Jupiter in Gemini's Glittering Images

Some decidedly scattered reflections on Jupiter in detriment, the past presidential debate, the 2024 election season in the shadow of the Great American eclipse, and the Trump assassination attempt.

Laurent Grasso — Studies from the Past

We’re almost two months into Jupiter’s transit of Gemini, the sign where the Greater Benefic is considered by the ancients to be in “detriment”. A sign where Jupiter is in a state of exile, separated from its resources, and less equipped to bring about its traditional significations: growth, expansion, protection, good faith, etc. 

Gemini is, of course, a Mercury-ruled sign, presiding over the early summer when the light is rapidly building and the frenzy of pollination is in full tilt. Appropriately, Gemini is given to micro-curiosities, hacks, factoids, mental shortcuts, and even the surface-level dazzle of linguistic artifice. “Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order”, said Samuel Beckett (a Jupiter in Gemini native). 

In terms of meaning-making, Gemini’s view is micro rather macrocosmic: the dragonflies in their stylish coital arabesques, so like the electric green canes rising from the moss tufts of Cat’s Eye lake, where we were hiking during the Jupiter ingress. Jupiter deals in the oracular force of metaphor; Mercury: the more fleet connective tissue of simile.  

If our Sky Daddy presides over consensus, great tents of faith and religion, as well as social congruence, this is the sign where the larger myths governing our society are troubled. Or begin to fracture altogether.  Etymologically, “detriment” means to rub away, to tear, to husk. It feels like no coincidence that only days before Jupiter ingressed into the sign of its ripping and fraying, aurora borealis opened incandescent portals in our skies, those alien tongues reaching as far south as California. We caught them in Kimberley too, as a Gemini-rising friend played his bamboo flute into the firmament.

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Just minutes before Jupiter ingressed, a dandy of a frog greeted us on the banks of the lake: an emissary of Mercury, surely (the steersman of Jupiter now). Frogs are liminal creatures after all: between land and water. They’re capable of changing their sexes in the tadpole stage, based on environmental conditions. Even their crepuscular choir, singing in the dusk, reminds me of Mercury’s endless underworld errands above and below the horizon line. Its star presides over the uncanny hours before and after the Sun rises, when shadows are softer and the palette blurs. 

In Aristophanes’ satirical play, The Frogs, our titular amphibians cause chaos during Dionysus’s passage to the underworld along the river styx. Much to Dionysus’ exasperation, the frogs are riotously chorusing a discordant song, bristling with puns in ancient Greece, all but drowning out the steadier melody Dionysus had matched to his oar strokes. Their cacophony is not only irritating but has interrupted a larger quest: Dionysus’ descent into Hades to rescue the dramatist, Euripides. 

 Within Jupiterian parameters, songs, myths, even epic poems function to impart moral lessons/instruction and to consolidate social order.  The rigid hexameter and steady metrics of an elegy, for example, are the socially codified sluices and locks that enable the flux of a recently departed human soul to travel into the frozen canon of all songs of mourning. Jupiter’s hieratic bent has a social function. 

In the sign of Gemini, however,  this larger project breaks down. Jupiter in Gemini finds meaning in all places. Its verbal patterning fractals off in a million digressions. It is language overhearing itself and breaking down into the inside jokes of puns, double-entendres, and mocking reiteration. 

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In terms of great tents of consensus becoming unpegged amidst Jupiter in Gemini’s restless winds, the presidential debate of June 27th felt particularly emblematic. Aside from Biden’s mind melting in real time — gazing beyond the middle distance and straight into Bardo itself — it’s the desperate Democratic clinging to the narrative of this presidential candidate that feels particularly perilous in these Jupiter in Gemini times. Fortune favors the fleet and the nimble in this moment, at least as far as Jove is concerned. Just look at the French leftist coalition, the New Popular Front, defeating the far right in France a week ago in the final round of snap parliamentary elections. 

Then again, there’s something about Biden’s dance macabre, playing out in the most public of ways, that fits with America’s sleepwalking off the abyss in the wake of its recent Pluto return. The US also hosted a total solar eclipse in April, its totality path not far from Washington DC itself. This particular eclipse was just a degree off the glitzy exaltation degree of the Sun: a king killer, if there ever was one. 

For the ancients, Sol represented kings, emperors, and heads of state. And around the Sun’s degree of exaltation, the luminary is at its most decorated, gilded, and even pompous.  Eclipses, however, represent the obfuscation or sudden dethroning of even the most powerful political figures.

In Mesopotamia there existed the substitute king ritual, which was performed to protect the king from the eclipses’ baleful rays. For 100 days the king would go into hiding, performing rituals of exorcism and protection. In the meantime, the substitute king would enjoy all the wealth and pleasures of the court, until the 100 days were up and the substitute was put to death having successfully absorbed the ominous eclipse energy.  In a roundabout way, it feels like Hunter Biden has been proffered as the symbolic scapegoat. Biden has said that he would not pardon his son, after all, should Hunter actually face prison time. 

On a mundane level, eclipses create conditions of poor visibility: the shortsightedness of backing a candidate in the late stages of dementia, for example. A MacBethian Jill praising Joe for answering all the questions. In recent photographs of Biden, slack-jawed against a backdrop of draping blue curtains, it’s difficult not to draw Lynchian comparisons. On the other side of the US’s Pluto return, the president looks as uncannily animatronic as the robins that close out Blue Velvet.  The next presidential debate in September will fall just a week before the first North Node Pisces eclipse in 18 years, which will bring its plot twists to Biden’s 4th House of family and roots. Harsh lessons and consequences may befall the president from within his inner circle

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And with Jupiter in Gemini now, once convincing — or at least tacitly agreed upon — narratives are skittering away like beads of quicksilver. With Biden’s most recent press conference gaffes, the meme cycle is now being flooded with the geo-political chimeras of Biden’s failing mind. Like that dada-ist parlor game, exquisite corpse, images are now circulating of Zelensky topless on a white horse or Trump’s head photoshopped onto one of Kamala’s pastel power suits. It’s high Jupiter in Gemini malarky indeed but also a signal that tragedy is now tipping over into farce as far as US politics are concerned. 

Apart from the longer unraveling of the Great American Eclipse and Jupiter in Gemini’s center no longer holding, the presidential debate was dominated by Saturn stationing retrograde in the last arc seconds of Pisces. The Saturn-Neptune co-presence is closer than ever, a time of collective fatigue, disillusionment, and once load-bearing structures dissolving. 

Anytime Saturn stations, we feel our own mortality much more acutely. And in Pisces, it’s a metaphysical chill that settles deep in the bones. The fear of krakens stirring in deep water. Saturn also signifies old age, processes of decay, and death itself. As the presidential debate with the two oldest candidates in history, it makes sense that this debate was sponsored by Kronus and ended with two old men squabbling about their golf strokes.

Saturn stationing right after the debate is striking enough, but the planet of hard limits ground to a halt almost exactly on Biden’s IC. For a debate that was scheduled unusually early in the election season, you couldn’t have really picked a worse day for the president’s performance. From the Latin for “bottom of the sky”, the IC is the point in the chart where the Sun symbolically dies in the underworld. As a counterpoint to the MC, which represents the Sun at high noon and symbolizes one's worldly status, the IC is a much more private and domestic part of the chart. It’s the final resting place. The ancestral matrix. Not unlike eclipses, it represents the end of the matter. 

Saturn stationing on the president’s MC echoes the rising chorus of senators, democratic party donors, and even Biden’s bestie George Clooney, all imploring the president to pack it in. Clooney’s messaging was well within Saturn's wheelhouse: “the one battle he can’t win is the fight against time”.

Given the indignities and pathos of cognitive decline, the 4th House is exactly where Biden should be: drinking ovaltine and watching West Wing reruns in the most private and cloistered part of the chart. With an eclipse set to light up this same house axis in the fall, there's the very real possibility that this will be Biden’s last chance to enjoy his grandkids before shuffling into the blue velvet curtains of his 12th House stellium and its natal promise. 

But with transiting Neptune’s foghorn sounding on the anaretic degree, the gaslighting will likely continue until morale improves. The inertia of sunk costs is the true 21st century kraken. A last foray of Pluto into Capricorn, this early fall, is further foreshadowing that the gerontocracy will not fall gently from the coconut tree in the run up to the election season.

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Well, holy shit. I was just about to get into Trump’s current transits when my socials exploded with news of the attempted assassination attempt at the rally in Pennsylvania today. This is still an unfolding news story, so I will not be commenting on the details. However, I was wondering about Trump’s chart this weekend, with his 24 degrees Taurus MC set to be triggered by the highly volatile Mars-Uranus conjunction at 26 degrees Taurus. The conjunction actually perfects on Monday, the same day that the Republican National Convention launches. But it’s very much building in intensity now. 

It was when Mercury and Uranus conjoined at 24 degrees Taurus, on June 3rd, that Trump was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records. Mars-Uranus is also squaring Trump’s Leo Mars, which is just a few degrees off his Leo ascendant, a transit that could absolutely impact the former president in a highly physical way. Mars rules over blood, combat, severings, and violent actions of all stripes. 

Regardless of how you feel about Trump (I personally can’t stand his narcissistic, garden variety demon-of-chaos ass), the images circulating now of his bloodied face and fist pump, as secret service agents scuttle him away to safety, in undeniably a “glittering image” — and will likely become the “face” of the campaign narrative that coheres around Trump over the convention. Trump will milk this for all it’s worth. I’m sure the merch is hot off the presses, as I type this: an image of MAGA-red martyrdom. It’s undeniably powerful imagery to invoke in these late Piscean times, especially as we anticipate Saturn and Neptune finally conjoining Aries in 2025. 

From a Jupiter in Gemini lens, this moment will likely only expand the polarization that Trump has used as his primary political parlor trick. Zooming out, Uranus will start to transition into Gemini in 2025, into the US’s house of open enemies, applying its defibrillator paddles to Trump’s Gemini Sun-Uranus-North Node: not a chill combination. Past Uranus in Gemini transits have coincided with the American Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War 2, just for further context.

All of this is just a reminder of how chaotic this election season is foreshadowed to be, under the Great American Eclipses’ after-ring (and recent events). 

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As a needed palette cleanser, I’d like to offer Cancer queen of surrealism, Shelley Duvall (RIP), singing a Harry Nilsson song in Popeye. Bless.