This month, the Capricorn stellium comes back to haunt us. In mid-July the Sun is in late Cancer, triggering Jupiter, Pluto and Saturn by opposition for a week (7/13-20). Then Mercury begins to oppose them as the month comes to an end.
Our focus should be connecting the dots between the beginning of 2020 and right now. The skies of July are showing us where we’ve come, since those world-altering transits charged out of the gate in January.
Identify what the dramas were, that got started back then. Not just the obvious ones — the mass explosions — but the ones that happened for you — the personal implosions. Ask yourself to name them, with a clarity that wouldn’t have been possible when they were brand new.
Naming them makes it possible to tease out the larger issue: Where do you stand with them?
It’s a big question. It’s the question.
Social convulsions
As July opens, the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction is ringing in the air. Over the months since the Saturn-Pluto conjunction (1/12/20), Jupiter (growth, education, social justice) and Pluto (hidden things, profound change) have retrograded back to the stellium degree.
Societies all over the world are convulsing with deep-structure change. Individuals are, too. Wherever the 25th degree of Capricorn falls within your natal chart, that area of your life is now getting prompts – internal and/or external — to sand-blast and reconfigure old patterns like never before.
Reactivity
Over the course of the month, Mercury and Mars will square each other. Because Mercury stations direct on July 12th at 5 Cancer, it hangs around those early degrees for weeks, extending the square.
Take note of where in your chart these early degrees of cardinal signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn) reside. It’s as if the sky were putting these parts of your life in italics.
From 7/8 through 7/27 we need to be on our guard against the reactive uses of Mars in Aries – already prone to rash behavior – as it is triggered by Mercury in Cancer.
Both of these signs are volatile, emotional and subjective. Cardinal water, Cancer, is prone to taking things personally. Not that this should necessarily be considered a negative.
The deeply personal (Cancer) reception of information (Mercury) bestows kindness and understanding.
Know your own strength
As for Cardinal fire, Aries, it is emotional in a different way. It tends to sprint off with hair-trigger speed when provoked, or 
when it thinks it’s being provoked.
This makes for a particularly flammable phase of a long-term combustible placement. Mars in Aries 2020 has drawn the attention of astrologers for years now, especially during its retrograde phase (see this blog), September through November.
Mars in Aries is the ultimate warrior placement. But this is about more than brute strength.
Bullying and machismo are how it shows up in primitive form. We can see this on a societal level, when the collective ego is allowed to run roughshod over whatever threatens its primacy.
And we see it on an individual level, when the personal ego is not integrated. This happens when self-orientation becomes selfishness. Mars forgets that it exists to serve the Sun, not the other way around.
But when used with spiritual maturity, the soldier becomes the samurai.
