Weekend Entertainment Guide 1/3/25
Will books survive 2025?
Welcome to the first Weekend Entertainment Guide of 2025! It’s likely to be a significant year with multiple outer planets exploring new signs. How drastic are the changes going to be? Well, that’s where there’s room for interpretation.
Remembering Johanna Mitchell
No one did an astrological forecast for the year quite like Johanna Mitchell. As a leader in the astrological community of Eugene, Oregon, she rallied crowds at Tsunami Books every January for many years to give her take on the months ahead.
She died of ALS at the end of 2018, and I am sad that she did not get to see me grow into myself as a public astrologer. She lives on in the notes I took in my diaries at her annual lectures. In the excerpt below from January 5, 2013, her coverage of the astrology of 2013 included Jupiter changing sign from Gemini to Cancer. During 2025, one Jupiter cycle later, Jupiter will again move from Gemini to Cancer.
My 2025 forecast
I wrote a 2025 astrological forecast for Tarot.com. As detailed there, we will get our first taste of the following outer planets in new signs: Saturn in Aries, Uranus in Gemini, and Neptune in Aries.
I saw that coming
The following letter to the editor in the December 19, 2024, Eugene Weekly caught my eye:
A Nod to Parker Learning Gardens
Parker Learning Gardens is growing mightily! The 330-acre educational organic farm has spent the pandemic offering outside education to children and families, offering children’s garden clubs and teen garden clubs, fresh cider-pressing and apple gleaning to low-income and neuro-divergent families in Lane County since 2020. Check out our website (ParkerLearningGardens.org) to donate and to see how you can help.
Robin Winfree-Andrew
Eugene
Three years ago, I would have been more likely to see a letter referring to “low-income families and families of color” than a letter referring to “low-income and neuro-divergent families.” This tracks with my prediction in Weekend Entertainment Guide 9/13/24 that DEI efforts will be more focused on neurodiversity than race by 2027 as Saturn and Neptune move from Pisces to Aries. I don’t see this particular shift as morally bad or morally good — I just see it as a natural part of life that the collective’s interest fluctuates from one subject to another over time.
(To make a minor clarification to Weekend Entertainment Guide 9/13/24, it was actually April 4, 2024, that I first expressed the idea of neurodiversity overtaking racial issues in a private conversation, and then seeing the displays at Powell’s on April 7, 2024, provided powerful validation.)
Yes, we do have an unusually high number of outer planets all starting to change sign at once in 2025, hot on the heels of Pluto’s recent move from Capricorn to Aquarius. I personally don’t think this means that the extraterrestrials are imminently coming to whisk us away from all our problems, though. I think the more likely outcome is that we will still be stuck here and stuck with each other, but we won’t be able to count on the rules being the same. Priorities and alliances could be reconfigured to the point it becomes at least temporarily unclear which behaviors are acceptable versus which will get you in trouble.
As discussed in Weekend Entertainment Guide 12/27/24, one potential area of change is increased awareness of telepathy. Jupiter now in Gemini might be starting to stir that pot, and then the issue could expand further when Uranus enters Gemini starting in 2025.
It emerged in a comment exchange with
on Weekend Entertainment Guide 12/27/24 that what I really fear about a potential collective increase in telepathic abilities is that we won’t get grace and understanding as the rules we have long been accustomed to suddenly change on us. The same sort of fear could apply to the prospect of social change surrounding many other issues including but not limited to neurodiversity. Whatever the situation, it might be wise to have patience with people who are getting used to something new instead of being quick to punish them for every infraction.Hot on Substack
, A New World Begins in 2025Well, there’s an idea:
We should be buying hard copies of our favorite books, especially history and science books. The worst version of this nightmare, with Saturn and Neptune in Aries, looks like not just book bans, but mass book burnings and deletions of our archives and histories. (Incidentally, while you’re buying books, if you haven’t already, buy as many vibrators/sex toys as you can afford and store, because I suspect that the Christian Nationalists in power will do whatever is possible to make them illegal using the Comstock Act next year.)
I have gone on record in Weekend Entertainment Guide 8/9/24 predicting the opposite regarding books — given that the last Saturn in Aries transit in the 1990s saw the emergence of raunchy South Park, I think our more likely near future is that the oppressive literary cancel culture of the Neptune in Pisces era will be replaced with a wild free-for-all in literature and other art forms.
However, it is worth noting a dissenting perspective because I have heard the same idea from multiple sources. While I have my diary from 12 years ago out of storage, I will relay a conversation with a senior astrologer I documented there in January 2013. I remember this astrologer, whom I have not spoken to in many years, as a private person, so I will redact her name out of respect for that, and I ask anyone referring to her in the comments to do so too. I don’t know what her political preferences were, but her general vibe and presentation were very different from those of Weiss, so it is striking that two people very different from each other would independently reach the same conclusion.
. . . I said nothing could happen to [name redacted] until there were about 30 more young people in [the astrology community] to split up her books, as I can’t take them all myself. She said she was planning to bury them in the [location redacted] to protect them from being burned about a dozen years out. I asked if this was about the dwads of the Age of Pisces, and she said no, it was about Neptune in Aries, a period that would be marked by the idea that everyone must believe one thing. She doesn’t know what that one thing would be, but the last Neptune in Aries period was the U.S. Civil War renowned for its bloodiness.
Regarding Weiss’s statement on sex toys, I think the greater threat to the enjoyment of masturbation these days is along the lines of this Reddit thread where people share anecdotes about energetically sensing that others were masturbating with them in mind. Although it is often wise to take Reddit content with a grain of salt, I believe some individuals do have various sorts of telepathic experiences whether or not it is convenient for everyone else, and we definitely need to figure out how the social norms around this are going to work.
Meanwhile, banning sex toys would run into one of the big problems that attempts to ban guns now run into — people can just 3D print whatever they want these days. And if it comes to that, the Christian Nationalists are not going to ban carrots and cucumbers, because then they’d have to admit they’re the ones with the dirty minds.
Weiss also provides a list of significant planetary ingresses and aspects throughout 2025.
, Metaphysical Publishing Trends for 2025Reed interviews editor Lee Anderson about likely publishing trends for 2025: higher paper costs due to tariffs, more AI, more self-publishing.
, 60. I Am Not My Business and My Business Is Not MeFontana brings up the issue of synastry between your natal chart and your business’s natal chart. I am still classified as a sole proprietor but would like to split my publishing efforts off as an LLC at some point, so this is relevant.
, 2025 Tarot Journal - 377 PromptsThrough January 2025, Boyer is offering a 2025 tarot journal for free download.
Joe G. Santos via
, Capricorn II: The myth Saturn's childrenSantos points out that the second decan of Capricorn, where the Sun is now transiting, includes four degrees of Jupiter’s terms and six degrees of Venus’s terms.
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What is going around these days?!?
I got sick for the first time in a while on Dec. 30. At first, I was actually relieved to get sick — I had been under so much mental stress about a variety of issues, including end-of-the-year income calculations, that finally experiencing physical symptoms seemed like a release of the stress somehow. I got pain in my tongue, which is not new for me; I first recall experiencing that when I got sick right after finishing a summer school class the summer I turned 12, so I figured it was the same sort of letting go at the end of the term. I also got painful congestion in my ears, which is another common complaint for me. Maybe the underlying tongue weakness and ear weakness both make sense for my natal Mercury-Pluto square early in the signs of Leo and Scorpio, and of course that’s all getting triggered by the transiting Mars-Pluto opposition now.
The intensity of the problem wound up being unusual this time around, though. My tongue was so painful that I had to take extra-strength acetaminophen to be able to swallow my own spit. It hurt to chew, so I had to stick with oatmeal-consistency food. Though I’m often helped by herbal supplements that drain the lymphatic system, that wasn’t fixing it this time.
My mom spends a lot of time in the stranger corners of the internet and had heard there that nicotine gum is helpful for various ailments. The morning of Jan. 2, I was so uncomfortable that I tried nicotine gum, which I had never tried before, and I was chowing down on toast half an hour later. Since I started the nicotine gum, I have not needed to take any acetaminophen. Today, Jan. 3, I still feel under the weather, but I can at least eat normally. Super weird!
Thank you for sharing! Looking at these transits in light of the macro cosmic environment (e.g., far more solar radiation reaching the surface of this and all other planets), I share your sentiment that the balance will tip towards greater openness despite efforts to exert forceful control over the flow of information. It's good to be aware of the possibility that books might be banned to the extent that this encourages us to (1) reaffirm the value we find in books and (2) choose to place our focus on creating a world where information can be exchanged freely and openly.
It's also interesting to note that with telepathy becoming more and more accessible to greater numbers of people (including me - and also you), books may well start to fade away not because they are banned but because they are denser, more cumbersome ways to share information.
Great to have the conversations and what comes to me is that this growth assists the curiosity and caring that I think humanity is being asked to develop and expand upon now. The north node of Jupiter is in Cancer and with Uranus in Gemini coming soon (also south node of Uranus is in Sagittarius) getting curious about learning about consciousness rather than responding with projections of fear or defensiveness is important. Just as we hopefully would be with any child learning about itself. Consciousness is always birthing itself and it learns about itself through how we are parented and stewarded through the process. I think we are being asked with mars retrograde in cancer to learn how to parent society from a more wholistic and playful way.. one that does not harm but learns with “the child” and does not teach that the learning process in developing skills is “bad” but that learns from the introspective process and fine tuning … just like any art project. We learn something deeper even when we color outside the lines and we become more skilled. Humanity has been trained to project fear when it doesn’t understand the bigger process.. we do not need to damage people in the learning process just as we wouldn’t want to damage a child learning and maturing through developing and practicing one’s skills. So much to contemplate on that, really appreciate our conversations Eva!