Mars in Cancer and a Scorpio Full Moon: We Fall to Pieces
I explore the Full Moon's reawakening of the Saturn-Uranus square, and Mars in its fall, through the crisis in India, Nancy Pelosi's adrenochrome epistle, Canuck tech censorship, and Andrei Rublev.
Snow falls in the Moosewood Sandhills, on ghost
burrows, deer woods, in the bone-home,
last snow.
What does it mean to become nothing?
You've dug a cave in the earth,
room of knowing, room of tears.
It means to place yourself beneath irrational things
and know they are without blame.
The potato smell of the dark.
You've given up.”
― Tim Lilburn, Moosewood Sandhills (Cancer and important mentor of mine)
This full moon reminded me of walking along the cedar coastline of Gabriola Island, to stumble upon an enormous heaping of kelp, tuber, sea weed and mermaid's hair. It was the size of a whale, but there was something almost alien about its tuberous motherboard: a cat's cradle of strange valves, latex ribbons and rubber piping the color of bottle glass. It felt like something the sea had dislodged, violently (even orgasmically), from its foamy throat. The pong of it drying in the sun practically slapped your face like an ammonia strip, or freshly poured tar. Indeed, there was a moment when the moon reached peak fullness that I felt the void gazing back, and my blood went ice cold.
When I meditate on the Scorpio archetype I see hidden networks, hyphae unspooling their Jamesian sentences between trees, and all numinous, but compelling power grids writ in blood, magnetic fields, ley-lines, vibration... (and viiiibes). Scorpio is the brain in the vagus nerve, the hinge in the Venus fly catcher's jaws, natural selection's mask growing its kohl-ringed eyes in moth wings, and the part of seduction that is veils twitching in front of a violent hunger and need.
Through Scorpio we confront the true, amoral complexity of system and hierarchies of power, and the sprawl of tendrils straining, and even choking that which it weaves through in order to stay alive.
As your cosmic gumshoe for hire, (and the daughter of reporters with my IC, Mars and Sun in the third house), an important part of my astrology practice is keeping my ear to the ground. I was curious to see how this full moon would advance the plot of events seeded in February, when we had our last exact Saturn-Uranus square, and vaccine roll outs were grinding (glacially) into motion.
The second cymbal clash is still applying and will peak in June, but the full moon plugging into the square would've brought these energies ricocheting down into the masses (as the Moon has purview over the rabble).
Firstly, news of the imminent Great Fire Wall of Canada was definitely in keeping with the techno-authoritarianism of the square. The last time I relied on a VPN was my year-long tenure teaching poetry and the classics in Beijing, and should I decide to linger in Canada post vaccination (I won’t), I might just find myself rebooting my Astril account. Interesting that conservative rag, The National Post , seems to be the only major Canadian newspaper running this story:
“Once hailed as a bastion of free speech, the internet is increasingly falling under the grip of state censors worldwide. China is purging dissent. India is silencing its critics. And Canada’s Liberals recently made changes to a bill that will allow authorities to control the content that people post to sites like YouTube. Watch out: Justin Trudeau is coming for your cat videos, and putting your free expression at risk.”
Perhaps the most obvious, and unsettling manifestation of this Scorpio Moon in the news has been the ongoing Covid crisis in India, the country’s third house stellium in Leo forming an intense grand cross with the Full Moon’s t-square. This also tracks with Mars' ingress into Cancer, which has been buffeting the helm of India’s Gemini rising, and now finds itself severing the resources of the second house (namely oxygen), which are supposed to support life of the first. India’s Mars is at 1 degree of Cancer, and the ingress coincided with the peaking of the deadly second wave.
Horrifying images of funeral pyres stacked in car parks, a hospital fire from exploded oxygen tanks, people collapsing in endless lines snaking out from emergencies, and even an earthquake striking another care facility--were all a grim reminder of the volatility and ruthlessness of this pandemic.
Scorpio crisis points, like that glistening knot of tuber expelled onto the beach, are often fiendish knots to untangle. Even the first decan of Cancer, where Mars is now river-larking, sees a flotilla of Sabian symbols associated with ship rigging, rope and knots. India's crisis is not isolated (and should worry us all), despite the Saturn-Uranus drive to crystallize, compartmentalize, and draw national lines in the sand in terms of vaccine technology--an extraordinary Promethean gift from the gods if there ever was one.
The BBC described the crisis in India as a perfect storm of governmental hubris and complacency, high population density, covid variants, false complacency as sprawling religious festivals returned, and of course vaccine nationalism: this is yet another facet of Uranus in Taurus seeding chaos in the realm of our resources. I see hoarding—whether of toilet paper or vaccine—as a reaction to this unsettling estrangement from the dimension of touch, oxytocin and our bodies easefully moving through physical spaces.
The Covid riptide in India also coincided with Mars' ingress into the sign of its fall, where the warrior takes on an aura of melancholy and dissonance after Gemini's coked up day trader: I think of the reluctant, exiled knights we see in Andrei Tarkovsky's Rublev, or Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. The latter wanders a plague scorched landscape only to play a game of chess with death himself. The battle is long over (though it continues to echo in the abstraction of marble and rigid chess moves) and the knight can only take on the mantle of witness, closing the eyes of the war-strewn dead, and comforting the women and children.
A recent spate of mass shootings (high even by American standards), and the political theatre of the Chauvin trial, has our neighbors down south understandably on edge (Mars husking that Cancer stellium). The craven spectacle of Nancy Pelosi, in an ecstasy of rhetoric, twisting George Floyd's brutal murder by the police into a fucking ritual sacrifice for Justice (by which she means The State and the rotting status quo) was the moment Mars really ingressed.
In the realm of Cancer, we are no fools for linguistic sleight of hand—we smell heartlessness and soul corrosion like bad blood, and we all saw The State practically melting via Pelosi's face (or whatever apparatus of hooks, and thread facelift, are attempting to convey empathy, while her lizard brain short-circuits on the symbolic frisson of it all).
I've been paying extra attention to our ingresses of Mars since the Capitol Hill storming coincided with the warrior trading its blood-matted fleece for the bull horns of a Q-anon shaman. The ingress into Gemini marked another potential Q-anon skirmish (March 4th being an important day in their deranged lore). True to Gemini's pixilated nature, the actual threat dissipated, but Mars compensated with Twitter rage, and internet brain.
We also saw the climax of kitsch, and clown-echelon capitalism, through the new money-laundering scheme of NFTs. The mass psychosis and simulacrum-fatigue was real. Language and jargon itself became increasingly weaponized, as if our signs and symbols themselves were in a state of fever and purification for that moment when we trade in the alphabet for the new hieroglyphs that are memes.
All of this is to say, Mars' ingress into Cancer ruptured the decidedly brittle ideological warfare of the past several weeks. We now find ourselves in the lands of ugly crying (only me?)--a catharsis that deepened with our recent lunation.
Full moon weeks often lead me to insomniac trawling of Reddit, and I couldn't help but notice a sudden uptick in posts on mental health struggles and loneliness (Capitalist Realism is one hell of a drug), as well as commentary on the phenomena of parasocial relations.
I'm not ashamed to admit how my desire to watch Criterion films and The Sopranos last summer was replaced, as the pandemic wore on, with a regular roster of podcasts, Zelda twitch streamers, and Subreddits. What a perfect corollary to the invisible Scorpionic networks, transcending the increasingly rigid tech infrastructure through moods, vibes and passionate long-form podcasting.
I’d like to do a longer piece on parasocial relations soon, but today is not that day as I’m feeling utterly full mooned. Let me know if the Scorpio Moon was cathartic, and how Mars in Cancer is sitting with you.
Welp, given my scorpio ruled 4th house and cancer ruled 12th house, my ugly cry was fueled by parent/family wounds and realizing how the elements are my family and in my many moments of solitude and loneliness and « no one understands me », I would (/still) go and feel understood and held by the wind, the sun, that rosemary bush, a bath...