Astrology with Alice: Fire plus air equals liftoff!

Remember how I keep making a big deal out of the planets moving into fire and air signs? How since 2021, we’ve closed a 200-year book on an earth cycle and opened up a new book on air cycles? And how this year, with Jupiter moving into the bonfire that’s Leo, Saturn and Neptune moving into the firestarter Aries, Uranus moving into breezy Gemini, and Pluto holding down a two-decade fort in windy Aquarius, not a single slower-moving planet is in a more locked down earth sign? Nor an introspective water sign? It’s like an unlit tinder box. Dry and flammable. Waiting to be lit.

Well.

July’s going to be when the proverbial rocket takes off. And let’s stick with that rocket ship analogy for a moment. Think of what happens after the countdown, launch, and pretty hero shot of the rocket clearing the tower. What happens next? Well, the whole machine screams up through the lower atmosphere and shakes so hard that the astronauts' vision goes blurry and everybody on board white knuckles the armrests and waits for the ship to punch through safely into the quiet of space. There’s nothing base command can do. Houston is unreachable. You strap in and move with it and hope you did everything you needed to do to prepare.

Yeah.

That’s the rest of the year, and July is when we light the fuse. But why now? Didn’t the planets already move into fire signs? Yes—but that was just them getting into position. Before, we were talking about potential. And now they’re going to line up and activate. To understand what I mean, you need to understand the planetary geometry that’s forming right now.

So here's the sky. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto are parked around the fourth degree of their signs right now. And remember how I said they’re all in fire and air signs? Well, fire and air signs talk to each other in the forms of sextiles (60-degree angles), trines (120-degree angles), and oppositions (120-degree angles), which are all activating and stimulating, so they’re all waking each other up. The slow planets (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) have been holding this shape for a while now, just sort of idling. What's been missing is a spark.

And guess what? That spark has arrived. Meet Jupiter—the celestial hypeman. He’s the guy who can rile everyone up and turn a party into a party. Jupiter is going to slide into place at four degrees Leo and turn that serious conversation that the other four were having into a rave. Or a fight. Or both. And if we go back to the rocketship analogy, the slow planets were the rocket sitting fueled on the pad while Jupiter is the match. And Jupiter doesn't shrink anything it touches, it blows it up bigger. Result? Liftoff. (Or, if I were going to be super Jupiterian, I should instead say, MOTHER EFFIN’ LIFTOFF, BRAH!)

The themes of this transit will take years to unfold, but the kickoff is now.

Movement isn't progress

Everybody's going to want to call this "progress,” but please don't. Progress is a sneaky little word that smuggles in a happy ending, but nobody upstairs signed off on a happy ending here. What we've got is movement. Plain old “we’re going fast, ready or not” movement. Fire burns and air blows and neither one knows how to sit still, so the question this year was never whether things would change. The question is whether you'll move with it or freeze.

(And let’s not forget that at the top of the year, I wrote about how we’d be seeing a lot of change and movement because we’re in a 10 year numerologically and how the number 10 corresponds with the Wheel of Fortune card in the Tarot.)

So there’s this scene in World War Z (stay with me) where Brad Pitt's trying to get a family to leave their apartment with him. They're terrified and they want to stay put where it feels safe, and he says it to them plainly: movimiento es vida. Movement is life. The ones who keep moving make it out. The family that stayed put, hunkered in the dark praying it would pass over them? They didn't make it. That line's been living rent-free in my head lately because that's the entire assignment that the astrology of the year is presenting us. We’ll survive breaking atmo by not stopping.

The last time this happened was 1922

If you want to see what I mean when I say that movement and progress aren’t the same, take a look at the last time this exact Uranus-Pluto trine came around, which was 104 years ago in 1922. That very similar sky handed us the discovery of insulin, the first public radio broadcasts, and Howard Carter cracking the seal on King Tut's tomb. It also handed us Mussolini marching on Rome and Stalin sliding into the driver's seat of the Soviet Union, plus the baby versions of the political movements that would go on to gut the century. We saw miracles and monsters at the same table. The Uranus and Pluto trine pops the lid off the jar, and what climbs out is anybody's guess.

And that brings me back to the Jupiter-Pluto opposition across Leo and Aquarius. The Leo-Aquarius axis represents “Me vs them,” the one against the many. The self that wants to be its own sovereign country versus the system that would really prefer to just absorb it. We're watching that fight at full volume right now, with a certain breed of man reaching to plant his flag on the whole planet like it came with his name on the deed. (Sounding like our current political worldscape?) Furthermore, all the planets are lining up at the fourth degree of their signs, and the number four is the Emperor in the tarot. That type of strongman is the Emperor in his shadow. The Emperor at his worst grabs his own sovereignty by helping himself to yours.

But the Emperor at his best asks the better question, and it's the one this whole mess is really putting to you: Where are you going to plant your flag? Who are you—no apologies—when the wheels are spinning this fast? Because the same energy that’s compelling strongmen to grab at the world is also nudging you to grab hold of your own life. It’s saying, don't hand your sovereignty to anybody while everything's in motion. The coward's move—the World War Z move—is to go quiet in the apartment and pray it skips your door. And spoiler: It won't.

So where's this actually showing up in your life? The cleanest way to read your July is through that Uranus-Pluto trine to see where it's flipping the lights on in your chart. Find your sign. (Read your rising too—if you don’t know your rising sign, you can look it up using this free rising sign calculator.)

Your July, sign by sign