Astrology is Political

CHANI NICHOLAS: When I was 12, I had a reading from an astrologer, and I fell in love with it. I’ve been studying it ever since. I had a lot of astrologers, psychics, and healers in my life when I was young. It became a very important part of my life, and it felt like something that took hold of me from a really young age.

CÉLINE SEMAAN: As an astrologer, what radicalized you? How do you feel astrology is connected to advocacy or politics? Did something happen in your life that made you feel like “this is unfair, I want to speak out”?

CHANI: I had the good fortune of being educated by feminists. I had the good fortune of reading Black feminist thinkers. I had the good fortune of reading Chicana feminists. I had the good fortune of reading Indigenous feminists from the world over. I had the good fortune of being queer. I had the good fortune of being raised in a counterculture. I have the good fortune of having a very clear understanding of injustice, and that’s for a lot of different reasons. I’ve always been concerned with injustice, and that’s partly from some of my own personal experiences—being a woman, being Jewish. I understood from growing up in my family what it is to be othered. So, all of these things together, but mostly my education and being introduced to a multi-tiered feminist approach to the world, were the greatest gifts I could have had at a very young age. There’s a gift in wanting to decolonize and wanting to understand how power works in the world.

CÉLINE: I love how you’re saying that it’s a good fortune, everything that you’ve described. Often, when we are introduced to these things, they’re tainted by the idea of being underserved or marginalized. We don’t always look at our lives in this way. That I’m so lucky to have come from a certain culture, or lucky to have had a certain upbringing and education. Is there a book you read or some other thing you experienced in your youth that made you feel more emboldened to do what you’re doing today?

CHANI: There are so many teachers and professors I had who were devoted to the practice of teaching and of building out curriculum and educational experiences. What happens in a truly transformative classroom is that everybody’s stuff comes into the room. All the power dynamics and the emotional dynamics come into the room. Only an incredibly skilled facilitator can bring about alchemy. In the course of my life, I had the opportunity to be a part of two experimental and incredibly transformative educational institutions. I have such deep reverence for the curation of material that all the professors I worked with put together. To learn something actually demands that you change. Unless we are building that skill alongside taking in the information, it’s not actually going to produce any kind of real shift in the person or the world. The professors I had were just as important as the people they were getting us to read. And then, of course, my classmates, and what we helped to pull out of each other. One of the programs was called Assaulted Women’s and Children’s Counselor Advocate. It wouldn’t be named that now, but that was decades ago. It was basically Feminism 101. I just recently finished my bachelor’s at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

CÉLINE: A lot of people perceive your platform to be about consulting the oracle or understanding a bigger perspective, but you’ve always included political education as part of your work. When you are looking at the planets and their positions and the influences they have on planet Earth, and you look at these patterns in relationship to the rise and fall of empires, or moments of collective awakening, do you see throughout our history how astrology and politics are intertwined?

CHANI: Yes, always. Throughout history, if one empire took over another, they would be like, “Where are your astrology texts? Where are your medical texts? Where are your scientific texts?” Science, medicine, astronomy, and astrology were all intertwined. All empires in the ancient world, most of them that I know of, consulted astrologers, worked with astrologers, and wanted the astrological knowledge of competing empires. There’s no way we can look at astrology as a mirror of human potential, human design, human capacity, humans in general, and not look at it politically. It makes zero sense to me because politics is just people concentrated into a system. Every single major astrological moment has a precursor. When you look back in history, you can see that something is going to happen in February 2026. The last time Neptune and Saturn were conjunct—although not in the sign of Aries, which is where they will be at the end of February—we witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Something will be eroded during the February 2026 conjunction. Maybe it’ll be the GOP. I don’t know, but we can feel it. It’s impossible to look at astrology and not be political. So many people want me to shut up and talk about astrology without ever mentioning politics, which is impossible. The horoscope can only be understood within the context of the person’s life. You have to contextualize the person, the place, the time, the thing. Otherwise, you don’t understand it and are looking at it through a keyhole.

CÉLINE: Yes, the idea of apolitical astrology, or fashion, or beauty, or music, or anything is a false concept. 2025 was a “9” year (2+0+2+5 = 9), a year of endings and closures. It was also the Year of the Snake in the Chinese Zodiac. In your opinion, what has ended culturally? Or what are we no longer going to be thinking or doing? I don’t know if you can explain from an astrological perspective what has happened since 2020, but it feels like information is growing rapidly, and people are accessing it in a way that’s making them more aware. It’s creating an acceleration in what we call the revolution, the uprising. How do you see that in looking back at 2025, from the perspective you have?

CHANI: The reputation of Israel as a democracy, as a place of human rights, has been fundamentally disrupted. We have to keep leaning into that because Israel, the genocide, and all of its components are one of the arms of the global capitalist system. It’s about nothing but money and land grabs. That is the greatest conspiracy. Naomi Klein, in her book, Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World wrote: “…if no one ever taught you how capitalism works, and instead told you it was all about freedom and sunshine and Big Macs and playing by the rules to get the life you deserve, then it’s easy to see how you might confuse it with another c-word: conspiracy.”

Capitalism is the conspiracy. There’s this fixation on finding the problem. But there’s only one problem. And the problem is the money. If we follow the money, every war, every genocide, every point of human suffering that is man-made comes from that.

Besides just being human, all points of systemic human suffering are about a very few people getting rich off our suffering, off violence inflicted on us, and off using us. I hope that since 2020, that is what has eroded. Saturn and Pluto came together at the very top of 2020. And that conjunction is a marker of pandemics, disease, and the overhaul of a structure. It’s a marker of exposing something deeper about our structures.

This time has been a harrowing journey that has resulted in more fascism, because we have never gotten to the root of the problem. Which is that all major corporations are the welfare queens of the world. They are stealing our life force, our money, our future, our children’s futures, the Earth’s future. It just goes on and on, but it’s a simple thing that has been contorted. They love to deflect with racism and anti-trans hate, and bigotry, and xenophobia, and Islamophobia, and all the things that separate us.

CÉLINE: Ultimately, the playbook is to divide and conquer, which has been in place since the Roman Empire. It’s been ingrained in popular culture that Israel is an ally to the United States, equal to the United States in their values regarding human rights. However, we’ve seen this past year how Israel’s image has shifted in an irreparable way, in a way that I don’t think can be salvaged. Now we’re seeing the Zionist project for what it is. From an astrological point of view, what happened? Is it a planet specifically, or a position? Is there something that has shifted? It’s like a veil has been lifted.

CHANI: October 2023 was host to a set of eclipses near the South Node in Libra. These were the same eclipses that Netanyahu was born under, and that the Nakba happened under. They happen every 20 years, so it’s not the only time it’s happened since the Nakba, or since his actions have been unleashed on the world. But it was so wild to see that repetition. That’s what eclipses do. Eclipses reveal the shadows; they reveal what’s been obscured. Palestine, Palestinians, the history, the land, has been so obscured, hidden in plain sight for most of the world. Obviously not from people of that region, but for most of the world. And as an American Jew, I have been the recipient of the indoctrination. My grandparents were recipients of the indoctrination. For all of us, this is the time to reckon with the shadows in our family histories, and with the legacy we’ve been handed. We should have been grappling with it the whole time, but again, we’re living in a system of indoctrination. It is being peeled back and ripped away in such an intense way.

CÉLINE: Were you raised with Zionist indoctrination? Was there a moment when you questioned it? I know that many of my Jewish American peers have had a moment of breaking away from the education that was imposed on them, so they could find their way out of the programming without losing their culture or their ties.

CHANI: Zionism is actually an erasure of Palestinian Jewish identity, of Moroccan Jewish identity, of Ashkenazi Jewish identity. You were not allowed to speak Yiddish or the language of your culture once Israel became a state. You’re supposed to give up your identity and become Israeli, which is a false thing. If you were actually from that land and Jewish, you were Palestinian!

If you’re regionally of that land, you’re not Israeli, you don’t speak Hebrew. You speak Arabic. You speak a local dialect. Israel as a state robbed Jews of their identity, of their cultural heritage, and of their indigeneity. You weren’t allowed to carry your traditions because to be a settler, a colonist, you had to take on the identity of the State, which is not an organic thing to do. It’s not real. It’s all fabricated.

I didn’t grow up with a ton of Zionism. My grandmother felt very deeply about Israel. I don’t even remember hearing the word Palestine until I was in my 30s. I traveled to the land, I stayed in a kibbutz in the south, and I thought, this is one of the most painful, brutal places I’ve ever been in my life. Something is so deeply wrong with this place. My grandmother demanded that I go. I was there living with Moroccan Jews and Arab Jews, and they told me about a time before the State that their grandparents and parents remembered. I left that place and never wanted to go back. And I didn’t know why. And then I started learning… I don’t remember how I came into contact with the information. Probably, through CODEPINK (a feminist grassroots organization working to end U.S. warfare and imperialism, support peace and human rights initiatives, and redirect resources into healthcare, education, green jobs and other life-affirming programs – codepink.org), JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace), and radicalized Jews, anti-Zionist Jews, who were from there, who were born there, and were then living in America. They said that it’s not what our parents or our people tell us it is. It is something else. In the Jewish community, in a lot of diasporic communities, there’s a feeling of uprootedness, and so when you come into community, you want to feel connected. Zionism was often the elephant in the room, that I didn’t always know how to deal with. Now I feel unequivocally clear about it.

CÉLINE: What do you see for 2026?

CHANI: 2025 was a game-changing year. Planets were entering new signs, but then they were going back into their old signs. In 2026, they’re settling into their new signs. So, 2026 is a continuation of everything new that happened in 2025. The things that happened alongside the extreme fascism, the groundswell of opposition to it, and of a deep understanding that we need to contend with all of the things that we have been trying to push to the side. We have to deal with it now. Zohran’s win shows us that we’re actually ready for real, literal change. However we move towards a politics of solidarity; however we started moving towards that in 2025; however we saw that it was the winning solution, we have to double, triple, quadruple down on that. And not look at the odds that we’re up against. No one thought at the beginning of 2025 that Mamdani was going to win in the way he did. We know that that is what wins, and we have to move full force, every cell of our being, towards what will win against fascism right now. And that is our only option.

CÉLINE: It’s a year of integrity. I feel like he won because he has integrity. Everybody is looking for integrity in people and in politics, and doubling down on that. So, 2026 is a year of the politics of solidarity? I think that’s so important to talk about, because we’ve seen a lot of division, a lot of takedowns, a lot of backstabbing, especially in progressive circles. Sadly, we don’t have what the right has, which is the solidarity of crooks and mean people. They stand with each other no matter what. We don’t have that in progressive circles.

CHANI: Everything new that took place in 2025 gets fully, deeply entrenched in 2026 and beyond. We need a socialist, populist plan because that is what won. Trump forgot who he was when Mamdani stepped into the room. That is the power of being in your integrity. Integrity can rearrange our known reality. That is the thing that changed. That is the thing that won. That is the thing that moved the most powerful city in one of the most powerful nations in the world. We now have a young, Muslim, pro-Palestinian, Socialist mayor. That just says to me, this is what we need.

CÉLINE: We have elections in 2026. It’s a year of change, isn’t it? In a year of political and power dynamic change.

CHANI: The walls are coming down.