Astrology of the Week Ahead with Chani Nicholas - The Week of August 24th, 2026: Shocks, surprises, and insights with the Pisces eclipse
Episode Date: August 24, 2026Episode 297In this podcast, New York Times best-selling author and astrologer Chani Nicholas discusses the astrology of the week and what it might mean for us all.The astrology of the week of August 2...4th, 2026, has the power to change everything. Mercury (the planet of communication) meets up with the South Node, signaling a major release — or leak — of important information. Then the messenger planet moves into Virgo, where it’s supercharged, and meets up with the Sun in a cazimi that’s sure to deliver some game-changing intel. On the same day, the lunar eclipse in Pisces wraps up a two-year cycle we started in September 2024. This eclipse is also square to Uranus (the planet of shocks and surprises), so expect some sudden shifts and unexpected endings. And once Mercury and the Sun square Uranus as well, more revelations could surface that change our perspective. Pay close attention to your dreams, epiphanies, and communications this week. It’s going to be a wild one.This episode covers:Mercury’s conjunction with the South Node on Tuesday, August 25thMercury’s entrance into Virgo on Tuesday, August 25thThe Mercury cazimi on Thursday, August 27thThe lunar eclipse in Pisces on Thursday, August 27thMercury’s square to Uranus on Friday, August 28thThe Sun’s square to Uranus on Friday, August 28thThis episode was recorded on 8/4/2026.For more, check out your free daily horoscope on the homepage of the CHANI app — now on iOS and Android.As we enter the last stretch of eclipse season, it’s also the last chance for new and expired CHANI app users to get 30 days of free ritual tools, cosmic insights, and astro support from our team of real astrologers. To claim your all-access premium pass, use code FUCKAI in the “redeem offer code” section of the app. But you have to hurry — this offer ends on 8/28/2026.The music featured in the podcast was created by Latashá.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
I want you to think back to September of 2024.
What was beginning for you at that time?
This week, we wrap up the lessons that began two years ago.
We might be wrapping up the projects that began two years ago.
We might be wrapping up something about the conditions that began two years ago.
We might be noticing that there is some closure available.
to us this week that we didn't even foresee or know we needed. Hello and welcome. This is the
Astrology of the Week Ahead podcast. I'm your host, your Astero, Besty Channey Nicholas. In this
episode, we are talking about the week of August 24th, aka another eclipse week. This is the wrap
up of eclipse season, but let's not get too ahead of ourselves. We still have to go through it.
This eclipse is another visually stunning eclipse. It is a lunar eclipse, meaning it is happening
on a full moon. It is going to be visible throughout a lot of North and South America,
which means a lot of places that can see the totality of this eclipse will be impacted. There could be
something going on in the countries that the eclipse is visible in. There could be something going on
with the leaders of those countries. I am recording this on August 4th, so I don't know what has
happened in the rest of August. So if it sounds like I'm being cryptic, I'm not trying to be,
but I know that the eclipse of mid-August, the eclipse on August 12th was such a big eclipse that
I'm wondering what is happening with leadership really ever.
everywhere and in terms of the changes of leadership that we might be going through at this point.
So you might have thought about something when I said September of 2024, something might have
come to mind. You would have been like, oh, yeah, this thing began. If you remember anything about
September of 2024, you might be like, oh, that was the time when. Or it might be good to remember
some historical events around that time. I don't know, there was like a presidential debate that was
happening at that time, at least in the United States. What was happening in your country? What was
happening in your town? What was happening in your world, in your life at that time? That was,
it feels like one of the before times, right? It was like, oh yeah, that was when a lot of possibilities
we're still swirling about.
And then they were limited and now we're in this reality.
And okay.
So here we are.
We're at the end of that cycle of eclipses.
So take note of where you were then and where you are now.
And the best way to understand what this eclipse means for you is to listen to your
reading for the week in the Chani app.
And you can do that by using the code, fuck AI.
F-U-C-K-E-C-K.
AI in the Chani app. We wanted to open up the app to everybody for Eclipse season. So please use the code,
send it to your friends and family. It doesn't matter if you've ever downloaded the app before.
If you've ever paid for premium before, the whole entire thing is open for everybody because we
wanted to give you the most support possible for Eclipse season. And that code, fuck AI, is only good
until the 28th. It's only good until Friday. So please make sure that you use it as soon as you hear
this so that you have the app for the next 30 days. And I want you to go and listen to your reading
for the week so you can get to know like, where is this happening in my chart? What might be coming to
a point of closure or finality or wrap up or conclusion that again started a couple of years ago?
what does this moment mean for me? I think this is a really wild eclipse. Now, eclipses are always about
change. They're always about like a little bit of a timeline jump. They're always about a blip in
the matrix. They're always about revealing something about the shadows of our world, of our lives,
of our own psyche, collectively, individually. It is a time for us to grapple with the things that
we normally like relegate to the outskirts of ourselves, of our lives of society. That's when
that stuff kind of comes back up. It's like the swamp creatures dredge up or get dredged up from
the bogs and make themselves known again. Not to be dramatic, but you know, it's eclipse season.
It's shadowy. It's light and shadows and the dance between. It's a time to integrate those sides
of self. It's a time to be less internally.
compartmentalized, right? If we're always compartmentalized, this is the good part of me,
that's the bad part of me, then we are way more prone to fascism, to be honest, because we're going
to be separating self out into binaries that are false. And we're going to be way more likely
to fall for scapegoating kind of mentality. And so the more we're able to integrate the more difficult
parts of self into our conscious awareness, the less we're likely to fall for that happening externally.
And also, the more in touch with our own creativity and our own power and our own potential,
we are because the toughest stuff about us and the hardest thing to really accept about
ourselves is the thing, is the part of us that is also full of creative charge and full
of our life energy. Our life energy gets stuck in and enmeshed in the things that are the most
difficult for us to contend with. And so this is a time that's really good to go to therapy.
You know what I'm saying? Hey, therapists. I hope you have some extra time in your schedule because
we're all going to need you a lot. It's a good time to get an astrology reading. It's a good time
to get a massage. It's a good time to get help. We need each other. There's something really
magical that happens when someone is able to contextualize us or just witness us, sit on the
bench with us, bear witness to our soul's evolution and what it is we struggle with and what it is
we grapple with. Because if it's just me and my shadow hanging out, then everything is too in mesh.
But the moment there's another person, space is created for reflection. Space. Space.
is created for realization space is created for insight and integration it is a magical kind of
combination me plus you creates a third thing so whether I'm holding space for you or
you're holding space for me the two or more but really it takes like two people creates a
third space and that's where healing and conscious awareness and integration can happen
And so that's what we want to be focused on during the eclipse season, at least in part.
That and all of the wild changes and upgrades and shifts that are occurring will stir a lot of things up.
And this eclipse is like that because it is exactly square Uranus, the planet of disruption and change and chaos and being loud and disruptive.
And it's also in exact opposition with the sun and mercury who are forming their Kazimi,
which means this is a moment of deep and profound insight as much as it is about catacalismic change and disruption.
But is it the insight that creates the change and is it the insight that's disruptive?
Or is it the disruption that gives us the insight?
is it the disruption that creates the conditions for like, okay, well, then we need to change this.
There's something here that's shifting, that's changing, that's deepening our awareness of what needs to be
unlocked and what pieces of the puzzle of our lives are like, sorry, this doesn't fit anymore.
We can't just put everything back into a nice, neat little compartment.
That's not the deal here.
The deal is that we're playing a different game or we're playing on a different field and the regular rules or the regular modes of conduct do not apply here and now.
So what is that thing that you're learning to change, to integrate, to shift with?
How are you learning to adapt?
How are you learning to pause and reflect?
And how are you learning to tune in to the messages that are trying to get your attention?
I say the messages because Mercury plays such a key role.
role in this week's astrology. On Tuesday, Mercury makes a conjunction with the South node. That means
that there is a lot of words that are coming out. It means that there's a lot of information coming
out. I even think that there could be an information leak this week that could be like,
oh, God, I can't believe that recording came out. Hopefully it's none of us. Hopefully it's,
you know, something that's pivotal and helps to change things. Hopefully it's going to help us progress
in some way, shape, or form.
But it does feel like an information leak.
I'm just going to say that.
So if you are not trying to send an email to the wrong person,
really double, triple check that everything in your text,
everybody's in the group chat that you want there,
you know, like it feels like a little bit of a mistake,
or it feels like something is going out,
like a big report is going out, a paper's getting published,
some kind of information is going out into the world.
I don't know if it's on purpose or not.
then Mercury moves in to Virgo on Tuesday, where it is superpowered.
On Thursday, the day of the lunar eclipse, Mercury and the Sun come together in Virgo.
That's a really charmed, helpful situation.
But it's happening at the same time as the eclipse, which is a really volatile and unpredictable
and exciting and unstable situation.
It is a spectacular kind of moment because it's visually stunning.
And so we know that there is a great amount of insight and we need to listen in to the information.
Please pay attention to your dreams, especially on Thursday.
Please pay attention to the emails and the texts and the conversations that you have that feel like, whoa, where is that from?
Because both the Mercury Kazimi, Sun and Mercury and the full moon slash lunar eclipse, is exactly square Uranus.
And again, Uranus is the planet of like unforeseen, unpredictable, loud events.
this changes everything kind of vibe. But it's already in eclipse, so it already changes everything.
And it's already in Mercury Kazimi. So it's already like, oh, wow, I didn't know that. It's that
piece of information that comes in at just the right time that allows you to make a decision or
allows you to be like, wow, now I know so much more about the situation than I did before.
This is so helpful. And it does feel like very helpful information that comes in. And it's
game-changing information. It's a really stunning kind of lineup. It's a stunning eclipse because of all
of these things lining up in just these ways. We've had some really phenomenal, you know, astrology lately.
It's been like the last eclipse was on the same day as a meteor shower and then the full moon before
that was on the Jupiter Kazimi. I mean like wild, wild, wild, wild times. And then on Friday,
it's a continuation of these themes when the sun and Mercury make an exact square.
to Uranus, but again, it's everything that I just said. It is insight, information, intel,
communications, a translation of something, an alchemy of something that shifts our perspective.
It is paradigm shifting astrology. And it is all about something coming to a close. So there might
be abrupt changes. There might be abrupt closures happening. Again, like I said, in the last eclipse,
People will come in and people will go out.
That's the nature of eclipses.
It kind of like changes the lineup.
It's like, oh, I thought those players were playing.
Nope, they're out.
And now the people that have been on the bench are in.
There's something like that that's really shifting, again, in a kind of unpredictable way with this week's astrology, with this week's eclipse.
Okay, now we've got a question from the audience.
Hi, Chani.
I've been following your work for about 10 years now.
Oh, my God.
You've been such an anchor for me.
And I'm curious to learn more about how queer families are represented in natal charts.
I know that's not an easy answer because there is so much diversity in queer family constellations.
But in my particular family, we are a two-mom household with a donor-conceived child.
And I'm just curious how myself as a gestational parent and my wife might be represented in my child's chart as well as the donor.
I know that there's a lot of talk about, you know, X represents mom, X represents dad,
but there's not a lot of nuance or talk about how queer families are represented in natal charts.
Yes, this question definitely hits close to home.
There isn't.
And I want us to just note that, you know, ancient astrology was talking about a time where humans loved, you know,
like a couple thousand years ago, up to a couple thousand years ago. And certainly the nuclear
family was not it in any community back then either. Now, in all the texts, you'll see things
about the mother and the father. And we can talk about different writings, different texts coming
from different times and different societies and different cultures and different religions and all
of that. But we just, we want to remember, like, people had all kinds of relationships.
And queerness, as we would call it now, was very present in many ancient societies. Like, many, many,
many, many, all of them always, of course, queer people have always been here, trans people
have always, have always been here. It's been eradicated out of the history. And so all kinds of
relationships were prevalent, omnipresent, were just like.
like everywhere. And so it wasn't this sterilized, weird, heteronormative,
cisnormative nuclear family set up contexts within which they were writing from.
And I think that that's an important thing to build back into what it is we're reading
and what it is we're thinking about. And of course, then there's these like really, you know,
awkward heteronormative statements that you'll also read from ancient texts. So it's like a both
and just because it's not written in queer ways doesn't mean that there weren't queer iterations
of families, not in the way we do it now, of course, but, you know, people had lovers and
people had all kinds of relationships all over the ancient world. And all of that has been taken
out. So it's also about who translated it and what their agenda was and all of that. And of course,
in the ancient text, a lot of people will say you look to the fourth house for the father. I know in
modern. It'll say fourth house for the mother and 10th house for the father. But in a lot of other
traditional texts, you'll see the fourth house being the father and the 10th house being the mother.
But certainly the fourth and the 10th were about parents. And certainly we can look to the fourth
house for ancestry and lineage and like the I see also, which in wholesale houses doesn't always
fall in the fourth house. That can also be connected. The planets that rule those houses and that point,
and that point, and also if there's any planets present. Now, in terms of like DNA and biology
and, you know, the, if you have a donor, is it a known donor? Will the child have the opportunity
to know that donor? Are they embedded in the child's life from the get-go? Are they a non-known donor?
You know, like there's a lot of different specifics there. And I think that my,
My real answer is I look to see who the parents are, who the caretakers are. Because even if you're
born, you know, from heterosexuals, doesn't mean that the parents are going to be there.
It doesn't mean that you're going to have an experience of both parents or either parent. What if
you're dealing with incarceration? What if you're dealing with, you know, absentee, whoever? What if
you're dealing with being an orphan? What if your parents passed away? Or like, what if a lot of
things. And so whether you know the parents, whether you don't know the parents, I think is going to be
present. The story is going to be present in the chart. That's not a very specific answer because
I think it's going to be so nuanced and so specific to the person and their relationship with
being somebody who's a child of queer parents and their relationship with the donor,
whatever that, whether that's an egg donor, sperm donor, what is their relationship to that knowledge?
Do they have a relationship to that person? Do they not care? Do they want to, like, there's a million different factors.
But I think those factors show up in the chart. But I can't give you like a specific formula of that.
But I think evidence of our families are in the chart. And I just want us to remember that none of our families are
are normal. I mean, some people's families fall into the heteronormative nuclear family agenda,
but most of ours do not. And all of our stories are in the chart. The stories of colonization
are in our charts. The stories of being colonizers or being from colonizers are in our charts.
The stories of being displaced. The stories of surviving war. The stories of, again,
incarceration, all of that's in our chart. And so if we look to the fourth house, if we look to the
I see, and then if we add on the 10th house, too, the meaning of the 10th house as another parent or as a
parent, we can play around with that and see if it works for us. We can look to the stories that
the moon in the chart holds. We can look to the stories that the sun in the chart holds.
Like there's all the ways in which how we got here, how we were conceived, how we were raised
shapes us, but it all depends on how we relate to it and our experience of it. And that entire
shaping will be present in the chart. And so we want to look to see how the chart is set up
to have a sense of belonging or not, to have a sense of connectedness to the people that
took care of us and raised us or not. We want to see how this individual,
is experiencing the conditions within which they came into the world.
Because as we know, also sperm donors, egg donors are also, you know, happen in
heterosexual couples too.
So fertility issues, fertility situations, different ways of conceiving, doesn't matter
if you're queer or not or straight or not, we a lot, you know, there's a spectrum of people that
have these needs and that are born into these conditions. And that is how they came to be here.
That is how they came to have a child. That's how they came to have a family. And so they're really
good questions. And I think it's all about the individual family. It's all about the individual
chart. It's all about the individual experience. It's all about how the whole
chart is speaking to the issue of family connectedness, rootedness, who took care of them,
who brought them in, how they feel about it. It's all there, but it's all going to be specific
to the chart itself. I'm sorry, there's not a more straightforward answer, but I just want us to
remember that, you know, none of these things are specific. I mean, like, you know, they didn't
have IVF in the ancient world. But there was all.
kinds of ways in which families were created always, always, always, always, always, always.
And we're just sold this sterilized, like, Barbie and Ken kind of version of reality that's never
been true, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever.
Thank you for that question.
It's so important.
And it's also about, you know, like how we feel as queer parents bringing in our families
and like what the conditions are that we are surviving through.
that we're thriving within and how we take care of and protect and nourish the family structures
that we have and how we can show up for each other. And that's also in our charts. It's in our
children's charts. So all of those stories are there, but they're not simple. And it's not a formula.
Again, I'm sorry. All right. Keep sending your questions. I love them. I thank you for them.
Thank you for listening. I'm sending you all of the eclipse love and sweetness.
take care of yourselves, take care of your body. This is a lunar eclipse. This is bringing conscious
awareness to something that's nocturnal, meaning it's more subconscious, meaning it's more hidden.
The moon is also about the body. So we need to, again, take care of our bodies,
nourish yourself, replenish yourself. Next week, we are moving into a Mars, Saturn,
square. So we know we're going to be hitting a hard limit. So we don't need to be.
to like, you know, burn ourselves out this week. We want to pace ourselves. Say no to the things
you do not have to do. Please say no. Unsubscribe now. Send your, I'm so sorry, but I'm not going to be
able to make it email now. I promise you. Your future self will definitely, absolutely be so grateful
for it. Come back next week. We'll talk more about that, but we'll also talk about the fact that
Jupiter is making a trine to Saturn. And this is where our dreams and our reality, our hopes and our
realities come together. And Jupiter is ruling this eclipse. So again, there's some kind of
change or shift that's happening, awakening that's happening with this eclipse. But the fact that
Jupiter is moving into a trine with Saturn is telling me that there's something occurring that's
going to take shape next week, but it's connected to this eclipse that is like, oh, this is going
somewhere good. We're laying down the train tracks for the train of opportunity to like cruise
right on down through. And this week's changes, this week's awakenings, this week's abruptness
is going to spur us on those tracks, if that metaphor works. All right, I'll see you back here
really soon. Bye for now.
