When we spoke early in January, astrologer Chani Nicholas warned me about 2020. Saturn would move into conjunction with Pluto in the beginning of the year, she said, a uniquely inhospitable planetary placement that would lead to some turbulence, to put it mildly. She mentioned this in passing, but the comment stuck with me as the ensuing months unfolded in a veritable yellow brick road of flaming shit, leaving deep gouges in our collective human psyche. She also mentioned, in passing, that 2021 would bring its own set of challenges.
Nicholas, one of the most prolific astrologers of the modern era, has gained a devoted following thanks to her approach to the stars, which is bracing, warm, accessible, and rooted in social justice. In January she published a book—You Were Born for This: Astrology for Radical Self-Acceptance—that aimed to make birth charts easy to interpret and digest. And this December, almost a year later, her self-funded iPhone app, CHANI, went live. (When I asked how it felt to be a single-name entity, Nicholas, who video-chatted me from a seat in front of a row of crystals, laughed and covered her face.)
The app, which I found easy to use and as visually appealing as her website and emails, consolidates Nicholas’s offerings—horoscopes, birth chart interpretations, a mini podcast, workshops for certain phases of the planets—into a central location. Portions of the app are free, and portions are subscription-only. Nicholas and a team of astrologers update the app’s text in real time according to subscribers’ charts. “Every single word was chosen from a place of, This is what we do for a living, and this is who we are,” she told me. We discussed her hopes for the app, her 2020 reflections, and how 2021 is shaping up so far.
Vanity Fair: What was the thought process behind creating an app?
Chani Nicholas: My wife, Sonya Passi, and I have been running this business for the last six years together. Our business model is so archaic; it’s so out of date, it’s ridiculous. We were like, we have to update how we’re delivering content to people, because the response to the actual material is so good, but the way that we’re delivering it is like we’re in 1994. We wanted to give people tools for healing and self-reflection. So it’s really all the things that we’ve ever offered as a company in one place. Astrology to me is a healing tool, and that’s how I’m interested in using it and sharing it with people.
I love that it’s just called CHANI. It’s like Cher or Madonna.
[Laughs] It’s really intense. We decided to go with it for brand recognition because my name is not a common name, at least until Dune comes out. If you [Google] my name, I come up. On a personal level, I’m like, Oh, my God, I can’t believe this is happening. And on a brand level, it was like, this seems like the best way to go.
I wanted to talk about what people will be using it for, which is moving into this new year. Personally, I feel like this time period is something of a reset—everyone’s reshuffling and everything is resettling. How are you thinking about the transition from 2020 to 2021?
What I said in the beginning of 2020 is that the end of the year was going to be a big reset. So however we ended the year and began the next year was really important. Because I was looking at the Saturn-Pluto conjunction at the beginning of 2020, we knew it was not going to be a fun year, but then with the Mars retrograde through the last half of the year, and the Mercury retrograde through the election, I was like, I don’t know how this is going to go. It’s not great astrology. And as we saw, it was very…
Bumpy?
Bumpy. It took basically until the eclipse on December 14 to know [the election results] for sure. I always said the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction at the end of the year would be a reset, but it depends on where we are when we’re resetting. We’re beginning a new 200-year cycle, so it’s up to us to begin it in a way that feels like, Okay, maybe there’s hope and possibility.
What happens through 2021 is that Saturn, the planet of form and structure and systems and laws and regulation, is going to be in a square with Uranus, the planet of upheaval and change and rebellion. That’s a really tense aspect; it creates a lot of friction. So we know there will be some big points during the year where the push to update our outdated systems is going to be really intense. That is not a bad thing. That is obviously a necessary thing. The structures we’re living within are outdated and archaic. They need that, but it’s how radical are we going to be able to get, and what kind of chips and breaks in the old guard can we make, and what structures do we need to keep in the meantime?
I’m being very American-centric, but we have this change in leadership, and it’s still part of the old establishment, but it does feel like, Is there going to be a window for greater change to actually happen? I think those will be the tension points this year. And I think that the climate crisis will also push us into these emerging and urgent conversations in a different way.