With all this unprecedented disaster and catastrophe and serious change, it is easy for anxiety and despair to sink their talons in. And that's before you add whatever thafuck is enacting a similar impact for you personally. We knew this revolution would be televised but nobody said there'd be days like this, to quote the sages.

New year brings new readings, deeper shadow work and a whole bunch of new ways to work together. If you are looking for a sign, this is datura.

Venus in Aries is iconic and leaves an indelible impression. A one word moniker is often all that is required for these wonder women and gamechanging men. Audrey. Marilyn. Gaga. Rihanna. Einstein. Lincoln. These powerful ranks include epic go getters like Elizabeth Taylor, Jack Nicholson and Katherine Hepburn. Venus in Aries natives are born to shine brightly, lead the charge and leave a formidable legacy.

Aquaria is known for its irreverence and the delight it takes in forging an unseen path of its own. Said to walk to the beat of a different drummer than most everyone else, its natives are quirky originalists with a stubborn determination to do things their own peculiar way.

Our hair is more than just a reflection of our good health, virility and fertility. Great hair has a power and magic all of its own. For centuries, hair has held spiritual power in its strands and many religious rites have been associated with lustrous locks. In some cultures long hair brought you both closer to earth and closer to God. In magic, hair contains the essence of a person and is thus a supremely powerful ingredient in spells.

As we peer down the barrel of this week, the cosmic waves continue rolling in thick and deep and fast. Their power and beauty is cataclysmic in its execution of our new natural state. The evolution is here, darklings. This is more than a chorus. It is a no holds barred imperative.

With changeling as our default setting these heady evolutionary days, we are becoming adepts with zero time for naysayers and non believers. Today again holds quite the shift, all the better to prove our nonplussed adaptability and maintain momentum. Both of our cosmic luminaries now take centre stage. Together they glide through the powerful anaretic degree of the sign they depart, to stand tall at our next initiation point.

The icing on this week's cosmic layer cake is our impending full moon on the rise, and it's not even Wednesday yet. Her blazing gaze, magnified by proximity and purpose, peaks at the begin-again point in the house of the divine feminine healer. Initiation and medicine for a new life finding its feet.

Having spent years wailing and fighting, surrendering and accepting, the matrix is already rippling with your healing. In 2010/11 when our greatest cosmic teacher moved into Pisces, we were forced into deeper water and given little choice but to begin our life's greatest education. Today we graduate from Chiron University, with our sights on dancing post grad horizons.

That thing. Dangerous, they cry. That doing something different and strange and right like it hasn't been before. Versus everything you think you know up until now. Doing it anyway, your future a greater lure than your past.

The waxing moon in Cancer and the final day of my year whispered to me that today was the right time to harvest my mugwort. Artemisia is a plant of the moon, whose astrological home is Cancer. And I just so happened to have co-opted my kin for a day up this way, so harvest we did. Giant bundles of my dearest plant ally have been hung in my apothecary to dry out of the sun for use in smudge sticks, dreaming bundles and of course my Mugwort Magic anointing oil.

In just about every culture and tradition humankind has crafted, fire is a powerful transformer. Beyond an elemental requirement for life, fire is a cornerstone of ritual and rebirth. Fire creates and destroys, cleanses and purifies, balances and reclaims us as sacred. Smoke from flames carries our sacrifices and desires to the gods themselves. Fire is mesmerising and consuming, demanding our attention and respect.

As a tarot reader I will forever be enchanted by what the cards reveal. More than the answers to your most vexing questions and beyond their ability to sniff the future on the breeze.

If you are mainlining ripples of dreamy fluidity and drifting melancholia in the matrix, you are well tuned in to the music of the spheres. Last Sunday Mercury dived deep into Pisces where our winged messenger will remain submerged until early April. His long surrealist soujourn will include his first retrograde of this year, just a fortnight away.

This week is a warm up in every sense with Mars dominating the outer reaches of Aries. Next week we enter a period of epochal change overflowing with once in a lifetime seismic shifts. The kind that tilt worlds and herald revolution. But first Uncle Mars is having his way with us, offering the kind of life coaching that is low on saccharine and heavy on imperative. All the better to set a fire beneath us.

You know by now darklings that I never send you hurtling towards potential astrofuquery without a strategy. Our twisted firestarter is throwing his significant weight around this week. See post below for why this isn't a terrible thing. See list below for what to do when Mars attacks.

Fool's gold glistens and seduces us because we want so badly to believe it is real. It speaks to the true nature of our desires. Most dreadfully, to our willingness to be duped in our ardent pursuit of them. Under pressure, its true nature is revealed. It never passes any real test and will fail as many times as you let it.