Weekend Entertainment Guide 5/10/24
Astrological chart of the 19th Amendment included
This edition of Weekend Entertainment Guide is all about Substack! There’s a lot of great stuff in and around the astrology scene. Even some concerning content lurking in the larger world can be meaningfully analyzed from an astrological perspective.
Hot on Substack
Joey Cannizzaro via
, Supplication & Splatter Horror: Taurus Decan IIICannizzaro takes on the third decan of Taurus, home to intimidating fixed star Algol. Through use of historical sources, Cannizzaro reveals that this decan is also ascribed to the Litai, mythological figures associated with supplication and mourning.
, 5.5.2024Giles provides an update on her experiments with AI Tarot readings noted in a previous Weekend Entertainment Guide. She wound up having experiences that matched the readings’ predictions of emotional betrayal.
, The Taurus New Moon and the Power of Receiving: Weekly Forecast for May 6-12I love new moons because they are a double-dose of the energy of the season, with both the sun and the moon in the same part of the sky, the sign of the season we’re in. This may be obvious to many of you listeners who are versed in astrology or astronomy, but I like to highlight it because I remember a time not too long ago when this was new to me. Before learning about astrology, I knew that moons were associated with a sign, like a full moon in Scorpio or a new moon in Taurus, but I wasn’t aware of the beauty that all new moons are in the sign of the month we’re in, and all full moons are in the sign of the opposite side of the wheel.
This quote caught my attention because I didn’t quite grasp the basic structure of New Moons and Full Moons until I was already some distance into exploring astrology. I learned in a scattershot, disorganized way for a while.
In this post, Dale also mentions working on a children’s book about the zodiac and the seasons. As I discuss in my book Impossible Dreams: Hopes, Fears, and Expectations for Saturn in Pisces, I think it may be time for astrologers to think more seriously about educating their children. I’m curious to see how Dale’s children’s book turns out.
, We Never Tend AloneWildermuth explores how different Pagan groups vary in their spiritual and political activities. I don’t personally identify as Pagan, but some astrologers might.
, Jupiter in GeminiAstrum Opus continues its charming series of love letters to the rising signs. This installment is focused on Jupiter’s upcoming transit through Gemini, which begins on May 25.
, Turn On, Tune In, Drop In: Psychedelic Conflict Resolution and The Origins of LifeBeiner announces the Psychedelics Super Conference, a free online event that will take place May 20-26.
, The Martian Drive to Do and BeWoodruff examines the variety of ways that the energy of Mars can play out. Placements like Mars in Libra and Mars in Pisces are especially complex. Concerning people who vent their aggression by sharing videos of themselves ranting in their cars on social media, Woodruff notes, “Automobiles are modern-day armor. Armor and Mars go together, so this is another expression of a sublimated Martian articulation captured by a mobile phone.”
, NYT's big article on vaccine side effects is a long time comingHealth journalist Joy Victory elaborates on last week’s article in The New York Times about potential side effects from the COVID-19 vaccines, sharing her personal experience with dermatographic urticaria (persistent and painful hives) that came on after she received a COVID-19 booster shot in November 2021.
I don’t know whether Joy V. speaks astrology. For those of us who do, Saturn, the planet that tests whether our actions align with reality, is now moving through the idealistic and compassionate sign of Pisces. During this transit, it may become increasingly clear that things aren’t guaranteed to work out just because we sincerely want them to. We need to be honest about what people are actually experiencing — even if it’s not what was supposed to happen.
Disturbing on Substack
Earlier this year, there was a big ruckus about the alleged presence of Nazis on the Substack blogging platform. NBC News reported that Substack ultimately removed five publications as a result.
I browse Substack pretty widely and have never come across content that I would describe as frankly Nazi. Wherever Substack’s five Nazis are, I don’t like them, but I don’t think they are the world’s greatest existential threat to Jews and Judaism or anyone else at this time.
I do regularly encounter Substack content that is not supportive of transgender rights. I don’t love seeing that stuff, but I acknowledge that uncomfortable discussion is generally an unavoidable part of hashing out a relatively new cultural issue.
What disturbs me more deeply is Substack content questioning a cultural equilibrium that was established prior to the birth of all my grandparents.
“Repeal 19,” as shown in the screenshot of Alexander Scipio’s comment on a recent Alex Berenson post, is short for “repeal the 19th Amendment,” which gave women the right to vote in the United States.
of Postcards From Barsoom, who has more than 12,000 subscribers, took things in an even creepier direction in a February 2024 Substack Notes thread:Progressives are starting to get worried. They should be.
One of the unspoken assumptions behind democracy is that the proportion of violence-capable males on either side of a policy question is similar. So long as that is the case, it is better to count heads on bodies rather than heads chopped off of bodies, because if both sides have the same proportion of violence-capable males, the larger side is likely to win if it comes to a fight.
This is why early democracies limited the franchise to men, or even to land-owning men. If you were no good in a fight, either personally or via your ability to rally others, your opinion was fundamentally irrelevant to a political question.
As long as the franchise was limited to men, this assumption could go unspoken. Indeed it's so basic we forgot about it. That's starting to change.
We're now entering a period in which political questions are divided along sexual lines. One side is composed of a preponderance of women, while the other has a majority of young, fighting-aged men. Under the current rules of democracy, everyone gets the same vote, so all that matters is which side is larger.
But.
What happens when side A is 55% of the population, but 80% women, and the 20% of men are the least virile of the population? While the other side is say 45% of the population, 80% of men, but contains effectively 100% of the fighting aged men who are actually capable of fighting? Side A will keep outvoting side B at the ballot box because it is larger. But eventually side B realizes that if they just … take over … there is absolutely nothing, from a purely realpolitikal standpoint, standing in their way.
I don’t think an effort to repeal the 19th Amendment has a realistic chance of success in 2024. (Among other things, determining who’s a man and who’s a woman is sometimes more complicated now than it was in 1920!) I do think that this type of chatter has grown prevalent enough that it should be looked at as a cultural indicator.
Astrologically, of course, the 19th Amendment has a birth chart. The New York Times reported that Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby signed the proclamation at his home in Washington, D.C., at 8 am on August 26, 1920.
Transiting Saturn in Pisces is currently opposing the 19th Amendment’s natal Venus-Saturn conjunction in Virgo, which might account for people expressing criticism of the 19th Amendment at this time.
Interestingly, the Moon of the 19th Amendment chart is conjunct Pluto of the Sibly chart for the birth of the United States. This area near the end of Capricorn has recently been emphasized by the first Pluto return of the United States.
Astrologically, the Moon is associated with women. The Repeal 19 rhetoric is not a scattershot approach to hatred that fantasizes about seizing the vote from racial minorities, Jews, gays, and a whole long list of other targets. It is specifically focused on women.
Of course, one of the most prominent events that happened in the United States during the recent Pluto return was the repeal of Roe v. Wade. However, abortion is not the only political or cultural issue that affects women.
My personal read is that the Repeal 19 stuff is not primarily about abortion one way or the other. Pew Research Center found in a 2022 United States poll that women were only slightly more likely to express support for legal abortion in all or most cases (63%) than men (58%).
Not all women become pregnant — and those who do don’t always draw the same conclusions from the experience. What is harder for a woman to evade, however, is the pressure to take care of others. Whether this comes from biology or socialization or a combination of factors, women are nurturers! Conservative women strive to protect whoever is under their wings from the particular set of threats that comes up on their radar, and liberal women do the same for a different set of threats, but the underlying motivation is clearly shared.
A lot of good comes from women’s capacity to nurture and care for the vulnerable. Like pretty much anything else, however, it can also be taken too far.
, who has over 1,000 subscribers, is based in Australia, so the astrological charts I’ve provided for historical events in the United States potentially aren’t as relevant to the people around him. However, he stated in a March 2024 post:In recent years, I have had more and more people, both men and women, quietly say to me “it was a mistake to give women the vote” and mean it. Nor, it turns out, am I the only one having this experience.
When people say that, they are not complaining about women’s success, increase in status, or equality. What is driving them is the attack on freedom of speech and thought, the replacement of meritocracy, the shift from teams to cliques, the loss of social solidarity, the trashing of heritage. The consequences of feminisation supercharged by careerist feminism doing so much to drive an imperial progressivist propriety that seeks to invade all spheres of life, from sport to comedy to entertainment, to all use of language to science, to ...
A lot of this comes from the female desire for emotional comfort — which a certain sort of male glomps onto — and self-deceptive aggression. It is no way to run an institution, a public space, science, technology or anything really, outside friendships and some aspects of parenting and family life.
Although no one is obligated to respond to every nutty view that anybody anywhere holds, there is sometimes value in hearing out a complaint that has reached critical mass and seeing whether there is anything to it.
Literary cancel culture is an easy example of the “attack on freedom of speech and thought” that Warby mentions, and it is disproportionately perpetrated by women against women. Last year’s harassment of Elizabeth Gilbert was especially egregious.
If I were the ghost of Susan B. Anthony, I would find everyone involved in literary cancel culture and poltergeist them so viciously that they would never sleep again.
Love your digest, Eva. You have that thang for curation and synthesis! And, thanks for mentioning the love letters.
Thank you for the mention Eva.
And great take on the 19th amendment chart.