This year the Cancer solstice is entangled, its threshold mingling with Chiron’s move into Taurus after seven years in the wild I Am’s of Aries. The last time Chiron was in Taurus in the late '70s coincided with the original discovery of this asteroid that forms a bridge between Saturn and Urania. This shift is significant generationally as well as collectively for the present.

The sun slow to rise now as we grind into solstice. Though you cannot tell if you peer into the world, the stilling that defines the solstice is taking hold. For four days the sun will not move from its point on our horizon as it rises and sinks over our longest days and nights, our end points and outer reaches, seasonally adjusted.

Shapeshifting is a vastly underestimated magic considering how common it is. You have already done it so many times in your life. Utterly and completely changed your shape, I mean. Grew a limb back when your life had cut it off, sometimes a whole organ. Sprouted wings when you needed to fly. A mermaid’s tale when freediving in the deeper currents of your life. Inhabited the guise or form of another creature outside your own, to charm or to menace.

The strange pinpoint of this Sagg apogee is likely to deliver things that cannot be shoved back under carpets or into boxes and buried deep. The kind of gnosis that shifts trajectories, conjures truth telling and refuses to even try shoving the genie back in the bottle. You can always bank on knowing more after a Sagg full moon than you did before it, but the quieter debate is usually on whether or not you can unsee it.

The Libran full moon rises over this week as checkpoint and palate cleanser, the first in the new astrological year and fading wake of a torrid eclipse season. Retro rear vision mirrors are no longer clamoring for our attention with flashy undones. With all planets in direct motion until May and most of in Aries, this horse year finally begins to gallop through the smoke and mirrors of the old world now dying at its own hand.

Eclipses should come with a similarly succinct warning. But even with all possible due diligence, this mad season oft gets the best of us. If everyone or everything is feeling chaotic, unsteady or hard simmering towards boil over, remember this gristle and grinding down is how we make the change eclipses always herald. Not one of us is immune to their sandpaper loving and violent reconfiguration. Fuck you, says the eclipse to the earth’s meat in its sandwich, I’m hardly going to do what you tell me.

Well in the wilds of eclipse season, the second in our pretty pair approaches through clouds of bait and switch. You know we’re not nearly done, right? Beyond the veiled outer reaches of Merc’s revisionist retrograde only just in play to muddy the field, this next Virgo full moon is the red letter lunar eclipse. She who offers us all a grand eclipsing of the past in service of the future, or a future borne of all that you still cannot eclipse.

It is no surprise to anyone that I love Friday the 13th, but to have it arrive the day before my annual Valentine’s Day rant? Chef’s kiss. We are certainly floating in a sea of confected stories here at the end of the world as we know it. Friday the 13th is our day, witches and wannabes. Always has been, which is why it has come to be associated with the implied darkness of all things occult.

Perhaps it has taken until now to pick your jaw up off the floor. The outrageous glitching is more than just a herald of revolution well underway. The constant shock horror two-step isn’t just a relentlessly awful avalanche meted out by the monsters in charge. In the stars constant alarm bells are the calling card of Urania, clanging against all that remains sleeping in our souls. Waking us like our lives depend on it, and they do.

It seeems entirely appropriate for Lammas that I have become an insufferable breadmaker. Finally I get it and simultaneously I now want to make every kind of bread there is and roll it warm in a tea towel and arrive with a long flat knife and good butter. I have never been a baker, though I am a very regular roaster. Not a cakemaker but well known to whip up a formidable pav that would make your grandmother weep for the old desserts, made with sugar and love instead of chia and control.

There are just so many places we lost our way.

It’s our birthday, witches!

This Coven Electric and my Patreon platform, which has bloomed The Channel and so very many mooners and spells, has just entered its 7th year! There are vast changes afoot, new tiers and a whole lot more magic coming your way.

We slipstream now into the final moments of Merc's magic trick of a retrograde, only interested in how you have made the crossing between head and heart. Dangerously cunning at the station point and with an endless retinue of thaumaturgy to boot, the psychopomp takes no prisoners as he guides us through the breach.

In the most ancient Egyptian dynasties risen and fallen many thousands of years ago now, Aker was the powerful earth god who presided over the horizon. Guarding the eastern and western thresholds to the underworld and taking the form of two lions.

Best way to know you are in shadowy territory? You can't make it all add up. There are holes in your position you could drive a bus through. It's not working anymore. Because everything becomes business under capitalism - just ask organised religion - we all have a glaring stinking problem in the whitewashed West. Find it at the intersection of spirituality, capitalism and abundance.

The first day of the next season on the calendar, its tendrils wrapping around us like creeping vines long before now. The sky keeping its own time, the soul self biding its allocation and weighing it against glitchy unruly transformation.

Gemini season arrives annually to haul stale thinking out of its doldrums and boots stuck in the mud blood of the old world. Its twin skinning of perception and faculty is not a figment of your imagination. Gemini came to play, already messing maniacally with the stubborn fixations revealed by a storming Taurus season.

Welcome to the end of your tether. To the glitching place of before and after. The exact spot you will look back on and realise you felt the quake coming. The change subtle but seismic, the shift tectonic.

Billed as an exasperating hellscape, I'm starting to wonder if the end of all our tethers isn't the place the new world begins.

In astrology, as in life, it's easy to get ahead of yourself. To float above or beyond the present moment. Gemini season begins in a frenetic nanosecond, accelerating the pace with its switch hitting shape shifting buttons pressing ch-ch-change on repeat. But first darklings, press pause to make the very most of our last moments in the langorous little bull's realm.