The 2024 USA Election in the Shadow of Mars opposite Pluto
Reflections on our recent Mars-Pluto opposition on the fraught anaretic degree as America votes
As Americans take to the polls in what is being described as a historically knife-edge election, the deadlock is reflected in our skies, with polling taking place in the afterring of Mars opposite Pluto. The first Mars-Pluto opposition perfected on Sunday: a gong sounding in the underworld. Its reverberations will still be thick in the air on election day this Tuesday. Mars-day. As a transit that can stir the cauldron of our most primal fears, projections, and tendency to “other”, this highly factious mood will dominate the election, regardless of the result.
I wish I could say this danse-macabre is a one-and-done — but these oppositions will dominate our skies until April 27th, with the second opposition happening near the end of the year. Regardless of who wins the election on Tuesday, the aftermath of the vote is likely to be bitter, rancorous, even violent — and the result could absolutely be contested. The pain drawn out; The catharsis deferred. Mars’ Pluto’s poison folded in. The psyche of America has split into two factions unable to perceive humanity in the other. This all anticipates the Uranus in Gemini years to come of course, a transit that has historically brought war to American home soil.
Hard Mars-Pluto contacts are not exactly a rare occurrence; they happen a couple of times of year. But Mars finds itself in its fall in Cancer, not exactly comfortable skulking the Moon’s damp grottoes. The severings and thousand cuts of Mars, brought to the lunar realm of nurturance and emotions, can conjure abandonment wounds, tumultuous upbringings, kitchen sink dramas, and even exile from the ancestral matrix itself. In Cancer, Mars’ fight is not straightforward. The rules of combat are murky, the fight feels doomed from the start, and the warrior is left to seeth in the basement. It’s incel/femcel-coded. Its irrational explosions of ire that can often be self-wounding.
Adding to the angst, this first opposition occurred on the fraught anaretic degree, with Pluto’s sprawling deep state about to shift into Aquarius later this month, leaving Capricorn for the rest of our lifetimes. There’s black-pilled and then there’s Pluto on the anaretic degree of Capricorn-pilled. Mars in Cancer very much reflects the battle for reproductive rights but looming over all of this is the Military Industrial Complex and the subterranean riches at stake. Plutonic truth is often so gruesome that it remains unexamined, deliberately obfuscated, or outsourced to the next available scapegoat. That the US presidential election is openly a standoff between two oligarch-puppeteered candidates, yoked to the Zionist death cult is, well, enough to break the minds of anyone not completely numb to the images of genocide that have been pouring out of the dragon’s head since the nodes ingressed into Aries and Libra.
But of course, after 16 years of Pluto unleashing its super-secret termites through our infrastructure and governmental systems, the damage has already been done. Trust in institutions, gatekeepers, politicians — even the democratic process in the USA itself — has all but collapsed. And Trump may just be riding this wave of mistrust to the White House again. The USA itself is a Cancer Sun, its luminary lodged in the shadowy 8th House of death, loss, grief work, financial institutions, the occult, inheritances, and forces outside our control. I’ve noticed that 8th House people can sometimes find themselves the victors of devastating events — but not without a price. A malefic retrograding through that 8th House indicates a gift, some sort of bounty, being dragged back into the underworld again. The seeds planted for a potential future Civil War over this election, perhaps?
In any case, emotionally scarred and without its usual resources, Mars will enter Hades naked on December 6th, a sort of Neo figure dripping ectoplasm, expelled from his proto-womb. If Mars’ soul-weary fight in Cancer is directed somewhere, it’s the protection of the most vulnerable among us. This transit makes me think of those stories of mothers suddenly developing superhuman strength to lift the wrecks of cars off their infants. It’s hardly a coincidence that this election could pivot on reproductive rights and female bodily sovereignty.
It also makes a strange sort of sense that this election season has been dominated by dark fairy tales of harm befalling cats, dogs, and most recently a squirrel. The former devoured by Trump’s fascistic scapegoat of the rapacious immigrant, and the latter the New York State authorities who seized the instagram-famous rodent and euthanized it. Pluto in Capricorn as the manifestation of the cold bureaucracies of evil we’ve all suffered under.
I also can’t help but speculate that these images of animals in peril, haunting this election season, are a proxy for the thousands of Palestinian children crushed by the USA-funded war machine. This horrific, Plutonic truth of the blood sacrifice that fuels this echelon of late-capitalism —a fact too mind-breaking for many to fully comprehend. The despair of these late Pluto days has to go somewhere: AI-generated memes of kittens in crutches, with tear-pooling eyes, circulated by boomers on Facebook. And Trump’s political instincts are indisputably sharp. Here is this hopeless grief about both parties yoked to the project of ethnic cleansing, not to mention the extractive evils of Capitalism accelerated by a global pandemic and leaving many without the resources to survive, let alone thrive. I will soothe you by putting it here, in the scapegoat of the parasitic, bloodthirsty immigrant, boiling and eating your pets. This is all within Pluto’s playbook, of course: the smaller, often invented, easy to grasp evil that covers the intricate, sprawlingly systemic, institutional evil.
Mars is dancing between Trump’s 12th and 1st houses in the coming months, the most liminal boulevard of the natal chart. The 1st, where spirit fuses into matter and the 12th where the unconscious speaks in dreams, deep images, and the blur of archetypes. For better or for worse, something, indeed, “deranged”, in the American psyche, seems to be speaking through Trump. In an age when quicksilver mimetics and vibe shifts are key, Trump’s lack of a centre that holds feels somehow “true” to the spirit of these inchoate times.
And with the primal war drums of Mars-Pluto still reverberating, I don’t think we can discount a riptide of irrationality fueling people’s votes. The third party vote, because people are soul sick over the Biden administration’s ironclad alliance with Netanyahu. Or a whiplash back to Trump because his very volatility feels cathartic and at least anticipates something shifting — even if that itself is an illusion. Pluto in Aquarius could bring an empowerment of the collective, rising class consciousness, or even that secret third thing: revolution. But this transit also chimes with the sort of hyper-privatized techno-feudal vision for America that Musk and Peter Thiel, the latter acting through his blood boy Vance, would likely enact under Trump.
All of this is to say, the election is occurring during a highly unstable moment, as we find ourselves on the threshold between ages, with all of the outer planets preparing to change signs in the next two years. I’m not here to make any sort of astrological prediction as to the outcome of the vote, but I am caught on the fact that we’re being birthed, rather gruesomely, into an entirely new quality of time. Neither candidate, in my mind, really represents the sweeping changes we’re going to experience in the next decade or so, as the outer planets shift from feminine, nocturnal, water signs to a preponderance of masculine energy. Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and of course Pluto, will lodge in fire and air signs by 2026, which sounds, well, highly combustible. Accelerationism on speed.
Returning to a more granular view, a major transit of 2025 that does, perhaps, signal a Kamala Harris win is Venus stationing retrograde in Aries, only a week after Mars stations direct in Cancer on February 24th. There’s something about Venus starting her underworld journey in the sign of her detriment, Aries — where she is sullied and exiled from her usual Venusian resources — and then finishing it in Pisces, the sign of her exaltation, that feels like a restoration of female rights and bodily sovereignty.
Majorities of Americans have backed abortion access and Roe v Wade for decades, but it was rarely the deciding factor in a USA election. Now that the US supreme court has overturned Roe, permitting more than a dozen states to ban almost all abortions, reproductive rights may become the deciding issue of the 2024 election. This is definitely echoed in the astrology. Mars’ retrograde in Cancer feels like the alarm sounding, a sign that’s connected to mothers and caregiving, and Venus’ retrograde in Aries feels like the actual battle to restore reproductive rights, as Harris has promised to support a bill supporting Roe’s protections or veto any national abortion ban. Again, under a Mars-Pluto opposition, the stakes of this election are extremely primal. Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric may tweak the lizard brain of disenfranchised and hurting Americans desperate for a scapegoat… but the loss of bodily sovereignty is an even deeper horror yet for many women. And I suspect polling may be underestimating this crucial issue.
I’m also intrigued by the fact that the nodes are about to ingress into Pisces and Virgo again, where they were positioned 9 year ago when Trump was elected in 2016 as the upstart outsider claiming he would “drain the swamp” (this imagery is very Virgo-Pisces axis coded). A lunar eclipse in Pisces occurred on September 16th, 2016, a couple months before he was elected. We already had the first eclipse of this series in 9 years on September 17th, the day after the second Trump assassination attempt and coinciding with the IDF pager/walkie talkie terrorist attack in Lebanon (I covered this in my previous post). Trump himself was born on a lunar eclipse in Sagittarius, making these mutable eclipse series all the more charged for him. Will the next instalment in this eclipse story represent a decisive ending for Trump’s political career or a shadowy new beginning?
Trump is in a 7th House year, until his next birthday in June, a part of the chart associated with significant partnerships, including open enemies. Et tu, Vance? Kamala, on the other hand, is in a 1st House year, amping up the transit of Jupiter through her house of the soul, personal ventures, and leadership, which has been echoed in her “joyful warrior” campaign messaging (though the euphoria seems to have been squelched from the Dems in recent weeks, perhaps not wanting to underestimate Trump and get cocky in the way that Hilary did). Her time lord of the year is Mercury, which is slowing down to go retrograde in Sagittarius, on November 25th. Should Kamala win, there could be a period of considerable confusion, a la Bush and Gore, until she’s actually announced as the winner. Mars retrograde also points to this.
Jupiter transiting Trump’s 11th of friendship and his allies reflects the endorsement of media giant, Joe Rogan, whose sway over the zeitgeist cannot be underestimated. Looking at ZR, both Kamala and Trump are in peak periods for some time, so even if Trump loses I don’t think he’s likely to retreat from the public eye and quietly lick his wounds on some Florida golf course. It’s actually hard to imagine the media landscape without Trump and the outrage he reliably stirs up which entire media empires are hooked on by this point.
Anyway, I just said I wasn’t going to call it either way… the astrology truly feels like a coin toss, befitting an election with two candidates with major Gemini placements. What really matters is that there’s a new Cure album and it’s the slow, darkly elegant dirge we all need as Pluto slowly bleeds out on the marble steps to Aquarius.