Pluto in Aquarius: Act II
A survey of the haute couture fashion marvels and (Apple Vision) man-made horrors of Pluto's recent ingress into Aquarius.
As Pluto in Aquarius prepares to oppose my Leo Sun later this month, its chthonic rumbles have mostly been registered in dreams. (And yeah, the intensity required a screen break, so thanks for being patient). The 9th House, where Pluto has begun its long katabasis in my chart, is considered by the ancients as the House of God. A place of revelations, divinity, and oracular channeling.
When Pluto first made its toe-dip into Aquarius last spring, I was convalescing in a friend’s “back house” near Berkeley, unable to venture far from my lodgings due to a mysterious ear infection and waves of vertigo that lasted for weeks. I fancied myself a garden hermit and took my morning espresso behind a screen of lilting bamboo, reading poems from a water-warped collection of American poetry I’d found in a free box. A devil’s trumpet plant snaked around the porch and I huffed its heady fumes every evening, not realizing the plant was poisonous — but could induce hallucinations and vivid dreams when taken in small doses. It was strange and alienating and utterly life-shifting time.
Too unwell to continue my Tinder dates with tech the bros, my only visitors for a time were birds: Aquarius’ alien menagerie came to my doorstep. Wild turkeys, owls, monarch butterflies, love birds, and even a hawk. Pluto didn’t make the exact opposition that first time around and my ear infection eventually subsided enough for air travel back to Canada — around the time Pluto left my 9th, which also rules over long-distance travel. There’s more to this story but that’s the TL;DR.
Though I’m back on sturdier Kimberley terra-firma as Pluto opposes my Sun again, my psyche continues to be pomegranate-husked. Recent dreams have brought visions of copulating machines, exploding secretions with piston-fervor. In another I’m watching jet-black clouds felting and interpenetrating in a way that’s also decidedly sexual. Veined with lightning, emanating a human sentience, I awaken with the thought that the skies are more alive than ever.
As for ripples in the zeitgeist, it’s been striking to see the release of Apple Vision Pro coincide with Pluto’s second ingress into Aquarius. Striking but not surprising. Pluto’s first ingress into Aquarius in February of last year saw AI tools, such as Midjourney and ChatGBT, reach critical mass. Though ChatGBT was released in November 2022, it wasn’t until February of last year that the AI bros videos really started flooding my feed.
Pluto is known as the God of concealment, possessing a helmet of invisibility. The helmet’s enveloping cloud of mist helps its wearer evade detection from supernatural entities. Viral videos of tech bros finger-banging the Bay Area air, as if tracing sigils into the ether, feels like a reversal of Hades apocryphal helm. Instead of repelling supernatural entities, they are surely being conjured. I can’t think of anything more hellish than dozens of open tabs, Tik Toks, and Venmo requests hovering in my actual environment. A bargain basement version of Bardo indeed. (Speaking of which, Kanye just dropped the first fully AI-rendered music video, directed by Canadian digital artist Jon Rafman).
And as with all Aquarian uncharted territory, we have no idea what 5D screen-gooning does to our already fried dopamine receptors. As babies imprint on human faces, I can’t even imagine the developmental damage that this device will unleash. Or the quantum leap in surveillance it represents, as every pupil dilation is translated into a marketing call to action. Pluto in Aquarius is the territorialization of the ether: our virtual panopticon explodes three dimensions.
The incursion of the virtual into our lives is already absolute, of course. For many, smartphones already feel like an extension of the body or the brain. We probably spend more time in virtual spaces than touching grass at this point. But there’s something symbolically loaded about lowering a mask over our primary sense organ, consecrating the entrance into this other realm. A place that is neither virtual or “reality” — but some secret, frankly demonic, third thing. A comedian described Apple Vision wearers as NPCs from a snowboard game, which feels exactly right.
Perhaps even more creepy is Apple’s attempt at solving the inevitable isolation that such devices will create in social settings (and yes, advertisements depict Apple Vision Pro as something you’d wear all the fucking time). The Verge explains:
“The front display on the Vision Pro is an attempt at keeping you from being isolated from other people while you’re wearing it. In Apple’s photos, it looks like a big, bright screen that shows a video of your eyes to people around you so they feel comfortable talking to you while you’re wearing the headset — a feature adorably called EyeSight. In reality, it might as well not be there. It’s a low-res OLED with a lenticular panel in front of it to provide a mild 3D effect, and it’s so dim and the cover glass is so reflective, it’s actually hard to see in most normal to bright lighting. When people do see your eyes, it’s a low-res, ghostly image of them that feels like CGI. The effect is uncanny — the idea that you’ll be making real eye contact with anyone is a fantasy.”
Aquarius’ princeling avatar, Ganymede, kidnapped by Zeus in his eagle suit to become a cupbearer in Olympia, was cursed by his “in betweenness”. He would never be a God but was no longer a human, either. The idea of something obscuring your vision, only to feedback your surroundings back to you through video technology — except a version of reality that’s merely a canvas for digital augmentation — is actually making me feel insane.
The implantation of the first neuralink on January 29th, just over a week after Pluto re-entered Aquarius, also feels uncannily timed. Elon Musk believes the implant could one day meld human consciousness with AI. Time will only tell what a “promising neuron spike” actually means, but reports of test monkeys scratching out their implants, becoming partially paralyzed, or self-harming is a reminder of how gruesome mining Pluto’s subterranean ores can be.
As much ink is spilled on Aquarius’ visionary qualities and restless inventiveness, it’s a Saturn-ruled sign after all. Even in its transgression there remains a keen awareness of what was transgressed. Or, to quote George Bataille: “The taboo does not banish the transgression but, on the contrary, depends upon it, just as the transgression depends on the existence of the taboo.”
On July 25th, on the banks of the Seine, John Galliano unveiled his menagerie of uncanny, Lautrec-like Parisian rovers in a Maison Margiela Artisanal show for spring-summer 2024. Many have described it as a major fashion moment, one that was labored over painstakingly for over a year. Pluto in Aquarius answers to Saturn and Saturn’s ultimate muse is time, after all.
Falling on the Full Moon, a resplendent Leo lunation, Galliano captured the Dionysian eruption of Pluto entering the sign of the alien, the angel, the cyborg, and the exile. Alexander Fury describes its 1920’s dive bar, outfitted with “ramshackle bentwood chairs, sickly, violet-flavoured cocktails and cloudy, mercury-backed mirrors in peeling gilt frames”.
Writing for Vogue, Sarah Mower highlights the intertextual innovations of Galliano’s world-building, which many are calling a return to a singular, creative vision (the Leo side of the Pluto in Aquarius coin).
“His transferences into cutting, ultra-extreme corsetry, padded hips, erotically sheer lace dresses, and wildly imaginative hair, chiffon-masked makeup, and eerie doll-like body-modifications took a year. A year to work on a production that seamlessly mixed film—which played in the mirrors—into the scenario, showing lovers, dancers, and gangsters prowling the banks of the Seine. To make it seem that these strutting denizens, fugitives from fights, or half-dressed from sexual encounters, clutching their moon-bleached coats or scrappy cardigans around them were actually congregating from the riverside and into the club before our eyes.”
Though Galliano drew from Brassai’s 1920s and 30’s portraits of Paris’ underbelly, I was struck by the sensual, almost papier-mache effect of of chiffon and membrane-like lace sheaths. These waifs, strays, and night-walkers looked as if they’d stumbled, fully-formed, from some primordial fold of the earth itself, their pell-mell garments a second skin, true innocents lurching from Pluto’s kiln. Cormac McCarthy’s sublime visions of the horribles in Blood Meridian also came to mind:
“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil…”
What also struck me, as I watched the livestream of the runway on Youtube, was a frisson Galliano had captured in what it means to be human in 2024. Under a Leo Full Moon, embracing rather than resisting the liminality of these times, he issued a defiant, Leonine riptost to Aquarius’ uncanny, frozen Sun. The Apple Vision Pro NPCs may fancy themselves angels for a time, drifting a frictionless realm of 5D content and ever-perfected video feedback latency. More real than real. But In Galliano’s vision, the ramshackle machines inherit the earth — in all its stubborn decay, grotesqueness, and decadence.
For Richard Tarnas Pluto is “the archetype of primordial energy, the universal life force which impels all evolution and transformation. … It is the Dionysian energy of life, the Serpent power, the Kundalini. It compels, empowers, overwhelms, transforms; it destroys and resurrects.”
Galiano’s Dionysian eruptions of color, desire, and pathos are accentuated, rather than suppressed, by the model’s doll-like trappings and animatronic lurching. Prosthetics and extremes of corsetry dramatize the struggle of the human against its Saturnian limits. Their stilted movements also recalled early cinema, when a moving image was still a miracle rather than the most benign, everyday i-phone instance of consumption. The painted smears of eyes and mouths, rain-smeared and bleeding across implacable porcelain visages, recalls AI’s ever-shifting chimeras — in a state of ecstatic emergence.
Instead, it was the human audience that struck me as the aliens, the un-ensouled, the ghosts. Their faces were mask-like too, bathed in the glow of their I-phones, echoes of their porcelain-painted counterparts — but the effect was somehow more deadening. Just inches away from a true aesthetic cri-de-coeur, the spectators were still cucked by their phones. It reminded me of the original Blade Runner, in which the replicants express more humanity and aspiration than their human masters.
Among Galliano’s references, I was especially fascinated by his callback to the Parisian “Incroyables” of the late 18th century — the last time Pluto was in Aquarius, no less. The Incroyables and their female counterparts, the Merveilleuse, of 1795-99, were an aristocratic fashion subculture in Paris that embraced luxury, exaggerated forms, decay, and irreverence in the wake of The Reign of Terror.
Like many of Galiano’s sheer, clinging gowns, they wore dresses and tunics modeled after Greek chitons, sometimes referred to as “woven air” (a beautiful Aquarian detail), deliberately dampened to accentuate their figures. Their public balls “bals des victemes” provided catharsis for those who lost loved ones to the guillotine. They greeted each other with herky-jerky movements of the heads, as if in a perpetual state of decapitation themselves, effecting a lisp that avoided pronouncing the “r” of “revolution”. Pluto’s creative and erotic regeneration sometimes emerges from excesses of violence.
I’ll end on these show notes by Alexander Fury, which capture the creative potential of this moment, especially with the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction just around the corner (fodder for another post). I highly recommend watching the show in full on YouTube below. Sublime, truly.
“This show was indeed a celebration. A celebration of humanity, of individuality, of fashion as pure creative expression and of extraordinary craft. They don’t call it ‘Artisanal’ for nothing – here, technique was pushed to a new zenith. Summarising the different approaches and inventions and experimentations in this collection would take forever, but suffice to say they managed to meld old-school and high-tech, in an extraordinary expansion of what couture can mean. There were silicone treatments to make fabrics seem soaked, dragged through water or rained on; tweeds were treated with glue and crêpe then boiled to shrink and mould the material. Coats were made from layers of organzas and chiffons printed to resemble heavy-duty wools, then smothered in tulle. Lace dresses were decoupaged, to appear apparently seamless. In short, nothing was as it appeared – including ‘porcelain’ neck-pieces, actually made from polished leather. It was an astonishing, extraordinary, you-need-to-be-there-to-believe-it moment of fashion trickery”
Thank u!!!