Weekly Wrap-Up 7.5.24

You know Mercury was the ruler of the week when public and private conversations felt like drinking from a firehose that only spouts actual fire and liquid meth.

Even this lion is depressed by the state of humanity in 2024. And he lived in Ancient Rome.

What Has Happened So Far?

Mercury moved into Leo on Monday in the first planetary transition from cool, watery emotion to the fiery extroversion of unapologetic passion, and boy did it show! Our communication planet has been holding our reins all week, which means there has been a lot of dramatic writing, speaking, shouting, and opining, but not a lot of action or clear strategy. We were already revved up and looking for a fight; Cancer season cranked the collective emotional temperature to it’s limit last week, and the fallout from world events included some very mercurial shrieking and pearl-clutching via talking heads that make up our communicative landscape.

On Wednesday, a leonine Mercury made good on their promise of drama and opposed Pluto, indicating foundational upheaval that gets tongues wagging and ideas flowing. Pluto is eternal chaos, and he has no problem upending institutions and structures that have previously been perceived as unbreakable or immovable (Pluto never tires of disabusing us from the notion of our own permanence…it gives him a giggle as he pushes Earth’s tectonic plates closer to eruption.) Another back-up on our information highway came courtesy of Neptune, a shady misanthrope of a planet who formed a trine with Mercury right before they changed signs. Neptune contributed his typical distortion to everything we saw and heard this week, muddying the waters that run between true, factual developments and conspiracy-laden paranoia. Some things were true, some things were false, and a whole lot of declarations were a dangerous blend of the two, because confusion is the goal for chaos actors and liars.

Let’s see who succumbed to what!

7.1.24 - A Day of Hysterical Waterworks

Mercury met Neptune in a puddle of emotion right before the speedy little rock left the house of introverted cuddling for the house of extroverted roaring, which indicated that our communication throughout the week would be colored more by our feelings than by our intellect. Whoo, boy, was it ever.

1. The ruling class saw it’s reflection, realized it was old, freaked out

   Mercury was still in Cancer, probably crying about something, when they made a trine Monday morning with Neptune in Pisces, who was also crying about something. This might explain how in their feelings public commentators were after the privileged world noticed what many of the rest of us knew for some time - that our world leaders have become just as calcified and useless as the brittle, primitive document that gave them power over hundreds of years ago. Suddenly the pundit class had urgency! They spouted doom prophesies and wrote lugubrious suggestions framed as silver bullets to fix deteriorating, entrenched systems, which literally never works.

   
   Once our fleet-footed messenger planet moved into the house of the lion, calls for action became louder and funkier, but they ultimately sprung from Neptunian delusion and did little illustrate a clear path through tangled messaging. Every overwrought think piece could be boiled down to the following statement; we know things are on fire, we just don’t know what to do about it, please keep buying our product and electing our ghouls. Keep an eye out for more snake-oil salesman and profit gurus to gum up the conversations about the direction our world is taking; Mercury also rules commerce, and there is never a shortage of hucksters looking to capitalize on anxiety.

2. Governing bodies designed to be impartial bulwarks embrace say fuck that, embrace emotional fanaticism

   Also on Monday, SCOTUS ruled in favor of despotism and proclaimed the United States President to be above the law in Trump v. The United States, a decision that is transparently partisan and emotional on the part of our frilly-collared, Eternally Supreme Bishops for Jesus, or whatever the fuck they go by these days. There is nothing more amateurish or emotionally unhinged, nothing more Mercury/Neptune/Pluto than creating public policy based off of an ancient book of fairytales, but that is exactly what American courts seem to be doing.

   In keeping with Mercury’s tradition of throwing information at our faces like so much damp spaghetti, this development was tangled and conflated with various other dire talking points (almost purposefully tangled, no?) that it was easy to miss the significance of such an obviously corrupt proclamation, but that’s how Neptune rolls; take something real, reflect a distorted version back to the public, and drown the original signal beneath waves of deception.

7.3.24 - A Day of Noisy Generational Shifts

Mercury and Pluto opposed each other in Leo and Aquarius on Wednesday, indicating the shaking of previously unshakeable foundations and institutions. Hades and Hermes share a fairly harmonious relationship in Greek mythology - neither entities mind chaos, and they both hold the ugly truth to be paramount to anything beautiful or comforting. Pluto is a slow planet with a huge orbit, however, so it can take a while for the effects of his sauciness to hit us here on Earth…but hit us he did! The very next day, Britain kicked their conservative Tory party to the curb in snap elections hastily arranged by Tory doofus Rishi Sunak, and the imperialists who birthed the United States will now have their first Labour Party PM in fourteen years.

Mercury in Leo is often loud, which was evident in the sparklers, screaming, and bubbly acceptance speeches peppering British airwaves Friday morning - but the true depth of any transformational jibber jabber has yet to be seen. Volume, no matter how obnoxious, is not the same as substance. Whether or not this small instance of change is a harbinger or an outlier could become clearer as 2024 moves on, especially since Pluto is only getting started. We have 20 more years of this shit.

I personally wish I hadn’t ever gotten out of bed. Like, ever.

Weekend Activities

Friday’s nurturing new moon in Cancer is an important demarcation; the days will now grow shorter, the fate of Western empire more precarious, and the astrology from now through December is unpredictable and spicy.

It’s a cliche at this point to talk about the Cancerian ethos of home and family as a panacea for the world’s ills, but cliches stick to our public consciousness because they’re based on factual precedent. If you know anyone in hospice work or have read accounts of near death experiences, you’re likely aware that jobs, money, politics, and the economy are never deathbed topics, nor are collective social issues or voting records. I wish I spent more time with my kids, I wish I spent more time with my wife, I wish I had spent more time doing nothing with my cat in the garden, I wish I had stopped that stranger at the bookstore, I wish I had kissed her, I wish, I wish, I wish, whisper the near dead. When we leave this particular iteration of ourselves, the ancient Greeks imagined that we traveled to the realm of Hades so that he could judge us on the real shit, i.e. our moral code, who we loved, and how we loved them. This is why Pluto activity is interpreted as being both clarifying and destructive; in the mythological landscape that informed astrology, death was the ultimate destroyer, and to experience it meant laying bare one’s soul to the gods.

The lunar cycle we are kicking off in Cancer today will last for four weeks, and it will give us an opportunity to work out the real shit for ourselves before Pluto showers us with more spice, politics, chaos, and destruction. Change starts small, the activist buzzkills like to say, and history supports that cliche, too - teams, families, and communities are the oldest survival mechanisms known to gods and men. This is why I’m recommending everybody turn the news off this weekend to ponder deathbed regrets; how can we avoid them? With whom would we spend every possible moment, given the chance to do just that? And if you aren’t doing those things now, what is stopping you? Why should we sit in anxiety, waiting for what Hades has in store - something destructive, deathly, chaotic, anxious, and transformative - when we could make the choice to transform ourselves?

Following that thread, my new moon ritual will involve moonstone (duh) as well as ALL of the heart chakra stones like rose quartz (compassion), emerald (marriage), moss agate (family), and some pink tourmaline for familial protection. We don’t need to do any complex sigil work or manifestation to activate this moon, we can simply verbalize our feelings to anyone that should hear it amongst friends, family, and lovers. Tell them how much they mean to you, how deeply they affect you, and the lengths to which you would go to keep them safe. It’s not too late to cut Pluto off at the pass and transform before he forces the outcome. Why wait? Fuck a deathbed confession. Eulogize the living.