Venus in the Shadows and Dark Gothic Maga

“You are Standing in an Open Field (Etienne Saint-Denis)” - Jon Rafman

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”

– David Foster Wallace

“It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.”

― Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

---

Full disclosure: I’m so over Mars retrograde in Cancer. The emotional marathon of it all. The metaphysical kettle whistling in my inner ear. Last week, Montreal broke records for the most snowfall in 5 days. After two consecutive blizzards, the dump was the largest since 1871, when records started being taken. If Mars in Cancer has felt intractably sluggish and claustrophobic, there’s nothing like the windows of your townhouse literally sealing shut with snow. Some vehicles on our block were entirely buried, while the only way to get groceries was to walk in the middle of the road between snow trenches. A week later, the city is only 25 percent cleared and we’ve resigned ourselves to a much more local existence. The Greek Bars are still open, with their single taps of Coors Lite. The same coterie of video lotto wraiths are still putting in their hours at the machines. Still, it’s hard not to succumb to a very real Mars in Cancer foreboding about just how messed up it is to receive a winter’s worth of snow in one day. The seasons lurch so spasmodically now, giving you nothing until suddenly they blow their load, paralyzing municipal infrastructure.

Our resident snow angel, Sila, cleansing the vibes

Mars will station direct on February 23rd, thank the Gods, but its splinters will be lodged in the same degrees, the same emotional terrain, for another few weeks, i.e. 17 - 19 degrees of Cancer. This just happens to be a couple degrees from my Cancer Moon. Send help, please.

Only a week after Mars stations direct, Venus will begin her own descent into Hades, scouring her own tract of starry real estate. As it happens, her retrograde will bridge the signs of Aries and Pisces — the same transition Saturn and Neptune will be making over the spring. Venus is exiled and degraded in Aries. Saturn’s statues crumble in the sign of the ram. Mars has been in seppuku mode since October, falling on its own emotional sword. Even Jupiter is in the sign of its detriment, fragmenting reality and shitposting merrily as our technofeudal overlords stage their coup. If it feels like the sky is falling, at least symbolically this is true.

Venus entered her pre-retrograde shadow on January 28th, the terrain she will rove again and again in the coming months (24 degrees Pisces to 10 degrees Aries), probing Lorca’s duendic “rim of the wound”. Falling again through the portals of still open questions. Anne Carson, in Autobiography of Red, wrote “desire is no light thing” — and yeah, I feel that. Venus will station retrograde in Aries later in March, where she is considered in a state of banishment, severed from her adornments and creature comforts. But there’s also dynamism here. A productive frisson. Poetry itself depends so much on the jagged edge of engagement — evidence that it is cut from the finer clothes of eternity.

This feels like a strange retrograde: Venus back-and-forth between the Boticellian sea foam of her exaltation and the scrappy Paper Bag Princess mode of her exile. You’re either in the golden chariot or you’re out. Rags to riches and back to rags again. The madonna-whore coin spinning. The retrograde makes a fateful over the shoulder glance from the harsh realities of Venus in Aries to the high glamor of an exalted Venus in Pisces. The casting back to a golden Elysium, often Roman, is very much part of the fascism playbook. One of Trump’s first moves in office was to mint his own cyber coin — very Roman of him.

We can’t forget that Venus also answers to a fallen Mars, further distorting her expression. Vettius Valens says of Venus, “it is the giving and receiving of gifts … and it causes men to be gold spinners, gold workers, … and people fond of cleanliness and toys.” To this end, Netanyahu’s beaming “gift” to Donald Trump, a golden pager to commemorate the terrorist attack in Lebanon that killed 37 and maimed thousands, speaks of the depravity possible when Venus is in detriment. The polished cedar wood setting, its rings resembling the shockwaves from an exploding bomb, remind us that aesthetics and evil often meld.

Venus, rebirthed into her morning star form after the fiery baptism of her retrograde, is considered her face of war: Lucifer. The torch bearer. She is indeed a bright flame in our night sky now, on the cusp of her vanishing act. Making this retrograde even more volatile (and reality-bending) on the world stage is Venus’ triggering of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, which enters an 8 degree orb on March 3rd, the day after Venus stations retrograde. The Saturn-Neptune cycle is known to be entangled with crucial moments in Russian history, so that could be a potential trigger point.

Satan in His Original Glory by William Blake, 1805

I find that Venus retrograde periods — those enchanted 40 days and 40 nights — can also represent profound reversals in matters of taste, aesthetics, decorum, and collective values. There’s often a sharp flip between what is considered cringe and what is considered based. During Venus retrograde, the “rules of the game” — our unspoken social pacts of decorum and mutual good — can suddenly shatter. The counterculture, or even the reactionaries, suddenly become the mainstream and vice versa. It was 8 years ago, i.e. a Venus cycle ago, when Venus last stationed retrograde in Aries and traced her path back to the opium of Pisces (Make America Great … Again). This was the March of 2017 after Donald Trump’s first inauguration, a win that at the time was considered a fluke. Now the cruel kids are eating scallops and lobsters at the inaugural Pepe Ball, where nazi salutes are the new meme. Or, as Sam Kriss recently put it, reporting back from his stomp around inauguration time DC:

“Something has changed, and it’s not just that Donald Trump got 4% more of the vote than he did in 2016. The general sense is that there’s been a movement in the vibes. A high pressure vibefront heads in from the Pacific, and suddenly tech moguls are dressing like fuckboys and the hot girls are getting into the skull-measuring type of racism. Vibenadoes whip across the plains; whole structures of thought and feeling reduced to splinters overnight. How many of the people I met in DC posted black squares in 2020? Not none. You thought you were a rational individual forming your own conclusions about the world; in fact you’re a leaf flapping about in the psychic winds.”

Another banger, from @darkmargaritaville

The tech ethos of “move quickly and break things” was mostly relegated to Silicon Valley in the past decades. But as the outer planets shift into the fleetness of yang fire and air signs, within the larger container of the 200 year aeon, such a philosophy, as applied to the larger project of governing the most powerful country in the world, is no longer unthinkable. It was simply waiting for the outer planets to catch up. Not unlike the dangerous melding of church and state I think we’re witnessing a merging of algorithms and state. Or as Steve Bannon puts it, the way to the deal with the democrats is to “flood the zone with shit”. In the new air aeon, seizing the virtual agora, controlling its information freeways, and directing the zephyr winds of its vibes, is the way you wage war.

By the time Uranus enters Gemini this summer, which really does describe Yarvin’s vision of “the patchwork”, our potential techno-feudal future will be cooking with gas. A future where the USA has been balkanized into corporate fiefdoms, or network states, run on crypto and AI, with virtual reality prisons no less. A year ago I may have regarded this video essay as hyperbole — but now that we’re fully in Pluto in Aquarius for the next 20 years, and staring down the “hard reset” of Saturn and Neptune conjoining on the cardinal Aries point in 2026 —not to mention Uranus in Gemini’s reliable harbinger of American upheaval and civil war — I think this is exactly what the tech billionaires are cooking.

In Yarvin’s words “The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.” In his vision entire nations will be run like the most rapacious Silicon Valley start ups, and if you don’t like your tech warlord (maybe the grinding down of humans into biofuel gives you the “ick”), don’t worry: you can simply “opt out” and flourish in another network city in the patchwork. It’s giving the same energy as Trump saying the Palestinians would simply be ethnically cleansed into “mythical beautiful homes, while the USA takes control of glorious Gaza-lago.

After Trump’s firehose of executive order chaos, the disintegration of democracy into warring corporate network states no longer feels so far-fetched. Trump’s ascent into Sun King, or pseudo Caesar, is the necessary Leonine foil — the great distraction — as the actual coup is led by Musk’s army of young coders who are ctrl-alt-deleting the federal government as I type this.

Except this isn’t a spontaneous coup. The ideological soil has been tilled for years now. I’d actually pinpoint the last Pluto ingress into Capricorn, in 2008, coinciding with the banking crisis, as the first crucial blow. The void it clawed open allowed for the inrush of radical new ideologies, many of them centered around the inevitable demise of democracy. Dark Gothic Maga has been festering, like a super toxic black mold, in the think tanks of Silicon Valley for decades now. I do find it fascinating that the Great Conjunction, the larger holding vessel for this epoch, triggered the Sabian symbol that describes “an old adobe mission in California”, which Rudyar describes as the “work and spirit of the Spanish priests … whose monuments were able to make a mark on an alien landscape.”

Nicolas Bruno — Death

Pluto is all about power. When the accumulation of unimaginable riches is not enough for the billionaire CEOs, why not speedrun the demise of the American empire and rebuild its glorious new republic from the rubble — in your image? To Valens, Aquarius is “misanthropic, single-minded, malicious, devious, and very very cold.” We have to remember that Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg et al earnestly believe that the accumulation of their Plutonic riches is a direct reflection of their brilliance and superhuman superiority. It can’t have had anything to do with those generational blood emeralds or a little family business mining Uranium in South Africa…

Mike Brock describes this Pluto in Aquarius power grab in stark terms in his Substack Article “The Plot Against America”:

“As I write this in early 2025, a quiet revolution is unfolding within the U.S. government. Inside the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), teams of young tech operatives are systematically dismantling democratic institutions and replacing them with proprietary artificial intelligence systems. Civil servants who raise legal objections are being removed. Government databases are being migrated to private servers. Decision-making power is being transferred from elected officials and career bureaucrats to algorithms controlled by a small network of Silicon Valley elites… DOGE is not about efficiency. It is about erasure. Democracy is being deleted in slow motion, replaced by proprietary technology and AI models. It is a coup, executed not with guns, but with backend migrations and database wipes.”

///

I remember becoming aware of Curtis Yarvin’s work — the reactionary Rasputin whispering in Vance’s ear — in 2021 through his Substack Gray Mirror. Though I found his ideas abhorrent, in the same way that I find libertarian trust fund bros absolutely insufferable, I remember sensing a dark allure pulsing behind his transmissions. He’s skilled at evoking the aura of edgelord philosopher offering forbidden knowledge. Others have described his prose as weaving a sort of Lovecraftian spell — and it’s there. I get it. Until you peel back the intricate lattice of citations and realize he’s a crackpot racist who simply spent years reading and collecting theories that would reinforce his superiority complex as well as his belief that aristocracy is as much an inevitability as slavery.

Curtis Yarvin’s natal chart offers a strange mirroring indeed of the US’s natal placements. His Chiron conjoins the USA natal Chiron where the country is currently experiencing an extremely masculine-coded healing crisis. Aries can long for structure, a general’s orders — or a para-daddy ordering you to make your bed. This Chiron return also feels like lambs being led to slaughter, so he’s very much dialled into that primal wound and giving voice to it. His Cancerian Venus is conjunct the USA’s Mercury, speaking of intellectual seduction. His part of fortune conjoins the US Sun. His Jupiter is copulating with the US Venus. It’s quite a Klimptian clusterfuck in the USA’s 8th House of power, fustian pacts, and shadowy investors.

Something that Yarvin provided, I think, through his prolific activities of the blogger with all the time in the world, was a sort of Venusian connective agent. An unspoken signal. When he was doxxed from his Mencius Moldbug anonymity, he became a darling of Dimes Square. He was at the same parties as the likes of Vance and Thiel. Perhaps then it was still uncouth, even in libertarian tech circles, to talk openly about calipers — but you could say you read Yarvin. Wink, wink. He took the heady fumes of 4chan shitposting and translated it into his version of dactylic pentameter. He allowed the racists, the accelerationists, the technofascists to feel that their project had an academic, even mystical, pedigree. An oracular inevitability.

Something really clicked into place for me though when I was listening to a Behind the Bastards podcast deep dive on Curtis Yarvin. They were describing Yarvin’s younger days as one of the earliest adopters of internet culture, when it was largely gated message boards only accessible to the uber tech nerds. Saturn was in Aquarius during this so-called golden age of the internet, a time when Usenet was untethered to a central server and operated in a rhizomic fashion.

“You Are Standing in an Open Field (Autumn Valley)” — Jon Rafman

Yarvin described its admissions control, where only tech students and engineers had the chops to even enter its experimental digital culture, as producing a pseudo aristocracy. With Pluto in Aquarius now, those early adopters and architects of the internet, arguably the most powerful technology on the planet now, have infiltrated the White House. They’ve played the long game. Some of them have used their wealth to live as luddite ascetics, shielding themselves from the damage inflicted by the very apps they created. And now they want to shatter the USA into a frontier as wide and utopian as the early internet felt before the rabble started pouring in. Of course this way of thinking is absolutely unhinged. About as detached from reality as Peter Thiel’s "ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual," which billionaire Bryan Johnson has taken to another level. (Ex-Mormons will literally compare boner stats with their sons before going to therapy…). But Aquarius, on a power-drunk bender, is very much capable of the kind of hubris that denies human mortality.

Yarvin’s over the shoulder glance at those halcyon days shit posting with the tech elite — within their hermetically sealed parcel of virtual paradise — is the powerful desire, the Venusian longing, shaping the current coup. Pluto, a God of invisibility as well as power, has this knack of planting seeds that start out super small. But when the time comes their rupturing unleashes waves of destruction as powerful as nuclear fission itself. Yarvin, steeped in the ideas of Nick Land, was very much aware of the ideological vacuum that opened after 9-11 — and even more so in 2008, when Pluto entered Capricorn and the banking crisis was unleashed. For better or for worse (definitely worse), he just kept writing and world-building into that void and eventually hyperstitioned his Dark Enlightenment into reality.

Such ideological intoxication is par for the course during Pluto in Aquarius. Uranus in Gemini will only accelerate the dashing of once convincing stories, like democracy, into smithereens, including the language that ratified the US constitution in 1887 during the last sojourn of Pluto through Aquarius. In other words, yes, the American constitution will be having its own Pluto return in the coming years. So maybe their deranged gamble is paying off. The very tech platforms they’ve authored have rendered a population that’s demoralized, alienated, anxious, perpetually distracted, increasingly illiterate, and lacking in the executive function that any sort of resistance would require. A populace that’s absolutely primed for the shaping hands of these self-appointed tech Gods.

The unholy entanglement of AI with autocracies is an abstraction, a thought experiment, until suddenly it isn’t. Between flashing nazi salutes or wielding bureaucracy chainsaws, gifted to him by the Argentine president who receives his political counsel telepathically from his cloned dogs, Musk recently, giddily, stated: “I am become meme… I’m living the meme.” Democracy disintegrates in shitposts.

I Just bought this album by Portishead on vinyl and this song is feeling especially cathartic as reality jumps the shark. Or the bureaucracy chainsaw.