11/4/24-11/10/24: Ad-Libertine

Venus and Mercury are attempting to bring some enthusiasm into the mix now but with Jupiter in Gemini the results are not always much more than the wizz bang fizz of pop rocks tickling your tongue, or the tang of some low level spice suggesting something enticing to an otherwise sodden outlook and flooded set of parameters. Think of the physical locations that have experienced too much precipitation over the past several weeks, and all the new pathways and circuitries and neural linkages and out of nowhere synapses which resulted in scrambling around less than ideal circumstances and then consider the current moment where situations have begun to have moved along progressively enough to begin to now touch base once more with what you are excited about outside of external contexts. Seeing through survival mode eyes being harmonized with the reality of surrendering to whatever you are currently immersed in and the obligation to go with the flow in an over saturated and fake world that is for the most part limp and as thrilling as a wet noodle while wayyyy too much information is in circulation and the most authoritative voice is one of chauvinist flexing while things really are kicking into gear but in a mad cap way that obviously will get squirrelly as all fuck in barely any moment now while our ultimate hearts desires are juxtaposed by a bazillion factors which spin our minds into numbness as we reach for the remote to switch off the tube as its stuck on channel surf.

That’s one way of looking at it. But something really unique is also happening simultaneously. All the planets are visible in the sky at various points of the day or night, interesting for the Sun being in a LunarZodiacal Shape corresponding to what gets delivered to either channel of the Yin and the Yang. Here on the Eastern seaboard of the US you’ll find Saturn, Jupiter and Mars visible after 10pm and you’ll just be able to catch Venus and Mercury near the  crescent Moon on the western horizon after sunset. The Sun in Scorpio and Mars newly in Leo are in mutual reception. Jupiter in Gemini as well as Mercury in Sagittarius are also in mutual reception. From my client work I’ve found and corroborated with the observations of other consulting astrologers that mutual reception tends to have a particular, unique functionality which most often does better than an over expressive planet in rulership or a more convoluted planet in doctrinal debility. The reason may be that the planet in rulership expresses unhindered in one particular life layer with no care to what happens in other layers of life, where as the debilitated planet may find a nuanced way of operating it still tends to express in an inefficient and often generally unrelatable fashion, whereas two planets in mutual reception collaborate, share ideas and scheme in unison to tie multiple layers of life together, and this tends to trickle down to whatever other planets they rule and subsequent life layers ruled by them. A kind of happenstance synergistic set of motions are at foot. Like moments in a movie when all the disparate plot lines all facilitate the overarching narrative to move the charachters way along the story boarding.

This week may feel not right, you may be looking at it through a groaning gut, feeling pet the wrong way by the world, unable to ignore how much the whole of life, culture and reality has stalled out and is over-infused with mediocrity. You may feel like all you get is party favors rather than the real thing, the holy grail, the alchemical result of all your passion having dissolved somewhere into the past and vanished for good. You may feel like despite all the podcasts, YouTube creators, and access to endless music and movie media there’s nothing on to entertain you and it only actually pisses you off. You may feel like knowledge got replaced by charlatanism, the elder priests got swapped out for child preachers. That all there is being said is inflated cock talk, and people are thinking with their egos attempting to perform impressive acts by inserting too many too large things into too many curious yet inappropriate holes all at the same time. There’s a tension between variety, goals, passions, nostalgia, advantage, what gets the most attention, what doesn’t not work and what our guts tell us is not negotiable— BUT, somehow things seem to synchronistically falling into place all the same. This is not the recipe you might have imagined would get you to where you’ve been trying every fucking which way to arrive at or exhausting yourself all these years to accomplish, but somehow, by a series of accident, mistakes and happenstance, things might be all coming together and aligning to bring your inner, urgent drives into play in just the right way for you to soon take a swing at the big one.

If the splattered array of water, fire and air with the historical ground about to be removed which results in pressure on what we are tactically performing leading to a sooner Mercury retrograde and later Mars retrograde so be aware that our appetites, libidos and enthusiasms may soon be getting us into a not so funny set of dance steps, all falls into some sort of strange harmony with your chart you might be just feeling perfectly at home in this moment, but for the rest of us, this feels like we’re pretending to be doing one thing just to get all the wheels to be spinning while we’re simultaneously plotting our escape and the diverting attention tactics are soon to be crisis identifiable. All the disguises are about to fall askew, crack and melt off faces at all the podiums across all the television broadcasts in plain sight of all the cameras being broadcast to all the devises worldwide and this includes yours as well. The upside is you are just one of a whole world of people who are being unmasked all at once, but the effect has the strange result of there being little difference between disguise and no disguise. Animal tails, face filters, aliases, alternate profiles, avatars and all the rest step up against bombastic displays of bold faced and belligerent personal power. Is everybody clowning around? Well the clowning is getting a little real guys. I think the melted mask fused with the flesh and now no one can get their distorted disguise off their face and the costume in tatters is the only thing left in the wardrobe. Oh, well, no one knows who they are or were anymore. Moving on to who we can possibly become in the next episode which has yet to air and is only half scripted, so ad lib like a motherfucker.

As the clock strikes the hour to get aggressively real there’s literally no longer any way to do so, except go completely under the radar, essentially cease to exist from a societal perspective. You like raw, uncompromising nature and continuous labor to hold down the hut on a daily bases? Well that’s probably your only alternative to full blast dystopian artificiality with no substantial cultural or aesthetic reward whatsoever. As the next subcultural enclave archetype has yet to reveal itself we are presented with such a tangible split between the organic and inorganic options which epitomize in the bifurcation of phenomenological and egregoric paradigms. This is civilization at its pinnacle, which from a non-progressivist perspective we know that when things peak and spike off the charts it's a sure indicator for extreme imbalance. With the scales of equilibrium recently having gone out like baby with bathwater we are feeling around for an authenticator of balance. How do we know when something which voices confidence enough to be true and plausible enough to be real also has value and is sound to be brought into the equation of the broader equilibrium?

That’s the problem of the next twenty years which we begin to look directly at right now. We know in our gut what is real. The wilds are real. Nature is real. The organic is real. With Pluto in Aquarius whenever we attempt to touch this real we run up against corrupt systems. We are made alien and exile by being real. Nature, and survival in it, becomes more off limits as things become more progressively controlled. Autonomy and culture will be awarded to you as a behavioral reward system. There is no conspiracy necessarily behind this network, but the network automata itself has its egregoric hold on us. The medium is the message. The most willing to celebrate and perform the artificiality will get the most spotlight, and more and more feel cutting edge and punk for doing so. Pluto is still in Capricorn, suffering the last few days of its previous Plutocracy. A sham world of property scams, bank bailouts, corrupt development, status symbol pantomime of its-cool-to-act-out-what-our-parents-thought-rich-people-were-like while also hating on boomers and their wealth simultaneously; globe trotting, air bnb-ing, restaurant patronizing, Whole Foods shopping Social Justice Warriors. New issues are now looming; youth problems, identity crisis, automaton, simulation adoption and so on we are not ready for. But we’re ready for something, anything to stir the pot, kick up the stagnancy, flip the pond, so we’ll take the heat anyway, just zap us with voltage and revive our corpse.

For the week we feel our discontent, malcontent hearts stew in what has and hasn’t manifested and finger the hot beads of our potential enthusiasms strung on a short circuit string with no where worthy to connect. But yet, something is forming. The event horizon is gaining in definition.

Give this experiment a try this week to assess where you may be going. Take a paper of decent size and draw a horizontal line across the center. That’s your horizon. Now, allow your imagination to fill in the rest of this world or place snapshot, unfiltered. Draw from what’s inside you. You can source from your gut, your instincts, your needs, your desires, aesthetic sense, excitement, abstract ideas. Don’t filter. Once you feel it is finished put it aside. Start another one. Make as many as you’d like but resist looking back over the ones you’ve already finished composing for now. Next Sunday get them all together and take a tour through the imaginal vacation you recently escaped to. Contemplate what themes and forms and notions arise from your stream of conscious pilgrimage. More instructions to come next week, ciao for now.