Mars Intensifies
On the Full Moon in Cancer conjunct Mars, the Los Angeles wildfires, and Neptune's upcoming ingress into Aries.
“It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself…Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.”
— Joan Didion, from Slouching Toward Bethlehem
“Los Angeles is a microcosm of the United States. If L.A. falls, the country falls.”
— Ice T
First night in 2025, with clear and unbroken skies, I glimpsed Mars: its vermillion brooch pinned at the apex of a parade of planets. Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, and Mars can be glimpsed, in a sigmoid curve, all through January. There is the feeling of a cosmic counsel opening our new year, though gathering under the cover of night: a last flurry of negotiations and back room deals before the outer planets all change signs this year. After many rounds of boar on the floor in Mar-a-Lago in the past weeks, the tech oligarchs have all predictably kissed Trump’s ring. The vibe shift intensifies.
But it’s Mars’ omnipresent air-raid siren, retrograded back to Cancer now, that dominates our ever-changing heavens for the first quarter of 2025. It’s a time when sabres rattle and new battle lines are drawn in the sand. To wit, Trump’s rhetoric on seizing control of Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal (while a fleet of water-scooping Quebec planes help battle the LA wildfires, no less). Whether it’s bluster, trolling, or a very serious testing of the waters, underlying this rhetoric is the heat of Mars, peaking in our skies now. As a new battle over resources sharpens into focus, the climate crisis will shape geopolitics in the decades to come. Where’s John Candy when you need him?
Unlike the retrograde journeys of Mercury and Venus, in which these planetary bodies vanish within the throne room of the Sun, a Mars retrograde brings the planet of war and aggression into greater visual prominence. As the planet of conflict edges the closest to Earth that Mars will ever be in its cycle, its mandate of heat, fire, and discord is amplified. Yesterday we experienced the peak of its cycle: the Sun-Mars opposition. Today’s Full Moon in Cancer is a further exclamation point in the Mars rx journey. However much we’ve tried to compartmentalize the struggle and frustration of the past few weeks, this Moon could bring an urgent need to process everything on an emotional level. To let the boulder tumble down the hill again. To weep tears of cortisol.
This past week, Los Angeles is never far from my thoughts: that golden city that I feel I understand less each time I visit. A metropolis that verges on deep image. A city impossible to flaneur on foot, as if it was always meant to be experienced through a screen: windshields, celluloid, etc. LA has become a personal port of call for the past few years, yearly staff retreats bringing me to Santa Monica, with its art deco buildings and the Wheel of Fortune alit on its iconic pier. To walk down that boardwalk is to move through the netting of so many dreams being spun at once: Apollonian body worship, born again mega concerts on the beach, a crone singing Stevie Nicks covers as her cat dozes in a flower-strewn baby carriage.
In a recent post I wrote about several of 2025’s notable transits — that last eclipse in Aries, Pluto in Aquarius, Saturn in the sign of its fall — feeling like a ransacking of solar centers of power, celebrity, and wealth. I had no idea it would play out so literally, and so soon. Los Angeles, the eminently solar city of dreams, American mythos, and incandescent images, has its Moon in Aries, where the Sun is exalted. Its MC is positioned in the first degrees of theatrical Leo, just a few arc seconds away from an exact opposition with transiting Pluto in Aquarius. A Venus-Neptune conjunction in Libra describes the transcendent, Vaseline-smeared visions from Hollywood’s golden age. As well as the arms race of cosmetic treatments.
Its Sun in Virgo, however, describes a deeper identity behind the Neptunian haze, which is measured, circumspect, self-possessed, and resourceful. As only a visitor of LA, I know next to nothing about the intricacy of its infrastructure, politics, and patchwork constituencies — but it makes sense that the mutable, earth-bound sign of Virgo, which excels at connective stitchery, would hold this sprawling, very much working class city together. The unsung vestal priestess silently tending to the sacred flame in the temple — keeping the city lights on. For the next couple years, Pluto’s seismic shifts will rock Los Angeles’ imum coeli, the root system of the chart. In the short term, Mars is retrograding through LA’s 10th House of public standing and highest visibility — a protracted period of challenge, crisis, and of course inevitable opportunism by bad actors.
This past summer, around my solar return, I took some time off after my last work retreat to explore California by car with my boyfriend — a bright patch in what was a difficult year. Our road trip would take us to Santa Barbara, with its red tile clay roofs and cool gardens, through Monterey, and finally to Joshua Tree where we did mushrooms under the stars — Los Angeles’ halo of light still haunting the skyline in the desert.
The journey began along that serpentine stretch of highway through Malibu, where we made the pilgrimage to the Getty Villa with its simulacra Rome and dazzling marble statues: opulence in the Trumpian mode. It was there I spied the two glamorous 60-something twins, filming each other in the portico in matching hot pink dresses and bleached blonde hair. They were bedecked in every procedure this city has to offer, flesh hoisted skyward — bronzed twinbos for life. Such visions seem unique to L.A., the city of the Druidic and electric conductive Holly Oak, spawning its own Olympiad of silver screen Gods in its heyday. A city that rejects time, on some level. Though the Getty Villa remains unscathed by the wild fires so far, everything oceanside on that Pacific Coast Highway, which I gazed at in boredom through a traffic jam, has now been burned to the ground. A fact I still cannot digest.
Joan Didion, writing about the Getty, describes its unapologetic shattering of our more romantic conceptions of the ancient world, as if it was always pastoral, gracefully time-worn and sepia-toned. Instead, the Getty presents the gaudy reality of Ancient Rome, where “...fountains … once worked, and drowned out the silence we have come to expect and want from the past. Ancient bronze once gleamed ostentatiously. The ancient world was once discomfortingly new, or nouveau, as people like to say about The Getty.”
LA will always be nouveau, restlessly reinventing itself. Still, it feels almost metaphysically wrong that a city so steeped in illusion, mythos and everything Neptune — waging a long aesthetic battle against decay — can actually burn. The cybertruck in flames outside Trump’s gold-plated tower was a first, glittering image to open 2025: Mars-Pluto’s calling card. But now a second version has dropped: its mirror or photographic negative. An entire LA neighborhood block on fire, the inferno reflecting off the chrome surfaces of an intact cybertruck. A persistent image to flash in my mind in recent weeks has been that of celluloid catching fire, voids clawing themselves into once living texts of light. Neptune ingresses into Aries this spring, leaving the sign of film, photography, and archetypes and entering a sign more concerned with the primal facts of life: blood, struggle, dominance, survival.
We’re also at a threshold where AI-generated images are basically indistinguishable from the real thing: whole immersive worlds conjured from nothing. The apotheosis, perhaps, of Neptune in Pisces. Except, of course, that too is a Neptunian lie: the extraction of resources that keeps AI running is profound. Nothing is for free. Los Angeles burning feels symbolic of this Neptunian transition from one spell of enchantment to another. So far, Trump and his oligarchs are proffering a dream of hyper-masculinity and a “cleansing” of America from the woke mind virus that is apparently causing LA to burn. This is, of course, just another flavor of Neptune’s misdirection. AI’s unregulated acceleration is another pipe dream.
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I remember the Blade Runner skies over San Francisco and other major cities as Mars stationed retrograde in Aries in 2020. Its bloodshot eye presided over what was an unprecedented forest fire season at the time. A few years later, these same climate crisis horrors are arriving in the dead of winter. Jupiter in Gemini is perhaps a harbinger of the lightning-fast random combination machine that will be cooking with gas by the time Uranus enters Gemini (The planet of curveballs enters the sign of quick changes later this summer). The continued complexity and unpredictability of the climate crisis is perhaps the only thing we can count on. A meteorologist, writing for The Guardian, describes the Los Angeles wildfires as a canary in the coal mine for an emerging era of climate crisis:
“The ingredients for these infernos in the Los Angeles area, near-hurricane strength winds and drought, foretell an emerging era of compound events – simultaneous types of historic weather conditions, happening at unusual times of the year, resulting in situations that overwhelm our ability to respond.”
As a storm of politicization and conspiracy predictably rages around these fires, it all feels like an unconscious refusal to really sink into the grief of collapse. This is understandable. Mars, in the sign of its fall in Cancer can force us to reckon with the limits of self protection too — not a comfortable reality check either. All the planning, safety measures, and fail-safes in the world are no match for walls of fire riding those dread Santa Ana winds. In the temple of the Moon, Mars’ severings and destruction hit much closer to home. We are overwhelmed by the stark reality of just how close to Didion’s edge we are within collapse. The vast swathes of our lands that are increasingly uninhabitable. And how much worse it will get within our lifetimes.
This sense of sudden, personal loss is playing out all too literally, as thousands evacuate their homes in Los Angeles. Every home, its own universe — its own intricate matrix of memories, talismans, and lineages — reduced to ash in seconds. Mars in its fall is harrowing enough, but a retrograde Mars dancing with Pluto is especially hardcore. I’m really at a loss for words with what’s happening in California, but I hope this Cancer Moon offers some spaciousness today to grieve a world we thought we knew, that’s now careening away from us.
These gorgeous words by Sophie Strand, an excerpt from her forthcoming book, The Body is a Doorway, brought me comfort:
“During those first weeks of quarantine, I kept thinking of the hermit crab with a fleshy stomach, a delicate structure, and the dire need for a shell that its body cannot independently produce. These little crustaceans make do with snail shells that they eventually outgrow. The curious moment occurs when a hermit crab, spilling out of its shell, exceeding its narrative, finds another shell that is a little too big. Instead of trying to enter this spacious shell, it waits patiently, sometimes for up to eight hours, for another, slightly bigger hermit crab to arrive and take the big shell, discarding a protective home more suited to the original hermit crab. Sometimes as many as twenty crabs will congre- gate and perform a truly amazing ritual called a vacancy chain. When they have finally assembled, the crabs will quickly evacuate and exchange shells, each claiming the new one that best suits their size.
What does it feel like to be that first hermit crab, overflowing its shell, waiting beside another shell that it also cannot properly inhabit? What does it feel like to be so soft, unprotected, and incapable of immediately producing a new story? The hermit crab says wait. And he also says that we never reach the next story on our own. We need a group. A group of people all willing to vacate and exchange their stories. Even more wildly, these stories do not belong to any single one of us. They were produced by something outside of our species. A snail. The story that will fit your new body, your new desires, your new needs, will be intimately excreted by a being living well outside the bounds of the human.
Perhaps when we are jellylike, formless, and without a guide, we should look outside the bounds of human culture and narrative for our new shape, our new shell.”
Just gorgeous writing, wow. And that hermit crab lineup image from Sophie Strand… wow. Feeling it all right in my heart. Thank you.
Your writing is like a censer puffing mystic beauty as it gently swings at the core of the smoking, choking fumes of the world.
I’m finally in a place where I can subscribe to things ❤️