Throughout history, and particularly to our ancient ancestors, eclipses were read as endings; the sky making an announcement, usually announcing that somebody’s time was up. The Moon went dark over the harbour at Syracuse in August 413 BC, and the Athenian fleet sat frozen in the water until it was destroyed. It eclipsed over Mesopotamia eleven days before Alexander the Great defeated the Persian Empire at Gaugamela. It rose already in shadow over Constantinople in May 1453, and six days later the walls came down and the last of Rome went with them. Empire after empire, throughout the ages, eclipses have always indicated that something was finishing, and it was often a throne.
An eclipse is really just a Full Moon with the volume turned all the way up. Full Moons tend to bring things to culmination, or into illumination - they’re the harvest of something quietly sown months earlier - but an eclipse is like that, times ten. If a Full Moon is a page turning, an eclipse is a chapter closing.
But this Friday’s eclipse does something rather bigger than just close a chapter - because of where it falls in the sky, this one closes the whole book; the entire story we’ve been living inside since January 2025, with all its fog and its flooding and its exhausting inability to tell what was real. The tide is going all the way out on Friday, and when the water pulls back that far, we get to see the floor….every single thing that dissolved into it while we weren’t looking, lying there in the open.
This is the end of one long story, and the beginning of another, and as this tome we’ve been living through draws to a close this week, it ends on a cliffhanger and hands off to the book about to begin - a flood of revelation that will propel us into the new story.
And if you want to know what that new story is, and what the revelation will be, read on, friend.
Never miss a word.
The Turning of the Page
This Friday brings a lunar eclipse in Pisces, when the Sun and Moon face each other across the sky, with the Earth directly in between them casting its shadow across the face of the Moon. This one is a deep partial - about 93 per cent of the Moon slides into the Earth's shadow, leaving one thin sliver still lit, which feels about right for a book closing on its final line.
To understand exactly what kind of book is closing this week, we look to the part of the sky that makes the eclipse possible in the first place - the Node, the points in the sky where the Moon and the Sun cross paths, and where a Full Moon landing near one of those crossings will cause an eclipse. I wrote quite a bit about the Nodes in a recent article:
The Nodes - North and South - tell us where we’ve been and where we are headed; they tell us the general trajectory of the story we’re living inside. Most eclipses are chapters in that story, but every now and then, one lands at the very moment the Node is leaving its sign, and when that happens it’s like the final page turn, the back cover of the book closing.
And that’s what this Friday is.
The ancients watched those crossing points for thousands of years, and read them as a compass. The North Node points toward where the collective is being asked to grow, giving us an idea of the direction of our collective learning, and the South Node marks what we’re being asked to release - the old ground, the familiar territory we’re outgrowing. The Node moves slowly backward through the zodiac, spending about a year and a half in each sign, and wherever it sits, that’s where the eclipses fall and where the sky does its deepest work on us.
The Node has been in Pisces since the middle of January 2025, arriving there just days before Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last eighteen months or so, you’ll understand exactly what the Node moving into Pisces was telling us then about the direction we were heading in, and the title of the book we’ve been inhabiting.
Pisces is the ocean - the sign of dissolution, and of fog, and of everything that blurs and floods and can’t be pinned down. With the collective compass pointing into Pisces, we’ve lived through a year and a half where the shared story itself went completely underwater, with information arriving faster than anyone could verify it, and truth and rumour tangled together until the sorting became exhausting. Institutions, borders, certainties - all of them softened at the edges, and underneath the noise, an enormous unnamed grief moved through the collective, looking for somewhere to land.
That’s been the weather of this entire first half of Trump’s second term, and whether you live in America or not, whether you vote red or blue, or whether you’ve even been paying attention, you’ve likely felt that sensation of standing in fog, reaching for something solid, finding water.
The lunar eclipses of this era tell the story of the book chapter by chapter, and they alternate like a tide. There are four of them, in strict rotation: Virgo, Pisces, Virgo, Pisces. The ledger, the ocean, the ledger, the ocean. The audit and the flood, taking turns. When you lay them out with the news of their weeks beside them, you can watch the whole story - and its lessons - unfold.
The Chapters and the Lessons
The book opened on March 14, 2025, barely six weeks into the new era, with a total lunar eclipse in Virgo, the first total lunar eclipse in three years. Virgo is the record, the receipt, the verifiable fact, so under that lunation we saw US judges ordering thousands of federal workers who’d been fired by DOGE reinstated while the White House fought the orders, and a funding showdown in Congress that split the opposition against itself. The day after the eclipse, deportation flights left the US for El Salvador under a wartime law from 1798, while courts and government argued over whether the planes should ever have flown, and one man was removed by what officials would later call an administrative error. And two weeks on, at the paired solar eclipse, a journalist was accidentally added to a group chat where cabinet officials were discussing live war plans. The entire opening chapter was a fight over the ledger - who’s on the list, which orders count, what got written down, and whether the record itself still held. The first lesson was essentially that solid ground can soften quicker than anyone believes possible, and even the record can be argued with.
September 2025 brought the deep middle of the book; a total lunar eclipse in Pisces on September 7 was the water at full height. Within days, the flood came from every direction at once, with Russia’s largest drone assault of the war reaching Kyiv’s government quarter, Russian drones crossing into Poland and NATO invoking Article 4. An Israeli strike on the negotiating table itself in Doha. A youth uprising burning Nepal’s parliament. Charlie Kirk, shot dead mid-speech at a university in Utah. The whole world wore fury as the face of its fear that month, while almost unnoticed in the noise, Britain’s ambassador to Washington was dismissed over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein - the old drowned records stirring, a thread this Friday’s eclipse returns to directly - and when the paired solar eclipse arrived two weeks later in Virgo, it fell on the day of Kirk’s memorial, and a country trying to feel something too big for it. The middle chapters taught the harder lesson that the flood can’t be out-thought, and grief unfelt converts to rage.
Then the third act arrived on March 3 of this year, with another total lunar eclipse in Virgo and the commencement of Trump’s war with Iran. The strikes began in the last days of February, Iran’s Supreme Leader was confirmed dead on March 1, and on the very day of the eclipse the bombing of Tehran intensified while Iranian drones and missiles came back across the Gulf, blasting embassies, air bases, and the great refinery at Ras Tanura, and oil crossed a hundred dollars a barrel within days. The fog era’s final audit arrived as fire, which is the last and hardest lesson of the book, the one this whole framework has been pointing at from the beginning - when the mind is pressed to the very edge of what it can hold, and won’t reach for the door, it reaches for force. Fear, cornered, makes war.
Three chapters, three lessons.
The ground can soften.
The flood can’t be out-thought.
And fear, pressed hard enough against the wall, reaches for fire.
That’s the book we’ve been living in.
But now a new book is about to begin.
The Book About to Be Written
The Node slipped out of Pisces last week on August 18, making this week’s lunar eclipse like the closing of the old book - the sky putting a final punctuation mark on the fog era. Whatever the Pisces years dissolved stays dissolved, and we come out of the water changed - there’s no walking back into the story we had before January 2025. That’s worth considering as we walk towards Friday, because the personal fog and the collective fog have been the same fog, and both are being released together.
So, if one book is ending, then a new one must be beginning, and we look to where the Node is heading next to understand the theme of the tome we’re about to dive into. With the North Node in Aquarius and the South Node in Leo - the sign of the people and the sign of the king - for the next year and a half through the remainder of Trump’s term and right up to the 2028 US election season, every eclipse falls on the axis of collective will versus personal rule.
With the North Node moving through Aquarius - the sign of the many - and the South Node moving through Leo - the sign of the sovereign, the authority that says “I alone” - the sky’s theme for the book that will be the second half of this Trump era lands like a question: who rules, and by whose consent? If the Book of Fog asked us what’s real, then the one now opening asks us who decides.
Donald Trump was born with his Ascendant at the very last degree of Leo and his Descendant in Aquarius, and this week, as the Node slides backward through the last degree of Aquarius, it crosses that axis exactly, in the same week as the closing eclipse. The collective compass, in its first act of the new chapter, lays itself directly along his horizon.
When the Node crosses someone’s Ascendant–Descendant axis - which happens once every nineteen years or so in any life - the eclipses come home. For the next year and a half they fall along the line between the self and everyone else, and that line becomes the ground the sky works on. And the direction of the alignment matters here enormously, because the South Node - what we’re releasing, and what we’re outgrowing - lands on his Ascendant: on the persona, the face, the “I alone”, at the final degree of the sign of kings, right where his Mars rises. The North Node - the direction in which we’re headed, the way in which we’re growing - lands on his Descendant in Aquarius: with the other. The public. The opposition. The many who face him.
Read plainly, the current in his chart now runs away from the crown and toward the crowd. The question the sky is asking the whole collective - who rules, and by whose consent? - gets asked through his own horizon, eclipse after eclipse, for the remainder of the term.
The solar eclipse in Leo earlier this month fell in Trump’s 12th house - the hidden room of the chart, the place of what unfolds behind closed doors and beneath the surface of a life. The eclipses will move backward through Leo for the next two years, sweeping deeper into that hidden twelfth house as they go, and the great eclipse of August 2027 lands almost exactly on his natal Pluto, the planet of power itself, buried in the most private room of his chart. This is not the kind of sky that shows a man rising - it shows a man literally being eclipsed, again and again.
The fog chapter arrived with him.
The chapter now opening writes its questions straight across his chart.
Where the Wave Lands
It’s not just Trump’s chart that will feel this week’s lunar eclipse. This is a sky determined to rupture the charts of the powerful.
This Full Moon in Pisces faces the Sun in Virgo with Uranus in Gemini square the whole eclipse axis. Virgo is the ledger - the record, the document, the audit, the detail. Pisces is everything that got dissolved, drowned, concealed, forgiven, or never written down at all. And Uranus in Gemini is the rupture that arrives as information - the leak, the file, the transcript, the list of names. Put the three together and this eclipse has a signature we can read like a headline - records that were dissolved coming back as information. A disclosure eclipse, arriving with a jolt.
This week’s eclipse lights up the House of Windsor and the network around Jeffrey Epstein. The eclipse Sun lands exactly on former Prince Andrew’s Pluto and on King Charles’s Saturn, the planet of office, duty, and the weight of the institution.
Around them, on the very same degrees, many once associated with Epstein see their charts take a hit - Peter Thiel’s Venus, Leon Black’s Mercury, Bill Barr’s Jupiter takes the eclipsed Moon itself - while the late Virginia Giuffre’s Uranus sits on the square right where transiting Uranus stands, as if she’s wielding the weapon that causes the rupture.
A host of American lawmakers and those in charge of law enforcement light up hard - former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s nodal axis takes the square to within ten minutes on a timed chart (and eclipses on the nodes are the ones that move the direction of a life), Kash Patel is hit three separate times, Mike Johnson’s Neptune takes the square exactly, and the Democratic Party chart takes the eclipsed Moon straight onto its Pluto, so the pressure runs across the aisle.
And then there’s the new Attorney General, Todd Blanche - Trump’s former personal lawyer who had the sit down interview with Ghislaine Maxwell days before she was moved to a comfier prison. His chart takes a double hit - the eclipse Sun and Mercury land right on his Mars in Virgo, the enforcer’s blade buried in the ledger, while transiting Uranus ruptures his Neptune, the planet of everything concealed. His chart is the bridge between the two clusters - the Epstein network on one side, the machinery of American enforcement on the other - and this eclipse draws its line straight through him.
The Vatican’s chart takes the square on its Moon, which in a national or institutional chart means the faithful themselves, the body of people. California is hit on both arms of the T-square at once: Neptune on the eclipsed Moon and Chiron on the Uranus square - water, dissolution, and a wound arriving through information. Canada takes the eclipse Sun on its Mars. Iran takes the eclipsed Moon on its Venus. Russia takes it on the Moon - again, the people rather than the state.
So when Friday comes, and the wave rolls in, expect to see stories about records and files thought dissolved, surfacing as information. Names and lists. Pressure on crowns and on the individuals who hold the machinery of enforcement. The sky, as always, names the theme, and this one has named it in unusually clear handwriting.
How to Close a Book
So here we are, holding the last page.
As we stand here on the precipice of this final page, we should take a moment to sit with the book we’ve just lived through. The fog years didn’t just happen in the headlines - they happened to each of us personally, in ways that we never saw splashed across the news. Something in each of our lives has dissolved since January 2025 - a certainty, a plan, a role, a story we had about ourselves that stopped holding water. This week, we should name it. We don’t need to have made peace with it - we just need to name it, gently, the way we’d close a book we didn’t choose but still read all the way through.
If you’re interested in exploring exactly what chapter is coming to a close in your own life, and what’s about to begin, you might like to try Ask Arion - an app I was involved in building that helps you read your own natal chart so you can see what the stars have to say for you personally. It’s free to sign up, and a great way to start your journey with the stars, and from there you can ask questions about how this eclipse plays against your chart.
Consider how the three lessons landed personally by asking these questions:
Where did my ground soften, and what did I find underneath it?
What did I try to out-think that could only be felt?
And where did my own cornered fear reach for fire?
This is not a moment for verdicts. This book asked hard things of us all. Whatever we find, our challenge is to meet it the way we’d meet a friend coming out of deep water - with a towel and a warm drink, not an interrogation.
And when Friday’s wave comes, let it finish the job. Whatever rises - grief, relief, an ache with no name - that’s the last of the Pisces water moving through, and our only task is to feel rather than flee. Find where it lives in the body and breathe into that place. Let the water take what it came for. Whatever dissolves in each of us this week was already dissolved…..the eclipse just carries it out with the tide.
And then we prepare for the new book - quietly, like we’re sharpening a pencil ready to draft on the blank pages. The sky’s new question - who rules, and by whose consent? - will be asked at every scale, on the world stage and of each of us personally. Because there’s a king in each of us: the voice that says “I alone,” that grips and performs and defends its little throne. And there’s a crowd in each of us too - all the parts that got no say, the quiet knowings that kept getting outvoted. The next year and a half will keep asking each of us exactly what it asks the world: who’s actually running you? Fear, or the heart? And did you ever really consent?
None of us are supposed to have the answer right now.
Our task is simply to live inside the question.
The Book of Fog showed us what happens when we hand the wheel to fear. The book now opening asks us, page by page, to hand it somewhere truer. So close the old book with gratitude, even for its hardest chapters - they’re the ones that taught us to swim. And when the new one opens, may we each choose the heart. That’s where the compass is pointing, and the heart already knows the way.
The quiet secret of every eclipse is that the shadow always passes.
The Moon comes back whole, every single time.
And so will we.
I’ll see you, friends, on the other side of the wave.
If this writing resonated with you, please share it with your friends.
If you’re interested in exploring how the eclipse land on your own natal chart, I was part of the team that built Ask Arion - an app that helps you read what the sky has to say for you personally.
It’s free to sign up, and a great way to start your journey with the stars.
As I read this post I am blown away by the synchronizaties occurring in my life pointing and moving me in the North Node direction. You help me understand what is happening and the path I will follow. 🙏🏾
A great read! I am looking forward to stepping into a new chapter, part of which may finally involve getting back to my chart and a clearer view of where I am and We all are.