October invites us beneath the surface. In this month’s forecast, Rick Levine explores a powerful month of retrogrades, shifting perspectives and deep transformation as Venus and Mercury turn retrograde and a nearly stationary Pluto intensifies the astrology. Rick breaks down the key transits and lunations shaping October, why retrogrades may be asking us to pause rather than push harder, and how widening our perspective can help us navigate what emerges with greater awareness. From the Libra New Moon to a potent Taurus Full Moon square Pluto, this is a month for noticing what’s been hidden, reconsidering what we thought we knew, and becoming more conscious of what we’re ready to carry forward.
✨ Want to know what Venus Retrograde means for your sign? Download our FREE Venus Retrograde Guide for all 12 signs, including what this cycle is asking you to revisit, reassess, and explore in your own life: 👉 https://astrologyhub.com/venus
🎬 IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR:
00:00 – September Recap + The Astrology of October 2026
06:06 – Venus Retrograde: How to Work With Retrograde Energy
20:14 – The Outer Planets: The Bigger Astrology Story
25:59 – Pluto Transits: Transformation, Power & What’s Hidden
39:49 – Mars Trine Neptune: Turning Vision Into Action
40:34 – Libra New Moon: Relationships, Polarity & Perspective
52:51 – Taurus Full Moon: A Powerful T-Square With Pluto
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LINKS FROM THE EPISODE
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Study with Rick: https://portal.astrologyhub.com/produ…
Subscribe to Rick’s channel for an even more in-depth monthly breakdown of September: https://www.youtube.com/@RickLevine
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“It only takes one candle in a dark room to light up the whole room. And so we each need to become those candles.” – Rick Levine
Transcript
Laura: Welcome back to The Astrology Hub Podcast. We're here for another month ahead forecast with Rick Levine. So Rick, welcome back. It's great to be here with you. So we are recording this on September 24th, and last month you talked about September being kind of like breathing room, but like a really productive month, and that's definitely been my experience, but not in the way that I thought it would be.
Like, I feel like I'm experiencing some like post-eclipse clarity and like understanding how I can work with some of the things that have come up. Um, and so when I think about what you said about being productive, I feel like it's been very productive in that sense. So how does it look from your seat?
Rick: Well, uh, two things. One—why is it always two things? Two things, and I'll forget what the second one was. Um, two things. Uh, the first is that it's never quite the way we think it will be. I mean, that's the magic of the multilevel reality in which we live. We can have a good sense of what the planetary movements are. We can have stories and mythologies built around what they did in the past and what they might do now, but as it unfolds, reality never conforms to, you know, exactly what we were thinking. Um, that's the first thing.
The second thing, I think we talked about how this month was also—this month meaning September—was going to be like more dominoes falling, that things were… You know, that there was movement ahead, and yet there was also this clinging, um, onto the past that still isn't ready to quite give it up. Um, and so I think, you know, for me it's been a very productive month, but it's been an overwhelmingly, um… I don't want to say distracting month, but there's been so many things that have come up that have had to be dealt with one after another after another that adds to the productivity.
Um, but there's a frustration 'cause it seems that things still aren't moving quite along in the trajectory that we each might imagine as fast as we might have imagined that it would. And I think that, um, as we move into October, that flavor is going to change, but it still may not change quite in the flavor that we—two things again—one, want, or two, expect.
Laura: All right. So more surprises may be ahead then. So you also said that as we gear towards the end of September with Mars entering Leo, it's kind of starting that October story. So we're right before that. Um, talk to us about October. What is the story with October?
Rick: Well, um, in October, uh, I think the story of October uh, is really uh, the inner planets and the action that they make or don't make uh, because we have Venus and Mercury turning retrograde. Now, of course, Mercury turns retrograde three or three and a quarter times a year, and every now and then we get a year where we get a fourth retrograde or a part of it at the beginning or the end of the year. But Mercury basically turns retrograde, you know, every three months or so.
Um, and so that's not an unusual thing to happen. Venus, on the other hand, because it moves at a rate fairly close to the rate of Earth, we really only get, um, five retrogrades every eight years. So it's about, you know, a little around a year and a half or so between those retrogrades. And remember, all the other outer planets all go retrograde every year for a good portion of the year. So Venus is the planet that goes retrograde less common, or less often, um, than any of the other planets. And when it does, it's close enough to Earth that it does some stirring.
And I think that this month has a lot of the, uh, Venus retrograde story in it that as we get going will probably be a part of what we'll be talking about, because I really do think that Venus and Mercury together have a lot of the story of October and even into November, because we go into November with both of them still retrograde.
Um, and as we were talking about just before we turned the mic on, it's very unusual, um, that they both turn direct, um, on the same day in November, which really is kind of crazy. I think that's November 13th. Yeah, November 13th. Um, and so what is… It's almost like, what's going to be the outcome as we begin to move, uh, into the second part of November and into December when things then begin to be moving forward again?
And of course it will take some time for each of those two planets, both Mercury and Venus, to move out of what we call the retrograde shadow, the area where it's already been. So it really might not be until December when the pace really begins picking up, and then I think it's going to pick up really quickly. That's my energetic sense of all of this.
Ad Break / Announcer: Hi, friends. Here at Astrology Hub, we are all about giving you grounded and practical advice for the astrology ahead. So if you want to know what this Venus retrograde period means for your sign, we created a handy guide that goes over what Venus retrograde is, how to work with it, and horoscopes for all 12 signs. You can get yours totally free by going to astrologyhub.com/venus. Now, back to the episode.
Working with Venus Retrograde
Laura: So we talked a lot about Venus retrograde last episode, but Venus retrograde can bring up, like, old relationships from the past, financial issues, like issues around things that we really value or don't value. And so if that comes up for someone during Venus retrograde, like, what's a good way to engage with that energy versus just like thinking things are happening to you or thinking that they're meant to go backwards? Um, how do you work with that?
Rick: Yeah. Well, let me back up from that just a little bit, uh, because when people hear the word retrograde, they automatically go into a particular place. “Oh my God, Mercury's retrograde again. Oh no, I was going to…” Venus, you know, whatever the planet is. But we do have, um, both Venus and Mercury turning retrograde.
Um, and the thing that we need to understand about retrogrades is that astrology comes from a couple-thousand-year-old tradition. At least modern astrology derives, um, you know, from at least a couple of millennia, whether it's in the Eastern Vedic, you know, uh, Jyotish Indian tradition, or in the Hellenistic, um, Islamic medieval tradition here in the West.
And retrogrades are not looked on very kindly, and they're not for a very, very interesting reason that many modern astrologers don't even ever think about. And that is that planets are like radio stations. They're each, like, in a way, broadcasting their own signal. And just like a radio station, when a planet in its normal motion gets closer to Earth or farther away from Earth in its normal movements, that station gets louder and/or quieter.
And when a planet gets as close to Earth as it can get in its normal cycles, that's when perspective gets messed up. Just like if you hold a pencil or a finger close to your eye and close one eye and move it back and forth and switch your eyes, you can see the difference in perspective. But if you move your hand way out, it hardly moves at all.
And when a planet gets close to Earth, it looks like it's going backwards with respect to what's out there. Of course, retrograde planets don't really go backwards. But from Earth's point of view, they do cover territory that they've already covered, and that is its whole feeling of, like, people surface from the past. We don't move forward the way we've been moving forward with Mercury in our thinking and Venus with our production of values, our love, our romantic interests. And so there is that sense of time reversal.
But something else happens that people don't realize, and that is when a planet is retrograde, because it's closer to Earth than it is normally, the radio station is louder. It's that simple.
You know, when Mercury or Venus go retrograde, they are coming between the Earth and the Sun. If you have a, let's say, a Venus-Sun conjunction in your chart and Venus is retrograde, that means it's between the Earth and the Sun. Now, if you have a Venus conjunct Sun in your chart and it's not retrograde, that means it's on the far side of the Sun and really far away.
Those two conjunctions are incredibly different. And when a planet is retrograde, Mercury or Venus, it looks in our chart like a conjunction. When an outer planet—Jupiter, Saturn, Chiron, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Eris, whatever else you use—when any of those outer planets are retrograde, when they're closest to the Earth, they're on the same side of the Sun as the Earth, which means the Earth is between those planets and the Sun.
So if you have Mars opposite the Sun in your natal chart, it has to be retrograde because that's when it gets closest to Earth. And what we miss is that when planets are loud, when they're close to Earth, inner or outer planets, that energy just doesn't fit into everything that's going on. It needs to be dealt with.
I mean, imagine that you're a woman being brought up in, oh, in Greece, in the ancient and Hellenistic period of Greece, or in the 1300s or 1400s in Europe, and you're a member of a trade family, a fairly wealthy family, and your brothers are all learning Latin and Greek and studying music. And let me say you have Mercury and/or Venus retrograde. Your Mercury is loud, and the fact that you aren't allowed, um, to read or write… Because we're born in ancient times, we're born into a position, and we just simply need to live that out. We don't have freedom of what we now call, uh, personal growth, you know? That's a 20th-century concept in the West. And so if you can't figure out a way to take that expanded, loud, amplified Mercury language or Venus sense of emotional, aesthetic, beauty value, then you just simply have to be property, because as a woman, that's what you were, like it or not.
And so that is a heavy weight to bear because there's nothing you can do about it. Now, in modern times, when a planet is retrograde, either by natal chart, by birth, or by transit, that planet is still getting louder. Now, the problem we run into is trying to just say, “Oh, everything's the same,” because it's not, because that planet is louder.
And therefore, if we understand that during Mercury retrogrades—which we are now coming into, or which begins toward the end of the month on October 24th, but Mercury is already getting closer to Earth as it's slowing down as it moves toward its retrograde. And Venus, which turns retrograde at the beginning of the month on October 3rd, Venus is already slowing down here at the end of September, meaning that Venus is already closer to Earth and therefore louder.
The question is, what do we do with these louder energies? Do we try to just blot them out and live life like we normally do? Because if we do that, then they're going to come screaming in and going, “Look at me. Pay attention here.” Something happens, and we… Because those Mercury retrogrades, you know, the traditional lore says that we may see people from our past—Venus also—or that we may miss appointments. We may drive somewhere and make a left turn where it should have been right. We may transpose a date. This is all because our mind is working so much faster and we're not paying attention to it, and we try to fit it into that other realm, and boom, then something happens.
So how we work with Venus and Mercury retrogrades is being aware of them and not waiting until something happens and then go, “Huh, I wonder why that happened.” Now, even having said that, and for years… You know, karma has a way of coming back and biting you in the butt. And for years I've held this position: Oh, the negative parts of Mercury retrograde only happen to people who have, you know, weak or dysfunctional Mercuries, and, you know, quit whining, just get on with it.
Well, I don't say that anymore because I've been blasted enough to know that whether or not you're paying attention, things still happen. I mean, if you don't, going into a Mercury or Venus retrograde period, deal with Mercury, your computer, backing up your hard drive, doing things like that… A Mercury retrograde is not a great time to do a major software reinstall or computer upgrade. And obviously that's not always the case; sometimes you have to. But the reason why it's not a great time is that often when we do it, we do it with such an “Oh my God, this needs to happen now” sense of urgency that we don't take as much care as we might at another time, and therefore we go, “Oh shit, I forgot to back up that file and now it's lost.” Or we go, “Gee, if I waited just two more weeks, the new update would have happened and I wouldn't have had to deal with this whole problem.”
With the Venus retrograde, you know, it may be looking at your finances and looking at trying to take care of those things that should have been taken care of a long time ago. But as Venus gets closer and closer and closer to Earth during that retrograde period, those things may come blasting through and remind you of the things that you didn't do before. But you may not see it that way if you're not paying attention. You might just go, “Oh my God, I overdrew my checking account, and it's costing me this amount of money, and how did I let that happen?” You know? Or it happened to me. And so I think, like most astrology, the key is: how can I gain more awareness around the issues?
That may not have been the answer you wanted, but I think it helps people. There's nothing wrong with a retrograde, any more than anything being wrong with winter versus summer. These are natural parts of cycles, and as planets get louder and then quieter, and louder and quieter… You know, often we wait for a square to happen to do something that we would have been better off doing at the trine when the energy was flowing and easy and we thought, “No, I don't have to do that because there's nothing wrong with what's going on now.” And often it's exactly the opposite of what we think we should be doing.
Laura: We humans love to procrastinate until something really lights a fire under us. But what I'm hearing you say, Rick, is that we have some time before the retrogrades. Well, Venus is going to turn retrograde soon, but to fortify things, right? Like, if you've been putting something off, maybe prepare and fortify those areas of life. If something comes up during the retrograde, confront it head-on, and like, you know, you need to deal with that loud volume of the radio station. And take care during retrograde cycles, too.
Rick: Yeah, and there is something else. Sorry to interrupt you, but as you said that, there is something else though that I think is just as important in understanding. And it's not just about taking care of the things as they come up that we should have taken care of before; it's also in some way… You know, you can't inhale forever.
And sometimes when we get to a retrograde period, it's like we're working on a project and we're getting farther on it, and things are going into place, and then Mercury retrogrades, and all of a sudden we feel like things aren't moving as fast in the direction that we had intended and were working on. And our immediate ego response is to just push harder, when Mercury is actually saying, “You know what? Relax the breath.” Instead of inhaling, do a little exhale and see where you've been, where you're coming from.
All retrogrades, R-E, retrogrades, are associated with the R-E words: review, reconsider, rethink, re-aim… I'm missing them. There's a whole list of them. Review, yeah. Um, and in a way, when those planets begin to go retrograde, it doesn't mean we have to let go of our goals, but sometimes just taking that relaxing breath and using it as a time to reposition. You know, to regroup. Um, to rest, which is, you know, R-E. But it's that same kind of… And it's not about getting lazy. It's about just gaining a new understanding of where I'm coming from, where I am.
And then as that retrograde begins to come to an end, and then as it turns direct… And again, as it turns direct, it's still going to go through a period of time where it's moving through that area of sky that it went through first direct, then retrograde. And then it turns direct and it goes through that shadow area again. So often after the planet goes direct, everyone goes, “Oh, Mercury's direct. Venus is direct. Now I get to…” fill in the blank. And often it takes a good week or two or three to kind of get a feeling of where it is that we need to go next, if we're really paying attention.
Laura: Yeah. I mean, often the stationary day, the direct day, is one of the most retrogradie in my experience, 'cause it's literally stopped in the sky. So…
Rick: Yeah. The two largest internet outages—and I'm not talking about at your home or my home, I'm talking about regional Cisco routers shutting down entire parts of the country—occurred on Mercury stationary retrograde days.
Laura: Yeah. So, I mean, personally with all these outer planets and fire and air, I'm kind of really looking forward to retrograde periods and some water. Maybe slow some things down a little bit. But, awesome. Thank you, Rick. That's really, really helpful. Um, so what else is of note in October?
The Outer Planet Basket
Rick: So, looking at the chart for October, I mean, at the beginning of the month, we already have Mercury and Venus having moved on into Scorpio. And the reason why this is important and will become important over the month of October and even into the month of November, is that when planets move into Scorpio, they are going to be moving into a fixed sign—Scorpio, fixed water—which means that they will be squaring Pluto in fixed Aquarius.
Now, back at the end of September, we already had Venus's square to Pluto, which I think we talked about even last month—when I say last month, I mean in our September discussions. Because when Venus squared Pluto back in mid-September, it was setting up energy that would be back on our plate when Venus retrograde squared Pluto a second time, and that would be coming up this month on October 19th. But then once Venus turns direct, it will square Pluto a third and final time on December 9th. Now, this creates an entire field of energy around this Venus squaring Pluto. We can say more about that in just a moment.
But into that mix, we also have the fact that Mercury does the same thing, and that Mercury actually will make its square to Pluto on October 2nd. Now, Mercury retrograde doesn't get back quite that far to square Pluto again, but we're seeing a pattern here of first Venus, then Mercury, then Venus again, then Venus again. But when the Sun moves into Scorpio, it too will square Pluto. And we also have Mars, which is now at the beginning of October at two degrees of Leo, which means that we have Mars moving into its opposition to Pluto.
And that opposition to Pluto occurs on October 3rd. Now, here on October 2nd and 3rd, I think we have the first intense, intense wave of what this energy might be and play out in the future, because we have Mercury in early Scorpio, Mars in early Leo—fixed Scorpio and fixed fire Leo—making a square and an opposition to Pluto at early fixed Aquarius.
And so we have this being set up in the early days of October, and we're also coming off the fact that as each of these planets are moving into this hard energy, they're all coming off of more gentle aspects to Chiron, which has retrograded back to the very end of Aries and fire. And so we have kind of this shift of energy going on that I think sets the stage for a lot of what happens throughout the month.
And in fact, as we play the month ahead, and we get Mercury squaring Mars early in the month, but then as we get the Sun moving through mid-Libra, the Sun is going to oppose Saturn, and that Sun's opposition to Saturn occurs on October 4th. And so we're getting this mixture of energies from both Scorpio and Libra, and even then Mars and the planets moving through Leo that are stirring up the same energy again and again and again, while Mercury and Venus are going retrograde and saying, “Not so fast,” into the future.
And for that matter, it's not just Mercury and Venus that are going retrograde, it's also Saturn and Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, and Chiron. And although that begins to change because Pluto does turn direct mid-month, Pluto barely moves all through the month. Now we've had this discussion before last month with Uranus, when Uranus stationed retrograde, and therefore for the entire month of September, Uranus barely moved at all. And a lot of September was about planets' motions against Uranus or in relationship to Uranus because Uranus was holding its position.
Well, in October, it's Pluto. I mean, Pluto quite frankly, on the first day of the month, Pluto is like at two degrees of Aquarius. Even going into December, Pluto barely moves at all, and that's what's really going on here. And so with Pluto stationary, as these planets make these squares to Pluto, it's going to be tough. It's going to be stronger than normal.
Pluto Transits
Laura: So with all these squares to Pluto and the Mars opposition to Pluto, Plutonian energy… what might we expect from something like that? Is it just like a lot coming up that we might have not recognized before? Like, okay, yes.
Rick: Yes, yes, all of that. But let's also keep in mind that even while retrograding, we still have Uranus not far from its trine to Pluto, and Neptune still actually very close to its sextile to Pluto. Neptune, at the beginning of October, is less than a third of a degree orb. It's still tight. And so Pluto is not necessarily the bad guy here. What Pluto's job is is evolution, its job is transformation, and its job is metamorphosis. Metamorphosis is a great word because the caterpillar has to go in order for the butterfly to arrive.
And so Pluto, which in the Western world is considered to be the lord of the underworld—where the underworld is a frightening, scary place… I'm always reminded of Ram Dass, who used to say that the great American death mantra is, “Oh, shit.” Because we don't understand death. We're not prepared for it. We bury it. It has this fear attached to it. And yet, in other cultures, in most indigenous cultures, just like a retrograde being part of a cycle, death is simply part of a larger cycle.
And so from that standpoint, the caterpillar doesn't have an ego like we do. It doesn't fear getting into the cocoon because it's just part of this several-billion-year-old life tide that it's surfing on. And it goes through that process, and it lets go of the caterpillar to become something that it never was before: a butterfly.
And humanity right now, in a combination of things with Pluto moving into Aquarius, with the 50-to-60-year process of Neptune sextiling Pluto, with now Uranus trining it for the first time after it joined up with Pluto back in the 1960s—starting a whole cultural, evolutionary, metaphysical revolution—we are in a process of great and dynamic change.
And we can look week by week, day by day, month by month, year by year, but sometime in the future, whoever that is in the future looking back at what happened here will go, “Wow, that period from the mid-20th to the mid-21st century, that's when…” And fill in the blank. We don't know what those blanks are.
In a conversation at UAC a couple of weeks ago, I came to the realization that writing about the changes of this time, of October of 2026 or of the Uranus-Pluto trine that we're all experiencing as deep cultural transformation, revolution, evolution… writing about that, trying to figure it out, would be kind of akin to living in the summer of 1965 and writing about the Uranus-Pluto conjunction. Because anyone who lived through it—that would be me—or anyone who looks back and says, “Oh, that's what happened then”—that would be you—the changes weren't in 1965 and '66 at the exact conjunctions. The changes occurred in building amplitude, amplification in resonance through '67, '68, '69, '70. It wasn't until '71, '72, '73 that it began to quiet down enough that we could look back and go, “Holy crap, that's what happened?”
And that's where we are in this, and that's why I'm hesitant to say too much about the specifics of what's going on. Although as I've said many times in the past few years, if you want to understand what's going on now, all you need to know is AI, AR, ET, and E-I-E-I-O.
And I can do this real quickly in order:
AI is what some people refer to as artificial intelligence. Some people call it alien intelligence. Some people call it augmented intelligence, or altered intelligence, or alchemical intelligence. But there's something going on with intelligence that's no longer… Consciousness, we know, does not reside in the brain. It's a field event. That's one thing.
The second thing is AR, which is augmented reality, which is all the tools that make our individual reality extend beyond what we call the five senses. Remember, 100 years ago, if you couldn't see it, touch it, taste it, feel it, or smell it, it didn't exist. That's not our world. So we have reality that's been augmented that will continue to, especially by neurological interfacings with what we might call bionic arms, or wiring things in a body so that someone who couldn't hear all of a sudden has hearing again, or seeing, or augmenting our senses making it so that we can see not only the colors of the rainbow, but when we get to violet, what happens if we have augmented reality and we can see higher frequencies—ultraviolet, which many people already see as auras? Or if we can see lower frequencies than red, infrared, like reptiles do? That's how they see prey—they see the heat. But the point is AI, AR, and then we have…
ET: You know, it's not what it used to be. Back in the '50s and the '60s, there were a lot of people looking at this, but it was totally off in the field of total conspiracy—that's crazy, and maybe it's science fiction. Well, as I wrote back in the early '70s: Science fiction has become science faction / But look at us robots, we have no reaction. The fact is that what once was fiction is now reality. What once is imagined becomes what is true. And so ET, we don't know where it's going. We don't know who the bad guys or the good guys are up there. We don't know whether ETs are us in the future or leftovers of ancestor guides, or whether they're actual inhabitants of Arcturus or the Pleiades or whatever. We don't know what kind of interdimensional travel or faster-than-light travel there may be. We just don't know. But we're right on the edge of finding out.
So that's AI, AR, ET. And E-I-E-I-O is a simple one: Earth is a little dust mote in a huge, huge universe, and if we can't realize that we are all species living on Old MacDonald's farm, if we can't get together, and if the turkeys and the geese and the cattle and the pigs and the humans can't figure out how to make it work, we're all screwed. The farm's going to go.
Laura: Mm-hmm.
Rick: Anyhow, that maybe was a little divergent, but that's what's going on. And when you're in the midst of things, it keeps coming back to one of the most brilliant things that the media guru Marshall McLuhan would say again and again and again. He would say, “Environments are invisible. The fish can't see water.”
We live in an environment that's everything around us, and we don't realize it's there. It's just part of us because there is no boundary between the inside and the outside, even though sometimes we feel there is and sometimes we feel like the outside is against us.
But getting back to Pluto, Pluto is metamorphosis. It is the change of something transforming. It's something that was becoming something else. And if we're in this large-scale change, as great or maybe greater than what humans did going from maybe pre-human species to human, or pre-modern to modern… we look at our lives and compare them, the change that we're going through right now is extraordinary and once-ever. And no amount of repetitive cycles in astrology is going to help us navigate where we're going to be in 150 years, assuming that we don't stupidly destroy ourselves like a virus that grows so quickly in a host it kills the host.
I'm not a pessimist, but we have some work to do, because when you engage in the underworld, which is Pluto's realm, Pluto doesn't value life over death. Pluto values transformation. And a caterpillar holds onto its stuff, even though it may forget it was a caterpillar—we have no way of knowing that, just like we may forget about our childhood or our past lives. Understanding that we moderners may live multiple lifetimes in a body, and we may forget about the decade when we were 14 to 17 years old and all that stuff happened, or we may forget about our real past lives or so on. Because when you step into the Plutonian realm, only Mercury, mental thoughts—only Mercury maintains his identity. Everything else loses its identity.
And so as we as a species go through this Plutonian change, there's a lot of us who are scared shitless, because we're afraid of what might be around the bend. And what do we do? We do exactly what deep psychology suggests that we do, and that is in a time of crisis, we go back to something that felt comfortable. We try to make the past perfect. And the past wasn't perfect, but even though it wasn't, in our mind, the devil you know is better than the devil you don't.
And so that's a lot of where the bifurcations are occurring right now in our society. And I'm not suggesting that we should just drop our past and run helter-skelter into the future. It's really a matter of: what do we hold onto, what do we treat with the iron fist, and what do we treat with the open palm?
And so I think that that's a lot of what we're experiencing as the intensity of the day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, especially now as we're moving into the Scorpionic period. And remember, Scorpio is the realm of the nighttime Mars traditionally, and in modern astrology, it's where Pluto is at home, which theoretically is always in the night because it's the realm of darkness.
And we fear the darkness. We fear the hell realms. I say “we”—most people coming from a Western tradition, because there are many traditions that understand that the real magic, the moment of birth, the moment of conception, the moment of creation, always occurs in the dark. And those who are not afraid of going into those realms and making what was invisible visible, they are the ones that can be the most enlightened—and I don't mean enlightened from a spiritual sense, I mean it from a sense of the solar, of the lights going on.
And that's part of our job as we have this Uranus trine Pluto, which is going to be with us through late spring, early summer of 2028. Our job is to make the lights go on, is to take and shine that… It only takes one candle in a dark room to light up the whole room. And so it's… we each need to become those candles.
Sorry for going off on a rant, but when I look at October, I see this energy of so many of the planets retrograding—it's actually what we need in order to get our perspective and our grounding and our centering, and not be freaking out about if we don't get there right now, we're in trouble. And there may be some of that, but the “now” is not October 1st or October 17th or October 23rd. Oh, I just picked those dates at random—no meaning.
But often we want to take everything… People who know me well have heard me often quote what I and some of my friends call Rick's Theory of the Over-Inflated Importance of the Present Moment. Because if I'm with a bunch of friends having a nice wine, this is the best wine ever, you know? It's like if something goes wrong, it's, “Oh my God, this is the worst moment I've ever had in my life.” And of course this is true because, as Ram Dass taught, be here now. Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now. In some ways, now is all there ever is, but we make the mistake often of conflating now with all, and sometimes that freaks us out.
I'm sorry for the rant or the detour. We probably want to get back to some specifics of October beyond just the opening days, which I think are pretty tough.
Mars Trine Neptune
Rick: Although on October 2nd, while Mercury is squaring Mars and Pluto, and Mars is coming into the opposition to Pluto—this is all on October 2nd and 3rd, these are some tough days—we also have Mars trining Neptune, and Mars coming into a sextile with Uranus by the 7th, which gives us some room to move physically if we're not too impulsive. ‘Cause Mars in Leo kind of has this little sense of impulsivity. And also on October 4th, 5th, the Moon will move into Leo and join up with Mars and highlight that whole pattern. So I'm looking at the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th as kind of a… even into the 7th. Um…
New Moon in Libra
Rick: …and then by the 10th we have our New Moon. And the 10th, I think, does tell a bit of a different story, which I think is a… Oh, it may be a little bit of a breather. The New Moon is in Libra at 17 degrees of Libra.
And it's kind of in between some tough aspects, because we have Saturn at almost 11 degrees of Aries, and Eris and Chiron are both at the end of Aries. So this New Moon, even though it's not by degree, the New Moon is opposite all those Aries planets, kind of highlighting the polarity between me and you, between inside and outside, between right and left, between “AI is the most dangerous thing ever” to “AI is the most amazing thing ever,” to right-to-life versus the disgusting thought of killing an embryo, red versus blue. I mean, I'm not looking to make fights, I'm just picking out some of the infinite polarities that we have.
And this New Moon, in some way, because of its opposition from Libra to Aries, even though there's no exact degree-oriented opposition, it is opposing the energy as a whole. And yet I think we're also gaining a little bit from both Mars and Jupiter, and the South Node all in Leo, kind of trining some of that Aries energy. We're getting a little bit of movement here.
But I think the strongest thing or the most important thing about this New Moon is the fact… And we're back now to what I said at the very beginning, and that is these squares and oppositions to Pluto. Although Mercury, Venus, and Mars are all past their squares and oppositions to Pluto, we do have Venus, now retrograde, making its square to Mars. And so we still have that fixed energy that is being stirred up, and that Venus square Mars happens on the same day, on October 10th.
And so it's interesting: Venus square Mars. Venus's first home sign is Taurus, its second home sign is Libra; and Mars's home sign is Aries, its second home sign is Scorpio. We have a New Moon in Libra opposed planets in Aries, with Venus and Mercury in Scorpio. So we're really getting this bifurcation, I think, even though the New Moon itself looks a little bit softer than some of the other lunations that we've had.
Laura: The Libra New Moon—Libra being really good at kind of like balancing both perspectives and seeing both sides with the retrograde—it seems like it could be a good New Moon to plant seeds around seeing something in a different light, or seeing both sides, or being able to come to a new agreement. Would you say that that might be true?
Rick: Yeah. I think I'll put on my playlist for that day Joni Mitchell's I've Looked At Life From Both Sides Now.
Laura: Great song.
Rick: You know. Um, yeah. Because the… yeah, that is very much, I think, the wise energy behind it. But it may be more difficult to live it in the three-dimensional world because of the ongoing fixed squares going on.
Now into that, as we approach the 15th, we have Pluto turning direct. But by the 16th, we have Mars in Leo reaching 10 degrees of Leo, which is where Saturn is. And so right around the 15th, 16th, 17th, on the day that Pluto is stationary direct… But remember, Pluto doesn't visibly move for about a week. It's at the same degree, same minute, even though we can mathematically calculate the point at which it technically stops going this way and starts going that way.
Just like a pendulum on a clock: the pendulum moves the fastest at the bottom, and as it gets to one side, it has to stop before it goes the other way. And so when a planet like Pluto is moving so slowly, as it slows down to stop and then stops, it actually appears not to move for days, and that's happening already around the 10th on the New Moon.
But by the 16th, Mars is making a partile, or perfected, an exact trine to Saturn, and this deepens our organizational capability. It helps us manage complex tasks that have multiple parts that allow us to kind of manage what I like to call the gas and the brake—Mars being the accelerator and Saturn being the wall or the brake or the resistance.
And so in some way, during this period of mid-October, I think we get a little bit of a reprieve from that. But at the same time, we have the Sun opposing Eris, and Eris definitely is about a higher order of integrating that which has been excluded. And for those astrologers who don't use Eris regularly, I might suggest that if you were an astrologer in the 1870s, you might have rejected Uranus and said, “No, it doesn't work,” or maybe an astrologer in the 1940s saying, “No, Pluto's too far out.” But Eris is there, as are other objects that we don't work with only to keep things simple enough.
But the Sun's opposition to Eris, that occurs once a year on October 18th this year, kind of again shines the light of the Sun into this place where we can stir up trouble so that we can see what's wrong. So I'm looking at the mid-October period as being kind of an interesting period that then builds to the 19th, which we've now talked about.
This'll be the third time we've talked about it, because we talked about it last month when Venus first squared Pluto when it was direct. Then we talked about it at the beginning of today's session when we talked about how Venus was going to go direct and then retrograde on the 19th, and then direct again over that same point in December. But this, on the 19th, is the exact second phase of Venus's square in its retrograde motion to Pluto, and that can be complicated because Venus is about emotional volatility, even in Scorpio. Venus in Scorpio is not afraid of going there.
Now, when I say “there,” use your imagination. It's the place that we usually like to resist, especially if we are in a nice day of Libra energy and wanting to keep things simple and on the surface, and harmonized and well-balanced. Well, that retrograde Venus in Scorpio is reminding us that there is a lot of stuff that's not yet on the surface.
And as it squares Pluto on the 19th… Incidentally, on the 19th, the Moon will be moving from Capricorn into Aquarius, and it will be aligning with Pluto that same day, the morning of the 19th. And so I don't think that's going to be an easy day at all.
And then as we get to the 21st, with the Sun moving closer and closer to its entry into Scorpio, on the 21st, the Sun opposes Chiron, which remember was in Taurus but is now backed up to 28 degrees of Aries. And so again, this is like the Sun opposing Eris and then opposing Chiron. Remember, the Sun opposed Eris on the 18th and it'll oppose Chiron on the 21st. This stirs up a lot of old wounds one more time. And yet, we can freak out and fight against it or try to bury it, or we can work with the energy and see if we can make communication from it.
And we do get some help by the fact that the Sun on the 23rd moves into Scorpio, deepening our sense of autumn in the North, because that Scorpio sense is really… Halloween being the Scorpionic holiday: the unseen coming alive, the hidden coming out into the three-dimensional world.
But on the 23rd, as the Sun moves from Libra into Scorpio, on that same day, retrograde Venus is getting ready to move back into Libra—that it doesn't do until the 25th—but the Sun lines up with Venus, Venus inside the Sun. This is considered to be one of the five star points of the retrograde Venus conjoining the Sun, meaning that the Earth and Venus and the Sun are in a straight line with Venus on the same side of the Sun as the Earth.
This alignment, called a synodic conjunction, happens five times every eight years, making a grand five-pointed star in the sky. The work of Ariel Guttman has brought this into modern astrology in a very deep way, called the Venus Star. And tracking these points in our lives, because every eight years that Venus-Sun conjunction occurs right around the same point in the sky, we can look back in our personal lives in eight-year chunks and begin to build a theme, a story around what that Venus retrograde, the Sun at the very end of Libra or very beginning of Scorpio, might be. And that does occur on the 23rd.
But at the same time, Mercury, which has been moving really fast and is way ahead of the Sun, is now 20 degrees ahead of the Sun—the Sun at zero Scorpio, Mercury at 20 Scorpio, which means that Mercury looks like it's coming to a stop.
Again, it's like Mercury is going around the Sun. Let's say my head is the Sun, but it looks like it goes like this because as it gets as far here as it can, it begins circling around the other way. And so Mercury is now at what we call its maximum separation from the Sun, and it officially turns retrograde on October 24th. Which means by the end of October, we have both Mercury and Venus in Scorpio, both louder than normal, with the Sun in Scorpio.
And remember, that Sun moving into Scorpio is now within three degrees of making that square to Pluto that we talked about earlier. And so we have this energy building again to another round of intensity. But Mercury backs up—it moves into Libra on the 25th, just as Mercury is turning retrograde on the 24th.
And incidentally, Mercury will turn direct, as we mentioned earlier, on November 13th, the same day that Venus does. And we'll talk about that next month and I'll do a little more research, because I can't recall any time that those two planets have turned direct on the same day. It may be more common than I think right now, but we'll get back to that one.
Full Moon in Taurus
Rick: But as we're doing this, at 9:11 PM Pacific Time on October 25th, we now have a Full Moon. And this Full Moon, I think, is a bit more potent than the New Moon that we talked about back on October 10th. The Full Moon again is at 9:11 PM Pacific Daylight Time, and the Full Moon occurs at two degrees and 46 minutes of Taurus, which means that it's almost three degrees of Taurus. I mean, 45 or 46 minutes after an hour is like a quarter to the next hour—12:45 is a quarter to 1. So this is like a quarter to three degrees. So we can say that even if we look at a computer printout and the Full Moon is listed at two degrees of Taurus, rounded off, it's just about three degrees of Taurus.
And the Sun is at almost three degrees of Scorpio. And where is Pluto? It's at three degrees of Aquarius. Get the picture? So this Full Moon actually makes what we call a T-square, with the Sun and Moon making an opposition, with Pluto at what we call the apex, or the dynamic point of that T-square.
It's like Pluto is the angular exacerbation, stimulation, stirring-up point of this bifurcation that's no longer Aries to Libra—me to you. It's more about the deepest, most hidden part of not just me, but what my values are and what I own, and what I think is mine, and how I hold my own position. All of that's that Taurus energy: the physicality of my beingness. And it's being bifurcated by the complexity of everything else—the Scorpio energy, everything that everyone else owns and has. Not just you, Laura, but everything out there. It's you holding a position of power at Astrology Hub, in your family, in your world. It's the things that you bring—and not just you, but everyone in my world out there: all the “yous,” all the governments and taxes and complexities.
And so now the bifurcation is much stronger than just a simple “me to you.” But Venus has retrograded back into Libra, and Chiron has retrograded back into Aries, and so we're not ready to leave that old personal thing behind. It's a fascinating Full Moon.
And also at that same degree, the Sun and the Moon on that day are making a quincunx—the Sun a quincunx to Neptune, and the Moon a semi-sextile. Now, a semi-sextile is just half of a sextile. So the Moon at two degrees of Taurus is one sign away, or 30 degrees, a semi-sextile from Neptune at two degrees of Aries. And the Sun at almost three degrees of Scorpio is making a 5/12—that's one sign off of an opposition—to Neptune.
And that's a complicated energy, because the quincunxes feel like they don't fit in. They do, but they won't go away, and so we know that there's something that's not fitting in. And what's not fitting in here is Neptune. It's our dreams. It's our imagination. It's our spiritual connection to the outer world. It's everything that's metaphysical.
I look at this as an incredibly potent period of time. And on top of that, we have Jupiter still barreling through Leo, moving toward the nodal axis. And Jupiter at 23 degrees of Leo, with the nodal axis at 27 Leo and Aquarius, is kind of making a trine with Eris and Chiron in Aries.
And so we have, again, the deep potential for this very, very powerful and profound healing. And remember, we're now getting closer and closer to the second of the three exact Uranus-Pluto trines. The first one, remember, was on July 17th at that whole other lineup. But now at the end of October, Uranus is moving retrograde from four degrees of Gemini back toward three degrees. Pluto is now moving direct, and that trine becomes exact for the second of five times by the end of November.
And so there's this deeper wave beneath the chaos that is stirring up this larger long-term energy that it's important that we do not lose sight of. Because again, I've been saying for at least a couple of years: don't trust what's going on out there. Don't dismiss it—it's going on out there—but don't mistake it for the long-term trajectory, because if we do, it will become the long-term trajectory. We have to hold on to the values, the beliefs, the results of this transmutation.
And again, Uranus trining Pluto: it sounds sweet, and it is, but Uranus is the planet of revolution, and Pluto is the planet of revolution without the R—evolution. And so revolution, evolution, even when the energy is flowing, isn't necessarily graceful, peaceful, or easy. You look at some of the most important breakthroughs that humanity has made, even if they didn't go ultimately in the direction that the imagination might have held at that moment—whether it was the American Revolution, or the French Revolution, or the Bolshevik Revolution—they each held seeds of something.
And we're at that point again. And again, I'm neither predicting nor avoiding this talk of World War III. I think it's a stupid label because the world has been at war for a decade, and I think that the physical artifacts of this war are certainly already there and have been there for a decade or more. But the real war is being held in the metaphysical realms. It's being held in the realms of spirit, of spirituality, of ET, AI, and everything that's outside of the realm of physicality. That's where this war is going to be and is, in fact, being fought. And it is a real war. It's an information…
Laura: Well, sounds like this month we're going into the underworld. We've got Mercury retrograde maybe to aid us a little bit, Venus retrograde bringing things up from the underworld, and sounds like what comes up from the underworld is meant to come up for healing and evolution, like you said. And sounds also like we need to be more like the caterpillar and go through this process a little bit with less fear. Is that right?
Rick: Well, no, I think that a little fear is good, but it's misplaced. Instead of me fearing you, I need to fear that laziness and/or denial will prevent the change that will help us both get to the other side.
Laura: Yes. Okay.
Rick: But yes.
Laura: Love that. So Rick, one last question for you, and it's not the question you think I'm going to ask: Where is the opportunity this month?
Rick: You're right. Obviously I thought you were going to ask, “Give me a one-sentence summary” and not…
Laura: I mean, if you'd rather answer that one…
Rick: No, no, you could too. No, I think the opportunity is about awareness. The opportunity is: how can we widen our perspective? Widening my perspective does not mean that I then need to agree with you or lose an argument. An argument only occurs when I think that the polarity needs to be resolved into a unity.
If I can accept the fact that you and I differ on this issue, then the question becomes: how can we create a reality where we both have our needs met, where we're both happy? And maybe all of that is not possible, but the question is: how can we move closer to that? So I think the opportunity of October is really in how do we hold our positions while also engaging in dialogue rather than simply finger-pointing.
Now, there are some fingers that need to be pointed in both directions, in all directions, because there aren't just two. Everything is more complicated. And I would say that as I look out in the real world—whatever the hell “real” means—there are very specific issues that there's no question which is right and which is wrong.
However, I also understand that there are people out there who have the exact same conclusion that there is only one right and one wrong, but their conclusion is that my right is wrong. You know? And so those are not going to just dissolve. But the question is: how do we work with that energy rather than denying it?
And Pluto strengthens on denial. You know, I know that the astrology community was aghast when Pluto was demoted from a planet into something outside that's not a real planet. And at that time—and I still hold the position—Pluto loves it.
You know, there's a wonderful book by an author that if no one's read, go do a little search. Charles Fort wrote a few books in the early 1920s that were New York Times bestsellers. His first book was called The Book of the Damned. His second book was called Lo!—L-O exclamation point. And Charles Fort wrote about things that shouldn't have happened that somehow were reported that happened. We saw a resurgence of this type of book in the '60s—books called things like Stranger Than Science and those kinds of books.
But Charles Fort, in the opening sentence of his Book of the Damned—which again, was a bestseller—his opening line has stuck with me. I'm an Aries; a lot of opening lines of books stick with me. But his opening line of that book is this: “By the damned, I mean the excluded.”
Why is that significant? Because that's what Pluto is. Pluto is the damned, it's the excluded, it's the hidden, it's the underworld. It's that stuff which we need to keep out of our current awareness. And yet deep psychology and even spiritual traditions teach us to meditate and to go into those spaces and engage with those fearful parts of us, knowing that they're not bad. It's the fact that they gain power when they're damned or excluded. How do we bring that into our awareness, into our consciousness?
So I think with Pluto stationary direct at this point in time, and all of this energy culminating on October 25th with the Full Moon squaring Pluto, I think that's partly our work. Go out and read some Charles Fort, but don't be frightened by it. Be intrigued by how much there is out there that we just say, “Nope, that can't be.”
I mean, 20 years ago, think of how many things you might never have even thought would be possible, or things that you heard about and go, “Yeah, that's another conspiracy crazy thing. That can't be.” All of a sudden to find out that not only is that true, it's true with steroids or in spades or in multiplication.
So that's our work, I think, is to use these retrograde energies, the energy of the planets moving into Scorpio, the fixed sign energies, and the squares and oppositions to Pluto to do our work.
I mean, this is Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. This is going into the underworld, then coming back with a jewel that we didn't know existed 'cause it seemed like a poisonous monster. And so we basically pushed it out of our awareness.
And this, of course, is why Mercury is so important, especially in its retrogrades, because Mercury's real job is psychopomp. And the psychopomp is the messenger or the guide who guides souls into and out of the underworld. Whether you're using this in Western astrology—whether it's Mercury or Hermes, or Thoth from the Egyptian period—or whether it's in every indigenous culture, there are shamans and there are Mercury-like people who basically go back and forth between the realms. Deep psychology simply uses talk—Mercury. Talk psychology is using Mercury to go into those hidden realms to help us make the transformation on the surface. That's what October's about.
Laura: I love it. All right. Well, this should be an interesting month. For those of you listening, if you're listening on YouTube, we'd love to hear how it goes for you in the comments section. And Rick, just thank you for continuing to provide this community with such excellent guidance throughout the year. Um, should be interesting.
Rick: It's my pleasure, and thank you for creating this platform. You know, again, having just returned from UAC with you and all of the A-Hubbers, all the Astrology Hub people… you guys are appreciated and needed in the community as a kind of quasi-neutral platform where there are so many distinct points of view, and that's good. That's what we need.
Laura: Yeah. Well, thank you for saying that. I mean, every chart is different, right? It's so nuanced, and so bringing that kind of perspective out into the world I think is a good practice too, that everyone's so different.
So awesome, everyone. Well, thank you so much for tuning into this episode. Thank you so much for your subscription to our channel, and we will catch you on the next episode. Take care.
Rick: Thank you.