Content note: this post discusses specific incidents of violence against women, including intimate partner homicide. Take care of yourself, and step away if you need to.
Three weeks before the headlines started, I pulled up the new moon chart for April 17, 2026, and sat back in my chair with tears welling up. I knew the month was going to be brutal for women. Then the names started arriving: Dr. Serena Fairfax. Shenika Pew. Devonte Curtis.
I made a video walking through that chart because a version of this configuration will return someday, and when it does, I want you to be able to recognize it. This post covers the same ground in writing.
The stories
Dr. Serena Fairfax, a 47-year-old dentist in Fairfax County, Virginia, was mid-divorce from her husband Justin, the state’s former lieutenant governor. She had documented his financial abuse in court filings. Three days before his court hearing, he shot her, then himself, while their children were home.
In Louisiana, Shenika Pew was separating from her husband, Shamar Elkins. He shot Christina Snow, the mother of three of his children, in the face at her home, then drove to Shenika’s home, shot her, and killed eight children. Shenika’s sister and niece survived by jumping from the roof. Police killed Elkins. At the time I recorded the video, both women were still fighting for their lives.
Both cases fit a pattern researchers have documented for years: women are most likely to be killed by their partners in the two months right after they try to leave.
And then Devonte Curtis, a 31-year-old Black trans woman in Chicago, was bludgeoned to death in her sleep by a boyfriend who had literally googled how to do it, then stole her money, phone, and car.
There are too many stories like these. The question I want to answer is what the sky was doing that made this particular month different.
Why a new moon chart matters
A new moon marks the start of an astrological month. The Sun and Moon meet at the same point in the sky, the cycle resets, and whatever configuration exists at that moment effectively gets frozen in place for the next 28½ days. When a new moon lands amid difficult configurations, existing tensions get amplified for the whole lunar cycle.
This chart had five of them stacked on top of each other. I’ll take them one at a time. (A note before we start: several of the planets below, like Admetos, Zeus, Cupido, and Vulcanus, are Transneptunian planets used in Uranian astrology. If those names are new to you, I introduced the whole cast here.)
1. The ascendant: locked in at 25° Taurus
The ascendant describes the environment we’re stepping into, and Taurus is the zodiac’s immovable object. Nobody’s leaving. Nobody’s budging. That stubbornness matters in a month defined by women trying to leave and men refusing to let them.
This specific degree also carries tarot correspondences to the Seven of Pentacles and the King of Swords. The Seven of Pentacles is the “lord of success unfulfilled”: hard work that yields disappointment, with financial struggle attached. The King of Swords is ruthless, cutting decisiveness that doesn’t factor anyone’s humanity into its choices. Golden Dawn authors Chic and Sandra Tabatha Cicero describe him as “deceitful, tyrannical, and crafty,” a violent, fiery power of movement, the furious storm and the eye of the hurricane.
And honestly, that’s the thing about these crimes. They don’t actually have anything to do with love. If they loved you, they’d have gotten some act-right so you could have stayed.
Taurus is ruled by Venus, and in a mundane chart (one cast for a country rather than a person), Venus governs women’s issues, the birth rate, and the social dynamics around marriage and children. So the chart’s ruler put women’s lives at the center of the month before we even look at an aspect.
2. Venus, Uranus, and Admetos: love ends suddenly and coldly
The first major configuration is a conjunction of Venus, Uranus, and Admetos, and each pairing inside it tells part of the story.
Venus with Admetos signifies repressed affection, coldness in love, the end of love, and in the traditional Uranian literature, the death of a female. Uranus with Admetos brings cracking, shocks, breaking off, convulsions, sudden separation, and murder. Synthesize the three and you get a violent, sudden conclusion to love, potentially the tragic death of a woman through violent means.
3. Sun, Moon, Chiron, and Zeus in the 12th house: the wounded marriage and the weapon
Remember that a new moon is the Sun and Moon meeting, and in astrology that combination can represent the husband and wife. It’s a marriage signature.
This marriage signature sat with Chiron, the wound: pain, damage, the victim and the victimizer. All of it in the 12th house, the place of hidden struggles, betrayal, and unseen forces, where things fall apart in ways nobody notices until it’s over. And Zeus, the Transneptunian planet of controlled force, weaponry, and compulsive behavior, was tied in.
Picture it plainly: husband and wife bound together through a shared wound, sitting in the house of betrayal, with a weapon in the room. Something gets discharged.
4. Mercury, Mars, Saturn, and Neptune: forced endings, theft, and deceit
Four planets in conjunction here, and the pairings compound. Mars with Saturn signifies endings, forced separation, funerals. Add Mercury and you get heated conversations, harsh words, violent thoughts, and troubling news about separation and death. Add Neptune, whose meetings with Saturn bring loss, deception, fraud, and prolonged hardship, and the whole stack reads as forced separations plus death plus theft plus deceit.
That’s not abstract. Devonte Curtis’s boyfriend allegedly killed her and then stole her phone and car. And Serena Fairfax’s court filings described a husband who had defaulted on nearly $30,000 in credit card debt, skipped his share of the children’s school fees, and left her carrying the household while he spent extravagantly. The marriage she was trying to leave had already become a form of theft.
5. Juno, Pluto, and Vulcanus on the midheaven: obsession, amplified
In Uranian astrology, the midheaven symbolizes the moment itself, and during a new moon that moment is crystallized for the month ahead. Juno (the marriage asteroid) sat conjunct Pluto right there. Together they describe someone deeply committed to partnership to the point of obsession, with undercurrents of intense sexuality and infidelity. In its heaviest expression, this combination can mean death through marriage.
Vulcanus, the Transneptunian planet of overwhelming force, opposed the pair and amplified everything it touched. Obsession, power struggles, the darkest side of relationships, turned up to maximum volume and stamped on the month. (The infidelity undercurrent played out publicly too. That was the same stretch when the Klay Thompson and Megan Thee Stallion cheating story broke. I can’t with him.)
There was one more signature: Pallas, the asteroid of strategy and calculation, connected to Zeus (weaponry, compulsive force) and Cupido, the Transneptunian planet of family. Calculated, weaponized aggression inside families. Premeditated violence at home. That’s the trend the chart pointed to, and the month delivered it.
What to do with this
Here’s the sobering truth: spousal homicide happens every day, and most of the time it’s personal. You’ll find versions of these same alignments triggering an individual chart, the victim’s or the perpetrator’s, in cases that never make the news. What made this month different is that a single collective chart tied several of these stories together at once and forced the nation to look.
So the takeaway is simple. The next time a wave of these stories hits the news and something feels off, pull up the chart. The sky was telling us. It usually is.
If you’d rather watch me walk through the actual chart wheel piece by piece, the full video is here. And if you want to understand how these configurations touch your own chart, book a consultation.
For those we’ve already lost, and the ones still fighting.
