COVID-19 and the New Retrograde Cycles

Pluto stationed retrograde a couple of days ago, just as people were succumbing to the springtime urge to free themselves from lockdown:

“…beaches in the southern part of California were packed with thousands of people over the weekend.”

Sunscreen but no masks or social distancing. Very American.

Saturn will retrograde back towards the COVID start point on May 11, in tandem with more easing of constraints.

Planets do not move backward through the Zodiac, but the Earth does move CLOSER to the planet as it catches up with the orbiting planet and then surpasses its orbit; creating the appearance of retrograde conditions.

The whole notion of retrogrades and ‘revisiting’ or ‘redoing’ feels like semantical idiocy to me. I’ve always found this embarrassing about astrology, along with notions of ‘intercepted houses’ and other non-literal conditions that are treated as factual.

What does seem germane is planetary proximity, which could be read as intensification. As an astrologer of 45 years, I’ve never noticed any alteration or ‘weakening’ of a planet that is retrograde at birth, in fact, more the opposite, they are often more emphatic.

Astrologer Noel Tyl claimed that a natal retrograde planet, in his experience, was so potent it threw its influence across the wheel, highlighting the house in the opposite hemisphere. I can attest to this with a retrograde Saturn in the 4th house and the aspiration associated with my chart’s Taurus midheaven — namely the desire to live in the natural world completely — which, fortunately, I’ve achieved. My home (4th house) and business (10th house) are combined and entwined completely within nature.

So Saturn and Pluto retrograding back through Capricorn in late spring toward the hotspot of their January conjunction (which coincided exactly to the recently confirmed dates when COVID first registered in the US) would translate as acceleration, not deceleration — and possibly an increase in potency.

I’m afraid this is going to turn ugly and have the opposite impact as what’s hoped for and intended. The silver lining would be more casualties associated with Trump’s feeble-minded handling of what was announced to him in early January as a looming pandemic. Translated: fewer votes in November.

There’s all of this talk of building herd immunity — but as is the case with most theoreticians, they aren’t the ones that actually inject themselves with whatever they are blowharding about — so think twice about exposure and your own springtime hormonal blowouts. You might not live to see the child you fathered in May come to full term the following year.