Sun now in Scorpio

The Sun has entered Scorpio and stands at the very first degree of the sign, about a degree from Venus, which is retrograde there and drawing closer. Scorpio sets the solar will on depth: one thing lived fully rather than many lightly, feeling followed down to its roots. With Venus beside it and moving backwards, that intensity goes first to love, attachment and what people want from one another. Both bodies sit in a hard figure with Chiron in Aries and Pluto in Aquarius, so the Scorpio month opens with real pressure on exactly those questions.

Sun and Venus together merge will and affection. The wish to be oneself and the wish to be loved become hard to tell apart. In Scorpio, Venus loses some of its distance in relationships, and retrograde it turns attention back over ground already covered. Old matters and old faces can resurface, and it becomes easier to face what one truly wants in love and what one will no longer accept. Something that broke may get a second chance. The same contact can make warmth harder to find and sensitivities quicker to bruise. If a feeling arrives with unusual force, it is likely old as well as new.

The figure is two T-squares with one apex: Sun and Venus in Scorpio each oppose Chiron in Aries, and Pluto in Aquarius squares all three. The opposition sets Scorpio's need to merge emotionally against Chiron in Aries, a sore place around standing up for oneself and being met as an individual. Oppositions are lived through other people, so this pull tends to look like someone else's fault. All of it presses towards Pluto. Pluto is moving forward again after turning direct a week ago, and it asks for something outworn to be cleared, because standing still is not an option.

In Aquarius that pressure works through groups, causes and ideas of how people ought to be, and there it can crowd out a single person's freedom. Its harder side is compulsion, control and the manipulation of others. If a closeness turns into a contest over who decides, or a shared cause starts flattening one person's voice, that is this figure going the harmful way.

The figure is shifting: the Sun's opposition to Chiron has passed its closest point while its square to Pluto tightens, and for Venus it runs the other way. The square between Pluto and Chiron, in force for weeks, holds only until 30 October.

There is real support for this figure. The North Node in Aquarius receives an easy contact from all three bodies on the opposition: trines from the Sun and from Venus, and a sextile from Chiron that is within a degree of exact and easing. In Astrocábala the Node marks tikun, repair, the work still outstanding. Chiron asks for acceptance of what is, beyond the removal of the hurt, and for a pain once carried to become help offered to someone else.

Pluto is used by deliberate action that serves more than one's own standing. Astrocábala asks that collapse and reconstruction, Pluto's two forces, work together rather than against each other. Mars in Leo trine Saturn in Aries, easing but still present, gives steady effort to that work. Saturn asks for thing so be built and corrected so that they hold.

Mercury in Scorpio is slowing towards a station and turns retrograde tomorrow, while it squares Jupiter in Leo. Jupiter enlarges whatever it touches, and in hard contact it inflates claims and promises. Leo adds pride, and Mercury in Scorpio thinks with intensity but little detachment. If a conclusion feels larger and surer than the evidence behind it, that is the square at work. The retrograde that follows is suited to reviewing, rechecking and rethinking, and it is hardest on rigid plans. One modern reading holds that a very important agreement may be best left until Mercury turns direct.

Uranus in Gemini, retrograde, is within a degree of a quincunx to Black Moon Lilith in Capricorn, and the contact is tightening. The quincunx is modern practice's aspect, read as a strained link; the classical tradition does not count it. Uranus brings restlessness, a nervousness whose cause is easily overlooked, and the urge to break whatever has set too hard. Lilith marks lack and the unfulfilled wish. In Capricorn that lack sits around duty, control and being effective. No planet stands in an earth sign today, and six hold fixed signs. The sky is persistent and slow to change course, yet short on practical ground. If an obligation suddenly feels unbearable, small precise adjustments serve better than overturning it.

Beneath the day runs Neptune in Aries sextile Pluto in Aquarius, a generational contact within a degree of exact and easing very slightly. It stays in orb for years. Sun and Venus each make a quincunx to Neptune, Venus's passing and the Sun's newly forming, which can blur ideals in love and make it harder to see clearly what one is reaching for.

The Moon is in late Pisces, receptive and quick to absorb the feelings around it. Its trine to Mercury, now separating, lets feeling and thought flow together. This is day fourteen of the half lunation opened by the New Moon in Libra on 10 October. The gibbous phase asks for evaluation: refining and clarifying what was set going then, before the Full Moon in Taurus on 26 October. The sky's shape is a splay, separate and uneven groups, each concern standing on its own terms and resisting being folded into the others.

What the day asks is to let something deep change rather than defend it, and to keep every claim in proportion while that happens.