A quiet period in planet town
Photo from NASA
My readers will be relieved to know that over the next week or two the planetary energy is much more mellow than what we have been experiencing over the past few months, especially in July. The outer planets which have created so much pressure and power are beginning to move away from each other and will not make any major aspects for the rest of the year.
Even Mars will be relatively quiet and not give us too much trouble by not playing nicely with the other planets until it enters Cancer on August 4th.
Mercury will be turning retrograde on August 2nd at the first degree of Virgo so it will dip its toes into the organization of ideas that Virgo inspires and then retrograde back into Leo where the focus is on ways to enhance the sense of Self. I’ll be writing more about this process as we get closer, but we can utilize this retrograde period to assimilate the shifts and changes that have occurred in our lives and be better prepared for next year’s planetary realignments.
Clarification: Dharmaruci made the point in the comments that the actual square of Uranus and Pluto is still tightening and won’t actually begin to separate until early August. That is certainly true, but their interaction has been intensified by the energy of the eclipses and with that intensity lessening we will begin to resolve some of the conflict of Uranus/Pluto.
DR also points out that Mars will be entering Cancer on August 4th, at which time it will begin to set off Uranus and Pluto, and then Saturn but these will be more like the kind of aftershocks we experience after an earthquake rather than […]
Photo credit AP / Kirsty Wigglesworth 
Image by Donovan Zimmerman 
I have always found it interesting that the worldly definition of “Uranian” according to Wikipedia is
in a man’s body. The term Uranian was picked up by Victorian writers such as Oscar Wilde, who wrote: “”To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble – more noble than other forms.” (Ulrich’s chart shows Venus opposite Uranus, and Uranus squares the Moon in Wilde’s chart.)
Tropical astrology is based upon the turning of the wheel of the seasons, with Aries at the Spring equinox and the rest of the cardinal signs marking the beginning of the other equinoxes and solstices. But what happens in the southern hemisphere where the seasons are reversed? When the first day of Aries marks the first day of autumn, does astrology still work?