HOROSCOPES: THE VOLATILE AND THE SOLID
Week of November 20-26
Full Moon Readings: November 27
December astrology openings
Alchemy of the Word<—January 2024
“Rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. All the rest is grief.” (Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris)
Tattooed across the sky’s knuckles: F U C K….This week’s astrology seems to be about, among other things, limits and bounds. We’re in the final degrees of Scorpio. So the limits have something to do with depths, fear of—-the silence down there, the mud. We become salvage divers.
Like the astrologists and cinema’s visionary extremists, the Stoics thought tons about how bodies mingle and mix—-itself an issue of bounds and limits. They distinguished between three sorts of mixtures: juxtaposition, fusion, and total blending. In total blending: can’t tell one body from the other. I mean, think about that for an instant. Portions dissolve so that a third thing can get created. As Mars and and the sun blend totally, what third thing’ll come into being? Time will tell. Intracosmic, deranged, inked, mundane.
This week, the Sun and Mars move through the final degrees of Scorpio as a hot team, then delink, enter Sagittarius in solemn procession. Right away, they square Saturn, whose out to sea in Pisces. Those two states—-rage and grief—-kinda face off. What can we change and what cannot ever be altered? Sorting that out—way beyond what we may delude ourselves into believing out of ease or convenience—-is itself a stoic ethics in which astrology wheels and deals.
Saturn: the divine and earthly limits, father time. Simone Weil said every limit is God. At best, Saturn is the good patriarch, what Slavoj Žižek called “a protector of appearances which render our daily lives tolerable.” Mars is the law of rowdiness and risk. Mars takes apart and severs. Motorcycled, a speedfreak limit tester. Sawed-off limbs, decapitations, surgeries, weapons, funnels and sieves, dismemberment and ectromelic images populate Martian moments in alchemical manuscripts.
Saturn stands, the heaviest metal, at the beginning and end of the alchemical work, all work, the work of ——. By turns maddening and sanity-inducing, alchemy is a “volatilization of the solid and solidification of the volatile.” If we tend to associate Saturn/old age/experience, with a certain hardwonwisdom or stillness, Mars—communing with Saturn at harsh, truth-inducing angles, calls those notions into question. Rambunctious children efface the room’s wallpaper, testing the protector of appearances. What do we bear/bare? What makes it bearable?
Horoscopes for all twelve signs below—-I suggest reading for sun, moon, and rising, though many may apply——