A CONVERSATION WITH EMILY'S ASTROLOGER
The astrological angles on the changing zeitgeist
Our new workshop, Autonomous Strategy Lab, starts June 1 and is available for early bird sign ups now (get the low price while it’s hot!). It’s a continuation of our exploration into how to produce and assemble knowledge at the dawn of AGI – except this time with more advanced strategic and creative challenges, and hopefully more community connection along the way. This one is designed to work well for returning students as well as people starting fresh. We already have an amazing (aka slightly intimidating, thoughtful, interesting, global) group shaping up and would love if you joined us! Information and sign up link here.
This conversation is with Chris Reppucci, who is Emily’s astrologer, astrology teacher, dear friend, and occasional Nemesis collaborator (he put the ancient spells in the smart contract for KNOTS, among other things). We sat down with Chris to discuss the astrological angle on the changing zeitgeist.
CR: One of the interesting features of 2025 is that multiple outer planets – Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune – dip into the next sign that they're going to be transiting for the upcoming long haul and then retrograde back into where they’ve been (for just this Fall and most of the Winter). So this coming Spring and Summer, we're going to do the astrology of the next 15 to 20 years, whereas in Fall 2025, Winter 2026, we're going to do the astrology of the last 15 to 20 years. And then in Spring of 2026, we'll finally be fully into the next 15 to 20 years.
ES: So we get a taste of the new zeitgeist, and then we go back to the old zeitgeist and then we go fully into the new zeitgeist. And it's like a zipper.
CR: It's more than a preview. It's the first installment. Everything's moving into fire and air signs, so things are going to get a lot faster, a lot more dynamic, a lot more exciting, and things are going to change a lot more quickly. There's going to be a lot of information, but then that pace is going to go back to a slower, cooler, more sludgy kind of modality in the fall. So it's good to know that before we get carried away.
ES: We've been in kind of a sludgy period for a while, wouldn't you say?
CR: We’re ending the period of Neptune in Pisces, which was since 2011, 2012. The whole period of streaming media, like fantasy movies, Marvel movies, Netflix and chill, opioid epidemic, weed legalization – this kind of escapism that was that watery, Piscean, slow, amorphous kind of mode. …And now we’re going into Aries: a much more action-oriented, tactical period of doing and impulse-following. … It's like we're kind of coming to the end of doom scrolling, or really we might be coming to the end of scrolling in general, all this amorphous buffet of what you can zone out on – that's ending. And since Aries has a lot to do with what's very young and adolescent, we could say when Saturn is there, there's a mismatch of what's mature and what's immature. And I think what may happen over the next few years is the people that get most addicted to what's coming through the screen will be the very young and the relatively old or very old or whatever, whereas I think people who are kind of in their 30s or even 40s will be able to discern between what's real and what's not real, what's coherent and incoherent.
ES: Tell me more about coherence and incoherence.
CR: Well, lately I’ve been thinking about the loss of the informational commons. If you take a random slice of the demographic, just randomize people and put them in a room together, they can't agree on what reality is and what words mean. And it starts arguments almost instantly. Especially with Uranus moving into Gemini – that is going to scramble information even more. One of the things that we're going through is when we were in the Earth period, there was the kind of fundamental classical mechanics of physics, the issue of movement, heat and light requiring fuel to sustain and maintain themselves – it literally was sort of friction running everything. It's like mechanical friction. It's why engines overheat if there's not a cooling system. Our world for the last 200 years needed fuel to operate and it was a frictive environment, and that doesn't go away because part of that just is life. We eat food and that's how we run around. But I think as we go into the Air period for a variety of reasons, like the role of quantum computing and AI, the issue is more coherence versus incoherence. We're not there yet, where the energy crisis has been solved, but in essence, it's very different. It starts to become like – how are we going to keep things coherent against the incoherence that our technology has hardwired within into it?
ES: With that in mind, I’m curious what your experience using AI for astrology has been like.
CR: A few months ago I just looked up some charts, and [the LLM] gave a writeup that was actually pretty eloquent and articulate, but it had multiple planets in each nativity in the wrong position. And so for an untrained eye, you might assume that that information is correct, you know what I mean? But we don't know what AI gets wrong, and that could be across everything, including imaging and video. So I think this year, when obviously AI is getting integrated everywhere, I think part of what’s happening is when the planets are retrograding back into the previous signs they've been in for the past 15 to 20 years in the fall, is so many things get AI-integrated and then aren't working and are just causing complete nonsense…I think there'll be a lot of mistakes and missteps and procedures and things that should go on and be effective and work and do what they're supposed to do, except they’re not doing what they're supposed to do, and a lot of things being rolled back later on. And then they’ll get reintegrated for real in the spring of 2026.
ES: I think astrology is such an interesting topic for AI because in theory it should be so programmatic, but in practice it is not. How frightened of the future are you? One of the reasons I really appreciate astrology is that it helps me take a wider view and look at different time periods more neutrally than I might otherwise.
CR: Well, Pluto is where we can see the pressure of corruption – the biggest power in the world is almost always corrupt by default, so it's corruption and/or power – and Pluto is now in Aquarius, so we can kind of see that there's a lot of technocracy interwoven with culture and society at the moment. And people are kind of like, oh, I'm sick of it. I'm sick of the platforms. I'm sick of Meta. I'm sick of TikTok. And people are getting offline, not everyone, but they are. The last time Pluto was in Aquarius in an Air period was during the fall of feudalism and the creation of the commercial economy between the 11th century and the 14th century when land barons and giant aristocratic, feudal landowners were just not being seen as sovereign anymore…with people just kind of no longer respecting their role. And I mean, it happened entropically over a long period of degradation rather than being marked by ongoing conflict.
ES: And this theme of dissolution – also incoherence – comes up elsewhere in the astrology, right?
CR: When you put Neptune and Saturn together multiple things could happen. Very famously in 1989, Neptune Saturn and Uranus were together in Capricorn, which signaled the kind of breach and dissolve of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the USSR. It was like all this Saturnian structure getting rumbled till it broke and then washed off. But we can also say about Saturn and Neptune that it's like dreams of machines, right? Dreams of structures. And then when you put them in Aries – which is about being autonomous – you could be like, okay, dreams of autonomous structures or structures that can autonomously fantasize or hallucinate. And then you're like, okay, this is sounding a lot like AI. But then since Neptune often signifies the drug of that generation, you're like, okay, well then we could it like this: what comes about with AI becomes addictive.
ES: That’s how we get into the whole prophecy of permanently addicting screen drugs.
CR: As we move further into the next period, it'll have a lot more to do with performance enhancement and less to do with scrolling. Neptune in Pisces started with Downton Abbey and ended with TikTok addiction. I mean, we didn't really think that binge watching series was necessarily an addiction while it was happening, but people were spending massive amounts of time escaping into these fantasy worlds of period pieces. And since things are moving out of Pisces, I think we're not going to be experiencing that as much as we used to. Things simply won't be as viral as they have been.
ES: I’ve been thinking that, lately. Virality seems more and more to be a kind of Macguffin, or red herring, and the real world continues in the meantime.
For your reference, some outer planet timings and larger planetary context, prepared by Chris:
Air period: 2020—2219: age of information, movement of people, things and ideas
Pluto in Aquarius: 3/23.2023—6/11/23. 1/20/24–9/1/24, 11/19/24—1/19/2044: fear, corruption, conspiracy, power dynamics, ominousness, extreme emphasis on progressive, collectivist, cutting edge, pioneering, networking, syndicating, and decentralizing
Neptune ingress Aries: 3/3/25—10/22/25, 1/26/26—2039: imaginal, mystical, fantastical, intoxicating, hypnotizing, dissolving, illusory, perception widening, blending of real and unreal in autonomy, action, individuation, effectiveness, and directness
Uranus in Gemini: 7/7/25—11/7/25, 4/25/26—2034: revolutionizing, radicalizing, shifting, changing, making volatile, experimenting with data, information, exchange, communications, polarities, opposites, ideas, variety and curiosity.
Saturn ingress Aries: 5/24/25—9/1/25, 2/13/26—2028: structure, strategy, formidability, systems, obligations of autonomy, individuation, directness, action, effectiveness.
You can read more of Chris’s thinking, check out forecasts, and book consultations here (highly recommend).
And in case you missed it: information and sign up link for Autonomous Strategy Lab is here. Feel free to email us at info@nemesis.global with any questions and we’ll get back to you with haste!