Planetarium

LEO

July 25—August 22

Leos were built to handle impossible people and ridiculous situations while remaining suave, unruffled, and calmly spiritual. But it would be hard to imagine outer circumstances more uncomfortable than the current passages of Saturn in your 7th house and Uranus and Neptune in your 6th. There isn't a human being in the world who wouldn't prefer a day at the beach to a round of duty sticking a finger in the dike to save humanity. However, if anybody can stabilize conditions and maintain more pluck and spunk than the Three Little Pigs when they had to deal with the wolf on the other side of the door, it's definitely you right now.

VIRGO

August 23-September 22

With Jupiter still in Virgo, you're convinced that you're above all planetary aspects and subject only to your private enthusiasms. So the fact that Mercury is retrograde until August 14, in opposition to a 6thhouse Saturn, would ordinarily pose no challenge at all. You've probably been doing the bran-and-broccoli thing and being productive at the old keyboard. Cheating on a diet and sneaking around behind your own back are normally beneath you. But this summer's transits will show you that you're as much of a procrastinator and escape artist as all those Pisceans you are forever preaching to.

LIBRA

September 23—October 23

As you yourself are painfully aware, over and over again you're forced into situations where you have to be more polite than the southemest of southern ladies and gentlemen, even if that means you're not always able to be fully real. In fact, few people ever see your primitive, judgmental side. However, with the lunar nodes moving into your solar 3rd and 9th houses, the next eighteen months could be a gigantic round of the most thrilling mind games. Every one of your cultural, political, and religious prejudices will come up for careful and grueling scrutiny. What? Prejudiced? Vous?

SCORPIO

October 24—November 21

These days, all the people you know are wondering exactly how far your powers are going to extend. Just when everybody expects you to perform a major coup d'etat and take over the United Nations, you withdraw, disappear, pull back your troops, and regroup. And then just as they're sure it's safe to go back into the water, here comes that Scorpio fin. On July 31, Pluto goes direct after a five-month retrograde. That means new plans, new strategies, new creative rabbits pulled out of the hat, and little old you getting your rocks off by pushing certain people way beyond their limits.

SAGITTARIUS

November 22—December 21

You're entering a new phase of your life in terms of relationships. It is becoming more and more important for you to have that certain wonderful someone to talk to. Bear in mind that the perfect relationship you are seeking might just conceivably exist only in your head. Remember, too, though, that you do not have to settle for just anybody. Whoever the idiot was who said that in this world there is someone for everyone obviously never had to sit alone on the sidelines at the high-school dance or, worse yet, had to resort to doing the polka with the nerdiest nerd in the class.

CAPRICORN

December 22—January 19

If, around the full moon in mid-July, you want all the craziness going on to end, ask yourself why, and for what. Just remember how long you resigned yourself—with only the smallest amount of medication here and there—to the drab life you thought was choking your soul out of existence. Don't worry. You will never have to work on that assembly line again. All Capricorns should gather for a mass rally sometime this fall and hurl all their bras and neckties onto a gigantic bonfire. In the meantime you're still waiting and thinking—quite wrongly—that change will come without your having to do a thing to bring it about.

Michael Lutin

AQUARIUS

January 20—February 18

It's really hard for you to go on laughing it up and acting normal, as if you didn't hear that insistent bell clanging in your ear. What bell? The bell you're not supposed to ask for whom it's tolling. That bell. The astrologers of the world recognize the moaning and groaning you are doing in private at the present time. We see, too, that as Pluto starts moving forward in early August you will probably catch a little messianic fever—the tendency to want to be treated as a pure and sacred creature and even to believe that you are one. You're really going to have to watch that closely come fall.

PISCES

February 19—March 20

Remember all those times in the past when you were terrified of becoming just another beat-up, wrung-out has-been? Remember how you fought for jobs, worked all kinds of extra hours, did the impossible to prove you weren't flaky? And now, when all you really want to do is retire and spend long sunny mornings pruning the roses, the nodes of the moon have to go and enter your 4th and 10th houses! As far as public and private lives are concerned, you're simply going to have to operate in both. But then, if your life weren't tinged with maddening irony, you wouldn't be a Pisces, would you?

ARIES

March 21—April 19

This is that time of year when you try to run away from the mad, mad pressures of the world and the dizzying fact that you have absolutely no idea where you are going. While the sun transits Cancer until late July, you will enjoy sitting around in sneakers with no socks, acting perfectly normal, and pretending you're just family. It would really serve you well to wake up and smell the damned coffee, quit acting like a teenager, stop talking to hear yourself talk, and go look up the word "superego" in the dictionary. For the next year and a half, while the north node is in your 9th house, don't teach. Leam.

TAURUS

April 20-May 20

Let's approach this transit of the dragon's tail and head through your 2nd and 8th houses from a happy and healthy perspective. It will last for eighteen months, and during that time you'll be dealing with being somewhat financially dependent on a member of the opposite sex. It could be a close tie to a boss who writes out the paycheck. More likely, though, it will come through a more intimate relationship. It will challenge you to overcome any prejudices you may have about sexual stereotypes. Prove to everyone now that Tauruses can take any news about money—as long as it's good.

GEMINI

May 21—June 21

Dear Hamlet: With the south node of the moon passing through Gemini from now until January 1994, expect to have a hundred and one little ego attacks. You'll be madly possessive of yourself, staunchly determined to set boundaries for others, fiercely single-minded about your independence. And yet, there will be people everywhere, and you'll definitely be having relationships with some of them from other cultural or racial backgrounds, so you might as well accept it. If your energy level should drop, or if you should feel as though you were falling back into an old teenage pattern, find a good shrink and stay there!

CANCER

June 22-July 22

The caldron should be bubbling by the full moon on July 14, or by the time Pluto starts creeping forward in early August. The turf you've been protecting, the old neighborhood dry cleaner who knows you so well you don't have to save the tickets, the house that once seemed so exciting, then boring—these are all part of your old life. You are now feeling the call of the wild and the lure of adventure. Adventure? You? You, whose blood pressure fluctuates in inverse proportion to the bottom line of the bank statement? Question of the summer: Do you throw the old life away completely, or just pay to keep it in storage?