Most of us live with some fear of what’s coming. Will the money hold? Will the relationship last? Is this hard stretch ever going to end, or is this just what life is now? We lie awake turning the same questions over, and the mind, with nothing to go on, fills the dark with the worst it can imagine.
So we go looking for answers. We ask friends, we doom scroll, and we come away none the wiser, because nobody we’re asking can see ahead any better than we can. And all the while, the one thing that can show us has been sitting above us the whole time.
We used to read the sky to know the way forward. For thousands of years, reading the sky was simply how people saw what was coming. Queens chose their coronation days by it. The wise men of the Christmas story were following it. The man who worked out how the planets move was paid to read it for an emperor. Then, about 300 years ago, we stopped looking, and we’ve been walking in the dark ever since.
The sky shows the terrain in front of each of us - the climbs, the open stretches, the sharp turns - and it shows when we’ll reach them, often to the month. For anyone afraid of the future, looking up allows us to see the shape of what we’re walking into before we arrive. The map of our whole life is right there in the sky - all we need to do is read it.
This is the story of what we once knew, how we lost it, and how to find the road ahead again. If you want to know what’s coming, read on, friend. Read on.
Never miss a word.
Can the Sky Really Show Us the Future?
The ancients taught that each of us chose the life we were coming to live before we arrived, and that the plan for the journey we chose was written into the sky at the moment of our first breath. That’s the natal chart - a snapshot of the sky at the exact moment we came into the world, and from that snapshot, we can divine our own cosmic design. It reads like a manual for how we think, how we feel, how we interact, how we love, and how we tick. (You can read more about that in What the Sky Remembers and Searching for Purpose.)
But the sky doesn’t just tell us who we are - it tells us where we’re headed. When we hold that snapshot from our birth up against the sky today, we can see exactly where we are in the journey we planned and which season of life we’ve reached. And because the planets keep perfect time, we can hold it up against next month’s sky, or next year’s, and see what we’re walking into. Astrologers call this reading the transits.
And it’s an incredibly detailed map. It marks the pressure points, often down to the day, when emotions will be running high, when tempers are short, and when it pays to slow down and take extra care.
It shows the windows when work is ready to move - when recognition or a promotion is likely, when it’s time to start a new job or launch the thing we’ve been sitting on, and when it’s wiser to wait.
It shows when money is likely to flow more freely and when to tighten the belt, and which weeks to avoid signing anything important.
In love, it shows the windows when a new relationship is most likely to begin, when one is ready to deepen or be made official, and when a partnership will be tested and need extra care. It even shows when someone from the past is likely to reappear.
At home, it shows when it's time to move house or put down roots, and when family life is likely to grow or change.
It shows when to take the trip, when to go back and study, and when the body is asking for rest.
And it shows when a long hard stretch finally ends, which for many of us is the thing we most need to know.
Our lives are still ours to steer. What the sky lays out is our energetic choice points - the forks in the road. It shows the nature of the terrain at each one and the part of our life it’ll touch, and which path we take from there is always our choice.
If we know how to read the map, the road ahead becomes knowable and clear. We can see each choice point coming, and reach for it with readiness instead of fear.
We’ve Always Looked Up to Look Forward
Reading the sky to see the road ahead is one of the oldest things human beings do, and for most of our history nobody thought it strange.
In ancient Egypt, everything depended on the Nile flooding, and the Egyptians knew when it was coming because they watched for the brightest star in the sky, Sirius. The morning that star first reappeared on the horizon at dawn, they knew the waters were on their way.
The most famous journey in the Christmas story was made by astrologers. Matthew's gospel calls them magi, the priestly star-readers of Persia, who saw a star rise and followed it west. We know them as the wise men. In one of the best-loved stories of the Christian faith, the people who read the sky are the wise ones, and it's a star that leads them to the birth of Christ.
Rulers throughout history read the sky to help them rule. The Roman emperor Tiberius kept an astrologer at court. Catherine de’ Medici summoned Nostradamus to Paris to draw up horoscopes for her children. Elizabeth I had astrologer John Dee choose the day of her coronation. And when Johannes Kepler - the man who worked out how the planets move - was made imperial mathematician in 1601, his main duty was to give the emperor astrological advice. Rulers took the sky seriously enough to fear it - Augustus made it a crime to use the stars to predict an emperor’s death, and in 1581 Elizabeth I did the same in England.
In days gone by, ordinary people looked up too. Two English astrologers, Simon Forman and Richard Napier, kept notes on around 80,000 consultations between 1596 and 1634. More than 60,000 people came to them, from servants to noblemen, asking about their health, who they should marry, where an absent husband had got to, and who’d stolen their goods. The same questions that keep us awake now.
For most of human history we lived by the sky. People looked up to learn whether this was a time to plant or to wait, to push or to rest, to begin something or to let it end, and they shaped their lives around the answer. A life had seasons, and people knew which one they were in.
Then, in the late 1600s, Europe stopped looking. Astronomy and astrology had always been one subject, studied by the same people, but as the new science took hold they were pulled apart, and when France founded its Academy of Sciences in 1666, the astrologers were left out. By the end of that century, reading the sky had lost its place in the universities and the courts.
When science turned away from the sky, it gave us a great deal in return - medicine, machines, a longer life. But the sky went from a map to a clockwork of rock and gas with nothing to say to us, and the idea that a life has seasons mapped in the sky went with it.
What we were left with is the belief that things just happen. Good years and bad years fall on us like weather nobody forecast - luck of the draw, deal with it - and all we can do is brace. So much of our fear of what’s coming starts there. It’s the fear of people who’ve been told there’s no map.
But in some places, the looking up never stopped. The Ottoman sultans kept a chief court astrologer until the empire itself came to an end. When Burma became independent in 1948, the moment was chosen by an astrologer. And when Thailand crowned its king in 2019, the court astrologer cast his horoscope and inscribed it on a plaque of gold.
In the West it carried on behind closed doors. After Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981, Nancy Reagan turned to an astrologer, Joan Quigley, and his chief of staff later wrote that every major move the Reagans made was cleared with her first. France’s President Mitterrand consulted an astrologer at the Élysée Palace during the Gulf War, and was recorded asking her, “When is the next best day for me to speak?”
We used to know a better way to move through the world - by looking up. The map has always been there - we just stopped looking. It’s ready to be read, whenever we’re ready to read it.
The Road Ahead in the Sky
When we look up at the sky map, each planet marks a different kind of terrain.
Saturn is the climb, where life gets heavier and slower and asks what we’re really building. Jupiter is open country, where doors open and things grow. Uranus is the sharp turn nobody saw coming. Neptune is fog, where old certainties dissolve. Pluto is the place where something ends for good so that something else can begin.
Where a planet is crossing on our map tells us which part of life the terrain belongs to - work, money, home, love, health - and its speed tells us how long the stretch will last.
Put those together and the future stops being a blank. We can see a climb in our working life that begins in March, is steepest in August and is behind us by the following February. We can see open country in love arriving in the middle of next year. We can see a sharp turn at home, and know the month.
The long journey has its landmarks too, and all of us reach them at the same ages - which means we can test this on our own lives right now.
Think back to the year you turned 29. For most of us that was the year life got serious - a marriage or the end of one, a child, a career that finally started or fell over. That’s Saturn arriving back where it stood at our birth, and it reaches every one of us at the same age. It comes round again at about 58. And if your early 40s turned everything upside down, that was Uranus, right on schedule.
Knowing where we are between those landmarks tells us where we stand in the whole story, and how far it is to the next one.
That’s why the job stopped making sense when it did.
That’s why the friendship went quiet.
That’s why the thing that wouldn’t move for years moved in a couple of weeks.
It’s all there in the map we hid for ourselves in the sky.
We don’t have to stumble blindly through life - we can move down the road with clear intention, following the map we made before we came.
The Sky That Lights the Way
The idea that we drew this map ourselves, before we were born, is ancient. Plato wrote about it 2,400 years ago, at the end of his most famous book, the Republic, in which a soldier called Er dies in battle, comes back to life, and describes what he saw on the other side. Souls waiting to be born are shown the lives on offer, and each one chooses its own. The choice is then sealed beneath a great spindle whose turning rings are the orbits of the planets and the stars, and the soul drinks from the River of Forgetfulness and is carried up into the night to be born.
A Roman writer called Macrobius filled in the journey down. The soul falls to Earth through the sphere of each planet in turn, he said, and takes something from each as it passes - reason from Saturn, the power to act from Jupiter, fire from Mars, desire from Venus, speech from Mercury. Read that way, a birth chart is a record of the descent.
The Talmud holds a version too, in which the unborn child is taught the whole of the Torah in the womb, and as it's born an angel strikes it on the mouth, so that it forgets.
And people are still describing it. In A Walk in the Physical, Christian Sundberg writes of remembering his existence before this life, and of the veil we pass through on the way in.
The details differ in each telling, but the same shape keeps appearing time and time again: something known before birth, forgotten on the way in, waiting to be remembered. And the map of all of it is hidden in the sky. We drew it before we came, and on our way in we agreed to forget it. By looking up, we can be reminded of the path and the terrain ahead.
When we know a climb is coming, we can pack for it, pace ourselves and stop expecting to sprint. By looking up, we can stop being surprised or even disappointed by life, thinking things have gone wrong because we’re walking through a challenge - the challenges are written into our sky, as opportunities for growth. When we know where we’re going, how long it lasts and where the challenge is taking us, we can walk the path in peace.
Fear of the future is mostly fear of the dark. Once the road ahead has a shape - a beginning, a steepest point and an end, in one part of our life while the rest carries on - the mind has something real to work with, and it can stop bracing against everything at once. What’s left is a feeling we can actually sit with, and a stretch of road we can actually prepare for.
See Your Own Road Ahead
If you’re lying awake over what comes next - worried about money, or work, or relationships, or the hard stretch you feel trapped in that won’t seem to end - there’s a way to stop guessing. Look up, friend, look up.
And if you’re not sure how to read the map in the sky, I’d be honoured to help you interpret it. I craft 12-Month Transit Reports that chart the year ahead, month by month, according to your own sky. Each one tells you what’s coming and when it arrives, which part of your life it touches, how it’s likely to feel, and what to do with it, with the dates that matter most marked for your calendar.
It’s written in plain language for people who’ve never read a chart, with just enough of the sky shown for you to see where each stretch comes from. These are great companions to the Astro-Blueprints I create, that tell you who you are. The Transit Report tells you where you’re headed.
Every reading is created personally, written for you alone, and delivered to your inbox.
The road ahead is already on the map, and we drew it ourselves.
All that’s left is to look up and read it.
If you’re ready to see your year ahead, here’s where to begin.
If this writing resonated with you, please share it with your friends.
Thanks Wiz...I needed to revisit my Astro Blueprint apparently. As you advised it has taken a bit for the information to settle because this message just opened my eyes to my North Node and the interpretation you gave me. May Peace and Love ❤️ be with you. (A message to you from from my Blueprint)
A grandson is taking Astronomy in college right now - I forwarded this to him. I'm looking forward to the discussion!