Weekend Entertainment Guide 7/11/25
Uranus in Gemini stirs speculation about World War III and Tartaria
Now that Uranus has moved into Gemini effective July 7, all of the outer planet entrances into new signs expected for 2025 have happened, at least for the first time. Things are changing, but not necessarily in the wildly dramatic ways that online fearmongers have predicted — in my view, the shifts worth watching are more subtle.
Will Uranus in Gemini bring World War III?
I will be 39 years old next month, and people have been speculating about World War III for my entire life. When I was growing up, I was often dragged on family outings to shop at thrift stores, and what I found on offer there in the 1990s included a lot of books from the 1960s. From that reading, I have the impression that people started anticipating World War III pretty much as soon as World War II ended.
There is definitely violence and tension in the world right now — as there has been at many points along the way since World War II ended. There is also something about the human mind that likes to put things in threes: Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the three-act play, and so on.
Perhaps there is something in us that is looking for a World War III in hopes it will bring us a sense of narrative closure.
In 2013, I attended a panel discussion on memoir at Wordstock, a literary festival in Portland, Oregon. Panelist Ariel Gore talked about how there’s this myth that we always get closure when someone dies or when a relationship ends, but it doesn’t actually work that way — sometimes we don’t get closure, and we’re left with an ambiguous ending. That has stuck with me ever since.
As Uranus, the planet of disruption, enters Gemini, the sign of narrative, we might take the opportunity to question the stories we tell ourselves. We may need to get better at discerning the difference between actual present events and the mental models that we would find it convenient for our experiences to fit into.
What does the Chicago World’s Fair have to do with Tartaria?
For the whole lifetime of most people now living, the planets Neptune and Pluto have been running at a sextile with Neptune two signs ahead of Pluto. We’re all used to seeing Neptune sextile Pluto in our birth charts and the birth charts of everyone we know.
However, Neptune and Pluto actually conjoin once every 492 years. Adrian Ross Duncan explained in Astrology: Transformation & Empowerment, “The last conjunction took place around eight degrees in Gemini in 1892, at about the time of revolutions in communication — technologically via motorization, telegraph, and film — and on an inner level through dreams and psychology.” Duncan went on to say that the Neptune-Pluto conjunctions have taken place in Gemini for several millennia.
In Pushing Through Time: Synodic Cycles and Their Developing Phases, Georgia Stathis gave the coordinates of the first hit of the most recent Neptune-Pluto conjunction as 8°37’ Gemini on August 2, 1891. The current Uranus in Gemini transit will first hit that degree in July 2027, potentially bringing whatever was going on at the time of the Neptune-Pluto conjunction back into awareness.
One big event around the time of the Neptune-Pluto conjunction was the World’s Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair, which ran from May 5 to October 31, 1893. According to the official explanation on Wikipedia, the event featured buildings that were intended to be temporary:
Façades were made not of stone, but of a mixture of plaster, cement, and jute fiber called staff, which was painted white, giving the buildings their "gleam". Architecture critics derided the structures as "decorated sheds."
The temporary buildings looked striking while serving their intended purpose at the event. A few were kept around after the fair, in Chicago or relocated elsewhere. Wikipedia describes what happened to the rest as follows:
Since many of the other buildings at the fair were intended to be temporary, they were removed after the fair. The White City so impressed visitors (at least before air pollution began to darken the façades) that plans were considered to refinish the exteriors in marble or some other material. These plans were abandoned in July 1894, when much of the fair grounds was destroyed in a fire.
Interest in the buildings of the Chicago World’s Fair has recently resurfaced. In the kookier corners of the internet, it’s now claimed that these buildings were not intended to be temporary. Instead, they belonged to an advanced civilization that was intentionally destroyed — the Tartarian Empire.
It is hard to find a solid canonical version of the story of the Tartarian Empire. The story is mainly told in image-heavy videos. The plot moves around depending on who is telling the tale. At least one variant claims that old buildings didn’t have bathrooms because the Tartarians didn’t have bowel movements, but not all Tartaria enthusiasts go there.
The Tartaria phenomenon is a prime example of the “postliterate culture” described by Quillette founder Claire Lehmann, “where information is consumed via aural and visual formats as opposed to the written word.” Lehmann elaborated:
When an audio-visual narrative culture—which lacks the precision and permanence of written documentation—combines with amateur methods, our collective ability to discern the truth simply deteriorates.
The Lost Civilization of TARTARIA: The Global Reset to Rewrite History & Control the Future: Exploring Mudfloods, Free Energy, Giants, The World Fairs, & The Orphan Trains Repopulation Plan by Michael Luciano at least attempts to corral the basic claims about Tartaria in written form. I still do not personally believe that those claims are founded in reality, but the e-book is relatively inexpensive, and reading it is much more efficient than sitting through hours of rambling videos.
Sorting out what’s true about Tartaria is also challenging because there are occasional bits of actual historical occurrences mixed in with the more speculative content. When a JonLevi video referenced infant incubators at World’s Fairs, implying they were evidence of his assertion that the fairs were used as indoctrination camps, I thought that sounded like a bunch of crap. Furthermore, I suspected the supporting photo was generated by ChatGPT.
I fed ChatGPT the following prompt to see if I could replicate the photo in the video:
Make a photo that looks like it was taken at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. The photo should be black and white with a sepia tone. It should show people milling around. In the center of the photo, there should be a squat rectangular building. There should be a prominent sign at the top of the building saying in capital letters, "INCUBATOR BABIES." Make the whole photo a little bit grainy because it's old.
ChatGPT indeed generated a photo for me, but then I looked into the story more, and I actually found a Smithsonian account of an incubator display at a second Chicago World’s Fair that took place from 1933 to 1934. Though the Smithsonian account argues that operator Martin Couney was really a medical technician rather than a medical doctor, it otherwise corroborates Couney's 1950 New York Times obituary, which describes Couney’s displays of incubators for premature babies at various expositions and fairs beginning in 1896. The video’s claim was therefore at least partly true.
At least I got a photo of myself at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair out of that line of inquiry. I gave ChatGPT the following prompt (and then ChatGPT asked me to supplement it with a photo of myself before supplying the output):
Make a photo that looks like it was taken at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. The photo should be black and white with a sepia tone. Make the whole photo a little bit grainy because it's old. It should show people milling around in a concourse with booths. In the center of the photo, have Substack blogger Eva Sylwester standing at a newsstand with newspapers. The sign at the top of the newsstand should say "READ MY BLOG HERE."
My post Outtakes from Impossible Dreams shows some of my efforts to make AI art when I was assembling Impossible Dreams: Hopes, Fears, and Expectations for Saturn in Pisces in early 2023. That was only a little over two years ago, and what I am able to make now is far more impressive — the technology has rapidly improved! I am not an expert with ChatGPT, so someone who really knows what they are doing could probably do even better.
The rise of photography and film was a major achievement of the last Neptune-Pluto conjunction. As Uranus, sometimes referred to as a thief or trickster, now approaches the degree of that Neptune-Pluto conjunction, that achievement faces a crisis of trust. A photograph used to be sufficient to serve as proof of a contested claim. With AI images becoming increasingly sophisticated, that may no longer be the case.
Hot on Substack
The Moon goes void of course after it makes its last aspect while traveling through a given sign. If a slow-moving outer planet is camped out at 29° of a given sign, void-of-course periods tend to be short, as the Moon will only become void of course after it aspects that. However, now that all the outer planets are in very early degrees of the new signs they’ve entered, we’ve had exceptionally long void-of-course Moons lately, some lasting more than 24 hours. Although the void-of-course Moon days can feel slow and unproductive, I think this enforced downtime helps us process the influx of fresh energy. My picks for Hot on Substack this week therefore focus on the void-of-course Moon.
, Aspecting the Cosmos: Lunar Void-of-Course: "Nothing will come of this."Cantrell describes activities to pursue and activities to avoid while the Moon is void of course.
, Monday 7/7/2025: Uranus in Gemini; Full Moon in Capricorn; Saturn Retrograde; US Uranus ReturnElisabeth Grace shares personal anecdotes of how void-of-course Moons played out when she worked at CNBC in the past.
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