The Astrology Of November 2020: KATABASIS

William Ludwig Lutgens

Jupiter conjunct Pluto, My Best Fiend

The breach in our infrastructure is such a chasm that we cannot even begin to comprehend it and while we spent most of the year looking directly into a single spot in the great wall we spend the other amount of time attempting to understand the overwhelming absence of everything and come out with an existential melt down. Here in lies the main issue, we are blinded by perspective. We either see one brick in the wall without stepping back to see the whole structure, and its corrupted mechanisms in full, or, when we do we see Pluto and immediately turn to accusations of conspiracy theories lurking about, as the planet of paranoia casts shadows across the systems. I think a breakdown might be helpful here, in our last month and a half of this predicament so we can all look at the perspective freeze we’ve been chewed up in since last December.

Jupiter: coherence, wide scope perspective, knowledge, wisdom, sagacity, opportunity, optimism, philosophy, spirituality, higher education, long distance travel, religion, celebration, joy

Capricorn: hierarchy, systems, management, laws and limits, territory, borders, walls, fortification, conservatism, tradition, constriction, monument, enduring structure

Pluto: the unknown, the beyond, the unprecedented, the ominous, the overwhelming, uncertainty, fear itself, obsession, mystery, investigation, power, obliteration, oblivion, void

Pluto and a Harlequin in Hell, Giuseppe Bernardino Bison

Clearly we can see the 2020 cocktail described here and that is simply just one component of the greater schema. Jupiter concludes his time in the absolute pits of a mental blinding power manipulation, territory seize up and population control nightmare over the next month and a half, notably making his last and final exact conjunction with Pluto in Capricorn on November 12th, the day before Mars stations direct and returns to full fire power in Aries. 2020 is not an in like a Lion and out like a Lamb type sequence. Its a mechanical monster from start to finish. We are literally caught in a giant paper jam. The machinery is not only broken, its outdated, and no one makes the parts to fix it anymore. Nothing has advanced since last January. We are no where better than where we were since we began the crisis. Those in power positions only control borders and police, their only solution is lockdown because that is all they are set up to do, suppress populations and tighten borders. They have no other function. From the beginning we needed health supported and better distribution of resources. Real health, real resources. Not greater access to a homicidal medal system that is antithetical to organic life. We got nothing of the sort. Instead we got capital chess moves and restricted mobility across the globe with no verified improvement to whatever conditions might have been the problem in the first place. We’re counting deaths across normal morbidity patterns. This is Jupiter on Pluto for a year in Jupiter’s fall, massively debilitated. Wide coherence of the fear of death itself and the fear of fear itself. This is the scare that shutdown the world. But in the end it is no more than a scare that increased plutocratic security systems in massive proportions. As we move into an Air period, known for their gnostic leanings, we once more attempt to outsmart the universe, and try to dodge death. But the War on Death is also the War On Life, as we can clearly see in a year that arrested mobility more than an ice age. This is not a crisis response, it is emergency law where the emergency is simply that we are alive. To any threat of health we must respond with vitality, not suppression of freedom and massive pressure to populations applied with inhuman and alienating population management measures. Finally cities in Southern Europe are speaking up. Demanding citizenship over emergency law and control returned to the regions. People cannot be consolidated into “populations” without loosing organic significance, without dehumanizing. Populations cannot be simply moved like game pieces. The measures of 2020 have done massive damage. The numbers in the news are meaningless to their roots. We see reflections of the same data disaster in the current election. Integer abstractions are endlessly manipulatable. Its the game of the powerful and the rich which somehow hypnotizes the “population” which assumes its position on the bottom and accepts their de-human status, especially in a void of culture. Today in the Mediterranean there is mass Mutiny, in places whose culture threads back to the Greek Classical World and beyond, outcry over lockdowns and curfews, rage over the closer of hairdressers and merchants, as it is in such places that authentic human culture germinates. Salons and barbershops world over are central nuclei of communities. The hate memes slung by young progressives at middle American soccer moms demanding Supercuts reopen mid quarantine show precisely how unrooted, warped and in a cultural vacuum America is. Anytime people begin to gravitate toward authentic human activity another faction programed to eradicate organic cultural expression attacks them. The American right, long despised and dispicable to the core is now joined by their nemesis and counterpart in the cartoon the liberal left who have slid into the position of being almost more anti-human and anti-life and anti-culture than their opponents. At the intersections of Elemental periods, like this threshold moment of 2020 we see empires fall, and no other Empire is as well defined by the period of 1802—2020 as the American Empire. The antidote to the illogic which spreads globally now will doubtful come from within the US, as the States spin into civil war (which, news flash, astrologically is scheduled for 2025—2032, we are just in the set up period), but from intact cultures (not nations, CULTURES) who have withstood and held on to their values for several centuries if not millennia. Air periods are information ages, but they are such in the context of classical inheritance and cultural exchange. Each time, in the west at least, Mediterranean ideas were revived. Watch Naples today, listen to the song of Parthenope begin to rise from the sea and oracular wisdom steeped in the deeply set stones and listen, to the 4th most bombed city in WWII, to the last European city to suffer a Cholera outbreak, to a true multicultural chaosphere, listen to those who have survived multiple volcanic cataclysms and perch upon multiple hellish gateways in Paradise, those who were famously fucked over by organized crime and live in or adjacent to an area referred to as “The Triangle Of Death” from intentional industrial waste mismanagement, tragically fitting for a culture seated in necromantic magic, the people repeatedly disenfranchised by monarchy and corruption but persist in pride and flamboyance. Listen to the keepers of the human cultural current of the western world who hold the mysteries of Dionysus within their hearts and whose blood today boils over as they call out that emergency law is inhuman. Filling the piazza, their signs read “Make the rich pay the crisis”— In Air periods we turn hermetic, we turn gnostic, we network and exchange and become mobile and aggregate the mysteries of existence, but repeatedly since the Hellenistic period, the very period in which Astrology congealed into the form we still use today, we turn to the

Mediterranean culture and the classical inheritance. We become human again.

We must absolutely fight racism, and call for equity and dispel the wretched atrocities of unaccountable authorities, but we must also make sure that our scopes are wide enough to oppose everything that is anti-human, or else we will see ourselves destroyed. Human vs. Anti-human, Life vs. Anti-life, Culture vs. Anti-culture, should be the only binaries you acknowledge from here on out and leave the manipulation of politics, whether they be rooted in bipartisanism or identity, behind in the wake of 2020, the climax of the industrialized and capital driven world, with all of its misery.

Castor and Pollution, Max Ernst

Scorpio and Capricorn, Dark Water, Dark Earth

All the signs of the zodiac have abundant virtues, but as we see both malefics not only empowered in their own rulerships but also in seriously convoluted and amplified into instability, Saturn copresent Pluto and Mars retrograde, the pair caught in a square with one another for the past couple months we don’t necessarily get the nicest versions of these sky sections. This might look like pollution collaborating with corruption, psychological trama working hand in hand with oppression, as planets link hands spanning the signs of Scorpio and Capricorn, and reach out from here on occasion to Uranus rupturing material existence, upsetting the rhythm of life, messing with markets and radicalizing our methodologies, or to Neptune in Pisces scrambling our awareness, mixing fact and fantasy, and lacing the structures we depend on with a tendency towards deception. It’s hard to not see in this array the systemic collapse, the fear of fear and the mass hallucination of a crises, when really the problem is an arrest of our ability to holistic understanding. Increasing health and vitality in a profound way has not even been on the table for much of 2020. I’ve personally suggested that be encouraged in local communities only to have actual herbalists tell me thats too far fetched, no one would do it and we need lockdown measures. It’s surprising that even amongst holistic professionals encouraged vitality expression is abandoned and human life suppression is embraced.

We’ll have to get a handle on this all in literally the next month and a half and come to terms with the muck we’ve been marching in place in. Our souls just got deeper, the waters within got darker, the poison has become more damaging, the shadows and crevasses of the earth darker, the tunnels more illusory, the mountain passes more impossible to traverse. In November a lot of this bullshit gets processed. The Sun trine’s Neptune by the 10th the same day Mercury re-enters Scorpio after stationing direct on the 3rd in Libra. We are able to consider our primal and raw conditions as animals as much as humans for a few weeks and we might be able to escape into this analysis from an imaginative and creative perspective. We should be growling and seething and gnashing a bit amidst this kind of trance, it’s not the trines we were making during the Cancer-Leo span over summer when we got to take a break from the heaviness and go to the beach with friends and family. Here we get into an altogether more real mood, and even though there is opportunity to lose ourselves in the glamour of it, its more of a lycanthropic episode than it is a vacation. The Sun sextiles Pluto and then Jupiter the day after Mars turns direct and we realize more and more that we’ve been stuck in a malfunctioning mechanism and the beast within us is beyond sick of the torture wheel, it can sense the pattern now and it churns our stomach. So we want out, we want to see as much change in the exterior structures as we have to make hermetically in the halls of our hanging entrails and layers of organs and internal tissue. A New Moon in Scorpio arrives just then to contemplate and initiate these subtle psychological shifts and the endocrine release within our body chemistry begins an ongoing process of alchemical change. Mercury opposes Uranus a couple days later and as the Moon begins to gain in light and the process unfolds our thinking is augmented and our fixations of what makes our mouths water can be seen modifying the exterior world quite drastically as we reanimate the mouse, it Frankensteins alive and we find the blood quickens within us as we are put to arresting our prey all over again, and instinctually we organize ourselves to do so. This ushers in a whole set of old challenges once again, as the Sun sextiles Saturn on the 19th, but time tested, nature takes its course. Venus squares Saturn the same day on her way into Scorpio. We tried to be nice and make getting what we want work for everyone but sometimes some necks must be bitten and some blood be drained to satisfy the lusts of the vampire. In the predatory world there is always a victim— nature works that way, theres no getting out of it, especially when you are immortal, have been alive for thousands of years and aren’t getting off that train anytime soon. Some desires and pleasures carry with them animalistic or otherwise deeply embedded archetypal oomph that decide for us which heads roll and who gets to keep their neck in a skirmish.

Feast, Emma Richardson

Mercury trines Neptune and sextiles Pluto between the 23rd and 27th of the month and all I can say is your art might get deeply saturated with power while your imagination is heavily eroticized so lay your pen to page or brush to canvass and let the ink flow, but i the wider world context prepare to be lied to and massively manipulated once more. He’ll sextile Jupiter and Saturn right after, which will be more sobering as we begin to process how sick and twisted these societal chess moves really are. This is all quite gross. I hope, in the tail end of a year that literally hosted the most acute arrest of human movement our species has ever experienced in all its history, and 99.9% of people were hopelessly brainwashed, yes fact its just true, this is the final sickening with the entire narrative from every angle as we unanimously can’t take it all anymore— its Scorpio, we’ve been doing some intense thinking, and done some painful soul searching, connected with our animal natures, and you know what, this is absolutely unacceptable. It needs to stop. Venus opposes Uranus around here towards the final days of the month from her Detriment to her Domicile. Are values are wildly out of balance. Shit is going to careen out of control and the one who is getting most hurt by that is ourselves, internally, deeply wounded. Again, the age old operation needs to take place, ask yourself what you really actually want beyond all else, what you most truly desire from your core, the very thing that brings you the most pleasure, what you are absolutely insatiable for if you could throw off all restrictions and norms and break any taboo in your way, and then, identify what the fuck is stopping you from obtaining your own ecstasy, and radically change your methodology based on that criteria.

Venus in Rulership, Making Fucking Lemonade

For the first time since March we get a benefic in rulership. Last time was Venus in Taurus in March, which was undoubtedly the combination of everyone getting free money to spend and getting really excited to bake bread. That was Venus trine to the Jupiter-Pluto-Saturn configuration, so harmonized. People were happy to not work and spend more time in their kitchens amidst a draconian lockdown. This time its Venus in hard aspect to the malefics. She’s playing an altogether different game than they are. Libra is the most cultural and social of the signs and loves soirees, parties, gatherings and events. She loves to mix and mingle, especially when it involves the arts and a good cause. Taking major pleasure, especially by contrast of the socially distanced (insert societally mandated antisocial conditioning) several months we just endured, is going to put the power of values, attractions and connections in a contentious clash with the rest of the current climate, but yet, by her shear presence i her home sign we know these qualities will persist.

Catch Me If You Can, Irena Jurek

Right off the bat she opposes Chiron in Aries on the 1st of the month, and we’ll be dealing with both our squeamishness in social settings despite loving the feeling of getting to connect with one another, we’ll be in territory where everyone is easily triggered and has a wounded sense of individuality, agency, personality and persona after the damage inflicted by years of identity politics sparring and outright attacks. Chiron in yang-iest Aries is more than an appropriate expression of the guilt and shame one is expected to feel around being biologically male and identifying with it. We’ll have those injured selves to deal with as we come together for a good time. And this is under Venus’ full power to mediate, equalize, harmonize and brig balance, so we’ll have that working for us, despite being in a very malefic heavy episodes where villains are literally king, don’t care for people at all, and are running the ship aground.

Mercury stations direct i Libra shortly after Venus’ ingress, turning tail on the 3rd with a renewed awareness of what is fair and square in the most just and egalitarian sense, but again, more than squeezed by 2020’s highly pressurized circumstances. About a week into the month Venus opposes Mars slowing down to finish his retrograde which places burning hot artillery on the other end of the seesaw against charm and grace. But this is Dignified and let us hope and pray Deified Venus, and I implore you to call to her every Venus hour and Venus day as above all it is Aphrodite in her most extreme and oldest forms who rules over even Zeus himself. Love is the Whole Of the Law, as the saying goes, and we need all the benefic we can get ad as much pleasure principle infused into the equation as we can with Zeus’ star imprisoned in Hades and Kronos’ combination cage. This pretty significant realization of how much value culture has turns the tides on a year we’ve been encouraged on several sides from engaging in or exhibiting art, dining, connecting, conversing, and upholding equity and societal harmony. We need people exchanging ideas, classically occurring in galleries and cafes, people celebrating and mingling, no better place than on the dance floor, exchange and fair trade, for which we need the streets and the marketplace. The focus on emergency law vs the economy is incredibly sick and far sided and so is the notion of fuck the economy; with eco as the prefix we might be reminded that human culture has an ecological fabric ad we should seek to keep culture healthy and not consider culture secondary to society. If the culture is sick those within it are also ill. We cannot become healthy this way, so we cannot by any means fight off a virus. We only make ourself increasingly vulnerable. There’s living, breathing human beings behind these masks, let us not forget it. In our strained state put us together and we’ll fight, and of course that was perhaps the point all along. But the power to create culture and to partake in mutual pleasure is equally as strong as that to quarrel. As we have the Sun and Mercury Scorpio minded at this time that Venus is in her optimum position to deliver pleasure, we might connect with our more animal instincts and try to turn to sex as a solution— in all honesty it might be much better to fuck instead of fight at this point.

Although, after the opposition on the 9th its not too long until Venus squares Pluto on the 15th and Saturn on the 19th before she moves into blood thirsty mode in Scorpio, meaning much of her time in Libra will get the big “No way” across the board from authority structures. Moving into winter very soon and the holidays by then well under way we might see a lot of contentious complications surrounding the appropriateness of communing with family and partaking in festivities. Many will do it any way, and it will feel so good, but under the threat of consequences, possibly fines or even arrests. Let us think back and reflect to Neapolitans demonstrating the lockdown measures, resisting merchant shutdowns, calling out against being collected and corralled like cattle. This is a culture who by far holds concern for their elders more than many other, an absolute grandmother worshiping tradition. We might want to try and think for a while about how the single option of defense against a tangentially defied threat all year could be not only option of navigating health concerns, crisis or not. Quarantining populations have never been attempted before, still show no absolute benefits, and the only other instances of populations under forced lockdowns are shadowed in grief and known as human atrocities. Neapolitans venerate the Madonna, both religious and secularly. Let’s hear what they say as Venus is in rulership, and the Divine Feminine gets a moment at last to express.

Drool, Snatch, Clean and Jerk, -Chris Finley

Mars direct, Uh Oh

We know Mars is stationing direct on the 13th, almost midway into the month. This is by and large a good thing. It is better to have a steady and stable running chainsaw than one that runs erratically and at odd intervals and is difficult to control the intensity of. No one would want to wield such a tool. With Saturn squaring Mars the past couple months we haven’t been able to use the broken tool so much anyway, only when it fit into an impossibly restrictive set of guidelines and scheduling. Now that we are more freely able to take the weapons into our own hands, and trust that they are tuned up to deadly precision, locked and loaded and ready to get down to business, we contend with a lot of lost time, and adding that to tempers reaching all time highs we might see very rapid and intentional acts of violence and destruction fire up out of no where. On the macro level, embrace for impact, and on the micro level, in our own personal lives, set your sights on the obstacles that need to be dealt with and use the martial skills you have hopefully been acquiring all summer and fall and overcome these critical difficulties. Agency and capability and effectiveness has been restored, and there is a little more room to operate in than there has been for quite some time, we can at last do our thing, so take your aim, you are at last getting your shot, try and take it. Its good to have a corrected and ready yang signal, hot and sharp and accurate, but as astrology goes, everyone has this weapon in their hand all at once, so crossing of swords is inevitable, shootouts are more than likely, and some will certainly get outgunned. The past couple months have been the preparatory period, we are now in showdown mode. Its safe to say round two is about to be underway.

Donq, Stephen Kade

Gemini Eclipse, WTF is happening?

The Sun ingresses Sagittarius on the 21st, the same day Venus ingresses Scorpio, so there will be a definite mood shift and focus change. The Sun in Sagittarius is looking for the ultimate target, the ideal pursuit, and gets excited to chase lofty goals. With Jupiter in Capricorn beginning to escape Pluto, but not by much we’d expect this is still police abolition and uprooting a racist system. The Sun enters here the current Nodal Axis and is walking right into eclipse season. The last very slight Sagittarius eclipse in the first days of June brought the uprisings catalyzed by the murder of George Floyd. This pair of eclipses are going to be anything but slight. The first is lunar, landing on November 30th on the North Node in Gemini. We might expect in response to tensions let loose, blocked attempts to achieve equity and accountability, the increase of curfews and restrictions, an oncoming cold season, an orientation to primal thinking, pleasure found in destroying things and a restored confidence in violence, all the circumstances necessary to deliver a mind boggling media blitz the likes of which we in all seriousness never seen before. As we approach the crossing of both Saturn and Jupiter dramatically into Airy Aquarius next month, this air sign eclipse might even bring new social technology, delivering another dimension to multiplicitous fashion we experience information and think about reality. Polarities, binaries, opposites, paradoxes, and the juggling of contradictory information is sure to intensify as many more balls are added to the routine. The trick will really be to focus your attention on being multi-dimensional and multi-faceted rather than picking Side A over Side B. The world will certainly get very 101010101010101010, so you want to be clever enough to be a programmer, hacking the game rather than becoming one of the programable puppets busy rotating the objects in the air.

The Court Of Death, Rembrandt Peale

Mercury, Gemini’s ruler, will be in late Scorpio while the eclipse pops off, so the Moon will be swallowed by the shadow of cyclical sickness and cyclical hunger, the vicious loop of never getting enough and leaving the table hungry forever more. This will be working hand in hand with Saturn playing an authoritarian chess game to check mate. Again, the mass proliferation of information suddenly seems to smell suspiciously of manipulation and control. We can’t take our eyes off the car crash and our perverse fascination for more gore transfixes our eyes to the image, which is exactly what the machine wants. Mental agility, finesse, cleverness, neutrality, and adaptability are to be our playbook keywords. What we should be seeing instead of what is spoon-fed us is that no matter what, we need to be utterly sick of the cycle of abuse we have been subject to, and look everywhere for increased optionality, autonomy, multiple channels, open circuitry, diversified selection, proliferation of alternatives, and a flourishing of the freedom of choice.