#synodic cycle
The most pertinent astrological event of these years is the once-every-two-centuries transition in the elements of the Jupiter-Saturn synodic cycle. In December 2020, we are moving from an earth age to an air age. I will be cataloguing reflections and predictions, as well as amplifications of the elements and their zodiacal signs. Here are the first four.
Small Things and Small Views
We are seeing deeper specialization, we are seeing narrower reality tunnels. The final act of the epoch of earth was kickstarted by the narrative of fake news, and relative truth. There were no longer supposedly objective news sources. Ideologies became more specific as milieus were reduced to echo chambers.
What I realize as I observe this is the movement from earth to air. Virgo is the airy part of earth, and rules sand, particles, and details. The microscope—and the tiny worlds emergent from observation through that tool—are ruled by Virgo. The finale of the atomic understanding of the universe is the overbearing strain of the intellect toward the asymptote of infinite detail. Ultra high resolution. Next, we shall not find bits, but qubits. We shall not find things, but processes. Not nouns, but verbs.
The Undead Dragon
It doesn’t always go down like this, but in 2020 when Jupiter and Saturn conjoin for the final time in an earth sign, they will then be moving together, still close, into Aquarius, officially inaugurating the synodic air epoch.
That this earth-based synodic cycle should conclude with Capricorn is fitting, and even more fitting the continuity into Aquarius. These two signs are both ruled by Saturn, and are indeed the only adjacent signs ruled by the same planet. Thus even the proximity of these two signs testifies to Saturn’s constriction, endurance, and authority; the sun will always take twice as long to cross Saturn’s domain, as it is the only “double-space” on the board.
The entire tension of the last 30 years can be summed up between Capricorn and Aquarius, despite all the spectacular aspects in other signs during this time. But basically the cultural backdrop across much of the planet has been about the tightening of regulations and infrastructure amid struggles for independence. The capitalist narrative in the final act became less fascinated by the amount of goods it was possible to produce; nor was the focus anymore on the acquisition of land and deriving its highest yield. These stories were still around, but the new focus was on the abstraction of capital itself: people began to ask “how do we keep this going? How do we keep the system alive?” Like an increasingly desperate necromancer. And more and more bare was the inherent symbolic magic of the system, as banks were bailed out with conjured funds, and new companies with no profit were monstrously inflated with venture capital, their entire worth a fabrication of promise.
This is both Capricorn in decline, feebly attempting to carry on the work of prolonging the life of its institutions; and it is the anticipation of Aquarius, the wish, the hope, and that a company’s acumen is prized above the goods themselves.
Virtual Black Squares
In the black square too I see one of the final proclamations of the age of earth. The square (and cube) is a classical symbol of earthiness and materiality. Blackness too is associated with earth: the deepest, heaviest, earthiest hue. But it is no object that we are seeing in the black square: it is a digital image, a projection of light with no weight. It is not in one place, as a physical object is. It is diffuse across platforms. In this sense it anticipates the air epoch.
Earth is also the element of value. It is desire that coheres matter into form, and those forms inspire evaluation. Do I value the green cube or the blue cube? “Where I come from, we sit on blue cubes! We eat green food! These are my values!”
The black square phenomenon speaks to our collective experiments with value over the last 200 years. It reminds us that we are individuating away from objective materiality into deeper recognition of our personal reality tunnels. To some, they are posting the black square in informed solidarity; others post it as accidental sabotage; still others post it deliberately for counterrevolutionary purpose. When people look upon it, some see a dramatic collective statement; some see a tacky thing; some see a distraction. For certain casual witnesses, this cyberspace abstraction is their main statement on the historical moment.
During the revolutionary protests, the first widespread issue to cleave the gap in values was the “looting” of Target, a temple of goods. For some, the seizing of commodities was irrelevant to the issues of the protest; others sensed the close relationship between the capitalist temple and the racial and social inequality it engenders.
The multiplicity of values ignited and bared by the proliferation of the black square—this flat image that invokes the form of earth, but does not present it—is one fitting summary for what our preoccupation with material goods has born. America forgot that black lives have value, and now it believes black squares matter.
Devil and Clown
As it has stood til now, “the devil is in the details.” Virgo is the sign of detail, and the scientific paradigm of collecting an infinite amount of samples, rules, and categories has crept into the corporate and legal systems that rule the social order. In the US we find it is rather difficult to bring charges to a police officer, due to the meticulous legal attention it requires. The law finds a way to break down an incident into particles of appropriate size so that it can reconstruct it into a version that preserves itself.
There is an earth devil and an air devil, and the earth devil is the one who instrumentalizes the masses to its own purposes. This is the devil of fascism. By comparison, the air devil fills people with radical individual self-interest. That devil does not grow its arms into the polis, it turns people into violent free agents. If we are using Virgo, mercury-ruled, as one example of an Earth devil, then its analogue in air is Gemini, mercury-ruled. Gemini is the clown, the unpredictable, volatile, independent actor driven mad by apparently irreconcilable cultural forces. We have spent the last few years with this little boogeyman, in the joker movies and the IRL clowns who were scaring people a few years ago. Were these a symptom of the school-shootings, the random and senseless outbursts?
Virgo, and the other Earth signs, convince us that things are ultimately reducible to discrete parts. We wanted to isolate the killer clown, wherever we found him, separating him off from the rest of us. We were focused on the independent actors, and relatively unconcerned with the systemic oppression which produces the social and psychological circumstances that birth such nihilism. Only now, in the final years of the earth age, has the police state and capitalism become flagged as the central issue among the masses. Systemic relations are the concern of air. The clown, master of affective mutability, is frightening because it contradicts atomic positivism. This is something else that is anticipated the age of air: the interdependency of things, the leaking of identity into the individual from the environment. There are no independent actors anymore. No fixed objects of any kind, only becomings.
