Aliens, Angels, and Drones: Welcome to Pluto in Aquarius' High Strangeness
The Sky frenzy intensifies as Mars in Leo, which loves a spectacle, gets closer to its opposition of Pluto in Aquarius ... This article will explore drone and orb furore through a historical lens.
“You did not have to see these costs. You got to go to school with the expectation it would turn into a job you only hated with most of your soul, rather than all of it. A job that would allow you to eventually afford housing, buy more slave-made devices and take an annual holiday.
None of these promises ever come back. All those soft parts have boiled off. There is just the gleaming skull of The System, of the realpolitik reality of what it actually took to keep you in the hologram of virtue and optionality.” – From the wonderful Rune Soup Substack
“He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
“Stars were falling across the sky myriad and random, speeding along brief vectors from their origins in night to their destinies in dust and nothingness.”
―Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
And so, the Mars rx in Leo opposing Pluto in Aquarius fanfare intensifies. Just as class consciousness is trending in the States, the rising desire for cataclysmic change has shape-shifted into a recent wave of “sky frenzy”. Aquarius is connected to our heavens, aviation, angels, and indeed, aliens. The abstract reaches of our firmament function as a Saturnian text — the farthest planet still visible to our naked eye. In these stark Plutonic days of reckoning with the “gleaming skull of The System”, Aquarius beckons us to look upwards. To cast out to distant star systems completely removed from capital and profit.
We are reminded that constellations scaffold some of humanity’s most enduring stories. Living avatars of the “the archetypes: generators of boundless energy, forming and dying through the slow flow of eons”, to quote Carl Jung. Aquarius reminds us too of our endlessly, regenerative capacity to create new myths; to smash constellations to smithereens. In that threshold moment of the old world bleeding out and the new one struggling to be born, we gaze at our stars, as if for the first time. We are struck again by their icy fletchings, piercing our hearts with a force that’s not love, exactly — but represents an enduring and patient witness. In this moment, this scene comes to mind. Spoilers for the first season of the masterpiece that is True Detective:
It was during the middle of the 7th century BCE that astrology first flourished as a state-supported endeavour in Mesopotamia — a time period that just so happens to coincide with Pluto in Aquarius. It was then that colleges were established all over those lands, now modern day Iraq, and the skies were meticulously observed, with reports sent back to the king. This period set the Saturnian foundations for the Western branch of astrology still practiced today. Whenever Pluto journeys through Aquarius, a sudden desire to look up — to cast beyond the mortal concerns of our fleshy vessels — seems to sweep humanity. And this yearning for a trans-human intelligence, or indeed, an age of miracles, is often accelerated by both the technological advances and social upheaval that tend to dominate these Pluto in Aquarius seasons.
With Pluto in Aquarius now, and the first real rumbles of profound societal upheaval in the wake of the CEO murder, it makes sense that the mysteries of deep space are also charting. Whether conscious or not, the desire for non-human contact echoes a deeper yearning to reconnect with a latent potential within ourselves: to explore the infinite realms of the soul, even more uncharted than our heavens. How many of us can actually be alone with our thoughts for thirty minutes without restlessly reaching for that next dopamine hit, of which an endless supply lives in our phones? This is, of course, the point. The West brought opium to the Chinese; the Chinese, whose plans are measured in centuries, deliver us the demonic entity called Tiktok (indeed, it is a time and mortality thief). To quote Jung again, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul.” Waking up from the long dream of doom scrolling will be painful — but it’s also absolutely necessary if we hope to create a new world.
///
Still, it’s hard to say if the meme momentum behind Saint Luigi de Mangione will translate into a larger movement, I believe that Mangione’s self-sacrifice pierced through the noise and mass hypnosis of our menagerie of digital distractions. At least for a moment. With his recent terrorism charges, the public outrage is likely to intensify. Once again, their agenda has been stripped down to the bones: slaughter a classroom of preschoolers and you are a mass murderer. Kill one of us and you are a terrorist with the threat of the State executing you. Recent images of Luigi being marched along the New York City pier, with a Joker level security detail rivaling that of the Unabomber, is a reminder that the battle over optics continues to play a major part in Mars’ retrograde through Leo. Has the gleaming skull of the system ever felt more naked?
This latest piece of political theatre, as the powers that be attempt to make an example of Luigi through some sort of public shaming, is of course backfiring spectacularly. The fit was immaculate: wide lapels, that pop of maroon, a Prada-esque cinched belt, and a fresh haircut/eyebrow trim that signals how well he’s being treated by his fellow prisoners. Penitentiary orange is the new Brat green. Comparisons to Renaissance paintings of Christ being marched to his crucifixion are already sweeping social media. Trump’s assassination attempt photo, which once qualified as the “hardest image of the year”, has been swiftly dethroned in these early Pluto in Aquarius days.
So yes: the power balance continues to shift as Mars and Pluto duke it out. And Luigi is the avatar of the self-sacrifice, stoicism, and conviction that will replace the age of the victim and trauma as clout. At least, I hope so. The realization that a single life can send riptides through the entire matrix is something we learn through Leo: the sign of self-sovereignty and an inner light that answers to no external authority. If Leo is the cultivation of our soul’s hearth fire, Aquarius is the decentralized dispersal of this light — our gifts, our talents, our slant on the world — igniting the entire collective.
///
But back to dem aliens. The first uptick in drone activity over New Jersey was reported on November 19th, the very day Pluto re-entered Aquarius “for keeps”. I can’t help but think of that Great American Eclipse this past spring and the living shadow, or portal, it cast across the Eastern seaboard. The early narrative had people online speculating that a “dirty nuke” had somehow been scuttled into the USA through the New Jersey port and that the drones were sweeping for radioactive material. Anytime Mars is roving the underworld and within sight of Pluto, you can expect all manner of headlines reflecting shadowy undertakings, covert operations, mass cover ups, and hidden agendas. Mars adds the military element, of course.
TikTok, as the great narrative accelerator, quickly moved on from this unsettling, albeit less flashy, dirty nuke theory. Discourse has now intensified into shapeshifting drones, sentient plasmoids, angels of light, underwater UFO compounds, ancient technologies, and benevolent alien “timeline adjusters”. The most recent iteration of this hyper-lore is that the drones aren’t sweeping for isotopes but are surveying mysterious glowing orbs. Some believe that the drones choking the skies over New Jersey are a cover up for something stranger — as well as a convenient way to debunk any of the videos being released now. If you can’t control the narrative, hit the mass “confusion” button. Then contain.
Most remarkably, in my mind, is that people seem to be clocking for the first time in their lives that you can gaze at Venus and Jupiter, very bright now even in our light-polluted night skies — and that yes, these stars appear to sparkle and scintillate. There’s a reason the ancients saw our most brilliant stars as gods whose rays could alter our fates. Sirius is a particularly resplendent star in our heavens now, its blinged out double-binary system a reminder of why the Egyptians worshipped it as a second sun.
A recent mania around eclipses and an uptick in aurora borealis activity has primed people to record what’s happening in our heavens. The sophistication of even I-phone cameras also allows us to pick up light in our night sky that we wouldn’t be able to perceive with the naked eye. Yes, it’s remarkable that new celestial “noticers” are zooming in fixed stars, even with Nikon lenses, and mistaking those chromatic blurs for alien intelligence. Even a recent ABC news segment aired a close up video of what was probably Venus, as if the aliens had arrived. A Mercury in Sagittarius in mutual reception with Jupiter moment, to be sure.
Still, I can’t help but be fascinated by the wonder and awe that’s surging again around our starry firmament again. Even if many of the videos circulating of these so-called plasmoid/angels are easily explained away as the “bokeh effect” — aka lens distortions when you zoom in on lights — the archetypal force of these images cannot be underestimated. These out of focus stars remind me of both biblical angels and the star child in 2001: A Space Odyssey (a text I reference often when thinking about Aquarius). Some read the star child as the first iteration of humanity not beholden to technology. Or the rebirth of humanity into new evolutionary frontiers. It’s interesting that Saturn’s entry into Aquarius, in 2020, also coincided with the mysterious appearance of Kubrickian plinths all over the world.
///
Amidst this wave of glittering images, a collective courting of the new, the miraculous, and the veil-piercing is right in line with the Leo-Aquarius polarity. The central solar authority is shattered into brilliant new shards of meaning. As the obsession with celestial wonders surges again, I want to cast back to another Pluto in Aquarius epoch: the mid 16th Century . This time period was pivotal all across Europe, as it saw the Protestant Reformation gain momentum, leading to widespread challenges against Catholic authority. King Henry broke from the Roman Catholic church at this time, radically dismantling England’s devotion to a particular doctrine. Echoing the later age of the guillotine in France, the Church of England was established while the heads of traitors rolled. Aquarius is a sign where we can literally “lose our heads” in the fever of radical new ideologies. This epoch witnessed numerous uprisings and conflicts fueled by religious fervor, as various states grappled with their identities amidst rising Protestant sects. The existential anxiety of this period of time also set the stage for a collective mania over miracles — particularly wondrous skybound phenomena.
The Public Domain Review has gathered together pamphlet images from this period of time, as apocalypticism soared during the Reformation, as well as a growing interest in messages sent from God. Alongside the tumult of the era, German broadsheets circulated all manner of woodcut images of sublime celestial phenomena, sometimes bound together along with astrological literature, sermons, and personal diaries into what were called “wonder books”. Along with a rising fascination with eclipses, sun halos, northern lights, and comets, some of the images are much more surreal. Floating crucifixes, rains of blood, and even geometric apparatuses floating in the heavens, in UFO-like forms that resemble light-strewn tubes or crosses. Another broadsheet describes an extraterrestrial melee between floating orbs, in an uncanny echo of the videos and images proliferating through social media now:
“The globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour”, wrote the broadsheet’s author. Some of these vehicles crashed down beyond the city limits, while a terrifying, arrow-like object appeared in the air. “Whatever such signs mean, God alone knows.”
Though this age of miracles and wonder books emerged in the tail end of the Pluto in Aquarius years, the longing for miracles extended throughout the Pluto in Pisces era, tapering off in the 1700’s when Pluto entered Aries/Taurus, ushering in the brutality of the war of Spanish succession, as well as the Seven Year’s War. These conflicts brought these apocalyptic visions from the great projection screen of our heavens back down to the mud of canon-torn battlefields. To that end, I’m interested to see how the Pluto in Aquarius sky mania shifts when Neptune leaves Pisces and enters Aries next spring — at least for a few months. It feels like a brutal hangover indeed.
Something chimed for me, as well, in the technological advance piece of Pluto’s periods in Aquarius — and how new media technologies can take on this aura of truth and authority. It’s no coincidence that the coupling of TikTok’s rapid dissemination of images (as well as mass hysteria), with the high-powered cameras that live in our pockets, would allow more niche UAP lore to spill out into the mainstream. As The Public Domain Review notes, the invention of photography (when Pluto was in Pisces — a sign associated with cinema and projected images) ushered in a rising interest in the paranormal, as anomalies in photographs were believed to be traces of ghosts. Taking advantage of new double-exposure technology, some charlatans also realized they could profit through the circulation of such images under the guise of occult photography.
Zooming forward in time, to 1938, Jupiter was in Aquarius the Hallowe’en evening that Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio drama was aired. Using a “breaking news” style reporting about an alien invasion, the entirely fictionalized drama still incited panic amongst its listeners at a time when mainstream radio was still a relatively new technology.
The Public Domain Review article also underscores the importance of new media technologies back in the 16th century as influencing, or shaping, these wondrous sky-borne visions (communication technologies being especially pertinent when Pluto lodges in an air sign):
“Most of the images below come from Einblattdruck, a form of broadsheet that consisted of a title, woodcut, and an account of wonder. These sheets could be created rapidly, disseminated widely, and purchased cheaply. News and current events were thus being printed with greater speed and reach than ever before. As such, genres evolved and hybridized with haste. In the early 1520s, so-called “siege prints” — graphic tableaux of battles — became particularly popular. And astronomical almanacs were some of the most widely consumed vernacular texts in the Holy Roman Empire. Is it any surprise, then, that battles between stars started appearing in the skies, wedding these two genres, evidenced by woodcuts of astrological siege?”
The rise of hyper-lore through memes and short form video content is, of course, how we’ve traveled so swiftly from drones sweeping for nuclear material to a shadowy celestial battle in the heavens between the U.S. military and 4th dimensional plasmoid/angels. Meanwhile, Neptune’s last crescendo in Pisces has brought us to a place of never really knowing if what we’re looking at is real or AI-generated. Perhaps this uncertainty will simply dissolve any desire to fact-check the imagery flashing through our devices at lightning speed. Maybe we secretly desire a frictionless stream of images to project our hopes and fears upon.
Leo sees the Sun in its domicile, symbolic of the divinely mandated king, the status quo, all that is centralized — and Aquarius is where Sol scatters in its wintry, far-flung detriment. In the midst of solar figures, like CEOs, seeing their golden inner sanctums infiltrated, parallel reports of fugitive orbs of light. Fallen angels. The revelation of parallel universes through Google’s Willow chip. The sign of Aquarius is linked to the tarot card of The Star whose maiden, unashamed in her nakedness, bathes in the starlit waters of a private pond. It’s a card of hope and healing following the crisis of the Tower. We will be midwifed into those waters again but this process may take decades to unfold.
///
To return to Carl Jung again: “As stars are unique units in the heavens, so individuals are in a way stars, they are unique units. The innermost substance is a microcosm, as every star is a microcosm. The earth is a microcosm in the great cosmos of the stars and we are ourselves microcosms upon the earth.” This, I believe, is the highest lesson of Aquarius. And to gaze, with wonder, into the night sky again is to plunge into the metaphysical depths of our own souls too. The solstice is a powerful moment to dwell in the darkness, the mystery, and the stillness without trying to decode it. I’ll be taking my own digital detox for the remaining days of my winter break. The invention of paper also happened under Pluto in Aquarius and I’m looking forward to spending time with this ancient and enduring technology — ploughing through a stack of books in the temple of my bathtub.
One last note. During an astral projection this morning, I levitated out of my sleeping body into the uncanny bardo version of my room. Quite spontaneously, in my light body, I asked about the orbs. For those who haven’t experienced astral projection, you are entirely lucid in this state and have access to your memory bank. An orb did indeed dart into my field of vision then, swirling bands of cerulean and an outer halo of white light. It was about the size of a quail egg. But almost immediately, in the afterring of my question, I was sent tumbling back into my body again, in what felt like a chiding by this entity. The non answer was, of course, the answer. In the solstice dark, there is light to be reclaimed from within. Take care of your own affairs. Go High Priestess mode. “Not supposed to know yet”.
Mars opposing Pluto again will further clog our channels with rage-bait, attention harvesting, and misinformation as the powers that be attempt to grab hold of the narrative. Don’t let yourself be seduced by the noise. Wave that static away, like so many plumes of smoke. “I hate white rabbits, I hate white rabbits” is a Girl Guides era spell I will be invoking in the coming months, as the empire bleeds out.
And as ever, the Polish-American poet, Czelaw Milosz, is a balm in these darkest days. Here is his, “On Angels”:
All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.
There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.
Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at the close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.
They say somebody has invented you
but to rue this does not sound convincing
for humans invented themselves as well.
The voice–no doubt it is valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightning.
I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:
day draws near
another one
do what you can.
Just a heads up that the Giotto painting you've reposted in comparison to Luigi's perp walk is likely AI-generated. Giotto's "Arrest of Jesus (Kiss of Judas)" is a completely different painting. The AI piece has some suspect characteristics, including every feature being being too exact of a match. Someone definitely fed the Luigi picture into AI with a request to turn it into a Renaissance painting, likely due to all of the talk around the composition of the perp walk photos mirroring Renaissance themes.
The spoiler has me thinking next season could be a crossover with the last season. Darkness in Alaska…💡