The Astrology Of October 2019: Cave Painting

A small volcano in miniature pierces the center of the table, and despite the extreme effort to ignore it or remove it by rendering it obsolete to the conversation it remains throughout the entirety of the meeting, oozing with cool blue gel, resembling a forbidden confection, and up from its slow eruptions which ooze over the edge of its protrusion in slow and beckoning emissions of rolling folds, the sweet sounds of singing unwrap in circling flights of singing voices as paper candles drip with black wax ink and splotch the table in rhythmic rorschach from which arms outstretch and puppets play in shadows against the flow of powerpoints projected crisscrossing askance heated debate in the civil chamber, the hearings that have persisted since yesterday unceasingly haunting the candies rolling in their jumbled pockets, the ballbearings of edible polyps like lychees spit thin saline streamers and soften the stiff starch of parliamentary cabinet members lapels which waft ammonia stained moth wings up to their nostrils which are penetrated by skirt ruffling intruders invisible to the eye, yet discussions persist, and the meeting looses momentum, and pencil stubs snap then soften into soiled sections of paper pads upon which foul thoughts may lay and join in coitus- nymph and faun combine under the florescent lights, the lips of the defense salubriously contorting in prolonged silence, pregnant with repression, and the water in the glasses undulates awake, forms porpoise choruses and cream colored gauze is all that's left after the inevitable splash. Blouses and trousers are torn, and carcasses with rib cages splayed and reaching up to the drop ceiling as if praying beg for mossy branches to collapse the panels and bring down the fixtures with the weight of their dark limbs, but coffee has just been served, as is justice, and everyone prepares their name tags, and refreshes their pertinent details, and shuffles their paperwork and readies their statements, while large cats stalk the room, then stand in all their might and serve drinks on clamshell trays, and the whole meeting commences slurping oysters while watching the playback of some footage where a dancer is injured after becoming possessed, his protege behind the thin curtain mimicking his movements and committing them to memory, and the committee forget their lines, and the clock ticks off the wall, and the maintenance man is called awake out of bed and by the bitter promise of time and a half pay and early retirement rouses, abandons his family and returns to the chamber of commerce where the voices of the small town meet to discuss how the arts should intersect with tourism, and while he works they doze off and are ejected into extreme nightmares from which they will never awake, where they glimpse themselves in the act, and with the most delicious guilt exterminate their gut flora and bleach their eyebrows and light fire to their lawns and gulp sour milk, but then the alarm struck by accident, out of sync with the minutes jars them awake, and day is worse then night, as the debate continues un-erred, they've ushered in a new team of interns to take their place, and they are younger and smarter and more socially savvy and like blank slates they perform their duties with the precision of automatons, and the with growling appetites the board members step down and feast upon the sweat and scent of the glowing flowers and laugh at their false sense of scrutiny, downing tumblers of gin as if it were a 70s novel, over literate and dreadful, the sewer system erupting in psylocybn syrup until from the grates and curbside drains emerge reptilian cortesans and out come the check books and the forgeries are faked so they are by proxy real signatures and everyone is involved and no one can escape and papers are shredded and in the mess of the amphibian aquarium bottom the meeting is at last adjourned. Nothing was decided, but somehow everything was changed.

Venus and Mars in (uncomfortable) mutual reception

By October 4th we have Mars and Venus co-present in Libra, and even though this is Mars’ sign of traditional ‘detriment’ or ‘exile’, being opposite his domicile of Aries, his time here is facilitated at first by being copresent with Venus on the other end of the scales. The Lady of the house is in and able to do what she does best in Libra, host and distribute delightful goodies and dispense plenty of charm. Mars here has a hard time stepping up to the plate and being effective as he worries excessively about how it will effect others around him, and as a result our tactical operability suffers in these periods, we get gun shy and then carry agitation around from passing our opportunity to strike over to whoever was standing nearby while we knew we could have done it better than they did, we were just being polite and look what happened, etc. Venus makes sure that we get to accommodate other people and keep the peace while also giving us a chance to get a shot in. No one’s hogging the lane, we can all get up and see if we can roll a strike, but its still Mars in detriment, so despite the fact that no one is arguing over who goes next no one is really getting a chance to show what they are really made of either, there’s just not enough time and things are so equal opportunity that no one seems to excel. This is the opposite of King Of The Mountain, here there are no losers and everyone wins, all the teams leave with gold medals around their necks, but that also means that they are relatively meaningless accolades.

The dynamic changes on October 8th when Venus enters Scorpio, Mars’ nocturnal rulership. Both Mars’ signs of Aries and Scorpio are Venus’ places of exile, although in Scorpio she is in watery triplicity dignity by night sect, so still in feminine modality, and even though Mars and Venus can’t see each other and make a traditional aspect in signs right beside each other, they are still in some kind of mutual reception be being in each other’s domiciles. This may be a little circumstantial and paradoxical, as they can’t communicate with one another but are in each other’s house. The fact that Venus has just come from her house where Mars remains might help this out, as there’s time to get ready before the switch occurs, a grace period of about four days to balance out and equalize and harmonize and tune your aesthetic receptors and desires to your action agendas and tactical artillery. With Mars in Libra the pen will certainly be mightier than the sword, and the paint brush or harp might be even most powerful of all. With Venus in Scorpio the creative battle plan might involve detailing deep and intense fixations and explaining in song or dance why you salivate over certain delicacies and why specific objects of desire make your blood boil. This is a soiree set up strategically to smooth everything over across the entire community where all the participants smear themselves in musk and imbibe spiked wine to entrance themselves in lycanthropic abandon for the sake of collective catharsis which through sensual trial bonds all in attendance to mutual initiation through a threshold crossing. The trick is all in the dosage: a carefully measured mixture of excitement, exhibition, emotion, honesty, clarity, concern, danger, fear, stealth and consensual boundary pushing. The sublime beauty of a culture of depravity and the civil blessings in its sick agendas which beget peace and processing. This sounds and is paradoxical and is only familiar to the few but look into the material history of avante gardes and counter cultures and you will see very clearly this very dynamic providing both nourishment and therapeutic relief and most importantly cross community sensual satisfaction throughout both recent and distant pasts. This has gotten perhaps a bit lost and convoluted in more recent incarnations of social justice, but this fall may see a sudden about face and rallying for the import and necessity of the perverse and dangerous.

Libra planets squaring Saturn/Pluto

Throughout September we discussed the implications of Saturn’s square from his rulership in Capricorn to his exaltation in Libra effecting Venus and the planets she has been hosting in her domicile. This is a little bit more of a well behaved hard aspect from the Greater Malefic, although that doesn’t reduce the pressure, just makes it more worthwhile and more well measured, which sometimes can come as a bigger pain as its one you can’t ignore. You know the complaint against you is sound and you must heed it, you’ve been caught red handed and called out fair and square, time to correct your behavior and make adjustments. Along the way to showing the community how gorgeous your sculptures are theres time at the grindstone with chisel and hammer blows, and endless hours burned in charm school doing timed drills with books balanced on your head. This continues into October, but after the 8th without Venus copresent, so the feeling under foot of Saturn might register as more extreme and plain mean. But when times get tough we get tougher, or at least we can attempt to with a Mars in detriment all but incapable of clear violence. Either way, we’ve got to keep on our feet, float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, and in all this dancing around keep our eyes on the prize, collectively, as a dance troop, and in harmony with the death-rock soundrack Venus prefers pre-Halloween prioritize productivity so that the clash of malefics expresses as industrial action rather than catastrophic collision and anger at confinement. So stretch your hamstrings now while things are calm and warm up for the most elegant and mechanically prolific psychodramatic goth-industrial ballet ever to swing you around and pull your heart strings so hard you feel it in your loins while the black bile in the thermometer displays how many parts per unit are produced each machination of the marionette which you didn’t know you ever were but under the cover of night and in full view of the community you don a cape of dark colors and interpretive dance your way into a firmer foundation and more secure state that you were prior to the fall. This sounds pretty awkward and strange, and it is; prepare for a busy, strenuous, chatty, moody-broody, creative, excessive, debaucherous, socially charged month, kind of like playing multiple roles in a staged Butoh production of Swan Lake with Einstürzende Neubauten in the orchestra pit. The final product is provocative and exquisite but the preparation was intense and socially demanding.

Scorpio planets opposing Uranus, trining Neptune and sextiling Saturn/Pluto

The soft aspect side of the month occurs between the Scorpion Venus and Mercury with the outer planets of Saturn, Neptune and Pluto in tandem after first opposing Uranus early in their ingress. Uranus delivers a particular jolt, the mad scientist energy in the modality of feverish, predatory hunger and magnetic mating impulses sounds very Frankenstein, and indeed we may be laughing maniacally and screaming “It’s Alive!” a couple times throughout the first half of the month for a pair of interrelated reasons, the first being likely a dark transmission of some sort or a deep epiphany, and the second being some carnal pleasure randomly delivered to us where we get to taste some elicit droplets of whatever this portends. The mad hubris warned against in Mary Shelly’s novel would be healthy to consider leading up to this double lightening jolt. As planets progress through the dark and watery tunnels of Scorpio they come into collaboration with the very infrastructure of the place in encountering Saturn by sextile. When penetrating the depths the tunnels themselves are passageways and all part of the form which is defined by skeletal Saturn in all his strictness. Are ability to move about here and not drown is thanks to the system which defines the maze, like ants engineered networks. We thusly find ourselves navigating breathtaking caverns and finding ancient paintings and messages within rather than being hopelessly lost in a single black and flooded shaft. The images upon the walls animate to life as Mercury then Venus trine Neptune, harmonizing our inner demons and lurid lusts with our most magical fantasies and hallucinatory imaginations. A whole hidden world unfurls from a feeling and there is no limit to what we can paint and what pleasure it might bring us. Finally the personal pair sextile Pluto, where we become absolutely obsessed and investigate the pits and corridors which have never yet been explored and are far beyond oxygen lines and radio contact. We lose ourselves in the beyond, overturning stones which behind void infinity yawns and we plunge with intellectual fixity and delight into our own oblivions seeking ultimate states of emotional impact and meaningful resonance and sexual power.

These sequences are the moody and meaningful dimension of October which run concurrent to the social agendas and cultural demands. It is as if after equinox we extend ourselves through time in a perfect dual procession of night and day dimension. We are experiencing moonglow under make up as the not-long warmth of the sun caresses our skin, and uncork shimmering gold effervescence to ignite the night through slender keyholes of crescent still shade which swings pendulum precise across our sleeping bodies in lucid communication between the gap of wakeful emersion in dreaming attention. Some people prefer the sober and steady reliability of night/day clockwork, but in this case the Cuckoo has turned trickster and all ticks are long song chimes and all the tocks are echoing in wet delay. For those who need a marked difference between direction and reflection they may need to bring along some life rafts and tethers, as which when you work and what hour you roll in the hay or imbibe the heart or sicken the spirit or spank the heart might seem indistinguishable, as if we perpetually wake up from naps to sip absinthe and coffee intermittently while we paint blurry beauty across canvases conveniently placed beside the bed. When the office staff peaks behind the smeared drop cloth into the painters studio and wonders at how they might possibly work in such messy and muddy conditions but the artist instead fancies to wallow in the starlit mire, the very murk and muck from which colors reach up and out into light assuming the form of flowers.

Two Mars Ruled Lunations

Amidst the salivating of this sweet and savory predicament as saline and sanguine as can be we receive two lunations in tandem ruled over by Mars who turns within the music box of Libra attempting to apply his tactical abilities to keeping it all in equilibrium as it gyrates around him, and us. These Moons likely will mark the athletic apex of these contests with the full Moon on the 13th and the quiet seeding of a more stealthy approach with the New Moon on the 28th. Mars ruled lunations in general spell out excess and in the case of Aries this may be burn out, especially in the social dimension, a point when the inability to pease everyone at once quickly turns to conflict you didn’t intend, quite the contrary: by trying to keep the peace you started a war. Not everyone can be happy all of the time, and with everyone generally geared toward problem solving the public square and keeping cultural communication calm and quiet there is probably going to be within no time too many cooks in the kitchen, a colliding collection of over assertive mediators attempting to all be go-betweens for one another. An Aries activated ticking time bomb, a competition to the death for the title of who can be the most neutral and out-do one another by being as impartial and accommodating as possible until inevitably sparks fly simply because one or more inbetweeners overheats or short circuits and causes a kind of chain reaction. This occurs with both luminaries forming a square to Pluto in Capricorn so the real cause of the conflict is unknown, hidden in some forgotten shadow under some lost layer everyone forgot about but are obsessed over anyway, chasing after a mystery that never existed. This is also where the Sun sextiles and the Moon trines Jupiter still in rulership in Sagittarius, so its not all bad; in fact, perhaps it's all good. We might have simply needed a lot of chickens running around with chopped off heads to shake up the barnyard and wake up the man up stairs so some miracles could occur. With the slot machine on tilt the tokens pour out and amidst the melee no one knows who got things that were intended for someone else and again everyone wins, but in a different way than described earlier in the forecast, in this instance you might come away with some prizes, some new insights, some quickly coagulated coherence and slap dash philosophies that advance you on your quest and inflate your reputation, the door-prize of some circumstantial chaos and spasms of quick cultural collapse.

Mercury turns RX Conjunct Venus in Detriment on Halloween

The kind of pièce de résistance and queer crown jewel waiting at the very tail end of October is Mercury’s stationing retrograde conjunct Venus in the final degrees of Scorpio on Halloween. We could psychologically have a field day with this. Attending to the details of your scandalous costume you find that you feel so bad its good that you make your self sick with how much your loving putting yourself through perpetual debasement that you arouse a turnaround reassessment of what everything means on the deepest level of your emotions and come to terms with what your soul desires on the most primal level of your being. This may be kinky costume party fetishism which cascades into a whole shitstorm of considerations and reframing of the unmentionable and undefinable psycho-spiritual dimensions of your being and life. 2019 has been an absolute doozie due in part to Mercury’s retrogrades occurring in water signs, which means we have spend extended periods of time cleaning up emotional messes which have considerably confused our thinking and left us drowning and splashing up the place consequently compromising our clarity. Last March was probably the most confusing, and June perhaps the most uncomfortable and emotional, but its October and November which hold the deepest, darkest and most meaningful. Here is love and hate and sex and violence and fear and ecstasy swirling the opposite directions and taking up space in the rational sector of our minds. We assess here our passions, and have to get the plumbing sorted out in a much needed maintenance call. The fact that this initiates while everyone is inebriated, invoking Hades, smeared in fake blood, dancing wildly and dressed like sexy pirates and dead celebrities is quite interesting indeed. This is the night classically to be who you tell yourself you can’t be all year long and let your libido lead you by the sex organ through swimming pools of spiked punch into whoever’s bed. This is the night the Werewolf is let out of the closet. The fact that the month features an inability to communicate our deepest and most explicit selves to the over-reactive and suppressed restrictions of the social culture and its justice protocols describes well a conclusion that things aren’t as simple as they might socio-politically seem, and if we don’t let vent our shadows they may rear up and ride us through the gates of hell. Ultimately, there is massive creative realization here, and we may be hosting a Halloween party to remember, particularly as when everything changed, personally at least, the evening we met by chance with our evil twins and agreed to proceed hand in hand from then on.

By Week

Monday October 7th to Sunday October 13th

Monday 10/7/19: 2am: Mercury opposite Uranus

3pm: Sun square Saturn

Tuesday 10/8/19: 1pm: Venus ingress Scorpio

Friday 10/11/19: 7am: Mercury into Scorp 2

Saturday 10/12/19: 6pm: Venus opposite Uranus

10pm: Jupiter into Sag 3

Sunday 10/13/19: 11am: Sun into Libra 3

2pm: Sun sextile Jupiter

5pm: Full Moon in Aries

The week begins with a particularly potent transmission as Mercury in Scorpio opposes Uranus in the early am which might have narratives in our dreams and waking trains of thought and thinking patterns polarized across the fixed axis with parallel particulars acting out experiments as each others puppets. This is a bit of getting a telephone call from a friend down in the sewers beneath your house to inform you what is going on beneath your territory and sending up wild arrays of image messages of the spooky inner workings of your soul. Beneath the land you live on and the place and pastures upon which you derive your pleasures and live out your grooves are earthworms and burrowing beetles that slither through the soils and within your own guts there are multitudes of flora in their own intestinal universe. We are not sealed systems, we are not individuals, our bodies are haunted and we are never alone. We are ecosystems, networks, villages, lineages, communities. Through some jarring realizations or surprise discoveries we may learn at the beginning of the week how permeable we really are and how who we share orb with in our lives there very well be considerable bleedthrough. Mercury's aspect to Uranus here brings with it some new tech we can utilize, some new magical tools to engage with the sensual and sensory landscape via our souls septic filtration network. This is a bit of getting down and dirty for the ecstatic thrill of it, dowsing for the potency beneath the surface of what feels cyclically good or methodically stimulating. Beneath a thorough and calming massage is the subtle reality of our bodies interiors being accessed by the pressures of hands on the surface. Acupoints, nerve electrical networks, dark flesh submerged in plasma and blood that never sees the light like the cores of pomegranates. This is the kind of radical thinking that sends shivers through our spines and the single word that can rise goosebumps over our flesh. When we quake with passion from the quicksilver flash of mental exchange and become volatilized and everything is changed, from water table all the way up through aquifers to the pastoral paradise above that bristles with forking beacons and promethean spires twisting up sculptural into the canopy where they pass charges at randomized intervals. Surprise transmissions modifying and mutating the materials that make up our sensual and sensory experience and how we move in circles and cycle within it.

The Sun squares Saturn later in the day. Unsuprisingly as our bodies and the many other spirits who live within it, or our lands and the myriad occupants we share it with are getting revolutionized and mentally overstimulated we get a very concrete cog connection which for some will be the much needed and grounding click of interlocking leverage that raises the mechanisms which move the massive stone doors which manage the flow of cultural discourse and relational balance. For others this comes as a considerable clash, but not one that is impossible to set into its proper position, even though that task is possibly more strenuous than we would hope. Where to set relationship barriers, where to place boundaries, how are we called to reset the many balances of what is allowed, what is proper, what is fair, what is appropriate and mutually beneficial to the many others in our lives; these questions are clear cut as we sight past the sharpness of the sword despite our blindfolds and with a more sophisticated eye, we see to our right hand side flanking the fortress wall our Advisor holding us in stern and serious consternation. The questions are clear yet the answers are not, as the Sun is rather handicapped in this sign, he must work extra hard to be functional, and quite a bit of walking a mile in another man's shoes is required to land the boundary blocks in the appropriate places so the skirmish of players goes according to plan and doesn't become disordered chaos that brings down the house. The house will stand, as Saturn is in his domicile strong, but its the balance of culture and its interrelations which will take the strain unless approached with care and respect. Saturn knows this place the Sun aspects him from quite well, and will assist in setting the fulcrum properly, even though our egos might go cold at the touch of his firm handling. Whatever serious resets your life needs right now heed them with respect and take care to consider structural integrity and reference the blueprints soberly with diplomatic charm applied to all others involved. A tall order amidst a passionate and unexpected psycho-sexual electrical storm, but maybe the intense and unpredictable new information and surprise swerves is exactly what you need to hear to guide your hand upon the balance. We may have gotten the wake up call right in the knick of time.

Venus then ingresses Scorpio on Tuesday and our delicate harp plucking gets submerged in fat fuzz and growling grain, drowned in distortion and the articulation of fingers caressing strings sounds instead like the howling and yowling of beasts in heat. Today we sip artisanal cocktails and clink champagne flutes and tomorrow we salivate for the taste of blood and the flavor of flesh and the scent of fear. Nature lives in fear and we as humans who have compartmentalized our lust prefer to live behind locked doors where we can escape the extent of our passions. When Venus is in Scorpio we remember to enjoy our own sense of terror and savor our nightmares as they have more potency than any other experience or emotional register. This is not adrenaline junkie type behavior; there is nothing sports or particular athletic about this. Its the part of the primal passions and instinctual aching desires that induce lyconthropic trance and pull us into possession; the possession of the very spirits which inhabit us that we live with at all times and often ignore so we can properly function in society and stick within civilized customs and social norms. Venus here is instead nonverbal, prelingual, a coyote language, and in pursuit of peak deliciousness, no matter how dangerous and delirious, she can be satisfied no other way. There is a lot to learn about ourselves and our world here, as this is the unmediated pulse of the wilds, which we rationally desire to be re-wilded, but would rather usually not think about the hunt and the kill in all its nakedness. Engaging with this Venus can deliver the most memorable experiences of your life, but also the most regrettable. This is lust rather than love, eroticism rather than romanticism. This is the place where love and wrath exist as one eternally. Navigate it very carefully utilizing the sextile by sign to sober and boundary expert Saturn in Capricorn, but also take advantage of its raw potential and come away with a revived libido and reacquaintance with your deepest longings.

The weekend opens with Mercury switching from the first to the second decan of Scorpio. Not a titanic movement but Mercury here moves out of the solely Mars focused first section of the sign. Now in a decan defined by face dignity attributions to Jupiter and the Sun and the section where he will reach his only dignity in this insectoid stretch by bounds which span from 11 to 19 degrees, Mercury can communicate in a more constructive way than snarling and hissing bedtime atrocities- talking dirty or more confrontational talking trash. Mercury here focuses instead on ouroboric loops of intense intimacy, that moment when two party goers encrust themselves in a quiet corner and get locked into talk so tight that the lights snuff and around them are halos of smeared smoke that no casual chit chat could penetrate and within their grave discourse the neglect to notice the actual last call announced and after all other guests have gone to bed or turned quietly to pumpkins the pair persist into the oblivion of oncoming twilight. This is not meloncholia, despite the lack of limits on how exceedingly dark the discussion can get; this is the passions, its Martial Water- it boils, its scalding, it steams up the place, it overflows, it can become molten and within the crucible things can become lost as well as irreparably altered. The Sun wants clarity and Jupiter wants wisdom, but this planetary pair of filters also is like a magnifying glass and a steady ray. Expanding upon your deepest and darkest emotions can burn a hole through the membrane and catch shit on fire. There are times in life when you can't get a rise out of people and you're left like "helllo? Is this thing on?"-- this is not one of those times. Its on. Mic is hot. You might zap your lip and go crosseyed catching sparks. But this can be what we are looking for. Potent content. Meaningful messages. Thought bombs. Remember, harbor your stealth and make your words count, and since Scorpio is fixed, prepare for a steady stream of fascinating filth to stream forth from the speakers. Get into it. Dog out. Smell the smells. Life is life.

Saturday amps up this slowly twisting tourniquet of fetishized injury and ruthless revenge as we get Venus' opposition to Uranus in her sign of Taurus to her in her exile in Scorpio. She can likely take the radical power of revolutionary Uranus dishing out her significations to her but at decibel levels she wouldn't choose her self. This is like a taste of your own medicine when you are in no condition to take it. "Oh you want sensual cycles of methodical manifestation? Heres a helicopter drop to topple the Tower" Venus is in a particular mood; horny and slinking around like a large cat and showing her teeth, so the overload of rich compost and blossoming blooms comes at an odd time, and likely at odd intervals. We've been burping up our old photos and delighting in the darkness our previous selves were forced to digest, and now, just dropped through the manhole we are assaulted with mutated music and marvelous mosaics. There's next level art coming at us from the opposite end of the spectrum. Earth shaking stuff bursting forth like starlit mire breeching the slime slick tunnels in a terrible tremor. We tear out our entrails and ensnare our lover, love bind in erotic knots, with the perfume of the gods stolen from heaven's gardens smeared upon us the nectar work of so many incendiary flowers. The Nightstalker on nocturnal hunt appears in an opposite form, blooms replacing the spots upon the leopard. A fine silk suit wire tapped and sparkling with led rhinestones clothes the killer, and as she slips through the labrynthine aquifers betwixt streams of sewage holographic vibrations from an alien world prompt her gait and her classic stalking is augmented by a possession; the creative and generative world in all its sultry sauntering has been brought to a buzzing din, and in the frantic drone of protesting pastures the ligaments and bones and marrow and bowels of this Puma pump and leap and hump the air as her poison dipped teeth seek the blank slate of night for a neck to puncture and fountains of blood to suckle. The wishing well inverted. Upon you and coming down fast. Swallowed by the void. A massive collection of desires. A whole generation. A world that thinks its dying. The last ditch efforts. Making love at the Apocalypse. There is no Heaven. We live in its divine and exalted Hell here on earth.

Jupiter returns to the third decan of Sagittarius in the late evening and we are motivated to reach our ultimates and seize or chalices and consumate our quests at all costs. Jupiter will not see early Sagittarius again for 12 years. This is it. All the chips on red number 7 and everywhere you look there is the wisdom to win; or all else be damned. You're either in or you're out. Get in the fucking car. We're going to Reno and we're not coming back. The Moon by now has rolled her swelling bright body into early Aries at this point. The initial Lunar Mansion, instigatory, lucky, reckless and discordant. She's seeking to receive the Sun's full light which comes on Sunday in the early afternoon while the Sun is sextile Jupiter. Meanwhile, Mars, Aries ruler is in Libra worried about offending people and setting everything out of balance. This rash intuition, the knowledge of only chances and last chances and dice burning a whole in your pocket and being too hot to hold so you gotta hold, echoing Venus seeking romantic rapture like its nobodies business, its all enough to make your head spin, which it does, whether you know it or not because Mercury is already a few degrees into retrograde shadow and planning to come back to the thoughts and words transpiring today later next month after he turns tail in a dirty death dance with Venus in detriment on Halloween. I'm not framing any of this as bad, but you might as well get Babalon on the horn because it seems she's coming to town invited or otherwise. There is no right or wrong here, simply how much you like to surf oceans of blood and how deep you like to dive. How destabilized would you like to see your life, and the world in general for that matter. Well its the same fucking thing. Get raw and wicked while the gettin's good. There's a whole other slice of black bird pie on the other side. For some the answer is "no, please don't fuck me up, everything is jolly as is". Well, hold strong, baton down the hatches and make sure your stuff is tethered tight, but remember; Saturn and Pluto are planning on teaming up early next year, and all that safety gear might be useless in the end. Probably a better idea to look your demons squarely in the face right now and start making some contacts on the darkside (of life, of yourself or literally in hell, whichever). This is not about compromise, its about being with your passions and a quaking world and your own imagination and your most sacred plights and your most impulsive instincts within a madhouse society and its banal consequences. Don't believe the hype. I am absolutely not a Thelemite whatsoever, but occasionally 'Do What Thou Wilt Is The Whole Of The Law. Love Is The Law' rings with truth. Only, this time it comes in a world who's laws are dissolving. Who's hierarchies are disappearing and all that's left is there projection. Total control and lack of defined architecture. No blueprints just pressure. And here we are surprisingly still with skin in the game. Listen to the skin. Its your roll. What's your pleasure? Who are your intimates, what do you ultimately want and what are you going to do right now?

Monday October 14-Sunday October 20

Monday 10/14/19: 3am: Mercury sextile Saturn

3:30am: Sun square Pluto

Tuesday 10/15/19: 6pm: Mercury trine Neptune

Wednesday 10/16/19: 2pm: Venus in Scorp 2

Saturday 10/19/19: 2am: Mercury into Scorp 3

noon: Mars into Libra 2

6pm: Mercury sextile Pluto

Sunday 10/20/19: 10am: Venus sextile Saturn

The past couple weeks have been pretty topsy turvey for most people, but especially for those of us with placements and angles in Libra, or in cardinal signs in general, as this is the territory where the bends of the nodal axis can be found, and the Sun and Moon are pulling on the tension cable connecting the eclipses, inspecting it for flaws and listening to its taughtness, plucking on it and deciphering the thumbing of notes. This thing sounds good, its got promise, I could go places with this, in fact I could open up a whole other reality right here, as long as I could step right into this trip wire and safely split myself in two like a cheese slicer; if only we were that malleable. Well we probably are, psychically and some of us even physically, but the world tends to disagree. An appointment at 6 o clock on Tuesday is one chink in the fence, not another and bilocation is the premiere reservation of the Saints. It can be done but burns a lot more than calories. Everything before us doubles, and symmetrical situations and obviously uneven parallels swing and sway before our eyes. A black cat explodes from the shadows but goes both ways before our eyes. Did it cross our path? Not really. It sort of...like... I dunno. Are we cursed anyway? Always is likely the best answer and then move on from there. We are essentially unclean beings. That's why traditional magic requires so much cleansing practice as a prerequisite first step. We're sinners. Born bad. The Cat is just trying to remind us to watch our step. But Tricksters abound. Even our own Other's. Lets return to the mirror. Look at that guy. Can you trust them, even for a second. That's not the point. There's a process playing out. We are exactly between the shadow gates with both luminaries this week having rung a big ole sonorous bell (cue metallica. Not really. How about Sabbath. No forget it just circumambulate a cathedral in the rain). What is coming out the pipe around Christmas and what came out and what else got drained off mid summer is still a bunch of unformed half manifest grit and grain, a TV out of reception but with figures and voices just forming as the storm passes and the rabbit ears begin to fetch the signal from the aethers.

I awoke to some kind of night terrors early in the am this morning as the Sun squared Pluto. I remember thinking distinctly "Fuck, I'm in the wrong dream", and then hurriedly got myself out of there before shit got really nasty. There are webs of fate being spun and that structurally consists of more negative space than silk, more void than string. But the stuff spiders spin is strong, incredibly so, so there is enough to hold on to and even move around as the whole thing swells and sways and adjusts to the equilibrium of the autumn air, there's just one problem: are we Predator or Prey. I don't think we can answer this. With Venus and Mercury sailing across Scorpio's middle section there is a certain role playing that is not clear or assigned or as definable or distinguishable as you would hope to expect. There is only one thing that makes sense or has any value, and that is engagement and exchange. A perfect time for Mercury to trine Neptune, right? Sort of. This is like saying, "I'm really concerned about how my life feels excitedly yet dangerously destabilized suddenly, and I'm edge walking this cliff like Jim Morrison dancing on the ledge of the theatre, I think a big ole hit of acid will help me make sense of this and get all my passionate impulses neatly organized." This is obviously nuts. But, it doesn't mean it won't work. You have to go in to get out. To be sane you have to lose your mind, at least temporarily. Reality is not straight and narrow, its elusive, contradictory, paradoxical, enigmatic, arcane, enchanting, alluring, deadly, terrifying, sensual, profound, subtle, brutal and banal all at once. We cannot make complete rational sense of it all.

Mercury will sextile Pluto by Saturday evening, meaning, our logic and language abilities will be willing to work with whatever the Sun saw which scared the shit out of him earlier this morning. It makes sense that there's a lag as more rationally minded Libra takes time to pass the ball through the digestion tubes to Mercury in more instinctually oriented Scorpio. Whatever we are actively trying to balance it might make more sense in the dark than in the light. Night has a role. We need not see or show all of our cards in the game, then there would be no tension at all and everything would balance out to a flatline. Libra is dynamic, very much so, but Scorpio lays a thick layer of 'I'm not cooperating and I'm not telling you why." This isn't necessarily negative. We have to think of our lives as stories. There are impressionistic periods within the sequence. Say for instances a series of passages describing the rawness of the bitter cold landscape, naturally unforgiving, which segue into illusions about a certain character's demeanor. We don't flinch but in life we run for explanations. Allow yourself the painful joy of being submerged in your own drama in an artful sense rather than a troublemaking way. When the crows flying over head remind you of your dream which somehow is related to your need for that which is forbidden or too dangerous to do, and the fire that burns in your backyard cackles in your ear like nightmares awake, but it puts you back mentally for no reason at all to where you were in your errant and impossible youth, shaky and afraid, and collecting your wits and coming back to now seems to meander the message, as if it is turning in your stomach and you might vomit liquid shadow and spill ink across your desk, rife with ruined papers, a whole corrected thing now destroyed in one foul swoop, let it be the story that it is. Observe it from both up close and from afar. Watch it like a film. We are not mathematical or sequential. Enjoy the superimposition even when it causes you to swerve or stumble. Digressions are where the thematic substructures emerge and rear there heads like Dragon Porpoises from cold, grey water; watching things proceed drunk in a messy, chaotic amble ladens life with meaning.

Venus tops off our week by following suit and sextiling Saturn. She may be in exile in a sign that thinks evisceration is pleasurable and a bit of pain actually quite nice, but she is quite at home in the night mode and can still receive satisfaction here. She can also stretch her arm across to capricorn, where she loves deeply stones and bones and trees and all things old and natural, and drape her scarlet sleeved appendage over old Kronos' shoulder, as if to say, "lock me up, I kind of like it." This won't be direct BDSNM for everyone, but being able to appreciate the night in all its restrictions is central to the recipe. At least, in the deep end of the pool, we are reasured that there is a bottom somewhere, or at least an edge to the open water.

Monday October 21st to Sunday October 27th

Monday 10/21/19: 3pm: Venus trine Neptune

Wed 10/23/19: 1pm: Sun ingress Scorpio

Thursday 10/24/19: 3pm: Venus into Scor 3

Friday 10/25/19: 6am: Venus sextile Pluto

Sunday 10/27/19: 10am: Mars square Saturn

-midnight (night): New Moon In Scorpio

Trines are interesting aspects. Lacking the un-ignorable direct eye contact of oppositions, the shared space of conjunctions, the alarming clash of squares or the collaborative exchange of sextiles. Trines are harmonized places on the zodiac, positions where by 120 degrees apart the circle planets are on the same wavelength: same element, and in the case of Monday's trine between Venus and Neptune that's water, and a yin polarity. But Venus is in exile in Scorpio, a place she feels quite attuned to her sexual desires and primal attractions but often more than is socially acceptable. Keith Richards, Jim Morrison, Charles Manson. She's at home in water but this water is particularly hot and deep. One might argue that Empedocles in discussing the four elements was really talking about physics states: solid, liquid, gas and plasma. In this case Scorpio might be more of a magma than a water, a regulating hydraulic pressure coming from deep within and occasionally flowing out as lava, with all its destructive force and ability to alter a landscape. It even can form islands, and as Venus is both Creatrix and Destroyer. Losing ones stability to a void of desires, but elsewhere, in some possible island of the future, as an echo ahead of our selves, in the shifting sea that holds naught but hydras and creatures who remember us in our more ancient incarnations and sardonically laugh at our gill-less-ness, drop by sulfurous drop future land masses gain footing within the primordial serum, rooted into the unknown depths. At the start of this week it is this Venus, bold and stimulated by fear, wearing the darkness as negligee and the rings of haze to cloak and crown, this cast away, ship wrecked in volcanic expulsion en-sceptered over smoldering rolls of match stick trees which all are topped by false-angels, each with a song to sing and a yarn to spin, in a place where up is down and vis vers, where there are no rules, and its scary and you like it; it is this Venus who can feel her own very exaltation, where she is free to love, and to let art simply happen, and to move her body without restraint, and immerse in color and change the tone, to altar anything, and to step through out of sheer attraction any desire whatsoever, and articulate herself beautifully, effortlessly, as all is equally beautiful, the earth just is, the universe emerges from no where and it is an act of beauty in itself, of desire desiring, where even blood and marrow and fornication and evisceration and cracking corpses and collections of teeth, and splattering fluids and putrefaction, all of it in its glittering glitz or in its matte black horror are a part of the vaulting seas of tragedy, so succulent, such joy, such sorrow, as the Classics describe, which seem so overly dramatic, until they come for you with their serrated harps and wicked razor lyre's. Venus in the land of alcohol and sexual blood play can sense her exaltation in Pisces from here, in its nightly-ness, its receptive immensity, but she does so through a certain gatekeeper, and that is Old Neptune, who tells her everything she wants to hear and more.

In one sense this is simply positive, as its a trine, right, a friendly aspect, and this is just positive feedback, much needed reinforcement to emotional realizations. But it just keeps coming and coming and coming and changing and mutating and morphing and everything is interconnected and your body courses with undulations and you can no longer think, the intensity of your desires flowing through your organs and rippling your blood and it seems to have gotten everywhere, all over everything, everything you touch, there is no difference, no escape, its all an ocean of these perversions reaching up to the ceiling of the sky and we wash in its currents and then, again, the hydras come, like wrathful deities, beautiful and terrifying and ready to lacerate the world apart and shred it into whatever it was before all this, and you are ready and willing to let it happen, to no longer flinch, what was it all about anyway, here we go, catch the wave, impaled upon a shark tooth, a water dog, a double canine, seven headed seal, ten horned narwhal, spires of licking tentacles from the threads of your loins, every sinewy strand, at one with this blackwater, capsized, and spiraling like lyme into the tissue, you forget that you were ever awake, a dream within a dream within a dream. Yes I'm being dramatic, that's the idea. Yes this is a soft aspect, and some fantasy release valve for our darkened Aphrodite, but beneath your daydreams the beginning of this week is an ocean of drool you might want to watch out for, or alternately pay a lot of attention to, depending on your current dilemma.

The Sun ingresses Scorpio midday on Wednesday, and all this over dramatic tone I've been using will suddenly seem simply par for the course. "No, that's actually how it is though". Where the Sun shows up especially effects our orientation. Here in the Northeast this is around the time the artful kaleidoscope of colored leaves falls like a sudden curtain drop to reveal the muted skeletons beneath, with all their spindly fingers molesting the grey sky. A much more somber vibe, but evocative of certain beauty, a starker sublime. This marks also hunting season, as maneuverability and sight-lines increase in the forest, it becomes time to stalk. To move in stealth, to hide out, to outwit, to mask scent, to lie in wait with a loaded weapon, cocked and ready to deliver the fatal firing. And if the snare is triggered, and a heart properly pierced through, in a moment of shock and surprise for the victim but in elongated anticipation for the assailant, then careful cutting ensues; skinning, gutting, bleeding, decapitating, quartering, roasting, eating, sharing with your voraciously hungry intimates. Scorpio is an act of pre-meditated murder, whether it is of this legal variety or not. It is where our shadows live in full, able to do as they wish as they have learned to slip between the cracks and fissures and rent fence sections and odd alleyways un-erred. They do not always sneak around so because they are up to no good, per se, but simply because those in the daylight would never understand. There is a definite modality to the nocturnal, that differs from the diurnal. The nocturnal doesn't need to "make sense" or have clear "goals" or "rational outcomes". Its one big thrill kill. Happy Halloween. Yes, its about the depths of the soul, etc. and a wrestling with our own poisons and finding antidotes for our venom, etc. But when day turns to night, as it does for the period the Sun swims across Scorpionic waters, we move by our most primary intuitions first, and think it all over in segments, when we get a moment to pause in our hiding spots.

Venus, skipping happily along in her most visceral desires moves from trining Neptune to sextiling Pluto by her very own day, Friday the 25th. She's been dosed with the bad acid, had a dark trip, and despite the spiders crawling up her thighs has managed to make it through with some amazing images and intense inspirational urges to process and digest. Taking what she has gained thus far, fully aware of the never ending, perpetual cycle of desire and depravity which is the human, and animal, condition, with this wisdom she walks into a back alley deal with Death himself. "Alright", she says, "I'm ready to talk business". Once you see all the cards laid out and how it really is there is only one thing left to do. Slip the Black Joker out of the pack and walk down the road at midnight to meet with the Devil. Come on; you know what you really want, stop avoiding it, its all yours for the taking, nothing else matters, are you going to let Victorian values and Fundamentalist social conditioning still prevent you from tasting the fruit of paradise? I didn't think so. Get your bottle of booze, your guitar, or whatever else, and get the fuck down there. You know he'll come whenever you call. At least the story goes. But it's more complicated than that. This is Scorpio sextiling Capricorn. It's heavy. Again, a soft aspect, but look who we are dealing with. It's a friendly collaboration between villains. But, in the society we live in, we sometimes from the outside to be very much on the sinister side of the fence, so pay close attention, how can your perpetual and honestly unquenchable thirsts interact positively with the void? When you look into that endless tunnel of darkness, fully aware that deep down you will never actually be satisfied ultimately by anything completely and permanently, what can the abyss do for you? What does it have that you could use, and vis versa?

Hey, great timing for a nice weekend face off between both malefics which culminate in a lunation overseen by the weaker one. Mars in detriment squares Saturn in rulership on Sunday morning, probably an ill advised move on Mars' part but he really has no choice, its how the universe works, which may say something interesting about our own fates and how they operate. Mars has been trying to balance all his energies, organize his agendas, but the tactics slip from sight and miss their marks through shifting social circumstances. In the art of war clear and uncomplicated directives maximize the effectiveness of operations. There are no opinions in an army. The soldiers are all conditioned equally. This is not the case in culture, where all of the attitudes of everyone in a society are leveled and balanced by extensive diplomacy. Mars simply can't work this all out. He can't get a clear shot at his target while immersed in the full swing ball. This says a lot about how in deep shit Venus might have gotten herself in Scorpio for the time being, the sign Mars rules, as radios talk two ways. She can't see him or him her but they are in each others airwaves. Our Warrior, amidst this tactical trouble, operating unfortunately in a troop of civilians has a sudden collision with base station, and as he puts up an emergency flare it is answered immediately, but only to make matters worst; High Command recognizes his situation and is more than pissed. Now he's got to work to correct it. He's obligated to. It's his ass. From here the narrative kind of bifurcates, as remember this is still the Scales Sign; there is this and then there is this. Saturn knows this place, he's exalted there, and the way he does it is by knowing when its time to party and when its not. When boundaries are necessary and when to drop them altogether. It's a masterful dance of walls and portals. Mars, as fucked as he's gotten himself realizes that to get his shot at his targets he's got to get his teamates drunk, get them dancing, create a diversion, have some fun himself, blend in, get in the mood, join the party, not because he wants to but because it makes tactical sense. A lot more important maneuvers were made over cocktails than they were in control rooms. The show must go on, and if everything goes the way IT ABSOLUTELY MUST WITH FAILURE NOT EVEN AN OPTION, then he'll have to normalize to Libra's mode and find his chance in the fray of fun. There's no other way except to send people screaming for cover and be remembered for your missdeeds.

Something is seeded here in all this, in the kind of stealth that this particular operation required. A kind of hiding out in the open, because you have no other choice, and people will keep on going on being people no matter what, and like it or not they drink and fight and carouse and screw and laugh maniacally and plot against one another; again, the Classic literature displays it perfectly well. When effectiveness is necessary in a world without an industrial military complex, action must come from within culture itself, shadows and all. These dark sides of ourselves can't be deleted or convinced to play along nice. we are a race of mirrors and our dopplegangers will come and get us if they don't receive their due. They cannot be lanced like dragons, this is a christian misnomer. Don't believe the hype. We're all ultimately evil yall.