Weekend Entertainment Guide 7/18/25

Tartaria and the Saturn-Neptune conjunction; Mercury Retrograde links

The Tartarian Empire is the gift that keeps on giving in this non-election-year summer. This wacky conspiracy theory happens to be a great illustration for many of the new outer planet energies coming into play in 2025.

Tartaria and the Saturn-Neptune conjunction

In the kookier corners of the internet, it’s currently claimed that an advanced civilization called the Tartarian Empire once had access to free energy but was then wiped out by a mud flood. Various ornate old buildings, including the temporary buildings used for World’s Fairs in the late 1800s and early 1900s, were allegedly built by the Tartarians, not by our own ancestors.

Last week, I described components of this phenomenon that seem related to the current Uranus in Gemini transit, including the possibility that the photos used to support their wild claims are AI-generated. Of course, Tartaria advocate Mind Unveiled just accuses everyone else of using fake photos.

I don’t believe the mud flood is real. However, I do believe that public interest in the Tartaria phenomenon has grown to the point that it needs to be addressed.

On YouTube, Mind Unveiled has 339,000 subscribers, and JonLevi has 340,000 subscribers. For comparison, my Substack newsletter has 518 subscribers. Freddie deBoer, a non-astrological Substack writer who offers paid subscribers to his Substack the opportunity to have their work linked in his posts in order to reach his large-for-Substack audience, has 65,900 subscribers.

A prominent mainstream Substack writer has about one-fifth the audience of these Tartaria channels on YouTube. This supports the claim I made last week that the Tartaria phenomenon is an example of the shift to a postliterate culture.

I have never liked the handwringing over whether this or that genre of online misinformation comes from the Russians. I don’t know where anyone is getting the idea that Americans are so bereft of crazy left to their own devices that they need to import it. Even so, if an individual in Russia produces online content that an individual in the United States can then consume, that means the internet is working the way that it is supposed to work — the point is for people in different countries to have the ability to interact with each other.

The fact is that each and every one of these online videos can be turned off by the viewer if the viewer gets tired of watching it. It therefore doesn’t matter to me whether a problematic video was produced by the Russians or the guy next door. I think the bigger issue is with the viewers who willingly choose to keep consuming sketchy content. Looking at the astrological zeitgeist can potentially identify the psychological needs that viewers meet by engaging with this content.

A substantial piece of the current celestial weather is the approaching conjunction between Saturn and Neptune, which will be exact at 0° Aries in February 2026. Saturn is the planet of structure, while Neptune dissolves structure. 0° Aries is the point of new beginnings.

Color authority Pantone selected Mocha Mousse as the Color of the Year for 2025. In Weekend Entertainment Guide 12/6/24, I noted that a brown color would typically represent the energy of Earth signs, yet Earth is the least represented element among the outer planets in 2025. However, I went on to say:

In a roundabout way, some of this could potentially refer to the North Node, Saturn, and Neptune all emphasizing the transition between Pisces and Aries throughout 2025. Even though Aries isn’t an Earth sign, it’s the beginning of a new cycle, so it ultimately has to build from the ground up!

Image credit: Pantone Color of the Year 2025 Media Kit

That Mocha Mousse kind of looks like a mud flood to me. The cultural trends that led Pantone to pick Mocha Mousse as the Color of the Year could therefore overlap with the cultural trends that are leading people to become interested in tales of the Tartarian mud flood.

The mud flood was a destruction of what had come before. However, it also provided a foundation for a new beginning. It is a perfect metaphor for the currently imminent Saturn-Neptune conjunction.

As one might expect for a postliterate phenomenon, Tartaria supporters do not really have a firm date as to when the mud flood happened. Michael Luciano’s short book 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 has a chapter called “The Mud Flood,” but it does not provide a specific date. The chapter mentions the World’s Fairs in the late 1800s and early 1900s and suggests that the mud flood then destroyed the buildings used for those events:

It makes more sense that they inherited the buildings. Cleaned them up. Slapped plaster on the walls and called it a fair. And when the world started asking too many questions, they destroyed the evidence.

The late 1800s and early 1900s were not that long ago for anyone who keeps up on their family history. If you knew your grandparents, and they knew their grandparents, you would have heard about it if something on the scale of the mud flood had happened in the late 1800s or early 1900s. My own ancestors left family history documents covering that period of time, and they did not mention that sort of event.

However, a 2022 survey by Ancestry found that 53 percent of Americans couldn’t name all four of their grandparents. Whatever led to this rootless state, the Tartaria phenomenon absolutely takes advantage of it.

I understand that there can be tragic circumstances where family estrangement is the least bad option. I understand that, even in family dynamics that are bearable enough to maintain, the past can suffocate the future. When possible, though, at least knowing the basics of one’s lineage should have some preventive effect against getting caught up in craziness.

Orphan trains bringing orphans from Eastern cities to farms in the Midwest were a real thing that happened in the United States between 1854 and 1929, as described on Wikipedia. The peak of the orphan train activity, 1855 to 1875, overlapped substantially with Neptune’s last transit through Aries, which ran from 1861 to 1875.

Some Tartaria proponents claim that these orphans actually had parents who were locked up in asylums for knowing the truth about the mud flood. I don’t think this is the truth of what happened in the past, but I think it definitely speaks to present anxieties about separation between generations. Some parents are probably worried about getting left behind as their children pursue different approaches toward subjects like gender, sexuality, and religion.

With the slow-moving outer planets now shifting into active Fire and Air signs, keeping the past comfortable at any cost is probably not going to be a high priority. The more that we can accept necessary change in a sane way, the less likely we are to experience a harsh reset that leaves everyone isolated and unmoored.

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Free online event

Maurice Fernandez will present a webinar through Kepler College regarding Mercury at 10 a.m. Pacific on Saturday, July 19. Register here.

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