Note: This will be my last monthly astrology guide for the time being. I plan to still post occasionally when I have something worth writing about a particular transit or time period, but I am taking a break from regular guides to reconsider and reconfigure my work / life / side-hustle balance. To stay up to date on my occasional astrology writing and other tarot/astrology projects, you can join my mailing list here.
The context at the beginning of Gemini Season:
Just after the Sun enters Gemini on May 20, Venus (moving retrograde through Gemini since May 13) hits her second square with Neptune. Mercury has only just come out from under the beams of the sun to become visible as an evening star, and is applying to a head-on conjunction with retrograde Venus. The Moon begins Gemini Season exalted in Taurus but closely conjunct disruptive Uranus. Mars is in watery Pisces with Neptune. Saturn is moving retrograde through the early degrees of Aquarius, which he traditionally rules. Jupiter and Pluto are moving retrograde through Saturn’s other domicile Capricorn. The Moon’s nodes have recently moved into Sagittarius and Gemini, meaning we’ll be seeing eclipses in those signs over the next year and a half, including a penumbral lunar eclipse this Gemini Season.
Venus Retrograde in Gemini
As I mentioned in my astrology guide to Taurus Season, Astrologer Nick Dagan Best has described Venus retrogrades as times when social conventions come up for review. For this Venus retrograde in Gemini from May 12–June 25, it is pretty easy to pick out a few social conventions that are in the process of changing (social greetings, face masks, isolation, etc.), though there are bound to be some surprises as well. With Venus retrograde completing three exact squares with nebulous Neptune, we can expect pretty things and creature comforts to be especially distracting at this time. With Mercury conjoining Venus in a tight square with disorienting Neptune on May 22 (coinciding with the new Moon right at the start of Gemini Season!), we can expect some of the trappings of Mercury retrograde as well such as problems with communications and technology (and even more so when Mercury actually stations retrograde in Cancer near the end of Gemini Season on June 17).
Note: I’m posting this a little late (about a week into Gemini Season), and the beginning of Gemini Season has already seen some major social “norms” come into question.
Twitter’s fact checks and flags on recent tweets from President Trump prompted him to sign an executive order reinterpreting a 1996 law that affects the liability of social media companies for content posted by users (the law went into affect just before another Venus retrograde in Gemini, which occurs regularly on an 8-year cycle). While it is unlikely to hold up legally, this order has called into question the role of social media companies in protecting users from false and/or harmful content, the sometimes conflicting First Amendment rights of social media companies and their users, and under what circumstances might a social media company be considered a publisher and held responsible for content posted by users.
But most notably, the tragic murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer has spurred nationwide protests and has drawn significant attention to the issue of police brutality against Black People. It is difficult to know what changes may come from this tragedy (and difficult to be optimistic when racism and violence against Black People have been baked into U.S. culture from the very beginning). Yet there is still hope that this may be a tipping point. We can’t afford to be patient or complacent. BLACK LIVES MATTER.