EQUINOX HOROSCOPES
SEPTEMBER 22, 2026 | 8:05 PM EDT
image and text by Shane Powers
image of Pyritized ammonite, 150 - 180 million years old
Hello,
Happy equinox on both hemispheres of the planet. The spiral of light coils inward on the northern hemisphere and outward on the southern. It has been a while since I wrote horoscopes and I want to say hello. Astrology is not my only gig. I have other interests, and feeding those, I've found, keeps astrology well fed too.
People often ask how I define astrology. Astrology is an open source technology available to us within nature. While attempting to make meaning and sense of observable natural phenomena, astrology offers infinite approaches to name and discuss the conditions and circumstances of our lives. Its ancient hermetic roots are for the most part evergreen while evolving within spirals of time.
I won't sugarcoat it, the astrology at the moment is gnarly. The harvest does not fruit abundantly every season. Sharing love, resources, wisdom and practical know-how, we can make small choices that collectively add up to life affirming optimism, upholding the sensual world.
I offer these horoscopes as broad strokes over a season. Ideas to keep the rudder steady, not instructions to follow. Astrology, like medicine or poison, can be helpful in measured doses, in excess, a hangover. Adjust your dosage accordingly.
In writing these horoscopes, I focus on what is most evident through the ruling planet of your rising sign. You're welcome to read for your Sun and Moon signs as well, offering a more three dimensional reading. Other configurations pass in my peripheral view, but I remain focused on the big picture.
Feel free to reach out with any reflections on your horoscope. Or simply be in touch to say hello. It is great to hear from you. Also, please forward these horoscopes to anyone you feel would enjoy them.
xo,
Shane
Aries
For the past two months, a quiet temper, swamped with intensity, may have welled up around topics of family or sense of place. If you've been bitten by circumstances beyond your control, cultivate patience and perspective. Do not bite back with abandon. Draw what is supportive and essential to you, without covetousness. If you must withdraw from a social environment or family affair, autumn would be an ideal time to do so, while misunderstandings and pecking orders remain unsettled, like salt in a delicate wound. Resources may be dormant; tend and care for them well. Relieve afflictions through a deep well of strength that will soon express itself in self-directed creative play and sensual wonder.
Taurus
Under the absentminded words of others, spells through which you perceive a mirage of a collapsing worldview, you unwittingly assume it as your own. White noised, your voice on mute. Wary, you are conscious of how you communicate your hunger rather than filling up on others. Not long ago, you bravely approached a few self-defeating beliefs of your own. Now you are standing defiantly at their source. From now until the second week of the new year, you'll be steeped in the alchemical work of balancing personal desires and the tension of relating. You're questioning if and how you hold honest to god stability in relationships, professional and romantic. There is no beating around the bush at this time, as it is a fundamental consideration with the prospect of affecting your entire lifestyle.
Gemini
You'd prefer to wander in leisure, dabbling in creative and whimsical pursuits. Have dessert before dinner. For now you're tangled in tedious tasks. You are not defined by this busy work yet you feel emotional about non-emotional things. You're well intentioned and focused but it feels as if you are glittering a turd. Putting lipstick on a toad. Perhaps you are making it harder than it needs to be. You have great ideas about the future, more than you could reasonably explore. Pull back a bit. Far enough to see the terrain and how its patterns intersect. Let some dreams die — there are simply too many to chase. Exchange social diversions for sage interests and wizardry. Analysis paralysis for long distance flight.
Cancer
Summer has tested your emotional strengths and weaknesses, during which irrational fears too easily ruffle your feathers. Self-medicating through alienation and avoidance? There is a sobering quality this autumn in terms of your dreams and realities. This concerns how you appear to the world, and how resources dovetail precisely into that reality. There is opportunity for growth and independence where you once relied on the abundance of others, socially or materially. You have a reservoir of talent within you, available to be reimagined. This reservoir has the ability to be of great service and relief, if you step out of your own way. It may not feel like the perfect solution, but do not squander this opportunity to make the best of what you already have. At home, improve upon what is under your own two feet.
Leo
You're focused on establishing harmony among family and kin. This means tempering secrets, petty or grave, swallowed whole or held within immediate or distant family. Chosen family as well. Looks like something is not being said. It's something profound, one that will only harden with every turning day, pushing someone close further away or sweeping an issue further under the rug. The silent treatment may have been necessary, but soon what has been quiet will decay, ooze and emit a pungent whiff. Your generous heart, with self awareness, can bear delicate situations gracefully and hold the family cosmology together. As the stars hold the sky. If nothing else, mutual understanding is possible as the truth cannot be denied.
Virgo
You're thinking about what you've got to work with, specifically how the talents you have to share, your lifestyle habits and your income are intrinsically linked, affecting your ability to thrive. After a summer of financial butterflies, you're feeling the pull to save, not only money but your energy, for a rainy day. Notice where vital resources leak through empty curiosities and meandering tasks. If you hear a train coming, there is time to get out of the way, do not freeze; relaxing into considered risks may pay off in unexpected ways. Keep a steady focus on the body, aware of foods that feel good in the moment but have no lasting value, quietly costing you. A relationship, too, may demand more than it returns. All indulgences this fall come with a higher interest rate. It is not a great time to rock the boat, financially or physically, but instead find peace of mind in what is already plentiful.
Libra
You're processing the material world. Recently, your relationship to stuff, yours and what you share with others, may be irritatingly undefined, an itch you'll want to scratch this fall. Be aware of codependency within a partnership, or with a venomous client, where banality sugar-coats less savory realities. Or, if you're completely honest with yourself, be aware of your entanglement with other people's resources and the quiet drain on your energy and spirit. Consider trading luxuries for austerity. Austerity has its own merits: a blank page, offering space for restorative beauty, nothing more or less. Improvements around the house may bring no lasting satisfaction, but the creative solutions born of austerity may serve you better than convenience with a glamorous price.
Scorpio
Afloat at sea. Not all who roam are lost; many are found. While stasis has slowed the beat of your heart, you're reaching just beyond the comfort of reason, where faith is never a given but an evolving extension of yourself, expanding and contracting within the coil of experience and time. So it is with the people you love: hold them too close and they blur, and you go teary-eyed, but held at just the right distance, you may see them for what they are, and possibly who they are, with their awkward but charming quirks, unexpressed kinks that shudder, then melt. Know, too, where to draw the line when pleasing everyone leaves little for where it counts. Protect your heart, for it will soon be unarmored.
Sagittarius
With grace and confidence, you realize the blessings of loss this fall. You understand that the safety of home, family, parents and friends can be both fleeting and beautiful. Beliefs about yourself and your formative upbringing unravel and are questioned anew, even though (or perhaps because) you have humbly reached another pinnacle of self-knowledge. You seek a home and family, of blood or choice, in keeping with your generous nature. You long for flexibility in complex social webs, and you float above them, unburdened, because you've released other people's ideas of what is possible for you and what is not. On high, you survey a vista through the opaque eyes of death and the starry eyes of rebirth.
Capricorn
You're inside the hourglass and time is passing like a silent film. A sense of permanence slips away grain by grain, a slow, certain erosion. You seek meaningful connections and untie frivolous ones. Look around the house, too, for memories cluttering the hallways. Ancient images and primal markings offer insight into something greater than this moment and yourself. Sapience held in foundations and in landscapes formed in stone. Time is weird. It purrs like a cat or saps like a parasite. We've invested everything in time, commodified it like bottled water, pissed it away. Natural time is eternal, belonging to neither past nor the future. It whirls around obstacles, floods, evaporates and drifts into clouds, then returns as serene ponds, raging rapids or lapping ancestral waves.
Aquarius
You've entered a labyrinth, its walls climbing roses, fragrant and thorny. The scent is intoxicating, elusive, alluring. Its corridors and cul-de-sacs change orientation frequently as do your perceptions and moods. Be mindful of the tempo of your decisions this fall; outcomes may slide sideways earlier and direct later. Aside from that, you're nostalgic about where you came from and how it relates to who you're becoming. Your origins are not a puzzle to reconstruct. You've cut and rearranged its pieces arbitrarily: distant love affairs, the patina of emotional wear and tear, homes and projects that ran their course. The temptation to revisit or follow a love of practice or passion, far away from home, may weigh on the scales of your heart.
Pisces
You're turning a corner. Surrendering to a pace you can manage the unknowns and accept complicated truths about yourself. Where possible, releasing toil and needless grind. Taking a load off your shoulders. You're decisively putting the balance between health and work in its place. It will require commitment and deliberation, but a sobering inventory of your resources inspires creative approaches, and tending to them becomes a game worth playing. Be astute with your finances; leave nothing to chance. You now see your worth, and how the outer world wedges its contrived demands between you and your own needs. You owe nothing more. You've given enough, and freely.