Mars in Gemini: We Do a Little Finding Out
A Virgo New Moon squares Mars, who is already hacking the astral fantastic in Gemini. I unpack Mars's long larp as psychopomp, as he ushers us over the Plutonic threshold into the new Aquarius Aeon.
“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”
― James Joyce (Mars in Gemini)
“It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”
― Virginia Woolf (Mars in Gemini)
“I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Mars in Gemini)
“If this is the end, I want a boyfriend.”
– Lana Del Rey
Mercurials of the world: it’s your time. Yesterday a New Moon dawned in Virgo, squaring Mars in Gemini in a tense dialectic. Quite the astringent tonic — but a needed one. It’s time to start saying the quiet part out loud, as the balance of fucking around finally tips into a new era of finding out. As collapse accelerates all across the globe in a dizzying cascade of droughts, floods, nuclear roulette, and desiccated rivers, we will need Mercury’s unflinching pragmatism to cut through the end times malaise (and delusion). Honestly though — it’s a lot. I’m finding it harder and harder to keep up with the endless carousel of man-made horrors. (And I’m still searching for an end times lover / travel companion — sigh).
Emmanuel Macron’s recent speech heralded this new season of eviscerating clarity, as he described humanity at a tipping point in our long expired “age of abundance and insouciance”. The narrative is already being massaged. Over this lunation, we may experience the first prickles of the coming winter of our discontent, as well as the themes that will emerge during Mars’s seven-month long master class in the sign of the twins. Yes, seven months!
Hours before the New Moon perfected, an electrical storm swept through our river valley — a quick and dirty affair. There was hardly any rain (which our drought-stricken lands sorely need), but Uranus and Venus put on quite a show, edging each other in a perfect square as the storm pounced. Whips of lighting lassoed into greek vase motifs, breaking a summer’s worth of languid heat. And there was Mars too, undressing the sky with his scalpel. Dashing the fourth wall to smithereens. The next day I noticed the light had lost its dreamy sepia. The air felt exfoliated, sharper — threaded with the chill of the winter to come.
Mars is actually the planet that retrogrades the least, it’s archetype more disposed to action, rabble-rousing, and rushing in where fools fear to tread. Mars does not prevaricate like Mercury, the planet that retrogrades the most frequently (up to three times a year). When the cosmic warrior backtracks, and painstakingly scours the same tract of starry real estate (for seven months, no less) it feels potent. Even portentous.
I see Mars retrograde as the soldier transformed into the scout. Especially so in the sign of Gemini, Mars embarks on a mission of mapping, establishing the fault lines of power, global tension, and the coordinates of the battles to come. Whether this be humanity’s existential struggle against climate change, the potential Balkanization of the USA still in the throes of its “empire killing” Pluto return, the ongoing grim spectacle of war in Europe, the spiritual crisis of our post-truth era, or the chthonic rumblings of our shift into a multipolar world — I believe this retrograde will flip over all the most important cards of our new Plutonic era to come (even if it leaves us with more questions than answers).
Recall Mars’s last retrograde in Aries, where it was empowered in the sign of its domicile (basically given free reign to ratchet up strife and discord). The “summer of love” saw cities across the USA burn in near daily riots in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. A particularly nasty forest fire season also saw skies across California turn Blade Runner orange and red, just as the planet stationed retrograde in September — quite literally impregnating the skies with its fiery archetype. Mars did not go gently into that good night either, leaving Aries the very afternoon the events of January 6th unfolded.
Mars retrograde in Gemini is a much different game, however. The Martian combativeness will be concentrated in the realm of ideas (rather than Aries’ sheer brute force). Yes Virginia — it’s all a pysop. We could see an uptick in propaganda, deep fakes, vicious de-platforming of heretics, whistleblowing, hacking, and even more brazen censorship. There will likely be an intensification of cancel culture, pandemic revisionism, and media gaslighting (if this all sounds familiar, remember that the North Node’s rapacious dragon head was in Gemini during the first two years of the pandemic, as quarantine accelerated our post-truth world). What one Twitter user described as TikTok “mkultraing everyone under 30 into theater kid simulacrums” will likely accelerate — and get even weirder. The virtual could also further bifurcate into privately-funded platforms that decry censorship, and those under the umbrella of Zuck that act as extensions of the interests of The State. I think we could leave Mars in Gemini, 7 months later, with two completely siloed versions of the internet.
We may also witness one last open access Renaissance of memes, before Pluto in Aquarius attempts some sort of institutional mimetic capture — when our anons and admins (truly the philosophers of our time) may be forced into creative exile. Corporate memeing won’t work, of course: once you “have” a meme it ceases to be one. You can’t isolate a meme from its authorless rhizome, as thousands more will just rush into its space. A meme only exists in the communal swoop of its modification — its quicksilver darting and weaving is something that can’t be focus grouped, or engineered. But trust that the powers that be will try! “Hello fellow kids” indeed. In any case, as we transition from the Earth Age to the Air Aeon (Pluto in Aquarius crystallizing the crossover) meme magic will likely be one of the crucial battle grounds during Mars in Gemini (and beyond).
In the sign of our airy contrarian, Mars is in peregrine condition — he possesses no essential dignity. Peregrine planets have a tendency to wander, and Gemini is a mutable sign given to dispersal already. The fact that Mars’s ruler, Mercury, opposed Neptune around the same time of the ingress suggests that this war of words will be concentrated around misinformation. The conspiracy-industrial-complex may reach new levels of frenzy, weaponization, and militancy. In fact, tarot readers and astrologers may be the next target in the waves of shadow banning to come.
Yes folks, seven months is a long time for Mars to hack the interstitial. To stitch-pick whatever embroidered tatters remain of our thriving, complex systems. Clouds continue to be seeded in drought-stricken China, as drones scratch storms right out of the sky. The world’s mightiest rivers have been reduced to threads, their ancient hunger stones offering a dire prognosis: “see me and weep”. When it’s not hunger stones, it’s a graveyard of Nazi warships, coughed up by The Danube (not ominous at all). Microplastics have infiltrated every last raindrop. War in Ukraine continues to flirt with a second Chernobyl, and the fact that a potential nuclear disaster barely makes the news anymore is, itself, a new level of horror. I apologize for the doomer turn this post has taken, but Gemini is the sign where it all falls to pieces. The fates gathered round our earthly cat’s cradle, cutting more and more of those quantum strings.
What’s fascinating to me about this Mars retrograde in particular is its relationship to Pluto — the great transformer — slumming it in the last dregs of Capricorn. As you probably know, Pluto will be changing signs into Aquarius in March of next year (and Saturn will enter Pisces not long after). We’ll be time-traveling into a whole new reality next spring, though Pluto will only dip its toes in the sign of the alien/angel — think of it as a trailer for the cinematic opus to come. In any case, it feels significant that Mars will linger in dexterous Gemini during this transition, scattering and dispersing the last holding patterns before we enter the new Air Aeon in earnest. In fact, Mars was in Gemini during our last Plutonic changing of the guard, when Pluto entered Capricorn in 2008.
Pluto is one of our slower moving planetary titans, bringing its twinned entropy and evolutionary impulse to humanity as a whole. For the Millenials — the embattled, “don’t talk to me before I’ve had my Twin Towers, my Great Recession, my plague, my polycule for housing crisis reasons” Pluto in Scorpio generation — Pluto’s journey through Aquarius will be the great challenge of their lives. The spiritual battle their souls apparently chose (masochists — the lot of us). For the Pluto in Leo boomers, it will be the last white-knuckle attempt to consolidate power and live out the end of days in New Zealand bunkered comfort. And since the zoomers live in the eternal Tik-Toked present of Kate Bush as that singer from Stranger Things — I think they’ll be ready to be yeeted into the AI hive mind by the time Pluto in Pisces dissolves humanity completely. It’s giving liminal back rooms vibes.
The day that Mars ingressed into Gemini, Nasa released an audio rendering of a black hole and its alien keening was about as eerie as you’d expect. In a way, its maenad howl felt like the thesis statement of this transit and its relationship to Pluto: the pure, entropic noise of everything we’ve been speaking around in these dog days of collapse. Everything that’s too horrifying to say. In fact, it reminded me of the eerie cacophony that accompanies scenes of Kubrick’s monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Through the film the Monolith’s appearance precipitates great leaps forward in humanity’s evolution — very much a Plutonic archetype (and Mars is considered the lower vibration of Pluto in evolutionary astrology).
I’ve written before about Pluto as “revealing” itself (and exerting its inexorable influence) through paradoxical absence, a vacuum — the void. The monolith’s implacable surface sends the viewer falling backward through ever more inscrutable rings of the self. Kubrick himself explained the monolith as a way to cinematically depict an alien presence in a way that would be “as mind boggling as the being itself” — its imposing austerity and blankness acknowledging that anything rendered photographically could not match the power of the imagination. Collapse itself has long been a distant abstraction — even an alien presence — but Mars in Gemini is here to ferry us through these mysteries and help us bring language to bear on these horrors. We may be naming and de-fanging a few of our own shadows too.
Richard Tarnas equates Pluto with a libidinally-charged Dionysian urge. Pluto brings volcanic outpourings of rage, sexual ecstasy, a Nietzchian will-to-power — even an inexorable death-drive — to everything it touches. Since 2008, Pluto has brought its chthonic rumblings to Capricorn: a Saturnian sign associated with big business, banks, the consolidation of resources, and protection of the status quo. Pluto has a tendency to both compress and massively expand everything it touches, so we see more and more abstract iterations of capital through Capricorn — a veritable Tower of Babylon.
As mentioned, the last time we had a Mars retrograde in Gemini was during the credit crunch and subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-2008, which resulted in the stock market crash of 2008. Mars in Gemini loves to play elaborate games and the housing bubble offers a warning as to the dangers of such fiendish financial origami (I see echoes now in Blackrock’s massive corporate buyout of land and real-estate and our emerging techno-feudalism). The banking crisis also coincided with the ingress of Pluto into Capricorn — the Plutonic epoch we’re now about to exit.
I think it’s fair to say that we never recovered from the last stock market implosion. A few fall guys were imprisoned, of course, but the globalists resurrected the economy's Lazarus by printing more and more money. The 1 percent also continued with their Plutonic agenda of hoarding wealth and hiding it in offshore accounts (Pluto loves to bury treasure, after all). Jeffrey Epstein, larping as Hades himself, was also blackmailing our world’s most powerful elites with a child sex-trafficking ring, as channels of power and influence unfurled deeper into Tatratus. As we brace for another recession (or part two of the one that was deferred), it’s clear to me that 2008’s Faustian pact will continue to reverberate in this new age of consequence.
With Mars in Gemini on psychopomp duty once more, ushering us over the threshold into a new Plutonic era in Aquarius, I would pay very close attention to the games that are being played to influence, control, and consolidate power within mass social movements. In Aquarius, Pluto’s volcanic eruptions of dionysian rage will explode in a social and ideological context, rather than tunneling into the material world and corrupting our institutions — as we saw through Capricorn. Of course widespread institutional distrust will be part of the violent societal unrest to come. Plutonic ages are waves and impossible to isolate from each other. The French Revolution dominated Pluto’s last tour of Aquarius, just for context, but it was Pluto in Capricorn’s rotting of the feudal power structure that set the stage for the upheaval to come.
Mass hysteria, waves of ideological fervor, sex and death cults, social straification across lines of tech-augmentation, the prophecized technological singularity, trans-humanism — these all feel like possible ways Pluto in Aquarius will unfold (and yes, I’ll be writing more about this in the coming months). Against the rising zealotry, group think, algorithmically-managed despair/rage, and empathy-killing atomization of this aeon that’s dawning, we are offered one last Mercurial stand. Make the most of these next seven months of relative mobility!
My hope is that Mars in Gemini will ensoul language once more and rupture the brittle rhetorics of tribal signaling (dead language, like so much lamb’s blood, designed to shake off the woke mob). I hope we’ll see new stories, myths, and lore embroider the institutional gaps. I hope people will start immersing themselves in the classics again, as there’s no better antidote for Millennial narcissism and malaise than realizing that every Wojack in existence was already penned by Dostoyevsky.
In fact, I think it’s possible that society itself will bifurcate into those who will finally reject — on a soul-level — Aquarius’s totalizing social categories and mass identity-politics psyop. The Mercurials (and Mercury adjacents) who maintain a tolerance for ambiguity. Those who continue to believe that one’s subtle and recalcitrant inner life cannot be stripped for parts and fed back into the machinery of Capital. Then there will be those who will continue to shelter in corporate-sponsored “counter cultures” (aka cults), testifying by canceling the Sydney Sweeney of the week on Twitter — living dopamine spike to spike. I know what side I’ll be on.
Just remember, those who most vehemently insist on the purity of their soul; who set elaborate language traps for you to fall in; who act purely from an impulse of persecution (never forgiveness); and who wear the dominant culture as sheep’s clothes — they will be the first baying for blood during the revolutionary epoch to come. The people who would have you denounce your family because they voted for Trump — these people are not your friends. But they definitely want you isolated (a classic abuse tactic). I can only hope that the majority of people involved in today’s Sydney Sweeney Twitter feeding frenzy are bots — but that’s probably hoping for too much.
Anyway, I’m trying to remember that a lot of this dystopian static disappears as soon as you put down the phone. It really is that simple. A couple weeks ago, I ventured down the valley with my oldest friend to swim in the crystalline waters of The Slocan. The air was smokeless and the pebbled beach was almost empty, save for a few New Denver locals. The only hint of the anthropocene was the extraordinary warmth of the water — I could’ve been floating on my back in The Med, cava buzzed in Cadaques.
After our dip, I was lost in meditation, stacking a cairn of river stones. Just as I found a particularly beautiful rock, bisected by lightning bolts of snowy quartz, a black bear emerged out of the cedars right in front of me — just a couple meters away. I froze, struck dumb, holding my stone as time slowed to a molten langour.
Whether the bear registered my presence or not, I caught a glimpse of his gimlet eyes — implacable — as he loped past me toward the water in a graceful, rolling gait. My friend whispered calm into the ears of her border collie, who frankly seemed unbothered. The bear drank from the lake and wallowed for a while in the surf, before melting back into the woods. It’s hard to explain how surreal the encounter felt. The chill of Kubrick’s monolith was there, as I was faced by an alien intelligence with unpredictable, potentially deadly caprices. Claws that could rip my face off in one fell swoop. Except there we were, sharing this fleeting intimacy: joined as creatures seeking relief from the relentless heat — humbled at the seat of our increasingly unforgiving solar deity.
These lines of Rumi come to mind:
“Before the Sun can a handful of snow do anything but become annihilated in radiance and light.”
For now, I invite you to bask in this haunting performance of Pink Floyd’s “Great Gig in the Sky”, with its Gemini-esque twinned high priestesses sonically rending that pomegranate stitched veil. I think it speaks to the anxiety, the mystery — even the sublimity — of this threshold moment for humanity. An aria of everything we’re not supposed to know … at least not quite yet.
A note on the drawings: Emma Kunz was a Swiss-born painter, healer, medium, and spiritual visionary whose large-scale pictures on graph paper emerged through a process called radiesthesia — the ability to detect the mandalas of radiation emitted by a person, object or location. Her images were expressions of the energetic fields of her patients and she used a pendulum to guide her meticulous progress — sessions that sometimes lasted 24 hours. Kunz has a stellium in Gemini in the 8th house involving Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and the Sun. No wonder she was such a pure channel. The fractaled intricacy of her drawings (which often feel like weavings) also captures Gemini’s interstitial peregrinations. Exquisite.
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Aptly spoken as shou
Aptly spoken as should