Astrology of the Week Ahead with Chani Nicholas - The Week of January 20th, 2025: Entering a new era with the Pluto cazimi

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

Episode 214 In 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 January 20th, 2025, marks the dawn of a new age. During the Pluto cazimi, the Sun joins the planet of underworld journeys in Aquarius for the first time in over two centuries, sending revolutionary waves through the collective. And as three more planets come into contact with Uranus (the planet of disruption), we’re in for a few surprises. The next seven days promise plenty of innovation and a major shift in how we practice community. Let’s get into it. This episode covers: The Pluto cazimi on Tuesday, January 21st  Mars’s sextile to Uranus on Thursday, January 23rd Mercury’s opposition to Mars on Thursday, January 23rd Mercury’s trine to Uranus on Thursday, January 23rd Venus’ trine to Mars on Saturday, January 25th Mercury’s sextile to Neptune on Sunday, January 26th Venus’ sextile to Uranus on Sunday, January 26th This episode was recorded on 11/21/2024. For more, check out your free daily horoscope on the homepage of the CHANI app — now on iOS and Android. The music featured in the podcast was created by Latashá.

Hello and welcome. This is the astrology of the week ahead podcast. I'm your host and your Astro Bestie Channy, Nicholas. In this episode, we were talking about the astrology for the week of January 20th. I just want to say that I don't like talking about the astrology of this week, given the fact that we are going to be going through a very collectively challenging. moment. No matter what country I think you live in, the inauguration of the so-called president of the United States, Donald Trump, in this country in this week, is going to be really devastating to

so many of us. And I would say just like in my own opinion, and you can fight me on this if you want to. I'm here all week, all year, forever. and ever, but I think it's going to be devastating to life on this planet because of the dysregulations in all the ways that are going to happen. And it's really hard for me to talk about moments like this astrologically because there's some really, there's one really intense signification that's happening basically on inauguration day.

On the 21st of January, we have a Sun Pluto conjunction. We call it a Kazimian. it is the sun and Pluto coming together. They're coming together for the first time in our lifetime in Aquarius, which means it's the beginning. It's like the dawning of a new era. So I want to say this. It's very like Voldemort type of vibes in a lot of ways. It's very like robot Voldemort type of energy. And it's also very the inception of collective power. And it's also very, the inception of collective power. of us taking seriously our collective power type of energy. So while there is this absolutely devastating event that's happening, in my humble opinion, occurring at the same time as

Pluto-Kazimi, which looks like the destruction of many different systems, Aquarius, that benefit the people, Aquarius, there is also a calling, a specific activity. and planting of a seed for our understanding of the fact that we are the only ones that are going to save us, that our government and all the different iterations of it, no matter what party you are from or voting for or connect to, have massively let us down. And we have got to reclaim our power from the systems. We have to also save whatever structures we can. Aquarius is a sign that does deal with a lot of structures and systems.

I don't care what anybody says. It does. It's like this is the way a structure works. How do we innovate it? So Pluto is a planet of transformation. It's a planet of wealth. It is a planet of the underworld. It is a planet of all that happens in the shadows.

It is a planet that deals with very shadowy, material, subterranean themes. So while there's a lot of stuff that's going on right now that feels very challenging to our human story and to our relationships and to our ways forward, there is also something that I need us to tap into. And I'm recording this at the end of November. So I don't know what's happening in January, and I'm assuming this is going to be talking about what is happening in January. But there's something that we need to tap into about what is also occurring at the same time underground and maybe above ground, but also what is occurring underground in our private conversations, in the kind of like ground swell of activity that is about collective power and about collective liberation. And I don't take that lightly.

I don't think that that is an easy thing to do, especially in this type of political climate. In the face of fascism, collective liberation becomes all the more challenging. But I do think that this is a seed moment for both possibly some of the most disastrous things to happen because Pluto takes us into the underworld and because of who is being inaugurated right now, but also the most hopeful things to happen, which is to say, we forget about trying to find a savior. We forget about trying to find a cult leader. We forget about trying to find a hero. And we instead refocus on our collective course of action. We refocus on our ability to take care of one another, we refocus our emphasis on the one to the many. And that is what I'm clinging to right now.

And I am from the past sending strength and determination and energy to all of us living this week out. Because obviously this week marks a major change. And this year, the year of the year of 2025 is so filled with change. Why? Well, Pluto has just moved into Aquarius for good. End of March, Neptune changes sign moves into Aries. Huge deal. End of May, Saturn changes signs. Also moves into Aries. Massive deal, having Saturn and Neptune at the first couple of degrees of Ares for a lot of 2025 is really prominent. And then you're in it. also changes signs. I mean, Jupiter does too. Jupiter does every year, though, but Uranus changes signs in July. And having all three of the outer planets move into new signs in and around 2025

signifies a changing of the guard. So on the top level of things, this change of guard feels pretty obvious. And the change of emphasis and maybe the new projects of 2025 are also quite obvious. But I also want us to remember that this is our signal that we change as well. We change our strategy. We change our goals. We change our emphasis. We change how we organize where and when we need to. we stay with what works, where and when it does, and we refocus. We are all in this year. There is nothing else to work with, but what we've got, what is going to bring us through the most challenging era, possibly, of our lives and of our lifetimes. And I'm not trying to be hyperbohy. And I'm not trying to be hyperbolic and I'm not trying to induce fear at all.

I just take this moment in our human history exceptionally seriously. And that's what this astrology does as well. It is the beginning of something new that has to do with all of us. It has to do with us reckoning with what it is we're capable of creating, what it is we're capable of destroying, what it is we're capable of recreating, and what it is we're capable of seeding. Deeply. This is not a superficial type of moment.

This is a moment for us to anchor so deeply into everything that works and also anchor so deeply into the spirit of innovation and moving towards. something new, something that we've never had before, something that we've never experienced before, something that we are, though, ready to be part of birthing. So I want us to just take a moment to reclaim our attention away from everything that feels exceptionally gloomy, devastating, demoralizing, and depraved. Because all of that's there. And we know it's going to be there when we're done with this little podcast.

But just for a moment, I want you to reclaim your energy from all of that, from the news of the day, from what is circulating in the ethers. And if you would, if you can, or when you can, I'd like you to just take a nice, deep, breath in and feel like you're calling your energy back into your body. Feel as though you are reclaiming your energy from the world. And in that, I want you to also imagine you reclaiming your imagination and your powers of imagination back from this collective what can feel like a nightmare. reclaim your power of creation and recreation with your mind, with your psyche, with your body, with your energy. Reclaim it, call it back into your being. We are seeding a new reality in the face

of great odds. This is the call that we have no choice but to answer right now. Reclaim your energy, reclaim your powers of imagination and dare in this moment to dream of something else, to dream of what is life affirming, to dream of what co-leadership and collective liberation could look like. If you can close your eyes, feel yourself calling your energy back into your system back into your body. And for a moment, imagine what it would be like to live in the world that you most want to live in. And imagine that this moment is the beginning of that reality. that everything that you do individually connects into everything that we need to do collectively. That is the only option. See yourself moving into the next right action. See yourself moving towards the people

that you need to connect with next. See yourself as part of a major movement, a movement of people that spans the entire globe, a movement that is reinforced by everyone in the past that has done this work for generations, a movement of people that are right beside you doing the same thing and a movement into the future, into the people in the future, the future versions of you and me and all of our children and all of our families living in a way that is in accordance with life and your deepest, deepest values. Imagine that this is the moment where we seed all of that. And then take a deep breath. If your eyes are closed, open them. I implore us all. Really, I'm talking.

to myself to keep doing that this week every week. We have to reclaim our imagination from the machines of destruction that are running wild at the moment because that is part of the way in which we will find a path forward to create something that is joyous and wonderfully rebellious and worth living for, worth fighting for, worth going forth for. Okay, should we talk about the rest of the astrology? On Thursday, after the Pluto Kazimi, Mars and cancer makes a sex style with Uranus. This is Mars retrograding cancer, who is all about fighting for what we care about, making a helpful aspect with Uranus, who is about doing things differently. So how do we care for people? So how do we care for

people and ourselves and our communities in a unique and experimental way. Also on Thursday, we've got Mercury making an opposition to Mars. And these are fighting words. This is a really heated conversation. This is not an easy thing to talk about. So we've also got Mercury making a trine to Uranus. So Mercury is picking up on the innovative. action that we need to take, but it's also embroiling us in debates and fights. So on a personal level, we need to be really wary of how our emotional energy gets embroiled and enmeshed in arguments that maybe we don't need to have. Like, maybe don't have debates with bots online.

For instance, like this is not the time to do that. It never is, but especially not now. Temperatures are really running high. There's a lot of inflammation in the system, in our collective systems, and our personal systems perhaps. And Mercury articulates this on Thursday. So it feels like these are fighting words, and this is a different way that we could utilize this moment.

We can have an argument, maybe in a more productive way. can we? Can we have an argument in a more productive way? I don't know, but this is what the astrology is pointing to. On Saturday, Venus makes a trine to Mars. And this is helpful for our projects that are like needing a little infusion of energy, but are about social cohesion or about beauty or about creating really gorgeous works of art, get infused with the kind of like get up and go that we need. Venus is exalted right now and doing really well for a lot of reasons. And Mars is not. Mars is struggling. So in a way, it's like Venus helps Mars out. So what does that look like? It looks like our unions and our bonds and our friendships and our way of celebrating

what is beautiful and what is connective helps us to find ways to move through what is inflamed and what is agitated. Connect to people that you love to help yourself move through the agitation and the aggravation. And then on Sunday, Mercury makes us sex style to Neptune, which is really lovely. It helps us to, again, have conversations that help us to connect to other people. It's a nice thing to happen after Thursday's astrology. Thursday just feels like those are fighting words, warring words. by Sunday something comes in to be a little bit of a salve or help us through those harsher

kind of moments. And also on Sunday, Venus makes a sex style to Uranus, which is like, you know what, we still have to have joy. We still have to protect our peace. We still have to protect the things that bring us pleasure and sweetness. And we need to experiment with the ways in which we connect with one another and that we let each other know that we are here for one another. That is essential for this moment and for many. But before we go, I am answering your questions that you're sending in, that you're leaving. If you're watching this on YouTube, leave a question below and I will answer it. But I want to take a moment to answer a question from the audience. So someone asked, what is a house in astrology? And what do each of the houses mean?

Great question. I think this is so fundamental, especially when we're thinking about something like the Mars retrograde that's happening right now, because Mars will govern two of the houses in your chart. Mars is in charge of the house that contains Ares and Scorpio in your chart. So right now, as Mars is retrograding through the sky. I want you to think about where it's retrograding through in your chart. This week, it's retrograding through cancer. Next week, and for a very long time until the end of February, it'll be retrograding through cancer.

So it's in the part of your chart that contains cancer. But Mars rules the parts of your chart that contain both Ares and Scorpio. And this is really interesting to learn about, to understand. while Mars is retrograde because you might notice themes that are connected to these different parts of your chart. So what do houses mean in astrology and what are each of them a representative of? So in astrology, houses are the different domains of the sky. So when we're born, there is is a snapshot of the entire sky that is taken. That's how we get your rising sign. And your rising sign sets up the entire chart because it tells us where the first house is going to be. What sign is

going to be in the first house? Because the first house is a place of self. And then the other 330 degrees of the sky are in your birth chart. So this is my biggest gripe with people. I love you all, but I want you to understand one thing. Your birth chart is not a list of placements. Your birth chart is the entire sky. Your birth chart is a giant circle. And it has every single sign in it. Not a planet in every sign. I'm saying that the whole sky is your chart. And you will have empty houses. You'll have empty signs, if you will, in your chart. That's just normal. But you still have that sign in your chart because the chart is a wheel. It is the wheel of the sky. It is the wheel of the zodiac. So the entire Zodiac. So the entire Zodon,

vehicle belt is in your chart, is your chart, is everybody's chart, is the chart of the moment that I'm speaking right now. And what happens is when you're born, we see what sign is on the part of the astrological belt, the zodiac that's coming up over the eastern horizon. The moment you take your first breath, that's your rising sign. It is the marker of your birth. It is so important. It's so foundational. It tells us everything we need to know about you and your life. because it sets up where everything else is. Now, there are 12 houses in your chart, and there is a sign in my astrology in traditional astrology, I use something called whole sign houses, which means each sign is a house.

But no matter what kind of astrology you use, there are 12 houses in everybody's chart. The first house is self. The second house is money and assets and resources. The third house is communication, siblings, daily life, local life, your neighborhood, your calendars, the 24 hours that you have in each and every day. The fourth house is home, family, foundations, roots, ancestry origins, grandparents, parents. The fifth house is children or and creative projects, sex, love affairs, hobbies, anything you do as a form of creative self-expression. This sixth house is illness, health, wellness, work. It is the

labor of our life. Even if we do not work for a living, we all have chores to do. It's also the place of pets taking care of them. They're lovely, but also we have to water and walk them. It's like all of the work of life and then anything that has to do with illness. The seventh house is about committed relationships. It is about the people we commit to. Might be for a week, might be for our lifetime, doesn't matter. It can be intimate partners, romantic partners, platonic partners, can be business partners, and can be clients. The eighth house is the place of mental anguish, despair, grief, loss, death, but also it is the place of other people's money because it is in traditional astrology, associated with inheritances. So it's what other people gift us. We have no control over it,

but it is a place where you might get access to like, oh, I didn't know that this person was going to gift me this thing, but here it is. And you might have like a transit through the eighth house that's beneficial. We are all physical beings. We are all spiritual beings having a physical experience. We will all perish. We will all die. That's just a fact of life. eighth house represents that amongst other things. It's also about collaborations and again about like the material resources you might receive from other people. It is opposite to the second house of your money. It's like the eighth house of other people's money. But it also contains within it the understanding of grief and loss and the process of living in a reality that is going to end.

We will lose everything. And so it's the ways in which we contend with those difficult subjects. That's what we do in the eighth house. And we all have an eighth house and we all have to contend with it. We'll all have transits through it. We might not all have a planet in that part of our chart, but we all have that part of our chart. We all have every single part of our chart in us. The houses are about the full scape of life.

Scape, landscape of life, the full scope of life. Okay, so the ninth house is a place of religion and law and travel and higher education. It is a place where we seek out the truth. So from the difficulties and sometimes the confines of the eighth house, we can think of moving out into the ninth house and being like, whoa, there's these big horizons and I want to go an adventure and I want to go to see things and learn things and be part of things. But it really is about the spiritual experiences. that helped us to understand that we are more than just our physical being, right? Like, yes, we're all going to die.

We learn that in the eighth house. But in the ninth house, we're like, okay, so then what is it all for? What does it all mean? If it's all temporary, then what brings meaning to my life? It's also about publishing and going global or having a global reach or doing something that's like multinational. 10th house is the highest part of our chart. It is about how we connect to the public. It's how we connect to the world. If you have a career, it's about your career. If you have a vocation, it is about your

vocation. It is about who you are on the outside, how you portray yourself on the outside, what your contribution to the world is. Doesn't matter if you get paid for it or not. It is about your offering to the world. It's opposite to the fourth house of home and family and roots and lineage and privacy, the 10th house is about your public self. 11th house is the place of groups and friends and collectives. It is the hopes and dreams that you share with other people. This is the family you choose. These are the groups of people that you choose.

This is who you're like, oh, you guys are doing that. That's amazing. I was doing this. Let's get together and da-da-da-da. It is your audience if you have one. It is being part of the collective that might be the audience. It's both like singing to the audience but also being part of the audience and being sung too. It is good luck and good fortune in a lot of ways because of who we know and who helps us do the things we know we need to do in the world.

The last house is the 12th house. It is another one of those parts of our chart that we all have. We all experience it. But it is a place of self-unddoing. It is a place of understanding how we get in our own way. It can be a place of despair and anguish and loss and also transcendence. But you can't do the transcendence without fully understanding the landscape of every human emotion and how deeply powerless we are. When people have placements in the 12th house, they quite often want to give their life over to something bigger than themselves.

there is a desire to not be so of the world, but to definitely be in the world. I mean, I hope. I'm not going to say that that's a blanket statement for everybody. But there's a need if we have placements in the 12th house. I'd say also in the 6th house and in the 9th house, a little bit maybe in the 3rd house. But definitely the 12th and the 6th, there can be a need to address pain and suffering to say this hurts and this is why. There's also a connection with the 12th house with like incarceration and the institutions where we stick people and we shove people away. And so I've seen a lot of people that do amazing restorative justice work in the world have really important 12th house placements, maybe even eighth house placements as well.

I know a lot of people with eighth house placements that are like death doulas or crisis workers or people that do work that is very deeply rooted in. trauma-informed practices. So there's a lot of ways in which we can work with placements that we have in difficult houses in our chart. In traditional astrology, there's a lot of good and bad. But in a lot of ways, it doesn't serve us to look at things in astrology in good or bad ways. It's just that somebody with a lot of placements in the 12th house and the 8th house and

the 6th house is more than likely going to do work that maybe isn't about getting famous or being known for it. You know what I mean? It's more about addressing suffering, addressing illness, addressing what needs to be healed. The other thing about the 12th house, sorry, I'm skipping around a little bit, is that it's about behind the scenes work. So quite often people with 12th house placements, like the son and the 12th house, they need a lot of time outside of the public sphere. They need a lot of time to go away and do things on their own, or just to have some kind of solitude. Okay, I hope that was helpful. And let me know, leave a question here or write us and ask a question about the houses. We'll have like lots of different placements

and a lot of different signs and a lot of different houses. I want you to really focus, though, in the beginning of your astrological journey on where your son is, what house it's in. Yes, what sign it's in, but then really studying what house it's in, this is the area of life that you're going to shine in or that you want to shine in. Look for where your moon is. Yes, the sign it's in, but also the house. This is where you come to find solace and comfort and self-care in an everyday way. And this is also an area of life where you're going to want to nurture and nourish it.

And then I want you to look for the planet that rules your rising sign, that rules your ascendant. What house that planet is in will tell you about the direction. that you have to go in in this lifetime. I wrote a book all about this. It's called You Were Born for This. You can get it anywhere. You can get it on our website.

But it is a detailed understanding of this setup. And just knowing those three placements where your sun, moon, and the ruler of your ascendant is in terms of what house they're in can unlock so much of your potential and also relieve you of so much angst because when we're really living out our chart, a lot of the angst and a lot of the anxiety and a lot of the stuff, the machinations of the mind, they get quelled because we're too busy doing the work that we need to do. Okay, y'all, that is the episode. I hope it's helpful. Next week, we have a really beautiful new moon on deck that is also about our ability to communicate with one another to get the message out there. And it is a new moon that is filled with

some beautiful auspicious signatures. It is a new moon that is, yes, the lunar new year. So it is a feeling of big new beginnings. And it's also trying Jupiter. So I'm hoping that that signifies something that is really auspicious and helpful for our collective organizing, our collective gathering and our collective power again to imagine and keep ourselves anchored in the possibilities of what it is we can transform now and every day forward. I am sending you all the love, all the blessings. We are in this together. We are in this side by side.

We need each other. Let us call on one another. Let us anchor into. our relationships, our communities, and into our collective potency and power. Bye for now.