Astrology and Global Politics in 2025

Get ready, because in March 2025, I think it all kicks off. The times right now are both literally and metaphorically volcanic. March will see a ton of emphasis on the first sign of the zodiac, Aries, the go-getting fire sign of Mars, the war planet. Aries doesn't think too hard about things, it just takes action, fired by instinct and divine inspiration. We're going to see a huge injection of dynamism and contention into global politics As the world realizes that, as Donald Trump's second administration clearly believes, you can just do things. Yes, March is going to be intense. And in this video, I'll be digging into the big shifts of this pivotal month, both for you individually and for the wider world. So welcome once again to another journey into the past to understand the present and the future. In my January forecast, I pointed out that Uranus would be stationing direct at the end of that month in a conjunction with the midheaven of President Donald Trump and with the sun of the chart for Israel. And I thought we'd see some kind of shocking or surprising development involving that president and that country. And indeed it came with Trump's surprise announcement that the US was going to take control of Gaza and administer it as some kind of international territory. Nobody saw that coming, such as the way of Uranus. So much is happening so fast under Donald Trump's administration that it's honestly impossible to keep track of it all. But I think a way to sum it up is that we're really seeing Trump bring America into a multipolar world. Another way to put it is that he's dismantling the American empire. With the dismantling of US aid and the possible end of countless social engineering projects around the world, including in the US itself, We're seeing the US withdrawing from its efforts to liberalize the planet and a shift towards the country focusing much more on itself. We've been talking on this channel for some time about the age of air and Pluto in Aquarius signifying the emergence of a multi-polar world and I think we're really watching that emerging in real time. As the US shifts its focus the world is going to fragment and regional influence is going to become much more important. We've also seen a weirdly large number of Air crashes in recent weeks. The high-level theme is Pluto and Aquarius. Perhaps we're seeing the early stages of some kind of transformation of the airline industry. But this also seems to have coincided quite directly with Mars's retrograde. And in my last forecast, I noted the conjunction of Neptune with the north node of the moon. I thought this would signify storms, possibly literal, but also metaphorical. Fortunately, we didn't see anything as dramatic as previous Neptune node conjunctions. But one of the places highlighted for the manifestation of this transit was Australia. And we saw a Category 5 cyclone named Zelia make landfall in Western Australia with 180 mile hour winds. But the Neptune Node conjunction made itself felt in weird ways. I think one of them could have been the LA fires. And another would be the wave of weird fog that blanketed parts of the United States, particularly Florida. Residents in some places complained that it had a chemical smell and made them sick. What was going on? Well it all remains very mysterious, which is itself a signification of Neptune. Finally Mars stationed direct in Cancer on February the 24th and so the war planet is finally going to start moving forward once again in March. It'll take some time to get moving so it'll be a few weeks before we can really evaluate this Mars retrograde period. We're already seeing some hints of what might be coming. Mars in Cancer can be emotionally volatile and clannish. We've seen a ton of heated discourse and soul-searching in recent weeks around the theme of immigration and its effects on countries, which are cancerian entities. Just as Mars was making its station, Germany elected a new conservative government. The man poised to be the country's new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is known to be much more hawkish on Ukraine than Olaf Scholz was. Notably, he has promised to give Ukraine access to Germany's Taurus missiles, with which it could strike deep. into Russia. And as Trump tries to secure a peace in Ukraine and has attacked Ukrainian President Zelensky in the process, we're seeing a rift opening with European leaders like Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron who seem to think the war should go on. There will soon be a lot of energy in the air as Mars picks up speed over the course of the month. Let's get into it. If you're enjoying this video so far, then please do click the little like button down there and let YouTube and me know that. And please do subscribe to this channel if you want to make sure to catch future episodes. And if you really like what I'm doing here, then... You could become a member of World Astrology Report, which will give you access to extended, ad-free versions of my videos, including this one, and all my long-form live streams going deep into topics like the Age of Aquarius, the Kali Yuga, my 2025 forecast, and the astrology of UFOs and fallen angels. And you'll get 20% off private consultations with me. I currently have some slots free in my schedule, so if you'd like me to look at your chart, then head to worldastrologyreport.com and book a slot. Thanks for listening, and now on with the video. On March the 2nd, Venus will station retrograde in the sign of Aries. A retrograde period will last until April the 13th, when she'll station direct in late Pisces. Venus is the planet signifying the unification of disparate elements, and so Venus represents love. attraction, desire, pleasure, beauty and aesthetics. In other words, the forces that magnetically draw people together. And so Venus retrograde will bring rewords like reversals, reflection, rejection and return to the relational realm of Venus. At an individual level this can play out in a myriad of ways depending on what Venus is doing in your natal chart, but there are some pretty typical Venus retrograde stories. One of them is that it can signify a more challenging time for relationships. You might find yourself finding faults with your partner in new ways, for example. What's really going on is a process of reflection or reassessment or revision of the relationship. As with every transit, think of this as a learning experience, an opportunity to pay more attention to what doesn't work so well in your relationship and to think about how you can improve. or mitigate or live with those issues. And sometimes this will be a time when people decide a relationship simply doesn't pass the test and they leave it behind. But if it's strong, you don't have anything to worry about. Another common Venus retrograde experience is a return to relationships of the past. Yes, it's the sex with your ex transu. But Venus is also, more generally, a signifier of friendships, wealth, and things of beauty and value. So they're all areas that can be implicated when Venus switches direction. And here's a tip, when Venus is retrograde, buyer beware. It's not a good time to make important purchases. You'll often find that things you buy at this time will turn out to be somehow defective or not to your liking and there'll be a need to return it. And bear in mind that the same thing applies to relationships. Relationships begun with Venus retrograde are less likely to last, I'd say. At a mundane level, the Venus retrograde will speak to relations both within and without societies. So that can mean that relations between different racial or ethnic groups come up for revision. On the world stage, we tend to see issues around alliances and diplomatic relations coming up. Something to bear in mind is that Venus follows an eight-year cycle. Every eight years, she retrogrades in roughly the same part of the zodiac, about two to three degrees earlier. And this means that there are five parts of the zodiac at any one time where Venus is retrograding and they form a five-pointed star or a pentagram. And here's where we glimpse a little something of the magic of the cosmos because the number five was associated by numerological esotericists like the followers of Pythagoras with love. According to the writer John Anthony West, this is because it represents the union of the first female number, 2, and the first male number, 3. So there you have it. The very motion of Venus relative to the Earth tells us that she signifies love. This year, Venus is stationing retrograde in the 11th degree of Aries. Now, if we wind back time eight years, we see that Venus stationed retrograde very close to this point in the 14th degree of Aries on March the 4th, 2017. What we tend to see is that similar themes come up in these repeated retrogrades every eight years. So think back to March of 2017 or look in your diary if you have one. Events at that time related to Venusian themes should clue you in to what could be coming for you this year. Now if we look to the wider world, March 2017 was when the UK triggered Article 50, which is a clause in the European Union Treaty governing withdrawal from the Union. So we might expect UK EU relations to come up during this retrograde. Maybe the EU is the UK's ex that the UK will want back, or maybe there'll be problems in their relations. And again, in March 2017, there was also trouble in relations between the EU and the US. At this time, the EU threatened to remove visa-free travel for Americans, although it eventually decided against that move. So I think we can expect transatlantic relations to deteriorate during the coming retrograde. Which isn't at all surprising given the tensions that already exist. We saw a foreshadowing of all this with J.D. Vance's blistering speech attacking the deterioration of free speech in the EU. So that's the first big development of March. But there's a lot more because this month marks the first of this year's two eclipse seasons. On March the 14th we'll see the first eclipse of 2025 with a lunar eclipse in the sign of Virgo. This will be the first eclipse in Virgo since 2016 and the first eclipse at the south node of the moon in that sign since 2008. So we'll now be seeing accelerated changes in the domain of Virgo, the mutable earth sign of analysis and service ruled by Mercury. A lunar eclipse is like a super powerful full moon. It brings culminations, revelations and endings. This particular eclipse is in a very tight opposition to Saturn, which will be conjunct the Sun in the eclipse chart. So Saturnine themes will be strong here. They include denial, restriction, structure, separation, suffering and melancholy. There's a tension here between the ideal, which is Piscean, and the realistic, which is Virgoan and Saturnine. that could feel quite heavy, as is Saturn's way. In mundane astrology, Virgo's realm includes healthcare, the service industries, technical specialists, food, crops and farming, and labor unions. So these are areas likely to be affected by this eclipse. Given that Virgo's opposing sign, Pisces, is also implicated. We might see oceanic themes, trade flows, migration coming up. There's an inherent tension between the working class, and with migrants because they often but not always compete for jobs. And that's reflected in the zodiac in the opposition between Virgo and Pisces. I can't help but wonder if labor action such as strikes could come up around this time. As I mentioned, Virgo signifies labor unions and with Mercury retrograde and the very strong Saturn influence on this eclipse, I could see them downing tools at this time. Now, interestingly, there's another technique that we can use to understand what any lunation is. including an eclipse, is signifying. And it's also suggesting that the theme of labor action and workers' rights are going to come up at this eclipse. This technique was developed by the astrologer Detriff Pessin and detailed in her book Lunar Shadows 3, The Predictive Power of Moon Phases and Eclipses. She calls it the lunar gestation cycle because it ties lunations that come nine months apart together and it shows how they're related in meaning. It's incredibly powerful because it allows you to see hidden threads of meaning running through human lives and history. And in the extended version of this video, available for members of World Astrology Report, we're going to dig into this technique, see how to use it, and see why it points to labor action as being a likely development around the time of this eclipse. The other interesting thing about this eclipse is that its ruler, Mercury, will be stationing retrograde just as it comes into effect. And so once again we reach an eclipse season that is complicated by the messenger planet going haywire at the same time. Just what we need. On March the 15th Mercury will station retrograde in the 10th degree of Aries and so we reach the first Mercury retrograde of 2025. Mercury is the messenger planet, the clever and cunning governor of communication, trade, and technology. And when Mercury stations retrograde, he dons his trickster hat and his domain goes haywire. Usually the snafus we experience during Mercury retrograde aren't life-threatening or damaging, they're just annoying. But the more annoyed you get, the louder the trickster's cackles become. The important thing to bear in mind here is that we're being given a lesson in patience. This is a time to take deep breaths and to bear in mind that there's nothing wrong with taking things easy. But Aries is a shoot first, ask questions later sign and with Mercury in that domain we can see that perhaps the biggest risk here will be communicating rashly or impatiently without thinking things through. Mercury retrograde is not a good time to be taking trades or signing contracts or putting out content. But of course often we don't have the luxury of avoiding these things. So be careful, be patient and remember that this too shall pass. This is yet another period where we'll be seeing eclipses at the same time as Mercury is malfunctioning, so it's quite possible that it'll be harder than usual to figure out exactly what's wrong and where problems lie until later when Mercury stations direct. And a few days after Mercury's retrograde comes one of the most important astrological moments of the year, the spring equinox. On March the 20th comes the spring equinox, the beginning of the astrological year and the initiation of Aries season. At this moment we move from the half of the year in which darkness predominates in the northern hemisphere to the half in which light has the upper hand. And so this is a moment symbolic of birth and rebirth. The sign of Aries is ruled by Mars, planet of action, but it's also where the sun, signifier of the light of consciousness, is said to be exalted. So Aries is the sign in which the self comes to know itself through the actions it takes in the world. Archetypal Aries isn't bothered about what anyone else thinks. Aries just is. Aries just does things. And if it can, Aries does things first. Aries is the sign associated with the head, and it likes to be at the head of the pack, pioneering, taking bold action, and discovering new ground. But where does Aries get its inspiration from? Well, Aries is a fire sign, and it's intrinsically tapped into the divine creative principle. It's through the creativity of the fire signs that the divine will finds its most direct conduit into the world. The pioneering psychologist James Hillman had both his sun and moon in the sign of Aries. He once said this, sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. This is what I must do, this is what I've got to have, this is who I am. The entry of the Sun into Aries is the symbolic beginning of the astrological year, and the chart for that moment can be used to interpret how the year will go for the country chosen as the location. In the extended version of this video, available for World Astrology Report members, we take a look at this chart for Washington DC. Now, there's something else of interest relating to the spring equinox this year that I want to flag for you now. I did a recent live stream on the Yuga cycle, which is the idea from Hinduism that the world moves through successive ages in which the amount of virtue in the world rises and declines. The worst of all these ages is said to be the Kali Yuga, the Iron Age, which we may or may not be living through right now, depending on who you ask. But Bibu Dev Misra, the author of an excellent and deeply researched book on this cycle, Yuga Shift, believes that the Kali Yuga will end on the spring equinox this year. or March the 21st, 2025. And that's good and bad news, if true. Misra thinks that at this moment, a 1200 year transition into a better age, the Dwapara Yuga, will begin. Spiritual energies will pour into the world in greater intensities, raising our vibration. But the transition will also require a great purification of the world by fire. He suggests that this will take the form of comets or asteroid impacts that gradually reset world society. If you're interested in this idea, you might want to consider becoming a member of World Astrology Report because I gave a recent two and a half hour live stream on this subject that you can watch right now. Oh, and Misrath will be coming on World Astrology Report on YouTube soon to talk about his research. Watch this space. I don't know if he's right about the end of the Kali Yuga, but there's certainly a lot of fire in the sky in late March, especially as we get deeper into eclipse season. But before we get to that, there's something else I want to flag. On March the 23rd we'll see the first of nine oppositions between Pluto and Vulcanus, which is a hypothetical planet used in the Uranian school of astrology. The positions of these planets were deduced by the astrologers who pioneered this school in Germany in the early 20th century. Vulcanus has a 663 year cycle and it's said to signify great strength, force and energy, while Pluto is generally seen in Uranian astrology as signifying transformation. The combination of these planets, as we'll see this year, is said to signify great and rapid transformations. It signifies volcanic eruptions, both literal and metaphorical. Pluto and Vulcanus are reaching their opposition now, but they conjoined last between 1848 and 1854. And this was indeed a massively transformative period for the world. Europe was hit by a wave of nationalist revolutions. The hugely traumatic Taiping Rebellion, essentially a civil war broke out in China and the Mexican-American and Crimean wars broke out. There were also significant volcanic eruptions during this time including Iceland's Mount Hekla and Hawaii's Mauna Loa, the largest volcano in the world. And right now, lo and behold, volcanoes are threatening to blow all over the world. In the past month there were thousands of small earthquakes in Santorini, prompting fears the volcano there might erupt. A volcano in Ethiopia started releasing plumes of methane, Italy's Mount Etna started spewing lava and there are also fears that Mount Spur in Alaska is about to erupt. But these eruptions are only physical manifestations of the fiery tendencies that are very much in the air right now. I can't help but think of Bibu Dev Misra's prediction of the transition out of the Kali Yuga involving cleansing by fire. Could dealing with volcanic eruptions and their effects on the world be part of it? Bear in mind that Pluto and Vulcanus will oppose each other nine times between now and 2028, so we won't necessarily see anything quite yet. Bear in mind that we're already seeing this Pluto-Vulcanus opposition play out in the flurry of executive orders and transformational decisions that Donald Trump is taking in the US. And the message here is get used to it. There's much more to come in March. Pluto and Vulcanus are telling us that, but so are eclipses. On March the 29th we'll see a solar eclipse in Aries. And frankly speaking this eclipse looks potentially explosive. Eclipses always bring about rapid change but this one looks like it'll be particularly dramatic and fast acting given that it's taking place in Aries, the sign of Mars, the war planet. But there's more. The eclipse is in a semi-square, that's a 45 degree aspect, with Uranus, planet of surprises and revelation and rapid turnarounds. And it's at the midpoint of Jupiter and Pluto which brings a sense of big and bold transformation potentially having to do with finance and big money. The fact that the eclipse is in the sign of Mars points us to the possibility that this eclipse could have to do with war or violence or contention. Now here's a map showing where the eclipse will be visible and we can see that Europe seems to be the main area affected. But so are parts of Canada and Greenland. As we've seen on this channel many times before, solar eclipses can come into effect about three months before they actually happen in the sky. So I have to ask, are we seeing here a signifier of President Donald Trump's shocking and surprising interest in acquiring Greenland and maybe even Canada too? But to figure out which places are affected by an eclipse, we can also look to birth charts for countries and see which of them have sensitive... points at the location of the eclipse in the zodiac which is the 10th degree of Aries. And this eclipse is hitting a lot of important mundane charts. For one thing I think it could very well be important for Germany. If we look at the German reunification chart from 1990 we find that it has a midheaven very close to the point of this eclipse. Now eclipses come in families known as Saros series. This particular eclipse will be from Saros series 149. which is the series that astrologer and eclipse expert Bernadette Brady calls Nine New North. We can look at previous eclipses in this Saros series and see what happened to get an idea of what might be coming, because themes in successive eclipses in a Saros series tend to repeat themselves. And Germany's international relations is a theme that seems to be associated with this eclipse family. At the last one in 2007, Germany deployed tornado airplanes to Afghanistan. controversial move seen as signifying its commitment to NATO. At the eclipse before that in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. Go back another 18 years and we find Germany signing the Treaty of Warsaw which saw it make a commitment to non-violence and cemented its borders with Poland. In 1953 came the East German Uprising and in 1935 Hitler announced that Germany was rearming. So the theme of German military engagement seems to come up. quite often with this family and ominously the eclipse is also conjunct Mars in the chart for the NATO treaty. An eclipse on Mars is going to stimulate that entity's martial aspects. Could this signify NATO engagement in conflict of some kind or some event that provokes NATO action somehow? This same eclipse also hits sensitive points in charts for Russia, Iran and Israel and even China and Taiwan. Of course it won't necessarily be signifying one single event implicating all these different countries. Could be many things. But I've got to say, I'm a bit nervous about it. I find myself drawn towards the Middle East as a possible locus of the events to come. The geodetic meridian of Uranus is hovering right over Iran's capital of Tehran right now, signifying the potential for disruption or revolution or violence in Iran. I'm mindful that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still spoiling for a fight with Iran and wants to pull the US into any such conflict. My sense is that President Donald Trump doesn't want war but events could force him into one. We've talked about Aries a lot already in this episode but I've saved the biggest news for last because Neptune is about to move into that sign, bringing the Neptune in Pisces era to a long-awaited close. On March the 30th, Neptune will enter Aries for the first time since 1862. This is the first of four outer planet sign changes coming this year. Soon enough in 2025, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus will all change signs too. So this year will certainly be one for the books. But back to Neptune. The Neptune in Pisces era, which began in 2011, is drawing to a close, finally. Neptune signifies the ideal, the archetypal and the imaginal. And the sign that Neptune is in tells us a lot about collective ideals and trends and the ethos of the times. Pisces is the last sign of the zodiac. It's the end of the story and inherent to it is the sense that return to source and rebirth are imminent. And so it's a sign of martyrdom, self-sacrifice and yearning for the ideal. It also carries a sense of divine discontent with this flawed material plane. The Neptune in Pisces era, which coincided very closely with the rise of smartphone-powered, image-obsessed social networks, was both idealistic and intolerant. I think we'll look back at Neptune in Pisces as the quote-unquote woke era, one in which the ideals of political correctness dominated discourse. It was characterized by both idealistic attempts to ignore the differences between people, as well as an insistence and emphasis on those very same differences. It's also been an era of high migration, driven in part by the way that social networks have revealed to people in the developing world how people live in the richer parts of the world. But over decades, waves of migration have transformed societies in Europe. And as Neptune moves from Pisces to Aries, we're now seeing waves of reaction against that trend. And so the Neptune in Aries era has been building for some time. We see it in rising right-wing populism. and nativist movements that are pushing back against the high levels of migration favoured by internationalist elites. And so the rise of Donald Trump came in the middle of the Neptune in Pisces era. Trump wasn't able to be very effective in his first term, he wasn't well prepared to be president or for the resistance he would face. But we're now seeing a very different Trump administration, one unafraid to make bold controversial decisions and to take decisive action to change the course of America. and by extension the world. There's an article I'd like to recommend here entitled American Strong Gods by the conservative writer N.S. Lyons on his blog The Upheaval. The article explains where we are now better than anything I've read recently. The phrase that Lyons uses repeatedly to describe the ethos of this second Trump administration is, you can just do things, and you couldn't get a more concise summary of Neptune in Aries than that. This is the shape of things to come in the Neptune in Aries era. We're going to see the world being remade by individuals and groups and nations taking action regardless of what conventions and rules say. Whenever a particular sign is activated by a planet the opposing sign is also implicated. With Neptune in Pisces the significations of Virgo were also in full force. There was an extreme consciousness of difference which is Virgoan, which we saw with identity politics, combined with moves to try to enforce equal outcomes for everyone. which is more Piscean through things like DEI. Virgo is also the sign of the working class. And during this period, we saw governments in all sorts of places enacting policies that favoured globalist business interests, but left working people feeling betrayed. With Neptune in Aries, the Aries ethos of just doing things will contrast with that of Aries' opposing sign, Libra. Libra is the sign of balance and harmony and the laws, agreements and contracts that regulate society. I'm going to quote from NS Lyons' article here. He says, quote, The principle behind all Trump's behavior here actually appears to be quite straightforward. He is willing to use American might, however it may benefit the nation, rather than caring very much about protecting the status quo liberal international order for its own sake, or adhering to polite fictions like international law. Turns out you can just do things on the world stage too. Diplomacy and alliances are logically seen as of value. only insofar as they benefit America. This is indeed what America first always meant. Again, think Ares versus Libra. Whatever you think of the Trump administration, his approach is very much in line with the ethos of these times. This era is going to be one of action that will completely reshape the international order that was put in place after World War II. And again, I think that regardless of politics, we can all take a lesson from that. With Neptune in Ares, it will be time to shake off our doubts, our fears. our self-consciousness and just do things. Of course inevitably all of this will go too far, just as the Neptune in Pisces era did. Soon enough we'll start to see a building wave of feminine taurian energy in reaction to this very masculine Aries energy, driven by a growing desire for stability and the ability to just enjoy the material pleasures of the world. Now in the extended version of this video we explore a technique that can help you to figure out what an eclipse or indeed any lunation is going to bring into your life. This is the lunar gestation technique outlined by astrologer Dietrich Pessin and understanding how this technique works will help us to understand what the coming lunar eclipse in Virgo will promise both for individuals and for the wider world. That's it for now. If you're interested in learning more about what Neptune in Aries promises for the world then I suggest you watch this video that I made with the astrologer Adam Ellenbos. We dig into symbolism and history to help you understand Neptune in Aries and Neptune in Pisces in this video and I think you're going to like it. Thanks and see you next time.

Aries doesn't think too hard about things, it just takes action, fired by instinct and divine inspiration. We're going to see a huge injection of dynamism and contention into global politics As the world realizes that, as Donald Trump's second administration clearly believes, you can just do things. Yes, March is going to be intense. And in this video, I'll be digging into the big shifts of this pivotal month, both for you individually and for the wider world. So welcome once again to another journey into the past to understand the present and the future.

In my January forecast, I pointed out that Uranus would be stationing direct at the end of that month in a conjunction with the midheaven of President Donald Trump and with the sun of the chart for Israel. And I thought we'd see some kind of shocking or surprising development involving that president and that country. And indeed it came with Trump's surprise announcement that the US was going to take control of Gaza and administer it as some kind of international territory.

Nobody saw that coming, such as the way of Uranus. So much is happening so fast under Donald Trump's administration that it's honestly impossible to keep track of it all. But I think a way to sum it up is that we're really seeing Trump bring America into a multipolar world. Another way to put it is that he's dismantling the American empire. With the dismantling of US aid and the possible end of countless social engineering projects around the world, including in the US itself, We're seeing the US withdrawing from its efforts to liberalize the planet and a shift towards the country focusing much more on itself.

We've been talking on this channel for some time about the age of air and Pluto in Aquarius signifying the emergence of a multi-polar world and I think we're really watching that emerging in real time. As the US shifts its focus the world is going to fragment and regional influence is going to become much more important. We've also seen a weirdly large number of Air crashes in recent weeks.

The high-level theme is Pluto and Aquarius. Perhaps we're seeing the early stages of some kind of transformation of the airline industry. But this also seems to have coincided quite directly with Mars's retrograde.

And in my last forecast, I noted the conjunction of Neptune with the north node of the moon. I thought this would signify storms, possibly literal, but also metaphorical. Fortunately, we didn't see anything as dramatic as previous Neptune node conjunctions.

But one of the places highlighted for the manifestation of this transit was Australia. And we saw a Category 5 cyclone named Zelia make landfall in Western Australia with 180 mile hour winds. But the Neptune Node conjunction made itself felt in weird ways.

I think one of them could have been the LA fires. And another would be the wave of weird fog that blanketed parts of the United States, particularly Florida. Residents in some places complained that it had a chemical smell and made them sick.

What was going on? Well it all remains very mysterious, which is itself a signification of Neptune. Finally Mars stationed direct in Cancer on February the 24th and so the war planet is finally going to start moving forward once again in March.

It'll take some time to get moving so it'll be a few weeks before we can really evaluate this Mars retrograde period. We're already seeing some hints of what might be coming. Mars in Cancer can be emotionally volatile and clannish. We've seen a ton of heated discourse and soul-searching in recent weeks around the theme of immigration and its effects on countries, which are cancerian entities.

Just as Mars was making its station, Germany elected a new conservative government. The man poised to be the country's new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is known to be much more hawkish on Ukraine than Olaf Scholz was. Notably, he has promised to give Ukraine access to Germany's Taurus missiles, with which it could strike deep. into Russia.

And as Trump tries to secure a peace in Ukraine and has attacked Ukrainian President Zelensky in the process, we're seeing a rift opening with European leaders like Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron who seem to think the war should go on. There will soon be a lot of energy in the air as Mars picks up speed over the course of the month. Let's get into it.

If you're enjoying this video so far, then please do click the little like button down there and let YouTube and me know that. And please do subscribe to this channel if you want to make sure to catch future episodes. And if you really like what I'm doing here, then...

You could become a member of World Astrology Report, which will give you access to extended, ad-free versions of my videos, including this one, and all my long-form live streams going deep into topics like the Age of Aquarius, the Kali Yuga, my 2025 forecast, and the astrology of UFOs and fallen angels. And you'll get 20% off private consultations with me. I currently have some slots free in my schedule, so if you'd like me to look at your chart, then head to worldastrologyreport.com and book a slot. Thanks for listening, and now on with the video.

On March the 2nd, Venus will station retrograde in the sign of Aries. A retrograde period will last until April the 13th, when she'll station direct in late Pisces. Venus is the planet signifying the unification of disparate elements, and so Venus represents love. attraction, desire, pleasure, beauty and aesthetics.

In other words, the forces that magnetically draw people together. And so Venus retrograde will bring rewords like reversals, reflection, rejection and return to the relational realm of Venus. At an individual level this can play out in a myriad of ways depending on what Venus is doing in your natal chart, but there are some pretty typical Venus retrograde stories.

One of them is that it can signify a more challenging time for relationships. You might find yourself finding faults with your partner in new ways, for example. What's really going on is a process of reflection or reassessment or revision of the relationship. As with every transit, think of this as a learning experience, an opportunity to pay more attention to what doesn't work so well in your relationship and to think about how you can improve.

or mitigate or live with those issues. And sometimes this will be a time when people decide a relationship simply doesn't pass the test and they leave it behind. But if it's strong, you don't have anything to worry about. Another common Venus retrograde experience is a return to relationships of the past. Yes, it's the sex with your ex transu.

But Venus is also, more generally, a signifier of friendships, wealth, and things of beauty and value. So they're all areas that can be implicated when Venus switches direction. And here's a tip, when Venus is retrograde, buyer beware.

It's not a good time to make important purchases. You'll often find that things you buy at this time will turn out to be somehow defective or not to your liking and there'll be a need to return it. And bear in mind that the same thing applies to relationships.

Relationships begun with Venus retrograde are less likely to last, I'd say. At a mundane level, the Venus retrograde will speak to relations both within and without societies. So that can mean that relations between different racial or ethnic groups come up for revision. On the world stage, we tend to see issues around alliances and diplomatic relations coming up.

Something to bear in mind is that Venus follows an eight-year cycle. Every eight years, she retrogrades in roughly the same part of the zodiac, about two to three degrees earlier. And this means that there are five parts of the zodiac at any one time where Venus is retrograding and they form a five-pointed star or a pentagram.

And here's where we glimpse a little something of the magic of the cosmos because the number five was associated by numerological esotericists like the followers of Pythagoras with love. According to the writer John Anthony West, this is because it represents the union of the first female number, 2, and the first male number, 3. So there you have it. The very motion of Venus relative to the Earth tells us that she signifies love.

This year, Venus is stationing retrograde in the 11th degree of Aries. Now, if we wind back time eight years, we see that Venus stationed retrograde very close to this point in the 14th degree of Aries on March the 4th, 2017. What we tend to see is that similar themes come up in these repeated retrogrades every eight years. So think back to March of 2017 or look in your diary if you have one.

Events at that time related to Venusian themes should clue you in to what could be coming for you this year. Now if we look to the wider world, March 2017 was when the UK triggered Article 50, which is a clause in the European Union Treaty governing withdrawal from the Union. So we might expect UK EU relations to come up during this retrograde. Maybe the EU is the UK's ex that the UK will want back, or maybe there'll be problems in their relations.

And again, in March 2017, there was also trouble in relations between the EU and the US. At this time, the EU threatened to remove visa-free travel for Americans, although it eventually decided against that move. So I think we can expect transatlantic relations to deteriorate during the coming retrograde. Which isn't at all surprising given the tensions that already exist. We saw a foreshadowing of all this with J.D.

Vance's blistering speech attacking the deterioration of free speech in the EU. So that's the first big development of March. But there's a lot more because this month marks the first of this year's two eclipse seasons.

On March the 14th we'll see the first eclipse of 2025 with a lunar eclipse in the sign of Virgo. This will be the first eclipse in Virgo since 2016 and the first eclipse at the south node of the moon in that sign since 2008. So we'll now be seeing accelerated changes in the domain of Virgo, the mutable earth sign of analysis and service ruled by Mercury. A lunar eclipse is like a super powerful full moon.

It brings culminations, revelations and endings. This particular eclipse is in a very tight opposition to Saturn, which will be conjunct the Sun in the eclipse chart. So Saturnine themes will be strong here.

They include denial, restriction, structure, separation, suffering and melancholy. There's a tension here between the ideal, which is Piscean, and the realistic, which is Virgoan and Saturnine. that could feel quite heavy, as is Saturn's way. In mundane astrology, Virgo's realm includes healthcare, the service industries, technical specialists, food, crops and farming, and labor unions.

So these are areas likely to be affected by this eclipse. Given that Virgo's opposing sign, Pisces, is also implicated. We might see oceanic themes, trade flows, migration coming up. There's an inherent tension between the working class, and with migrants because they often but not always compete for jobs. And that's reflected in the zodiac in the opposition between Virgo and Pisces.

I can't help but wonder if labor action such as strikes could come up around this time. As I mentioned, Virgo signifies labor unions and with Mercury retrograde and the very strong Saturn influence on this eclipse, I could see them downing tools at this time. Now, interestingly, there's another technique that we can use to understand what any lunation is. including an eclipse, is signifying.

And it's also suggesting that the theme of labor action and workers' rights are going to come up at this eclipse. This technique was developed by the astrologer Detriff Pessin and detailed in her book Lunar Shadows 3, The Predictive Power of Moon Phases and Eclipses. She calls it the lunar gestation cycle because it ties lunations that come nine months apart together and it shows how they're related in meaning. It's incredibly powerful because it allows you to see hidden threads of meaning running through human lives and history.

And in the extended version of this video, available for members of World Astrology Report, we're going to dig into this technique, see how to use it, and see why it points to labor action as being a likely development around the time of this eclipse. The other interesting thing about this eclipse is that its ruler, Mercury, will be stationing retrograde just as it comes into effect. And so once again we reach an eclipse season that is complicated by the messenger planet going haywire at the same time.

Just what we need. On March the 15th Mercury will station retrograde in the 10th degree of Aries and so we reach the first Mercury retrograde of 2025. Mercury is the messenger planet, the clever and cunning governor of communication, trade, and technology. And when Mercury stations retrograde, he dons his trickster hat and his domain goes haywire. Usually the snafus we experience during Mercury retrograde aren't life-threatening or damaging, they're just annoying. But the more annoyed you get, the louder the trickster's cackles become.

The important thing to bear in mind here is that we're being given a lesson in patience. This is a time to take deep breaths and to bear in mind that there's nothing wrong with taking things easy. But Aries is a shoot first, ask questions later sign and with Mercury in that domain we can see that perhaps the biggest risk here will be communicating rashly or impatiently without thinking things through.

Mercury retrograde is not a good time to be taking trades or signing contracts or putting out content. But of course often we don't have the luxury of avoiding these things. So be careful, be patient and remember that this too shall pass.

This is yet another period where we'll be seeing eclipses at the same time as Mercury is malfunctioning, so it's quite possible that it'll be harder than usual to figure out exactly what's wrong and where problems lie until later when Mercury stations direct. And a few days after Mercury's retrograde comes one of the most important astrological moments of the year, the spring equinox. On March the 20th comes the spring equinox, the beginning of the astrological year and the initiation of Aries season.

At this moment we move from the half of the year in which darkness predominates in the northern hemisphere to the half in which light has the upper hand. And so this is a moment symbolic of birth and rebirth. The sign of Aries is ruled by Mars, planet of action, but it's also where the sun, signifier of the light of consciousness, is said to be exalted.

So Aries is the sign in which the self comes to know itself through the actions it takes in the world. Archetypal Aries isn't bothered about what anyone else thinks. Aries just is. Aries just does things. And if it can, Aries does things first.

Aries is the sign associated with the head, and it likes to be at the head of the pack, pioneering, taking bold action, and discovering new ground. But where does Aries get its inspiration from? Well, Aries is a fire sign, and it's intrinsically tapped into the divine creative principle. It's through the creativity of the fire signs that the divine will finds its most direct conduit into the world.

The pioneering psychologist James Hillman had both his sun and moon in the sign of Aries. He once said this, sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. This is what I must do, this is what I've got to have, this is who I am. The entry of the Sun into Aries is the symbolic beginning of the astrological year, and the chart for that moment can be used to interpret how the year will go for the country chosen as the location. In the extended version of this video, available for World Astrology Report members, we take a look at this chart for Washington DC.

Now, there's something else of interest relating to the spring equinox this year that I want to flag for you now. I did a recent live stream on the Yuga cycle, which is the idea from Hinduism that the world moves through successive ages in which the amount of virtue in the world rises and declines. The worst of all these ages is said to be the Kali Yuga, the Iron Age, which we may or may not be living through right now, depending on who you ask. But Bibu Dev Misra, the author of an excellent and deeply researched book on this cycle, Yuga Shift, believes that the Kali Yuga will end on the spring equinox this year. or March the 21st, 2025. And that's good and bad news, if true.

Misra thinks that at this moment, a 1200 year transition into a better age, the Dwapara Yuga, will begin. Spiritual energies will pour into the world in greater intensities, raising our vibration. But the transition will also require a great purification of the world by fire. He suggests that this will take the form of comets or asteroid impacts that gradually reset world society. If you're interested in this idea, you might want to consider becoming a member of World Astrology Report because I gave a recent two and a half hour live stream on this subject that you can watch right now.

Oh, and Misrath will be coming on World Astrology Report on YouTube soon to talk about his research. Watch this space. I don't know if he's right about the end of the Kali Yuga, but there's certainly a lot of fire in the sky in late March, especially as we get deeper into eclipse season.

But before we get to that, there's something else I want to flag. On March the 23rd we'll see the first of nine oppositions between Pluto and Vulcanus, which is a hypothetical planet used in the Uranian school of astrology. The positions of these planets were deduced by the astrologers who pioneered this school in Germany in the early 20th century. Vulcanus has a 663 year cycle and it's said to signify great strength, force and energy, while Pluto is generally seen in Uranian astrology as signifying transformation. The combination of these planets, as we'll see this year, is said to signify great and rapid transformations.

It signifies volcanic eruptions, both literal and metaphorical. Pluto and Vulcanus are reaching their opposition now, but they conjoined last between 1848 and 1854. And this was indeed a massively transformative period for the world. Europe was hit by a wave of nationalist revolutions.

The hugely traumatic Taiping Rebellion, essentially a civil war broke out in China and the Mexican-American and Crimean wars broke out. There were also significant volcanic eruptions during this time including Iceland's Mount Hekla and Hawaii's Mauna Loa, the largest volcano in the world. And right now, lo and behold, volcanoes are threatening to blow all over the world.

In the past month there were thousands of small earthquakes in Santorini, prompting fears the volcano there might erupt. A volcano in Ethiopia started releasing plumes of methane, Italy's Mount Etna started spewing lava and there are also fears that Mount Spur in Alaska is about to erupt. But these eruptions are only physical manifestations of the fiery tendencies that are very much in the air right now.

I can't help but think of Bibu Dev Misra's prediction of the transition out of the Kali Yuga involving cleansing by fire. Could dealing with volcanic eruptions and their effects on the world be part of it? Bear in mind that Pluto and Vulcanus will oppose each other nine times between now and 2028, so we won't necessarily see anything quite yet. Bear in mind that we're already seeing this Pluto-Vulcanus opposition play out in the flurry of executive orders and transformational decisions that Donald Trump is taking in the US.

And the message here is get used to it. There's much more to come in March. Pluto and Vulcanus are telling us that, but so are eclipses.

On March the 29th we'll see a solar eclipse in Aries. And frankly speaking this eclipse looks potentially explosive. Eclipses always bring about rapid change but this one looks like it'll be particularly dramatic and fast acting given that it's taking place in Aries, the sign of Mars, the war planet. But there's more.

The eclipse is in a semi-square, that's a 45 degree aspect, with Uranus, planet of surprises and revelation and rapid turnarounds. And it's at the midpoint of Jupiter and Pluto which brings a sense of big and bold transformation potentially having to do with finance and big money. The fact that the eclipse is in the sign of Mars points us to the possibility that this eclipse could have to do with war or violence or contention. Now here's a map showing where the eclipse will be visible and we can see that Europe seems to be the main area affected. But so are parts of Canada and Greenland.

As we've seen on this channel many times before, solar eclipses can come into effect about three months before they actually happen in the sky. So I have to ask, are we seeing here a signifier of President Donald Trump's shocking and surprising interest in acquiring Greenland and maybe even Canada too? But to figure out which places are affected by an eclipse, we can also look to birth charts for countries and see which of them have sensitive... points at the location of the eclipse in the zodiac which is the 10th degree of Aries.

And this eclipse is hitting a lot of important mundane charts. For one thing I think it could very well be important for Germany. If we look at the German reunification chart from 1990 we find that it has a midheaven very close to the point of this eclipse. Now eclipses come in families known as Saros series. This particular eclipse will be from Saros series 149. which is the series that astrologer and eclipse expert Bernadette Brady calls Nine New North.

We can look at previous eclipses in this Saros series and see what happened to get an idea of what might be coming, because themes in successive eclipses in a Saros series tend to repeat themselves. And Germany's international relations is a theme that seems to be associated with this eclipse family. At the last one in 2007, Germany deployed tornado airplanes to Afghanistan. controversial move seen as signifying its commitment to NATO. At the eclipse before that in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell.

Go back another 18 years and we find Germany signing the Treaty of Warsaw which saw it make a commitment to non-violence and cemented its borders with Poland. In 1953 came the East German Uprising and in 1935 Hitler announced that Germany was rearming. So the theme of German military engagement seems to come up.

quite often with this family and ominously the eclipse is also conjunct Mars in the chart for the NATO treaty. An eclipse on Mars is going to stimulate that entity's martial aspects. Could this signify NATO engagement in conflict of some kind or some event that provokes NATO action somehow?

This same eclipse also hits sensitive points in charts for Russia, Iran and Israel and even China and Taiwan. Of course it won't necessarily be signifying one single event implicating all these different countries. Could be many things.

But I've got to say, I'm a bit nervous about it. I find myself drawn towards the Middle East as a possible locus of the events to come. The geodetic meridian of Uranus is hovering right over Iran's capital of Tehran right now, signifying the potential for disruption or revolution or violence in Iran. I'm mindful that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still spoiling for a fight with Iran and wants to pull the US into any such conflict. My sense is that President Donald Trump doesn't want war but events could force him into one.

We've talked about Aries a lot already in this episode but I've saved the biggest news for last because Neptune is about to move into that sign, bringing the Neptune in Pisces era to a long-awaited close. On March the 30th, Neptune will enter Aries for the first time since 1862. This is the first of four outer planet sign changes coming this year. Soon enough in 2025, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus will all change signs too.

So this year will certainly be one for the books. But back to Neptune. The Neptune in Pisces era, which began in 2011, is drawing to a close, finally.

Neptune signifies the ideal, the archetypal and the imaginal. And the sign that Neptune is in tells us a lot about collective ideals and trends and the ethos of the times. Pisces is the last sign of the zodiac. It's the end of the story and inherent to it is the sense that return to source and rebirth are imminent. And so it's a sign of martyrdom, self-sacrifice and yearning for the ideal.

It also carries a sense of divine discontent with this flawed material plane. The Neptune in Pisces era, which coincided very closely with the rise of smartphone-powered, image-obsessed social networks, was both idealistic and intolerant. I think we'll look back at Neptune in Pisces as the quote-unquote woke era, one in which the ideals of political correctness dominated discourse.

It was characterized by both idealistic attempts to ignore the differences between people, as well as an insistence and emphasis on those very same differences. It's also been an era of high migration, driven in part by the way that social networks have revealed to people in the developing world how people live in the richer parts of the world. But over decades, waves of migration have transformed societies in Europe. And as Neptune moves from Pisces to Aries, we're now seeing waves of reaction against that trend. And so the Neptune in Aries era has been building for some time.

We see it in rising right-wing populism. and nativist movements that are pushing back against the high levels of migration favoured by internationalist elites. And so the rise of Donald Trump came in the middle of the Neptune in Pisces era. Trump wasn't able to be very effective in his first term, he wasn't well prepared to be president or for the resistance he would face.

But we're now seeing a very different Trump administration, one unafraid to make bold controversial decisions and to take decisive action to change the course of America. and by extension the world. There's an article I'd like to recommend here entitled American Strong Gods by the conservative writer N.S.

Lyons on his blog The Upheaval. The article explains where we are now better than anything I've read recently. The phrase that Lyons uses repeatedly to describe the ethos of this second Trump administration is, you can just do things, and you couldn't get a more concise summary of Neptune in Aries than that.

This is the shape of things to come in the Neptune in Aries era. We're going to see the world being remade by individuals and groups and nations taking action regardless of what conventions and rules say. Whenever a particular sign is activated by a planet the opposing sign is also implicated. With Neptune in Pisces the significations of Virgo were also in full force.

There was an extreme consciousness of difference which is Virgoan, which we saw with identity politics, combined with moves to try to enforce equal outcomes for everyone. which is more Piscean through things like DEI. Virgo is also the sign of the working class. And during this period, we saw governments in all sorts of places enacting policies that favoured globalist business interests, but left working people feeling betrayed. With Neptune in Aries, the Aries ethos of just doing things will contrast with that of Aries' opposing sign, Libra.

Libra is the sign of balance and harmony and the laws, agreements and contracts that regulate society. I'm going to quote from NS Lyons' article here. He says, quote, The principle behind all Trump's behavior here actually appears to be quite straightforward. He is willing to use American might, however it may benefit the nation, rather than caring very much about protecting the status quo liberal international order for its own sake, or adhering to polite fictions like international law. Turns out you can just do things on the world stage too.

Diplomacy and alliances are logically seen as of value. only insofar as they benefit America. This is indeed what America first always meant. Again, think Ares versus Libra. Whatever you think of the Trump administration, his approach is very much in line with the ethos of these times.

This era is going to be one of action that will completely reshape the international order that was put in place after World War II. And again, I think that regardless of politics, we can all take a lesson from that. With Neptune in Ares, it will be time to shake off our doubts, our fears.

our self-consciousness and just do things. Of course inevitably all of this will go too far, just as the Neptune in Pisces era did. Soon enough we'll start to see a building wave of feminine taurian energy in reaction to this very masculine Aries energy, driven by a growing desire for stability and the ability to just enjoy the material pleasures of the world.

Now in the extended version of this video we explore a technique that can help you to figure out what an eclipse or indeed any lunation is going to bring into your life. This is the lunar gestation technique outlined by astrologer Dietrich Pessin and understanding how this technique works will help us to understand what the coming lunar eclipse in Virgo will promise both for individuals and for the wider world. That's it for now.

If you're interested in learning more about what Neptune in Aries promises for the world then I suggest you watch this video that I made with the astrologer Adam Ellenbos. We dig into symbolism and history to help you understand Neptune in Aries and Neptune in Pisces in this video and I think you're going to like it. Thanks and see you next time.

Transcript for:Astrology and Global Politics in 2025

Transcript for:
Astrology and Global Politics in 2025