The Birth Chart of Our Current World Order (and Its Reboot)

The time for creating the world you want is now.

I was watching a random YouTube video (Money & Macro The New World Order, Explained), and this chart (which I looked up halfway through the video, as you do), hit me in the fucking face.

He was talking about the treaty of Westphalia, which I had never heard of, and probably you haven’t either unless you are a history professor—but it is apparently when the current global order started. It’s when Europe decided they had better things to do than fight bloody religious wars, and got serious about sovereign nations having borders and self-determination.

It’s the moment that gave birth to the modern system of nation-states. Now, granted, there were still a lot of nations invading each other, that never stopped. But at least now they were not supposed to. 😆

This is the operating system that’s still running underneath all of geopolitics right now, but is also coming apart at the seams. It’s the basis of the “International Liberal Rules-Based Order” that as Mark Carney noted in his recent speech at Davos was never really fair, but it was still trying to pretend to look fair until Trump showed up and started saying all the quiet parts out loud.

That order was seeded October 24, 1648 at the signing of the Peace Treaty of Westphalia. (Untimed chart, so ignore the houses and angles.)

The opposition with all four of the outer planets AND the nodes marks a massive shift from Sagittarian faith to Gemini rationality.

Westphalia was the end of the Thirty Year’s War, which was one of the most devastating conflicts in European history, killing 8 million people—somewhere in the vicinity of 30% of the population of the Holy Roman Empire at the time. Death was not just from war but from famine and disease resulting from the complete breakdown of order.

Our current world order was born out of blood. It was a decision to finally stop fighting religious wars and move from the emperor/Pope dynastic model toward a system of co-existing sovereign states. It was the beginning of religious pluralism—it’s OK if we believe different things, we don’t have to kill each other.

This was genuinely revolutionary. It was also a trauma response.

The seeds of materialism

Westphalia occurred at the beginning of a steady directional shift toward secularism, which culminated in the Enlightenment project of trying to explain the entire world with science and rationality, and rejecting all other ways of knowing.

The rejection of religion on the grounds that it is irrational to fight over made-up beliefs was a completely rational response to the horrors of war and the abuse of power by the Christian church. But the Enlightenment didn’t just give us the scientific method (great, thanks, love it) — it installed a metaphysical operating system that says the only valid form of knowledge is what can be isolated, measured, and reproduced under controlled conditions. This eliminated the validity of whole swaths of human experience that simply doesn’t work that way.

And I would argue that it created an entirely new category of horror in the long term. Because once nature and other people stop being expressions of the divine and start being resources, there is a permission for exploitation that didn’t exist before, and just became more and more routinized over time. This is how we got colonialism, slavery, all the way up through the industrial revolution and modern capitalism. The entire materialist project treats the cosmos as dead matter to be used rather than a living intelligence to be in relationship with.

Our modern system of resource extraction and intense global inequality relies on a deep disconnection with an essential function of our soul—our ability to recognize the divinity in other people and in the natural world.

Westphalia didn’t solve the problem of humans abusing power—it just shifted the overall program from a Jupiterian kind of abuse (centralized religious authority) to a Mercurial kind (systematized and amoral).

We are at another global crisis point

We all know, and we all feel every day, that humanity simply can’t continue the way we have been. But none of us know what is next.

And right now, the four outermost planets are lining up again, but in a completely different configuration than the 1648 chart.

The exact conjunction of Saturn and Neptune happens Feb 20, but the full Minor Grand Trine will not be complete until April 26.

Shifts this huge don’t take place on one particular day—they roll out over years. I picked May 1, 2026 for the symbolism of May Day / Beltane, and because it’s a few days after Uranus ingresses for the final time into Gemini, completing the pattern.

This chart shows a very different energy than the opposition in 1648. A trine of any kind is about harmony and cooperation between the planets. Whatever is being born right now isn’t coming through rupture and opposition. It’s coming through connection, networking, and collaboration.

This new beginning emerges from what we create together

The sky we are living through is not about a one-way shift like the 1648 chart. It’s not an either-or. It’s about integration.

This change is about three intertwining energies:

- Aries (cardinal fire) — raw newness, individuation, initiation, impulse
- Aquarius (fixed air) — the stranger, the crowd, humanism, technology
- Gemini (mutable air) — communication, curiosity, information exchange

Air and fire are about ideas and action. This is up and out energy, not down and in. It’s energetic, expansive, and volatile.

In this chart, Saturn is in fall in Aries, and conjunct Neptune, the planet that dissolves structure. The planet of limits and borders and hard edges is being deconstructed and reborn.

The undoing of borders

Westphalian order rests on borders, nation-states, sovereignty. But today, anyone under 50 has already spent a significant chunk of their life in a borderless space: the internet.

Many of us feel more connected with our online communities than our physical neighbors. Our most meaningful relationships, our creative collaborations, our economic activity, and our sense of belonging increasingly happens in a space that has no geographic boundaries.

In my last article about the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, I wrote about the possibility that the sky is describing the technological singularity. That is a point where technological change accelerates to the point where predictions of where it is heading become impossible. A week after I published that, the article Something Big is Happening went viral comparing the recent expansion in AI capabilities to Covid in terms of scale.

Technological change is undeniably a huge part of this story. But I also see in this chart a reckoning with the story we tell about reality.

Will this restore balance to the force?

The Westphalian order and the Enlightenment amputated our spiritual intelligence as a species in response to the trauma of religious violence. That amputation led to everything from the eradication of smallpox to the iPhone, but also the slave trade, the Holocaust, nuclear bombs, and climate collapse.

I would love to see in this chart the resolution of the materialist split: a re-integration of the material and the transcendent. Not backward toward religious domination, but forwards toward a paradigm that restores what we have lost and validates what has been dismissed.

I want the transcendent impulse of Neptune to be supported and grounded in collective compassion, imagination, and art—not projected into conspiracy theories or drowned in gambling and fentanyl addiction. Humans are not meant to live without the spiritual function. It is as essential to being human as language.

But I’ll be honest, all this fire and air doesn’t really scream, “restoring balance”—we are already pretty tipped toward air/fire (Yang) over earth/water (Yin) and this is just a whole lot more of that. This chart screams ideas and action and speed. And later in the year when Jupiter is in Leo opposing Pluto, it will be about power struggle and ego, not embodiment and feeling.

What I can say is the “New World Order” will be a lot messier and more surreal, and we will be living through a reality-melting period of time before it stabilizes.

But given that Aries is fundamentally about individuation and taking action toward what you want, and we are moving toward a decentralized Pluto-in-Aquarius world—I think we should look at this as an opportunity to create the world we want to live in. Honestly, Aries doesn’t wait for the collective to get its shit together. Aries says “I'm going” and then other people either come along or they don’t.

And that is how new paradigms actually become real—through our actions and our willingness to step into something new, regardless of whether other people are behind us. Any massive crisis/change point is full of opportunities to give birth to new things, if you can manage your nervous system while going through it. 😵‍💫

This is the time to say:

I'm going to create the world I want to live in, and whoever resonates with that can build it with me.

Our personal ideal world might not become the overarching paradigm everyone is living under, but maybe that era is over anyway—what the internet has shown us if nothing else is how wildly diverse the human ideal is. People want to live all kind of ways, and that’s OK. As long as we don’t end up in a global authoritarian system (knock on wood), we have the tools at our fingertips now to create things that meet our personal definition of awesome.

We don’t have to wait for the collective paradigm to shift before we start living the way we want. We can already live as though the cosmos is alive and intelligent and has our backs if we listen to it, honor it, and live as an expression of it. Aries does not need permission—it creates because that is its nature.

The old operating system is being decommissioned regardless, and what we get as souls for being here for this massive shift is the opportunity to be part of creating what is next.

We chose to be here for this. It’s up to each of us to make the most of it.

So think about what you want the world to be—and just start creating it.

Fortune favors the bold—especially right now.