Project Unicorn, Funeral-Maxxing and Pluto Between Worlds
I unravel the hyper-sober spectacle of the death of the Queen - entombed in the vault of our passing Plutonic age. Reflections as well on my Saturn return in Manchester, forever ago (yeah, I'm old).
There’s so much to cover and I don’t even know where to begin. I finally finished this piece on the death of Queen Elizabeth, which already feels like old news, as nuclear sabers rattle again and Russia introduces a military draft. Such is the velocity of our current timeline (I’m hoping to publish something quick this weekend on Jupiter’s connection to nuclear threat and Putin’s current transits, so stay tuned).
As touched on in my previous post, we’re living through a momentous shift between Plutonic ages. And within this longer transition — a Mercurial quickening. Mars in Gemini has been tasked with breaking apart any holding patterns that still exist from our previous Capricornian era. The spider hitching a ride on the Queen’s coffin, into the Capricornian bowels of Westminster Abbey certainly felt like a wink from Mars in Gemini — our great interstitial weaver, trickster, and psychopomp purling us through one age to the next. Or, to quote Proverbs, “The spider taketh hold with her hands, and is in kings' palaces.”
Though the Plutonic changing of the guard will not be complete until 2024 (where Pluto will rove for two decades), we’ll have our first glimpse of the aeon to come when Lord Hades dips his toes in Aquarius from early March to early June of next year. These three months may feel like an enchanted window before we’re returned to one last Plutonic excavation though Capricorn. I imagine an angel bathing in a glacial tarn within an austere mountainous landscape. Perhaps the sea goat has allowed her finned tail to dip into these crystalline waters of the unconscious, as the maiden sings a lullaby of fantastical worlds to come, in an alien tongue.
The Star card itself is the zodiacal trump of Aquarius — what Alestair Crowley calls the daughter of the firmament and the dweller between the waters:
“the milk of the stars from her breasts: yea, the milk of the stars from her breasts … From the golden cup she pours this ethereal water, which is also milk and oil and blood, upon her own head, indicating the eternal renewal of the categories, the inexhaustible possibilities of existence.”
In the Thoth version of the card the maiden is depicted pouring the starry admixture outside of a celestial globe, which represents the heavens that cradle the earth. Aquarius, as the airy emissary of Saturn, ventures past the castle walls, outside the current ideological categories, beyond the earth’s atmosphere itself — but the dialectical relationship with Saturnian bounds remains. Even as Aquarius transcends earthbound limits, it seeks to create new cities, hierarchies, and ideologies in the sky.
Crowley’s Star is a card of transpersonal energies and spiritual environments that transcend space and time. It reminds me of Darren Aronofsky’s sci-fi romance film The Fountain, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, and even the French fable of The Little Prince. I think there’s something of Aquarius in Wim Wender’s romantic fantasy, Wings of Desire, with angels ghosting the occupied districts of Berlin and comforting the distressed and estranged. The Star’s cosmic oasis feels both liminal and hermetically sealed: a place of healing and integration after the trauma of The Tower. A place, as well, of frozen time where we start to glimpse new imaginal horizons. A protected realm where we can seed the myths and arts that will catalyze the aforementioned “renewal of the categories”.
I also see in The Star card (and the spirit of Aquarius itself), Jung’s idea of the kairos, an ancient Greek term connected to the spark of divine timing, as distinguished from “chronus”, or clock-time. Kairos pierces through the brittle linearity of chronology, ensouling time once more. While chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative, capacious, permanent quality. Kairos also meant “the weather” for the Greeks, and I do see a kairos-like spark weaving through Lisa Robertson’s poetry collection called, well, “The Weather”. Here are the first few lines from the poem “Monday”:
“First all belief is paradise. So pliable a medium. A time not very long. A transparency caused. A conveyance of rupture. A subtle transport. Scant and rare. Deep in the opulent morning, blissful regions, hard and slender. Scarce and scant. Quotidian and temperate. Begin afresh in the realms of the atmosphere, that encompasses the solid earth, the terraqueous globe that soars and sings, elevated and flimsy. Bright and hot. Flesh and hue. Our skies are inventions, durations, discoveries, quotas, forgeries, fine and grand. Fine and grand. Fresh and bright. Heavenly and bright.”
I recently learned that the Old English word for angel, ǣrendgāst, translates to errant ghast — a wandering ghost, which I think captures Aquarius’ spiritual homelessness. Indeed, I see Aquarius as the most fallen of fallen angels: a water-bearer but also a water dowser. An eccentric beachcomber. A baron in the trees. Ears tuned to kairos’s webbings of synchronicity, and the astrological music of the spheres. This passage from Jung’s The Undiscovered Self comes to mind in terms of our emerging Aquarian epoch and the liminality of these times:
“A mood of universal destruction and renewal has set its mark on our age. This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially, and philosophically. We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos- the right moment for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious human within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science… So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of the modern human”.
My confidence in the collective’s current psychological health is maybe .5 out of 10 Nyquil chickens. However, I do see this longing for a “metamorphosis of the gods” — however misplaced — within every mandela effect, conspiracy theory, emergent wojack hagiography, and even the haunting visions rising from our new AI unconscious (which is fodder for another post). What makes this Plutonic shift especially potent is the fact that it’s nested within the greater container of The Great Conjunction — the alignment of Jupiter and Saturn in Aquarius that we experienced in December of 2020.
Not only are we entering a new 20 + year Plutonic age, but also a much grander 200 year air aeon. The last time a new age was birthed with a great conjunction in Aquarius coincided roughly with the early flowering of the Renaissance from the early 13th century to the beginning of the 15th century. The fantastical worlds of Hieronymus Bosch, who was active during this period, reveal the imaginative possibilities of the age ahead (even if the actual art is delegated to bots and a rising class of AI “whisperers”). What’s always struck me about Bosch’s visions of heaven and hell, and his beautiful machines, is how modern his paintings feel. Aquarius’s angel/alien is also something of a time-traveler. The lesser known outer panels of The Garden of Earthly Delights are uncannily reminiscent of the Thoth Star card, as the viewer hovers outside the snow globe of this fantastical garden — assuming a God-like omniscience over the sensual excesses of this distorted paradise.
Pluto will cross over that sensitive Great Conjunction degree of zero Aquarius in 2023, before returning to its last demolition of more earth-bound institutions, structures, and political systems. I see March 23rd to June 11th of 2023 as a portal. A collective alien abduction. It’s worth mentioning that the Hebrew letter for the Star Card, He, translates as “a window”.
All of this is to say, it’s hard not to see the death of The Queen, and the dawning of a new Carolean Age, as another crucial piece in this transition from the Age of Earth to Air. I think the Queen’s passing marks the beginning of the end of the British monarchy. The last time Pluto traveled through Aquarius coincided with the French Revolution, the overthrow of the French monarchy, the abolition of the feudal system, and the declaration of the “Rights of Man”. America was also in the throes of its revolutionary war, which started during Pluto in Capricorn but stretched on into Pluto in Aquarius, with the US Constitution established roughly in the middle of the transit. This was also the peak of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason — the triumph of fixed air.
Now the USA Pluto return is slowly dismantling, (or perhaps Balkanizing), this global super power as we live through these last Capricornian dregs. The passing of the Queen feels like another significant blow to the Capricornian structures that will likely not survive Pluto’s entrance into Aquarius. Just on a purely symbolic level, the fall of the world’s longest reigning monarch is profound — regardless of how you feel about The Firm. Bit by bit, the last enduring centers — which have held, improbably, through these increasingly fractured times — are coming undone. London Bridge is falling down. Long live our “Algorithm Queen”:
I remember telling a close friend that I didn’t think the Queen would make it to Pluto in Aquarius, when the square of Pluto to her 0’12 Taurus Sun would have perfected. Pluto was applying to a square of her natal Chiron too at the time of death, in her 4th House of the ancestral matrix — a place the ancient’s also considered “the end of the matter”. Saturn has also been squaring her natal Saturn-MC conjunction, as her life’s work reaches a crucial threshold. Finally, our past Full Moon in Pisces conjoined her natal Venus, which is exalted in the sign of the love-knotted fish. Her crown, orb, and scepter born aloft on the royal coffin couldn’t be a more literal delineation of Venus in exaltation (or this hilarious Nathan Fielder-esque solution to the royal queue). I see Venus in Pisces as well in the stoicism and unwavering duty that her post required — a blank screen for all manner of projection. I remember seeing her enigmatic hologram visage in London’s Portrait Gallery, which captured this strange alchemy of a human into metonymy: her profile on our coins and likely branded on my subconscious. Anyway, these are certainly deathly transits.
The extended period of mourning after Queen Elizabeth’s death, marked by a clockwork cascade of pomp, pageantry, peals of brass, and archaic speech acts, would surely be delineated as Mercury retrograde in Libra. All of this is happening within the longer shadow of Pluto in Capricorn of course, as Hades ties up loose ends in the sun-ruled decan Austin Coppock calls “the throne”:
“The third decan of Capricorn is thus a place of beholding the state of things in order to manage them. 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. Our laws must be smart and fair, or we ourselves will rebel, making a mockery of our own authority.”
Mercury stationed retrograde two days after the death of The Queen, pivoting just a degree off the Libra ascendant of the United Kingdom. Just as Mercury back-tracked over the public face of this nation, stopping business as usual in its tracks, the “royal queue” was making headlines all across the world. I’ve always been fascinated by the UK’s chart, with its angles stationed in the cardinal signs and its 10th house Sun in Capricorn lording over it all. The sea goat’s comfort with hierarchy, procedures, and the rules partly explains why the monarchy has hung on so long in the United Kingdom. Queen Elizabeth’s Saturn-ruled chart also reveals that it was her destiny to maintain this ancient machinery for as long as she was alive. And I do think the monarchy will die with her.
But back to Mercury, backtracking through the sign where Saturn is exalted: Libra. The scales and sword of justice. The spirit of the law. The sign where Saturnian discipline is elevated into an aesthetic ideal. An elegiac apotheosis. Therefore, it makes perfect sense that our cosmic psychopomp, in charge of ferrying shades to the underworld, was tasked with overseeing the decorum and formality of Operation Unicorn — another relic unearthed from the world that is passing.
I couldn’t help but group these ancient funeral proceedings with the hunger stones and Spanish ruins that have emerged in dessicated river beds across our drought-stricken world. It certainly feels like we’re in a period of simultaneous decay, emergence, and temporal collapse, as we’re pushed through this cosmic birth canal between astrological ages. Whether it’s reckoning with the spectres of slavery and civil war in the United States, the UK’s colonial history, and the possibility of another global war, this period of inbetweeness seems to demand a raising of the bones. A collective catharsis.
In terms of the latter, I’m not hopeful that we have the communal containers, or mythopoetic structures, to bear the full force of this emotional release (which seems to be taking the form of a mass psychotic break, instead). Meanwhile, Big Tech has figured out how to milk the despair and rage of these times for maxim clicks and fattening of billionaire coffers. The powers that be will do everything they can to algorithmically maintain our purgatory of rage-cycles and emotional constipation. Catharsis would be bad for business, after all.
All of this is to say, I found myself strangely moved by this last upwelling (or death rattle) of monarachal ritual. I’m certainly no royalist and the optics of a tax-funded spectacle are, of course, dire. There’s nothing more dystopian than funeral-maxxing when the UK is on the brink of what’s likely to be a Dickensian winter of the poor and elderly dying in the homes they can’t afford to heat, or perishing in electric radiator fires. William Hogarth would have a field day.
Nevertheless, listening to the livestreams of days of funerary hymns and evensong — and even the sight of Brits gathered to politely queue for hours — rekindled a longing for something beyond screen-world’s whack-a-mole of cheap dopamine and misery. These virtual fragments I shore my pandemic-traumatized self to. The loops of news and meme-cycles are ever tighter and more dizzying. I also have the sense that my attention span has been irreparably damaged by the algorithms (or will be if I don’t do something about it soon).
A recent article by The Abbey of Misrule, which I would like to quote at length, beautifully captures this ambiguous longing for a pageantry that is already hauntology — the likes of which we will likely never see again:
“I say ‘pageantry’, but this is a dismissive word. What happened today was a rolling, dense mat of symbolism, replete with historical meaning, anchored in a very particular nation and time period. What did it symbolise? Above all, I think, it symbolised something that our culture has long stopped believing in, and as such can’t really process effectively, or even perhaps quite comprehend. This was brought home to me by one particular moment in the ceremony.
You can see that moment in the photograph above. It’s a view from the height of the tower of Westminster Abbey, looking down onto the Queen’s coffin below. The Abbey is, of course, laid out in the shape of the cross, and the coffin was set down at the meeting point of the nave and the transept, where the two arms of the cross meet. At one point in the proceedings, the camera showed us this view, and then focused in on the scene, and the impression was that of some energy flowing down from above and into the coffin, then out across the marble floor and into the gathered crowd.
It struck me then that this was an accurate visual image of the world which this Queen’s death marks the final end of, and it struck me too that this must be one of the reasons why her passing has had such a huge impact - one way beyond the person she actually was. What we were seeing as the camera panned down was a manifestation, through technological trickery, of the ancient notion of sacral kingship…
At the end of the funeral today, the orb and the sceptre, symbolising the Queen’s spiritual and temporal authority, were removed from the top of her coffin, along with the crown, and given over to the care of the church. At that point, Elizabeth became symbolically what she had always been in reality, and we all are - small, ordinary people, naked before God.”
I’m definitely not trying to romanticize the monarchy or argue for the return of medieval feudalism. What I’m struggling to articulate is a very serious longing for anything, absolutely anything, to make sense again. A desire for Jupiterian centers of communal congress and ritual to return on a mass scale. But I sadly think we’re past that particular rubicon.
In any case, watching the royal coverage had me reflecting on my own time in England, where I lived off-and-on during grad school. In fact, I was living in Manchester during the inexplicable horror of the Ariana Grande concert terrorist attack in 2017. This was the same arena where I’d seen The Cure play just months before — one of the headiest live-music experiences of my life. In the days that followed the attack, parts of my neighborhood were cordoned off as the search for the terrorist cell touched Whalley Range.
Strangely enough, I’d been involved in a violent altercation myself the day before the bombing. A hole-in-the-wall Lebanese cafe, where I used to bring my thesis work, was suddenly attacked by a group of young men in broad daylight. This was the Uranus in Aries era (Uranus in the sign of the martyr), when terrorist attacks were shockingly commonplace. I remember for years being unable to shake a very real anxiety and hyper-vigilance when I was in large groups of people.
As I scan my transits, Uranus was applying to a conjunction of my natal Jupiter in the 11th House around this time. I was also in the thick of my Saturn return, with Kronus separating from my natal Saturn in Sagittarius but edging ever closer to my natal Uranus (right on the descendent). Just a few months later, I would be back in Barcelona again for the summer, living just blocks away from the August 17th terrorist attack on Los Ramblas. Talk about lightning striking twice. By this time Uranus’s conjunction of my Jupiter in Aries was almost exact, and indeed this terrorist attack hit much closer to home (I even had a prophetic dream about it). My natal Saturn-Uranus is in the 7th house, by the way — the place of open enemies.
Anyway, back to the cafe in Whalley Range. The men overturned tables, launched a mug of scalding coffee at the old man beside me (hitting him in the face), and started breaking bottles with threats of glassing us. It was all so sudden, shocking, Uranian. I remember hugging my laptop to my chest as I thought it might be grabbed and used as a projectile as well. The whole incident is fragmented in my mind, but I do remember making eye contact with the five or so other patrons. It was like we slipped into kairos — suddenly out of time — and this unspoken consensus formed between us: we would fight back. There were more of us than them. The simple math of it.
I remember pushing the attackers out the shattered glass doors with the other strangers knotted around me, like we were one entity. The men (they couldn’t have been older than 20) kept screaming obscenities but finally relented, kicking over the remaining tables on the terrace, then peeling off in a car. An ambulance eventually arrived and ferried the old man to safety who was slumped over the table, passed out. He was fine in the end. For hours we waited for the police to arrive so we could file a report, sharing stories about our lives over cups of coffee and spiked mint tea. I can’t remember much about this conversation but the glow of camaraderie is still with me. The lot of us shell-shocked, shivering, and cracking dark jokes over the aluminum tables. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
The next day, an Islamist terrorist detonated a nail and shrapnel bomb as parents and children were leaving the Ariana Grande concert. Over 1000 people were injured and 23 were killed — most of them children. In hindsight, I believe that a riptide of violence flowed through Manchester over those 24 hours. Even before the cafe altercation, I remember being unsettled by the sight of crows and magpies viciously dive-bombing each other in the park where I used to run. I’d never seen them do that before.
Of course, I couldn’t help but wonder if the young men from the cafe attack were involved in the Manchester arena bombing (they weren’t). My paranoia was perhaps understandable as the search for the terrorist cell extended to my front door. It was a strange and deeply unsettling time. I started following stories about the bombing with an obsession that exploited all the worst impulses of my Mercury-Pluto trine. In hindsight, I think it was my way of working through the trauma of the cafe attack. I began to harbor these paranoid delusions that maybe “our boys” were the ones that went on to blow up the kids.
Eventually I was connecting dots between the Moors murders, the Rochdale sex ring, and stories of Mancunian urchins losing arms and legs to heavy machinery during the industrial revolution, which Manchester was the beating heart of. I was having nightmares and couldn’t stop obsessing about this idea of the Moors themselves swallowing children as some sort of cosmic retribution for violent industrialization. So yeah: I wasn’t in the best way. My mental health had already taken a beating from the psychological marathon that is grad school, so it’s not surprising I started to lose the plot a bit.
Anyway, after days of doors being exploded off hinges in Whalley Range during police raids, while I fleshed out my moors-as-Moloch theory, I was in deep need of some sort of release. A catharsis, even. A couple weeks after the attack, Miss Grande herself organized “One Love Manchester”, a benefit concert and television special, which was held on June 4th, 2017. Guest stars included Justin Bieber, Liam Gallagher, Robbie Williams, Coldplay, and Miley Cyrus. The whole thing felt pretty fucking ballsy, even if it was a corporate extravaganza. I remember lining up my two mini bottles of Costco chardonnay on my bedside table, planning to watch the concert on my laptop.
It was an unusually balmy day. My bedroom window was open. As I searched for the live stream, I realized that the concert was actually reverberating off the common, in real time, by some trick of city acoustics. Pop ballads started flooding my bedroom — though slightly distorted, vaporwaved. Something about this civic outpouring of resistance and grief — buoyed by the effervescence of pop — pierced through my funk. In a strange synchronicity, I’d been studying Denise Riley’s, “A Misremembered Lyric” around this time. Pop lyrics interrupt the neurotic ruminations of the poem — spectral and resonant — from The Cascade’s hit “Rhythm of the Rain”. John Latta, describing the poem’s Motown invocation, calls it:
“…the residual glossolalia of the century itself, its tumult of colliding voices, unsorted, inept, mercurial. Cuttings, unculled, relentlessly bunching up, merging into cranial array only to disperse, no agglutinant rare enough to hold, no grease fine enough to prevent seepage.”
It’s hard to describe, but the simultaneous privacy of the moment, as I was enfolded by these sonic reverberations — while a very public catharsis was happening in another part of the city — dislodged something inside me. Uranus was triggering my Jupiter in the 11th House of good spirit after all. From the poem:
“A misremembered lyric: a soft catch of its song / whirrs in my throat. ‘Something’s gotta hold of my heart / tearing my’ soul and my conscience apart, long after / presence is clean gone and leaves unfurnished no / shadow.”
The way this outpouring was held, and somehow mediated, by the architecture of the city itself: both proximal and distant. I finally started to weep. One of those pure, wrenching cries that leave you feeling just utterly emptied. The etymology of catharsis brings us to cleansing after all — a purging that can only happen through vicarious experience, according to Freud. I fell dead asleep after this bawling fit, as a cover of “Over the Rainbow” warbled on the wind, and whatever dark wave I’d been under for weeks finally pulled away.
Of course, the trauma of everyone personally touched by this senseless attack is something that will reverberate for generations to come. But I stand by this feeling that the concert shifted something. In the way that incense smoke offers a spectral, even mercurial, bridge between worlds in ritual contexts, I believe that something was absolved by those sonic waves. Something was being carried, ferried — communally and architectonically mediated — through this echoic simulacra of pop, as banger after banger rang off the city’s red brick walls.
(I also genuinely love this club anthem that Grande released after the bombing, with its discordant bait-and-switch in the chorus, and its eerie Escher-like folding city. A dark-Manchester flayed open by grief, revealing new astral niches and portals).
I’d like to end on a quote by Deleuze, cited by Denise Riley in her wonderful collection of essays Words of Selves, in which she expands on the spooky but oddly comforting Deleuzian notion that “others continue to think (and speak) through us”. Here is the passage:
“There is always another breath in my breath, another thought in my thought, another possession in what I possess, a thousand things and a thousand beings implicated in my complications: every true thought is an aggression. It is not a question of our undergoing influences, but of being ‘insufflations’ and fluctuations, or merging with them. That everything is so 'complicated,’ that I may be an other, that something else thinks in us in an aggression which is the aggression of thought, in a multiplication which is the multiplication of the body, or in a violence which is the violence of language–this is the joyful message. For we are so sure of living again (without resurrection) only because so many beings and things think in us…”
And this is the joyful (and terrifying) message of our emerging Air Aeon, as history itself speaks through us in its increasingly flayed tongues. Haunts and marionettes us. Stages its dispersal. As we hopefully find new elegiac containers, arts, myths and rites for its release over Pluto in Aquarius.
Happy Equinox and many light-spangled Mercury Cazimi blessings this veil-thinned eve. If you need me, I’ll be dancing alone in my bedroom to Manchester’s own Happy Mondays.