Horoscopes for the Week of October 11th

Yes, Mercury’s still retrograde. Yes, some obtrusive sandbars and sea monsters lurk on the horizon. But this week, we enjoy a sweet reprieve.

On October 15th, the Sun spills its spotlight on our solar system’s fairy godmother: the equivalent of dimming the house lights to hush a squirmy crowd. This is one of the most generative and joyful transits the Sun can hope for, invoking confidence, vitality, and that baseline of faith required to climb out of our clamshells.

Sometimes all you need is a cheerleader on your shoulder to prod you to audition for this play or submit for that contest or apply for that job. Jupiter plays such a role: affirming and celebrating your growth spurts.

Two days later, on October 17th, Jupiter stations direct in Aquarius. That’s exactly one week after Saturn does the same on October 10th — also in Aquarius. Jupiter and Saturn station retrograde (and direct) every year, so these events on their own aren’t revelatory. But they don’t often station on the same week, in the same sign.

It takes tremendous force to halt a moving object (think: Indiana Jones’ boulder careening downhill). It takes even more force to pivot this object’s direction. When planets station direct or retrograde, you can think of it as a cosmic boulder crunching to a halt, then groaning the opposite way.

At least, that’s how it looks to us on Earth. It’s a planet-wide optical illusion, similar to when you speed past someone on the highway and watch their vehicle recede. In relation to Earth’s motion, other planets appear to trek backward now and then. And just like the force you’d need to reverse Indiana Jones’ boulder, incredible power attaches to a planet on the day it stations. There’s energy, potency, and oomph.

A lot of oomph.

That makes Aquarius the site of a major pivot: a kinetic and cosmic script switch. It also means that Saturn and Jupiter will be clawing back over the same territory they’ve been chewing since May (for Saturn) and June (for Jupiter.) But planets tend to be more helpful to us when they’re moving forward. Whatever swells of wisdom you’ve gleaned over the past months, they’ll be easier to integrate now.

On the hump day between these two stations, October 13th, Venus sextiles Saturn. Armed with its dog-eared Choose Your Own Adventure paperback, Venus is forced to settle into its next escapade with a little more discernment. Every adventure requires a visit from the wise old sage, and Saturn in Aquarius will provide helpful counsel, helping to define and conceptualize our desires.

Less concerned with the alchemical (and sometimes harrowing) ways love breaks us down in Scorpio, Venus in Sagittarius wants to gather the myths, pop songs, and cosmologies that explain the endless expansion of the heart.

Such goals will be smoothly attained on October 16th, when Mercury sextiles Venus. While retrograde snafus will continue to tumble out the trickster’s sleeves, Venus helps us laugh at the blunders, or flirt our way out of a bind.

Within the headiness of Libra season, we are called to examine the stories we tell ourselves about everything we deeply value. We also have the opportunity to pinpoint the ways these narratives could be revised to welcome more abundance.

Your horoscopes are meant to be read as inspiration. If you know both your rising sign and sun sign, please read both horoscopes. You’ll know which one resonates more for you from week to week. Take what works for you, and leave the rest. If you want to share this work, please credit the source by quoting it and providing a link to this post and website. Thank you for your support and for spreading the work around. We really appreciate it and you.

The following horoscopes were written by Eliza Robertson and Stephanie Warner.

Aries & Aries Rising

Maybe there’s a clutch of dreams you’ve been sitting on for a few months, or a scheme you’ve been workshopping in community. You’ve been retracing the oaths you’ve made to a club, coven, or society, or you’re combing back over unspoken agreements between friends: the rules you live by, which need no announcing.

Your friend groups have been the site of bounty this year, but since June, that growth may have felt stunted. By the end of this week, whatever processes were slowing down start to find their pace again. Arguably, this has been the biggest expansion to your social life or community commitments that you’ll experience for another 12 years.

Does that mean you’ll stop making friends or marching with allies or devising newfangled variations of pasta salad for your community potlucks? No. But whatever wisdom you’re meant to glean from this period of expansion: you’re closer than ever now.

Meanwhile, Venus in Sagittarius’ spirit of adventure will open sublime channels of the mind, as you’re lured down an esoteric rabbit hole (or two, or three). There will be a sweetening of your learning pursuits, and cute encounters between the stacks — but also an opportunity to be seduced by the pursuit of wisdom itself.

As you pontificate about love, connection, and the dizzy entanglement of souls, you brush against the edge of something a little more tender.

This is part of a longer unfolding in your willingness to air your raw and authentic self in relationships. Perhaps a wisdom tradition offers a generous new slant on the contractions of your rebirthing. Your wounds themselves become portals into deeper revelation.

This week, the Sun helps us channel the bounty of Jupiter and both Saturn and Jupiter station direct. Learn how to make the most of this potent combo with journal prompts on the CHANI app. Learn how to make the most of this potent combo with journal prompts on the CHANI app.

Taurus & Taurus Rising

What if our professional schemes resembled, a bit more, a child and their sandcastle? Imagine the care — loosening each pail-shaped turret, finger-stamping the battlements, clawing out the moat — only to have the tide claim it. For the castle to be razed and rinsed. And to start again.

The past few years have been an initiation in getting your castles seaworthy. In your career, this has brought expansion and contraction in equal measure. A swell of ideas, followed by the real, unsexy labor required to keep it afloat.

In particular, the last few months may have led to some rewinding, some system checks and adjustments. By the end of this week, you have the green light to keep expanding in your career. The work won’t always be glamorous or Insta-worthy, but then, the truest moments in life tend to be less neatly captioned.

With Venus in Sagittarius now, there’s also a free-wheeling quality to the ways we court each other, which may not jive with your desire for more tactile and rooted connection. Nevertheless, the coming weeks offer an opportunity to use this sprightliness to make bounding strides in a healing journey.

Now is the time to take a multi-pronged approach to how you dislodge the ghosts of sorrows past. Shooting the arrows of many therapies into the sky, you may be surprised at what seemingly off-the-wall method lands.

Gemini & Gemini Rising

When we’re learning a new subject, or testing a theory, or dabbing a toe over the threshold of a mystery tradition, there’s a time when we’re breathless to understand as much as possible. That time is almost always followed by a period of settling into the perch of what we already know.

The path between the noob and the old hand is not linear, but circular, multi-headed, and rewinding. Since May and June, you’ve been retracing what you’ve apprenticed since the beginning of the year. Instead of hungering on to incorporate fresh facts and information, you’ve had to consolidate, integrate, and marinade in what you’ve learned.

After this week, you can start roaming again. You can add more theories, books, and ideas to your quiver. You can scrawl the most elaborate mind maps and follow the web where it takes you.

When Venus enters Sagittarius on Wednesday, you crave the learning that percolates in conversation with another — and there’s sure to be a flirty subtext too. The open questions trailing from your closest relationships may spill over into your career, and vocational pursuits. This is part of a much longer surrender to the wild winding of your life path.

An offhand remark from your bestie, or first date, may have you questioning your place in the world. Some of this feedback may be useful in defining who you want to be when you grow up, but it’s important to remember that these outside perspectives are not rooted in your lived reality.

Your life path may seem bewildering to those with a lower threshold for mystery, but there is magic in not knowing where you’ll be in five years. Trust the synchronicity that brought you here.

Cancer & Cancer Rising

Since May and June of this year, you’ve been subtly, even subliminally, retracing over the oaths, pinky swears, and commitments you’ve made to a significant collaborator.

Possibly you’ve felt a need to slow down these contracts — whether because your situation has shifted since you co-created that brain child, or because you want to recall the intricacies that led you here. Each “yes” inked on a dotted line or carved into initials on a tree trunk.

Even the collaborations you have blissfully merged into, which have stretched your own goals in helpful and everlasting ways: these have boundaries and codes of conduct. The last few months have prompted you to feel your way along the edges of these boundaries so you can make them mindful again.

After this week, you feel secure enough in your vows that you can start expanding into them, whether that involves making your promises bolder, or embodying that daring yourself in order to meet your loftiest, loudest dreams.

Meanwhile, Venus in Sagittarius has a way of bringing cheerful spontaneity to your work rhythms and rituals of self care. The mysteries of a healing journey continue to haunt in idle moments, and no amount of hustle will defer this deeply necessary (though not always comfortable) process. Yet breakthroughs feel a little easier now, and you find sweet support in your work and wellness rituals.

There’s comfort in being of use, and spiritual satisfaction in a job well done. This honing of your more practical skills may spill over into the elbow grease you’re willing to put into your emotional world. Your mental health journey, like your work day, can be parceled into manageable steps.

Leo & Leo Rising

Wide vistas and frontiers of pleasure open in your life now. These worldly delights inform a longer unfolding in the abundance you seek in your closest relationships and your need to define exactly what this looks like (and doesn’t). Perhaps the wild and raucous side of yourself could be brought to your more intimate entanglements too.

You may find that a pleasure-trip or a staycation allows you and a significant other to deepen your bonds, affirm your commitment to mutual growth, and crystallize exactly what is needed for the relationship to thrive — in lean times, as well as lush.

Even in the dizziest romances or besotted friendships, there comes a time when you think: how did we get here? Is this for keeps? Sometimes these moments are inspired by your own hesitation or uncertainty, but there can also be a nagging fear that it’s too good to be true, that happiness comes with a price or a finish line.

And those fears might be right. Life on earth comes with a necessary finish line, and every partnership requires sacrifice, even if we’re only surrendering our freewheeling autonomy. Yet there’s something about love that defies linear time.

Arguably, without love and life’s finish line, we wouldn’t find the same euphoric heights with each other. What joyous synchronicity that we’re occupying this earth at this same time. Starting this week, you’re reminded of the bounty partnerships offer you, the life that grows in the corners of your boundaried commitments, and the promise of dancing each other home.

Virgo & Virgo Rising

Over the past few months, you may have had the sense that your work is boa-constricting around your days, that you’re missing the freedom of periods where you were less firmly entrenched in your tasks. Quite possibly you’ve been putting in longer days, or hopscotching from responsibility to responsibility, with every activity in your day feeling obligatory.

You might already know this pace isn’t sustainable, that you need to peek under the hood of your calendar app to claim more spaciousness, more breath, more room to simply be.

After this week, that space will feel easier to come by, though it begins with you announcing some boundaries around your time. You’ll express these needs to other people too, yes, but first (and this is possibly harder), you’ll have to identify them for yourself.

As this negotiation with yourself unfolds, the season of swaying scales sweetens matters at home. You crave cozy nights in with your chosen family, and the arts, stories, and songs passed down through generations, or preserved in the web of your ancestry, bring deep comfort.

As the belly laughs flow at home, the coziness of it all may trigger an uncertainty you’ve felt around partnership. Perhaps a yearning to enmesh your beloveds with the sturdiness of your home life surfaces now. This is part of a much longer unfolding, as certain relationships shape-shift and your head spins trying to find new vessels to contain them.

As you weave elaborate stories around an elusive entanglement, what if you redirected that imaginative power to envision exactly the friend or lover you need to be to yourself to keep the home fires of your heart burning?

Libra & Libra Rising

There’s a chance you’ve felt disenchanted with your pleasure rituals over the past few months, that your watering hole meetups or Zoom book clubs or love affairs bear the burden of responsibility.

What began as a flirtation or diversion is starting to feel obligatory — you “should” text that person or cook dinner with your roommates or attend that show or poetry reading, but for whatever reason right now … you’d rather not.

Since May and June of this year, you’ve had the chance to first remember (or revise) what brings you joy, and second, extricate yourself from every entanglement that doesn’t meet this criterion.

Starting this week, the malaise dissipates, and your thrills are easier to come by. The same goes for your creative life. If your inner fount of the muses is feeling like a mosquito-haunted drainage ditch, that stagnation shifts this week as well.

Help and brain fertilizer are on the way, but until then, this swampy patch beckons you to remember what you truly want to create and participate in.

This all may plug into a longer process of crystallizing your visions of pleasure, Eros, and the good life. Perhaps it’s you who needs to be persuaded to demarcate more time for worldly delights? When was the last time you turned your famous pampering on yourself?

Scorpio & Scorpio Rising

We sign contracts when we lease a home, or enter a marriage, or a new job, but the families we’re born into are not typically gated with dotted lines. There’s a double edge to this consentlessness.

On the one hand, our vows to each other are non-verbal and unretractable — we ~have to~ care for our young ones until they can care for themselves. In return, young ones will always search for that groundwater of love, despite the surface (or sub-surface) SNAFUs.

On the other hand, there’s no ritual here. No moment where we say “yes,” and acknowledge the responsibilities required of us and the other people. We do have a choice about whose lives we stay yoked to — but these choices are the fruits of adulting.

Over the past few months, you’ve been tracing over the knots of those heart ties. After this week, something feels helpfully loosened or smoothed over. You can return your gaze to the road ahead, rather than the one trailing behind.

By Wednesday, your thoughts drift to your resources, your balance book, and your checking account. Blessings may stream in from multiple sources, and it’s up to you to cast your net wide enough to catch what’s falling from bending branches.

The bounty you’re enjoying now could feed into a longer journey you’ve been on around consolidating your roots, and defining who belongs in your most private bunker.

Since December of last year, you’ve been nudged awake to the responsibilities of your chosen family containers. There’s potential here for abundance, like joining with your neighbors to tend to a community garden, but it will require consistency and commitment from all involved.

Sagittarius & Sagittarius Rising

Maybe you’ve felt disenchanted with your social feeds lately, or a writing project has slowed to a crunchy halt. The past few months have necessitated a ritual of combing back over past documents or dialogues to assess what’s working and where to go from here.

This work may have been subtle, unfolding in the liminal minutes you spend in the shower or unclogging the tea leaves from your drain. Or it may have required literal stops, starts, and reversals when it comes to your communication habits and daily exchanges. While there is no strictly linear progress, the path forward will be smoother this week, with an ability to conquer each molehill.

Then starting on Wednesday, the vibes are simply in your favor. Who is pulling up a stump at your fire? What do you attract into your field when you trust the bow-string tension of your delight?

This season of flattering lighting might lead to deeper questions around your roots, however. As you coast, again, on the sheer force of your optimism, when does the drift prevent you from sturdier anchorage? When does your famous charm — which could allow you to surf couches forever if you let it — start to feel like a strain?

The challenge will be clarifying exactly the anchorage that will support your personal growth right now. Choosing what’s built to last among this embarrassment of riches is your task in the weeks ahead.

Capricorn & Capricorn Rising

Starting this week, matters of love and connection could feel a little elusive, as if seen through a dark glass. Lovers slip through your fingers like water, or a friendship is shape-shifts in ways you don’t have words for yet.

Secret liaisons and indulgences kindle your passionate side, though care must be taken that liminal entanglements don’t compromise your self-worth, or your pocketbook (and you have worked very hard indeed on both).

The past few months have possibly seen a contraction in your accounts and spending. Even if there’s been no material shift, you’ve been playing the ant to another party’s grasshopper: packing away your breadcrumbs to pre-empt any dips in your flows of plenty. Your pragmatism is one that acknowledges the situation could always worsen — just as it could astonishingly improve.

This week helps stabilize any unknowns and helps you feel confident in moving forward again, but you’ll also need time to rest, release tension, and recharge your cha-cha batteries.

With Venus in Sagittarius on Wednesday, you fall in love with the spaciousness of your solitude and repose. Rest stops and private time could be the portal to forays through the collective unconscious.

You might also find that a wild and restless part of yourself is waiting to be claimed in that cabin retreat in the woods, or a more personal inner sanctum. What parts of you come to life in spaces beyond prying eyes or the digital box of mirrors? In what ways is privacy itself an increasingly forbidden (and delightful) fruit?

Aquarius & Aquarius Rising

Though your first approach to life can be sober, and your resting mode more aloof, there’s a wild and raucous side of you that comes out within the group. The next few weeks may shower you with delightful opportunities to let your freak flag fly with other misfit toys and merry rebels.

In fact, your networks may provide a soft landing, as you continue to carve the authentic ‘you’ out of raw stone. In some ways it’s easier to surrender to hundreds of unknown hands when you crowd surf, than share your unfinished masterpiece with a single person. What are these collective enfoldings teaching you about trusting yourself too?

This longer process of self-discovery has been as much about deletion as deliberate marks, as you’ve been made aware of the people, places and things that will not support the long game of individuation. Your potential dwells in the negative-space you’re clearing. For now, you reveal yourself in everything you’ve stripped away.

You can’t always tell from the surface whether the tide is flowing in or out, but this sea change is always met with the deepest inner churning. As Saturn and Jupiter station direct in your sign this week, you may sense a profound pivoting, or gathering, even if you don’t have the clearest perspective on it yet.

Trust your wants. Trust your body-magnetism toward your next ideal path. The way forward is opening for you.

Pisces & Pisces Rising

We all do it. We all lapse into self-undoing patterns, habits, and thoughts — but this year you’ve been initiated into a special apprenticeship with the ghosts of past mistakes.

Since May or June, your progress on this front has possibly felt like you’re paddling through creamed honey — but this week, the current accelerates to match you. That inner pond of reflection buoys you again, and it’s easier to float in the right direction.

Meanwhile, with Venus in Sagittarius on Wednesday, your higher ups are all ears for your visions. Just make sure you stay grounded in your truth and goals, as the big whales circle, and your collective offerings start to make waves.

This moment of good press may connect to a longer unfolding in the way you present yourself to the world. You cannot help but embody the imagination, artistry, glamor, and transcendence flowing effortlessly through you now.

However, all worldly success turns to ashes if you’re not scheduling in ample time to rest and absorb all the change on a cellular level. Naps, private time, and calculated retreats from the public eye will be the secret to your long-term (and sustainable) success.