A Letter to My Comrade, Whom I Love
On the Jupiter-Uranus Conjunction (April 24, 2024)
“I understand what it is to be alone when you are confused and afraid and unsure of what will happen next. You are not alone. You will never be, unless you so choose. I know what matters, here at the world’s end. Ah, my love. An apocalypse is a relative thing, isn’t it?” - N.K. Jemisin
Dear comrade.
I want to write you a letter about the apocalyptic meeting of Jupiter and Uranus in Taurus. It happens in the tender spring of this important year, on April 20 of 2024. This is a letter about the thunder troubling the ground we stand on, and about trying to understand how Earth grabs time out of the sky and generates it from inside her belly, morphing the old pathways of history into the vibrant present and the fluctuating future. This is a letter about learning how to trust apocalypse as a pulling back of the veil, and about how I want to be with you through all of this, no matter how weird it gets.
In a way, this is a once-upon-a-time story, because it stretches across time in ways that probably neither you nor I fully comprehend. To tell you the story of how Jupiter and Uranus will meet in Taurus on April 20 to terraform our lives in new and unexpected ways, I want to weave beyond the lengths of our lifetimes, and into timelines that exceed the creation of cultures —we’ll have to look at the rise and fall of empires and beyond.
The implications of this particular Jupiter-Uranus conjunction on April 20, 2024 stretch back hundreds of years at least thanks to Jupiter’s important meeting with Saturn back in 2020. So I wonder if you will come with me as I rifle through the patterns that history has belched up according to the dance of these planets. I hope churning up that evidence will help us understand some of what is simmering up all around us now. And one thing is clear to me: I hope we can form our understanding in togetherness. So if you’ll take my hand, let’s go in.
Uranus
Let’s arrive first to a meeting with Uranus. I know this planet as the representative of change, revolution, liberation, and technological evolution. This outer planet has a sidereal orbit that lasts 84 years, so some humans will live to see their Uranus return, but not all. Humans first met Uranus in 1781, around the time of the French and American revolutions, a time when the Western world was fighting itself over the concept of freedom and individuation, though those freedoms were perversely predicated on the enslavement and genocide of black and indigenous bodies, and the eradication of indigenous ways of being in relationship with the Earth. So whenever I meet Uranus, I try to pray that humans keep learning how to respond to the principles of liberation and individuation more responsibly. We have much growing up to do as a species, and I pray we’ll learn how to better digest Uranus’ important medicine with time and attention.
Fascinatingly, before 1781 humans had never met a planet they couldn’t see with their naked eyes. Saturn, lord of time who is visible to the naked eye, was the last planet we had known how to commune with before the technology of telescopes enabled us little humans to stretch beyond our biological limits. It follows that for humans, Uranus became the marker of our ability to use technology to step beyond our embodied limits. Uranus continues to symbolize our capacities to break our chains and grow through our creativity. In the presence of Uranus’ explosive power, let us wisely discern between the chains we need to break, and the bonds we need to honor and keep. Know to whom you are accountable. Know your oppressors, know your enemies. Know what technology is and learn which technologies truly nourish life, and which deal in the colonial currency of death.
Now, slow-moving Uranus has been in Taurus since 2018, and will stay there until 2026. So let us take a moment to remember how much has changed since 2018. Where Taurus represents our values, our sense of security, our stubborn insistence on enjoying life, Uranus has been here wreaking sheer glorious havoc on our collective values and our understandings of what makes us safe and happy. Since 2018 I have seen more people become anticapitalist all at once than ever before in my lifetime. More people recognize that happiness and safety that comes through white cis het capitalist supremacy isn’t a happiness or safety worth having. We are watching our old systems fail us, and recognizing that we not only need to, but that we collectively can and want to make a different world real.
Jupiter
To make a different world, we need to meet our power, individually and collectively. This means it’s time to meet Jupiter, power’s celestial representative. And comrade let me tell you, when I think about how Jupiter has been storied throughout the history of a patriarchal culture organized around supremacy, my stomach turns. Take yourself on a trip through the Greco-Roman myths about Zeus/Jupiter. He is misogynist, and though he is queer, he is a rapist. He represents power as it gets taught to us by a culture that hates, fears, and debases all to which it assigns the label of “femininity.”
One thing I know is that Jupiter is in for some big restorying and transformation times because we are collectively more and more ready to change our beliefs about power. And because Jupiter is about to meet with Uranus, the representative of the very principle of change! So don’t forget the power of counternarrative. Now will be an important time for us to tell stories about how we have seen power manifest in and from the margins. About how we experience power in ways that look different from ways we have seen power institutionalized.
Now, we can’t fully understand Jupiter’s current or impending movements until we understand more about where Jupiter has been recently. Because y’all! Jupiter has been on an important ride. This ride has to do with the elegant era-making synodic cycle of Jupiter and Saturn, and this ride is wrapped up in movements older than you or me or our cultures.
Let us travel back to a strange year very few humans living in the modern world will ever forget. 2020. Not only was that year Covid and lockdown and the murder of George Floyd culminating in BLM blowing up to global proportions. It was also the year that Jupiter and Saturn participated in something Astrologers call a Great Mutation, which only happens every 200 years and is known for defining historical eras. Ok.
Jupiter and Saturn’s Synodic Cycle and the Great Mutation
The Jupiter and Saturn cycle is something that astrologers have been tracking for as long as astrologers have been doing their astrology thing. This is because the meeting of Jupiter and Saturn tends to correlate with shifts in the organization and structure (Saturn) of social, cultural, and political power (Jupiter). Fascinatingly, these two planets meet predictably once every 20 years. The wild thing is that for roughly 200 years at a time, they meet up in the same element of signs. So it goes: 200 years of conjunctions in fire signs, 200 in earth signs, 200 in air signs, followed by 200 years of conjunctions in water signs. So when we track how these 200 year eras match up to the organization of cultural power, it starts to help us understand exactly wtf is up rn, as in, why we are experiencing such a major shift in the zeitgeist. Hang in here with me as I spell this out.
In 2020, Jupiter and Saturn met in Aquarius, firmly transitioning humanity into a 200-year Air Era in which cultural power would be organize around the element air. This means it also shifted us out of a 200 year Earth Era in which culture organized around the element earth. (Take note though that in 1980, Saturn and Jupiter met in Libra before a final Earth conjunction in 2000, meaning the Earth Era began to crack open in 1980. We will revisit this.)
Alright. Let me show you what the earth to air transition looks like elementally. Earth is a sign that likes consolidation. In these eras people tend to be extra stoked to get rich, and hierarchies (social and material) work well when earth is dominant because earth materials stack up easily. In contrast, air is an element that likes to scatter. Think about how wind forces vertical things to become horizontal. Air topples towers. It also spreads seeds of potential across the earth. In Air Eras people tend to value creativity, communications, and horizontal organizations of power because during these eras, stacked-up shit tends to topple.
Now let me show you what that transition has looked like historically. In our 200-year Earth Eras, we have seen cultures build up a lot of wealth, and empires rise. Several earth cycles ago (3rd-5th c.), Rome was in the height of its prosperous Imperial era, which fueled itself with slave labor i.e. a violently hierarchical culture. In the next Earth Era of the 11-13th centuries, Christians began to dominate and steal wealth more aggressively through the Crusades. Since our last Earth Era that began in the early 19th century, we saw the industrial revolution, major feats of engineering, the rise of Capitalism which runs on grossly exploited/enslaved labor, the consolidation of the American empire, World Wars, the global dominance of the West, and the normalization of a class system based predominantly on material wealth generated by racialized labor.
Conversely in the 200-year Air Eras that have followed Earth Eras, we have historically tended to see empire fall and scatter, often to “barbarians” and plagues. For example, the Roman Empire fell to the Visigoth “barbarians” in the 5th century air era; in the same Air Era Alexander the Great broke up the Persian empire. In the 13th century Air Era, Genghis Khan and his nomadic bands of Mongol “barbarians” conquered China and initiated a short-lived but gigantic empire that stretched across most of Eurasia, and that had social welfare and a postal system. During this same Air Era, the Bubonic Plague/Black Death destroyed Europe’s social fabric; for a time this generated a social fabric in Europe characterized by collectivist labor values and resistance to landlords (for more on that read Caliban and the Witch). Within that same era, the Renaissance sprang up in Europe, thanks to the shift in values toward arts and creativity.
When we consider the cultural shifts from our last Earth Era to the Air Era we currently, and freshly move through, we must consider the Internet, one of the most human reality-altering technologies ever created. The Internet’s birthday (1983) followed the first Saturn-Jupiter conjunction in Libra in 1980, when the Earth Era’s container began to crack and the Air Era began to seep in. The Internet of course has given rise to completely new ways of interacting with information and has provided us with boundless potential for creative communication. However it has also provided Empire with a tool through which to collect unprecedented amounts of surveillance data, and through which they have made dystopian degrees of development in Artificial Intelligence. The Internet has also provided us, people on the ground, with a tool through which we can expose and intimately understand the realities of the racialized genocides that have made possible the wealth of our dying Earth Era. It has helped us learn just how disillusioned we must become with Western colonial capitalism and its foundational supremacies if we are to adapt to the realities of the present.
How Jupiter and Uranus Have Been Interacting since 2020
Immediately after Jupiter and Saturn inaugurated the Air Era in late 2020, these two bodies both spent 2021 in a series of intense square aspects with Uranus in Taurus. Do y’all remember how in 2020 and 2021, they told us to stay inside and protect ourselves from the pandemic? And instead of listening to the powers that be, we donned our masks, took to the streets, and generated the largest worldwide movement in support of black life in history. Across the globe, we organized together, on the ground. We explored and tested out collectivist, abolitionist power structures in ways that forever changed how we as people approach power. To me this speaks to the winds of Jupiter and Saturn in air signs scattering information across the globe and, at least within our hearts, beginning to topple the hierarchies humans had institutionalized during the recent Earth Era.
Of course we cannot forget the shadows of Saturn and Jupiter’s representations of structure and power. Though there is hope in how we on the ground have been liberating ourselves from how these concepts were institutionalized, our movements have been met by Empire in its death throes committing genocidal acts of terror. There is a rise of far right, fascistic governments and bigoted, supremacist populist movements across the globe, and the value of the “democratic vote” feels more and more obsolete. We can’t expect these institutions to go down easily, so let’s hold onto each other tight as we help bring them down.
This is the context through which the squares between Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus played out. Now we can close with an exploration of what it means for Jupiter and Uranus to finally meet this year, on April 20.
Uranus and Jupiter meet on April 20, 2024
Jupiter arrived to Taurus in May of 2023. As Jupiter moved through Taurus through the second half of 2023 and has been building towards its conjunction with Uranus, we have seen one of the most critical landback movements of our time become more escalated and globalized as Israel’s brutal genocide in Palestine is fully televised by people living through the genocide, on the ground. This has also elevated awareness of many genocides across the globe, in the Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia, China, Myanmar, Tigray and more. People living comfortably in the West are beginning to see the true price of Western dominance and its obsession with material wealth. So what will we see arise globally as Jupiter and Uranus meet in April 2024?
Uranus is a trickster. Jupiter is empowerment, and expands whatever it touches. Therefore as Jupiter comes to empowers the trickster, and widen the aperture on whatever portal Uranus in Taurus has been opening since 2018, the thing to expect is the unexpected. You can’t be ready for this unless you can honor that change is the god of this moment.
I’ve been deeply curious to meet this moment since those tense squares of 2021, because I feel very clear that through the opaque and embodied earth-wisdom of Taurus, I won’t be able to see or predict these moments until they arrive. I’ve wondered about more pandemics, internet blackouts, escalating wars, famines, the collapse of capitalism, more weird shit with AI evolving and beyond…but those things are already clearly in progress. I recognize that learning how to stay present for those things requires embodiment first. So I interpret the first and ongoing move here as learning how to honor our embodiment, as meeting each other through the truth of our embodiment, and becoming braver in the face of uncertainty. For each other, we have to do that.
I have also been trying to learn from Indigeneity, and honor that landback is one of the most critical asks that Taurus has to make of us as Uranus and Jupiter churns the soils. It is very clear to me that if there is any one thing the Powers That Be are united against, it is Indigeneity as a way of life. Empire’s work appears to be the decimation of the humans who have multi-generational, love relationships with the land. Humans who know that land cannot be owned, and that if anything, land owns us. I know my understanding of Indigeneity is deeply limited because I have been educated in a settler-colonial state and I have been trying to survive under a capitalist regime. But one thing I believe is that in this moment in history, I need to learn from Indigeneity how to be in relationship and in reciprocity with every kind of ecology —internal, interpersonal, social, natural, wild, linguistic, spiritual, ancestral ecologies.
Something else I learn from Indigeneity, is that while we in the West may be facing some degree of cultural apocalypse, Indigenous peoples have been through apocalypse after apocalypse since settler-colonial states have existed. The people of Gaza and Sudan (and beyond) are in apocalypse right now as the West murderously seeks to extract resources from those lands. So I hope to do my best by joining hands with the people who already know how to live through apocalypse, and to stand in solidarity, and together to peel back the veil so we can reveal new new ways of living and breathing and being liberated to participate with the world.
I think where we place our power at this moment in time will deeply impact the rest of our lives. How and what we prioritize, and what we believe to be important matters very much. How we are in relationship, how we open our minds and hearts about what relationship even means. How we resist the urge to be extractive and possessive, and strive to be in reciprocity.
So my comrade. I will leave you here with this prayer. I pray that Jupiter’s empowerment of Uranus blows apart our attachments to Western ways of being, and that we come closer to each other through the cracks of a dying era. I pray to become a humble agent in transformative reciprocity with my ecology. I pray that we can hold hands and learn intimacy with each other, with time, and with spirit in ways no one has been able to model for us just yet, but that have somehow been existing all along. All we need to do is give ourselves permission to learn them, together.
So for now, I just thank you for coming with me on the journey of exploring this moment. May we love each other through the end of one world, and toward the existence of another.
In love and solidarity,
Amalia <3
P.s. If I had to sum this letter up in a few words, it would read: Free Palestine. Free Sudan. Free Congo. Free all indigenous, racialized, oppressed people from the tyranny of capitalist colonialism. Decolonize our imaginations. Landback. Liberate the people to live with the earth. I love you.
With special thanks to my homie, Jahmil Roberts, who encouraged me to write this as a letter to my comrade.
In the future, look out for an edit that will include an extended reading list :)
sources on jupiter and saturn cycle!
https://jessicadavidson.co.uk/2020/11/02/the-jupiter-saturn-cycle-and-the-great-mutation/
https://jessicadavidson.co.uk/2020/11/09/the-jupiter-saturn-cycle-and-the-transition-into-air/