Exclusively for Vogue Scandinavia's Society members, astrologer Clarisse Monahan of Venus in Retrograde charts each month's most powerful cosmic shifts, breaking down exactly how to understand, navigate and benefit from them
Imagine it's the year 432 AD. You're somewhere in Gaul, tending the fields. You look up to the sky to see if it's noon, so you might finally eat some bread before many more hours of crushing labour. But the Sun isn't there…
Today, we understand the astronomy of solar eclipses, like the one occurring on August 12, 2026, which will sweep across Greenland, Iceland, northern Spain, and parts of Russia, dipping parts of Europe into midday darkness, the first total solar eclipse visible from mainland Europe since 1999, with Spain offering one of the best vantage points anywhere in the world. Technically, it's just that the Moon, near one of the lunar nodes, has passed between the Earth and the Sun, temporarily blocking its light.
Yet, despite this technical knowledge, eclipses still carry an uncanny quality, akin to the gaze of portraits on castle walls following us down corridors. Astrologers have long viewed them as moments when the ordinary rhythm of life goes slightly glitch-core. A hidden truth or scandal might surface. A long-simmering situation might boil over into confrontation. A story you tell about your identity might get severely edited. Because eclipses deal with the Sun (ego) and Moon (emotion), they tend to cause shifts in self-understanding.