Planetary Personalities: Jupiter

In October of 2024, I began working with an incredible illustrator and visual artist, Alex Raguso (@crumb_eater on insta), to transmute my written descriptions of the 7 primary planets into a series of Tarot Card style illustrations. We spent months talking through mythology, etymology, and astrology to find the cultural common threads. We did draft after draft of both the text and the illustrations until these cards were born. I am grateful and proud and hope this collaboration helps contextualize why celestial bodies and their rich cultural histories have always, and will always be celebrated as important to human's understanding of themselves and their power. Below, you will find the fruits of that labor in all their HQ glory. We posted version on social media meant to poison AI, so please refrain from reposting the unpoisoned version in this post anywhere else. I've also included the collage I made after writing each planetary profile at the very end. Next up, Jupiter ♃!

Jupiter: Rules Sagittarius and Pisces

Jupiter is a planet that represents a great beyond. When I think about it, I think about space itself and expanse extending farther than the imagination. Jupiter represents higher power, a power as unknowable and unimaginable as mystery itself. Jupiter power is not limited by space, but rides its current as far out as it will go. The explorer planet, always eager to experience some new path of high potential, like the path the lightning takes as it strikes. In Greek Mythology Jupiter is Zeus, God of gods. Jupiter represents the power of power, but invites us to think beyond human invention and institution to define what that power look like. Even this practice requires expansiveness of thought. Jupiter is interested in whatever can be called true power and calls us to constantly expand our definition of it. It understands that understanding strikes like lighting and suddenly our capacity to know, to love, and to change expands. Jupiter rules both spirituality and higher education, fields where the lighting of understanding and expanding can strike. As a planet, it might argue power can be found in one’s expanded potential to think, to feel, to connect, to understand, to change, to care, to.....

it doesn't actually matter what the energy is applied to, Jupiter is an exponent raising whatever it touches to the highest power. It believes true power is the power to empower. (god i can't wait to do the planets as mathematical functions series of posts!!!)

Jupiter expressed through the water sign Pisces, represents the expanded subconscious. The knowledge we can know and access through dreaming, feeling, and connecting to our inner and often suppressed world. Jupiter expands our capacity to empathize, understand, and even predict how things might turn out if they continue down their path. It relies on intuition and instinct. Pisces is the fish archetype because it embodies intuition as a force that guides our swimming through subconscious space. It understands that there is a current that can take you down any path at any time and that there's an entire ocean to explore. Giving into the flow of what you don't know strengthens the intuition to unbelievable levels. Pisces believes anything is possible because they know our understanding can expand at any point to include the impossible into the sea of our collective knowledge.

Sagittarius represents conscious belief, which is built through learning. That path to understanding is more literal with Sagittarius. Higher learning is to Sagittarius what Spirituality and Dreams are the Pisces, the path towards understanding. Sag knows we understand by inquiring, exploring, and being challenged. Whether it's literal travel study or more abstract travel through time, distance, and perspective through the study of literature, Sagittarius calls you to expand by looking outward instead of in. An outside perspective and an outside experience also strengthen the intuition and help create faith that you're on the right path. Jupiter expressed through the element of fire needs a more physical faith than the imaginative Pisces' ability to create it internally. Sagittarius understands that if you want to keep going and remain determined on your path, you've got to have the wheels for it; the legs, the wings. It knows momentum is a force that can be calculated physically and fueled just as physically so. Sagittarius' archetype is the centaur because it represents the curious explorative spirit of the human (an archer too, who expands their reach with a long range weapon - so jupiter coded) AND the practical vehicle, the legs of the horse to keep it going and going.

Jupiter's path is about both fortune and faith. Some are blessed with the good fortune of a good vehicle to go far, others have faith they'll get where they need to go. The most powerful often have both. Jupiter's idea of higher power is being able to foster both, that's what it means to be lucky, to be fortunate, to be blessed. Jupiter is represented by the wheel card both for the wheel of fortune and the ideas of representing momentum progressing along a path. It kickstarts the expansion of everything around it, it is also the planet of probability, of potential, and of luck. Jupiter is lucky because it trusts it's intuition, it knows when to be brave enough to follow the current or to break free from it. It’s confident in knowing when to splinter off from the path because it feels the road underneath beneath its vehicle and trusts the gut feeling too. A combination of physical and spiritual knowledge is what one could call Luck. The Pisces is lucky because it believes anything is possible, the Sag understands that it is.

Jupiter is a wheel because it requires a path to run. And when lighting gathers all it's power to strike, how unlucky to be in it's path? What a strange act of fate for it to be so sure of it's time and place and have found you in it. If there was a planet to represent this kind of pre-destiny, or the idea that there are certain paths already laid flat for us that have momentum moving us toward them, it would be Jupiter, power of powers, ruler of psychics and confirmation bias. It is the planet of fate making sense of the chaos of the universe, and sense making chaos of fate. It believes that whatever path you see before you, laid out and extending, is a reflection of some internal (spiritual) or larger than life (physical) power intentionally guiding you. It follows the current like a fish, the road like a horse, and the arc like an arrow. But Jupiter believes in one's ability to empower themselves. Whatever path you’re on, surely you can stray. If you only know, or believe, it's possible.