Late Sunday, Venus ingressed Cancer. Planets have been traveling close to the Sun all year, and Mercury and Venus are a little ahead it right now. As planets ingress Cancer, they make trines to Saturn, Chiron and Neptune, currently also in water signs. When all three water signs are going at once, that’s called a ‘grand water trine’, though the fancy term doesn’t tell you much about how it feels.

Photo by Eric Francis.

People who are more comfortable experiencing their emotions will probably like this astrology. Those who are less comfortable or confident with their feelings, or who are dependent on rationality for everything, may find this extended moment disorienting. All these water planets indicate that your mind may be less reliable than your intuition as a source of information.

Mercury and Venus in Cancer are just the beginning of the grand water trine. The Sun and Jupiter are on their way (in about three weeks from now) and Mercury will be retrograde in Cancer at the end of the month. This suggests the current moment is designed to what feels right, rather than what you think is right. Language tends to follow the mind rather than the feelings, so it would be good to reckon what you’re saying with what you’re feeling.

These placements indicate that we will all be taken into deeper water. If that’s uncomfortable I suggest looking within for what might be the root of that sensation. Somehow though I have a notion that many people have been experimenting with going deeper or exploring in there. Planets in water signs on this kind of scale is like a deepening capacity for empathy, reflected in the cosmic signs.

What ingresses the sign Cancer will soon make an opposition to Pluto. The suggestion here is that the depth of the water signs goes even deeper by such a strong aspect to Pluto, who is one of the astrological gods of inevitable progress. One by one, Mercury, Venus and the Sun will make oppositions to Pluto, as will Jupiter in a couple of months. Pluto’s presence takes things out of the realm of theory and into that rare place where what you feel actually matters.

There are also potential revelations and possibly distractions indicated by Uranus in Aries, which all these planets will square. (Said another way, each of these planets makes an aspect to both Uranus and Pluto at about the same time — the Uranus-Pluto square.) These sudden shifts may work very well to help you focus on what truly matters. Were we to consider that particular theme, it might point to subject matter rather different from what we think about most of the time.

When planets aspect the longstanding Uranus-Pluto pattern, we get what I call ‘signs of the times’. These might be outer events, and surely represents how we respond to them. I think that one message of our moment is: it’s better to know how you feel. It’s information you need. It’s also worth questioning whether you feelings are in alignment with the qualities of our rather strange, dangerous and beautiful moment.