If you are reading this, chances are the astrology algorithm has already found you. Planetary news you never asked for, sliding past on your timeline. And nothing performs quite like doom, so the feeds fill up with shouting about end times and new eras.
André Barbault and the astrology of historical cycles
You may have seen it go by: the Barbault Basket. A rare planetary configuration that forms the pattern of a basket in the chart over the coming weeks. And by rare I mean: never seen before.
Astrologers, and especially almost-astrologers, love a rare configuration. It does so well on social media, and this basket is a showstopper.
Where it usually goes wrong is the suggestion that on one particular day the world changes all at once. Nothing is impossible. An astrological event like this is better read as a symbolic threshold than as an exact endpoint.
André Barbault, after whom the basket is named, was a brilliant French astrologer who paid no attention to this week or next month. He worked on long-term astrology for humanity, studying planetary cycles against history. In other words: what happened last time?
The basket has never formed this way before, and he could still trace what it means symbolically: the starting point of a new historical era.
Social media trains us to react to the next spectacular moment. Barbault invites a different question. In which direction is the story of humanity moving?
Why astrology is more than algorithms and social media
Back to that dreaded algorithm, because that is where it pinches. We consume snippets, reels, quotes, memes and predictions. Our whole culture works that way. Meaning arrives more slowly, through research, contemplation and pattern recognition.
The algorithm rewards the exception. Astrology looks for coherence.
Look only at the geometry of the basket and you flatten the meaning. It is remarkable, of course. Never seen before: Pluto, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, all exactly at 4 degrees.
A symbolic threshold into a new era
I would invite you to look the way Barbault did. Squint at the future and sit with what those four planets actually symbolise: cycles that have turned their own rounds for centuries and now, for the first time, meet like this.
A threshold we cross together. A shift we will probably only understand many years from now.