The Cosmic Billiards of Nuclear Brinkmanship
I explore the ratcheting up of nuclear rhetoric, pipeline sabotage, (and Paris Fashion Week!) through Jupiter in Aries, Mercury's drunken shenanigans, and Venus returned to her airy domicile.
“What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening the use of nuclear weapons. And we can't get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves.”
― Martin Amis, Einstein's Monsters
“Had we managed to get home living
We’d trouble you worse than the dead.
Shambling, like blind men, among you
And most probably gone in the head.
So we’ve formed our heavenly choir
Composed of our melded limbs.
Each voices his part in the singing
We can’t disentangle our hymns.
We get noisy as larks in the sunshine.
Your leg’s with his head over there.
My fist’s stuck upright from a dugout.
It’s clutching a hank of his hair.”
- An excerpt from ‘Tucked in where they fell’ by Denise Riley
I was today (okay, yesterday) year’s old when I learned that Russia’s supersized submarine, the “Belgorod”, capable of carrying doomsday weapons, is no longer operating out of its base in the arctic. This is fine. NATO officials said that Russia may be planning to test the “Poseidon” weapons system, aptly named when you consider that Mercury just stationed direct opposite Neptune (and Jupiter is inching back to those Piscean waters). The poseidon system (also dubbed the weapon on the apocalypse) can apparently trigger a “radioactive tsunami” capable of razing the world’s major cities. So yeah. Mercury determined to station with maximum chaos.
Are you wondering why life has felt just Thee Most lately? Well, it’s not just the usual Mercury in gatorade shenanigans… Not even the fact that every planet and its mother has been retrograde too and answering to a drunk Hermes, stumbling out of Margaritaville. If I’m going to pin this on anyone, however, it’s Jupiter. Yep.
Last week Jupiter made its closest approach to Earth in 59 years, appearing as a bright star even in light-polluted cities. Jupiter’s opposition happens approximately every 13 years, meaning Earth is directly between it and the Sun. What made this approach extra potent, however, is that Jupiter was also approaching perigee — the moment when Jupiter and our planet are closest to each other in their different orbits. If you look to the East, after nightfall, you’ll still be able to see the gas giant in its peak blinginess, which is partly why life is feeling so extra lately.
It’s easy to forget that astrology is very much a symbolic language writ in light. The two benefic planets in traditional astrology — Jupiter and Venus — are simply lovely to look at. The benevolence ascribed to both of them has much to do with their jewel-like resplendence. Our malefic Saturn, on the other hand, appears brackish and dull, symbolizing the darkness of ignorance (among other things).
Last Sunday, I stepped outside to behold our benefic in all his glory, snap a photo, and was greeted by yet another black bear instead, just sauntering down my sidewalk by the rose bush. I think there’s a lesson here about the gods striking you down when you stray too close to the full splendour of their rays. Mars has an affinity with wild beasts after all, and Jupiter is under martian sovereignty — until the end of October, anyway.
As Jupiter continues to blaze bright, impregnating our zeitgeist with his symbolism, I’ve noticed a few permutations “as below”. Moshino recently debuted “inflation chic” on the spring/summer 2023 runway, while we careen merrily off the cliff of a global recession. The US dollar is flying high, while the British pound seems to be in a free fall: Jupiter’s winners and losers. Monster hurricanes Fiona and Ian have surely been intensified by Jupiter too, as sharks apparently swam the suburbs (speaking of Mars).
I also see Jupiter in the ratcheting up of nuclear rhetoric, as those sabres rattle again between Putin and the West. His recent Strange Love-esque annexation speech suggest that he’s a “true believer” — or very good at larping as one — as he positioned himself against the “satanic” Western hegemony, railing against a parade of Western sins. Yeah, things are cranking up. It’s not hard to imagine Jupiter in Aries as a wind of fire, vaporizing everything in its path (the great benefic is known to super-size whatever it touches). Of course, a little nuclear winter as a treat is already being massaged as divine intervention as far as climate change is concerned. And here’s why it’s a good thing!
As ever, the planetary cycles — and their resonance across space and time — never cease to amaze. Looking back to October of 1963, when Jupiter was last this close to Earth, we see an extraordinary global attempt at putting the nuclear cat back in the bag. On October 10th the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty formally went into effect after eight years of difficult negotiations. It’s hard to imagine now, but the governments of the USA, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union actually came together to sign a treaty with the aim of eventual nuclear disarmament. Anytime that humans gather under the tent of a common cause, their faith, or a higher ideal — Jove is pulling the strings.
Of course, we’re realizing now that this particular Pandora's box is not an easy one to close. In terms of humanity’s death instinct, Pluto is playing a much longer game and seems determined to answer the Fermi paradox. Instead of gazing deeper into the void of climate change or mutually assured self-destruction — Nasa looked up. Last week, the DART spacecraft slammed into a distant asteroid, Dimorphos with all the brute force we associate with Aries.
The historic mission, which scientists hailed as a “game-changer”, will test if human intervention can nudge a deadly asteroid out of a collision course with Earth. And we do a little cosmic billiards… Of course, I can’t help but think that this is all preamble to the inevitable Pluto in Aquarius intergalactic warfare spectacle/psyop, but that’s fodder for another post.
But still. What an extraordinary astrological synchronicity (or wielding of sympathetic magic on the part of Nasa). Just as Jupiter is the closest it will be to Earth for another 107 years, a mission is launched to do what Jupiter’s been doing all along: protect earth from errant space junk. Because of Jupiter’s gargantuan gravitational field, the gas giant has been protecting earth from asteroid and comet impact all along.
Well, kind of. Just as Jupiter is capable of deflecting comets away from us, it can actually redirect them toward us too. And our solar system’s asteroid belt? That was a planet that Jupiter’s mere presence prevented from coalescing. As ever, Fortune’s Wheel is capricious. And we haven’t even hit Mars retrograde or eclipse season yet.
But onto more pressing matters: what if the Jupiterian consensus that’s forming is one of war instead of peace? I remember writing back in March that it felt like humanity was increasingly horny for war — the ultimate dopamine feeding frenzy. Just consider the grim fare on Netflix these days: serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer is given the slick prestige drama treatment, while Blonde’s carousel of misery inadvertently performs a sort of Munroe-lore accelerationism (perhaps to finally free her hungry ghost).
As we continue to fry what’s left of our pleasure-reward centres, is it any surprise that the ultimate spectacle — nuclear war — would be presented as merely the next thing to be streamed/consooomed? It’s the only way I can explain the lack of horror, or even the existence of debate, as the West continues to pump arms and money into Ukraine. Meanwhile, iodine pills are being distributed in Poland and radiation emergency placards have gone up in the malls of New Jersey. It’s the “stay tuned” for me.
I’ve been reminded of the absolutely harrowing 1986 British animated film, When the Wind Blows, which chronicles a couple’s attempts to cling to normalcy in the wake of a nuclear attack and subsequent fallout. Their faith in the “powers that be” — and their pamphlet of government-sanctioned emergency procedure — barely wavers, even as Hilda and Jim begin their slow physical decline due to radiation poisoning. Instead of Dahmer, everyone should be watching this: the slow, brutal, quotidian reality of a couple making each other cups of tea through nuclear winter, as their teeth and hair begin to fall out. It’s the film’s ending sequence that truly destroyed me, however, as husband and wife crawl into their separate potato sacks, stumbling over the words of a long-forgotten prayer, as the rising sun heralds only death. Another Martin Amis quote comes to mind:
“Nuclear weapons could bring about the Book of Revelation in a matter of hours; they could do it today. Of course, no dead will rise; nothing will be revealed (nothing meaning two things, the absence of everything and a thing called nothing). Events that we call "acts of God"--floods, earthquakes, eruptions--are flesh wounds compared to the human act of nuclear war: a million Hiroshimas.”
Years ago, in another life, I was spending Christmas in Wimbledon in the semi-detached house of my ex’s Capricorn father. After getting into the closet hooch, he confessed that his happiest memories, over the span of his 82 years, were of living through the blitz in London as a boy. He described the freedom and excitement of having the run of the ruined city — playing hide-and-seek in destroyed cathedrals. Apparently his uncle carried him, on his shoulders, through falling ash and smoke as the bombs started raining down. Yes, Capricorns are built different, but the blitz nostalgia was still perplexing. Perhaps it’s that sweet spot of proximity to annihilation, while still being ferried to safety on an uncle’s sturdy shoulders.
And perhaps this is what worries me about our current era: even nuclear brinkmanship has been flattened into yet more content to be cozily streamed alongside Dahmer, until suddenly the sun rises at midnight.
Part of me thinks that mutually assured destruction would be letting us down too easily. Too neat of an ending. Pluto in Aquarius is just around the corner after all. Humanity’s reckoning with the techno-horrors it has created will be slow, arduous, even bureaucratic — many half-lives to this decay. I still hold out hope that there will be a way to opt out of this slow cancellation of our future humanity, though I can’t say what that will look like or what it will entail.
In any case, I genuinely think we’ve reached the overton window of a sunflower and Ukrainian flag in someone’s Twitter bio rendering nuanced discussion about nuclear brinkmanship all but naught. We’ve arrived at the stage of such hyper-partisanship that even the idea of Earth being glassed by doomsday weapons is not enough to push Twitter users, even an inch, from their emoji identikit of acceptable opinions and tribal signifiers. We’re somehow at the point where the possibility of being cancelled as a Putin sympathizer is far more terrifying than a Tsunami supercharged with nuclear waste.
All of this is to say, Jupiter in Aries certainly feels like a lockstep war cry on steroids, as it backtracks through the most martial of decans. The one that Austin Coppock calls “the ax”:
“We will need our hatchets, for the path forward winds through dense forest. Heavy brush below and dense canopy above, the pathways are overgrown and obscure. Insects threaten and predators stalk. We will need to cut our way through.
This landscape requires a machete, yet it also demands patience. A berserker flurry of cuts will not get us past the dense growth, but it will serve to exhaust.”
Will these last weeks of Jupiter in Aries see Putin go scorched earth? I couldn’t help but see the anagrammatic nesting of “nuclear” in a Guardian headline the other day: “Russia Unclear on Which Parts of Ukraine it is Annexing.” Mercurial tricks. Though the media fairytale of Ukraine’s David prevailing against Russia’s Goliath is seductive, history tells us that Russia’s strategy has always been waves and waves of cannon fodder: the brutal war of attrition that “serves to exhaust”. Mercury stationing opposite Neptune captures the confusion of Russia losing control over the four provinces it claims to have annexed, and I believe Putin’s at his most dangerous when his pride has been injured. The military mobilization likely won’t go as planned, but I think he’ll muster the troops one way or another.
And of course the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage only thickens the Neptunian fog of war, as Mercury stations in the froth of bubbles seen around the world. It’s also further foreshadowing of a long winter to come, as the final square of Uranus and Saturn closes out 2022 — a transit that has brought chaotic flash points in supply chains and infrastructural collapse. My feeling is that it’s going to be an unusually cold winter in Europe, marked by eruptions of civil unrest as the energy crisis intensifies. This all plays into Putin’s hand of course.
What I do know is that the astrology of this year folds in on itself. The spring and the fall of 2022 — our crucial cardinal turnings — are mirrors of each other. Perhaps this is appropriate for a year ruled by The Lovers card, with a Mars retrograde in the sign of the twins. If you’ve been feeling haunted by an experience or encounter in April, or like a situation from then is coming back around — you’re not the only one. California dreaming indeed.
Once again we’re staring down eclipse season in Taurus and Scorpio, as well as Jupiter returned to its Piscean mermaid grotto. The spring asks a question that the fall will answer. I will add that during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Jupiter was in Pisces and Saturn was in Aquarius — another haunting astrological echo. Our greater benefic and malefic in the signs of their domicile, equally empowered but unable to see each other. Saturn in Aquarius brings grave technological consequences, while Jupiter in Pisces ushers in the peak experiences that tether humanity together — whether through ekstasis or catharsis (often both, simultaneously).
Amidst this Jupiter in Aries battle cry — around which a terrible consensus seems to be forming — we have Venus returned to her air domicile. Some milk and honey interweave our flood waters and the Martian rivers of blood. I wouldn’t go as far to say that Venus in Libra is enough to temper the incendiary pitch of these times, but she’s sure a sight for sore eyes.
The day of her ingress into Libra, Paris Fashion Week heralded Venus’s return home with a futuristic spin on Botticelli’s Aphrodite emerging from the waves. Bella Hadid, a Libra herself, struck a Venusian pose on the runway tiles, as her handmaidens sprayed a white latex dress onto her nearly naked body. The invocation echoed the material innovations of Uranus in Taurus, and the cyberpunk edge of Saturn in Aquarius — but mostly it was Venus, in all her ethereal glory. In the hermetic hymn, Venus is described as “sea-foam born”, and Coperni captured these curds of surf with the unfinished, crenelated edges of her dress. Brilliant.
Ah, but we still have Pluto skulking through the wastes of these critical last degrees of Capricorn. Balenciaga volunteered to “do Hades”, transforming their runway into a mud-covered trench, as if hyperstitioning the war to come.
I was looking at the event chart for Putin’s declaration of “the special military invasion” — as it was broadcast in Kyiv. Putin, as an ex KGB agent, unfortunately has an untrustworthy natal chart (though I have a feeling it’s correct). We do, however, have a reliable event chart for the invasion. Its most striking signature is a Pluto-Mars-Venus stellium bang on the Capricorn ascendant. Sadistic, brutal, with Ukraine as the battered wife (Venusian crown jewel of the motherland). Algol on the IC is also worrying: considered the most violent star in our skies, it heralds decapitation but also losing one’s head to psychosis. Pluto has actually retrograded back to the degree of the chart ascendant, and will station direct on Sunday (over the Full Moon in Aries no less). The recent exhumation of mass graves and torture sites speaks to Pluto’s intensification of this horrors of this conflict (as well as the slow undoing of progress on Russia’s side).
Venus cycles also appear to be important in the longer unfolding of this conflict. Going back 8 years (a Venus cycle) we see Putin’s annexation of Crimea. Just like day 1 of the invasion into Ukraine, Venus was emerging from the shadow phase of her retrograde through Capricorn to be rebirthed as a strident morning star. Or perhaps an angel of war. I also noticed that the day those mass torture sites were uncovered in Ukraine, Venus and Mars were exactly square. Further research is required, but my intuition is telling me that there’s a crucial Venusian leitmotif to this conflict (and Putin himself is a Libra, if his chart is to be trusted).
Now we have Venus powerful in her domicile, though obscured by the Sun. She’s gone underground, preparing for her cazimi moment on October 22nd — a day of potential epiphany or breakthrough in this conflict (whether for good or ill). A Venus-influenced Full Moon in Aries is coming in hot this weekend, the same day Pluto stations direct. I keep seeing Tarot’s judgment card for October, and the blaring of Raphael’s horns. Welp, the astrology continues to astrology… As this post is already running long, I’ll save my thoughts on the Aries Full Moon for now, but I think it will be a crucial moment for the collective and a potential flashpoint in these days of nuclear blackmail.
As a reward for making it through my disparate, Mercury stationing thoughts, a palette cleanser via Sun Ra. Love y’all. xo
"As we continue to fry what’s left of our pleasure-reward centres, is it any surprise that the ultimate spectacle — nuclear war — would be presented as merely the next thing to be streamed/consooomed? It’s the only way I can explain the lack of horror, or even the existence of debate, as the West continues to pump arms and money into Ukraine."
There you go!