Astrological Rear View Mirror: 7.1.24
Saturn birthed the American oligarchy - and Saturn always eats his children.
“You will not be able to stay home, brother
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and
Skip out for beer during commercials
Because the revolution will not be televised”
-Gil Scott-Heron
“As thus he spahe, the Son of Saturn gave
The nod with his dark brows.
The ambrosial curls
Upon the Sovereign One’s immortal head
Were shaken, and with them the mighty
Mountain shaken, and with them the might
Mount
Olympus trembled.”
-Homer
“I applied for a trademark, “stuffed crust pizza,” and the trademark office said to me, “That’s a little bit too descriptive and we can’t give you that mark.” But I changed it a little bit and it’s “stuff in the crust,” and I got my trademark, but it didn’t make a difference. Pizza Hut took the method of my patent and went ahead and used the words “stuffed crust pizza” as a description, and I’m out.”
-Anthony Mongiello
What happened to us (a long time ago)?
Last week, Mercury in Cancer formed a trine with Saturn in Pisces. The end of June in 2024 belonged to the dour father of the Roman pantheon, and Saturn made sure we knew it. A primordial planet named for the ancient god of time and capital, Saturn was a real weird son of a bitch, whom Rome lionized after synchronizing him with the Greek god Kronos. Born of indifferent sky god Ouranos and earth mother Gaia, Saturn was the only child who would stand up to his remote, loveless father. Urged on my his mother, who finally had enough of Ouranos’ cruelty, Saturn grabbed a big sickle and castrated his father, ending the reign of the giants whose magnificent aspirations created our world.
When Saturn took over as ruler he instilled things like structure, time, value, and boundaries in the universe. He married his sister Rhea and together they ruled what Hesiod and others titled “The Golden Age”, a time on Earth when humans prospered effortlessly and grief, toil, and struggle were nonexistent. Hesiod wrote that the first incarnation of humans under Saturn were compassionate, wise, and wanting for nothing; at one with the bounties of both heaven and earth. So of course we had to fuck it up.
Some asshole clued Saturn into a huge bummer of a prophecy; his sister/wife, Rhea, would give him powerful children, but they would grow up to violently overthrow him and end his prosperous reign in a familiarly desperate ring of continuity. Much to her dismay, Saturn decided to nip that issue in the bud by eating every child that Rhea birthed in order to maintain order and power.
Like Gaia before her, Rhea wasn’t happy with her brother/husband’s cruelty, so she conspired to hide her last child, Jupiter, to allow him maturation before he became dinner. It was that son, Zeus to the Greeks, who would rally his siblings and defeat his cannibal father. Saturn and most of the Titans were banished in Tartarus, and the action-packed, cinematic Olympian rule began with brash, virile Jupiter at the reigns of it all. He kept a few Titans around who had assisted in his coup, and once they gave humanity useful gifts like fire, things deteriorated quickly. Hesiod believed humanity was subject to cyclical deterioration, and so labeled each age of man accordingly - from gold to silver, once Pandora slipped up and released her jar of horrors into the world. We slid from silver to bronze, as men discovered the violence and victory of war, and from bronze to iron, as men banded together to draw borders of nations, to claim propriety of the land and the animals that inhabit it. According to Hesiod, this is the age of violation; of human mistrust and greed, of lies, power struggles, poverty, and dictators. This is the age Hesiod found himself mired in, writing glorious poetry about mankind’s descent into depravity, and it is the age we find ourselves muddling through as I write.
What happened to us (last week)?
Against all odds, our capable, democratically-elected statesmen publicly debated ethical solutions to social issues. World citizens were able to assess the proficiency of their chosen representatives, engage in vigorous, productive conversation, and are, for the most part, motivated to find reasonable compromises in order to solve collective problems. The future has never looked brighter as humanity comes together to reduce poverty, hunger, and violent territorial disputes through a combination of philanthropy, education, and diplomacy. A brand new world awaits us.
Last week, Mercury formed a trine with Saturn…and none of the struck text above was relevant. In an enlightened world, in a fairytale story, in a feel-good summer blockbuster that cost 500 million dollars to produce and distribute, the above denouement would scroll gently down a black screen to a lush piano score. We’d emerge from the dark, blinking and chilled from arctic AC and jumbo sodas, feeling good about the state of humanity. We’d stroll out onto a sunny sidewalk confident that despite our petty squabbles, the human collective will always unite - we will kill the aliens, crush the communists, divert deadly asteroids with a rogue astronaut crew, and drive Godzilla back into the ocean. Despite our differences, we would carry a hope born of mutual storytelling that assures us we are good, and that love wins because it is a universal law we cannot help but follow. Certainly there were some people, somewhere in the last couple of centuries, that felt those feelings and had that hope. Those optimistic pilgrims are the reason we have art, books, music, parliamentary process, and the internet. They gave us the combine, the printing press, Stonehenge, The Sistine Chapel, the James Webb telescope, and donuts that are also, inexplicably, croissants. Hope is what brought jazz to the world, hidden cheese in pizza crust, and the ability to both can and carbonate alcohol in adorable, picnic-perfect packages. Slip on shoes, amphitheaters, hand sanitizer, and hearty rose bushes that bloom velvety mandalas the size of dinner plates all exist because, at some point, people had the audacity to make things bigger, better, smarter, more efficient, and more beautiful for those who might inhabit this plane of existence after them. People shared a collective hope that inspired us to send rockets into space, pushing our physical boundary farther out into a vast cosmos than any ancient astrologer could ever have imagined. Hope pushed our consciousness past frigid Saturn, the farthest planet that ancient star gazers could perceive, and gave us Neptune, Uranus, Pluto, and galaxies on top of other, complex galaxies, dense with stars that dwarf our sun by unimaginable orders of magnitude. We wouldn’t build satellites, or AI, or The Parthenon, or monster trucks, or indoor plumbing without hope; what would be the point? We only build for a future if we believe in a future. We blow past our physical limitations, century after century, because we retain the hope of making the world better for our children, their children, and their children’s children after them, flooding the world with prosperity, possibility, and a surprise bite of gooey mozzarella at the very last, sad, disappearing-crust-stage of pizza eating. There are a billion more examples of humanity’s belief in greatness littering our modern world; paintings and structures and inventions and beauty that don’t just fight our limitations, they transcend them.
Until the limitations start fighting back. Time, the domain of Saturn, is a flat circle, after all, and it has no true limit. Time is forever. It endures.
What happened to us (decades ago)?
In 1987, Brooklyn cheese monger Anthony Mongiello fucked up a pizza crust that he was making for his girlfriend. He had tossed too much dough, but because he saw no need to trash the extra, he simply added it to the outside of the crust ring. When he saw the edges of his pie puffing up like a calzone in the oven, he pulled it out and thought it might still make an okay pizza crust if the dough was stuffed with something extra, like cheese. After workshopping the idea with his dad, Mongiello applied for, and was granted, an American patent on stuffed crust pizza. Mongiello was the son of an immigrant and a believer in the boot strap American dream of never ending growth and prosperity, so he reached out to various pizza companies to offer deals on using his newly minted patent for cheese-filled pizza. Pizza Hut was the only company to respond, and although Mongiello had several conversations with the development department at Pizza Hut, they ultimately passed on working with him. In 1995, years after having viewed Mongiello’s patent, Pizza Hut rolled Stuffed Crust Pizza out to the American masses. Despite the existence of the patent, the courts ruled against Mongiello when he sued Pizza Hut, claiming that different verbiage use was enough for Pizza Hut to continue making money off of Mongiello’s invention without paying him a dime. In a remarkable instance of synergy with the future, the very first commercial that Pizza Hut released for its ostensibly stolen Stuffed Crust Pizza featured grade C celebrity and future president Donald Trump.
This didn’t happen last week, although I’m sure some version of it did. Some version of theft by oligarch has been happening every week, I would guess, in America and the rest of the world, since Rome devised a justice system that conflated the power of money with righteousness.
No, really, what happened to us?
Last week, Mercury formed a trine to Saturn…and the United States succumbed to Mercury’s charm and televised a debate between a rapist and old man, a despot and a statesman, a carnival barker and a genocidal corporatist. It seems to have provoked a dark night of the soul for certain segments of the population, who only this past week noticed the state of our world; that we have become a calcified Rome, and our choice of leader is reflective of our decay. The heretofore comfortably complacent, performatively concerned petit bourgeoisie were forced by Mercury to see the image of their authority shrunken and defeated before their eyes. Journalists, insiders, architects, tech workers, and lawyers across the country were forced to look upon our rot, writ pale and craggy on the face of an overwhelmed octogenarian and wonder frantically, “Is this going to affect my 401k?” This newly perceived threat to their comfort has prompted the petit bourgeoisie to, of course, focus on the least foundational issue of the whole she-bang, which is the age and character of the two ghouls that were on television last Thursday. Hastily composed lists of possible replacements for the candidate of advanced age (though not, it is pertinent to note, for the candidate of compromised character) were published within 24 hours, through which the segment of the petit bougiousie that comprises media deftly illustrated the real, foundational horror of our questionable democracy; we are incapable of halting our decay, because we cannot envision any framework apart from the one that is decaying. The bulk of the ‘solutions’ that the ruling class and their minions vomited out into the collective were simply younger, shinier replacements of the corporatists currently drooling into our coffers - overwhelmingly rich, white, male automotons, birthed from the same resource-hoarding slime bog in which our current leadership swims. After witnessing our withered, toddling rulers don HD makeup and argue about their golf game, while babies get their heads blown off and women go septic for the sin of being pregnant, the best our fourth estate could come up with was, “Meet the new boss, the same as the old boss.” Like Saturn and his father before him, we are dooming ourselves by clinging to old notions of power; it must be male, it must be white, and above all, it must remain married to capitalism and exploitation.
Last week, Mercury formed a trine with Saturn…and Saturn trained his eye on us, the creatures that have wildly deteriorated since his ignominious defeat. He went retrograde this past weekend, which means the most remote planet humans can observe without a telescope appears to be backsliding through the sky, telling us to stop, to wait, and to review. The cannibal planet taught Rome everything it knew, and Rome taught America everything it knows - how to rule, how to keep time, and how to draw boundaries. From Saturn, we learned to limit the power of the masses and balloon the despotism of authority; to strive for greatness and create our own legacy, only to consume it.
Hesiod identified our deterioration around 650 B.C., and we’ve been ignoring his warnings ever since, stretching the atavism of his iron age to a bitter, brittle conclusion. We are collectively struggling to find a scrap of order, of sanity, in 2024, amidst the war, famine, greed, and rage of our Iron Age selves. We should have known it would end like this, in a fog of war, fear, and loathing - how could it not? Birthed of rape, cannibalism, and a despotic need for eternal power, Olympus served as a mythological twin to the Roman Empire, that militant behemoth on which America fashioned it’s justice system, it’s calendar, and it’s soul. Our father taught us boundaries that we ignored and flew past, grasping for Prometheus’ fire and wanting more - more wealth, more knowledge, more fame, more power, more beauty, more cheese in the crust of pizza, more, more, more.
Last week, Mercury formed a trine with Saturn… Mercury was Hermes, and Hermes takes no one’s shit. As a psychopomp who is welcomed everywhere and nowhere, Mercury carries the messages, reveals the secrets, and telegraphs the truth, however dirty it may feel. Julian Assange, our modern Mercury, was released from prison last week and returned home after spending 12 years in various jails and consulates for revealing U.S. military and state secrets to the global public. His plea deal requires him to step away from journalism, to zip his mouth, clip his feet, and be absorbed into the status quo. Mercury is a slippery guy, though, and he spends more time in the chaotic Underworld than on earth. He’s hard to threaten, and harder to shut up.
Last week, as Julian Assange was flying home, Mercury formed a trine with Saturn and all hell broke loose. The hell was there all along, of course, but Mercury is a trickster and he loves to hold a mirror to humanity - he seems to tell us that if this is the knowledge we want, then we shall have it, and everything that comes with it. This is what we’ve been building, this is what it does, and this is how it ends, he says - a world of greed and chaos, ruled by kings past their prime, hoarding their gold and their power as they dictate misery to the masses. They ponder new ways to eat us as they argue about their golf swing. This is the glory of a calcified Iron Age.
Last week, Mercury formed a trine with Saturn …and we began reaping what we’ve sown. On Thursday, people that have been quietly thriving on capitalism, greed, and oligarchic wealth centralization caught a glimpse of the future they helped to create; a pyramid built on the labor of the masses so that the kings at the top never lose, never yield, and never die; they just grow richer. (Apparently, based on the hilarious reactions last week, people had also forgotten that fossilized power grows older.) The day after two withered kings embarrassed themselves on television, their robed, gluttonous co-rulers in SCOTUS declared that poverty can be prosecuted as a crime, corporations need no regulatory oversight, and bribing judges is legal. The white bibs these unelected, ravenous assholes wear over robes make them look like afternoon buffet attendees, which is apt, I think. Like Saturn, they will jail us, chew us up, and devour us in order to maintain power, barely pausing to wipe the greasy, human offal from their fingers before they fart out what remains of our souls.
Last week, Mercury formed a trine with Saturn …and broadcast the decrepitude of American governance to the entire world, but Saturn is more than a cannibal despot. He is the boundary man, the only thing guarding us from the inky infinity of the beyond, and the last planet standing between us and oblivion before humans defied limitation, yet again, by using a nifty invention called the telescope to spot Uranus in 1781. Modern astrologers often elide the hidden magnificence of Saturn, portraying him as a task master who only ever says, “No”, but we forget that Saturn also says, “Perhaps, but only after you suffer.” We forget that Saturn can also grant us entry to whatever lies beyond our limitations by forcing us to see alternatives to linear thought, because he knows that neither time nor morality are straight lines with good people on one side and bad people on the other. He is the planet of maturation, the guy who forced Jupiter to grow the fuck up and DO something if he wanted to free his siblings and change the world.
Last week, Mercury formed a trine with Saturn …and we glimpsed a future in the dark belly of the god we worship, the deity who made Rome prosper and fall, the child-eater who thought that with enough power, money, and time, he could rule forever. We are turning a spiritual and intellectual corner, hopefully, and getting hip to the notion that while we’ve been focused on consumption as a way to maintain power, we were actually the ones being consumed. A little light shone on us, courtesy of Mercury, and we looked to our fellow captives in the digestive tract of Saturn and shuddered. Trapped in the dark, swimming in bile, our hope and morality will continue to dissolve until we get it together, swallow an emetic, and vomit out our human potential - only then can we wipe the goop from our eyes and look at Saturn from outside his own body. Perhaps we could see America for what it really is, too, and look past it’s current iteration with optimistic zeal, the way a crazy man did in 1781 when he glimpsed possibilities beyond our last known boundary, a chilly planet ringed in ice. Or the way Anthony Mongiello did in 1987, when he made his own revolutionary ring of flour and oil. Saturn is the cause of both our limitations and our greatness; he smacks us in the face with our mistakes so that we can learn from them and try again. He dares us to understand that the same thing that birthed us will destroy us, that there are no straight lines or simple boundaries; only a great big circle waiting for humanity to make a move. To take a big, daring bite of delicious, gooey eternity.
Superb writing!
I suppose because I've recently embraced a perspective that the nation-state is one of the biggest threats to life on Earth---and think despite the chaos and suffering we'd probably go through to get there, a world without political organizations larger than the Dunbar number is our best hope for a sustainable, enjoyable future---I don't find myself feeling too emotional about the downfall of my native America.
It probably also helps that I've seen it coming since the 1990s---back when people probably had a right to call me crazy for suggesting America would likely not survive the 21st century in that end-of-history, post-USSR decade. And I'm also aware that living abroad puts me in a privileged "ivory tower" position, so I (mostly) haven't created media about the downfall.
Anyway, really enjoyed this piece, it certainly fit your nomenclature, and am subscribing now....