New Moon in Capricorn: A Bridge Between Ages
In this essay I explore Big Tech censorship, the martian riptides of Capitol Hill, Trump's potential impeachment, the archetype of The Hierophant, and Anna Akhmatova's poetry of dissent.
“But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if
evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows
disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. Here is the
shadow of my sword. But shadows also come from trees and living beings.
Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because
of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? You're stupid.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
No, neither under an alien sky nor
Under the protection of alien wings—
I remained with my own people then,
Where my people, in their misfortune, were.
— Anna Akhmatova, 1961
Tonight a New Moon in Capricorn opens its portal in the hush of vesper. Snow is falling, abstract, over all of the Kootenays as I write this from my solitary post. The mantle of snow intensifies this lunation’s mystery and subterranean shifting of the ground below our feet. Though it bristles with an astonishing configuration of aspects, I have been called not to attempt too clear an understanding of its intricate patina.
Instead, I see this Moon as a palimpsest: a layered and haunted text blurred with redactions, over-writing and traces of an ancient transmission that has perhaps been forgotten. Despite its material Capricorn mandate, this Moon seems to function as a liminal hinge between our earthen and airy ages, consolidating the dominance of aether into the existing corporate and political structures of capitalism (however riddled with woodrot). The whole thing feels a bit like skin being grafted over a festering wound, to quote Bret Weinstein of the Dark Horse Podcast.
In this clip from the Wizard of Oz the falling snow is actually industrial-grade asbestos—a chilling reminder of the Aquarian danger of wielding futuristic technologies for the sake of it.
This New Moon also calls back to the first Pluto-Saturn conjunction of January 2020, falling just a degree ahead. This was the conjunction that unleashed plague, entropy, a master class in mortality and increasingly authoritarian political structures. Its gift was an initiation into the astonishing persistence of the human soul, even amidst times of immense physical contraction, sorrow and suffering.
Now we are called to explore what this authoritarian impulse (and our resistance on the soul level) may look like from the more social and conceptual face of Saturn in Aquarius. Having experienced the contraction on more Capricornian terms under lock-down, sickness, and the dying of our elders, the emphasis shifts to the realm of ideology.
This Saturnian clamping down will set its sight on the free flow of ideas, cross-pollination, the bifurcation of the internet into separate ideological camps, and the rooting out of heretics. Under our North Node in Gemini, we resist through adaptation, flexibility and the eking out of liminal spaces of intellectual exchange not beholden to the Big Tech behemoths.
In a paid subscriber post, written the night before the insurrection, I was tuned into the simultaneous conjunction of Mercury with Pluto, and Mars’ roided out adrenal fatigue on the anaretic degree. I thought an excerpt from that post would be illuminating considering recent events:
Under Mercury-Pluto, our words have real weight and intensity, and may reverberate well beyond their oracular occasion. When our light-footed scribe and psychopomp joins the Lord of Hades, there can be cloak and dagger, shady transfers of power, and backroom deals that suddenly come to light. Mercury-Pluto can be a deft strategic power-play, often wielded under the cover of darkness to devastating results.
Think of that one perfectly aimed laser beam that slipped into the death star’s Achilles’ slot, and exploded the labyrinthine structure in seconds. If 2020 has taught us anything it’s that institutional consensus, lines of production—even political structures themselves—are incredibly fragile and can collapse with that one, perfectly timed, blow.
The Capitol Hill siege became that crucial Martian blow I feared (and with all the obligatory Aquarian strangeness in its Viking larping, the reveal of the Q-anon shaman, its symbolic podium snatching, and self-taserings). Despite its shambolic unfolding and Burning Man aesthetic, the siege’s breaching of the sacred halls slotted its improbable laser beam into the death star of the USA’s declining empire.
The immense riptides it released on the level of narrative, scapegoating, othering and hysteria-farming has been swiftly instrumentalized. It’s as if a plan was already in place, and Faceborg was waiting for that one, crucial domino to fall to execute their orders (very Mercury-Pluto indeed).
This is a power-grab that will reverberate for years to come. We are living the swift crystallization of historical narrative arcs, but perhaps like Yuri and Lara, in the 1965 film version of Doctor Zhivago, we can only wander the uncanniness and strangeness of this new age from a place of wordless wonder.
To this end, the New Moon’s conjunction of Pluto could not be more on the nose, as power and influence are consolidated in the wake of the Capitol Hill insurrection—these machinations taking place under the Plutonic smokescreen of fear, hysteria, reactionary zeal and righteous anger.
Trust that what happened will be isolated from a larger pattern on symbolic and aesthetic grounds. There is a discontent, and hopeless rage, across the political spectrum, as we have seen in the Antifa riots in Portland, and indeed anti-lockdown protests the world over. Until we turn our gaze to the systemic cancers that have left many feeling so hopeless, the rabble can only make their voices heard in the language of riots and fire. Until the deeper issues are addressed, these eruptions of rebellion and collective catharsis will continue across partisan lines.
As troubling as recent events have been, the story feels appropriate to our new air age. We are in the midst of a massive power-move on part of Big Tech to secure a monopoly over the realm of communication, ideas, and intellectual exchange. These tech giants have unilaterally decided that through their unchecked power, and ability to banish an app like Parler from the commons (exile being a crucial theme of the first decan of Aquarius), they have effectively crowned themselves the arbiters of information in an age when ideas will be king. This, from journalist Glen Greenwald, on the deplatforming of Parler:
“If one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths are, in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in violation of antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete with them in the marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything more compelling than how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor.”[1]
As Mars translates the light from squares to Jupiter and Saturn, climaxing with a powder-keg conjunction of Uranus over inauguration, the next few days could prove to be incendiary. I am beginning to understand that the great struggle of 2021 will be centered on freedom of speech, and the growing threat of these tech monopolies infiltrating the State and wielding the reprisals of wrong-think with impunity. Mars in the sign of his exile, as well as the New Moon, heightens this theme of rebels and heretics banished from the virtual public sphere.
Still, this is murky territory indeed when we consider that Trump’s Twitter incitements of violence, through coded dog whistles, have led to real danger and peril (and five deaths). On the other hand, Big Tech has been incentivizing the fomenting of outrage and fear for years, as journalist Matt Taibi has argued in a recent Substack article, pointing out the endless paradoxical nature of reality under our Gemini North Node:
“What we’ve been watching for four years, and what we saw explode last week, is a paradox: a political and informational system that profits from division and conflict, and uses a factory-style process to stimulate it, but professes shock and horror when real conflict happens. It’s time to admit this is a failed system. You can’t sell hatred and seriously expect it to end.” [2]
New Moon in Capricorn Decan 3: The Throne and The Hierophant
As we wrestle with questions around freedom of speech, a power grab by the “new corporate left authoritarian monoculture” (as coined by Michael Tracey), and the eclipsing of a powerful solar leader described by the Sun-Moon-Pluto conjunction, it’s fascinating to see this lunation light up a decan Austin Coppock calls The Throne.
This seat of power is echoed by its rulership by the four of pentacles—a card of the miser clinging to his riches. We can trust that the powers that be will be doing everything to maintain their authority (even though it’s this very status quo that metastasized Trump as a symptom of its decay). Coppock also sees this decan as a place of authoring edicts:
“The power hidden here is the ability to command and decree. Yet the wording of any edict or law is crucial. While it is a great delight to remember that the ability to rule ourselves and our lives is a natural consequence of our inborn sovereignty, it is not without risk. We can just as easily impoverish our kingdom and make ourselves miserable with the laws we enact in our world.”[3]
Therefore, we can expect weighty pronouncements in the coming days from our world leaders. Already the president of Mexico, and Angela Merkel, have expressed their concern over Big Tech’s Plutonic machinations in no uncertain terms. Trump is also set to deliver a speech today, as we inch closer to impeachment, and many are concerned by the potential for a ‘martyred’ Trump to further inflame the most extreme of his base.
I’ve also been thinking about 2021 as a year ruled by the Tarot card of The Hierophant, the archetype of traditional values, conformity, and all manner of ancient institutions. It’s a card that describes a hierarchical (and, indeed, patriarchal) transfer of knowledge or spiritual wisdom: the apostates are pictured at the feet of the priest whose teachings will initiate them into the power-structure of the church. The etymology of Hierophant is, itself illuminating, considering the ‘naked light’ of Aquarius, and future utopias that will hold many in its thrall:
“expounder of sacred mysteries," 1670s, from Late Latin hierophantes, from Greek hierophantes "one who teaches the rites of sacrifice and worship," literally "one who shows sacred things," from hieros "sacred," from PIE root *eis-, forming words denoting passion (see ire) + phainein "to reveal, bring to light"[4]
Of course, in a year when Uranus, (the planet of rebellion and upheaval), is squaring off against Saturn, (the conservation of traditional institutions), the rise and fall of symbolic Hierophants will inform much of the volatility of 2021. The sacred light of epiphany and Uranian revelation is for the all, but this is a year when false gurus and prophets (and indeed politicians and tech overlords), may try and position themselves as the enlightened few with the power to arbitrate what is revealed, and what is concealed, from the ‘ignorant’ hoi-polloi (on the Saturnian grounds of law and order).
From my own experience of living in Beijing as a poetry lecturer, I can see aspects of the massive censorial apparatus wielded by the Communist Party being seeded now in The West. During my first month, as an experiment, I lived without a VPN, relying on the Chinese internet. Sometimes I’d be able to access The Guardian, and other times the page would load so slowly as to be prohibitive. Most of the time it was blocked completely, but it was the ambiguous and unpredictable wielding of the censorial power that truly wore you down.
My masters students were sharp, and knew what was going on, but when pressed would say that the censorship was a necessary evil insofar as it maintained the greater harmony of a mind-boggling mass of people.
All of this is to say, Big Tech platforms can shroud their blocking of certain videos, or Tweets, by falling back on the excuse that errors will be made in the policing of such an in-commensurable network of information. From behind a veil of nameless monitors and content screeners, Zuckerberg, Bezos et al can control the cultural narrative without ever having to face repercussions.
All of this has been building for years of course. Nevertheless, 2021 may bring this phenomenon to a head of Silicon Valley Hierophants outsourcing their moral culpability across the aggregate of content creators—democracy dying in virtual ambiguity. These creators are, in turn, rewarded, for using hate as a click-magnet, and only punished when the entire enterprise needs to make a ritual example of a chosen heretic (today Parler; tomorrow something else).
We must somehow wean ourselves from the dopamine feedback-loops, and soothing confirmation-bias of algorithm-generated echo chambers, and find ways to get discussion going amongst the silent majority (And here comes my inevitable recommendation of Adam Curtis’ documentary Hypernormalisation):
A further danger of 2021 could be the radicalization of folks exiled from the tech-arbitrated ‘commons’, and driven into deeper and more subterranean corners of the internet, where there is no push back, or policing of dangerous incitements of violence. Better to know thine enemy than have them plotting under the cover of darkness.
The higher vibration of this decan would be the ability to become our personal authors of solar magnanimity, issuing our edicts from a place of generosity of spirit, and compassion. How can we be the benevolent rulers of our soul’s kingdom? How can we consolidate personal power and agency in these volatile times? How will cultivating our own solar radiance ripple out, in waves, through the entire collective? Mantra, affirmations and loving self-talk will be keys to unlocking the positive potential of this new moon. Now is the time for drafting the blueprints of our future expansion beyond the trauma of plague.
Mars square Saturn and Venus Trine Uranus: heart-centered creative innovation in the face of profound restriction
These two aspects, (starkly different indeed), flesh out the story of this new moon. Mars square Saturn is the unfortunate indication that lockdown restrictions will continue to be a heavy burden to bear across this lunation, even as we are heartened by the distant light of vaccines to come.
This energy favors the consolidation of existing structures and resources, rather than launching ahead with something completely new (a considerable temptation as Jupiter’s building square to Uranus stirs up rebellious desires and the need to expand out of existing containers). If you can, keep your powder dry over the next couple weeks, and trust that a more tactical and defensive approach will pay off in the end. This a time when deep rest, and reprieve from the news cycle, is part of the work.
With the radical sensuality of Venus trine Uranus, softening that harsh Mars-Saturn square, I was drawn back to this larger theme of censorship, and ways in which such pressures have been peacefully resisted in the past (we’re dealing with Venus in Capricorn after all).
One such example is that of the great Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, who wrote of the Stalinist terror in her intricate cycle of lyrics, Requiem. This long poem is a restrained, but anguished meditation on time and memory, and elegy to the many loved ones she lost to war and revolution (including her former husband, Nikolay Gumilev, who was shot against a wall). You can read it in full here: https://hopkinsreview.jhu.edu/archive/requiem/
One such method to evade the censorship of Stalinism was to return poetry to its oral roots, as Akhmatova burnt her manuscripts and painstakingly taught her long poem to a circle of friends (this from Martin Puchner of the BBC):
“To ensure the survival of her poem, she taught it to her closest female friends who would remember the poem after her own death… Stalin forced Akhmatova and her friends to live in something that almost resembled an oral culture, reduced as they were to reciting words from memory. Almost, but not quite: Akhmatova had composed her poem on paper, not orally, and Requiem had none of the structures of oral literature, such as exchangeable building blocks, repeated phrases, and improvisation.
Improvisation was particularly intolerable to Akhmatova. When she made changes to her poem, she asked her friends to remember them, insisting that the final draft of the poem be the one they would remember from now on. It was a reminder that Akhmatova’s friends weren’t oral poets or bards: their minds became the paper on which Akhmatova preserved and revised her poem word by word, comma by comma, with the precision typical of literature crafted with an eye towards the permanence of writing.”[5]
Obviously it’s a dangerous exaggeration to compare recent events to that of Stalinism (and it’s not my intention), but there is something here about Uranus in Taurus as a radical return to the breath, the oracular utterance, and oral traditions themselves. Perhaps over this lunation we can draw comfort from reciting poetry, or organizing social-distanced rounds of song, and story-telling around a fire. Perhaps we resist the Big Tech power grab by giving less of our words (and our souls) to its platforms, where we become the unpaid interns of its endless ouroboros of outrage, social-policing, and the media dissection of the endless harpy howls.
Perhaps the truly revolutionary act is switching off our devices altogether, and keening softly instead to the frozen mountain ash berries, the birch, the mountains and Mark Creek’s endlessly renewing scripture.
Easier said than done I know, especially as the virtual realm has become our only point of contact with other humans during lockdown. We can, however, continue to vote with our feet and support alternative platforms like Gab, Telegram, Clubhouse, and, indeed, Substack.
Returning again to the idea of this Moon as palimpsest, I’ve also been meditating on the fact that the USA was effectively birthed from the chaos of insurrection. Is how it begins how it ends? I’ll be exploring this idea in more depth in a deep-dive on the USA’s Pluto return, but for now it’s fascinating to see freedom of speech as such a lynch-pin with that Pluto-return occurring in the USA Sibly chart’s third house of communications.
To wrap up these restless ruminations, I see this lunation as one to process in silence, and ground in the body, as its chthonic wisdom may be pre-language. Today it spoke to me through that particular, alien sound of snow suddenly falling from tree branches. It was also in the hive mind of the murmur of starlings, rippling its rhizomic intelligence against the leaden sky.
Or you could watch this trippy Canadian cartoon that lives rent free in my brain. The Ministry of Winter is stormed by rebellious dissidents, but in the end Venus prevails and Saturn’s secretly a softy. I challenge you not to cry when the snow starts falling.
I’d also love to hear your thoughts on tech monopolies and censorship, and how this Moon has been hitting on a soul level.
Works cited:
[1] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-show-of-monopolistic
[2] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/we-need-a-new-media-system?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo3OTYwMTcsInBvc3RfaWQiOjMxMjUxMjE1LCJfIjoibUFFMk8iLCJpYXQiOjE2MTAzOTU0NzAsImV4cCI6MTYxMDM5OTA3MCwiaXNzIjoicHViLTEwNDIiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.YE-XhttQfcbkwnC8LWTl-rRjrsVT_jnrEglMhC30Td0
[3] https://austincoppock.com/astrology-jan-9th-19th-capricorn-3-authoring-edict/
[4] https://www.etymonline.com/word/hierophant
[5] https://hopkinsreview.jhu.edu/archive/requiem/