AT THE TURNING: Astrology and Horoscopes for the Summer Solstice and beyond - June and July 2026
Welcome to June, kindreds, and welcome to a new approach to these forecasts which I feel/hope brings us more into alignment with the magic of all that is.
Until now I have been writing monthly forecasts, which in a way I just kind of fell into, as it was what I saw other astrologers doing and what I was used to reading myself. But while that has served well enough, calendar months are really just administrative units. They belong to that culture of measurement and control that I am trying to find my way out of.
So we're shifting (well, I am shifting - and I hope you will come with me). From now on these forecasts will follow the solar year - the eight spokes of the wheel of the year, from solstice to equinox to cross-quarter day and back again. Time, like space, has quality as well as quantity. The solar cycle is one of the oldest and most common ways humans have oriented to that quality, the waxing and waning of light, the turning of the seasons, the rhythm beneath the rhythm. I am tuning into that SunWise frequency.
I have had a love/dislike relationship with the neopagan wheel of the year for a long time, (and for a few overlapping reasons, which perhaps I will write another post or video about in future). Fundamentally, I love that it acknowledges that as we move around the sun the quality and shape of the energy changes, but what I don't like is how this wheel can/ has become its own kind of dogma. The names for the spokes too are awkward - Litha, Imbolc, Ostara, Samhain - a mix of genuinely ancient and relatively recently invented, and there is plenty of misinformation circulating about all of them. I'm not interested in adding to that. And yet I keep coming back to the overall structure of that wheel because what I am interested in is the quality of the time itself, the lived felt sense of where we are in the solar cycle, which is real and available to all of us regardless of what we call it.
I also recognise that as a person living in Wales (UK) the wheel makes sense to me because it is rooted in the seasonal experience of the British Isles and Northern Europe. It reflects my sky, my turning year. But if you are rooted somewhere else - a different hemisphere, a different climate, a different relationship with the land - your experience of these qualities may (probably will) look and feel different. So please pay attention to that, and to the land where you are rooted, let that be your primary source of knowing. These forecasts are intended as a supplement to that wisdom, not to undermine it.
This first forecast in our new SunWise rhythm is a bumper edition.
I did not want anyone who relies on the monthly forecasts to be disappointed. So, rather than start at the solstice itself, I have also included the astrology for the first three weeks of June too - so two full months. Moving forward these will be a little shorter as they align with the 8 spokes of the wheel of the year.
You'll notice I don't include a full list of transits here. I used to in the monthly forecasts, but I feel like a list of dates and aspects is a bit too granular and not that helpful in this more thematic forecast. I am focusing on the energetics of what the sky is showing us, and that's what you'll find here. If you want the granular weekly detail - I get it, I like that too - I offer that in Moonday Magic Mail. A weekly email which includes the transits for the week, with interpretation and suggestions for using the energy. You can find out more and sign up here.
We are approaching the Summer Solstice, the moment of maximum light in the Northern Hemisphere, the "full moon" of the solar year. The lunar cycle moves us from new moon (dark, potential, inward) through to full moon (bright, ripe, fully expressed) and back again over a month. The solar year moves us through that same arc over a year. The Solstice is the peak. It is the moment of fullest individualised power and expression, and also the moment when the tide begins, imperceptibly at first, to turn back towards the dark. This forecast includes two movements, two qualities of time, two themes.
If you want journal printables inspired by the astrology of this summer solstice season you can find that here.
THE MAJOR THEMES FOR JUNE/JULY (Litha in the neopagan wheel of the year)
What follows are the two major themes emerging through the astrology of this period of time. As you read through them, pay attention to what comes up for you. We have so much more wisdom within us than we often believe to be so. Trust what calls to you.
The themes run in sequence this time, rather than parallel. I invite you to notice how each one lands as you move through them. The horoscopes at the end offer a more personal angle, and guidance.
THEME ONE: Tending June 1st — 21st
May asked us to open our hands and receive, and June's first movement (the first three weeks roughly) asks us to actually notice what landed there.
The sky in early June is, unusually generous (particularly in recent years). On the 9th, Venus and Jupiter meet in Cancer, a conjunction that only happens once a year, and in Cancer specifically brings warmth, emotional abundance, and a genuine sense of coming home to something. This is a transit for softening, for letting good things in, for noticing what is already here and finding it enough. Maybe more than enough.
Mercury moves through Cancer for much of this period too, lending our thinking a more feeling-toned, inward quality. We may find ourselves less interested in information gathering and more interested in meaning-making. Less interested in what is happening and more interested in how it feels. This is not a malfunction. It is an invitation to think with the body for a while.
Running underneath all of this, a steady/ serious hand on the shoulder, is Saturn in Aries. It makes its presence felt in several moments through early June, grounding the abundance, asking us to be real about what we are actually building and why. The generosity of this period is genuine, but it is not an invitation to drift or get carried away. Tending is deliberate work. The gardener does not just admire the conditions. She gets her hands in the soil. She creates the conditions.
And then, on June 19th, Chiron — the wounded healer — leaves Aries, where it has been since 2018, and enters Taurus. For nearly eight years Chiron in Aries has been working on the wound of selfhood. The right to exist. The right to take up space. The courage to begin. That chapter is now completing. Chiron in Taurus begins a new conversation. A conversation about the body, about resources, about what it means to feel genuinely safe in physical form. About worth that is not performed or proven but inhabited.
This shift happens two days before the Solstice, and it colours everything. The Taurus that Chiron is entering has also, until very recently, been home to Uranus - disrupted, electrified, destabilised for years. Uranus has now moved on into Gemini, and Taurus is settling back into itself. Slower. More sensory. More grounded. Chiron enters into that settling like a healer arriving in a community that has experienced an earthquake.
Tending, then, is the theme for these three weeks. But not as a gentle or passive thing. It means assessing the right and necessary response of where we are. We have been through a great deal. The conditions are currently favourable. This is the moment to consolidate, to integrate, to let what has been learned become lived. Not to push toward the next thing, but to be genuinely present for this one.
Micropractice: The Daily Tending Question
Once a day, whenever you can, pause and ask yourself a single question:
What needs my attention today (not my effort)?
Effort is directed outward, toward outcomes. Attention is a quality of presence. It says I see you, I am here. A relationship, a creative project, your own body, a feeling that keeps surfacing. What is asking to be seen and tended?
THEME TWO: Flow June 21st — late July
At 9:24 (BST) on the morning of June 21st, the sun crosses into Cancer and the Solstice arrives. Within the hour it makes its first aspect and it is a gentle, harmonious contact with Chiron, newly settled in Taurus. Peak light, and the first thing it touches is the wounded healer finding new ground. There is something so hopeful to me in that image. Whatever we have been integrating, whatever has been revealed and tended, the light now reaches it.
From the Solstice onward the quality of the sky shifts perceptibly. Jupiter, which has been generous and expansive in Cancer since the beginning of the year - nourishing, emotional, oriented toward home and belonging - moves into Leo on June 30th. The energy is more outward-facing and expressive. Leo wants to be seen, wants to create, wants to bring what has been privately tended into the light. There is an invitation here, if we can feel it: what has been quietly growing in us through this first movement, this season of tending? What is ready, now, to be expressed?
Mercury stations retrograde on June 29th at 16 degrees Cancer, and will move backwards through those tender Cancerian waters until July 23rd. We know Mercury retrograde as a time to slow down, to review, to revisit. In Cancer specifically, it has a particular quality. Feelings that have been circling want to move now. Not just to be analysed or managed (mercury can veer into that), but to actually flow. Tears, conversations, creative expression, time near water. The body knows how to process what the mind keeps trying to organise. This is a month to trust that.
And then there is July 4th.
Mars meets Uranus in Gemini, and the air crackles. This is one of the most electrically charged transits of the year. It is fast, unpredictable, potentially disruptive. In Gemini it moves through communication, information, ideas, the nervous system itself. We may feel it as restlessness, as sudden energy, as the urge to move or speak or act on instinct. The world around us may feel louder, faster, more volatile. There are likely to be significant events in the collective at this time, this transit has historical associations with sudden conflict and upheaval, and it would be naive to ignore that.
Intense energy needs somewhere to go/ be directed.
Animals who live with genuine threat, such as being hunted, do not stay locked in the freeze of it after the event. They feel it fully, they move, they discharge, they return to grazing. They do not catastrophise between threats. There is wisdom in that. It's not bypassing the intensity, but metabolising it. Letting it move through us.
July is also, in many (Northern Hemisphere) places, festival season. Midsummer gatherings, long evenings, the particular aliveness of high summer. That is not incidental. The body knows how to use celebration as discharge, how to use dancing and singing and being in community as a way of moving energy through. Let it. It is not escapism, it is physiology.
The deeper support for all of this metabolising is elemental. While the air and fire crackle above, we have Chiron quietly tending in Taurus - the body, the earth, the slow and sensory. Mercury retrograde in Cancer - the feelings, the water, the inward turn. Earth and water as the regulators for a largely fire-and-air moment. The antidote to overwhelm is not more thinking. It is bare feet on ground. It is cold water. It is the slow meal, the early night, the regular journal practice.
Neptune stations retrograde on July 7th, Saturn on July 26th, both in Aries, both turning inward. The great generational backdrop of this year is becoming more interior, more reflective, with both Neptune and Pluto retrograde. And on July 27th the nodal axis shifts from Pisces/Virgo into Aquarius/Leo, opening a new eighteen-month chapter in the collective story. A chapter that asks about the relationship between the individual and the group, the creative self and the community it belongs to. The Full Moon in Aquarius on July 29th, opposite the Sun and Jupiter in Leo, is the first lunation of that new chapter. Something is beginning. The last few days of this period seem likely to be illuminating.
Flow, then, is not about ease. It is not the absence of intensity. It is what happens when we stop trying to dam the river and let it find its own course. Feel what is here. Move the body. Return to ground. Trust that the water knows where it is going.
Micropractice: The Daily Discharge
Once a day, find one small way to move something through your body.
This might be a walk where you stay with what you're feeling rather than thinking. A few minutes of shaking or stretching. Writing in your journal (without editing yourself). Crying, if it's there. Singing in the car or the shower. Sitting near a body of water and letting it do its thing.
The question is not how do I manage this? But, where does this need to go?
THIS SEASON'S RITUAL: Making Sun Water
This Solstice is great for making sun water.
Find a clean glass or jar (not plastic as it will be in the sun), fill it with fresh water and place it somewhere the full light of the sun will fall on it. Leave it for as long as the sun is up. The longest day. Let the water infuse with the light at its peak.
This particular Solstice water carries something extra. The sun's first act on the morning of June 21st is to reach Chiron, newly arrived in Taurus. This is the wounded healer settling into the sign of the body, of earth, of worth that doesn't have to be earned. The light that charges your water on this day holds that medicine. It is water for the body's knowing. For the slow, sensory, grounded self that has perhaps been shaken and is now, finally, finding steadier ground.
- Keep your sun water somewhere intentional (n altar, a windowsill, beside your bed, bathroom cabinet) and use it as feels right over the coming weeks. Some ways you might work with it:
- Wash your hands with it at moments of transition, such as before creative work, before a difficult conversation, at the end of a hard day. Let the water mark the threshold between one state and the next.
- Wash your face with it when feelings are circling and won't settle, when Mercury retrograde has you tangled in your own thinking and you need to remember that you are a body, not just a mind.
- Wash your feet with it to come back to earth, to remember the actual ground beneath you. Particularly good in the more volatile moments of July, when the air and fire are crackling and we need something slow and cool.
- If your water source and vessel are safe for drinking, you might also take a small sip with intention at a moment when you want to feel the fullness of what this season is offering. Peak light, Chiron's new medicine, taken internally. (The Cancer new moon on the 14th is an ideal time for this).
Horoscopes for June and July 2026
(Read for your rising sign, or your sun sign, or moon sign, if you don't know your rising).
Aries
The sky this season is calling you inward, toward home, roots, and the quieter work of tending your inner life, even as the world outside continues to ask for your presence, your output, your visibility. There may be particular pressure around your work and public life, and around the expectations of your wider community. Both are real demands, and they are not going away. But the most nourishing thing you can do right now is trust that what you tend privately is the foundation for everything public. The conditions at home and in your inner world are where the real work is available this season. That may not look like progress from the outside, but it is where the deep change is happening.
Taurus
Something is shifting at a fundamental level for you this season - in your sense of self, how you're seen in the world, revealing what you've been quietly outgrowing over recent years. This kind of change can feel uncomfortable in a sign that prefers to build slowly and keep what works. But the good news is that the pressure and speed of recent years is easing, and this transformation is increasingly yours to shape. You don't have to have it all figured out. Move at the pace that feels right for your body, stay curious about what is emerging, and trust yourself enough to take the next steps as they reveal themselves.
Gemini
This is one of the most electrically alive seasons you've had in a while. The energy is moving fast, new things sparking, a sense of real momentum in who you are and how you're showing up in the world. Let yourself enjoy that. But running alongside all of that aliveness is a quieter current, one that is asking for feeling rather than thinking, for revisiting rather than rushing forward. Both tracks are real and both deserve your attention. The invitation this season is not to choose between them but to stay conscious of which one you're on, and to switch deliberately when your nervous system tells you it's time. The slower current is where some genuinely nourishing healing is available, if you remember to come back to it.
Cancer
This may feel like a season of disintegration, of things dissolving that you thought were solid, or of not quite knowing who you are or what you're building anymore. That is real, and it is hard. You are in between forms now, like the caterpillar that has to become completely undone before it can emerge as something different. What feels like falling apart is transformation doing its deepest work. You are not losing yourself, you are shape-shifting into a new version of you. The most important thing you can do right now is resist the urge to force that new shape before it's ready. Be genuinely gentle with yourself, take your time, and trust the process of metamorphosis.
Leo
You may have been showing up in ways that others expect of you for a long time now, but somewhere beneath the surface something inside you has changed, and it no longer feels good or true to keep showing up that way. The version of you that knows how to be seen, how to hold the room, how to meet the expectations, that version is real, but it may be starting to feel more like a costume than your actual self. This season is asking you to experiment with something more authentic, and your closest one to one relationships are the place to try that first, where the stakes feel lower and genuine connection comes more easily. There is a quiet gathering of inner resource happening before a bigger outward moment arrives. Trust that preparation. The most important thing right now is not to stay fixed in a shape that no longer fits.
Virgo
Your routines and systems (yes, sorry, very cliché Virgo - but this is what's up) have served you well, but some of them may have become more rigid than useful in recent times. This is a season for assessment of how you are working and living day to day, not necessarily overhauling everything at once, but noticing where your structures are genuinely supporting you and where they have become constraints. Some of what felt efficient once may now just feel like going through the motions. There is also an invitation to look at the beliefs underneath the routines. Sometimes what keeps a rigid system in place is a rigid assumption about how things have to be done. A little reinvention of the everyday goes a long way this season, and there is more joy and creative energy available to you than your current setup may be allowing.
Libra
There may be a quietly unsettling realisation arriving this season, that some of what you have been working toward, or organising your life around, is not actually what you want anymore. That is uncomfortable, particularly for a sign that invests so much in getting things right. But it is also an invitation to realign with something more genuine. Your relationships are shifting now too, but rather than trying to restore the previous clarity, there is more to be gained from staying curious about what is actually emerging. Joy, play, and doing things purely for the sake of how they feel are important medicine right now. So is expanding your horizons, perhaps through travel, learning, or spiritual growth. It's a moment to allow yourself to think differently about what a good life actually looks like for you.
Scorpio
You likely have been feeling the pressure building for a while now, and this season is when the dam finally breaks. Rather than dreading that, you probably will find yourself almost welcoming it. This is your territory, and the intensity of this period is the kind that actually moves things rather than just disturbing the surface. What has felt stuck or stagnant in your deeper life, in shared resources, old entanglements, the things that have been sitting unresolved, is ready to be cleared. Expect that clearing to travel into your home life and ancestral patterns too. Old inherited ways of doing things that have perhaps been running quietly in the background are also up for examination. It is a lot, but you are built for exactly this kind of depth work. What becomes available on the other side, particularly in your closest relationships, is worth the disruption.
Sagittarius
Your instinct is mostly oriented toward the bigger picture, but this season the learning is in the details. Your closest relationships may be feeling electric and unpredictable, and the knock on effects of that are landing in practical territory too, in shared resources, finances, and what you are actually building with others. Rather than zooming out or reaching for the overview, there is real value in slowing down and attending carefully to what is actually here. This season is supporting exactly that kind of close, feeling-toned attention if you can work with it. The reward for that detailed work is genuinely vast. Through attending to the specifics, a bigger and more vivid picture emerges, and your sense of who you are and what you are capable of has real room to expand.
Capricorn
You are one of the great builders of the zodiac, most comfortable when you can see where things are going and trust the structures that are getting you there. But this season several of those structures could be feeling less solid than usual, and the outcomes you have been working toward may be shifting in ways that are hard to predict or manage. The invitation here is not to grip tighter but to redirect your considerable energy toward something different: creating the conditions for creative joy and genuine thriving, rather than managing toward a specific result. Tending your relationship with joy and creative expression is not a distraction from building. For this particular season it is the building.
Aquarius
You understand yourself partly through your interactions with others, and right now those interactions may feel foggy or misaligned. Beneath that, there may also be a sense of not quite recognising yourself, of the familiar structures of your daily life and the ways you usually make sense of things feeling unreliable or hollow. This can feel disorienting. Who you are is shifting now, and the new version of you is still finding its shape. Rather than trying to fix or force clarity, this is a season for gentle experimentation. You can test out some new routines, new small practices, more rest than usual. Try things just to see how they feel. Clarity will come, so you may as well have fun experimenting in the meantime.
Pisces
The deeper structures of your life are being upgraded right now, from the foundations of your home and private world to your relationship with what you value and what you feel you deserve. This can feel unsettling, particularly when the disruption is happening at such a fundamental level. But of all the signs, you have perhaps the greatest natural capacity to flow with what lies beneath the surface, to trust what cannot yet be seen or named. This is a season to lean into that gift. Move with what is changing rather than trying to hold the previous shape in place. There is genuine joy and creative aliveness available to you in the middle of all of this, if you can trust yourself enough to reach for it.
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