The Astrology of Pokémon

by Drew Levanti

Pocket Monsters

In 1999, Time ranked Pokémon mascot Pikachu #2 on its annual Best People of the Year list. (1) Yellow and mouse-like with red, supercharged cheeks, according to Pokémon lore, “When several [Pikachus] gather, their electricity could … cause lightning storms.” (2)

Pokémon indeed struck like lightning, taking the world by storm as the highest-grossing media franchise of all time. While the intense “Pokémania” craze of the late ‘90s has faded in the decades since, the franchise remains immensely popular, continually releasing a flourishing canon of games, films, and anime.

Pokémon’s astrological inceptions can help us understand its cultural roots, and what it wants to become. As Pokémon approaches its Saturn return in Pisces, we’re seeing the franchise reach an important turning point as it reaches maturity. Originally a kids’ game, recently Pokémon has grown in popularity with adults, bolstered by the isolation and return to old comforts brought on by the Covid pandemic. (Last year, when my friend whipped out Pokémon Stadium on N64, I was transported back.) It’s also morphed to span new media: Pokémon is now popular as a genre on YouTube, as well as an e-sport.

With a revitalized fan base and dynamic emerging technologies, Pokémon is on the threshold of big changes during its first Saturn return.

But first, let’s go back to the beginning.

Pokémon’s Inceptions

Pokémon’s founding inceptions show strong Pisces signatures, empowering the franchise’s coherent, captivating fantasies. These Piscean inceptions root Pokémon in an ever-growing imaginal world.

When the first Pokémon video games hit Japanese stores on February 27, 1996, they were an instant craze — fantasy was for sale, and people were buying. This chart will be referred to as “Pokémon’s birth chart.”

With global markets on the horizon, the game’s creators founded the Pokémon Company (henceforth “TPC”) on April 23, 1998 to manage the international Pokémon brand. While Nintendo, Game Freak, and Creatures, Inc. shared management within Japan, TPC as a separate corporation is the primary entity responsible for Pokémon’s global proliferation. Pokémon’s birth chart gives us a foundation for understanding TPC’s inception, which in turn helps us understand Pokémon on the world stage.

In Pokémon’s birth chart, Pisces hosts the Sun, Mars, and Saturn, while TPC’s chart highlights the Sign of the Fishes with a stunning conjunction of the Moon, Venus, and Jupiter. All essentially dignified for TPC, these planets make the play product as comforting as it is charming and epic.

With ruling Jupiter presiding, the Pokémon world is ever-expanding. Since its initial release, Pokémon has created a new “generation” every few years, with an entirely new fictional region and, of course, new creatures. From the first generation’s 151 species, there are now over 1,000, echoing the Shinto kami, spirits said to be “constantly increasing in numbers.” (3) The promise of ever-more Pokémon offers seemingly endless imaginative horizons for fans, rooting their emotional investment in the captivating promise of “more.”

Of Gods and Monsters: Pluto in Sagittarius

Pokémon was born weeks after Pluto’s final ingress into Sagittarius in 1996, just a month before me. From the start, my life was filled with these centaurian oddities.

Like centaurs, Pokémon unite seeming opposites in one body. They are hybrids, fusing nature and culture, spirit and science, myth and modernity. To play Pokémon is to enter a world of coherence, above dogma and beyond the moral crises of spiritual war.

The franchise emerged at a time of intense concern over the role of science in society. Pluto’s early days in Sagittarius saw landmark developments in cloning and computing, raising deep questions about the morality of scientific advances. Were we abusing the power of our knowledge? Were we creating monsters, severing our connection to God?

When Dolly the Sheep was cloned in 1996, media outlets feared science was “playing God” like Dr. Frankenstein. (Interestingly, both Mary Shelley’s opus and Dolly have a Jupiter-ruled Pluto.) The moralistic fallout of Dolly’s birth even surfaced in politics. In 1998, US President Bill Clinton signed a law banning human cloning, stating that “scientific advances do not occur in a moral vacuum.” (4)

Fears quickened over computer intelligence too. The same month Pokémon debuted in Japan, World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov played against IBM chess program Deep Blue in a widely publicized match. The computer lost, but then beat Kasparov in a re-match the following year. Since many doubted a computer could defeat a human chess master due to the artistry and creativity inherent in the game, Kasparov’s loss called into question humankind’s aesthetic supremacy — did our connection to beauty even matter in a world filled by our monstrous creations? Pluto in Sagittarius incited fears about the loss of soul.

In this context, Pokémon was a balm and escape. In its alternate reality, humans, nature, and science work together in harmony. Science operates not as a threat to moral, spiritual life, but as its ally, the scientific study of Pokémon symbolizing the deepening of human intimacy with the spirit world.

The first character we meet as players in the Pokémon games is a scientist, the wise Professor Oak, who entrusts us with a quest: help gather data on every Pokémon species in the world. When players capture a Pokémon, its data registers for Oak to study. Capturing Pokémon becomes a quasi-religious activity, full of meaning and purpose. Pluto in Sagittarius squares the Pokémon inceptions’ stelliums in Pisces, elevating Hadean capture to the level of prayer. As much as Pokémon are objects of study, they are also a sacrament, and Oak a priest. (Interestingly, oak trees are ruled by Jupiter.) (5)

The religious themes of Sagittarius and Pisces appear in Pokémon’s embodiment of the Shinto kami, which may be

… everything from the divine spirits who realized the production of heaven and earth, the great ancestors of men, to all things in the universe, even plants, rocks, birds, beasts, and fish. (6)

Diverse beings, Pokémon span flora and fauna, gods and guardians, and figures from indigenous Japanese myth. Exeggutor, for instance, is modeled on the Jinmenju, a legendary tree said to bloom into smiling, human faces.

What makes Pokémon so soothing is how these traditional elements synchronize with modern ones. Alongside the stuff of legends, we find creatures based on industrial substances and modern materials: Grimer and Muk are made of purple sludge and modeled on toxic runoff, while the magnetic Magnemite and Magneton assist electrical power plants. In this enchanted aftermath of modernization, even industrial debris vibrates with mythic potency. Here, modernity and science stand not in opposition to traditional lore, but as parts of it.

Pokémon gave us a world where we didn’t have to choose between science and spirit, offering an atmosphere of oneness in a time when scientific progress was widely deemed a threat to spiritual integrity. Playing Pokémon conjured a Piscean magic, bathing stubborn contradictions in the ocean of unifying truth.

“I Choose You”: Sol, Mars, and the Aesthetics of Agency

Sun–Mars conjunctions feature in both Pokémon’s birth chart and the TPC chart. These hot, fiery planets share rulership of action and agency. In the former chart, they align in Pisces; in the latter, in Taurus. These alignments bring the Sun–Mars archetype into the domains of Venus, with Taurus as her domicile, and Pisces her exaltation. In Pokémon, solar and martial energy attune to the Venusian sphere. Choices center on beauty and relationships. We act to be together.

This orientation allows players to explore what philosopher C. Thi Nguyen calls the “aesthetics of agency.” (7) What makes playing Pokémon fun is not simply progressing through the story, but doing so in the style or aesthetic we value, which we express through the Pokémon we choose to fight for us. The appeal of the game lies in the diversity of ways it allows players to aestheticize our movement through it. Winning the game is easy. The real challenge is finding a beautiful way to win.

When afflicting the Sun, Mars can indicate separation from the father. With this pairing in both charts, Pokémon canonizes fatherlessness. In initial video game plots, players leave their mother at home to start their journey (no father is mentioned). Not until Pokémon’s third generation do players get a father. This release (November 11, 2002) is striking astrologically, with Jupiter in Leo and the Sun in Scorpio. This “overcoming” square from Jupiter to the Sun amounts to the Sun’s “bonification,” representing a subjective improvement in paternal themes. (8) While players in this generation indeed have an important relationship with their father, the relationship is martial. The father is a “Gym Leader” — one of the boss fights standing between the player and beating the game. You and your chosen Pokémon must defeat your dad in his gym. Can it get more Sun–Mars?

Fights between players are called “Pokémon battles,” a core activity in Pokémon. However, the mentality of battling is not just about winning, but winning in an aesthetically appealing way. Players acquire tastes in the kinds of Pokémon they like to use: for instance, battling with only a single “type” of Pokémon (e.g., water, fire, or rock). Other options come with massive limitations on how players proceed through the game (a notoriously difficult restriction is “Nuzlocking,” where Pokémon defeated in battle cannot be used again). By constraining their choices, players’ stylistic preferences and self-imposed challenges create different aesthetics of play, allowing them to explore novel forms of agency in the pursuit of elegant execution.

Venus shapes the emotional valence of these battles, which are not bloody or warlike, but stylized and dramatic. We learn this aesthetic mostly from the anime and films. Here, we follow the journey of Satoshi (in the English versions, Ash Ketchum). This protagonist’s personality and approach to Pokémon become archetypal for the franchise, creating a model not only for how to play, but also how to feel.

Satoshi is known for his ambition. His mission “to become a Pokémon master” is summed up in the first line of the anime theme song: “I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was.” In the original Japanese, Satoshi’s motto is

Saigo made akirameru na (“Never give up until it’s over”).

Dogged determination and unrelenting spirit are foundational traits of a Pokémon battler. Satoshi does not always win. He experiences the highs and lows of egoic transformation. His desire to be the best is tested repeatedly by fire (“ash”), reforging his will in the crucible of defeat.

Satoshi always rises from defeat with the love of his Pokémon. In battle, Satoshi is affected and impassioned, striving for a fluid connection with his Pokémon, seeking mutual understanding and inspiration on the path to victory. The anime represents emotional connection as battle’s deepest purpose, which in turn shapes the aesthetic of agency we inhabit in the game. The point of playing Pokémon is to love them.

Battles in the Pokémon universe are full of beauty and connection, drama and grace, inspiring us to pursue choices that express our unique values. The Pokémon themselves mediate the relationship we have with our own decision-making, helping us become intimate with our own Mars, our own Sol. This is the pleasure of the game. In representing our aesthetic preferences, Pokémon allows us to fashion and stylize our ways of moving through the games, and in turn the world. Play becomes an exercise in exploring the beauty of our choices — how we choose, and what we love.

Pisces and Taurus: Fantasy and the Market of Love

As much as Pokémon’s iconic video games, anime, and feature films fuel the cultural imagination of the franchise, they only amount to about 20% of its all-time revenue. The other 80%? Merchandise — toys, trading cards, stuff.

The Pisces–Taurus combination in Pokémon’s inceptions highlights how the franchise has converted virtual fantasies into marketable commodities. These commodities give the game world a Taurean tactility that draws young audiences into the franchise’s particular consumption culture, in which “love” for Pokémon drives sales.

The commercial appeal of Pokémon has been studied in terms of the Japanese pop culture aesthetic kawaii. Variously translated as “cute,” “loveable,” or “adorable,” cultural commentators connect kawaii with youthfulness, innocence, and desirability. It is most recognizable as an anime aesthetic: young characters with Venusian, feminine characteristics like large, glistening eyes, delicate features, and high-pitched voices. (9)

How has this particularly Japanese aesthetic been able to touch audiences around the world? Often cited as quintessentially kawaii, Pikachu gave the style global recognition. TPC’s Venus–Jupiter conjunction in Pisces explains this expansive reach. Pokémon’s Venusian magnetism, charm, and cuteness traveled on the wings of Jupiter, who elevated the creatures to global celebrity.

Collectibles were a key global marketing strategy of TPC. As a kid, I collected Pokémon action figures, stuffed animals, even food. My favorite drinking glass was a Bulbasaur Pokémon-branded Welch’s jelly jar, part of a collectible series of nine, each featuring a different Pokémon. With the jelly gone, the jar was the perfect size for my small hand, a reasonable serving of orange juice with breakfast.

Pokémon images were licensed across various Taurean domains, from cozy stuffed animals to sweet and fatty foods. McDonald’s Happy Meals included collectible Pokémon toys; Pokémon stickers appeared inside Wonder Ball candy, replacing Disney characters. This physical–world ubiquity made the fantasy of acquiring the Pokémon you love an everyday reality for kids, thinning the veil of the virtual. Following the franchise motto “Gotta Catch ‘Em All,” Pokémon were everywhere to buy and own. However, merely acquiring Pokémon was not the full point.

Building on the fusion of Taurean and Piscean archetypes, Pokémon emphasizes the meaningfulness of acquisition, embodied in a caring relationship with the acquired. Players are constantly reminded: “Treat your Pokémon with love and respect.” This made Pokémon merchandise feel special, like a real incarnation of an animated creature. The watery fantasy of Pokémon was something you could touch, hold, and cherish. Getting rid of my Bulbasaur glass would have been like throwing away a Pokémon — like discarding a living thing.

Pokémon created a world of “things” that felt lovably alive. Materials vibrated with imagination and intimacy. The virtual world was always on the brink of breaking through. Pokémon is a fantasy with grip, a dream with body.

Infrastructures of Imagination: Saturn and Neptune

More than a feather-light fantasy, Pokémon is grounded in material culture. This extends to gaming devices. Giving form to its imaginative content, the everyday technologies that make Pokémon possible have proliferated throughout the Saturn–Neptune cycle. Across Saturn–Neptune alignments, we find pivotal developments in what I’ll call infrastructures of imagination. This refers to gaming devices and visual tech, and how they allow players to travel to alternate worlds.

Saturn–Neptune signatures transport us through vivid visual experiences. Saturn undergirds the visual realm, arranging and configuring not only time, but light. It draws down the abstract power of Neptune into seemingly concrete form, embedding fantastical realms in the visible world. Historically we have witnessed these alignments bring enhanced visual tech, allowing dreams like Pokémon to surface in vivid color. Fantasies flow upon these infrastructures of imagination, circuits of feeling and play.

As a kid, while my mom taught dance classes, I’d sit off to the side playing Pokémon on my teal Game Boy Color. This portable gaming console is the most iconic device connected to Pokémon. Nintendo synchronized its 1998 release with the launch of the Pokémon games in Europe and North America, and Game Boy Color’s chart features a 1° Saturn–Neptune square. (10) This was the second edition of the Nintendo device. The original Game Boy had been released nine years earlier, with a Saturn–Neptune conjunction within 2°.

The closing square of the cycle initiated in 1989 saw the launch of Pokémon Go in 2016, the first Pokémon smartphone app. Smartphones themselves bear the Saturn–Neptune signature as well: both iPhone and Blackberry were released in 2007, during the exact Saturn–Neptune opposition.

A GPS-based app, Pokémon Go allows players to discover virtual Pokémon in their actual, physical locations using augmented reality. Pokémon appear on the screen as if they were standing in front of you. Like in the original games, certain creatures can only be found in certain locations, only now they are real locations, like the park, the library, or participating businesses.

The inception of Pokémon Go features a near-exact Saturn–Neptune square at 10° Sagittarius–Pisces, lighting up Pokémon’s birth chart and TPC’s inception chart, both with prominent Pisces placements in or near these degrees. The intense resurgence of Pokémon in summer 2016 reflected this Saturn–Neptune transit to Pokémon’s birth charts; Saturn in Pisces from 2023–25 will reactivate this energy, suggesting a similar boom.

Pokémon’s Saturn Return: Consolidating the Dream

In November 2022, a new Pokémon release changed the face of the games by introducing an open-world concept. Previously, players progressed through a set storyline in a linear sequence; accessing new parts of the game depended on completing objectives in previous areas. In this mode, the only choices available to players were which Pokémon they might choose. In the new open-world games, however, players decide the directions they explore, freeing player choice like never before.

This upgrade is remarkable because it finally aligns game-play with the lore of the Pokémon world established across other media like anime, films, and manga. This alignment can be seen as a mark of maturity, foreshadowing the franchise’s coming Saturn return. When Saturn conjoins Neptune in Pisces, we may witness the consolidation of Pokémon’s fantastical vision into new styles of play, technological interfaces, and infrastructures of imagination.

Unfortunately, the chart of Pokémon’s Saturn return is not promising for the franchise’s future: it looks like failed money grabs and uninspiring appeals to nostalgia. The chart features Saturn in Pisces conjunct two retrograde planets, Mercury and Venus, all tightly conjunct the Dragon’s Head. This combination reeks of bad business decisions, with the ruler of commerce, Mercury, afflicted on all sides: by Saturn, by Rahu, and in the sign of its fall. To top it all off, Jupiter rules this stellium from a place of its detriment, Gemini.

Combined with a retrograde Venus, one potential that comes to mind is issues with the appeal of Pokémon’s voices. Notoriously in 2017, the 20th Pokémon film, I Choose You, featured Ash’s Pikachu speaking in human language for the first time, to the intense derision of many fans. Long-term, more talking Pokémon would likely be a total bust, but may be proposed to drive profits in an ill-conceived money grab, per Mercury’s atrocious condition in the Saturn return.

Other features of the Saturn return chart aren’t much better: we find the Moon conjunct Mars in Cancer. Signifying the body, the Moon’s combination with Mars can represent a range of adverse physical and emotional experiences, from exertion and strain to pain and injury, as well as general irritation and restlessness. Within the next 30 years, might we enter a future in which playing Pokémon could involve sensory experiences up to and including physical pain?

There is actually growing precedent in the franchise for this kind of move. In a 2013 anime Pokémon: Origins, players are shown experiencing physical effects during their Pokémon battles. When their Pokémon takes a hit, the protagonist exclaims,

It’s like I’m taking damage!

pointing not only to an intuitive bond, but parallel visceral experiences.

One possibility for a virtual reality future of empathic and embodied connection could lie in neurotechnology: direct interfaces between artificial intelligence and the brain. The most popular example of neurotechnology is Elon Musk’s Neuralink, founded the same month as Pokémon Go in 2016, in the thick of the Saturn–Neptune square. (Natally, Musk has a Saturn–Neptune opposition). If successful, Neuralink game-play could enable players to communicate telepathically, or receive sensory input as part of gaming experiences. We might imagine, then, telepathically telling our Pokémon which attacks to use, and the Pokémon talking back, or the Pokémon’s declining energy being felt by the player.

Pokémon’s Saturn return chart also features a troubled Venus. Though in her exaltation, Venus is retrograde, and tightly configured to four malefic influences: Mars, Saturn, Rahu, and a retrograde fallen Mercury. The extreme affliction of Venus indicates not only difficulty having a good time, but much more dramatic experiences like betrayal and persecution. Retrograde Venus and Mercury in the signature sign of Pokémon’s inceptions suggest numerous failures of the very nostalgia on which the franchise banks. Will the franchise sell out our love of the past — or survive to see further intimate futures?

References and Notes:
(All links accessed December 2022.)
 1. See Time Asia, “The Best People of 1999,” http://edition.cnn.com/ASIANOW/time/magazine/99/1220/1999bw.people.html.
 2. See Bulbapedia, “Pokémon Red and Blue Versions,” https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Red_and_Blue_Versions.
 3. See Encyclopedia of Shintoism, “Basic Terms of Shinto: Kami,” https://d-museum.kokugakuin.ac.jp/bts/detail/?id=3779.
 4. Rick Weiss, “Clinton Presses Ban on Cloning,” Washington Post, January 11, 1998.
 5. William Lilly, Christian Astrology, ed. Deborah Houlding, Mansfield, 1999, p. 22.
 6. See Encyclopedia of Shintoism, ibid.
 7. C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art, Oxford University Press, 2020.
 8. Chris Brennan, Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, Amor Fati Publications, 2017.
 9. For more context on kawaii and the globalization of Japanese aesthetics through play, see Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination, University of California Press, 2006.
 10. See Nintendo fact sheet for Game Boy Color, https://www.nintendo.co.jp/n02/dmg/hardware/color.

Published in: The Mountain Astrologer, Aries Nox 2023

Author:
Drew Levanti is a writer, speaker, researcher, teacher, and consulting astrologer based in San Francisco. Specializing in elections and event charts, Drew’s work explores the aliveness of time and the everydayness of magic. He teaches Initiate, a live virtual class on these topics. Drew is also a teacher in Austin Coppock’s Fundamentals of Astrology courses. He has spoken at the Northwest Astrology Conference, the Astrological Association Conference, the Queer Astrology Conference, and the Astrology & Climate Change Conference. His writing has been featured in the magazine WellBeing Astrology. You can learn more about his practice at archeastrology.com.

© 2023 - Drew Levanti

Taken from this issue:
This article was published in The Mountain Astrologer, Aries Nox 2023 and can be purchased here.

All articles at a glance