Weekend Entertainment Guide 8/30/24
Leave the World Behind, free speech research
This week, I’ve got both speculative and serious content. I connected the dots that the date of this coming September’s Lunar Eclipse potentially appears in the imagination-stimulating movie Leave the World Behind. Meanwhile, I realized that mainstream academic research on aging and free speech unwittingly confirms a couple of things astrologers have already been talking about!
Revisiting Leave the World Behind
said in his September 2024 forecast, available on both Substack and YouTube:So the mutable signs can create a more diffuse environment where pathogens become more transmissible. So let's pay attention to September 17th and look at that and see if it is a harbinger of some greater epidemic to come. And again, I'm speaking from a textbook understanding of astrology, not from the perspective of fear mongering or anything like that.
This reminded me that, toward the end of the 2023 disaster movie Leave the World Behind, which was rumored to serve as predictive programming of coming events, the following date and time appeared on a screen: “09-17 T02:04:10+00:05.” In a January 2024 analysis of the movie, I attempted to construct an astrological chart based on that date and time.
I was then so occupied with trying to figure out whether the movie had any deeper meaning that I didn’t realize there was a Lunar Eclipse later in the day on September 17, 2024! The Lunar Eclipse has the Moon at 25° Pisces — the same degree where the Moon was when the movie premiered in Los Angeles on October 25, 2023.
When I made the chart for the date and time in the movie back in January, I used 2:04 am EDT, although I noted that the corresponding scene in the movie had daylight outside. Running the chart for 2:04 pm EDT, I see that the angles interact with both malefics in the USA Sibly chart: the Ascendant at 21° Sagittarius opposes the USA natal Mars at 21° Gemini, and the Midheaven at 12° Libra conjoins the USA natal Saturn at 14° Libra.
More broadly, the Lunar Eclipse’s Sun-Moon opposition interacts with the USA Sibly chart’s natal Mars-Neptune square. Mars-Neptune hard aspects in a natal chart can represent vulnerability toward infection or illness, which would be more likely to manifest when ongoing transits trigger that configuration. I can see where Evan Nathaniel Grim is getting the idea that an epidemic is possible.
To come back to Leave the World Behind, I didn’t think it was a very good movie. There is at least one scene in the movie where a loud, obnoxious noise attacks the characters, and that made the movie not fun to watch. Shortly after the movie came out on Netflix, one of the more salacious rumors going around about it claimed that the noise scenes contained inaudible frequencies that had the potential to damage especially people who had received vaccines for COVID-19. As reported in The New York Times, the people who actually did experience side effects from the COVID-19 vaccines have enough trouble being taken seriously as it is, so these sorts of flagrantly wacky rumors only make their lives harder.
Anyway, the Lunar Eclipse definitely has the Moon close to Neptune, so we will probably have to work hard to discern fantasy from reality around that time.
Hot on Substack
, Like a Virgin?For Virgo season, Ashland analyzes the archetype of the Virgin, which is more complex than whether one is chaste and innocent.
, The Days Around 9/1/24Oja looks at the chart for Pluto’s return to Capricorn on September 1.
, Financial mystHeart Astrology nails the vibe of the Venus-Neptune opposition that took place on August 28. My late father and I both have natal Venus-Neptune squares, and we both have had correspondingly disappointing experiences with stock market investments.
via , Juliane KoepckeCorbesier studies the natal chart of Juliane Koepcke, who was the sole survivor of an airplane crash when she was 17 years old. Koepcke was born October 10, 1954 — during the same Sun Libra transit in which the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) was founded on September 29, 1954. Both Koepcke and CERN therefore have a natal Jupiter-Uranus conjunction late in the sign of Cancer.
Posts regarding the 2024 election
, The Wounded Astrology of Bobby JuniorMiddle analyzes the natal chart of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which includes a stellium of Chiron, the North Node, Venus, the Sun, and Mercury in the third decan of Capricorn.
Kennedy was born in January 1954, so it’s worth comparing his outer planets to those of fall 1954 births Juliane Koepcke and CERN noted immediately above. Kennedy has natal Jupiter in Gemini, while Koepcke and CERN both have Jupiter in Cancer, but all three have the same T-square of Uranus in Cancer, Neptune in Libra, and Chiron in Capricorn. My father, noted further above, was born in June 1954 with Venus in Cancer joining that T-square.
, Sundry Notes, AugustWildermuth skewers cringe political merchandise such as Harris/Walz devotional candles.
, Mercury's Karma ChameleonCosmographia points out that Mercury’s station at 21° Leo on August 28 takes us back to ground last covered in mid-July — a crucial time for the 2024 presidential race with the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and the withdrawal of Joe Biden. The Republican National Convention took place amidst all that; if you start a paid subscription now, you can still go back in my paid subscriber chat and see the liveblog I wrote of the Republican National Convention.
, Harris vs Trump, September 10th, in Historic Philadelphia: What Does the Astrological Map Tell Us?Karl Skellenger looks at the event chart for the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump scheduled for September 10. The analysis includes fixed stars.
, THE US PRESIDENTIAL DEBATEGoddard looks at the event chart of the September 10 debate as transits to the natal charts of Harris and Trump.
Stanford aging research tracks with Saturn transits
Earlier this month, researchers at Stanford University published in Nature Aging that they’d found “consistent nonlinear patterns in molecular markers of aging, with substantial dysregulation occurring at two major periods occurring at approximately 44 years and 60 years of chronological age.” These ages are astrologically significant: age 44 corresponds with transiting Saturn opposite natal Saturn (part of the cluster of transits constituting the midlife crisis), and age 60 is right after the second Saturn return. Symbolically, Saturn is associated with time, aging, and mortality. For more information on the Saturn transits to natal Saturn that everyone experiences at predictable ages, see
’s essay “Saturn in Pisces and Your Chart” in Impossible Dreams: Hopes, Fears, and Expectations for Saturn in Pisces.Free speech research calls out Neptune in Pisces
Joseph McCarthy had nothing on Neptune’s transit in Pisces.
At the height of McCarthy’s anti-Communist reign of terror, Samuel Stouffer asked in a 1954 survey of Americans: “What about you personally? Do you or don't you feel as free to speak your mind as you used to?” Only 13.4 percent said they felt less free to speak their minds than they used to.
Researchers James L. Gibson and Joseph L. Sutherland put the same question to Americans in 2020. They found 46 percent said they felt less free to speak their minds than they used to.
In their 2023 article for Political Science Quarterly, Gibson and Sutherland went on to analyze other surveys asking the same question between 1954 and 2020. The resulting graph, shown below, depicts an upward trend of fear beginning in 2011. (Thank you to
for posting the graph and the link to the article on Substack Notes!)
As an astrologer, what happened in 2011? Neptune entered Pisces. Pisces is a sign associated with compassion and sensitivity. When Neptune, the planet that rules Pisces and has similar goals and priorities, moved into Pisces for a stay of roughly 14 years, our impulse to take care of the victims of the world launched into hyperdrive.
I strongly favor same-sex marriage being legal, and I volunteered on my state’s campaign toward that end during my twenties. I strongly favor transgender people being able to make their own decisions concerning how to handle personal matters. The heightened empathy for the vulnerable that characterized the Neptune in Pisces era brought about some achievements that I view as positive with regard to those issues.
That said, the downside of all this amped-up empathy was that I reached a point where I felt it was unsafe for me to continue pursuing an interest in fiction writing. New grievances seemed to be coming out of the woodwork without warning — and without mercy for whoever unwittingly wound up on the wrong side of them.
Toward the end of at least a year and a half of soul searching, I wrote in my diary on July 23, 2016:
We do live in a time of rapid social change, and a lot of that comes from a good place of trying harder and harder to do the right thing for more and more people. If you’re a writer and it takes you three or four years to write and publish your novel, though, mathematically that does not lead to a good outcome.
I finally walked away from fiction writing because I just couldn’t deal with the stress of it anymore. I thought walking away was the only way I could guarantee I wouldn’t cause irreparable emotional damage to anyone. In a plot twist worthy of Greek tragedy, I wound up causing emotional damage anyway.
I want participants in literary cancel culture to atone for the chaos they have created in my family life by implementing the reform I have proposed in “A Law Written in Tears.” Although I think a backlash to cancel culture will come no matter what they do once Neptune starts moving into Aries next year, my proposal actually provides protection they aren’t otherwise likely to get for the limited portion of their grievances that has some legitimacy.
Excellent edition. I love your adventurous approach, exploring the fuzzy world of truthiness!
Informative