The Next Turning
Art by Natalie Muir
Unlike any before it, this Leo season arrives in the unsettled midst of spectacular planetary configs holding us in their thrall. The stage is setting for one helluvan eclipse season. This evolutionary torrent likely to continue unabated as the chaos indeed forces our hearts to roar.
In our bodies the heart is the commander and our brain cannot function without it. If our leadership - of our lives, destinies and directions - is not generated from within this same place where our existence beats, we have lost our most vital centrepoint. Without its steady rhythm, we perish. When we dance to its singular song, we soar. We rule. We are in command of our lives. We are creative. We are courageous. We are truly lionhearted.
Leo season offers this most vital firepower to warm ourselves by, with room for basking even in the midst of apocalyptic reinvention. It flickers constant encouragement and nuzzles our creative underbellies. It calls us to nourish our hearts with their dearest desires, claiming our place in the pride and stalking new dreams.
Within days the sun will stand in opposition to Pluto in Aquaria, spinning the shadows and light already at play, bringing intensity and revelation to the ebbing of the fabled fourths. The cradle tips again leaving a taste of the eclipse axis to come. It may not be what you expect... perhaps the signature scent of this galloping year. This axis is most likely to conjure the courage required to speak truth to power, confront the places that hold us back - even if they are within - and court the future in ways that demand we rise to fully inhabit the brief. This is the latest preview of the next ep in that continuing series.
Leo season calls us together as a pack, a pride, an humanity and posturing is its shadow. Being sovereign is not the same as being selfish, and neither is leadership. With our eclipses soon originating in the lion's domain and the wheel always turning here too, dig even deeper into your heartmath to mainline its axis of change over the next two years. Your courage is as in demand as your strength.
You can’t kill the spirit of the lionhearted
~ Erin Van Vuren
The Merc Has Turned
Well that was some ten degree stretch back through all ye olde worlds, wasn’t it? By the time Mercury shifted gears again to end his dirty retrograde in today’s early morning smog you will have been gobsmacked, inconvenienced, wobbly, redirected, teary, collapsed, refilled and quite possibly remade. And all in the midst of the most remarkable configuration to grace our life's skies still ebbing and flowing.
Leo season striding right in as Merc's retrograde shows itself out can land like a mess in this mixed blessing basket. We remain in the psychopomp's thrall for a post shadow that will test whether where you now stand is a kink, a swish or a sting in its lashing tail. Once it too settles into memory, the liquid nature of this very effective transit will sink or float according to your willingness to feel it all. For all the tech and temerity, there is still no cheat code for that.
It struck me as patently ridiculous that most all the infernal platforms I use daily as part of my business let fly with AI upgrades and re-configs during the transit, the one that none of their pop-astrology AI has yet cottoned on to as their kryptonite. Fools and horses in a year fairly chockers with them, I am looking forward to the grand unravelling that lies in wait.
Don’t you be thinking we are out of Merc’s riddling zone yet, either. Every retrograde has a pre and post shadow that has a very real whip in its tailings. It is the place where all this shit started and once Mercury returns to it, we are done. Once it too settles into memory, the liquid nature of this very effective transit will sink or float according to your willingness to feel it all as it happened. Did you adjust accordingly, or push the hard stuff away again? Did you avoid the ex files or are you still arguing with them in your head? Did you make the most of this regular life edit and marry it to your outer reaches? As the next turning points continue to arrive in waves, take time to note precisely where and how your perception has shifted, your mind has changed and your heart has sutured. Make sure the post shadow is for integration, not more back and forth.
This Mercing I offered a retrograde podramble series that outlined the distinct choreography of each of its three and bit long weeks of re-organising our personal oceans as it inverted the tides. If you have a gift for pattern recognition or a brain not yet hammered into submission I can highly recommend using the post shadow to match the dance to what actually went down, blew up and flew into the window of your life since June. Blow your own mind just the way Mercury intended, darklings. As is the way with retrograde, please travel backwards through time for best results. Look anew from the start point and lament with month-younger-you who you may not have as much in common with anymore. Integration is kindness not judgement, or it just won’t stick.
And then if you find you have rather a taste for reading the weave, our Coven exists to satisfy the deeper hunger.
The Pulse From Aquaria
Aquarian otherness is a unique force of nature. Future focused and fancy free, its alt-dimensionalism is tapped into the zeitgeist. Its fingers touching lightly on pulses that originate from directions yet to be taken, felt through second sight and translated into lightning.
With a firm flashing eye on rebirthing humanity, the moon moves into Aquaria next week in the wake of the nodes shifting and prepares to blaze full. Takes her place next to Pluto in retrograde conjuring any remaining shadows from the old world before its fall. She will again rock the cradle of transformation as she blazes opposite the Sun in Leo standing shoulder to giant shoulder with Jupiter. As has been the case for weeks this next lunar formation is a prism of the lattice that the outer planets have formed about us, a gathering place from which there is no turning back.
The noise is intense. A cacophony of beliefs and opinions undeniably trauma informed and force fed, shaped as equally by our over-use of devices as it is now by experience and its limits of understanding. This Aquarian full moon is not interested in the fight. Leaves conversion to old world missionaries who cannot permit freedoms beyond the ones they have chained themselves to. Who mangle intelligent debate in hysterical echo chambers that refuse expansion, on a fast track to their own dead ends.
Chaos is fertile. It births new paradigms, liberating the stuck and consuming the stagnant. A closed mind will oppress you more than any system can. This full moon may well reveal any corruption of free thinking and the unholy permissions you granted in fear and uncertainty. Your liberation arrives with the peak in rebellion to the past and its old world order. Freedom isn’t wrapped in a flag or a furphy but your soul can sense its presence and stretches lit up into space. Your heart hums a tune still unsung as it dances to the beat of this different drummer. Leo’s generative heartspace calls us beyond analysis paralysis and overthinking as an excuse to under feel. Aquarius’ achilles heel can be an unwillingness to pay as much attention to the body as its marvellous mind. Get out of your head and get everyone else out too.
Go with the flux. Seek flow. Do not grasp what isn’t yours. Banish any limits to your sovereign right to life well lived. Dispense with tradition and all the shoulds for a vaster inner space. Traded for a peculiar freedom that exists lit like a promise on the tip of your tongue.
The Aquarius full moon next week rises in a hail of future frequencies transmitting very distinct signals. Their combined fields blast open the door already left ajar into eclipse season. It is too late now to get ahead of this, or on the right side of things just in case you were still putting that off as you waited for conditions to change by themselves. Ship sailed, darklings. By then the nodes will have shifted on to an (initially) unforgiving axis of sovereignty and evolution, and it will show in all our worlds.
Our next Full Mooner on Wednesday 29th July is a live channel diving deep into these weaving currents. Melding astrology and moon lore with ritual and imaginal magic, the kind that places you directly in its field and lets you find your way through by tapping into the only true transmitter of bespoke intel. Yours. Tickets here or included in our Coven Devotional, for those keen to dedicate themselves to a real life practice.
Words c. Kerrie Basha 2026 // Bohomofo is an AI Free Zone