The Astrology of 2024
The future is now, and we're not ready
I have struggled mightily with this forecast, dear friends, because I want to share the challenges of the year ahead without scaring you, but also want to usefully prepare you for a year like no other. I felt similarly at the end of 2019 as I analyzed 2020. This is not to say that we’re heading into a pandemic again (or a worsening of the one that never ended). After the last few years, we’re a lot more resilient than we ever thought we’d be, yet we also have a lot of unprocessed trauma. Let this be the year that we fully acknowledge what we’ve been through so we can collectively deal with what comes next.
Let’s take a moment to breathe together as we look ahead at what the stars may summon in 2024 — the good, the bad, the weird, the ugly and the beautiful.
I’ve waited until the very last moments of 2023 to deliver this, in part because 2024 looks like it will change everything that we believe about the world we live in. No single year I’ve looked at in my last 20 years as a professional astrologer has screamed PRECIPICE quite like this one does.
At the end of this general forecast you’ll find my detailed, sign-by-sign horoscopes for Aries to Pisces Sun and rising signs. Subscribe below to get all of these for 2024, plus loads more bonus content, including my monthly On the Erotic Ecliptic column, a guide to navigating the relational, sexual, and pleasure-focused parts of our lives through astrology. In case you got to this post via a direct link, I’m a professional astrologer, writer, certified clinical sexologist, and the author of 10 books, including the forthcoming Sex and Your Stars: A Sexologist’s Guide to the Erotic Energy of the Zodiac (Sounds True, summer of 2024), which is currently available for pre-order.
The thing to understand about the concept of apocalypse (right) now, beyond the end-times theology of certain extremist sects of Christianity, is that it’s already here. We’re living in it. The center has not held and things are already falling apart. This is late capitalism and the climate catastrophe and the extreme grief of witnessing multiple genocides all sharing the same space: this is the end of Pluto in Capricorn. You can see it outside your window and your body already knows it: the seasons are no longer doing what they did when you were a child. The news is not normal. Everyone is in a state of shock and waves of trauma flood through us hour by hour.
Apocalypse is not a one-and-done explosion and we’re mostly all dead like in The Day After or The Day After Tomorrow, or even like a Walking Dead or The Last of Us scenario of collapse over a few weeks and then years of fighting zombies with knives in a bleak dystopia. Apocalypse happens drip by drip, region by region, over the course of years. It happens to poor and marginalized people first, of course. They are the test subjects, the experimented-upon as the privileged bemoan and assess the circumstances and prep their rockets and stock their impenetrable compounds. It can take decades for an apocalypse to get its teeth in us. In 2024, it feels like we are frogs in a rapid boil, but I believe that if we begin to see each other’s humanity, we can escape this roiling pot of certain doom.
Astrology and the Singularity
I bring up sci-fi dystopia for a reason – with Pluto in Aquarius from January 20th (with a brief exit from September to mid-November to sew up the final threads of the American Pluto Return during our election) technology is likely to scare us, but here’s the hope: at the same time, we can make such gigantic leaps that building utopias to replace the concurrent, branching dystopias – that also feels possible. This is the potential gift and magic of the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction on April 20th. Stratospheric technical leaps are possible now, we just have to hope these leaps are about something positive — not weapons of war.
I will say this: I think that Black Mirror, a show I often reference, had the coming/current era nailed – as if they had an astrologer on staff, advising them about what the “near future” might look like. There were beautiful episodes that centered love, like San Junipero. Maybe our new world can look like that, where two beautiful souls find each other in a future where they are free to be themselves instead of the robot dog nightmare of Metalhead? (No spoilers, but you should watch it.)
When I first began studying the transits of 2024, I was struck by an emerging theme: it appears as if our thoughts are beginning to literally shape our reality as we encounter the concept of “the future” in real-time. I no longer think of the coming year as just a year: I think of it as part of a narrative of the 2020s – the decade our descendants will look back on in the year 3024 (if we don’t blow up or melt the planet) as a pivot point of modern civilization. Some believe we entered the “Age of Air” in late 2020 as Jupiter and Saturn conjoined at 0 degrees of Aquarius, but this feels like the year we all tap into it with our neural networks. Our minds and bodies may never be the same again.
I’ve been thinking about Ray Kurzweil’s idea of the singularity for a long time, and cracking jokes about it on the hellsite formerly known as Twitter, but I think we’re here, kiddos. As Pluto meets Aquarius in 2024, sliding in with the Sun on January 20th, I sense we’ll feel it palpably in the culture and the news straightaway, but more over the course of the year.
When Pluto initially dipped into Aquarius in early 2023, there were stories about aliens (remember David Gruch’s claims about an American UFO retrieval program? It just came up again last week. There were also fears about sentient AI from last winter (recall this). I covered this in my forecasts last spring. Pluto will be in Aquarius for the next 20 years. A chip may be coming to a brain near you, perhaps your own. I’ve been thinking about Pluto in Aquarius and the Age of Air for a long time, and the sci-fi of the last 50 or so years aptly captures what I expect our next few decades to mimic.
One of the reasons 2024 feels so much like a precipice is that 2025 is when the story of the decade truly kicks in and we can start to comprehend what is going on globally, so we can see where our personal lives fit. Neptune will enter Aries and Uranus will enter Gemini in 2025. Until then, we’re dancing between concurrent cosmic finales and preambles.
The Last Degrees of Us
In astrology we have a concept called the “anaretic degree” – 29 degrees of any sign, the final degree before the new sign is born. It’s considered a degree of great power and tension, fullest of the archetypal energy of the sign it’s in before it becomes something else. This year Neptune sits on the anaretic degree of mutable water sign Pisces, where it will hang out from May to the beginning of September. Neptune has been in Pisces since 2011. Pluto sits on the anaretic degree of cardinal earth sign Capricorn for the first three weeks of January and then again from early September until mid-November. Pluto has been in Capricorn since 2008. You can see the “end of an era” vibe we’re about to experience here.
Relationally, 2024 brings home that core experience of living in a body: showing us how the people we love should be the ones who attune our nervous systems. Over the course of the year, we might better fine-tune our ways of seeing into the kinds of humans who can help us co-create calmness and regulation, versus the ones that drive us crazy and make us anxious. With Pluto in Aquarius and Jupiter moving into Gemini in May, we’ll be taken out of our bodies again and again, floating in the ethers of our minds and the collective digital mind. During the Age of Air, when intellectualizing our emotions and disassociating from our bodies will be so tempting and so damn easy, it becomes more urgent for us to connect to daily pleasure and the softness of our animal bodies: to be with Venus.
This year Venus, also our connection to the concept of romantic love, moves swiftly through the zodiac, and unlike last year, she’s not calling attention to herself as much. After making a conjunction with Mars in Aquarius in late February, reminding us that friendship is ideally at the core of our romantic relationships, the love planet is co-present with her consort Mars until April, when she bypasses him. Mars is LOUD this year, almost as loud as he was in the fall of 2023. (More on that below.)
Venus chases asteroid Eros, another cosmic arbiter of our libido, coming closest in mid-September, bypassing Eros in late Libra and taking the lead. Black Moon Lilith opposes Venus in Pisces on March 27th and conjuncts Venus in Libra on September 4th. These are powerful moments to peel off shame and reject heteronormativity and patriarchy in our relationships and sex lives.
Saturn and Neptune in Pisces and Manipulated Mass Consciousness
With Pluto in Aquarius striking that intense sci-fi note as Saturn and Neptune come very close in the last few degrees of Pisces over the summer, we may get what feels like a blurred reality effect, as if we’re in mass hallucination. This is already happening to billions of young people on TikTok. I hope that Saturn will do its job and keep us tethered in truth through good journalism, but in Pisces, that may be harder to define. It can be beautiful for art and music-making, but for news gathering, not so much.
We’re already experiencing what can only be described as an unwriting of history. I’m not even talking about Nikki Haley’s Republican Party trying to claim that slavery didn’t cause the Civil War, although that’s part of it. Since 2016, state-sponsored Orwellian propaganda in the form of Putin-generated “fake news” began making its way into our media ecosystem. Trump in some ways presciently began showing us what life is about to look like when he took the useful term “fake news” - and made it into the opposite of what it was. He’s currently doing that same thing to the word “fascism” — this is what authoritarians do, of course, but it’s also a crash course on how easily manipulated mass consciousness may be starting in 2024 - not just MAGA consciousness.
This is not just your old-school Russian bot farms unleashing on Twitter or Steve Bannon‘s “flood the zone” strategy contaminating our politics (but there will be plenty of that). This is an entire society that doesn’t know what the fuck is actually going on. People have been primed for this boundaryless blurred reality effect for a decade, starting way back in 2011 when Neptune entered Pisces, but that will feel like sweet pink pixie dust compared to what I expect from the next few years. From social media’s ability to instantly make conspiracy theories viral to the current age of deep fakes that are getting better every single day, humans are checking out of reality more and more often, possibly because the raw truth is so unpleasant. I worry a lot about what this will mean for our next election. However, once Saturn and Neptune both escape from Pisces and move into Aries, there could be some kind of clarity around all the lies we’ve imbibed. The Aries years will bring their own series of problems, but we can talk about that in my 2025 forecast.
HOPE
I want to focus in more detail about what we can be hopeful about this year, and there is plenty. Trumpian authoritarianism poses a massive threat, and we cannot fail to face the challenge of defeating it and preserving American democracy. The Pluto in Capricorn era almost did us in during the first Trump years, but it also exposed the corruption at the very highest echelons of our government. How many times have we heard “No one is above the law” in the last few years? We’re still waiting to find out if that is true (it’s certainly not true for Clarence Thomas).
The Pluto in Aquarius era of the 1780s was a time of intense revolution (this era was called The Age of Revolution), and it may be again for us in the 2020s and beyond. We already see it stirring in the streets, and we may get a taste of what true reform looks like in 2024 — or at least make some first attempts at creating a government that lives up to the promise of the Constitution. That we’re fighting over the 14th amendment and whether Trump is eligible to run for office after leading an insurrection fits neatly into the central questions of this astrological moment.
A keyword for Aquarius is freedom. Another keyword is liberation. If we can tap into the spirit of revolution in the fight for bodily autonomy, we can probably also preserve this democracy that is so precious, and then reform it at the root. Keeping abortion rights at the forefront of our effort to reelect Joe Biden, even if we have to do so with our hearts in our throats because of the war in Israel/Palestine, and in any other fronts that open — this is one way of living up to the promise of the early years of the Pluto in Aquarius era. We can then turn that spirit to the work of reform, and we can make our government work for us. “We the people” will mean so much more to us during the next 20 years. That is the higher octave of Pluto in Aquarius — the promise of collective power, humanity working together to protect each other.
We also have to take back the word “liberty” from the far right. So the book banners, the Moms For Liberty fascists, the racists and anti-woke crusaders — they stole the language of freedom from those of us who have been fighting for it in the truest sense. We have to take that language back, and use all tech tools at our disposal to make “freedom and liberty for all” into the clarion call for a wildly diverse, multi-racial, queer and everything-in-between America.
Hot Spots of the Year
Let’s talk about April. I cannot even fathom the amount of insane astrology in this one month. As the month begins, we’re already in eclipse season (the late March Lunar Eclipse in Libra opened it) and Mercury stations retrograde on the 1st. The Great American Eclipse, a Total Solar Eclipse at 19 degrees of Aries, takes place on the 8th (this eclipse is conjunct Chiron), Mars is conjunct Saturn in Pisces on the 10th, and the long-anticipated Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Taurus is on the 19th, and finally, Mars is conjunct Neptune on the 28th. I’m already exhausted just thinking about this month. I am suggesting, as gently as possible, to be psychologically prepped and perhaps prepped in other ways – to be prepped as preppers are prepped, with bottled water and food, at least for a few days. Hopefully, nothing will happen and we’ll all just laugh about this later in the year, and you’ll just have extra food on hand, no biggie. My other months of concern are July, October, and November.
There is much to cover in the emergent astrology of the next year and the ones that follow it, but below you can find a list of the most salient points in my analysis. I didn’t go into great detail about each of these events above because this forecast would be 30 pages long if I did, but just want to note this for you, as it all informs how I’m thinking about the year ahead.
1. Pluto in Aquarius – January 1st – September 1st, November 19th - 2044
2. Jupiter in Gemini – May 25th
3. Continued eclipses in Aries and Libra, and one in Pisces:
Full Moon Lunar Eclipse 5 degrees of Libra, March 25th
New Moon Solar Eclipse 5 degrees of Aries April 8th
Full Moon Lunar Eclipse 29 degrees of Pisces, September 17th
New Moon Solar Eclipse at 10 degrees of Libra, October 2nd
4. The Jupiter/Uranus conjunction at 21 degrees of Taurus on April 20th
5. The first inkling of the Saturn/Neptune conjunction within 10 degrees in Pisces in June, before this goes exact in 2025
6. Lilith in Libra – June 29th
7. Sun-Venus Cazimi – June 4th
8. All the Mars transits: Mars conjunct Pluto on February 13th, Mars square Uranus on March 9th, Mars conjunct Saturn on April 10th, Mars conjunct Neptune on April 28th, Mars conjunct the North Node on May 19th, Mars conjunct Jupiter on May 29th, Mars square Pluto on June 11th, Mars conjunct Uranus on July 15th, Mars conjunct Jupiter on August 14th, Mars square Saturn on August 15th, Mars square Neptune on September 2nd, Mars opposite Pluto November 3rd (2 days before the presidential election), Mars Retrograde in Leo/Cancer – December 6th
9. Mercury Retrogrades through fire signs
All the Mars-Pluto contacts are highlighted because they are particular “hot zone” aspects. If you look at my forecasts from October and November of 2023, I discuss the Mars-Pluto conjunction in the founding chart of Hamas – I believe this is a signature planetary combination of the war, and worry that these harder aspects between Mars and Pluto may be flashpoints for what happens in the Middle East over the next 12 months.
I will probably add to the general forecast a bit in the coming days, because some other thoughts are percolating in my brain. All your sign-by-sign forecasts are below, for both Sun and rising signs.
HAPPY NEW YEAR, DARLINGS!