Photo by Krystle Merrow

I always forget that Virgo season starts in the summer. When I think of Virgo I think of the order and calm I associate with the fall, not the fomo fun panic of the end of August, losing the months long battle against fruit flies and fantasizing about a back to school wardrobe.

Virgo, the unsung hero of the zodiac, is the helper we all need. She shows up at the end of the summer when we need the order she can provide. She knows we don’t have it yet, she’s here to clean up Leo’s mess, and prepare our homes and psyches for the colder months to follow. Virgo will help guide you out of the summer, if you let her, will care for you in your mess and get you together. Virgo has an internet reputation for being ornery and judgmental, but some of the least judgmental people I have ever known have had Virgo in their charts.

Virgo season often arrives as a cool breeze, psychically and temperately. This year where I live the first week of Virgo season was drastically cooler than the days that followed it, dry and breezy after days of torrential rain and uncomfortable humidity. This kind of marker of a transition of seasons makes me think of Virgo as a mutable sign, a sign about change. All the mutable signs are parts of the year when we transition from one season to another. This reminds me that astrology is fundamentally about weather.

Astrology, like weather, makes us notice the ways that the world around us affect our inner world. Feeling malaise on a rainy day, manic on hot sunny ones, and depressed in the dark months is how the earth’s inner atmosphere does this. Feeling exhausted during eclipses, feral at a full moon, or energized in a Mars transit is how our solar system does it.

Eclipses are one of the first things that got us as humans noticing and working with astronomy (which was then the same thing as astrology). It’s quite difficult to ignore a few seconds of darkness during a day or a suddenly hidden moon, so it’s no surprise we started to seek meaning from them. And to this day as an astrologer I find there are fewer regularly occurring astrological events that people hype up as much as eclipses: even though we cannot see the large majority of them, if you exist within a stone’s throw of people who are into astrology, you are gonna hear about eclipses.

Previously I’ve been kind of skeptical about eclipses and how much they affect us, given how common they are. My training is to look at the transits of the slow moving outer planets, because they’re the ones that shape our big pictures. Lunations and eclipses and mercury retrogrades, these are the everyday inconveniences against the backdrop of a tough season.

But now I’m here, in a week of inconveniences and against the backdrop of a tough summer, and fuck if I’m not feeling these inconveniences with the same depth as I have the actual challenges that have shaped this season. Small emotional setbacks after a few months of feeling like the guy in the ten of swords are quite literally the last couple swords in the back.

So in a year (few years) of astrology as intense as ours has been, in a world well reflecting that astrology, what’s the difference if that last sword is a profound loss or a missed deadline? You’re already down.

But the good news is: eclipses are short. I relate to them much the same way that I do to my luteal phase. I forget it’s happening, then spend a few days in a torpor of depression, and then realize what’s going on and feel totally normal (so you see, readers, being luteal during the eclipse is really doing a number on me).

This eclipse is happening in the Virgo-Pisces axis, along which sits our reality and our dreams. In Virgo we deal with the mundane to such exactitude it becomes profound: in Pisces we dream so often it’s daily. This lunar eclipse, with the sun in Virgo and the moon in Pisces, is the last of a two-year cycle of eclipses in these signs and the closing of themes in your life that started in September of 2024. Personally I finished grad school around that time, and the very detailed thematics of that process are precisely where these eclipses have happened in my chart, so this shit really works.

With that in mind, I am going to try my best to write about details as ornery and particular as possible for your horoscopes, letting you know what areas of your life you should look to for the two year cycle in question. Virgo season is a wonderful time pick things up and put them back together: my bestie recently said to me, “I feel like u need routine and a sweater,” and dear readers, I wish this for all of us.

As always, read for your rising sign if you know it, but don’t disavow whatever resonates.

With hopes I’ll regain my consistency,
Amelia

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