Duelling Dioscuri: Jupiter in Gemini's Chaotic Coda via Trump and Musk

Divine twins, Glazer's deconstructed geezer caper, Sexy Beast, and Jupiter extra catty on the anaretic degree.

The Dioscuri — Giorgio de Chirico (1974)

“Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.”

— “Two-Headed Calf” by Laura Gilpin

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“The girls are fighting”, quipped AOC. “Trump and Musk’s breakup is truly the gayest thing about Pride Month”, tweeted Josh Sorbe — and seriously, you cannot make this shit up. At least cosmically, speaking. The ongoing feud between the “ex-first buddy”, Elon Musk, and an embattled Donald Trump — who has written off Musk as “the man who has lost his mind” — is peak Gemini season, the bitchiest of the signs by a country mile. Trump and Musk’s marriage of political convenience was always going to implode. Just as two siamese fighting fish cannot occupy the same tank for long, it’s practically a law of physics that two malignant narcissists and edgelords, with major Gemini placements, would eventually collide with extreme cattiness.

But that it happened with Jupiter in Gemini on the potent anaretic degree — the culmination of a reality-fracturing transit that has flooded all the zones — is striking indeed. Bringing even more elegance to this coda is that Jupiter’s ruler, Mercury, was squaring the Nodes this past week too, as Musk went scorched earth with the Epstein files tweet. Not only that, but Musk recently threatened to decommission the Dragon spacecraft that Nasa relies on to transport astronauts to and from the International Space station. Mercury (the planet of transport) squaring the Nodes (the mythical heads and tail on the dragon): It doesn’t get more literal than that.

Speaking of Ozymandian Saturn in Aries omens, Musk’s janky af 12-foot bust in Texas was recently defaced

What also feels fated about this MAGA schism is the fact that Donald Trump is on the cusp of his Mars return (it will perfect in the coming days). The defiant fist bump and rallying cry of “fight, fight, fight” on that Pennsylvania stage has now flipped into a gleeful schoolyard chant as the two bullies duke it out and the schadenfreude intensifies. Both Musk and Trump have important Cancer placements and it was during Mars retrograde through the sign of the crab, where the warrior falls and is humiliated, that the two forged their alliance. Musk was given a seat at the oligarchs table and a golden bureaucratic chainsaw, which he used to slash through federal jobs, tanking his own Tesla stock in process (the Mars in Cancer tendency to fall on its own sword). And Trump was given the X algorithm.

Musk releasing the MAGA hounds into the one of the world’s most powerful social media platforms likely played a crucial role in Donald Trump’s victory. Jupiter in Brat-green Gemini lavished its bounty on those who won the information wars, the meme wars, the podcast wars. The ancients assigned Jupiter to political ties, brotherhood, and allegiances of all kinds, so it makes sense that a pact forged under Jupiter in Gemini could potentially collapse as the gas giant prepares to change signs.

Gemini totems spied in Parc Jarry

Jupiter also finds itself in detriment in the sign of the twins, where its bonds are unstable and its rewards as capricious as zephyr winds. Musk jumping up-and-down on campaign stages and Tweeting that he “loves Donald Trump as much as any straight man reasonably could” all smacks of the love-bombing and sugar highs that this transit amplifies (in my opinion, anyway).

On top of Jupiter’s bubble spectacularly bursting, Mars is about to leave the sign where it started its tactical retreat: Leo. As mentioned, It will cross Trump’s own Mars and puffed up Leo ascendant on its way out, increasing the odds of more deeply personal attacks. However things unravel in the coming days, it appears that Trump will be prepared to brandish his lion claws and fight. Or at least put on quite a show doing so. Of course, the question begs if this battle royale between two megalomaniacs is not some elaborate dopamine harvesting event, or Jupiter’s last coup-de-misdirection. The calculated chaos yet again distracts from the destructive consequences of Trump’s political agenda, like the recently resurrected travel ban.

Or, as journalist Andrew Mitrovica put it, “Armed with a cellphone – likely embossed with the presidential seal – and a glint of inspiration, Trump can instantly shape or reshape the dominant “news” narrative. He does this by flashing shiny, fleeting baubles that further his parochial interests, while more consequential matters drift by like a passing cloud, unnoticed – leaving the hard, complex stuff to fade into neglect.”

Pantomime fisticuffs or not, during Gemini season, myths of divine twins rise in the collective consciousness. The constellation of Gemini itself is represented by the inseparable Greek dioscuri, the twins Castor and Pollux, fond of boxing, games of chance, and riding horses in their wide-brimmed hats. The immortal Pollux was the son of Zeus, who seduced Leda in the form of a swan. Mortal Castor was the son of Spartan King Tyndareus, Leda’s actual husband. During a family feud (or potentially a battle) the human twin, Castor, dies, though Pollux later begs his father Zeus to give Castor a part of his immortality. And so they are joined together in the heavens again, symbols of sacrifice and divine reunion.

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Dioscuri echoed through the film we randomly selected from the Criterion Collection last night — Sexy Beast — a geezer crime caper gone all warped through a David Lynch filter. (Spoilers ahead). Ben Kinglsey’s psychotic Don, one half of an erstwhile crime duo, tracks down his old partner again, shattering his Iberian idyll and retirement on the Costa del Sol. Don’s arrival takes on a supernatural force, as just days before a boulder crashes into Gal Dove’s hacienda pool: the one with the two conjoined hearts tiled on its floor. He’s there to propose one last job his old mate absolutely can’t refuse. And what follows is a tidal wave of bullying, violence, and caustic jabs so relentless that the two do indeed seem metaphysically yoked. And even the heist, an afterthought in the plot, involves womb-like tunnelling and scuba-gear. There’s no sealing away his shadowy criminal past in London; Gal has to follow the umbilical cord back to the source before cutting it. And even when Don finally meets his comeuppance, he only borrows deeper into Gal’s subconscious.

Trump and Musk, both highly combustible egomaniacs with daddy issues, are not twins by blood of course. Still, their natal charts offer some uncanny celestial mirrorings. They share in common prominent personal placements in Gemini and Cancer (further activated as the gas giant prepares to change signs into Cancer). Both have mutable Moons and fixed Mars signs. Since forming their precarious pact, Musk has been a stage 5 clinger presence in the Oval Office. He was also given permanent residence at Mar-a-Lago, the first “first buddy”, as he has called himself.

As for mythic twins, I think their feud harkens Rome more than ancient Greece. This is perhaps appropriate, given Trump’s flirtation with dictatorship, his administration often compared to the ancient reign of the Roman caesars, with all their flagrant power and excess. The story of the founding of Rome involves a factious relationship between twins, Romulus and Remus. They were the sons of Rhea Silvia, the daughter of a King who forced her to take a vow of chastity as a vestal virgin in order to prevent future claimants to his throne. Nevertheless, she was impregnated by Mars, the God of War, and the King ordered the twins drowned in the Tiber river. The twins somehow survive and the trough carries them to the future site of Rome, near a sacred fig tree, where the brothers are suckled to health by a she-wolf and later taken under the wing of a shepherd who raises them.

As adults, they eventually discovered their royal heritage and overthrew Amulius, restoring their grandfather, Numitor, to the throne. The brothers then set out to found a new city but disagrees on its location — Romulus favored the Palatine Hill, while Remus preferred the Aventine Hill. To resolve the dispute, they held an augur contest (the OG Twitter battle), scrying the will of the gods through the flight paths of birds. Remus saw six vultures first, but Romulus saw twelve shortly after, leading to a dispute over whose sign was more auspicious. Tensions escalated, and Romulus killed Remus— either in a direct confrontation or after Remus mocked Romulus by leaping over his city walls. (This is the point in the story, I suppose, where Musk insults Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”). Through this violent act of fratricide, Romulus went on to found the city of Rome, naming it after himself, and becoming its first king.

Speaking of omens…

Are we witnessing a sacrificial ritual in the founding of Trump’s Romerica? The “illegal alien” is cast into the K-hole (or exiled, as Trump’s backers call for Musk to be investigated and potentially deported). Meanwhile, Yarvin, Thiel, and the like, playing the long game, continue to whisper into Trump’s ear. Yarvin, whose ideas helped inspire Doge, has recently referred to it scornfully as “an orchestra of chimpanzees”. Even Trump has been relatively measured within this war of Tweets, allowing Musk to dig his own ketamine-fuelled grave. On May 30th, during his oddly muted and decidedly Lynchian send off in the Oval Office, Musk sported a swaying dissociated affect and a black eye. Trump’s muted, “he was ‘wearing thin’”, feels somehow more sinister for its restraint.

Just as one mythic twin is sometimes cast as the brutish foil to its more civilized other, this could all be playing into Trump’s tiny hands. Musk performs the derangement of the reigning tech billionaires: a pantomime of lancing the boil while the wound continues to fester behind closed doors. This plays into the larger strokes of Saturn and Neptune in Aries, their reality-bending mandate now lodged in the sign of the sacrificial lamb. Let’s not forget the ruler of Saturn-Neptune, Mars, is still operating through Leo’s stagey theatrics (at least for a few more days).

And Jupiter will ingress into Cancer on Monday, from its detriment’s bitchy jibes to a much more empowered position in its exaltation. Cancer is also Musk’s first house. Though this transit could boost and even protect Musk on a personal level — potentially inspiring that third party run — I can’t help but think of the world’s (still) richest man transformed into a sea sponge, doomed to absorb the vitriol that’s building as the Trump administration’s war on democracy continues. Nevertheless, his hands are still on the levers of the X platform, and just as he tweaked the algorithm to flood the zone with MAGA propaganda, he could just as easily “hot button” posts skewering the Trump administration. And the fact remains that Musk’s vast tech infrastructure is still very much entangled with Nasa and the Pentagon. It would also play an important role in the fabled “Golden Dome”. This is one Gordian knot, or twin-to-twin blood transfusion, that will not be easily severed in one fell swoop.

Then again, Trump has a history of welcoming his enemies back into the fold, but only if they’re willing to contort back into their pigeon-holes (narcissists cannot conceive of other people as whole unto themselves: they’re tropes, bit players, NPCs, figments of their waking dream). Speaking about Ukraine and Russia Trump recently remarked “Sometimes you see two young children fighting like crazy. They hate each other, and they’re fighting in a park, and you try and pull them apart. They don’t want to be pulled. Sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart.” Even if they were to kiss and make up, Musk would probably need to “drop on his knees and beg” first, as Trump tweeted in 2022.

Jupiter entering Musk’s first house could give him the confidence to pour his billions into taking on Trump. It could also pour gasoline on his delusions of grandeur. But it’s Uranus entering Musk’s 12th House on July 7th that brings a much more serious challenge, a place connected with hidden enemies as well as self-undoing. It will immediately activate his Saturn in Gemini at 1 degree, hinting at a shocking destabilization of Musk’s status and sense of security. This could potentially involve his tech infrastructure: Gemini rules over communication, transport systems, and arguably the internet. The ruler of his Saturn, Mercury, is conjoined Musk’s Cancer ascendant, so this will all be felt on an extremely butt-hurt, personal level. And Trump is already threatening Musk’s businesses, some of which have billions of dollars of federal contracts. Or as former FDA adviser Peter Loge put it:

“As a real estate developer, politician and president, he has used every tool at his disposal to punish people he thinks have wronged him,” Loge added. “Unless Musk expresses contrition, Trump is likely to hurt him in every way he can think of. If Musk is contrite, he can be welcomed back into the Trump tent.”

Much is yet to be written in this janky reality show with camera booms left in the frame. And so much depends on the profound vibe shifts that both these ingresses will bring. But what’s becoming clear is that Saturn in its fall in Aries is already doing its thing: the Ketamine King is falling. But will he take his SpaceX dragons with him?

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Speaking of knots that are impossible to unravel, the night that Mercury squared the nodes we fell into a trance Friday night — it lasted through an entire New Order album — trying to untangle a string of fiendishly fine, solar-powered lights. In the crepuscular garden, with the rosebush just starting to bloom, we performed this ghostly reiki for much longer than was necessary (two vesper martinis at Nouveau Palais in Mile End could’ve contributed to the madness). The nodes of the Moon are cosmos’ Moirai strings of course; the unputbackable intestines of dragons. And Mercury is in Gemini, the sign of tiny syntactical units of light. In the end, there was no tracing the fate-strings back to their source. The same starry road in was not the same road out. We balled the lights. The tangle would be the light fixture, nested in a mason jar. Very clap-stomp-yeah. Very “bless this mess”.

I’m going to close this out with some Blonde Redhead, the restlessly expatriate American band composed of Kazu Makino and identical twin brothers Simone and Amedeo Pace.