Weekend Entertainment Guide 8/2/24 + New Moon 8/4/24
Cancel culture, the Saturn-Neptune square, and the Neptune-Pluto cycle
I have been saying for a while that I expect the winner of the 2024 United States presidential election to be someone new rather than Donald Trump or Joe Biden. Beyond the transits to any particular candidate’s birth chart, Pluto is in the process of changing signs, as it was when Barack Obama got elected in 2008, and I don’t think the energy is there to force new wine into old wineskins.
We probably won’t just wind up with a new president, though. Pluto, and then Neptune, changing signs could shift many things — including, as I will go on to describe, attitudes toward free speech.
New Moon of August 4, 2024
For Washington, D.C., the New Moon chart has a lot of activity in the 8th and 12th houses, which are both associated with secrets. Meanwhile, Venus and Mercury are close together in the 1st house, which represents the visible presentation of things. Mercury is stationary at the time of the New Moon and about to begin a retrograde at 9:56 pm PDT on August 4 (12:56 am EDT on August 5). Venus wants to make everything look nice, and Mercury is the expert rationalizer. We may articulately try to talk ourselves into believing that some situation is on the up and up, but there could be more going on behind the scenes. Mars and Jupiter are approaching a conjunction in the authority-related 10th house, reflecting that the issue of electing leaders for the nation this fall is a top concern attracting a lot of energy.
August Daily Horoscopes
My August Daily Horoscopes are now running on Tarot.com. I am part of a rotation with other writers and write four months’ worth of horoscopes each year. To receive Tarot.com’s horoscopes in your email for free every day, sign up for a free account on their website.
As my horoscopes run, I weigh them against whatever actually happened that day to see if I was right. I think I already got a hit for yesterday, August 1, in talking about the quincunx between the Moon in Cancer and Pluto in Aquarius. My epic rant about literary cancel culture played out that theme.
An opposition shows you your obvious enemy. For collective-oriented Aquarius, the opposition, the obvious enemy, is individualistic Leo. People who believe in a very Aquarian way that canceling others’ books is necessary for the common good have already heard all the Leonine counterarguments supporting free creative expression, and they still believe that they are correct regardless.
A quincunx is the attack you didn’t see coming. The Aquarian authority of the collective doesn’t know what to do with the competing Cancerian authority of the family. I can imagine a cancel culture type reading what I wrote and thinking, “Wait, what? That could be me having that sort of interaction with one of my nieces or nephews in a few decades!”
I think I got them good!
Hot on Substack
Stevenson via , Leo II - A Crown of LaurelsStevenson provides case studies of Andy Warhol and Whitney Houston, both born with the Sun in the second decan of Leo.
Posts about the 2024 election
, The Mars-Jupiter Conjunction of August 2024 and the Chart of Donald TrumpRichmond comments on Trump’s transits for mid-August: “Mars and Jupiter will be conjunct his natal Uranus, while Saturn will be precisely square his natal Uranus. In other words, Trump’s natal Uranus is under terrific tension during the mid-August period. When an individual’s Uranus is activated by transiting hard angle, events outside of the ordinary take place.”
, the week of july 28, 2024Kadlec makes a case for abstaining from astrological predictions about the election.
Non-astrological posts
, The Ups and DownsByock, a psychotherapist, cites the Chinese parable of the farmer and his son with regard to the increasingly wild events of the 2024 election season.
by Scott Alexander, Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of VengeanceThis post breaks down all the reasons why cancel culture is terrible. It notes that most cancellations are friendly fire — liberals canceling other liberals who aren’t quite pure enough, or conservatives canceling conservatives who aren’t quite pure enough. That tracks with my own experiences. I am not and have never been a Republican, and I was not worried about being canceled by Republicans in the slightest when fear of literary cancel culture drove me away from fiction writing.
, Five reasons why Scott Alexander should love our definition of Cancel CultureLukianoff states:
But when we focus on the commonalities of these “mass censorship events” (as I've awkwardly called them) or of previous historical moral panics and witch hunts — both literal and figurative — we miss what makes Cancel Culture unique and why it exploded onto the scene not in 2005 but around 2014. We also miss the technological shift that made this possible: the mass adoption of social media and the moment when the first generation of junior high schoolers who grew up on it (and who learned how to use it to attack enemies) hit college campuses in large numbers around 2014.
This tracks with my own experiences. Lukianoff’s explanation of the practical side of the problem makes sense. As an astrologer, I connect it to the square between Saturn in Sagittarius and Neptune in Pisces that was going on around that time. Neptune is the planet of feelings, and Pisces is the sign of feelings, so the combination manifested in an ocean of emotion. It was also in a difficult relationship with Saturn, the planet of regulation, in Sagittarius, a sign associated with the free expression of opinions.
Per a Solar Fire report, the exact hits of the Saturn-Neptune square were as follows:
November 26, 2015, 7°02’ Sagittarius/Pisces
June 17, 2016, 12°02’ Sagittarius/Pisces
September 10, 2016, 10°24’ Sagittarius/Pisces
I personally felt the issue brewing a bit earlier, when my Saturn return took place at 3° Sagittarius. The exact hits of that were as follows: January 25, 2015; May 2, 2015; and October 22, 2015. Even though Neptune was past 3° Pisces by then, I would say my Saturn return was still complicated by the transiting Saturn-Neptune square. (There were five exact hits of transiting Neptune in Pisces square my natal Saturn in Sagittarius between May 2012 and December 2013; I wonder if that had anything to do with the nut allergy diagnosis I received during that time as described in my previous post, because an allergy is on some level an issue about sensitivity and boundaries.)
In general, an individual is more likely to experience dramatic effects from a collective event when the astrological significators of that event strongly interact with the individual’s birth chart. I therefore had an outsize reaction to the emergence of cancel culture because its astrological significators were engaging with my own Saturn return, which was in my communication-oriented 3rd house to boot. Over the past week and a half, transiting Mercury in Virgo and Mars in Gemini have both been in hard aspect to my natal Saturn in Sagittarius, so that may be part of why I am suddenly all stirred up about this right now.
Back to the collective, the issues of the 2015-2016 Saturn-Neptune square are likely to be revisited at the next major point in the Saturn-Neptune cycle, which will be the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in early 2026.
Meanwhile, we are currently in a long patch of the Neptune-Pluto cycle where Neptune and Pluto both change signs around the same time. Neptune and Pluto have been running in a sextile since the 1940s, so they have typically been in signs of the same polarity (Fire/Air vs. Earth/Water) throughout that time.
I think this accounts for dramatic pendulum swings back and forth. Fire and Air both favor freedom, adventure, and exploration. Earth and Water both favor security and protection. Both sets of needs are valid, but getting too buried in one of them tends to provoke a backlash toward the worst excesses of the other.
During my middle school, high school, and college years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Pluto was in Sagittarius (Fire), and Neptune was in Aquarius (Air). Maybe all teenagers are awful to a certain extent, but I am pretty horrified when I look back on some of the things I felt comfortable saying to my peers at that time. No one was talking about trigger warnings then, though — it was a very different cultural moment. Some of the lessons of the more cautious period that followed, with Pluto in Capricorn (Earth) and Neptune in Pisces (Water), were actually good for me personally.
Of course, this more cautious period that is now winding down has had its destructive excesses too. As Pluto pokes into Aquarius (Air) and Neptune approaches Aries (Fire), many people have had it with cancel culture and are ready to hop on a bullet train to the opposite extreme. By the time Neptune’s transit in Aries is complete roughly 15 years from now, the only word counted as hate speech might be “No.”
Unfortunately, real people with valid problems are likely to get lost in the shuffle. If anyone wants to implement my proposal to accommodate the limited portion of literary cancel culture that potentially has a basis in legitimate grievances, they had better get on it before Neptune enters Aries.
What do you think Cancel Culture is likely to do when Neptune enters Aries? I can't wrap my mind around it.