Weekend Entertainment Guide 12/20/24

Luigi Mangione! Satanism! Wicked! The CIA!

There’s enough excitement going on this week that I had to use low-resolution charts to get it all to fit in one email! My take on the movie Wicked is at the bottom of the post as it contains spoilers for the movie.

Pelosi experiences Pluto opposition

Ken Klippenstein

reports that US Representative Nancy Pelosi was given a hip replacement on December 14 after falling during an official trip to Luxembourg. Pelosi, now 84 years old, is already past her Uranus return at 19° Taurus. Transiting Uranus is now closer to her natal Mars at 26° Taurus. Meanwhile, transiting Pluto at 0° Aquarius is currently opposing her natal Pluto at 0° Leo.

Last week’s Venus-Mars opposition

In an old Facebook post,

Gary P Caton

explained that most (but not all) Venus-Mars oppositions occur while Mars is retrograde. That is a new finding for me this Mars Retrograde. I found Caton’s post via a Kelly Surtees article about a 2018 opposition between Venus in Leo and Mars in Aquarius. This time around, the signs were flipped — Venus was in Aquarius and Mars was in Leo — but some of the same themes may be relevant.

The Venus-Mars opposition that took place at 5°58’ Aquarius/Leo on December 12, 2024, at 2:46 am PST was complicated by Pluto at 0° Aquarius being close to Venus. This was a lot of intense erotic energy for the collective to handle, and I think it wound up manifesting in the widespread sexual fascination with Luigi Mangione, the alleged shooter of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, following his capture on December 9.

Natally, Mangione has Venus at 2° Aries sextile Neptune at 2° Aquarius. The transiting Venus-Mars opposition engaged with these natal placements, making it easy for the collective to project its erotic longing onto him. Mangione also has natal Mars in Taurus conjunct his Sun. Having Mars in a Venus-ruled sign and Venus in a Mars-ruled sign likely gives him charismatic appeal to a wide variety of people. Although many of his admirers are female, he has also been the focus of explicit discussion threads on the DataLounge, a gossip site predominantly populated by gay men (examples for adult eyes only here and here). Everyone wants to imagine that Mangione is on their team, but it’s hard to know what’s actually true with his Neptune being a big part of the equation.

NORSAN ASTROLOGY

recently looked up several potentially relevant name asteroids in Mangione’s natal chart. Though there’s not a name asteroid in the Astro.com database for just Luigi, there are many options that involve the first name Luigi combined with various last names.

The one that seems to be most relevant both natally and by transit on the day Mangione was captured is 58691 Luigisannino. It’s named after Luigi Sannino, who has been recognized as the youngest person to discover an asteroid, although this record is now under threat. This emphasis on youth makes sense for Mangione’s case, as people are clearly responding to him in a way they wouldn’t if he were not relatively young and sexy.

Natally, Mangione has Luigisannino at 6° Leo. On the day he was captured, transiting Luigisannino was at 2° Aquarius. Both ends of this were therefore caught up in the configuration of transiting Venus, Mars, and Pluto all in the early degrees of Leo and Aquarius.

Hot on Substack

We have a lot of long, vulnerable personal essays all at once! This is clearly the doing of the Sun in Sagittarius square Neptune. We are still in Sagittarius Season just barely, so I will hold Capricorn-themed posts until next week to maintain a consistent theme.

Stephen Bradford Long

, The Weird Travails of a Post-Satanist

This isn’t an astrological post — it’s a reflection on Long’s departure from The Satanic Temple roughly a year ago. Whatever one’s opinion of Satanism might be, Long makes some excellent points that are much bigger than Satanism. He states:

Just as high-power corporate settings tend to attract psychopaths, outsider spaces tend to attract the most dysfunctional, dysregulated, disagreeable people. You won’t be surprised to learn that Satanism has a self-selection problem. The people who self-select to identify with the ultimate rebel and outsider tend towards narcissism and don’t work well together. More broadly, people who self-select to be identified as outsiders will, in my view, have a higher-than-average level of pathology and dysfunction. This might be due to having a greater level of trauma in life, but it might also be due to personality traits that lead one to embrace outsiderdom in the first place.

Though Long claims he has never been to Oregon, I have lived in western Oregon for my whole life, and he has nailed the pathology of our culture with absolute perfection. In our case, it's not tied to any specific religion or lack thereof — the Oregon mentality comes in Christian flavors as well as every other flavor imaginable. Many people move to Oregon from a more conservative place with the origin story that, once upon a time, at some critical formative moment, someone told them no when they really needed to hear yes. We then spend the rest of everyone's life trying to atone for this primal wound. (This rant continues in my book Impossible Dreams: Hopes, Fears, and Expectations for Saturn in Pisces.)

I have had ancestors in Oregon since at least 1903, so I don't have the moved-here-from-wherever-and-need-to-rebel mentality myself; instead, my version of the Oregon problem involves being raised amid the resentful stink of, "Utopia was supposed to be here by now!" I love our idealism, but it is absolutely exhausting sometimes.

To bring the discussion back to astrology, I would look for difficult Uranus aspects or placements in the natal chart of any person or institution experiencing a version of this phenomenon. For example, the state of Oregon was established on February 14, 1859, with the Sun and North Node both in Uranus-ruled Aquarius square Uranus in Taurus.

The Cranky Astrologer

, The Archer

The Cranky Astrologer reflects on the shadow side of Sagittarius embodied in her difficult father — and also notes this optimistic sign’s “strength in mutability.”

Frederick Woodruff

, My Mom’s Orange Bikini

Woodruff reminisces about his complicated and charming Sagittarius mother.

Steph

, The ache of Dionysos

Steph describes using astrology and tarot to navigate a romantic situation.

Caleb J McCoy

, Into the Mist

McCoy comments on the role of story under the transiting Sun-Neptune square.

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Free online events

‘Tis the season for new year forecasts and solstice events!

Jane de Forest will lead a gathering for the Winter Solstice on December 21 from 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Pacific. Register here.

My take on Wicked (includes spoilers)

I went into the movie Wicked basically knowing only that it had something to do with The Wizard of Oz. As noted in Weekend Entertainment Guide 12/6/24, The Wizard of Oz is now having its Uranus return, which makes sense for it being revisited via a spinoff movie.

However, Wicked has its own history, first as a 1995 novel by Gregory Maguire and then as a musical that premiered in 2003. Roughly speaking, the 1995 novel is now having its Saturn return, and the 2003 musical, like any current 21-year-old born the year I graduated from high school, is now having its waxing Uranus square. The 2003 musical therefore came out at the waning Uranus square of the original 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz.

The Wicked movie now in theaters is actually Wicked: Part I — Part II is expected to come out in late 2025. Part I is the first act of the musical.

Wicked: Part I presents a backstory of Glinda the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch of the West where they were college roommates. Glinda, then known as Galinda, is played by Ariana Grande. Grande’s Sun in Cancer square Moon and Jupiter in Libra makes her a great choice to play a goody-two-shoes character somehow delivering the most passive-aggressive sugary smarm with a straight face.

Her polar opposite is Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West, played by Cynthia Erivo. Erivo’s birth time is unknown, but she potentially has the Moon in Taurus opposite Pluto in Scorpio. Moon-Pluto hard aspects can be indicative of complicated relationships with women, and the character of Elphaba gets that from many directions.

In the song “What Is This Feeling?” early on, when the two roommates are getting acquainted, dramatic tension accumulates as they try to name what they feel for each other. I wondered if they would admit to erotic desire, because there was a hint of the exchange heading in that direction — and this isn’t just me having a screw loose, because someone I saw the movie with read the scene that way too.

However, Elphaba and Galinda ultimately settle on “unadulterated loathing” as the proper term for their shared feeling. Reading the actresses’ charts to serve as proxies for their characters, inhibition makes more sense than openly expressed eros for the outcome. Erivo’s Venus in Sagittarius forms a T-square with Grande’s Mars-Saturn opposition. Though the Venus-Mars square in synastry might fire up passion, the Venus-Saturn square in synastry ruins it somehow.

As the movie goes on, Elphaba and Galinda become friends who display loyalty and concern for one another. Eventually, though, they reach a point where it’s clear they are simply on different paths in life.

Gemini, the sign of polar opposites as well as the sign of sibling (or sibling-like) relationships, is prominent in the synastry between Grande and Erivo. Grande has the North Node in Sagittarius and South Node in Gemini. Close to Grande’s nodal axis, Erivo has Saturn in Sagittarius opposite Chiron in Gemini. Astrologically, these two are more likely sisters with some serious issues than sexy sweethearts.

The theme of strained siblinghood also appears in a Wicked plot element where the character of Elphaba is responsible for looking after her actual sister who has a physical disability.

It makes a lot of sense that this movie about opposites attracting and having a sibling-like relationship was released during a Jupiter in Gemini transit. As discussed in Weekend Entertainment Guide 6/28/24, Hermann Hesse’s 1930 novel Narcissus and Goldmund also had a theme of close friendship between opposites, and Jupiter was in Gemini for part of that year.

Wikipedia said the movie’s premiere was in Sydney, Australia, on November 3, 2024, and a Reddit thread where fans in Sydney described their experiences gave 5:45 p.m. as the time. The Wicked premiere chart therefore has Chiron conjunct the Ascendant; this tracks with the movie’s theme of Elphaba being treated poorly on account of her physical appearance, which includes naturally green skin.

Wicked also came out under an opposition between Venus in Sagittarius and Jupiter in Gemini. This emphasizes the configuration of Grande’s North Node and Erivo’s Saturn in Sagittarius opposite Grande’s South Node and Erivo’s Chiron in Gemini.

Confidential to the taxpayers of the United States of America

In Wicked, Elphaba has more innate talent for magic than Galinda or any of their other classmates. She therefore gets invited to meet The Wizard of Oz. He’s eager to have her work for him, and she’s initially interested. However, when she discovers that the work would involve helping him spy on and oppress the residents of Oz, she rebels.

Could something like this happen in real life? Fitting for transiting Pluto opposing my natal Mercury at 0° Leo, I have recently been learning about the involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in both journalism and literature.

VICE, reviewing Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers by Joel Whitney, stated:

While the CIA’s involvement in anti-Communist propaganda has been long known, the extent of its influence—particularly in the early careers of the left’s most beloved writers—is shocking. Whitney, the co-founder and editor at large of the literary magazine Guernica, spent four years digging through archives, yielding an exhaustive list—James Baldwin, Gabriel García Márquez, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway all served varying levels of utility to Uncle Sam.

Whitney elaborated in an interview with BOMB Magazine:

In writing the book, I wanted to see if the cultural propaganda and sponsorship were ever done in service of those ugly things. A lot of times, I would find new magazines cropping up right after blowback about some terrible event the covert ops side had perpetrated. In terms of the folks I’m critical of, their legacies hinge on claims of good intention and fear. I looked at the structure of the CIA and saw that the funding of culture — whether through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, like the CIA’s magazines, or the Free Europe Committee, which funded radio stations and book publishing wings, or any number of other fronts — almost always came from the covert ops side of the agency.

David Price, writing for Orinoco Tribune, said of the CIA’s activities in the 1950s and 1960s:

Among the known presses that published CIA subsidized books were Scribner’s Sons, Ballantine Books, and G.P. Putnam’s Sons. The CIA was not the only US agency negotiating such propagandistic publishing agreements. Fitzhugh Green discovered that United States Information Agency (USIA) staff members, Louis Fanget, Donald McNeill and William W. Warner “would think of a book that could explain what the Soviets had done to hurt the freedom of its people; then they would offer Frederick Praeger or other publishers an advance to commission an author and publish his work for foreign markers, even if the topic would not normally sell abroad.” Through these and other maneuvers the US government secretly corrupted scholarship and warped academic freedom in ways that left the American public uninformed.

Price ended this history lesson on an ominous cliffhanger:

While the CIA claimed that it terminated its covert book subsidy program for English language books in the 1970s, Chaneles points out that in 1978, the language announcing the end of this program did not terminate “contracts already in place that had to be honored,” which left open the possibility of ongoing operations, and of course did not necessarily end the production of non-English language publications.

Could the CIA take an interest in a promising young writer much like The Wizard of Oz took an interest in Elphaba? This probably happens more than we know.

In general, I would prefer the journalism and literature I consume to be free of CIA involvement. I don’t love the idea that US tax dollars are funding government attempts to influence the media. However, I acknowledge that we don’t live in a perfect world. I’ve previously written several posts critical of literary cancel culture, the vicious and destructive phenomenon that peaked in people who had never read The Snow Forest, Elizabeth Gilbert’s then-forthcoming novel set in 1930s Russia, bullying Gilbert into withdrawing the book from publication on the grounds that it was somehow insensitive to the current Russo-Ukrainian War. I think I just found that menace’s natural predator!

As Wicked might put it, the CIA and literary cancel culture deserve each other. I personally don’t think that literary cancel culture is CIA; I think it’s just regular people high on their own self-righteousness. Literary cancel culture is certainly louder and more visible than the CIA, though — and the CIA could have a valid interest in stopping literary cancel culture from scaring away the promising young writers it would otherwise try to recruit! If the CIA actually succeeded in decisively putting an end to literary cancel culture, I think the public response, including my own, would be along the enthusiastic lines of “No One Mourns The Wicked.”