Knowledge Amid Chaos

Due to having two new moons in Virgo, the last of which happened in the final degree, the current lunation had Sun in Libra in all but its initial day. Indeed, the full moon in Aries already occurred ahead of the Libra new moon that will similarly initiate a lunar cycle with Sun in Scorpio. Such trend of out-of-phase new and full moons will continue until 2027, when we will have two full moons in Scorpio: on April 20 and May 20.

Current World Affairs

I began writing this article on October 13, hours before the Last Quarter phase that signifies a crisis of consciousness when trying to assimilate what the Full Moon phase revealed. We discussed both phases in the last article and indicated that the full-moon polarity of Libra and Aries could signify “diplomacy between nations versus the individual’s right to sovereign action”. By far the most important development has been the cessation of hostilities in Gaza which led to the loss of many innocent civilian lives. In that part of the globe, the full moon occurred on October 7, on the second anniversary of the horrific terrorist attack orchestrated by Hamas.

Two days later, a rudimentary peace plan was agreed upon which entered in effect on the 10th, when the eminently practical Venus in Virgo was in opposition to Saturn in Pisces doing its best to structure the masses. The Last Quarter, you may recall, arrived hours before Venus entered Libra and formed an exact opposition to Neptune in Aries. The living hostages have just been released in exchange for many Palestinian prisoners and hostages held by Israel. Also on the 10th, Pluto had slowed down enough in its retrograde motion to be considered stationary and it will have come to a complete stop later today, the first of the outer planets to do so.

A Chaotic Year’s End

Autumn marks the final three months of the year and, unfortunately, 2025 will end as chaotic as it started. Throughout the year, we have witnessed the transpersonal planets (and Saturn) working together through a Minor Grand Trine configuration that is highly-energetic and self-contained. Whether we realize it or not, humanity is rowing through life at the rhythm they are beating. Even though they briefly entered the Yang sign they will occupy for many years, all of them soon began to move retrograde and turned their energy away from direct action, which made us feel stuck. Moreover, all but Pluto are returning to their previous Yin sign to take care of some unfinished business as soon as they begin to move direct once again. To give you an example, last year Pluto reentered Capricorn in September and turned direct a few weeks later, just in time to oversee the US presidential elections that resulted in a powerful plutocracy.

Saturn, the fastest of the bunch (it “only” needs 29.4 years to complete an orbit), was the first to return to Pisces on September 1 and it will be the first to change direction on November 28. However, next week’s return of Neptune to Pisces is what will be felt more chaotic, bringing back a lack of clarity and disinformation to the world around us. Whereas Saturn will return to Pisces 25°09′, Neptune will only go back as far as Pisces 29°22′ before it changes direction, thereby staying in the anaretic degree of its sign, and the zodiac, until January 26 when it will begin fourteen years in Aries. Furthermore, Saturn and Neptune will be at most 4° apart in that span, which is closer than they have been in Pisces. After nearly three years of frustration, Saturn will have learned that it cannot structure the ocean, but it can surely cast a net!

Two Technological Bubbles

As mentioned earlier, Pluto has just begun to inch forward in Aquarius. I had already planned to write about the AI bubble when a YouTube video appeared in my subscription list. In it, Richard Murphy, a Professor Emeritus at University of Sheffield Management School, argues that two economic bubbles, not one, are about to burst: Artificial Intelligence and cryptocurrencies. Since both are highly technical, and thus Aquarian in nature, they are being subject to what Pluto will be doing in that sign through 2044, namely, unearthing the truth. Aquarius is ruled by Uranus which, although retrograde, is still forming a near exact trine (under 1°) with Pluto from the sign of Gemini. Incidentally, that powerful trine will be exact five times between 2026 and 2028.

21st Century Ponzi

I studied the technology behind cryptocurrencies years ago but as Professor Murphy notes, the bubble has nothing to do with technology; it is driven by greed. The price of cryptocurrencies continues to increase because more people buy what has become a scarce “resource”, which I enclose in quotation marks because it is completely useless. Except for rather dubious deals, one cannot use cryptocurrencies to purchase goods so they don’t function like currencies. In reality, they are instruments of speculation whose value increase when more people buy them. Thus, new buyers drive the price up and bring gains to older ones, which is the definition of a Ponzi scheme. Like in any such schemes, the price of all cryptocurrencies will come crashing down as soon as people realize there is no value behind them and no new money is poured into the scheme. Even the so-called stablecoins, pegged to the value of a commodity or a physical currency, suffer from the same problem. The last time we had a financial crisis due to greedy speculation was in 2008, when the banking industry had to be rescued from reckless lending and, incidentally, Pluto entered Capricorn.

Artificial Intelligence?

The Artificial Intelligence bubble, argues Professor Murphy, is driven not by greed but by fear, the fear of missing out on what has been dubbed the next industrial revolution.¹ Just as machinery replaced the physical work of humans, the story goes, AI will replace their thinking. The problem with this story is that Artificial Intelligence is a misnomer, for a computer will never be intelligent. The Merriam-Webster dictionary has several definitions of intelligence, with the earliest (14th century) being: the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations. A later entry defines intelligence simply as: the act of understanding. I emphasize understanding in both definitions because that is something computers will never achieve due to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems. They prove that understanding cannot be achieved by computation, regardless of its complexity. Although I am currently talking about neural networks in an enormous array of special-purpose circuitry, it also applies to the human brain when viewed solely as a computational engine.

Unlike today’s cryptocurrencies, I don’t think AI is a completely useless technology. In fact, it is already an incredibly powerful tool to speed up the uncovering of underlying patterns in immense quantities of very complex data. It does so by coming up with novel conceptual approaches, new ideas, based on its training data, which is why I call AI: Artificial Ideation. However, without intelligence, AI will never replace the thinking worker and the obscene amount of money being spent in monstrous data centers will never see positive returns. Some economists are already warning of a crisis similar to the dot-com one at the start of the century. That crisis was fueled by unrealistic expectations of what the Internet would bring in terms of productivity gains. Pluto in Aquarius is already poking holes at many scientific theories, like the silly Big Bang, and Artificial Intelligence is on that list.

Libra-powered Lunation

Although most of the upcoming lunation will happen with Sun in Scorpio, the Libra energy will be strongly felt not only at the new moon but also in the waxing phases. Libra is the sign that promotes personal relationships based on a values system. Such a system is initially conditioned by family and society but acquires an individual character as we grow older and more experienced. Indeed, it is those relationship experiences that the Libra individual craves so as to hone his values system. Someone having a strong Libra energy in his chart, such as Sun, Moon or the Ascendant in that sign, often appears obsessed with the value of everything. He is constantly weighing people, relationships or experiences against what he considers acceptable. Thus, we have the Libra symbol of a balance as an instrument to compare the unknown mass of an object, say a gold nugget, to well-known masses in order to ascertain its value. Unfortunately, many astrologers confuse the symbol with the scales of justice and erroneously proclaim Libra to be the sign of law and order, or state that Libra people are balanced. They may or may not be, but that is not a Libra trait.

In addition to having Sun and Moon in Libra at the new moon, its ruler, Venus, entered the sign on October 13 and immediately formed a Kite with the transpersonal planets, activating them. Unlike Mars, Venus is a much subtler trigger but no less potent, especially when in Libra, a dynamic cardinal sign. As it would be expected, Venus brings up the concept of value out of what we are trying to accomplish. In particular, many of the discussions around the Pluto-related issues mentioned earlier, the fallacies in AI and in cryptocurrencies, will be centered around personal value. Having Sun, Mars and Mercury in Scorpio, the latter until it enters Sagittarius at the First Quarter, will allow us to dig deep while searching for value.

New Moon in Libra

But enough preliminaries, the new moon in Libra will occur on October 21 at 5:25 a.m. in California, at 6:25 a.m. in Mexico City, or at 2:25 p.m. in Central Europe. The conjunction of Sun and Moon, characteristic of any new moon, will be at Libra 28°22′, as shown in the following chart:

As usual, we begin by looking at the Sun–Moon conjunction and we see that it is at the vertex of a Yod with the sextile of Uranus (Gemini 0°39′) and Neptune (Aries 0°01′) as base, focusing the retrograde energies of those two planets. This could favor relationships based on intuitive and even inspirational value-judgments. As you can see, Neptune will be poised to re-enter Pisces in just a few hours for it will literally be at its threshold. On the one hand, such an entrance will trigger the aforementioned chaos and increase the amount of disinformation around but, on the other, the immediate conjunction with Saturn (Pisces 26°21′) will enable much-needed sober reflections on issues like migration and maritime trade. On a personal note, we may receive inspiration about how to structure our dreams once Saturn changes direction on November 28.

Pluto Direct and Strong

Ever since Pluto briefly entered Aquarius in March, 2023, the specter of revolutions worldwide has been raised. Indeed, the last time Pluto was in Aquarius, from 1778 to 1798, the world saw multiple revolutions and perhaps none was more important than the French Revolution (1789–1799), fought over a gross inequality where the privileged upper classes, chiefly the nobility, lived in luxury while paying no taxes. Similarly, the current “Gen-z protests” that began in Asia but have since spread to Africa are seeing young people revolt against the ruling elites. These protests are growing organically from discontent expressed over social media, a very Aquarian expression. As a result they are mostly leaderless, as seen in Nepal, Madagascar and Morocco (among others). I will say more about this in the upcoming preview for 2026.

The square of Sun (and Moon) with Pluto (Aquarius 1°23′) will get much stronger on the 23rd when Sun enters Pluto’s sign, Scorpio, and it will be exact on October 24 at 1°24′ of Scorpio and Aquarius. Also in Scorpio, notice the exact conjunction between Mars (20°03′) and Mercury (20°46′). Furthermore, Pluto is still in Aquarius 2—”An unexpected thunderstorm” or the probability of the improbable—and also out of bounds until the Scorpio new moon on November 20. Taking it all together, the waxing phases will have more than enough energy to dig as deeply as needed to uncover the truth and make it public. Let me call your attention as well to the semi-square formed between Pluto and the North Node (Aries 17°49′), the indicator of opportunities and synchronicities thrown at us by life; the semi-square will be operational through the entire lunation. Pluto will be very involved, both directly and through the planets in Scorpio (Sun, Mercury and Mars) through the month, or at least in the dynamic waxing phases.

Everything is Maximized

The two main conjunctions of the chart: Sun–Moon in Libra and Mars–Mercury in Scorpio, are linked by Jupiter (Cancer 24°26′). Jupiter is at the vertex of a T-Square configuration with the opposition of Sun–Moon and Chiron (Aries 24°42′) and it is part of a Grand Trine with Mars–Mercury and Saturn. First, the opposition of the lights in Libra with Chiron in Aries is one that may bring out insecurities in all of us, especially in the area of personal relationships. We have talked in past articles about how Chiron affects our personal Chiron when activated, thus triggering our personal insecurities. Jupiter will not only increase our awareness about them but will let us find comfort and solace at home.

On the other hand, the water Grand Trine will provide creative energy to the truth-digging mentioned earlier. A trine of Jupiter and Saturn always makes us think of social implications. If we think of Saturn in Pisces as casting a net, Jupiter in Cancer could be a reference to the homeland and Mars–Mercury would indicate a relentless search for what is really going on in it. Do not be surprised when more truth is revealed unexpectedly—a reference, once again, to the Aquarius 2 symbol. Finally, Venus (Libra 9°29′), which is currently serving as trigger, will form a wide semi-square with Mercury and by extension with the Mars–Mercury conjunction. Venus will add an important value-judgment component to the search for truth.

Sabian Symbols Interpretations

I have written on various occasions about how the Sabian symbols were compiled by Marc Edmund Jones in 1925. He had been researching the ancient wisdom of the Sabian civilization since he founded the Sabian Assembly in 1923 and the symbols were channeled by a gifted medium, Elsie Wheeler, from one of the Sabian Brothers. Diana Roche, a lifelong member of the Sabian Assembly, wrote The Sabian Symbols in 1998 after 40 years of working with the symbols herself. As I have said in the past, the book includes reproductions of the original handwritten descriptions by MEJ but reinterprets them for modern astrologers. Dane Rudhyar, who corresponded with Marc Jones since the early 1930s but was never a member of the Assembly, also worked with the symbols for many years and provided a holistic interpretation in his 1973 book An Astrological Mandala. Since there are two important conjunctions in the chart, I will talk about two different Sabian symbols.

Sun and Moon

The symbol for Libra 29, where Sun and Moon will be at the new moon, is: “Humanity seeking to bridge the span of knowledge”. Roche sees it as a desire to understand and achieve something significant, and that it “speaks to the fact that man has the capacity to make himself a channel for the wisdom that sustains and supports the world in which he lives.” As he often did, Rudhyar reworded the symbol as: “Mankind’s vast and enduring effort to reach for knowledge transferable from generation to generation” and further explained it as a deep sense of participation in, and commitment to, social processes which seek to bring to all men Truth and a greater Life.

Rudhyar reminds us that mankind’s most characteristic trait is the ability to bind time, that is, to “transfer to other men as yet unborn the harvest of his conscious experiences and his deliberate endeavors.” This ability is based on consciousness, choice, will and self-sacrifice for the sake of future human beings. It rests on a deep feeling of the value of community. There is a Conscious Participation (its key phrase) with other men and women in the vast process of a living civilization. I find it interesting that such a symbol be found just as we will be searching for truth, for it is clear that there is a large community tired of the constant lying and corruption of oligarchic elites. We want to effect real change for our children and grandchildren.

Mars and Mercury

Meanwhile, the Mars and Mercury conjunction will occur at Scorpio 21, the degree where we had the Scorpio new moon in 2023.² The Sabian symbol has the image: “A soldier derelict in duty”, one of the 27 symbols that MEJ tagged as reversed or negative. The symbol, according to Roche, speaks about living with the consequences of one’s impulsiveness. She interprets the soldier as one who made a commitment out of ego-driven reasons and now finds himself unwilling to fulfill it. Rudhyar changed the symbol to: “Obeying his conscience, a soldier resists orders”, expanded as a readiness to face the results of a refusal to follow the authoritarian patterns of an aggressive society. Back in 2023, I wrote a longer discussion about this symbol that is currently relevant because Sun and Moon were forming a conjunction with Mars; I invite you to read it.

To me, this symbol is about being true to oneself and the combination of Mars and Mercury are at the center of a search for truth that will be as profound and comprehensive as necessary. Sun, in a square with Pluto, will empower the acquisition of true knowledge while Moon will help us realize the value of a community that is linked by such search.

Wrapping Up…

The combination of external chaos with the search for truth reminds me of a saying: It’s good fishing in troubled waters. We must stay laser-focused in the search for our inner truth and disregard the external noise.

With Sun in Scorpio and Venus in Libra, the cycle will be ideal to work in our relationships. Mercury and Mars will create propitious conditions for deep intimate conversations.

As with any new moon, we are all encouraged to declare our intentions before it happens. I suggest no later than Monday night.

Always Love. 🌹🙏💖

Notes

1. In reality, there seems to be a conspiratorial arrangement between the AI companies, primarily OpenAI, the chip manufacturers, chiefly NVidia, and the companies that furnish and run the data centers, in particular Oracle. Many more companies are involved in the massive investments being made but those three are investing in each other to drive their respective stock prices through the roof. To give you an idea, NVidia’s stock valuation is bigger than the entire pharmaceutical industry! ↩︎
2. Some of you may recall that the new moon occurred on November 13, my birthday, and Scorpio 21 is where Sun is in my chart. Thus, the lunar month will begin with Mars and Mercury forming an exact conjunction with my Sun. Not only that, Libra 29, where we will have the new moon, is the same degree of Neptune in my chart, yielding another exact conjunction. I can’t wait to see what the waxing phases will bring me. ↩︎