A Gemini New Moon Under Algol's Baleful Rays
Meditations on this frenetic New Moon, the fixed star Algol, the Texas shooting and my past eclipse adventure in San Miguel de Allende.
Within the fertile dark of the balsamic moon, Venus is returned to her earthen domicile of moss and loam — just as the lilacs are beginning to show in Nelson. Aphrodite is still in her morning star phase: strident, yang, even war-like, but her sojourn in Taurus will hopefully provide a balm to matters Venusian (as my horseback riding bruises and cactus scratches begin to fade… small libations for Mars).
It’s hard to say if she will be tempered in Taurus, or if her coolness will do anything to mitigate the conflagration happening in Aries now. The last time Mars and Jupiter joined in Aries Osama Bin Laden was killed in a military operation (the day the aspect perfected no less). Game of Thrones had launched its first season. S&M by Rihanna was top of the charts. In 1975 a Saudi assassin was publicly beheaded, with great fanfare, just days after the conjunction — the executioner bedecked in yellow robes and wielding a sword with a golden hilt.
This configuration is brash, martial, foolhardy, and rapacious. Its Tarantino blow torch is now in aversion to Venus’s garden spade, as she patiently propagates cuttings and prepares her wares for the farmer’s market. I don’t hold out much hope in terms of Venus’s diplomacy altering the course of Mars-Jupiter’s military phalanx, but at least we have an escape valve. The rivers of blood feel endless, but we can slip away into secret pastoral idylls to soothe our hearts and souls again before the next onslaught.
In fact, the astrology now feels a lot like multiple ships passing in the night, (to grave consequence). Just as Venus cannot see the fire raging in Aries, our New Moon in Gemini is also estranged from its host. Mercury is about to station direct in Taurus, on the fixed star Algol no less — the double-binary blinking star that the ancients considered demonic and used to ensure bloody conquest in battle. A star that the Chinese called “heaped corpses”, as Spencer Michaud pointed out to me during our fascinating YouTube parsing of the New Moon.
Our last lunar eclipse had the Sun on this star, and now Mercury returns to the scene of the crime. It’s impossible to talk about this Gemini New Moon without talking about Algol and its call back to the Scorpio eclipse — an extremely difficult one with its square to Saturn (the reaping of karma) and the gruesome catharsis that the South Node in Scorpio can bring in general.
With its connection to the Medusa myth, Algol can cause people to symbolically lose their heads — even their humanity. If there’s any star that can bring about a sudden psychotic break, it’s this one. Like Medusa’s piercing gaze, which could transfix people into stone, there’s also an unflinching clarity that this star can bring. I believe it’s difficult (though not impossible) to tap into its transcendent potential.
Perhaps it requires that the piercing Gorgon gaze is directed within rather than deflected, weaponized (as Medusa’s head continued to be even after her death). It needs to be trained on the parts of our psyche that are exiled, ugly, painful to look at. It’s also worth remembering that from the dripping blood of Medusa’s severed head sprang the Pegasus charging into Aries decan 1. Transformation *is* possible.
I don’t want to dwell too much on the recent Texas shooting, but it’s impossible not to see Algol’s baleful rays embodied by the 18-year-old shooter. Salvador Ramos’s birthday fell on that eclipse, which was also the day he bought the guns. There’s also something Medusa-like in the unsettling paralysis of law enforcement who seemingly sat on their hands for more than 45 minutes as Salvador murdered 19 children and two teachers in a barricaded classroom (planetary aversion becoming all too literal).
Not only did they turn away from the one job they had to do, but they went so far as tackling and tasering parents who were ready to go inside and rescue their kids. In true Aries fashion, it was the off duty rogue, in the middle of a haircut, who crossed the threshold of bureaucracy and dispatched of the shooter. I have a feeling the coming months will show us, in no uncertain terms, everything that we must take into our own hands.
Whether this disturbing non-action and obstruction of justice was born of cowardice, miscalculation, or procedural red-tape, it feels a lot like Salvador, along with the police, ritualizing the Neoliberal disregard for human life — the institutional level so far divorced from care of its most vulnerable citizens that an 18-year-old is left to pick off his targets, at leisure, in an elementary school. A blood ritual to fling open the gates of hell to the real Plutonic bottoming out to come, which I suspect will be accelerated with Jupiter in Aries.
Perhaps this is veering toward tinfoil hat territory, but It’s hard not to see the recent assault on women’s reproductive rights as Capital’s need for more cannon fodder as shit really hits the fan. As well, the convergence of this shooting with baby formula shortages: when things rhyme in threes, I take note.
Taurus governs the resources we need to flourish, with dignity, as souls in bodies. Aries is the hard scrabble of survival to secure these basic necessities. As the Mars, Jupiter and Chiron in Aries square up against the USA’s Cancer Sun, it’s clear to see that the Cancerian mandate of nurturance — the great mother archetype — has been seriously distorted (even flipped) in the throes of the US Pluto return. Whatever Cancerian coddling is left has been directed at maintaining the supremacy of a handful of billionaires who continue to profit off the pandemic, and our increasingly frenzied culture wars. Same as it ever was…
All this dissonance aside, the New Moon in Gemini is actually able to behold Mars-Jupiter by sextile. So it’s not all blind spots (or blind eyes turned). This lunation falls on the blingy Royal Behenian fixed star of Aldebaran. This star is all about honor, integrity and doing the hard but right thing. Associated with the Archangel Michael and the sacred cult of bull-slaying — The Mithras — I spoke with Spencer about an urgent need in the West for a regimented space of ritual to honour the oftentimes bewildering, and alienating, thresholds of maturation.
I’m still puzzling out in my head what exactly a modern day Mithraic space would look like, but the New Moon falling on this particular star gives me hope that Medusa’s piercing of the collective psyche will lead to something constructive (if we can resist the more righteous rage of Mars and Jupiter roided up in Aries).
The gift of this Gemini New Moon is reflected in the lore of the decan. In the book of 36 Airs we have the deity Tethys — the mother of rivers splitting into the webbing of infinite deltas. The Agrippa shows us a professor with a rod. Even the Sabian symbol echoes its array of possibilities: “a quiver full of arrows”.
Austin Coppock speaks of the binary poison that can taint this decan: our algol-rhythms closing the gap of nuance and curiosity with astonishing speed, as virality demands only the most extreme of emotions, stances, or hot takes. Gemini itself can be paralyzed by the multitude of options spangling the surface of life’s great pond of source.
Nevertheless, this decan gifts us with precision and virtuosity in parsing the many possible time-lines going forward and choosing that single tributary with great discernment, (and, indeed, integrity). We also have time to honor the gravity of this choice, especially as the eclipse dust continues to settle and Mercury spins its wheels (even if Jupiter and Mars demand snap-decisions).
Returning to the day this bad seed was planted, my experience of the time surrounding the Scorpio eclipse was actually rather positive. Certainly profound. I was spending a long weekend in San Miguel de Allende (a pueblo with Archangel Michael as their patron saint!), continuing to apply that Mexican balm to my broken heart.
The night before the eclipse, I followed a religious procession up the winding streets of San Miguel, as masked figures robed in velvet, feathers, and sequins danced in front of a pickup truck blasting increasingly frenzied music into the dusk. Trailing behind, teenagers in devil and goat masks and wearing regular street clothes, dancing much more wildly than the more regimented patterns of the group ahead in their feathered finery (the two seemed to be in necessary tension, or dialectic).
The procession ended at a viewpoint looking over the city, where I was offered a plastic cup of their ritual punch and welcomed to observe the ceremony. After every folk song was played the musicians knelt to be bathed in sage smoke — the same smoke that sacralized the cross and mandala. They said the festivities would go all night (the month long Fiestas de Santa Cruz only just beginning, as I would later find out). I eventually made my way back to the hotel, not before seeing a mob of kids kill a scorpion with a water bottle, because astrology is very very literal in Mexico.
The night of the eclipse I was prepared to spend the night in my hotel room, wary of said baleful rays, but my Gemini curiosity got the best of me again and I ventured into the Jardin — San Miguel’s primary square with the UNESCO protected cathedral and garden of immaculate myrtle hedges.
I watched the Moon assume its mantle of blood beside the palms and spires of the cathedral, a small crowd gathered with telescopes and binoculars. As the eclipse was perfecting, a man stepped up to one of the roving bands of Mariachi and asked to be allowed to sing. He looked totally innocuous: Bermuda shorts, a bro… but as he began to sing a rueful lament, acapella, the entire square fell into a hush.
Slowly, the brass of the mariachi began to back him and I realized tears were rolling down my face. What his voiced lacked in power it made up for in a wry, duendic force. It occurred to me that perhaps Medusa was sated, at least for a moment, as this man sang the tale of her woe (and of all woes) into the balmy night — a frisson running, electric, through the entire crowd. For those minutes it felt we were tethered. Then gone again as he shuffled off into the night and the mariachi continued to take more popular requests.
Perhaps this will be Venus in Taurus’s gift: the alchemy of sorrow into art, just as a searingly particular grief is released into the communal conventions, motifs, and dactylic hexameter of elegy (part of what I wrote about in my thesis). I suspect The West is starved of the ritual dimension of life — a codified Mithraic space for exploring and mediating the complexities of the human experience.
It’s my humble belief that the machine will continue to bleed out unless we find our way back to the mythopoetic dimension of time, where even the most heartbroken stars, like Algol (maligned, demonized, brutally beheaded) can receive their due witness. That which we refuse to look out will find our way to us, (and through us) in increasingly horrific iterations. Sandy Hook happened when the nodes of the Moon were last in Scorpio and Taurus, but reversed. A strange twinning. I think it was Margret Atwood that said time is a folded bedsheet with a needle pierced through it.
I hope you enjoyed these retrospective transmissions from my 12th house roving of San Miguel de Allende, where I’m planning to move this fall in time for Dia de Los Muertos (and next eclipse season!). The veil in Mexico is so very thin, which is probably why I felt such soul resonance there.
By the way, I somehow managed to finish my thesis corrections in Mexico City, which were finally approved (gracias a dios). It’s fucking done. This means I should finally have more space and time to nurture my own writing and my withering Substack. In the meantime, why not some 1980’s New Wave stylings from Mexico City’s Caifanes?