Hell In A Handbasket

When Big Astrology loses nuance, meaning and understanding at the tipping point, still the light shimmers

Art by Bill Mayer, a new little gouache of a sleeping faerie

Even if you only live on or under the 3rd rock, this latest cultural slam dunk cannot have escaped your attention. Big Astrology is wrangling the stats and strangling the stars again. Surely the descendant Barbaults of the world are losing their minds as AI astro-fakers everywhere blow their algorithm to smithereens with teeming once in a lifetime astrology headlines. Nuking our feeds like good capitalists with a volume steadily increasing since every last minute late to the game AI astrologer clocked on last Thursday. Or more correctly, their human named generator did. In the same way I have never understood why vegetarian food is often made to resemble meat instead of vegetables, I do not get why our robots aren’t given their own naming universe as alluded to by one of Gen X’s more enduring spiritual life rafts, Star Wars. I have been primed to listen to R2-D2 over Claude since before I could swing a light sabre.

But here we all are with the AI vampire’s digital teeth sunk all the way into the current spewing another massive once in a lifetime opportunity to spike the nervous system, hype the urgency, shorten the span and control the magic of hapless humans. Happening daily in your neck of the algorithm and running continuously inside your realm now by design. A tale as old as time told again in the latest LLM and its universal language of control. The funnel is real and just like every other prophet and scary tale warned us before now, the devil came offering something convenient for free and told us it was good. Literal cheat code that just like every other shiny shortcut before it actually destroys the receiver. Careful now that in all our systems use is deemed consent.

Though it be harder to find than before, and we live in a world that could certainly do with less broadcast and more occult, real astrology is still distinct because it has a unique voice. Oh how our humanity stubbornly endures through its fingerprints and farts, its innate genius and dynamic audacity. The bell tower is still climbed by its channel: a real person who pores over the stars first as they have done for years and years and listens for what constellates within. Now you absolutely get extra points for actually doing the writing yourself in your own voice, which used to be the basic standard for everything from emails to essays. In the good old days where plagiarism - the larceny or sneaky inhabiting of someone else’s work that you pretended was yours - meant you could not think for yourself and were cheating to get ahead. The assumption that went with plagiarism was disqualification not disclaimers. There was no negotiation after the fact. Lately you can tell that we have not learned a thing and all those cheaters are now in charge of our dropping standards.

In the same way that everyone who uses botox or ozempic or cocaine thinks no one can tell, the formula for the astrology/spiritual plug-in is just as jarring. And then as all the same formulaic info appears in a muted rainbow of branded un-colors and fonts, people and voices whose eyes dart to other screens, it begins to consume itself. The summary loop tightens into a knot that finally pulls through. Which means again that as this beautiful cosmic choreography exacts it has already been lost to a vacuum whose galactic centre is a whirling «System.NullReferenceException» and a tech black hole that endlessly eats itself as it feeds.

If there is any field that has consistently endured and outlived human folly it must surely be the one generated by the planets, the moon and stars above. The frequencies that even our clunk still measures. Outer space and its luminaries that humans have variously cast as gods and monsters, guides and resources, since they first looked up. Every culture has its distinct sky lore, stories that teach us how to be part of this vaster cosmos and our peculiar human experience of it from an earthbound perspective. Modern Western culture still managed to reduce it further in line with every other severed link between ourselves and the nature we are part of, borne from and return to. All its economies of scale similarly redacted into a reverse torus field that is right on cue loudly disappearing up its own arse, just as prescribed by its own (h)allowed arts and sciences.

And the astrology concurs.

Rocking The Cradle

Collage art by Nicebleed

As Jupiter languorously rolled into formation overnight in Leo, the giant geometry begins to lean on a lever most of us did not know we had inside. Its siren activation was in February when Neptune and Saturn met at the initiating degree in Aries. An alert from the future, origin and source resonant, that may not have landed like a feather in your path. Perhaps it was a bomb, or hit like a lightning bolt, or conjured an old storm that finally had its way with your life. Something caught fire in the most fertile way, incendiary conditions required to blast open the husk so the seed could travel beyond its early protection, hectic but effective.

And if you are interested in coincidences or patterns or data or uncommon sense, stories or stars depending on which way you spin it, February’s huge conjunction was also dangling from an eclipse and a watery retrograde about to switch currents, cloaked in the fog of far more than the sum of its parts. Harder to spot and easier to chalk up in an instant, fascinating if you pull the lens of time and space further back. Its basket - from the same branch of post modern astrology if not the same sect - was slightly different known as a Mystic Rectangle. In another stream of consciousness as the Righteous Rectangle. Got one of those going on in your life, darkling? Seeing how the play pits them for and against each other at the same time? Your chart will have taken a direct hit, even if it is hard to decide if this is a good or a bad thing. It is both and significantly more. In a natal chart these concurrent combinations of sextiles and oppositions involving two pairs of planets looks like a flag, a net, a rune. Described as a windmill, an envelope, a ladder, these unusual aspects are their own Rorschach when overlaid on the continuing story of your life. Certainly worth musing upon while staring into the middle distance with a glass of something illuminating in your other outstretched hand.

The longer transits at play, or how the planets are in conversation with each other and what their combined fresh frequencies are conjuring in us, are multilayered. A weave rather than a singular thread and anyone who sets out to explain it deserves the applause for the effort it takes to become the dude with the red string for everyone else. In the Coven circle we convened last week for witches to wade through the multiple concurrents, we stopped after two hours of rolling it about in our congress. The thing I have learned most of all from tyre kickers and grazers alike is that while not everyone is into it, they also don’t want to miss out on it. The distillation of its essence is the danger, the ease of use that denigrates the design.

Regardless, the planets spin and the stars blaze and we choose and we cower.

Now from within something is gathering, frequencies colliding that conjure a quickening, growing tips twitching at the current, tendrils shimmering like an outstretched hand. We cannot know these places before we reach their torrents, and neither can we control where or how the resonance plucks our strings. But you can track it, feel into it, wonder at how it makes you move and what is shifts in your world. This aperture demands our palms open and eyes to the sky tuned to the only instrument we have that can truly translate for us. Barbault's liner notes cradling our future in its open bowl as many a prophecy ripens.

Jupiter in Leo is the final planet of the four to reach the focal 4th degree, some would say the behemoth that activates the charge. Now in fated aspect to Urania in Gemini, Neptune in Aries and Pluto in Aquaria enlivening all their fabled fourths. What makes this flash so rare and wonderful is not just how unlikely it is for this line-up to shimmer. Jupiter’s orbit is 12 years, Urania’s 84 years, Neptune’s 165 years and Pluto’s 248 years. All four outer planets exacting at the same fourth degree of fire and air signs, the music of their spheres chiming in harmonic resonance. A combined note that has never rung out across the universe before now, a herald and a head turner.

All the codes and keys streaming, secret things unlocking inside of you that cannot yet be held in words or even wrapped for safekeeping. Your tiny spinning part an electric fraction of the ineffable whole at this threshold, the one we will each remember for all kinds of reasons. Tipping points are like this, reorienting us in a way we sometimes cannot see clearly until we have moved through the turning. The many others plugged into this particular star prophecy dot our lives regularly since 2020. Multiple transits as energy shifts and builds, gives and takes.

Astrologers chant the continuing story of the stars in our own languages of understanding. Your chart hums yours beneath every moment of your life from its specific dance with the planets whether you believe in it or not. There are many real things that exist beyond our observation, approval or condescension particularly if you only speak one human language. Evolution always rewards diversity of matter and spirit. Some part of what gathers will be only yours at this specific juncture, some will be for later and some seeds will eventually take different root in others.

So do we arrive on loud hooves and snorting, this next other place in the year and your life and the world worth paying very close attention. Tucked within and still your most valuable asset.

Sacred Geometry

Delicate Tension, 1923 by Wassily Kandinsky

Even as the planets began shifting into formation last year and the fable began to play out, I was enchanted by all the fours. Writing about this specific astrology again for our July Star, I was instantly transported. Back to the early years of my life when 4 was one of my favourite numbers, before I turned prime and irregular at 7. I never looked back through quite that lens until now, the good work of any fathomless retrograde if not its constant crick in the neck.

Maybe I am not the only analog kid who thought K’s were doing high kicks and S’s slithered through text as I learned to read but the shape of 4 always felt to me like a window, the irregular diamond on top of a wand. And at that same age, quarters were made out to be really really important though it would be many years before I did their deeper maths and put those four pieces together into a circle instead of a square. When I began reading about astrology in my teens the number 4 was also eerily similar to the glyph for Jupiter, a secret sigil that held its fraction as the split between spirit and matter. Its coding drew from the power of Zeus and the final say in what would go on to form our modern English alphabet. All these curious intersections mingling at this threshold, called upon simultaneously through four degrees of four signs creates a very specific shaped window.

In astrology each of the degrees also commands a peculiar frequency, holding domain and influence that weaves all the signs together like a tapestry. Ideas of what they mean have varied right throughout the ages. Modern degree theory is this century’s work of Serbian astrologer Nikola Stojanovic (published in 2002) which applied specific meaning to each of the zodiac’s individual degrees around its wheel. Some degrees wield more influence than others in a sign due to the resonance of their frequencies. I have long been obsessed with anaretic degrees because my chart pulses with a fair few of them. Critical degrees are the ones that get underlined, differing between signs and elements. 4° is the first anchor point, the critical degree of all mutable signs and the one that resonates with Cancer, whose themes we are all still soaking in. Calling in our good instinct for our own lives and connecting us to all our threads of belonging, ancient and unwound.

Four is a structural code and sacred key that weaves its peculiar union of opposites into our manifest world everywhere you look. It is written as natural law in so many ways, telegraphed through a multitude of our folklore and stories as a basis for our understanding. We live in a world of four seasons, directions, elements. Our biggest books tell tales of four gospels, caliphs, noble truths. We move through the four quarters of an hour, phases of a moon cycle, ages of our lives.

Perhaps the four horsemen of this galloping year of apocalypse are actually planetary. Listen for their hooves within you this weekend. Urania telegraphing inspiration and an electric multiplicity of vision. Pluto pulsing from the bleeding edge of the future, shadow streaming humanity’s extinction thresholds as portals. Jupiter conjuring visible distinction and heart led learning as Neptune reinvents and reignites the Dream and all your most audacious visions for your world. All four are in favourable aspects to each other until the end of the July, the portal open to dimensions the likes of which have not been possible before now.

Even if we let ourselves get swung up in galactic magic and high hope well beyond any tiny notions of swinging the frame, these are not weekend escape hatch stars. Consider instead that multiple transits strung like lanterns over much longer periods of time are sustained frequency torrents. In rare combination that will feel like nothing we have ever experienced before. The new territory is unfurling as we shift in its thrall, and these striking orbits.

That lever begins to move now, and you with it. You may feel it shunting into motion this weekend. Keep a glittering eye peeled on next weekend when the Scorpio moon swings the cradle and the nodes shift into this new axis of influence. We are not nearly done yet, darklings and neither are we cooked.

In the thrall of the Cancer eclipse on this day in 2019, at my local lakeside

For years I chased Big Astrology, stymied by cloud and disappointed by rain as eclipses and transits worked their magic on me anyway mostly when I wasn’t looking. This particular morn that echoes in me still I set my alarm and rose before dawn as the moon peered through my window, calling. I dressed quickly and flew out into the twilight just creeping. I perched on a fallen log by the lake, my goodest girl by my side in the still of a perfect Winter morn. Together in the silence and awe of the early day we witnessed some of the most incredible natural magic there is.

All those years ago now my life and I sat between the moon and the sun and I was finally, beautifully, gratefully eclipsed. At the time a whole new direction had formed about me whose arms I could not feel yet, though I could faintly hear it beckoning from the place between two worlds that I was wandering lost. I was not the same as I had been but also not yet changed. Life looked bleak and unfamiliar and I was unsteady in the crossing. What was eluding me then was imagination, a tragedy for anyone who dreams. So caught up and weighed down by the darkness of my reality at the time, I could not conceive any bright possibility could lie beyond it.

It is all too easy as we skid and shudder through the black spots and dark thresholds of our lives to forget what lies beyond our own locked gates. Even if your life right now is playing hard to want or veering wildly, hope is the thing with feathers that can see beyond the limits of the near horizon. Your ticket to that hallowed place is imagination, tethered to every moon made new and all the different worlds waiting for your fated arrival. Faith in the path and trust in yourself sets your course towards its calling, echo location that will find you no matter how off course you may feel.

You remain your greatest axis of influence and at absolutely any time at all, at your leisure and your discretion, you can begin again as you wish. Similarly when big astrology washes over us all, you can wonder on its magic and do nothing more than bask in its flow.

Kerrie xo

This week’s torrent

Old fashioned influence, the words of others that live in my head because of how truly they struck me and how beautifully they were put together.

All war is first waged in the imagination, first conducted to limit our dreams and visions, to make us accept within ourselves its terms, to believe that our only choices are those that lay before us. If we let the terms of force describe the terrain of our battle, we will lose. But if we hold to the power of our visions, our heartbeats, our imagination, we can fight on our own turf, which is the landscape of consciousness. There, the enemy cannot help but transform.

~ Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing

Some of my favourite astrologers that sent my spirit soaring and inspired me this fabled week on Substack, deep divers in a sea of foam.

https://substack.com/@ricklevineastrologer

https://substack.com/@farstellar

https://substack.com/@angstoic