StarCycles with Georgia Stathis

On Christmas Eve, transit Jupiter in Gemini creates an opening square to transiting Saturn in Pisces. Anytime you see a hard angle between Jupiter and Saturn, business shifts, changes, contracts, and alters in some way. You’ve been feeling this square for about a month now. You move between joy and laughter to feeling tired and unmotivated because they contain both these emotions. Jupiter is expansive by nature but moves faster than Saturn which is conservative by nature. Saturn is slower and so there is usually more caution than expansion. Anytime you get these two in a face off, you want to expand, but then you stop and think about it, then you try new things, then you stop and check other options. This energy can be very frustrating. You take a couple steps forward, then go back two, then three forward. I talk a lot about the Jupiter/Saturn cycle in my book, Pushing through Time: Synodic Cycles and their Developing Phases, as well as all the other synodic cycles, another one of which arrives in early 2026. Like Dr. Doolittle’s ‘push me/pull you’ character, Jupiter in an opening square to Saturn (active through July 2025) and this is a heck of a lot more workable than a closing square. You expand, then contract, then expand a bit more, then contract. That is a good formula for success.

As you go through this aspect, it still feels like you are walking towards a goal while getting good at juggling. A square between these two denotes lots of starts and stops. Those stops are imperative in working on a plan or strategy that is not completely forthcoming and requires time. Stopping occasionally (and the holidays are a wonderful time in which to do this) isn’t all that bad. Lots of ideas and opinions show up with this combo but only a few have legs. During hard aspects between Saturn and Jupiter, we often see businesses making plans on how to make their bottom-line work more efficiently. The businesses may not know everything they need to do but they do start looking at the ‘fat’ in their budgets and start planning cutbacks going forward. If you are in a job right now and sensing changes in your company that ‘feel’ like there could be some layoffs soon, then it behooves you to start exploring alternative options – that may – in the end – serve you better. Intention and intelligence and lots of research are the keys.

Neptune- again – Neptune moving through its last degrees often brings lots lofty ideas that are more fantasy than reality. Since dissolutions are associated with Neptune (also squared by Jupiter through mid-July 2025) more mergers along with dissolutions of current contractual arrangements are frequent. One of the industries that may be affected is anything that has to do with the health care industry. Under its umbrella lie mental health, pharmaceuticals, research, hospital care and hospital availability as well as rampant viruses and the current issues surrounding vaccines. There is talk of eliminating important vaccines like the Polio or the Measles vaccine. It doesn’t surprise me that with Neptune on the North Node, all the issues above and more are at the top of the news.

The important thing to remember and hold on to going forward is that Saturn in Pisces (which holds the reins in crises) is transiting closely behind Neptune in Pisces keeping certain proposals to change large swathes of existing health care practices in check. In fact, even those these two planets get within a moment of conjunction with each other from late March through mid-July 2025, they don’t completely conjoin until 2026. This means that lots of talk of getting rid of this or that may not happen as quickly as is planned.

One of these issues is the Polio vaccine, which was developed and distributed in the mid-1950s when I was a very little girl. I remember things back then for which many have no historical connection so let me share a story. I was taking a metal and jewelry making class at the Morean Art Center (a great learning center) in St Petersburg Florida where I live in the winter. I took this class about three years ago and loved it. My teacher, Brenda, and I are contemporaries and were then probably the oldest people in the room. The students I learned with were amazing, young, smart, skilled, and fun and it was one of those classes where we worked and talked freely about so many things. I got to be good friends with some of them. The subject of vaccines (a very Neptune thing) came up and I casually mentioned ‘The Iron Lung’ upon which several of the younger students said, ‘What was that?’

For those also asking that same question, here is a link showing you a hospital ward filled with Iron Lung patients if you’ve never seen one. The 2012 film, The Sessions, with Helen Hunt, is a film about a person who cares for someone in an Iron Lung. The Iron Lung looked like a Medieval torture device but it saved lives. Polio in its extreme expression can paralyze not only your limbs but also your lungs where you cannot breathe without the aid of an Iron Lung.

During that class, my teacher and I were surprised the students didn’t know what that was and so we proceeded to tell them – this is what many people who contracted polio and who lost the ability to walk or breathe had to live in all their lives so they could breathe. Without the Iron Lung they died. I was seven years old and remember someone in our neighborhood in Chicago who lived in one. We saw the doctor coming and going to check him (doctors came to the house then). This was real and Polio was a disease that killed millions of people worldwide. In 1952, (on a Saturn/Neptune conjunction , a conjunction that comes every 35.87 years) the worst outbreak killed 3,000 people in New York. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a victim of polio (thus the wheelchair and crutches and fortunate not to have to existed in an Iron Lung). Others that got polio were people like Mia Farrow, who spent eight months in the hospital as a child in an Iron Lung. Others surviving it were Alan Alda the actor, Donald Sutherland, Frida Kahlo, and even Mitch McConnell who suffered polio in childhood. Those first vaccines for polio, and then measles saved people, particularly children.

My sense regarding health care and the offshoots of health care is that much of what is being proposed now – especially with Mars and then Venus retrograde in the first five months of 2025, is that they won’t completely materialize in the way they are being presented right now. Saturn holds things back and acts as safeguard from impulsive change at least through spring 2025 and again in fall 2025 and early 2026. Neptune, however, is slower and often more powerful and so an error here or there may bring reality back to this system. I just hope it doesn’t come because we had to pay a price on something that could have been avoided.

I trust Saturn in this moment. Saturn has a lot of bad press because he is restrictive, realistic, pragmatic, and tough on us, but Saturn, in many ways is also the planet that keeps us tethered to reality – and practical applications. My holiday wish for everyone is that we embrace Saturn’s gifts of support while rejecting Saturn’s shadow side which is fear and trepidation. If you allow fear and trepidation into our psyche (easy to do with all the Neptunian media surrounding us), then it can take you over. Since we just entered the tropical sign of Capricorn, ruled by Saturn, and Winter Solstice is now past, let this season be a season of practical applications, contemplation, introspection, while finding the light that is deep within all of us. Happy Holidays.

I have been uploading recent lectures to the Shop. If you want to learn more about astro-techniques, go to our SHOP tab and explore what is available there to enhance your learning. Next week I will be in transit to St Petersburg, Florida and taking a few holidays moments off with family. I will not have a forecast and want to wish you a very happy and prosperous new year. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Seasons Greetings. Thank you for all your support throughout the years – it brings me boundless joy.

Warmly, Georgia