Saturn Square Uranus’s Final Act: It’s Not Over Until Ghislaine Maxwell Sings
“The narcissist feels unhappy because he thinks his life isn't as it should be, or things are going wrong; but all of those feelings find origin in frustration, a specific frustration: the inability to love the other person.He's a man in a glass box, unable to connect. He thinks the problem is people don't like him, or not enough, so he exerts massive energy into the creation and maintenance of an identity: if they think of me as X...
But that attempt is always futile, not because you can't trick the other person-- you can, for an entire lifetime, it's quite easy. But even then, the man in the box is still unsatisfied, still frustrated, because no amount of identity maintenance will break that glass box. If the other person is also in a glass box, then you have a serious problem. If everyone is in their own glass box, well, then you have America.
— “A Generational Pathology: Narcissism is not Grandiosity” — The Last Psychiatrist
“What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
― Nicholas G. Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
All hail the gathering of the light! As we approach the last exact Saturn-Uranus square on this solstice threshold, I’ve been trying to make sense of arguably the most important signature of 2021 — the spine of the poem, as my poetry prof Lorna Crozier would say. Bell Hooks and Joan Didion both slipping through the veil, as the square perfects, feels pretty damn profound. “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant” Didion said, and it feels like a rallying cry for this transit.
The notion of contraction keeps coming to mind, or tectonic plates suddenly slipping a disc and the pieces falling where they may. Techno feudalism feels like a potential place that this aspect is carrying us. This holiday season, I’m feeling its presence as the whiplash of a coming cold snap, an arsonist apparently on the loose in my hometown, and friends dreading ideological skirmishes over the gravy boat this Christmas.
Its cymbal clashes also seem to be ripping holes in the societal and class partitions that once felt secure. Saturn in Aquarius applies its cut glass lines ideologically, and I think it's fair to say that the polarized political climate has seen people swiftly switching allegiances. Or, there are those who still believe in the dappled shadow-lands of nuance — exiled in a center that only exists in whispers, between trusted friends. How many of you feel suddenly politically homeless?
I can’t help but recall a dream from late 2019, in which I was floating, a free-agent, on a cedar branch broom stick above the Himalayas: below me people were fighting, viscously, over patches of land on razor-sharp mountain peaks. As I got closer, I realized that the little land remaining was heaped over by frozen, entangled corpses.
And so we find ourselves here: Big Tech’s magnet wand, under the table, sculpting humanity’s lead filings into bristling factions. TikTok dance routines careening through the collective, as if we were suddenly connected, lockstep, by strings and sliding wooden slats. Saturn square Uranus never lets a good crisis go to waste after all, as the Uranian chaos becomes the impetus for increasingly restrictive measures and mandates. The authoritarian creep becomes a quantum leap as the squares build.
Remember that the ur myth, behind Aquarius, centers on one’s humanity being kidnapped (as well as leakages between human and alien realms). The beautiful Prince Ganymede was plucked from his mortal life, by Zeus’s eagle talons, to become a cupbearer of the Gods. Once he served his purpose and Zeus had a shiny new toy, he was discarded as a smear of stars — twice removed from his humanity. Saturn in Aquarius, and the new air aeon generally, seems to be staging this fabled kidnapping.
The hovering eagles are many: algorithms, the new clout economy, the omnipresent visual rhetoric of masks, tribal signifiers, Twitter bios reducing the human soul to identity listicles (all the better to survey you my dear). In the Metaverse, the human avatars are legless, sexless — floating cartoon bobble heads. I sometimes have the feeling, when scrolling TikTok, that the facial expressions of Zoomers are simulated — strangely free-floating. They map exactly onto the cocked eyebrow, and sideways smiles of Pixar characters.
Aquarius often puts the conceptual cart before the horse. I get the sense that TikTok was never about human connection; we were never dancing “with” each other. Instead, the exaggerated expressions, cartoonish filters and flattened identity signifiers make it easier for the digital panopticon to survey us (and sort us for maximum extraction through targeted ads). Every increasingly intricate dance is a petition — a desperate bid — that the new gods “see” us within the collapsed virtual wastes. The craving for surveillance is perhaps unconscious, but within our increasingly atomized, endlessly locked down lives, it’s a way to reassure ourselves we exist.
The Memphis corporate art style sees its human subjects transcending physics altogether: their boneless limbs are pulled, in impossible directions, by the endless, rapacious hooks of the attention economy. They are also depthless, like specimens on glass slides. If one has the misfortune of being swallowed by a black hole, it’s said that your body will be stretched into skeins of angel hair pasta at the event horizon. Hell is a realm of pure extension: a body that isn’t left to rot, but is simply unspooled, forever, before the abyss.
More mundanely, Saturn square Uranus also seems to line up with notable climate crisis whiplashes. These contractions reveal, with eviscerating clarity, the fragility of our infrastructure and supply chains. Uranian chaos becomes the new reality; the center can no longer hold. The Texas ice storms, during the first square, made tinder sticks of a state’s entire power grid.
Then we had the heat-dome apocalypse in British Columbia, during the second square in June (only to be followed by catastrophic floods as the third square ramped up this winter). The village of Lyton was practically lasered from the face of the earth, as if a god, quite bored, trained a magnifying glass right over it. I remember wandering the suburbs of Cranbrook as if I’d slipped, through an Aquarian loophole, into shimmering Tangier. Meanwhile, hundreds of unaccounted for seniors dying alone in their apartments.
As the third Saturn-Uranus square perfects, its steel-trap snap starts to feel strangely predictable — mechanical. The latest contraction of restrictions feels particularly feckless after two years of billionaire coffers bulging, while small businesses continue to be gutted. Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results, and I think it’s clear by now that the lockdowns never really worked (they were always too leaky).
At this point, they surely have the inverse effect: despair, drug overdoses, suicide, total loss of community and meaning. It’s difficult not to see the governmental obsession with locking down as something that accelerates our dawning techno-feudalism. Mold a society that will cower in their homes at the tolling of pavlov’s bell — a captive audience for droned in grub-hub and the endless, hellish extension of the Metaverse (seriously, why don’t they have legs?).
I tried for hours this past week to find a single headline that expressed tentative hope about Omicron’s long-game: the very real possibility that a weaker, but much more contagious virus, would squeeze out the more lethal strains and thus end this nightmare via global herd immunity. The few slightly positive headlines all came with a caveat: “Omicron might be milder… But Here’s the Catch”... (many variations on this theme).
The MS media has never felt more in lockstep, as bylines from multiple sources even seem to fall into the same cadence or syntax. “Inflation is Rising… But Here’s Why It’s a Good Thing”. I mean, it’s obvious that the media game changed forever post Trump, as an endless supply of fear, uncertainty and righteousness translated into easy clicks.
I don’t think it’s likely that the scare-mongering around Omicron will end anytime soon, but what I’ve noticed lately is people waking up to the jerry-rigged nature of this media charade. Sensationalist headlines about “wildfires” and “riptides” of cases are no longer cutting it, especially as ICU cases continue to fall in British Columbia. The news out of South Africa strongly supports omicron as a Christmas miracle, but we now live in a media era addicted to crisis.
Of course, the astrologer in me cannot help but see Jupiter’s imminent return to its watery domicile of Pisces as a moment of collective absolution, as we are cleansed of this seemingly endless Saturnian winter. What if the Saturn-Uranus omicron “storm” or “wildfire” is the virus in its last, lurching death throes? Saturn is now in the second decan of Aquarius, ruled by the Six of Swords: the card depicts a traumatized woman and her clinging child being ferried from stormy chop to the glassy bay of their future healing. Are we trauma-bonded to the pandemic’s holding pattern? Are we ready to heal and rupture our holding vessels? Jupiter lingering on the Sabian Symbol of a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, before its ingress in Pisces on the 28th.
This cosmic record stuck on the groove of Aquarius also seems to translate into the rigidity of governmental response to Covid over the past couple years (particularly in Canada). There’s a dogmatic, totatlitizing “one size fits all” side to this Saturn-ruled sign, which deals in clearly demarcated conceptual containers, and can get stuck in a groove once it has a thesis.
The lockdown ‘thesis’ made sense at the beginning of the pandemic, when ice rinks were filling dead bodies and field hospitals were being built to treat the overflow of people drowning in their lungs. Now we have an infinitely more contagious but seemingly milder strain, rendering travel restrictions and lockdowns all but futile. Omicron might even be the blessing of a “live vaccine” that will grant global herd immunity.
Instead of a “wait and see” approach with Omicron (which after a month has not killed a single person in Canada), the lockdowns snapped shut immediately in Quebec and Ontario. British Columbia just closed bars and gyms, while keeping hockey stadiums and malls at half capacity (the rules not making an iota of sense ramping up despair, non compliance, and nihilism of course). God forbid we boost our immune systems through physical activity in these dark winter days, but the boxing day sales must go brrrrr of course.
Instead of making rapid testing widely available — so that the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike can forget their differences and spend the holidays together (what a concept!) — we are told by Trudeau to isolate and hunker down. The vaccines haven’t exactly been the magical silver bullet that was foretold, but once again — under the totalizing climate of Aquarius — they are proffered as the ~only~ way out. It’s clear that we now live in a less safe pandemic world (the air aeon ushering in a new age of airborne pathogens). However, it’s my opinion that outsourcing our immune systems to a single pharmaceutical solution — instead of addressing the plethora of everyday life choices that support immune health — is frankly dangerous.
Where are the companion public covid strategies to bolster community ties, mental health, and provide an alternative to lonely doom scrolling and clout chasing in virtual realms? Where are the larger educational campaigns on the wonders of zinc, sunlight on bare skin, time spent outdoors, and vitamin D supplementation? There’s that parallel pandemic, comprised of fentanyl overdoes that nobody wants to talk about… Again, in the lands of nuance, I can be grateful for a vaccine that potentially saved my asthmatic lungs in the early, deadlier phase of the pandemic. I can also harbour doubts in this stage of the pandemic about longer-standing patterns of Big Pharma greed.
Still, I feel the tension of those wooden slats and strings that would have us all singing the same dogma, in formation. I’ve been reprimanded viciously by both pro and anti vaxers for not having a particularly zealous stance on the shot. An ex internet fling cited my vaccination as the “moment” when he fell out of love with me (lol bye forever). Meanwhile, a good friend hissed “you’re not becoming one of them are you?” when I expressed nerves about getting the second shot. How have we arrived at a place where uncertainty, or ambivalence, around a vaccine is enough to sort you into the category of Trump supporter?
The hovered threat of social exile, if you say the wrong thing, or ask the wrong question, is one hell of a cattle prod. The dusky piazzas of nuance have largely been explored in private these past couple years — and only with trusted confidants. Frankly, I’ve had enough of this. I’m getting sick of holding my Mercurial tongue. I will no longer be ashamed of my Gemini rising compulsion to hold two thoughts in the mind at once, and discover the truth somewhere within the vibrating tension of opposites.
My lingering worry about Saturn square Uranus — which, I’m loathe to report, will be a dominant signature next year too — is something I’d like to call The Fog of Covid. If Jupiter in Pisces is indeed the calvary come in the form of Omicron, (and the disease becomes endemic over the next couple months), the cynic in me does not hold a lot of faith that the “wartime” mechanisms in place now will retreat along with the plague.
I think that certain governing bodies, the world over, have gotten a taste for the power to shut people in their homes at the snap of their fingers. Putin is somebody with Saturn square Uranus in his chart, and the shadow of this aspect is cold and cruel authoritarianism. Of course, never assume some elaborate conspiracy when incompetence is more likely: I think a lot of the hysterical Omicron mandates have to do with out leaders not wanting to be the last holding the “hot potato”.
Nevertheless, greed is one hell of a drug. Over the pandemic the 1 percent have executed a massive Plutonic transfer of wealth — the likes of which hasn’t been seen before (and yes, we’re still in a deeply Plutonic Venus retrograde). As small businesses have been stripped by mostly futile lockdowns (in retrospect), our billionaires have been building space yachts that will yeet them out of this mess, just when things really get gnarly with the climate crisis.
If it’s not covid, there will be a roster of proxy culture wars unleashed to keep us divided and distracted from the true enemy (those with their names redacted from the flight log of the Lolita Express). They have us by our necks: families and communities have been torn apart by the current ideological frenzy, but I do believe we still have time to rediscover the humanity in our “enemies” and band together against this naked power grab on part of our lizard kings.
Algorithms sort and manage data with dazzling efficiency, enabling them to reflect our deepest desires endlessly back to us. Big Tech wants us to stay in Plato’s cave of course, accepting Metaverse pixels on the wall as reality — or something even better than the corporeal world. This sophistry is made possible by the elegance of simple binaries: next time you’re dissociating to the hypnosis machine that is TikTok, note the videos they fish out to you in pairs. The clips are alike in some way (lately I’ve been getting a lot on the theme of ASMR). I assume that if you watch both they will feed you more of its kind, but if you swipe one away they will find another pair — a slight variation on the theme — and see if that one causes your pupils to dilate with pleasure or disgust (it doesn’t matter which).
Except, we are not computers: at least not yet (let’s see what Pluto in Aquarius does!). The danger now is that with the pandemic triumph of the virtual, I suspect that we are unconsciously aping their algorithmic sorting mechanisms, IRL. We are constantly surveying our friends, our acquaintances, even strangers to see if they can be “paired” with us. These days it does not take much for said person, (whose beliefs may not align perfectly with our own), to be dehumanized, in an instant, and swiped away into the virtual wastes. Canceled. When such a mechanism is free-floating and allows us to make snap moral judgments — before we even have had a chance to explore the fruitful edges of our differences through conversation — we are in danger.
My wager is that the pandemic is on the brink of being washed away by Jupiter in Pisces’ benevolent tide, but Big Tech’s bid to keep us divided, dispirited, alienated, and addicted to their dopamine drip is here to stay — and we must resist. I’ll save my thoughts on what such resistance could look like in 2022 for another post, as this is already stupidly long.
For now, I’d like to end these ruminations on one last cosmic echo, which I find absolutely fascinating: the last time we had Pluto in Capricorn, Neptune in Pisces, Saturn in Aquarius and Uranus in Taurus together was when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses on the door of the All Saints Church in Wittenberg on October 31st in 1517.
Saturn and Uranus were not in a perfect square, but certainly gridlocked in a whole sign square. In any case, it’s an archetypal Saturn in Aquarius moment: a portal is opened between walls once considered inviolate. Saturn is the planet that rules over partitions of all kinds, and in the social sign of Aquarius it tends to heighten class divides as well as wealth disparities. The “in crowd” and the “out crowd” become cartoonishly stark: pro and antivax. Woke and red-pilled. Images now of unmasked celebs on the red carpet being waited on by their masked interns and gown fluffers.
Though Martin Luther’s rebel cry was directed at corruption within the Cahtolic Church — particularly its use of plenary indulgences — the resonances are clear. If you had the coin in Luther’s Germany, you could buy yourself space in God’s VIP lounge. Pluto in Capricorn tends to expose institutional wood rot and soul corruption via wealth. If the ongoing Ghislaine Maxwell case is not a collective wake up call on that front, I’m not sure what is.
Whether or not Luther physically nailed his list of propositions to the door is beside the point: one man’s moment of laser-focused indignation was enough to set off The Reformation, a schism his church would never recover from, as it splintered and reformed, splintered and reformed… The Reformation, in its long game, would re-shape Europe and birth the Protestant movement. You can never underestimate the potential for these fixed squares to shatter the status quo entirely.
My question now is whether or not a set of theses, nailed to the virtual threshold of Big Tech, is an act that could have any sort of impact in these inchoate times? Or does our humanity continue to circle the drain, in zeros and ones? What would a counter movement look like, which rejects the project of our rising Technocracy? Would there be any sort of appetite for such an alternative? Will the recognition of our common humanity, via Jupiter in Pisces, and the sensual hunger of the North Node in Taurus see the collective rejecting the bug paste, the pods, the owning nothing and being happy? Or will the horrors unleashed by the climate crisis be so severe that Plato’s cave, via the blindfold of VR masks, feels like the only option?
Wherever it is that we’re headed fam, I feel like philosopher and mystic, Rudolf Steiner, dreamed it a century ago. Merry Christmas everyone. Thanks so much for supporting my work, even in its less prolific seasons. Lo Saturnalia!
“We are dealing with the question of whether humanity at the present time will resolve to grow gradually into what benevolent spirits, wishing to ally themselves with human beings, bring down from the universe, or whether mankind will seek its continued cosmic existence in the gradual entanglement, in the spider-brood of its own, merely shadowy thoughts. It does not suffice today to set down in abstract formulas the need for spiritual scientific knowledge. It is necessary to show how thoughts become realities. This is what is so dreadful about all abstract theosophists who appear on the scene and place abstractions before people, for example: Thoughts will become realities in the future. But it does not occur to them to present the full and actual implications of these matters. For the concrete implication is that the intellectual, shadow-like thoughts, spun inwardly by human beings today, will one day cover the earth like a spider's web. Human beings will become entangled in it if they are not willing to rise above these shadowy thought.” (Rudolf Steiner).