Is Leave the World Behind Predictive Programming?

Analyzing the astrological chart of Leave the World Behind

Does the movie Leave the World Behind foreshadow a cyberattack that will paralyze the United States in the next year? I’m old enough that I remember when people were capable of watching a dramatic disaster movie without thinking it was real. With the Moon meeting Neptune in Pisces in the astrological chart of the movie’s premiere, however, I can see how the boundaries between fantasy and reality may seem especially thin.

The movie Leave the World Behind, currently available on Netflix, was produced by Barack and Michelle Obama. Based on a novel by Rumaan Alam, it tells the story of two families awkwardly marooned together at a vacation home while a cyberattack and other disastrous events break down society around them.

Although most people found out about Leave the World Behind when it arrived on Netflix in December 2023, the movie actually premiered at the American Film Institute’s AFI Fest on October 25, 2023. I have saved the AFI Fest schedule documenting this to The Wayback Machine.

With Uranus and Pluto both angular, the movie was equipped to make a big splash. The tight Moon-Neptune conjunction in the collective-oriented 11th house was good for picking up on a variety of anxieties floating around in society and tying them all together.

Unfortunately, the movie wound up fueling those sorts of anxieties as well. People for whom the Obamas could already do no right were rendered orgasmic — the movie just had to be “predictive programming,” a confession in advance of dastardly deeds that a cabal of evil elites plans to unleash upon humanity in the near future!

The movie also premiered during eclipse season, between the Solar Eclipse in Libra on October 14 and the Lunar Eclipse in Taurus on October 28. Actor Matthew Perry, known for his role in the TV show Friends, then died on October 28. As astrologer Matthew Currie points out, the October 28 Lunar Eclipse was right on Perry’s natal Moon-Saturn opposition.

Meanwhile, a running theme in Leave the World Behind involved one of the characters, a 13-year-old girl named Rose, being obsessed with watching the final episode of Friends. Some variants of the rumors about the movie therefore tried to tie in Perry’s death as somehow related to the movie. I’m not sure how that would even be physically possible, but the movie’s Scorpio stellium on Perry’s Scorpio Moon may at least serve to keep interest in his work alive for a new generation.

For all the hype, I was disappointed when I finally watched the movie. It started off compelling, but it then tied in so many things in such a flaky way that, at a climactic moment that was probably supposed to be scary, I laughed out loud.

I do wonder what the heck the Obamas were thinking in releasing this movie. Perhaps they are human beings who are sick of being relentlessly mocked and accused of all kinds of absurd things by their detractors, and they were just trying to throw some of the mocking back at their detractors.

The problem is that the movie’s Scorpio stellium is caught up in Barack Obama’s natal square between the Sun and Mercury in Leo and Neptune in Scorpio. He may not have been able to see clearly how the movie would make him come off.

On the not-paranoid side of things, there’s some precedent for former presidents getting into the arts. George W. Bush took up oil painting. After serving in one of the world’s most stressful jobs, perhaps it makes sense to unwind with a creative outlet.

The movie’s chart has a Scorpio stellium in the nitpicky 6th house, though, encouraging viewers to read into every little detail. The Scorpio stellium opposes Jupiter in the secretive 12th house, dangling the promise that digging just a bit deeper will lead to some absolutely mindblowing epiphany.

Near the end of the movie, when Rose enters the bunker, the following potential date and time appears on a screen: “09-17 T02:04:10+00:05”

I don’t recall that a year was ever given in the movie, but let’s go with 2024, as that seems to be where viewers’ anxieties are focused.

I typed the time into Solar Fire as it appeared in the movie, which gives a chart for 2:04:10 am. The corresponding scene in the movie had daylight, though, which would be unlikely for 2:04 am.

In any case, it’s an interesting chart. Pluto is right on the descendant, just after re-entering Capricorn for its last couple of months there this go-round. The Pisces Moon conjoins Saturn and opposes Mercury. The Virgo Sun forms a kite with Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus, giving the events of that day the potential to impact the collective.

Whatever the World Economic Forum may be trying to do, they don’t succeed in allaying fears about cyberattacks when they put out a video speculating about a future cyberattack being more destructive than COVID-19. Even if Leave the World Behind is only a movie, it’s true that we are increasingly reliant on the internet for basic activities, and there is vulnerability inherent in that.

Well, if you’re worried about a cyberattack, you can now buy my book Impossible Dreams: Hopes, Fears, and Expectations for Saturn in Pisces in paperback rather than e-book format just to be safe.

What do deer symbolize in Leave the World Behind?

I was curious going into Leave the World Behind about the reports of deer being prominent in the movie because I’d recently had an incident involving deer in my personal life. I wondered if there was a common symbolic thread.

When I finally watched the movie, the deer didn’t feel that symbolic. In the movie, somehow disruptions related to the cyberattack had interfered with animal migration patterns, causing deer to ominously hover around humans in increasing numbers. Flamingos had their migration patterns interfered with in the same way, which resulted in them descending upon the vacation home’s swimming pool.

Perhaps the recent deer incident in my personal life is more symbolic. My mother has a friend who is in her late 80s, and my mother often helps this friend with errands and other tasks. One night in November, the friend called my mother and reported that there was a dead deer in her yard.

My mother then set to work on her friend’s behalf calling businesses that handle wildlife removal. However, her friend balked at their quoted fees. My mother grew increasingly concerned about the deer rotting in her friend’s yard, to the point that I got pulled into the situation.

I thought the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife might be able to help. Although free removal of dead wildlife from one’s yard is hard to come by, I got the idea from browsing ODFW’s website that they’d do it if the dead animal was part of a cluster of dead animals that they needed to investigate. The friend had apparently had a dead raccoon in her yard over the summer, so my mother and I called ODFW to report a cluster.

Unfortunately, the ODFW representative on the phone told us that a deer and a raccoon do not count as a cluster — it would have to be two deer or two raccoons. My mother and I were back to the drawing board, worrying that it would ultimately be us having to remove the by-then-liquefied deer ourselves.

Finally, nearly two weeks after the deer ruckus began, my mother’s friend called, triumphant — the deer was gone!

My mother then learned that her friend had never actually seen the dead deer herself. The friend’s neighbor had reported the dead deer to the friend, but the friend never went out in her own yard and looked to confirm that the neighbor’s report was true. My mother and I had just assumed that the friend had gone out in her yard and looked before she got us involved, but that was apparently the wrong thing to assume.

We may never know what exactly went on between the friend and her neighbor or whether there was even a dead deer in the first place. I once saw a deer in my own yard resting so quietly that I wondered if it was dead, but I suppose I cannot disprove the friend’s claim that God removed a dead deer from her yard. I do know now that I need to look and see for myself before I call the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife or anyone else to report a dead animal in the future.

There are real problems in the world, but the lesson from this for the final degrees of Neptune in Pisces is that we must be careful to avoid adding to our problems ourselves.

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