The Astrology Of April 2020 : Hydras and Hives

Suddenly, as if out of no where you wake up and there is a 7 headed Dragon in your kitchen, or so you are told— an automatic metallic pigeon outside the window delivers the info to you via sonic centrifugal signal, and the steady stream of nonsense numbers projected across your nutrient depleted body conforms to a narrative that corroborates the story. You’re worried. You’ve never dealt with either a dragon or something with more than one head. How do you do that? You reach for your blade, which has been sharpened to impossible thinness over the past few years, having to multitask with it due to a lack of other tools. Cooking, cutting wood, slashing down assailants etc. You proceed down to the kitchen on time in an orderly fashion as you were told to do, and there is nothing there. Now you are more worried. You panic. Where the fuck is this thing!? It sounds dangerous. It could pop out of no where and surprise you. You don’t like surprises. You’d die of fright. You go over the message again, and again until you become hypnotized by its monotone delivery. You begin to fall into a kind of trance which summons the Dragon emerge from the wall, and in wavy lines and woozy composure you lift your blade and hack off a few of the heads, figuring you’ll just work through them until the end, but to your horror each bloody stump regenerates into two more heads. You carry on in this way for endless hours, until you begin to not remember how it all began, heads multiplying until there is no longer even a dragon, just a new reality populated with threat, and the original message that prompted you to attack is lost to the corruption of subjective experience, its simply anecdotal.

Your home hits mass capacity, windows are cracking and shattering as the size of the monster in proliferation pushes against the framing, cracks the plaster, the ribs snap open, the house disgorges its contents, the beast takes up residence upon the foundation, you are now simply a mechanism within its inner workings. The earth is a nest for which this thing to incubate. Time is a territory as blank as unfollowed tangents, a yawning vacuum within which there is a fire to escape, and an endless tomorrow that flees when you reach for it. The space widens, the resistance reaches out to limits that don’t exist, the marrow within the bones squirms out the pores of desiccation and these wiggling worms are unrecognizable to their host, and vis versa, tomorrows’ children, their mind a magnet for collective movement, like flocks of birds, like schools of fish, herds. There is a sublime beauty in creatures learning interdependence, as long as the horror which leads them to dance in a troupe rather than spar and brawl on the wet concrete floor doesn’t rip their brain cells apart, and require they need assistance in their thinking. If the new serpents that become of the pressure proliferating heads of horror apply to once tender topsoil, and rummage in the very fertile fissures that run the soil through, metabolize themselves to hive mind receptivity, both beautifully organized and mathematically perfect arrangements will arise, as well as the fall of novelty and variety altogether. If the Dragon is to replace its fallen heads with ever more, there must be an amendment, that each head be different, and erudite, and informative, and intellectually stimulating, and offer guidance, and perspective. It must lead out rather than in. It must not be a greedy clutching Dragon, which goes against their very nature, as they have long circled the pole, our earth’s very axis, Draco and Thuban, guarding the treasure hordes, one of many fearful beasts that haunt the forever revolving North— Bears and wolves and other poisonous and ferocious things which throng eternal and for no good reason. It can never be known why. This is not the way the world works. There are no answers. There are only experiences weighed in the moment. Precise words and bargaining lacerating all chance of escape. Don’t go— go. Birds of a feather. Ants. Insects. The face with or without filter. The mirror, and beyond.

Our world has left us cold, at the table, mid-meal, skipped out on the bill, no note, no explanation. We cannot continue to pretend. We must pursue. We have no choice. Wake up. Start thinking beyond what once was. Begin to let light and air in. Resistance is futile— except for total and ultimate resistance at the fictive root of your soul. Where fire is nurtured by the steady delivery of breath. Ignite. Grow bright. Brilliant. If it be in anger then it shall be sharp. Fashion a blade for yourself. Cut yourself out of the cords and cables. Walk out of the hospital. End the experiment. Terminate the program. No knife? Then Ace Of Spades. Simple enough. Swift, serious, severance.

Maybe this will help: William S. Burroughs, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Rachilde, Bertolt Brecht, Francois Truffaut, Kenneth Anger, Edouard Manet, Dali, Anais Nin, Max Reger, Jacques Brel, Henri Rousseau— just let Aquarius speak— hypothetical constructs rapidly assemble out of thin air, new directions become possible, and go wide, outside, away from all that is mediocre and predictable, flee the central stage, abandon the status quo and all sense of consensus. There is more to know, more to find out, other avenues to try, alternate areas to explore— what if there was more than this world and you could find it on the internet? What if there was more than the internet? What if there was something even more interesting than the interactive catalogue of information we are immersed in every day? What would that be? What else could we do other than this?

Venus in Gemini: A Mercury Story

Within the first few days of April Venus moves residence from her own palace of pleasure in earthy Taurus the altogether curious Airy habitat of Gemini. She does so ironically while Neptune has wrapped Mercury up in a deeply delusional conjunction, pouring fantasy into our brains and dousing us in endless oceans of undulating imagination and enchanting us with mesmerizing misinformation. Where Venus is defines where we derive pleasure for the time being and what drives our desires, and what Venus loves most in Gemini is information and socializing. She’s curious, eclectic, ephemeral, quick witted, contradictory, distracted, indecisive, just having a ball going down whatever google wormhole and filling the air with chit chat and end on end trains of thought that lift up and away with the flexing of a feather. Neptune, despite being Dionysian and cinematic, is also deceptive and paranoid. We might be having a grand old time here drinking the Koolaid as the media buzzes loudly with so many diligent pollinators passing the sweetly scented smoke screens around for us to indulge ourselves in. Venus plans on spending around four months here, as she’ll go retrograde in the Twin’s sign in May, and we’ll all have to reassess what we even like about socializing with one another and searching out answers and interesting factoids anyway. Her entry under the watch of Hermes himself, lost in an eddy of calamity and confusion is bound to be exceedingly convoluted.

Naturally, she tries to get her bearings, and see what there is to like about the new arrangement as she trines Saturn shortly after, trying to take pleasure in being as innovative as she can with the new extremely isolated program playing out. You can’t blame her— although let’s hope all this activity now in air signs will help get us thinking about what is really going on here and feel fired up, serious and satisfied to investigate the situation for ourselves and do as much processing as baffled Mercury can muster. Air signs are aware and alert, they’re paying attention, so let’s see if we can’t wake up and begin to design our future beyond simply taking cues from the authorities and following orders. Either way, with so much air going on, it’ll be interesting to say the least, we’ll be at full attention.

Venus will rule both Lunations this month, really centering us around needing what we want and wanting what we need. Our desires will be over active and keeping a steady concentration might prove challenging despite the fact that our minds will be racing and what we need to return equilibriums to our lives is clearly cultural connection and all the things we enjoy about exchange and interchange, discourse and experience. This will be more than apparent.

Before mid-month Mercury ingresses Aries and then the tone of our desires turns quite a bit more urgent. We’ve got some clarity, our thoughts are sharper, clearer, angrier. We’re starting to get impulsive, and the jabbing monologues we find ourselves spurting out also direct our hearts to beat a little more for contact, communication, answers, options, something. We’re growing impatient and less likely to play nice. It feels good to be a little combative. We might kind of start to get excited that the hive becomes abuzz with fire and fighting words. “Wait what’s going on here actually? Uh oh. Oh, No you didn’t.” Mercury conjoins Chiron right over the border basically by the 15th and it stings. The slap in the face we needed to get the temperature up to start speaking our minds. The show just got a little more interesting. Quarrels are exciting. Quips cut and the pen is mightier than the sword, or so they say, at least its good entertainment. There’s still a difference though between saying and doing.

The New Moon in Taurus arrives on the 22nd, and will go lights out separating from a square from Saturn. The things we wish to see bear fruit in the coming months, for what we yearn into the darkness for in sublime secret so seriously we can practically feel it, ready to get our hands dirty if we must just to to see it all come to pass, largely out of our reaction to the new systems being installed in our personal lives as well as in the macrocosm which require us to move bravely into uncharted territory and care for the fertility and some natural rhythm of life, no matter how radical and disrupted the ground beneath us has become, there has to be a connection with the organic world— this fetishism of the material dimension must cease, at all costs, and with pitchforks in our hands and mud smeared on our faces we walk into an abyss feeling ready to toil for the visions of the future, for real, that are barely starting to emerge amidst the chaos of a world caught in the whirlwind of a turnstiles and rotating within the revolving doors. With a spine shudder and a knee down upon the cold midnight ground, we utter audibly our basest needs, so mote it be.

Within a few days, after a dark bout of tension with Pluto and some constructive sobering insights from Jupiter something takes root. The Moon now a crescent and maybe our words become flesh in some small way as Mercury enters Taurus and he and Venus enter mutual reception. Venus has been harmonized between two malefic modalities, trine to Saturn at the start of the month and then just behind Mars throughout, meaning we have no choice but get our sick kicks while staying with the trouble. Once Mercury enters the Bulls’ sign, and bellowing can be heard and our thoughts stabilize and we build up some solid momentum and our hooves can get dug down into the ground while our eyes and ears are alert and the sounds of spring bring interesting updates from here and there and everywhere and the story starts to take shape and we can even entertain crafting a rather real collage with the collection of narratives we’ve been keeping track of for our scrapbooks, the planet of thoughts and ideas and opinions freely sharing with values and connectivity and desire and creativity stirs up some motion and gets the gears greased and turning. Have you heard the talk? It’s happening now. Vernal equinox occurred over a month before, but it is this cross-quarter period where beasts historically go out to pasture, and with the Pipes of Pan beginning to play, we might hear a more natural sounding song sung, one with a recognizable rhythm and a richer melody than we’ve been subject to for the past several months. What we think and what we say might here also reverberate and resonate with what we feel and what we can point at and say that there is real, that has actual value, so tell me more.

From here some new concepts challenge the natural order of things, and under that banner we consult the growing grass and murmuring soil and bleating frogs and atomizing flowers and turn our thoughts up to electrified levels. If this mother fucking shit is the case we need radical new realities. We need revolutionary greening. We need nature’s opinion. How does she react to all this madness? What’s her answer rather than ours (or more precisely theirs)? Maybe it should be the same, as we are not separate.

Jupiter Conjunct Pluto

April provides us with an overwhelming dose of everything we’ve always feared, so we can get a sobering understanding of just how bad everything actually is, so we can know what the depths of our darkest moments are composed of, in total which will hopefully provide us with the wisdom and sagacity to never get ourselves stuck in such a situation ever again. The problem is, and the awareness that abounds now more than ever is how manipulated we have all been and how manipulated we continue to be, how we have little to no control and barely any hope for anything ever improving. The hold they have on us is so overwhelming how could we possibly make any impact upon the utter phalanx oppressing us? The answers to this we are learning and it is an extremely difficult lesson but a real one. As the darkness expands and the system is surely doomed, at least in its current and unsustainable formation, we assess our foundations and come to coherence of what we are working with. OK, let’s take inventory, who’s fault is this? What do we got at hand to get us out of this mess? and how do we start improving the dire situation from the center of the shadow which has been cast? It’s as if we have to stare very deeply into the eyes of Hades, with respect, and ask, how do we play this game? How do we pull the Death card from the pack and make it the emblem of our altar? How do we become inspired and motivated and enthusiastic about picking up the sickle ourselves and getting to work? We’ve got a world to live in and lives to live, what should we hack down and hack back for the sake of ongoing, organic integrity and radical naturalism? See it, identify it, banish it to hell. What ideas, opinions, objective constructs, rational structures, artificial political mechanisms have we encumbered ourselves with that do not fit into natures design? Let them be swallowed by shadow forever. The tides of darkness and fear are turning, and though they will come back, they always ebb and flow, but for now, let them carry all that has been built to dominate the dynamic ecology to its insult and injury be carried out to sea and pulverized by the enormity of the eternal unknown.

Mars in Aquarius

Mars fairs better within his own abilities in Capricorn more than in Aquarius, although, after the exponential PSI of planets in Capricorn from December on it is likely a relief to have more planets in air signs, bringing a pressure release, even if that release is of searingly hot gas— it’s a welcome change from the unbearable weight. April begins with the intense, yet industrious combination of Mars separating from conjunction with Saturn. This occurs around every two years, but for this round it is while Saturn is in rulership and newly in Aquarius making himself widely known for his significations. This is an absolutely critical installation of new systems in response to crisis and panic. Long term strategies and on the ground tactics thrown together moment to moment as we go to design altogether new structures under pressure and attack. These maneuvers would obviously be done in haste and result in only temporary constructions and solutions, and yes, that is what Saturn’s retrograde back into Capricorn in July describes, as he double dips back into the mechanics of the old regime as if he plans on moving more into the nightmares of the past rather than the utopias of the future. This is only a short term return to the old haunted fortress, as he comes back to proceed into the brave new world with greater optimism next December and notably throughout 2021 and onward. Our current moment is defined by heavy fire of something we don’t yet fully understand and the rapid response to whatever’s got our head-spinning, firing off hypotheses in an industrial lockstep.

Within a week into April Mars square’s Uranus still separating from conjoining Saturn and we get to really start to feel how a disturbed material base and a disrupted rhythm of life hits home under these rushed rationals and premature predicted outcomes. We will likely be peaking in our anxieties here, but there is still more for us to do than simply freak out. What are our new and innovative long term plans to get out of the clutches of centralized status quo consensus systems? What is a more valid, interesting, and innovative way to live? On the day to day basis how does that operate? What might our responses be to a variety of critical situations? How can we radicalize our interaction with the natural world? With life as craft? With the living materials we engage with in an embodied way? How can we revolutionize our sensual experience of life? How can we input 1000+ volts of electricity and altogether transform our creative practice? How can we do everything different from how we’ve ever done it before to optimize all of these goals? What does an altogether alternative tomorrow look like in which we design our own systems of operation rather than rely on structures that imprison us, especially social structures designed by capitalist corporations? Is there another way for us to connect en mass that doesn’t require centralizing our discourse to store bought apps that come with a commodified consumer product? What happens if we all walk away today? Where do we walk to? Where is this away?

Be bold and radical in your thinking and feel wieldy in your cuts. Hold your sharpness and handle it. Bleed with the edge, and circulate that sanguine medium back into your heart— see blood upon altars in the coming days. What goes around comes around.