Cosmos in War Time

Some musings on the astrology of difficult times and Venus's current malefic besiegement.

Veru — from the extraordinary 15th century Comet Book, from which the rest of the article’s images are taken.

There Will Come Soft Rains (War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

— Sarah Teasdale (1884 -1933)

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I keep waiting for a metaphorical gap to return: the quadrilles of cosmic strife and eros obscured with at least a coat of symbolism. I long for the imaginary strain in sewing the starry figures above to the geopolitical permutations below. Except the veil continues to ladder, and astrology seems determined to be literal as ever. 

To wit: Putin launches war the very day the US Pluto return perfects (a once in 248 year occurrence, which happens to map onto the median age of empires). Yes, Pluto transits break their grackled waves for years, but still — the day it perfected. In my last article, I spoke about Plutonic energy exerting itself through absence, invisibility, and the void. The West fiddling with culture wars as Rome burns, and now a power vacuum, accelerated by plague, which certainly hasn’t escaped the attention of the Kremlin. As I write this, news of Saudi Arabia considering accepting Chinese yuan instead of US dollars for the sale of oil. Yes, every empire will one day be eclipsed.

Admittedly, I didn’t think the US Pluto return would play out as a second Cold War, or nuclear brinkmanship, but this is all within the Pluto-Saturn handbook. We’re still living the afterring of its grim dirge, even as Jupiter and Neptune whip up their own escapist fantasia.

The US Uranus return is not far away either, a transit that has coincided with the American Civil War, the height of WW2, and the Star Wars space program during the Reagan years (its least violent iteration). If Pluto is the insidious wood rot compromising the Tower’s foundations, the Uranian lightning strike is what finishes the job. Many thought that Biden’s half-slurred, State of the Union address, saw Ukrainians referred to as Iranians — but if you listen closely, it was Uranians. Perhaps that 12th house stellium is picking up transmissions from the collective unconscious after all.

Richard Tarnas has this to say about the dance of Pluto and Saturn — one of the bleaker synodic cycles — as it confronts the collective with the fragility of human life through war, plague, famine, and natural disaster: 

Pluto is associated with the principle of elemental power, depth, and intensity; with that which compels, empowers, and intensifies whatever it touches, sometimes to overwhelming and catastrophic extremes. . . . It is the dark, mysterious, taboo, and often terrifying reality that lurks beneath the surface of things, beneath the ego, societal conventions, and the veneer of civilization, beneath the surface of the Earth, that is periodically unleashed with destructive and transformative force…. [Pluto-Saturn brings] especially challenging historical periods marked by a pervasive quality of intense contraction: eras of international crisis and conflict, empowerment of reactionary forces and totalitarian impulses, organized violence and oppression, all sometimes marked by lasting traumatic effects.

The threat of nuclear annihilation peaks again as Pluto lingers at the threshold of Aquarius, idling thick fumes of thanatos. Despite the possibility of our total annihilation, The West seems increasingly horny for war. As mentioned in my last post (written pre-invasion, for the record) Pluto was discovered the same year as the neutron particle, thus seeding the conditions for mankind’s total destruction.   

Now Venus is besieged as Kiev is besieged (itself, a Taurean, Venus-ruled city). The increasing momentum of cries for the sky above Ukraine to be sewn shut, via a “no fly zone” (which is tantamount to a declaration of war), speaks to our stellium in Aquarius — a sign associated with aviation and the skies. Saturn wants to establish boundaries, Mars wants to shoot shit out of the heavens, and Venus is stuck in the middle: violin concertos being played in bomb shelters.

In astrology, a planet is enclosed, or besieged, when placed between the malefics by degree, or by aspect. In mundane terms, the planet is between a rock and a hard place. Venusian matters will be under considerable duress until she clears Saturn on March 28th. You may feel a profound sense of contraction, or restriction, wherever Aquarius falls in your chart. There may be a sense now of no positive solution: just a lesser of two evils, as you enter into thought experiment mode (a thing Aquarius excels at).

Of course, the horrific impotence of watching civilians slaughtered between the chess moves of Putin, NATO, nazi battalions and the military industrial complex is a testament to how awful this planetary signature can be. I’d like to think cool, Aquarian heads will prevail, but the propaganda, on both sides, is pulling all the stops.

I see this transit reflected in the humanitarian corridors that keep being shelled, as well as the contraction of sanctions in Russia. Cutting off oligarchs from their yachts, and squeezing out diamonds, vodka, designer clothes, Porn Hub, Mcdonalds — it doesn’t get much more Venus besieged than that.  

It’s also worth noting that Mars and Venus triggered the Great Conjunction degree when their last entanglement perfected, just days after their danse-macabre with Pluto. This extraordinary astrological cascade coincided with Europe’s largest nuclear plant on fire, and the propaganda machine at a fever-pitch. 

Looking back to the “Star of Bethlehem” (the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Aquarius), which ushered in a new 200 year astrological age in the air element — I’m starting to see a pattern. The great conjunction dawned in December of 2020, alongside the deus-ex-machina of the vaccine, which was positioned as the hand of god itself plucking humanity from the horrors of plague. I admit to being swept away myself, my mind broken by months of isolation and touch-starvation. This isn’t to say the vaccines didn’t help our most vulnerable, but they certainly weren’t a silver bullet, or a singular solution.

In any case, there is a sort of totalizing, one-size fits all side to Aquarius, and I can’t help but recall the blind hope that we focussed on the vaccines: their technological triumph and unassailable safety record.  Yeah, that didn’t age well. The fact that the Pfizer papers dropped, as Mars and Venus triggered this Great Conjunction degree again, is a reminder that hermetically-sealed Aquarian abstraction tends to collapse, and atrophy within the medium of time. 

I’m reminded that Aquarius’s Ganymedian blessing (and curse) is to be poised between the realms of the Gods and mortals, pouring out the starry waters of divine gifts that may not necessarily take the “human dimension” into context. Thus, the perfection of creation is seeded by a demiurge, and what looks good on paper gets funky in practice. 

My friend at @lilithrebellion noticed this cosmic call back to the vaccine launch as well. This Aquarian impulse toward idealized, one-size fits all solutions has had us worried since Mars and Venus’s embrace triggered that Great Conjunction degree. It’s hard not to see a resonance to that time when vaccines were unveiled, with lockstep fanfare, as the only path out of plague. 

Now consent is being manufactured, in real time, around the moral obligation of the West to instate a “no fly zone” — despite this being the very act of war that will likely trigger nuclear annihilation. It leads me to wonder if the majority of Americans who support this even know what a “a no fly zone” means or entails (not to mention the unspeakable gravity of its consequences).

Or has it become yet another meaningless hashtag — an emoji to insert in your bio, to signal one’s virtue, purity and submission to the tribal consensus. A streak of lamb’s blood above your virtual threshold. 

I mean, on one level I get it: how to sit back and do nothing as a nation is systematically crushed by a man who, like any garden-variety abuser, cannot stand to see Ukraine aspire to something beyond his own corruption and autocracy. I don’t think he will stop either until the wayward Ukrainian children are gathered into the lap of Mother Russia again. 

Already the US is hinting that chemical weapons will be a red line, and I worry about April’s Jupiter-Neptune conjunction in this regard — especially as Venus slips out of the malefic holding pattern in late March. An exalted Venus does not actually feel particularly peaceful, as I’ve noticed her as a major player in this particular war, and in the charts of dictators (fodder for another article, perhaps). 

Austin Coppock has described humanity, within this 200 year air age, as behaving increasingly like flocking birds. Indeed, as you swap out “covid 19” for “Putin”; “anti-vaxxers” for “Russians”; and “mask wearing” for the virtue signaling of pulling Dostoyevsky from library shelves, the ideological swarming barely misses a beat. Perhaps, in this new air age, humanity has finally abstracted into the waves of mass formation psychosis, rhizomic starbursts, and a death drive that seems to be analogous with too much system complexity. 

How else to explain the growing consensus around the inevitability of WW3, as if this doesn’t represent the brutal end of humanity as we know it. Instead, even war has been reduced to pure spectacle — the ultimate meme format.  Maybe this is all simply an act of libidinal outsourcing. After two years of being locked in our homes, and frying our dopamine receptors with non stop social media, perhaps it’s inevitable that humanity would be desperate for the next (and ultimate) instalment in the Marvel Universe’s endlessly sporing hydra heads. 

Zelensky himself was an actor and comedian whose career began in farce, and is now climaxing in tragedy (as Saturn crosses his Aquarius midheaven, no less). Even TikTok stars are being briefed on the US war line and “spheres of influence”. The word ends not in fire and ice, but simulation and simulacra. 

Of course, a new Red Scare is great for business, as well as for the censorship apparatus. A Russian bogeyman is the ultimate scapegoat for a multitude of corporate sins.  The Afghanistfication of Ukraine is also great for NATO, which is a business like any other. Already, inflation and soaring gas prices are being reframed as a noble sacrifice in the war against Russia. Price gouging is the new praxis, guys.

My fear with all of this is that greed and the corporate bottom line will see this war as simply too lucrative and convenient to end (much in the same way Covid was dragged out through feckless fear mongering around omicron). Glen Greenwald sees an extension of this conflict via a Western-funded insurgency as inevitable, and as black-pilled as his assessment is, it has the ring of truth. 

Now that the elites have had a taste of the power they can wield, (not to mention the endless, Plutonic wealth they can accrue), through the machinery of panic, they will keep finding new ways to keep the gravy train rolling. The authoritarian cattle prod of Saturn square Uranus is still very much a thing this year. They need a new Covid.

And I know the Orwellian meme is played to death, but… :“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”

I’ve been meaning to do a deep dive here on Putin’s chart, but it’s worth mentioning for now that the Venusian besiegement is happening in his fourth house — the belly of his chart. The fourth house is considered by the ancients as the subterraneous place: the chart’s symbolic midnight where root systems, the parents, and the ancestral matrix entangle.  It really is all about Mommy Russia, as Saturn’s longer march triggers Putin’s Imum Coeli and North Node conjunction. This is a rare, threshold moment for Putin: an opportunity to establish his legacy and prepare the ground for his death.

The insatiable hunger, and material conquest, of Putin’s dragon’s head is therefore trained on the ancestral aorta of the chart. He will have a sense of soul purpose when it comes to restoring the piecemeal shards of the Russian Empire (and Kiev has a special historical significance in this idealized unity). As a Libra, Putin is driven by harmony, and I can imagine the splintering of the Russian Empire would have been felt as an acute aesthetic affront (Hitler was another Venusian dictator).

Saturn, additionally, can manifest as an idealization (or even a longed for reclamation) of bygone, golden ages. All of this is interfacing through a sign of cool logic, rationalism and potentially rigid ideology. I don’t see Putin’s invasion as springing from a place of madness, or long covid brain fog. Rumors of a desperate, death-bloated man, hoping to go out in a blaze of glory are likely being leaked by the Kremlin itself. What better way to spook The West into doing something rash, after all, than by hinting that a madman has access to the nuclear codes.

There is, however, that uniquely Aquarian hubris of playing God, and this is precisely what worries me. I’m reminded of Orson Welles, in the Third Man’s ferris wheel scene, dehumanizing the fairgoers below as so many wave patterns of ants. 

Putin will likely be shielded by an Aquarian detachment in matters of homeland and ancestral lineages. He will not waver from what he sees as a perfectly sound rationale for the horrific violence and suffering he continues to unleash (both on the Ukrainians and his own people). From that Aquarian aerial view, the deaths are indeed statistics. In fact, Putin may see this struggle as archetypal, inevitable — the Yeatsian gyres of the East and West clashing again, as they must. 

Like every masterful lie, there’s also a kernel of truth: Ukraine does indeed have a Nazi problem, but name a country that isn’t dogged by a small group of extremists on both ends of the politicial spectrum. The nazi genocide Putin cites as the rationale for his “special operation” appears to be non existent. Of course, a classic abuse tactic is to deflect what you are onto your enemy. 

The fog of war has never been thicker, and I’m struggling to see through the Plutonic dust cloud of propaganda on both sides. Zelenskyy can be a hero, while also engaging in dangerous games of manipulation in his emotional extortions that The West “close the sky”. The cognitive dissonance of seeing liberals lionize Ukraine’s fascist Azov battalion, after smearing Trump supporters or Canadian truckers as LiteRal nAziS, is truly next level though.

Let’s not forget that Putin is a Scorpio rising, as well. The Scorpion, when cornered, will finally strike — though it will poleaxe itself along with its enemy. “It’s in my nature”. The comically long tables, and social-distance maxxing, do suggest a man hermetically-sealed in a Saturnian tower of ideology and increasing abstraction. At which point he feels the walls truly closing in, and how he will react when cornered — only time will tell. 

Now to somehow end these ruminations on a lighter note, here’s a quote by Tennesse Williams that made me cry during the Sun-Neptune conjunction this past weekend:

“The world is violent and mercurial — it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love — love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”

Also, just wanted to thank you for continuing to support my writing and star parsing. Its been hard to find the time to produce subscriber only content these days, but please know that your patronage is deeply appreciated. Once I’m out of ninth house malefic enclosure jail, and have handed in my PhD corrections, I hope to finally have more space for my own writing. xoxo