Happy New Year, one and all.
January 2026 begins with Mercury, our planet of plans and words, the mind and the mouth, moving into the paternal dirt of Capricorn.
This transit creates an ideal climate for resolutions, commitments and rock steady strategy.
Braid your will, your words and you’re bound for glory.
On January 3, we welcome the first full moon of 2026, the Full Wolf Moon in Cancer. This day of days has the feel of both culmination and homecoming.
How do you want to feel, where do you want to live and what do you want rid of in the year to come? Sit in a bathtub full of salt or stand in moving water until you sweat out an answer.
Venus, our planet of wanting and Mars of planet of doing, will also spend the first few weeks of the month in industrious, boot-strap, get-it-done and Capricorn. This is excellent energy to embark on the new year with, as Capricorn is about building and these transits are in service of whatever architecture you’re looking to pour the wet concrete of hope into.
The sky goes dark on January 18 when the New Moon in Capricorn whispers, “This is your time.” Puff up your shoulder pads as opportunities to advance are on the rise alongside this moon.
A gentle reminder: asking for what you need is not a negotiation.
On January 20, we leave the Daddy Warbucks paydirt of Capricorn for the professionally weird, wannabe utopian part-time nihilist climes of Aquarius, a shift akin to lacing the watercooler at the Pentagon with LSD.
Lastly, on the 26, Neptune, our planet of dreams and schemes, creativity and delusions, moves back into Aries for the long haul, IE, the next thirteen years.
Neptune in Aries is about the new and the inspired; it provokes and provides, baiting the bold b–ch within so that we might believe in and actively move toward our true purpose. This transit is also associated with rebellion and the literal or metaphorical burning of power structures.
With all of this cardinal energy afoot, January is a hotbed for hopping to it.
Here’s hoping you march with your better angels toward a better becoming.
Read on for your January 2026 horoscopes. Read for your sun and rising sign.
Hello, Aries! The New Year begins with a bundle of planets kicking around in your tenth house of legacy; what are you building that is built to outlast you?
With Mars, your ruling planet, gritting its teeth and grinding its gears in industrious Capricorn, now is the hour for strategic, sustainable changes.
The denizens of Okinawa, Japan, which boasts more centenarians than anywhere else on earth, credit their longevity to ikigai.
Japanese for “reason to live,” ikigai is the art of finding true purpose through the combined forces of passion, profession, and presence.
How can you get yourself some?
Create a Venn diagram that identifies what you love, what your skills are, what the world at large needs, and what you can be paid for.
Ikigai is the intersection and overlap of these cardinal points.
The stars have never been more supportive of a radical restructuring built on the purity of this purpose.
Happy New Year, Taurus!
The year’s kickoff in Capricorn highlights your ninth house of expansion, horizons, philosophy, third eyes and getting high.
I recently read an interview with director Ryan Coogler, in which he was asked whether he has a vision for his future after completing the third installment of the Black Panther trilogy.
“The image I get is a green meadow with Bay Area fog on it, and it’s dawn. That’s what I see after that movie, because it feels like open land, open opportunity,” he answered.
I hope you will spend the first weeks of this new year contemplating what your own meadow of embarkation looks like: the fresh dirt, the clean slate, the widening dawn, everything waiting to begin.
Hello, Gemini!
I recently learned that in Senegal, when someone dies, they say, “their library has burned,” as the collected volumes of someone’s lived experience are lost to us when they are.
As a cluster of cosmic energy moves through your eighth house of death and other people’s resources, I bring you this metaphor as a reminder to share your own private library before the flames of the future lick it clean and to commit to memory and recite the stories of your ancestors so that the pyre becomes not an ending but a page turning.
Happy New Year to you, Cancer!
This month, the concentration of Capricorn energy is hitting your seventh house of trusted partnerships.
I recently spent some time with my sage sister, who asked me to consider the following question:
“If you weren’t with your partner, would you be looking for them?”
I think the query stands whether the partner in question is romantic, platonic, or professional. If you didn’t have them, would you be trying to find their archetype in the wilderness?
If the answer is yes, stay the course; if the answer is no, it may be time to break the bondage of your bond.
Hello, Leo!
The sun, Mercury, Venus, and Mars in the sign of the sea goat activate your sixth house of daily ritual and the altar of the body.
In his poem Anodyne, Yusef Komunyakaa writes:
I love this body
made to weather the storm
in the brain, raised
out of the deep smell
of fish & water hyacinth,
out of rapture & the first
regret. I love my big hands.
I love it clear down to the soft
quick motor of each breath
To welcome the new year, I urge you to pay similar homage to the vessel that will sail and see you through it. Write a tribute to your humble, holy form, the marrow and the motor, the midwife of all that has been and will be.
Hello, Virgo! The sun, Venus, and Mars in cardinal Capricorn are turning and burning in your fifth house of pleasure and play.
In a recent interview, fellow earth sign and absolute luminary John Cameron Mitchell shared, “The best antidepressant is making things.”
The end of one year and the onset of another can feel more like an undertow than a blank canvas, but I encourage you to heed Mitchell’s advice and get to furious, fruitious making.
Be it bread, baskets, love, poems, paintings, or eggshell sculptures, use your hands to unburden your mind.
Hello and happy New Year to you, Libra!
The dense amount of Capricorn energy this month comes knocking slow and heavy against the broken picket fence of your fourth house of foundation, origins and home.
A therapist once told me that we teach people how to treat us. I agree with him but I think we get the playbook for what we are willing to accept or refuse from the bumbling gods that raise us.
In an effort to have a 2026 that feels like a departure from all the years that came before, I recommend returning to your raising, and the fraught contracts for love that were forged there.
It is never too late to set new terms.
American writer Denis Johnson dedicated his third book of poetry, “to the people I have lied to.”
As Capricorn season shifts the focus to your third house of communication and exchange, Scorpio, I encourage you to make a list of everyone you have ever lied to in an effort to see a pattern in yourself.
What do these people and these untruths have in common? What do these lies tell you about who you are and what you hide?
And perhaps, in the spirit of renewal, could the last lie you told be the last lie you tell?
Hello, Sagittarius!
The move from the merry-making ass-less chaps energy of Sag season into the ironed jeans of Capricorn can be a bit of a comedown, but if you play your cards right, you can channel it into a kind of come-up.
The cluster of Cap energy this month hits your second house of wealth and worth, material goods we build with and how we build our self-concept.
English polymath John Ruskin espoused, “We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well; then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.”
As you work with the mortar of the month ahead, I ask you to consider how the requirements for buildings and for being are one in the same.
Hello, Capricorn!
This year begins with the sun, Venus, Mars, and Mercury all in cahoots in your sign.
I recently read Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” where he reminds us, “That’s the wonderful thing about man, he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing.”
As you enjoy the onset of a new year and the return of the sun to your sign, I hope you, too, will commit to your own rebirth and the divine drudgery of what is worth doing.
Ahoy, Aquarius!
The New Year begins for you with an activation of your twelfth house of endings, enemies, and the subconscious mind, the shanty of shadows, if you will.
Robert Bly writes, “The person who has eaten his shadows spreads calmness and shows more grief than anger. If the ancients were right, then darkness contains intelligence and nourishment and even information, then the person who has eaten some of his or her shadow is more energetic as well as more intelligent.”
I beg you to get fat on your shadows this month, water bearer, to crack yourself open to the acuity of sweetness and suffering and to skip out of that shanty having been delivered by what you’ve devoured.
Hello, Pisces!
The New Year brings renewed energy to your eleventh house of community, gathering, and wishes.
The poet Rand Howells wrote, “If I could have but one wish granted, it would be to live in a universe like this one at a time like the present with friends like the ones I have now and be myself.”
As the resident dreamer and disassociater of the zodiac, I hope the year ahead makes you feel wildly and singularly grateful to be alive in this fraught time, dotted with the constellations of such company.
Astrologer Reda Wigle researches and irreverently reports on planetary configurations and their effect on each zodiac sign. Her horoscopes integrate history, poetry, pop culture, and personal experience. To book a reading, visit her website.
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