06/04/2026
I just updated and reposted this as one article!
You’ve landed back at Ritualistically Botanica. My name is Mo, and today we’re going to talk about eclipses. But before we do that, let me tell you how the hell I got here.
After nine clucking years, I finally finished my novel. Thirty-six chapters. Five generations. Three countries. Family secrets, betrayals, migrations, tragedies, reunions, enough emotional baggage to require its own customs declaration form, and one stubborn story that absolutely refused to leave me alone.
What started as a simple story about a girl with issues, sitting in a café somehow turned into a sprawling family saga that dragged me through history, memory, grief, love, and every damn detour in between.
At one point I had completed thirty-one chapters and then lost eleven of them in a computer glitch. Gone. Not misplaced. Not hiding in a folder. Gone. I did what I always do when life punches me in the mouth. I stopped. I wandered off. I allowed the obstacle to become the obstacle.
To the credit of my late husband, who was a brilliant left-brained architect and a wonderfully flawed human being, he listened to me complain about this catastrophe and calmly informed me that when I wrote those chapters again, they would be better than they were the first time.
I remember thinking, “You arrogant son of a bitch.” I hated that he was right. But he was.
This year the book finally got tired of waiting for me. It planted its feet, crossed its arms, and essentially informed me that I wasn’t writing another damn thing until I finished it. So I did. The story is complete. Not published. Not polished. Not perfect. But complete. Now I’m in what I call the Editorial Roadmap. Making sure names are spelled the same way throughout. Making sure chronology makes sense. Making sure the voice remains consistent enough that readers never notice the nine years that passed between the first chapter and the last. The story is done. The work is not.
All of this happened under the recent Sagittarius Full Moon. Normally, when a Full Moon rolls around, everybody starts talking about manifestation and release. Manifest this. Release that. Burn a piece of paper. Make moon water. Dance naked in the backyard. Whatever. Not this one. This one landed in what I call the Third Temple of my life. I’m not explaining that because that’s another book, and Lord knows I already have enough books trying to climb onto my desk. What mattered was that this Full Moon wasn’t asking me what I wanted. It wasn’t asking me what I needed to release. It was asking me what had been revealed.
So instead of manifesting, I examined. Instead of releasing, I investigated. I started looking at the loose ends, the patterns, the connections, and the things that had surfaced now that I was standing on the other side of a nine-year journey. Then, because my brain apparently cannot leave well enough alone, I started looking at the astrology coming up in June. Chiron moving into Ta**us. Jupiter changing signs. Mars crossing sensitive degrees. The usual astrological shenanigans. And then I noticed something that stopped me cold.
Several of the degrees about to be activated by Mars and Chiron were eclipse degrees.
Now wait a minute.
The eclipse itself was over.
Everybody had already taken the pictures. Posted the selfies. Shared the memes. Argued about what it meant. Then moved on with their lives.
But here was Mars preparing to walk across one of those old eclipse points.
And suddenly I found myself asking a question.
What exactly gets left behind when an eclipse is over?
Suppose an eclipse happens and leaves a marker in the sand. Then six months later, a year later, two years later, some other planet comes wandering through and steps on that marker. What happens then? Does it reactivate something? Not the eclipse itself, but whatever current the eclipse opened?
That question led me down a rabbit hole that I was completely unprepared for.
Apparently eclipses have families.
I know. I laughed too.
They’re called Saros Cycles. Every eclipse belongs to a family line. Roughly every eighteen years, eleven days, and eight hours, the Earth, Moon, and Sun return to nearly the same geometric relationship and another eclipse from that family is born. The first thing I wanted to know was how we knew that. The answer turned out to be astronomy. Pure geometry. No astrology required. Scientists can calculate these cycles centuries into the future and centuries into the past. The families exist whether astrologers ever showed up or not.
The astrology comes later.
And that’s where things got weird.
The Great American Eclipse of August 21, 2017 belonged to Saros 145. Roughly two years and seven months later, the world shut down. Now before somebody starts writing me an angry email, let’s not get stupid. I’m not saying the eclipse caused COVID. What I am saying is that if eclipses are gates rather than events, that’s one hell of a coincidence. The world before 2017 feels fundamentally different from the world after 2020. Trust fractured. Politics fractured. Institutions fractured. Reality itself seemed to fracture.
And that’s when I asked the next question.
When was Saros 145 born?
The answer knocked me sideways.January 4, 1639.
Now wait a damn minute.
What the hell was happening in 1639?
Europe was in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War. Governments fighting governments. Religions fighting religions. Old systems breaking apart. New systems struggling to be born. Authority being questioned. Reality being argued over.
Now wait.
Doesn’t that sound familiar?
And then somebody says, “Well, America didn’t even exist yet.”
Hold up.
Make up your damn mind.
Because Harvard was founded in 1636. Settlers were here. Colonies were here. Indigenous nations were certainly here. The land was here. The people were here. The tensions were here. What didn’t exist yet was the United States. The Constitution didn’t exist. The nation hadn’t formed. The idea hadn’t fully arrived. In other words, the river was already flowing. Nobody knew where it was going.
Now look around in 2026.
Trust in institutions is collapsing. Trust in government is collapsing. Trust in media is collapsing. Artificial intelligence is changing reality faster than laws can keep up. A handful of people have accumulated enough wealth and influence to rival governments. Everybody is arguing over who gets to define truth. Everybody is arguing over who gets to shape the future.
Now wait a mother minute.
Doesn’t that sound familiar?
I’m not saying Saros 145 caused any of this. I’m saying I find it fascinating that this eclipse family was born during a period when old systems were breaking apart and new systems were struggling to be born. And here we are almost four hundred years later looking around and saying, “Well, this doesn’t seem sustainable.” Neither did 1639.
The people living then didn’t know what came next. We don’t know what comes next either.
They didn’t know they were standing in the middle of history. Neither do we.
That’s the arrogance of every generation. We think we’re living in normal times. Then fifty years later historians give the period a name and act like it was obvious all along.
Which brings me back to eclipses.
Maybe eclipses aren’t events.
Maybe they’re openings.
Maybe they’re gates.
Maybe they’re rivers.
The gate opens in a moment. The river keeps flowing. The eclipse comes and goes, but the current remains. Other planets come along later and step into that current. Other events emerge from it. Other chapters get written because of it.
And maybe that’s why I’ve never been able to look at eclipses as one-and-done events. Maybe they’re more like dams opening. Maybe they’re more like rivers changing course. Maybe they leave markers in the sand that future travelers can’t help but step on.
I don’t know. — But I know this.
We Humans are always born into rivers already flowing. We just spend most of our lives pretending we invented the water.
Part two
Now we’re getting somewhere. Yes I cast the chart for the birthdate of this eclipse family back in 1639.
And the first thing I notice is that this chart is screaming the very thing i’ve been talking about. I’m not going to pretend I know the Ascendant for an eclipse family born in the Arctic in 1639. The chart software is giving me an Ascendant because I forced a location and time into it. That’s fine as an experiment, but what I trust more are the planetary patterns.
Look at that massive Capricorn concentration.
You’ve got:
• North Node in Sagittarius
• Venus in early Capricorn
• Part of Fortune in Capricorn
• Moon in Capricorn
• Sun in Capricorn
• Mercury in Capricorn
That is a ridiculous amount of Capricorn.
Now stop and think about what Capricorn represents. Not goats climbing mountains. Every astrology book has already beaten that metaphor to death.
Capricorn is structure.
Government.
Institutions.
Authority.
Hierarchy.
Infrastructure.
The bones that hold civilization together.
The rules.
The systems.
The architecture.
Now wait a damn minute.
What was I just talking about?
1639. 1639.
Old systems breaking apart.
New systems trying to be born.
And here sits the founding eclipse chart with a giant neon sign saying:
PAY ATTENTION TO STRUCTURES.
Then look at the Sun and Moon together in Capricorn.
This is a solar eclipse.
The lights are fused.
Consciousness and instinct fused together in the sign of civilization itself.
Not personal feelings.
Not romance.
Not self-expression.
Civilization.
Systems.
Institutions.
Governance.
The machinery that holds a society together.
And what have we been watching since 2017?
Arguments over institutions.
Arguments over government.
Arguments over authority.
Arguments over who gets to define truth.
Arguments over the architecture of reality.
Now here’s where I got chills.
Look at Saturn in Aquarius.
Capricorn’s ruler.
The dispositor of that entire Capricorn pile-up.
Saturn isn’t in Capricorn.
It’s in Aquarius.
The future.
Networks.
Technology.
The collective.
The crowd.
The people.
The social fabric.
The systems connecting individuals.
Again.
Doesn’t that sound familiar?
Because one of the defining themes of our era is the collision between:
Capricorn systems
and Aquarian networks.
Government versus internet.
Institutions versus decentralized information.
Legacy power versus digital power.
Old authority versus collective authority.
And this eclipse family was born carrying that tension.
Then look at Jupiter and Neptune together in Scorpio. Oh, now we’re in the swamp.
Power.
Secrets.
Hidden wealth.
Things beneath the surface.
Things that aren’t what they appear to be.
Financial entanglements.
Deep transformation.
The underworld of society.
Again, I hear my inner voice say:
“Now wait a damn minute…”
Because if somebody handed me this chart without a date and asked me what era it belonged to, I might start describing pieces of 2026. Not because the chart predicted 2026.
Because the themes rhyme. And that’s the word I keep coming back to.
Rhyme.
History doesn’t repeat.
It rhymes.
Eclipse families don’t repeat events.
They appear to repeat questions.
And the question I see in this chart is:
What happens when existing structures can no longer contain the future trying to emerge?
That’s the question of 1639.
It’s the question of 1776.
It’s the question of 1861.
It’s arguably the question of 2026.
And now I’m really curious what happens when I pull up Saros 139 and Saros 144.
That’s my personal eclipse families and you can find yours Google eclipses just prior to your birth. And then fall into the rabbit who I fell into find out what river you were born into.
She says with a cynical and sarcastic chuckle.
Because if 145 is carrying this much Capricorn-Aquarius tension in its DNA, then this article just got a whole lot more interesting.
I’ve gone from:
“Maybe eclipses leave footprints.”
to
“Maybe eclipse families carry inherited questions across centuries.”
And that, is a hell of a rabbit hole. ☕🌑📖🌊
