When Up Becomes Down and Left Turns Right

Wednesday's solar eclipse in Libra finds the world swinging into the heart of enantiodromia.

Oct 01, 2024

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ASTROLOGICALLY, THE SPECIFICITY and exactness of an eclipse mirror a concentration of awareness (Sun) that aligns with the unconscious (Moon). But more, eclipses disrupt our normal perception of the heavens. Our accustomed sky view shifts. During an eclipse, reality feels inside out. The Sun darkens, as in tomorrow’s solar eclipse, or the Moon casts a ruddy luminescence during a lunar eclipse. Dreams concentrate and condense during eclipse periods—the dream’s narrative becomes emphatic, liable to jump free and manifest in our waking life.

Tomorrow’s eclipse in Libra focuses on balancing—correcting—the imbalance, turning what is beginning to manifest in one direction into an opposite thrust. To do this, a process of what Carl Jung called enantiodromia is at play. Jung defined this principle as '‘the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time.” Give the thread of time enough leeway, and it eventually sways from its destination into a contrasting terrain. And then, of course, this cycle repeats ad infinitum. This is why it never pays to become too identified with this or that.

In keeping with its alignment with the Tarot’s Justice card, a shorthand description of Libra would be ‘karma.’ Look around you, and you’ll notice the compensatory nature of the sign swaying into gear over the next two weeks—culminating on the full Moon on October 17. See if you can track which experience or event in your life, at this moment, is in the process of rearranging into its contrary. You can also consider events in the outside world to track this transformative switch-up. Like these:

• It was reported yesterday by Semafor that “some of the subjects of Alex Jones’ darkest and wildest conspiracy theories could end up taking over his iconic, unhinged InfoWars brand in less than two months.” I wonder how, exactly, these haunted parents will remake the legendary ghetto of wingnut fabrications and overpriced Armageddon survival kits?

• Study the inescapable presidential election in the US and groan. Kamala Harris, whose star was ascending after her takeover from Biden in July, is showing signs of descent, as polls in 5 swing states reveal Trump gaining traction that alluded him throughout the summer. Adding insult to injury, Green Party candidate Jill Stein made her way onto the ballot in almost all swing states. Stein will likely scrape a percentage or two away from Harris on November 5, which equates to what was formerly the slight edge she held over Trump. The hybrid mix of idiocy and narcissism in politics today is stultifying.

• Mark Zuckerberg finally admitted that the content he made his billions off of was/is worthless. In an interview with The Verge, Zuckerberg was asked about using his platforms’ massive amount of user-generated content to train his new AI models. The interviewer wondered if the creators should be compensated in some way [me: yes], to which he responded, “…I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content...” But he still planned to harvest (steal) it anyway. Zuckerberg also shared details about his latest form of nonsense that nobody wants: AI, augmented Meta glasses that will depict the world around you as holograms. 😩 “Just like everyone who upgraded to smartphones…everyone…is pretty quickly going to upgrade to smart glasses over the next decade,” Zuckerberg said. As tech reporter Ryan Broderick noted: “Let’s not dwell on how inherently insane it is to assume that we’re going to be living in a world soon where everyone is just…wearing glasses all the time.”

• Criminals burglarized a post-hurricane merchandise shop in Florida that sold made-in-China MAGA junk for a particular criminally prosecuted former president (see how this works?) One of the suspects, when apprehended, was wearing a Trump cowboy hat that he claimed “ended up in his possession” after it “washed up from the hurricane.”

• And finally, spookily prescient UK documentarian Adam Curtis gives a succinct reading on what the last days of Pluto’s transit through Capricorn are about:

“This is a strange year, in which election upon election is overturning the expectations of those who ran the old systems. Everyone thought Modi was going to storm in and turn India into a super-nationalist state, but he was undermined. The ANC is falling apart in South Africa—there’s a mood check. In Mexico, you’ve got a green technocrat. The old smug certainties are being undermined. You get the feeling we’re at the end of something and we have absolutely no idea what’s coming.”

Welcome: Pluto’s ingress into Aquarius.

Kulture Klatch

WHAT I’M WATCHING THIS WEEK: You might need to be a gay male to appreciate what producer/director/writer Ryan Murphy brings to most of his productions. I just finished his sensational Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, (on Netflix), which chronicled the case of the real-life brothers convicted in 1996 for the murders of their parents, José and Kitty Menéndez. As I wrote on Notes last week: “Come for the patricide—but stay for the gay porn.” Some critics claimed the show turned the tragedy into a gratuitous spectacle that was unfair to the incarcerated brothers. Reading that, I concluded that the naysayers hadn’t watched the entire series. Murphy fashioned the story into a narrative disco ball, where every facet of the story was explored from each character’s (including the dead parents’) rationale. Murphy lets you decide if the boys were indeed terrorized with sexual abuse. Or were the sociopathic brats obsessed with money to the point of murdering their parents for their inheritance? Murphy can be salacious with his pandering to our culture's fascination with porn-creep, a condition that finds sexualized imagery infiltrating every aspect of our lives. He also knows how Americans love transforming criminals—especially comely ones—into celebrities. And so he cast two stunning actors to play the brothers (Cooper Koch—who deserves an Emmy, and Nicholas Alexander Chávez), with several hypnotic scenes where the boy’s super athletic bodies were stripped and on display. One shower scene that flashed Koch’s massive penis will make television history. But come on! I mean, sex and death are bedfellows, so it’s logical the lurid displays would wind through the show like a snake.

John Calendo and I will do a deep dive into Monsters next week on our Fame Whores podcast. Join us for free here.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO THIS WEEK: After Kris Kristofferson died the other day, I revisited his musical catalog on Spotify. As a rough-and-tumble Renaissance man, he’s a fascinating example of living out every component of his horoscope—from the roughest expression to the most refined and tender. A Cancer Sun, Leo Moon, with Scorpio rising, he graduated college with a literature degree (his Mercury, Venus, and Mars in Gemini), a command of language that he displayed in his poetic songwriting—images and moods that seemed feminine (Cancer Sun). But, on the flip, I lost track of how often his Scorpio facet found its way into his songs, evoking the devil as a character he conversed with (if he wasn’t playing the devil himself in several compositions). My favorite cover of some of his finest songwriting was from Sammi Smith, the only woman to make her way in the ‘outlaw’ posse that swept country music in the 1970s (along with Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson). Her version of Help Me Make It Through The Night is a heart slayer. Its urgency is intimate, pressing, and raw. The song was almost banned from radio for its unapologetic depiction of a one-night stand. It’s featured on my 2024 playlist, which you can follow here (presently, it’s 680 songs at over 44 hours).

WHAT I’M READING: The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture. The best thing about living in New York in the 80s was The Voice. I’d be up early every Thursday morning to snatch a copy from the bodega near the Soho apartment I crashed in with my friend Fred. This fascinating book combines 200 different voices—interviews with everyone and anyone connected with the paper from its Norman Mailer origin story in 1955 to its destruction and death in 2017 after being gobbled up by some tacky publishing conglomerate. The Voice was the first time I encountered the growing nimbus of Donald Trump via reporter Wayne Barrett’s scathing coverage of Trump as a corrupt con artist that no one else at the time was paying attention to.

TODAY’S TAROT DRAW: Considering tonight’s VP debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz, I drew a card to represent each candidate. So, who got which card? Comment below, and I’ll reveal the correlation at the end of the day—with some analysis. If you know these guys’ horoscopes, you’ll instantly know which card goes where (how does the Tarot do this?) Watcha think Cynthia Giles?

Love,

Opening image: Justice from the Waite-Smith Tarot, via Wikipedia. Public Domain. Monsters screencap by FW via YouTube. Crowley-Harris Thoth Tarot photograph by FW ©2024

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