 1971 on January 31st, May 21st, and September 16th. And these conjunctions happened between zero and 3° of Sagittarius.
This is a story that I’ve shared in a few places, so I apologize if you’ve heard me tell it already. But to me, it really epitomizes something about this Jupiter Neptune conjunction. Back in May of 1971 when this conjunction happened exactly on the ascendant of my chart, the rising sign, the embarking angle – my family took off from our tiny farm in southern Indiana, packed into an Oldsmobile station wagon to move to Southern California, where my mother had family. My father had died the year before, and he was a farmer. So, we were on a farm with no farmer. And that didn’t actually make a lot of sense. And I think my mother also just needed to get away. So, we journeyed across the continent in our station wagon. And when we arrived in California, it was such culture shock, we’d been here several times during the summer to visit our relatives and it was a lot of fun, but it’s a really different thing to come and visit a place as opposed to knowing that this is going to be your new home.
Now, in the end, this was the best thing probably that ever happened to me. I’ve got a lot of planets in the ninth house, I’ve got a Sagittarius Ascendant, there was no way that I was going to be happy in a small place. But I didn’t know that at the time. At the time, I was a little kid, I was leaving all my friends, all of the relatives that I’d known all my life. So, it was the beginning of an adventure, but it was kind of a sad adventure. And I think that that gets to the heart of something about these Jupiter and Neptune conjunctions. That it is a time of journeying, of expanding our horizons, but there seems to be some loss involved as well. Some sadness. Because to move forward in a new direction necessarily means that we leave some things behind. That to me is always something of the symbolism of Neptune, which is like the tide, it brings things in and it takes things away.
When we have Jupiter and Neptune together, it’s expected that we’ll have some kind of loss, some kind of sadness or difficulty. But ultimately, the Jupiter promise seems to be that our life has become bigger in some way. And we are asked during these times, often to reevaluate what we think about our lives, what is our belief system, what is our guiding faith, and to act on that, the Jupiter part that wants to step out into the grand adventure. So, you can take a look at the house of your chart where 24° of Pisces falls. As always, I’ll link to that blog post on my website that might help you find where that is. And look two aspects, to planets and the ascendant and midheaven of your chart that involve 23°, 24^ of Pisces.
I’ve gone through my own Jupiter-Neptune conjunctions in 1984, 1997, 2009, and what was really revealing was the aspects that those Jupiter-Neptune conjunction points made to planets in my birth chart. So again, we’re looking at zero to 3° Sagittarius in 1971, 0° Capricorn in 1984, 27 Capricorn in 1997, and then between 24 and 26° of Aquarius in 2009. I’ll also be writing something about this aspect, this transit for my website, and we will link to that in the show notes.
The Sabian symbol for this particular Jupiter Neptune conjunction on 24 Pisces, is “An Inhabited Isle”. And this Sabian symbol to me always talks about the kindness and compromise that are required to cohabitate with people. When you live together on a small island, resources tend to be a little harder to come by, not as much in this day and age, but traditionally. And to live together happily and productively means we have to share, we have to share what we have, and also, our know how, our skills, all of the other things that each of us individually brings to the table to make society work. I’ve talked about this symbol before in recent weeks, because Neptune’s been in this area pretty consistently. And it really does, I think, say something about how we are all having to learn to live together on what increasingly feels like a very small planet.
This week, think about, “What is your journey? Where are you headed? Where are you feeling the need to move forward?” But at the same time, feeling as if there were important things that you are not quite ready to leave behind.
Sun sextile Saturn (April 12, 2022, 5:14 pm PDT)
Later, on April 12th at 05:14 PM Pacific Time, the Sun makes a sextile aspect to Saturn. It’s on the Sabian symbol, “An Open Window and A Net Curtain Blowing into A Cornucopia”. I say this a lot, but this really is one of my favorite Sabian symbols. I remember having a little office in a church building not far from our house. When I was working on my first book, I really needed a place where I could focus. We had fairly young cats at the time and I really wasn’t getting much done. And I remember sitting there in this little room, this tiny little garret that I had painted with the soft colors. And I had dragged in a little altar piece that I had found from one of the storage rooms and I had candles burning and incense, so it was just lovely. And literally, I had this light white curtain at the window that would blow in, in the afternoon breeze. And it was just so beautiful and so lovely.
And I think that the Sun sextile Saturn on this degree is an invitation to take that quiet moment and listen on this sort of sacred day of the Jupiter Neptune conjunction. Maybe you can carve out just a little bit of time in the late afternoon or into the evening to think about what direction your Jupiter Neptune journey is going to take?”
Mars enters Pisces (April 14, 2022, 8:06 pm PDT)
Mars enters Pisces on April 14th, 08:06 PM Pacific Time, it will be in this lovely sign through May 24th. The last time Mars entered Pisces was on May 12th, 2020. Now, Pisces might be a gentle sign, but Mars is not a gentle planet, and it always symbolizes a field of battle. Pisces can symbolize things like confinement or disease. And the last time Mars entered Pisces, two months into the global pandemic, battles began to erupt around masks and social distancing and other measures meant to prevent the spread of the virus. This time around we are in a fairly different kind of place with the pandemic, not that all of the battles about it have subsided.
Mars is a planet that describes how we want to put forth our efforts and our energy and our determination, and in what areas of life. Now, as we understand in astrology, to everything there is a season, there is a time. Mars takes about two years to go all the way around the zodiac. And while it’s in each sign, the homework is to actually do something about what’s important to us in that area of life. Pisces is about the things we care about on a tender, empathetic level. If you care a lot about say, the plight of animals, while Mars is in Pisces is a really appropriate time to do something to help that cause. If you care about people who are suffering because of a particular kind of illness, or they’re homeless, or they’re in jail, whatever it might be, these are all things that are of the nature of Pisces. If you look at the house of your chart that has Pisces in it, it’s an intimation of that during this time of Mars and Pisces would be really great for you.
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The Moon Report
And now, to introduce the Moon report for this week, is listener Maria and her darling husband Bret:
The Libra Full Moon
Thank you so much to the two of you. That is so lovely and so fitting for introducing this week’s Libra Full Moon on April 16 at 11:55 AM Pacific Time, at 26° and 45 minutes of Libra. The Sabian symbol for this Full Moon is 27 Libra, “An Airplane Hovering Overhead”. And, I am not kidding when I say that in the 20 minutes that I’ve been recording this episode, I have paused the recording probably on an average of three times a minute, because there was a loud plane going overhead! We do not live in a flight path here in San Diego, but on certain days, they’ll divert the traffic a little bit or the direction of the wind is such that you would think we were sitting right underneath the airport. So, that’s what’s going on here.
The Sabian symbol for 27 Aries which is the Sun’s position at this Full Moon is, “Through imagination, a lost opportunity is regained.” Now, an airplane hovering overhead can be a bit of a nuisance if you’re in the city trying to record a podcast. I can remember, though…. I mean, I’m really in this mindset today of thinking back to the days on the Indiana farm because of that Jupiter Neptune conjunction. And I can remember as a really small kid that we had wheat fields around the house. And we loved to go out and tunnel in the wheat, which drove my father completely nuts. And, we would just lie there, my sister and I, and look up at the sky. Every now and again you would see an airplane going overhead. We were literally in flyover country, so when we saw planes, they were distant specks in the sky, they weren’t really hovering overhead. But what they did for our imagination! And that really talks about that Sabian symbol for the Sun and Aries too, “Through Imagination A Lost Opportunity Is Regained”.
So, the Full Moon as we know, it’s the awareness point of the lunar cycle, it’s when everything kind of comes clear. In particular, we could see with better clarity, the things that we conceived at the New Moon. Of course, we had a New Moon in Aries on April 1, and this is midway through that month long cycle. It’s also halfway through a lunar phase gestation cycle that began on October 16th, 2020, at a New Moon near the same degree of Libra. So, it’s a reevaluation point. It says, okay, the things that you conceive, then, the things you initiated, they are now bearing fruit, and it looks like this.
With the Full Moon in Libra, one of the things that’s being revealed to us I think, is how our relationships with other people have been impacted by those Aries New Moon ambitions or the Libra New Moon ambition. We’re reminded that it really is important to take others into consideration, and Aries isn’t really built that way. So, during this Aries season, it’s about “What can I do on my own to make an impact in the world, to get where I want to go, and do the things I want to do in my own way in my own time?” But at this Full Moon, we begin to say, oh, maybe my family is unhappy with me because I’m focused too much on my individual projects and not spending enough time with them. It could be things like that.
This is a very volatile Full Moon chart. It echoes in many ways the chart of the Cancer First Quarter Moon that we talked about last week in Episode 117, because the Sun and the Moon here are also connected with Pluto as they were in that chart. This time however, it is the Sun in Aries, Moon in Libra, Pluto in Capricorn, and the missing cardinal sign in this configuration is Cancer. So that tells us that if we’re feeling a lot of pressure, a lot of stress, all of which can be associated with Pluto, or that things just feel emotionally very, very challenging, that at this Full Moon, it’s not a bad idea to back away, spend time in your home with your loved ones.
Void-of-Course Moon periods
Let’s look at the Void-of-course Moon periods for this week. Again, the Void-of-course Moon times are when the moon has made its final major aspect in its sign and that window before it moves into the next sign. These are good times for reflection, especially on matters symbolized by the Moons final aspect, and not necessarily the best time for moving forward and taking action.
On April 12th, the Moon in Leo will make an opposition to Mars at 03:16 AM Pacific Time, it’s then void-of-course for about four hours, giving us plenty of time to think about the emotional agitation that probably emerged at that Moon Mars opposition. If you think of boiling water, you kind of get the idea with the Moon making an aspect to Mars. The Moon then enters Virgo on April 12th at 07:07 AM Pacific Time.
On April 14th, the Moon in Virgo makes a trine to Pluto at 11:11 AM Pacific Time, and it’s void-of-course for about two and a half hours. I would say the Moon’s trine to Pluto is one of the less disruptive ones involving Pluto, and this is a two-and-a-half-hour period that is just made for changing patterns and routines and hopefully in a good and healthy direction because it’s the Moon in Virgo, which tends to be pretty health conscious, but generally conscious of habits. So, having the Moon trine Pluto, again you have about a two-and-a-half-hour window there to clear the way emotionally to make those kinds of changes. Then the Moon enters Libra on April 14th at 01:46 PM Pacific Time.
On April 16th, the Moon in Libra makes a square to Pluto, 02:57 PM Pacific Time, it’s Void-of-course for about two and a half hours. So, this is just after the Full Moon, it’s when so much has been revealed to us about the impact of our actions and our ambitions on our partners, our close friends, the people around us, and it’s a square to Pluto. So, we may not love what was revealed to us during the Full Moon. This Moon is then Void-of-course for two and a half hours, until the moon into Scorpio on April 16th at 05:23 PM Pacific Time.
Mercury conjoins Uranus (April 17, 2022, 9:51 pm PDT)
Finally, this week, Mercury in Taurus makes a conjunction with Uranus on April 17th, at 09:51 PM Pacific Time at 13° and 48 minutes of Taurus. In Episode 117, I mentioned that Mercury in Taurus, while it would be kind of a nice slower pace, downshifting a bit, would not be completely stress free. And this Mercury Uranus conjunction was one of the aspects I was thinking about, because it does shake things up. It is an opening for inspiration, Uranus is very unconventional, and Mercury making an aspect to Uranus can make us perceive things in a new way, to take note of things that we had overlooked previously, but it also describes the nervous system that’s kind of working overtime and there is the tendency for the nervous system, the thought processes to go a little bit haywire. The Sabian symbol for this conjunction is “Shellfish Groping and Children Playing”. And basically, there is a lot of busyness in this symbol, the shellfish are groping around looking for sustenance, children are playing, having a lot of fun, being very active.
So, Taurus can be very tenacious, even though it’s a little more slow-moving. And I think that this combination showing all of this busyness in the Sabian symbol, Uranus being very high energy, could just speak to overdoing things, being a little too tenacious. If you’re the kind of person that will get started on an intensive project, doing computer programming, playing a video game, working on some bookkeeping, and you’re just not able to stop until it’s done, that is Mercury in Taurus being very dogged. So, this conjunction with Uranus just says, busy is good – but this is a time between about April 16th and April 18th, where you need to be conscious to give yourself a little bit of a rest. Now, Mercury with Uranus can act a little bit as though it’s retrograde or out-of-bounds, because things can be unpredictable. So, on the plus side, as I say this can shake things up in a good way, it can wake you up but it can also mean that there’s a lot of disruption. So, I would just say maybe don’t schedule yourself too tightly around these days because things will happen, things will come up that could put you off schedule.
Thanks and donor shout-out
That is everything I have on my show sheet, so I’m gonna wrap this one up. Thank you so much for listening to The Big Sky Astrology Podcast! If you like what you’re hearing, I hope that you will follow or subscribe, leave a rating or review, and please help spread the word by telling an astrology-loving friend. You can read show notes and full transcripts and leave your comments about each episode at bigskyastropod.com.
Now, I didn’t have time this week for a listener question or a mini lesson, but if you have a burning question about astrology, or an idea for a mini lesson, that you would like me to answer, please leave a voicemail of one minute or less at speakpipe.com/bigskyastrologypodcast. I’d really love to hear some of your voices on a voicemail. Or you can of course send an email to me, april@bigskyastrology.com And be sure to put “Podcast Question” in the subject line.
Thanks very much to everyone who showed support during the September Podathon. Each week, I’m thanking some of you by name. This week, let’s give a Big Sky Astrology Podcast shout out to Elizabeth Schultz, Tracy Mills and Janice Manson!
April: Elizabeth, Tracy, and Janice thank you so much for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate your support and your donations. If you miss the Podathon and would like to support the show, please go to bigskyastropod.com where we’ll be abundantly clear how to make your donation
That is it for this episode. Join me again bright and early next Monday. And until then, keep your feet on the ground and your eyes on the stars.
© 2022 by April Elliott Kent