seafoam readings

these are written predominantly for the *rising* signs but they are also intuitively "channeled" enough that they should work for any dominant energy you have! (try your sun if you don't know rising, or more advanced readers can try moon, anywhere you have a stellium, etc and see what works best for you!)

aries: focusing on your daily routine (improving it, refining it, starting it over...) keeps your identity on track even if this week's astrology shakes up your self concept or confidence a bit.

taurus: venus into virgo is fertile, fun, and flirty for you so make the most of it! if you're not feeling sociable or romantic the fun can be at home in your pajamas making art or reading a book if you prefer. bonus points if you plant a flower.

gemini: for multiple reasons really, it's a good week for you to stay home and chill. if you need to be out and about you can of course do so. but making and maintaining a sanctuary for yourself is a top notch aim this week.

cancerians: a retrograde station of neptune occurs in your 10th house this week. of course, mercury is already retrograde in your sign. just remind yourself as much as needed that setbacks are not all they appear to be. sometimes they turn out to be shortcuts or gifts.

leo: you are in a very good position as far as resources go. these are likely material/financial but if that seems impossible in your current situation, consider all the natural talent, enthusiasm, time, energy, community support, will power, or whatever that you do have. place a high value on resources that are not strictly material and appreciate them.

virgo: venus arrives in your sign. don't listen to too much of the old-timey fuss that she is debilitated there. it's true she is not at her most comfortable in service; but it is also true that she blesses the grapes on their vines to be juicy and beautiful. sometimes the best acts of service are done even in discomfort.

libra: let your relationships become a background matter for the week and focus instead on your mental health and wellness as an individual. this is especially about your inner mental and emotional world, more than it is about physical health, although of course you can work on that too. one often supports the other.

scorpio: be among friends! but not at the expense of your small daily anchors that keep you happy and well. first anchor, then friends, then everything else can come later.

sagittarius: mutability intensifies. it's chaotic but at least it prevents you from being bored. a minor adventure lies around every corner and the way you handle these enhances your reputation.

capricorn: with mercury being retrograde i would still recommend caution in travel and related themes, but you can get away with more than some other signs currently especially when it comes to publishing and academics.

aquarius: your sign is known as a humanitarian and it's a good time for you to live in this role. volunteer work, charity, and mutual aid are particularly auspicious all week - and for a while yet after, too.

pisces: some people will make a lot of claims about venus in virgo but for you it is genuinely a great time for interpersonal relationships and especially romantic partnerships. the ingress occurs this week.

watch the transit posts in real time to have the best guide through your week. want a little more? have a look at my patreon or ko-fi.

i have never heard of anyone making this connection but it just occurred to me and i think it should be explored a little more deeply!

have you ever noticed a connection between mercury transits and infectious illnesses or similar problems?

i will be watching this now because it occurred to me that since mercury has so much to do with exchange - often it gets credited as "communication" which it IS but it's also the flow of money, travel, etc and we do tend to acknowledge all that - why shouldn't it also have to do with exchange of germs or disease? full blown pestilence is definitely more of a saturn or pluto thing - covid became a problem in an intensely plutonic+saturnine time - but a personal planet for a personal illness, maybe? and i have had major personal pluto transits hit me hard with autoimmune problems but pluto transits don't seem to correspond with when i have had horrible colds, the flu, etc.

it also occurred to me that other things are transmitted that could be related to mercury but often aren't, like genetics for example. our dna is communicated to us from our ancestors. i'm sure the placements and transits matter for this stuff a lot but maybe you have a mercury transiting like a cancer lunar node or something and on the same day find out you have some genetic mutation that your grandparent had.

capricorn moon CAN (not always!!!!! only sometimes!!!!) be a little hard in love matters because it is SO rational, detached, and aloof, and for most people, love is simply not about those things. it is often the opposite! it can also be overthinking about the self love.

but if the moon and sun are trine? that actually helps you. you don't mention the degrees so i don't know if this is the case here.

libra venus is automatically good for these things. pretty much i have never seen a libra venus do anything bad for anyone in anyway. worst case, it makes one a little lazy, but this is better reframed as a person who enjoys the good things in life and doesn't put themselves through unnecessary torture or tedium.

the scorpio mars can go either way, it's very very passionate and fiercely loving but also can be secretive and manipulative. so that depends how you use it.

the rest, without seeing the chart or doing a full paid reading, the best i can say is it seems pretty neutral!

everything ultimately comes down to, what are you doing with the hand you are dealt?

the vibes for july, for people like me who like to fill out their planners with this stuff ahead of time.

mars on uranus in gemini, july 3. this is slightly ominous and can point to accidents and unexpected violence, but i hope it also shows people that the power lies with the masses and not the elite.

neptune rx in aries, july 7. neptune's retrogrades no longer take it back into pisces. this is all aries.as with the other outer planets, the broader retrograde periods are not super eventful, but the few days around the station can be full of illusions, deceit, and manipulation, so proceed cautiously.

uranus sextile neptune, july 15. the sextile has been noticeable for certain folks for ages already but is exact on the 15th. it is a union of two sorts of ethereal; the fog of shamanic trance + the sudden clarity of god downloading info into your brain directly. but this is one of those more-global-than-personal things; perhaps a new widespread spiritual movement or awakening, even if it goes without a name.

uranus trine pluto, july 17. like the above sextile, this has been ongoing and simply perfects at this time. but this is more of a tower (from tarot) sort of energy. institutions will for sure be crumbled around this time; hopefully the right ones, leaving whatever serves a good purpose steady on its foundation.

jupiter trine neptune and opposite pluto and sextile uranus, july 20. the outer planets move into an actually major alignment, all together, and involving less-geopolitical yet very benevolent jupiter. in spite of the way outer planets are frequently construed as malefics, this should be a harbinger of positive developments on the global front.

mercury direct in cancer, july 23. finally a likely chaotic mercury retrograde wraps up. the rest of july may feature some residual weirdness but at least it should start easing off and it will be more stable if you want to enact plans or sign forms etc.

neptune sextile pluto, july 23. this should be considered in connection to the other outer planet aspects aforementioned and it is long and ongoing, over months really. but it perfects on this day and may well correspond with some major world event. hopefully a good one, but i suspect it will be unclear to the average every day peasants what exactly it's about. even so, it brings about the end of an era and dawning of a new one.

ooh fun question, thank you for including tarot!! i like to remind everyone periodically that's where i have my real roots :) i have been doing astrology for a little over 8 years but i have been doing tarot for much, much longer, and my whole entire family is a tarot family - my mom has been doing this since she was quite young so it predates my existence in my genes. i am the only one who does astrology though lol.

those associations are actually what got me into astrology in the first place. i was a tarot-only girl for a long time and scoffed at such frivolous pursuits as astrology ;) (now look at me, lol)

they are usually meant to be the sign itself, not any particular planet in a sign and not any querent's sign. most, not all but certainly most, of these correspondences come from golden dawn and similar ceremonial esoteric traditions, with some deviations from that system like crowley's (although such deviations are still very similar).

so the chariot for example has the correspondence cancer. for at least the RWS deck and arthur waite's plans for it, that was just cancer, not the sun in cancer, not anything in cancer. just that sign, cancer, and its energies.

now, crowley's thoth deck is layered and layered and layered with extra symbolism. the chariot is still cancer. but you have things a little more specific in the minor arcana, like off the top of my head the four of wands in the thoth deck is called completion, and it is associated specifically with venus in aries.

so it's going to depend on what deck you are using, and whether you are comfortable applying eg the crowleyan themes to other decks. nothing stops you from doing that and it can be useful, but it's not necessarily the intended use, and purists might frown on it. i am not a purist.

a lot of modern artists who make their own decks don't necessarily include any such associations. you could choose to read them utterly without the astrology, or you could project one of these systems onto the deck.

personally when i read cards i don't delve into those astrological correspondences UNLESS something pings in my intuition that reminds me to do so. then it turns out to be relevant. but those are strictly intuitive choices i make on a reading by reading, card by card basis. AND in my head/intuition it changes somewhat. i may draw like, a king of cups, and be like oh, some water sign man. could be any of the water signs. at other times i may have the thoth deck in mind or be holding the actual thoth deck, in which case crowley's intended meaning was specifically the degrees in the last decan of aquarius and the first two decans of pisces, and lady frida harris drew a crab on the card, so i might think more specifically of cancer.

there is a story i think from rachel pollack? about drawing the chariot and a diagnosis, medically, of cancer - a weird association with that card but a valid one. (rachel pollack was a very cool lady btw, if you aren't familiar with her, look into her life and work!)

it's all so situational!

just for fun though, with no particular deck in mind and going strictly based on vibes for the big three you mentioned (some folks may disagree with my picks here) i would say page of cups for pisces sun, the high priestess for scorpio moon, three of wands for leo rising. (but there's not really any tradition applied here. just vibes and my brain.)

with the possible exception of pluto, saturn is the planet i see most villainized and feared in astrology. and there's good reason for this - he was classically a malefic and to this day necessarily retains unpleasant qualities like constriction, restriction, "lessons", and a long wait time.

on the other hand, especially when you are having a tough saturn transit, try to remember the positives! his association with time and constriction can enhance commitments, give long projects staying power, prevent you from taking overly/dangerously hasty actions, etc.

this is actually a pretty huge topic and something i might write more extensively on later but let's do a rundown here.

what is traditional is going to depend a lot on where you are from and who you learn from. vedic and western tropical are the two most traditonal ones i think, and it seems like you are referring to tropical here, but i want to be clear that's not always the case.

so, tropical: this doesn't take into account the precession of the equinoxes over thousands of years, which is why it no longer lines up with the visible stars. i discuss this in more detail in this book and it's also something you can do your own research on if you wish. in this system each sign is just a thirty-degree chunk of the sky, and the 0 degree of aries is determined by the day of the vernal equinox in the northern hemisphere (autumnal in south) NOT by the actual beginning of the constellation of stars that looks like aries the ram. i do not have any good scientific reason why this method should work better than any other, but my experience is that it is the best, and it is very old and widely used around the world so others must agree! i use this for pretty much everything although i know a thing or two about some other chart systems.

sidereal: DOES account for the precession of the equinoxes and DOES more or less line up with the actual stars as a result. but make no mistake, there's more than one way to do a sidereal chart. for instance, vedic astrology popular in india is one sidereal system. it uses the same 12 zodiac signs as the tropical system i use, but additional information and if i understand right also each sign is 30 degrees so it doesn't line up perfectly with the stars (someone correct me on this if i'm wrong in the replies please~). but there are other sidereal systems that don't have evenly sized signs, or they do but they incorporate eg the 13th sign, ophiuchus. i have written some before about how i feel like these sorts of systems SHOULD be more accurate but in my personal experience never are. the physicist/astronomer in me doesn't like that but whatever, i don't make the rules.

one thing i have heard is that while tropical is best for knowing thyself, sidereal or at least vedic is better for making predictions. i'm digging into that a little bit on my own time but i think tropical does predictions fairly well itself if you know what you're doing! since i am not as well-versed in vedic i still use tropical for my predictions and while i may not know the minute details it never really gets the vibe wrong.

draconic: a bit of a different thing. i offer these readings in my etsy. like everything i do, it varies a little bit from the most traditional/conventional manner. but it seems to work nicely. i think this style of chart has its origin in vedic astrology where the lunar nodes are the head and tail of the dragon, but it seems a lot of people do this chart in a tropical system anyway. it's defined by making the north node the 0 degree of aries and building the rest of the chart around that. so the planets and spacing of everything are the same as in the tropical natal chart, but the signs change. the idea is that this shows you something about your karma, your soul, your overarching personality in a way that is bigger than your personal egoic small self life as you know it. it's very esoteric and cool.

draconic charts are always really similar to natal charts. they are for a *person*. but you can do vedic or tropical charts about an individual, a meeting, a synastry, an event, a horary chart, etc. so that is another difference.

another thing i want to mention which you didn't ask explicitly but might interest you is all of the above are geocentric approaches. you can also do heliocentric astrology! i'm delving into that too because that's one of those things my science brain wants to work so much, lol. it is not widely practiced in the mainstream but astro dienst will generate heliocentric charts if you check off the right boxes. it's fun to play with. the big change is you no longer have a sun sign, you have an earth sign, and it is opposite whatever your natal sun sign is in tropical (eg i'm a taurus sun, but in heliocentric i have my earth in scorpio.)

this is information that is widely available elsewhere which is why i've never gotten around to a real post on it, but i realize not everyone understands how the shadow zones or shadow periods of retrogrades work. so let's talk about it!

first, it helps to understand what a retrograde looks like. the exact view depends on the planet in question but a retrograde is always a forward and back motion on the sky, often a loop pattern. so the planet chugs along, stops at a certain degree of the sky, turns around and heads back to a certain other degree of the sky, stops and resumes forward motion, thereby passing once more the point it originally went backwards, retrograde, upon.

for any time that a planet goes into retrograde, there is a shadow before it and a shadow after it. the shadow before, the "pre-shadow" part, is when the planet hasn't gone retrograde at all yet, but reaches the degree which will later be as far backwards in the zodiac as it can go.

the shadow after, the post-shadow, is after the planet has resumed its direct motion but hasn't made it all the way back to the very orginal-most point that it turned retrograde at.

so what does all this mean in practical terms? well, especially if you are a very mercurial person (a gemini-type person, maybe a virgoan, a person with a strongly aspected mercury natally) your mercury retrograde protocols need to go into effect early. other people might not really lean into the vibe until mercury actually changes direction but you won't have that same luxury, you'll feel the effect much earlier. and even if you're not a mercurial sort, you may want to hold off on any very big mercury moves - buying a car, signing a lease, upgrading a computer system, an important love letter or application - until you're safely outside of these zones. likewise for a venus retrograde if you're very venusian, etc. the outer planets spend so much time in retrograde, though, that you may not really need to worry much about those shadows. focus on mercury through ceres.

for an example: as i write this (although this post will probably be reblogged and this won't be true in the future) mercury has just retrograded from capricorn into sagittarius.