The Astrology of August 2024: Scam Artists

In the cartoon coliseum which is global affairs it is easy to indicate at this moment that things are loony, and the exaggerated mallets, salivating jaws, vats of corrosive acid and various Acme hazards are being shuffled amongst the elastic seeming characters puppeted by some unseen animator. Jupiter and Saturn in a sign or two ago was warning us well about how we can’t unsee what we look at and we ingest with our eyes as much as we do with our mouths and whatever absorbs into the retinae blackness must be then digested by the energetic and emotional body with either ease or difficulty similar to the benefits of nourishing whole foods or spring water versus a fast food lunch and energy drink off the interstate strip. A couple years of AI face filter impulse fomo and DALL-E art masturbation later and most can no longer detect the warped and rippling surfaces laced across the aesthetic scape from naked bodies to condiment adds to promo packets to political rhetoric. Post-guillotine fashion sense is in vogue, be it injury flaunting accessories of the uppercrust or see-through gauze gowns on the street, pivot pointing upon a section of skies beladen with plot twists which in many cases don’t actually misshape the narrative too much but do add some theatrical fireworks and reset many of the staging parameters so it seems we’re in a much different story now but in most ways we’re not. This is typical of high mutability; watch a fixed nativity person slowly change and become deeply and meaningfully crafted or worked into a different animal over the years of their life as they gradually migrate from one set of circumstances to another, meanwhile watch the mutable heavy chart person constantly flicker and switch from one node to another all the time and end up in forty years as same-old-scatter-brain, always on to a million different things— i.e.: the moment we’re living in has all the channel-surfingness to teleport you between episode to episode for the proverbial evening but not the depth required to sway the trajectories off their track, only the gimmicks to repackage the commercial. Jupiter in Gemini expands on the surface optionalities, expanding the channel band (with the South Node putting Libra’s judgement scales of vacillation under construction this doesn’t make decision making any less complicated) while Saturn works on the (Shakespearean level) ambiance of the overall drama. Welcome to the kinky, phony, over-acted, frothy, glitzy cast party after the opening night of the school play where you can immerse in the drama nerd dystopia and hob nob with theatre degenerates. But remember: what happens at the cast party stays at the cast party: meaning: it doesn’t effect the rest of your life, except in subconsciously haunting or anecdotal ways. What you were doing before you will continue to do, just in a different era, like wearing 80s fashions only a few years after wearing 70s fashions. For the people that all these little insignificant factors and mood signifiers are everything, it will seem an incredible shift of momentus importance, and for others, who tend to hold down the timeless and iconic baselines, its the same old crooks fucking over everyone with the same old scams. Well this is both true and not…

(above image Hieronymus Bosch)

Mathew Hansel

As Pluto is fucking with Aquarius now more dedicatedly than Capricorn we do have a new kind of crook, corruption and crime, but one that had a long period of set up so we’re quite familiar with it, i.e. the whole time Uranus was in Aquarius (1996—2004), Neptune was in Aquarius (1998—2012), Saturn was in Aquarius (2020—2023) and Jupiter was in Aquarius (2020—2021) and now, ladies and gentlemen and AI and ET, Pluto has taken his position. We were in what people called “Late Capitalism” which really was more like Post-Post-Capitalism, and now, low and behold, we’re in the Post-Internet. The money has been sucked out of society and away from people unless they are —A.) very well behaved, or, —B.) total scammers using the syndicate set formats, or, —C.) gambling addicts installed in the crypto casino. You can feel the moral and cultural vacuum of the South Node in Libra, we’re left with a world-mall populated by brand-identity consumers cued by fake-smart algorithm impulses where neighborhoods and martketplaces used to be. Opportunistic types scrape the cream off the top of this arrangement via match the aesthetic curatorialism similar to classical tourism but instead homogenized across the virtual landscape where everyone is essentially living as if they were 27ish years old. Pluto in Capricorn might have been the final chilling episode of total imperial gentrificationism. Pluto In Aquarius renders the internet we all know and love, if we were born from the mid 70s say onward, totally obsolete and corrupted, similar to cable television in the 90s spiraling down the drain into 00s. Selectability between prime time live-ish boxing bouts and critical exclusive directors cuts collapsed into Reality TV and game show networks. And here we are now in gamefied TV Reality, the opposite end of the spectrum and ultimate result of the polarity switch of the now dead internet. “But I’m on the Internet right now”, you might be saying. It’s safe to say the internet we use is a zombie internet, and within it we’ve all been captured, poisoned, and forced into bondage we cannot escape as outclassed participants without any sovereignty.

Aaron Johnson

Pluto hanging out in early Aquarius, as I’ve previously discussed, has Leo on the fritz. We cannot any longer find any viable way to express ourselves authentically, on or offline, as the reach and breadth of the panopticon now lurks outside the orb of the app in the general ideosphere inhabited by masses of impersonators and mimicry bent curator drones behaving in sync with the economic aims of the imploding digital economy syndicate hive. This means also that “enshitification” is now free of the virtual bounds and is clearly rampant in the IRL world, meaning its a post gentrification norm and any attempt to escape from it likely just transports the problem to another sector of the world map. Personal planets entering Leo have been going retrograde in tandem: Venus, Mercury and next up Mars. The latter is well timed as now we know the mask of Crony Capitalism is returning to the stage in full exaggerated boldness cued to one last visit of Pluto in Capricorn in the fall to convince everyone that all the old problems are still relevant when really the pivot of power has moved on to an altogether different array of oppression leaving many or most effectively screaming at walls, or even screaming out the window at their own family and neighbors or even more frightening screaming at themselves in the mirror in an endless feedback loop.

Christopher Wool

Having somewhat parsed out the glitchy, fritzy, corrupted axis between selfhood, sovereignty and exhibition on one end and technological networks, progressive syndicates and infrastructure of like-mind on the other which encapsulates Pluto in Aquarius opposing Leo for the next 40 years, consider the Sun in Leo conjoining Mercury retrograde at 29 Leo for an Inferior Conjunction which rules over everything else via Jupiter in Gemini and Saturn in Pisces. Quite an odd situation. The Sun itself is in its home sign, having contended a few weeks prior to being forced to look directly into the alien face of Pluto in Aquarius, but now is far enough away to operate unhindered as the Celestial King prepares to disrobe and enter the house of his scribe and messenger, who is busy backtracking, slipping into the clothes of the King they switch places and exchange information, pertinent details whispered in the ear, something critical retrieved or remembered which effects the expanding froth of mass media bandwith as well as dictates not only the general ambiance of the kingdom but also the parameters with which you must flow through it.

Mathew Hansel

Mercury’s entrance into earth sign Virgo in deep shadow in late July brought about the place within the scape of logistics which did actually effect the plot materially in certain specific spots, but since Virgo is about sorting out and correcting procedural flaws and the retrograde touches and concentrates on this place, it is as if the thing which needs to be materially dealt with to continue the general progressions in play since before last year are being reworked once more to get stories along to where they are ultimately headed, putting in the final tweaks to the vehicles and mechanisms and properties and other tangible factors, while the dressings of the over arching narrative are re-costumed for a new act of the play, the intentions of the characters remain similar and the designs of the director have not wavered in the slightest. It’s all going according to plan despite the apparent dramatic shifts and unexpected set backs. Left wing and right wing swings still bring us closer and closer to digital currency and ID agendas. But power doesn’t always get what they intend. The managerial tech elite, oligarchs, VCs and general archons are all still merely reality’s play things along with the rest of us, remember. Big Power changes society and distorts culture in big ways, but in the end the story of the World will do whatever it is going to do rather than what Empire wants it to. So, as the Internet goes more and more into zombified degradation, and whatever you put out there in public, online or off, gets sucked up and assimilated, and your sovereignty is constantly threatened, remember that organic subculture may be fermenting in obscurity and secrecy, and alternative ways to parasite the parasitic system and vampire the vampire are bound to be devised by nature which never stops needing to feed, breed, recycle and regenerate.

Leonard Reibstein

In your personal life you might ask: Where am I sovereign? where am I empowered and where am I disempowered? Where am I able to be authentic and truthful and where am I forced into functional falsity? What didn’t work last year that also didn’t work this year which needs to be engineered at a much more precise level to be operational? What is the little kernel which derails the mechanism needing to be filed down so as to keep the belts on the pulleys? How can things be made less complicated? What series of ephemeral changes, array of surface options, myriad of meaningless factors, or inconsequential buzz is busying the mental space and often crowding thought processes? Probably in direct tension with the latter, what unavoidable parameters must be attended to so as to keep things flowing? Within that, what is the right level of submission, relaxation, and ultimately application of form to keep things smoothly underway? What set of false morals need to be abandoned to arrive at more universal and divine truths, balances and attendances to justice? Where can we move into effective autonomy and lean into manifestation of skills?

Mel Ramos

The light poisons our eyes and warps our face, the information is meaningless and excessive, authority pours forth from the pretend world, we find our selves and our power and a place to both sharpen our claws and tune up our tools off map and out of the obvious course. Detour within detour within detour found us here, at the heart of the labyrinth, and with a couple leaps we clear the walls if we want, or skip over the laser boundary alarm and into nowheresville, otherwise we except our zombie status and continue in bold adherence to false truths and the egregoric banter of corrupt prophets programmed by a runaway syndicate set on perpetual self management. A system self-monitoring itself doing anything and everything to keep itself relevant no matter how mad, incongruous and un-integrated the charade. Time to step away from pretend, impersonation, mimicry, and role playing tendencies that only keep the entire thing intact. No longer playing along at this point is revolutionary. This might mean deleting Thee App. This might mean walking off stage within the pretend parts of our lives. The stage is where all the scenery is and where the other characters are and where the audience sees us. When we leave all this its only ourselves and our Daimons left to sort things out, and whoever we meet in that dimension of reality more directly connected to flora and fauna. The polarization may be entering more advance stages, where its time to choose which reality in which you wish to proceed, on multiple layers across your existence at once.

Louisa Gagliardi

All this, with a Total Global Lockdown event sandwiched in between (triggered by heavy 29* Capricorn and 0* Aquarius activity, where Pluto is concentrating now) severed all our lineages. No one knows the lived history of any tradition they now take part in. People don’t even recognize traditions much now, they just roll up Sprinter Van style into someone else’s locality and occupy with no curiosity about who built up ideas and forms and how a thing came to be. This is the Air Period migratory shuffling of curatorial channel surfing bandwith expansion optionality and selectability which follows Earth Period product on the shelf consumerism. In the Earth Period world of border drawing and nation making tourism, essentially selling visitation to a marketable version of a place made the globe an orb of market shelves. In the Air Period tourism is now passé and being protested everywhere, despite digital nomadism and lineagelessness making anywhere and everywhere  available for mood-boarding. The previous Pluto in Aquarius in an Air period saw the fall of Feudalism via entropic degeneration including plague and climate factors leading to the eventual inception of the renaissance via disenchanted people with nothing to lose wandering into warmer climes down in the Italian peninsula to have a less dreary existence now that they’d had a paradigm shift into Momento Mori, the canine like parade of stoic adherents to the trauma induced “life’s short then you die so live while you can” axiom quickly ceasing to recognize the power held over them by their land consolidating  lords. The parallel threads to now are obvious, complete with the recent revival of both scholastic and classic hermetic, magical and astrological texts. Yesteryears’ wanderlust minstrel is todays remote worker at a bnb in Indo, or taking your parking space with their $40,000 van in the local autonomous zone. Not an exact fit, as these processes span generations, and participants are like micro organisms in the progression of eras. It’s still worth pointing out the dynamics of these distinctions for any of us to strive for biome balance in the cultural sense, even when, or especially when, the tides are seemingly turned against us. To that we might, again, hope to encourage subcultural undercurrents, which are likely with a Pluto in Aquarius opposing exhibitionist Leo, to flow under the radar. Consider that last time Pluto was in this axis was in Leo (1937—1958), which neatly embeds McCarthyism, a period where politicians were attempting to weed out suspected communists from Hollywood, radio and Broadway. With the reverse in full effect now you can clearly grasp the dynamics of politics, propaganda, media, totalitarianism, socialism, acting, theatrics, witch hunts, paranoia, surveillance, centrally celebrated virtues, spotlights, ostracization and an inability to ascertain truth but all only switched to flow the other direction from present.

Wilhelm Marstrand

Enough back story for now. The month of August begins with Venus in late Leo squaring Uranus in late Taurus, referencing how attraction to boldness and bravery are clashing with turbulence or volatility at threatening levels to safety which may actually require a bit of warding to proceed authentically with creativity and heart centered romances. As this is Uranus upon Algol we might see Arthur en route to Guinevere provided a talisman by Merlin to trespass dragon infested territory. What might be normally stable ground is made dangerous by Medusan or otherwise hydral threats and though we want to peacock there in childlike abandon the otherwise inviting landscape is more than meets the eye and we must have our wits about us to proceed safely and with some dignity not to mention satisfaction in tact. This chord struck in late Leo is perfect foreshadowing for the rest of the month as this serves as a key set of coordinates hosting across all the zodiacal layers.

Aaron Johnson

Just before Venus falls into Virgo on the 4th, where she tends to be quite critical of beauty and concentrates on flies in the ointment (“this would be gorgeous if not for this flaw”) a new Moon in Leo incepts a new cycle of subjectivity and manifest emergence within our energetic centers and for the next couple weeks we’ll be contextualizing things from the inner I and Me perspectives. Curtly after Mercury turns retrograde in Virgo, as if he detects a problem and sets to double back to locate the snag and identify the issue and resolve it. This seems to be like an actress stressing out that she looks gaunt in the dailies and sounding an alarm which results in the camera crew trouble shooting equipment and stage lighting leading to a rabbit hole chasing technical issues along patch cables throughout the studio. The Sun on the 6th sextiles Jupiter, as if concern over appearing ones best on film leads to perusal of a bazillion lens filters, light gels, new editing software and a growing understanding of what tricks all the other studios are using being buzzed about in the breakroom. The following day Venus catches up to and conjoins backwards moving Mercury and reverse engineering ensues, attempting to recreate the problem shot which led to the initial bone of contention, but its easier said than done with stand ins and as initially assumed there were goblins in the gear then which might be a different breed than the gremlins making the more recent batch of footage look bad in a different way than it did two days ago.

Issy Wood

About a week goes by of waxing Moon gathering light and both emotions and situations mount leading up towards Mars’ conjunction with Jupiter in Gemini on the 14th. Mars and Jupiter share a lot of celestial synchronicity when you look at repeated multi-planet synodic combinations, making this a notable moment, especially as when Jupiter goes retrograde later on October 9th it will be in the vicinity of where Mars went retrograde in 2022 on October 30th. The expanding field of options and opportunities to polarize and pollinate hearsay clamors here with critical response cues and double tracked multitasking makes tactical maneuvering omnidirectional during a time when we’re headed everywhere at once, which of course in the spreading ourselves too thin sense possibly leads us effectively nowhere if we’re not careful: like in the actresses flawed photo analogy the camera crew attempts to try every combination of parameters they can think of and none achieve the desired effect thereby wasting time and money as well as raw material. Much footage of every type was taken, none were very good. Quantity over quality from an energetic expenditure and effectiveness standpoint. The very excessively Geminiic mode here applied to Mars also emphasizes the charlatan, thief, trickster, liar and double-dealer aspect of that planet in sign which might mean its a good time to steal other peoples ideas and fuck them over, or, as previously touched on, secret undercurrents and sneaky alternate paradigms might be percolating in the back alleys of the omniverse, killing however many birds with one stone, or killing one bird with a cloud of widely dispersed pebbles and grit. Remember Jupiter is the storm god, and a hot sand storm here could be apt.

Jamie Maclean

This leads Mars to square Saturn on the 16th. Usually the malefics paired up in any way is both irritating and industrious. Forced to deal with shit and put in the energy, as if under yoke. When that comes about in paradoxical and dispersed Gemini in torsion against flowing, releasing all permeating Pisces we might imagine a set of circumstances which whip up a lot of froth, like blades spinning in the water, tides running opposite winds forming chop, or the primordial churning of the ocean of milk where gods and demons in their tug of war actually form the nectar of existence. Smart investors wait for hype in markets to subside before they feel its safe to make plays and not get wrecked, but market makers and manipulators intentionally create hype on purpose so retail investors buy in then they pull the rug out from beneath them and sell their majority of the shares effectively dumping the crashed prices on the little guy and running off with the profits. I’m not suggesting you do such a thing here, but be aware that you may either be subject to hype, froth and FOMO at this point and knowing when to hold em and when to fold em is some god ole’ romantic wild west wisdom, and in other cases a gunslinger could surely use some mighty splashing and mucking about as an advantageous diversion in the tension of the funhouse shoot out.

Marlene Dumas

Yeah, then Mercury in retrograde squares Uranus right before the Inferior Conjunction, so the shattering of false mirrors to reveal pertinent information is encoded in the mentally chaotic moment recently described. We might imagine that it's through some mishap, like someone dropping a camera and nearly breaking it, that the setting they’ve been looking for to surpass the issue with the actress not appearing herself is finally resolved. But it's more than that. It may be that the camera used was actually totally broken now, and the dailies everyone sees at this point are actually the original ones, and they are only convinced they are new ones, and because of that charade they all feel better about it. It may be the actress herself feels she was aging, and having received media criticism whilst feeling insecure in the beginning of the month went into recoil leading the entire production team on a wild goose chase of logistics. Some studio pee-on in the breakroom reading in a tabloid her real age which just got recently leaked could see the root of the issue and has made it his personal mission to compliment her and make her feel beautiful once again, conspiring with the entire make-up and costume crew to do the same. Edging up to the Full Moon she is feeling less concerned about the integrity of her looks and braves the camera now undaunted, and not knowing they are filming her in an identical outfit and setting as before with a non operational camera, they then show her the contentious two week old raw rushes that originally derailed the whole production and she now glows over them, beauty and confidence restored. In the end, has she even aged, is she beautiful, was there a camera issue, was the lighting bad? Doesn’t matter, everyone has now become convinced things are amazing and the filming of new scenes is able to soon proceed, after a bit of studio recalibration and getting actors back on track with their lines.

At this juncture there is a vibe shift on the 19th. The Sun squares Uranus, aware of how shaky the ground actually is, despite confidence riding against the threatening kick. Opposite this the Moon goes Full in Aquarius, generating a state of detachment which allows for arriving at new ideas and complicated, unauthorized innovations, although when you attempt to articulate these fantastic, cutting edge concepts no one understands, the thought-forms are mostly untransferable. Coldly, you ally with whoever can follow your train of thought rather than your more regular comrades and companions. Jupiter then squares Saturn, and the expanding omnidirectional idea-sphere of truth-less info-units clashes against the atmospheric pressures, and there is a blitz of factors caught in a kind of slavery to wide sweeping forces beyond our control. Similar to earlier in the month, there is actual identified threats to instability and safety shaking our current confidence and centeredness which isolates us to a unique situation or circumstance only ourselves and possibly a couple others might begin to understand or relate with as the factors are so varied and the conditions so immersion based you’d have to be living in it to get it. To state that less personally and more worldly: everyone is an egomaniacal diva that thinks they know how to solve the world’s problems because they saw a tweet they can’t explain the total gist of right now and have lost the ability to walk in anyone else's shoes because of an ever increasing media onslaught curation which keeps them in a set of roles in opposition to other roles rallying around mascots, figureheads and cynosures. Nothing new, we saw a lot of these themes when Leo was the Saturn in Aquarius and Uranus in Taurus square trigger and when the North Node Eclipses and retrogrades were all happening in Gemini. This is a remix of that leading up to the hoopla of Uranus in Gemini and Pluto in Aquarius in 2025, so here we are, similar to how the various outer planets trailing through Aquarius mentioned in the beginning of this article describe periods where the internet era was getting remixed in various ways by all the best Alien outer planet DJs.

Melanie Daniel

The lights begin to dim, its getting to late summer and all, as the Sun ingresses Virgo on the 22nd, many of the rhinestones on the bedazzled jacked are actually just basic, ugly, country rocks that need to be removed, polished and replaced for the garment to look any good. Perfect, as Venus is going to trine Uranus and there is a love of solving all the most urgent problems, a great moment for rampant solutionism. Luckily, we’re thinking we should be brave in this moment of sorting out the hydra of issues vexing our less than secure world, as Mercury gets his head screwed on straight the next day in late Leo turning direct; at least we’ll be true to ourselves if not belligerent and over confident in our thinking. Well, this leads to us desiring some refinement and equilibrium, as ironically Venus ingresses rulership in Libra the 29th immediately forming a trine with Pluto. If you can’t beat them join them, you know how to be diplomatic and cordial and a good Samaritan right? Well now, when one finds oneself at the table of notable villains from the worlds most corrupt and heinous syndicates, simply flirt it up, turn on your charm, and make it a fabulous night out, it might just be sexy and fun. Keep in mind that this is a Venus headed to conjoin the South Node in house not long after, so whatever networking type hook ups ensue while in harmony with Pluto likely make her quite ill and will be cast off in short order. The whole sequence is queasily carried out under Mars in Gemini Square Neptune in Pisces. Remember last time they squared? Remember Sam Bankman-Fried and the fall of FTX in 2022? Yeah exactly.

Hary White