Venus and Uranus in Taurus: Holy Shit Go Outside!
Some thoughts on our pandemic severance from symposium, Venus' medicine of emergence, the Hierophantic glitching and proselytizing of Neptune square Mars, and the internet's cult of narcissism.
“the feeling of being a digression not the link in the argument,
a new direction, an offshoot, the limb going on elsewhere,
and liking that error, a feeling of being capable because an error,
of being wrong perhaps altogether wrong a piece from another set
stripped of position stripped of true function
and loving that error, loving that filial form, that break from perfection
where the complex mechanism fails, where the stranger appears in the clearing,
out of nowhere and uncalled for, out of nowhere to share the day.”
― Jorie Graham, The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994
First of all, I must apologize for my hiatus in posting here. My small town has been hit by an outbreak of covid variants, (most of them traced to a house party ffs), and my mental health has been sub-optimal as I wait for my first shot, and try not to slide into a permanent state of misanthropy. I may also be coming out of a period of seasonal depression that seems to hit me hardest in the spring.
I’m hoping that a letter from my family doctor will get my listed as clinically extremely vulnerable, but because my deadly asthma attack happened in Spain, and not Canada, there’s no medical trace of me in the system here. Vagaries of life as a disenfranchised Mercurial slipping between the bureaucratic cracks, as usual! In any case, the idea of succumbing to a Brazilian variant spawned from a Townsite rager is really just too grim to contemplate. Pray for me, lol.
I had a feeling this New Moon would rock the collective, and potentially see our matrix folding in on itself again. The Arian terrain of our recent Mars retrograde is thawing, and the marring of last year’s skirmishes was merely embalmed by winter’s ice. The Piscean surrealist ballet is now well and over (the fall from weightless jette has been rough), and old wounds are opening their eyes and stricken mouths again.
With Venus square Pluto coinciding with this New Moon, I was not surprised to see police brutality making headlines again, against the already triggering backdrop of the ongoing George Floyd murder trial (this New Moon is sponsored by Chiron after all).
The Venusian archetype itself has become a field for dissociation, psychic splits, and shocking upheaval for a number of years now. Uranus has been plunging us through a dazzling new event horizon in terms of our relationship to this earth (through her rebellion via plague and Anthropocene), but also our increasingly boundless entanglements as humans in a globalized world, interfacing through the box of mirrors we call the internet.
As Uranus’ host returns to her home roost of Taurus, we can expect the broader themes of this transit to be brought to earth, as it were, through a Venusian lens. Money, relationships and our value systems in general are now bearing the brunt of what I can only describe as a collective psychotic break, as we begin to reckon with the interpersonal damage of months of internet brain (a psychic corrosion worse than the lead in the pipes of the late Roman Empire, imo).
The alien calligraphy, grafted onto Grimes’ back over the New Moon, feels like an unconscious owning of the wound of this virtual matrix, and her proximity to one of its most powerful Tech overlords (I also can’t help but think of the Nxivm women branded by Keith Raniere’s sigil). I mean, a cyber punk future where Grimes’ son is cracking the whip over hordes of beleaguered meme admin no longer feels so far off, am I right?
The fact that folks are now buying parcels of digital acreage—as the NFT frenzy transitions to virtual land grabs—speaks to a strange acquiescence, on part of the collective, to our strange new air aeon. Ben Piven of Aljazeera, sees this latest NFT development as a potential reaction against the authoritarian crack down of Tech giants:
“With its verifiable property rights, Decentraland is the most developed and fastest-growing virtual land investment. With a vibe that feels like a combination of Second Life and SimCity, and similar to games such as Fortnite and Minecraft, Decentraland offers parcels that all must be bought and sold using MANA, its crypto token…The growing interest in NFTs points to a deeper, more lasting trend to democratize authority over virtual realms.”
Uranus in Taurus is estranging us from the old valuation of actual land, and ushering in a new wave of private ownership of the virtual simulacrum that I suppose we will all be uploaded to someday very soon. Meanwhile, we face down a garden gnomeless summer as the Suez Canal blockage has unleashed an unexpected hit in terms of Taurean accoutrements. I wonder if the gnome void will see a renaissance of what may be my ideal line of employment: the garden hermit assigned to an estate’s rockery, to add a decorative flourish of whimsy.
I’ve also been meditating, over this New Moon, on the loss of demarcated, physical space for the sacred flow of symposium, in the Platonic sense. Symposium is a convivial debate in the context of a drinking party, usually undertaken after a banquet. The spirit of this feels similar to the Spanish ritual of “sobremesa” (literally ‘over the table’), as that unhurried expanse of time after supper when you drink a chopito of digestif, and continue to chat and bask in each other’s company. How much of our current factious political climate is due in part to the loss of these fertile veldts of temporal, human communion?
The Pluto-Capricorn conjunction may be the most obvious signature for the pandemic, but Uranus has a lot to say about the psychic trauma that is seeded within a cohort. Severances that provoke alienation are a major part of Uranian transits, a la the castration myth of Uranus by his son Kronus. These Covidian Times have, of course, cut us brutally off from the Taurean ritual of breaking bread as fellow humans, and thereby working through our differences within an unhurried garden of good food, wine, and languid conversation.
Our initiation into lives conducted almost exclusively within virtual realms, sees the threat of digital castration always hovering. The ‘sobremesa’ space of play, sleepy mischief and half-drunk sparring has been replaced by a brutal panopticon of endless self-watching, where the crucial debates of our time leave digital traces, which can be pored over forensically (and potentially weaponized).
Cancel culture itself has become such a factious phrase that I’m loathe to use it, but I see this deep amputation wound as a symptom of the precarity of our digital turf within a boundless, and hyper-competitive market of charisma, emotional capital, and the now essential talent of being shameless enough to manipulate the affect streams in your favor.
All press is good press as the old saying goes, and the product that’s being sold is no longer a hefty Taurean thing, but something much more conceptual and difficult to quanitify. Christopher Lasch, in The Culture of Narcissism (aka The Bible), talks about a crucial shift post-war from people selling things, to selling themselves, and this has only been accelerated within the intermeshing of our markets with social media.
I would argue that what’s being sold by the garden variety spiritual guru is a brittle, but seductive, projection of frictionless self-actualization that is a Trojan Horse for the festering of narcissism that late capitalism feeds on (what a vicious loop indeed). They encourage a frothy languishing in vicissitudes of the self, supported by pseudo-religious doctrines of shadow werk, or ‘alchemy’ that allow this journey of self-actualization to cycle endlessly in an oroborus of woo.
These spiritual grifters attract their acolytes through a model of deprivation and lack (money mindset can only be unlocked by this hierophant). It’s interesting, in any case, to see Uranus’ tour of the first decan of Taurus highlighting the five of pentacles—a card of material and spiritual poverty
Except there seems to be very little in the way of redemption—or release from the relentless self-examination and vigilance of our digital age—within these pseudo-spiritual communities (many of them fetishizing and worshiping capitalism!). The proffering of identity markers takes on the dimension of competition in a market place, where certain trauma signifiers are necessary to even have a seat at the table.
Forced to become middle-managers of an intricate bureaucracy of the self, endless energy is expended in contorting ourselves into ever more elaborate shapes to compete in an unforgiving attention economy. (Energy that could be expended on raising class consciousness and stepping on the fingers of our tech overlords maybe?).
Or, in the words of Christopher Lasch: “The same benefits misleadingly associated with religion — security, spiritual comfort, dogmatic relief from doubt — are thought to flow from a therapeutic politics of identity. In effect, identity politics has come to serve as a substitute for religion — or at least for the feeling of self-righteousness that is so commonly confused with religion. These developments shed further light on the decline of democratic debate.”
Neptune square Mars is the other signature activated by the New Moon, and one that’s arguably more insidious in its machinations. I’ve seen within the spiritual community this past week a flurry of influencers (small fry and blue checks alike) addressing ‘the culture’, at a time when nerves are already frayed by covid variants, the Chauvin trial and a horrific spate of police violence against the Black community.
Over the course of the past few days, I found myself mesmerized by the Neptune-Mars spectacle unleashed by a self-proclaimed alchemist, witch, and unleasher of tantric trauma kink (if this is not a harbinger of an overly decadent society, I don’t know what is). She has a dedicated cadre of mostly white female followers who pay a princely monthly sum to partake in her wealth program. I had no idea who she was until she dropped a post (over the New Moon) claiming indigenous status through her European ancestral lines, which clearly did not go over well, though her viral internet moment has actually increased her follower count (you see the wicked game that Big Tech is playing with us here?).
This is honestly not a debate I want to wade into, but what fascinated me about this woman ‘lighting the internet on fire’ (what a bleak modern aspiration!), was the Neptune-Mars pseudo-religiosity of her performance. Over the course of several posts, she cycled between Hierophantic pomposity, simpering self-flagellation, an ecstasy of deference and fierce doubling down again on her original ‘heresy’—the posts seemingly responding in real time to the flood of comments that no single human could possibly address at once (yaaassss queens, die bitch, and everything between).
You could actually feel the cognitive dissonance of a narcissist glitching out as supply flooded her parcel of virtual land, and competed with the Byzantine curation of her lucrative online avatar. Endless binaries seemed to be cancelling each other out (bad ass witch or repentant white woman doing the work?), as the switchboard of her self-presentation responded to a cicada swarm of wildly different feedback loops.
Except the overall sweep of it had the flavor of a religious ecstasy. I was witnessing, in real time, a woman’s complete submission to the digital matrix (and cult of narcissism) that demands we prostrate ourselves to the point of dissociated babble and speaking in tongues.
Returning to another cult (the aforementioned NXIVM), I was struck by one aspect of Keith Rainier’s psychological warfare, which was that his sex slaves had to respond immediately to his texts, even if they were sent in the middle of the night. Failing to respond in a timely matter would lead to punishment. Like the heroine in The Story of O, a permanent state of openness to the cult leader’s power was symbolized by a pager, instead of a ring looped through a collar.
With Neptune square Mars, we can make a false equivalence between righteous reactivity as a portal into divinity, when the true mystic knows that many peak religious experiences are deeply private, and obscure affairs—very difficult to put into words. Social media is equally brutal and cultish, in my opinion, in its endless demands for emotional prostration, split second testimony, and openness to its 24 hour carousel of increasingly fractured self-watching and performance.
Returning to Uranus in Taurus, and the traumatic severance from leisurely spaces of symposium, how would the current moment be gentler if we severed these conversations from Instagram and the like, and created symposium in our local parks, squares and gardens (with social distancing of course). What if we only debated for this season with folks in our immediate, local context?
I remember a trip with my mom to Cuba, and the hours we spent watching young and old Cubanos alike debating the issues at hand in the Plaza de la Revolución. Although the arguments could get heated, there was also a dance to it—a Venusian flow, if you will. More often than not, the two people sparring would later smoke and swill rum together.
The gift of Venus in Taurus is one of trust in that which is emergent, and a willingness to quietly labor over the preparing of the land for future fecundity (especially the first decan of Taurus, which has a decidedly agricultural bent). Taurus also brings us the medicine of paucity, stillness and self-possession. In seduction, the Taurean trusts that her adornments and perfume will draw her suitors if she simply smolders, fine and glinting, in the corner.
I don’t mean to be so hard on this spiritual guru, by the way: I have compassion for anybody who has come out of this past year feeling slightly deranged by too much time online (myself included!). In my most audacious fantasies, I imagine a time in the future roaring twenties when we look back on this strange moment, and laugh at how seriously we took ourselves. How brittle and humorless we had become. How we relied on infographics and emotional labor scripts to talk to each other through the digital static.
Anyway, there’s a reason that the ‘holy shit, go outside’ meme started trending with Venus’ ingress. Yesterday I went for my first long bike ride of the season, and though spring is ever so late here in the East Kootenays, the first of the pussy willow tassels were waggling in the wind. The jointed stamens of horse grass, rising from the damp and moss, immediately made me feel sane again.
With the sun ingressing into Taurus very soon, I plan to continue blinking those heavy ox lashes at all the fuss and bother of the internet, trusting that if I continue to make beautiful things in my corner of the world, contentment will follow. I will keep many secrets. I will hold my tongue. I will only allow my emotions to be hijacked by the butterflies dawdling across my path.
And speaking of Cuba, was there ever a more divine opening sequence of a film?