How do we understand a world unhinged by the psychosis of one man?

No easy answer to that one, even for symbol readers. But a starting point, for astrologers, is to see certain public figures as modern myths: personifications of something the Universe wants to teach humanity. We decode transits to get a sense of what those lessons are.

Sometimes we humans learn by watching a symbol expressed with wisdom and grace. At other times, we learn in the opposite way, by watching it played out with catastrophic blindness. This is the case with our boy Donnie. He makes the meaning of cosmic lessons obvious through his obliviousness.

Our job is to watch these lessons that are personified without awareness, and apply them to ourselves with awareness.

Fog of war

Early this year, Neptune went into Aries, a truly baffling pairing of symbols. Try to wrap your mind around the planet of mists and vapors being fired up by the sign of armed conflict. Astrologers started using the phrase fog of war to express the paradox.

Generals, too, are partial to this phrase. It’s deceptively poetic, slippery and ambiguous — qualities that come in handy if you want to talk about death and destruction in a way that absolves you of responsibility. 

Eight days after Saturn caught up to Neptune, the Iran-Not-a-War war exploded. Here we have an event that matches the symbolism of a transit with such astounding precision that it becomes a teaching tool.

If you want to understand Saturn-Neptune, you’ve come to the right war.

The Neti War

And it is, of course, a straight-up war (Aries); but one so shrouded in confusion and obfuscation (Neptune) that even calling it by that word is the subject of official equivocation.

At its highest, Neptune uses negation to teach spiritual detachment. Consider the Hindu concept of neti, neti neti (“Not this, not this, not that”), which means: Whatever we think reality is, it isn’t. When joined with Saturn (responsibility), it is telling us to transcend the material world (Neptune), all the while shouldering the responsibilities of that world (Saturn).

This would be the most sublime way to use the transit. Alas, this not exactly what we’re getting from Washington right now. What we’re getting is a halted-halfway version of the Neti principle: How to negate nuts-and-bolts reality, without the part about responsibility.

To misinterpret any planet is a bad idea, but to misinterpret Neptune is is a really bad idea. Denying the world without benefit of the bigger context leads to nihilism, the dead zone.

Drugged with lies

Neptune governs art, which has been called “the lie that tells the truth.”  Low-level Neptune, however, is just plain lies.

Our man in the Oval Office has made a career of lying. His words have never been tethered to any inner commitment. A classic example is his oft-repeated pledge to stop foreign wars.

                    A promise is just a lie that hasn’t happened yet. — Trump impersonator James Austin Johnson on Saturday Night Live

Some of his lies are good old-fashioned whoppers, like the one about “a former president” confiding to him that he wished he’d attacked Iran, as Trump had. A childlike lie, it was immediately disprovable.

A more problematic kind of lie is self-delusion. I think we can conclude that our mentally degenerating head of state genuinely believes his own lies at this point.

Trump’s delusions of grandeur have made him easily manipulatable by a canny operator like Netanyahu. Bibi persuaded him that this war would make him the most bigly-remembered president in history. He also successfully fed his paranoia (Neptune), suggesting that the Butler shooting was an Iranian plot, and that Khamenei wanted him dead. “I got him,” boasted Donnie later, “before he got me.”

The big guy’s in-house enablers maintain his alternate reality. His zomboid lieutenants — imagine them clumping around the White House in their oversized Florsheim shoes – work round the clock to keep him bubble-wrapped from the truth.

“Secretary of War” PeeWee Hegseth, considered by his boss to be the more comely of the lackeys, has been parroting the boss’s lies for the camera, although he’ll probably be thrown under the next bus. Pistol Pete has been lately spouting warfightin’ rhymes like a Dr. Suess on meth.

And on televisions in every room of Mar-a-Lago, the old man watches Fox couch creatures reflect back to him what he wants to believe. Thus is he kept drugged, 24-7, with his own his lies.

Truth-free media

The phrase “fake news” entered the vernacular during the last Saturn-Neptune square (2016). Ten years later, at the conjunction, Fox is recycling the same neocon gaslighting they used to sell Iraq.

The conventional media is less blatant in its deception. Bought-and-sold networks like ABC, NBC or Bari (Bury-the-Story) Weiss’s CBS, and journalists terrified of being sued by a pissed-off president, use sins of omission and cowardice to lie to us.

The most subtle, and thus the most Neptunian, form of lying is normalizing an insane situation. This is what the New York Times is doing when they sane-wash Trump, covering him as if he were motivated by strategy rather than by the primitive impulses of a sociopath.

They are making us doubt our own eyes, ears and common sense.

War Porn

In this era of Pluto (power) in Aquarius (technology), a profound warning is being issued by the current transit. It’s especially applicable to a woeful number of our emotionally numb, terminally online sons and brothers. Neptune (compassion) and Saturn (blockage) are asking us to consider what happens when a whole demographic is cut off from its heart.

In White House bunkers that probably resemble their moms’ basements, emotionally stunted nerds-for-hire have been posting imagery that celebrates the war’s mass death and destruction with soulless juvenility.

As absurd as it is despicable, this slop includes clips from Tom Cruise movies, football highlights, and violent video games. They have the sensibility of snuff films.

The idea seems to be to make the whole US public as immune to human suffering as Trump & Co.

The Artful Dodger

Saturn creates tight situations to teach us maturity. Low-level Neptune slithers out of them.

Acting out the rock-bottom-worst version of this scenario is a president who hightails it out of Washington whenever possible, plays golf by day, shitposts by night, and sports a baseball cap to a ceremony for dead soldiers.

From his nepo baby origins and draft dodger adolescence to his umpteen felonies and war crimes, Trump has dodged accountability so consistently that it’s become his brand.

But equally illustrative of the theme are the Neville Chamberlains of our era: the tech lords that have lined up to give the mad king trinkets, the universities and law firms that have been bathed and brought to his tent, and a Congress that has become as toothless as the Russian duma.

This should not surprise us; these guys are part of the establishment. But on an individual level, it doesn’t get them off the hook. Those who allow Neptune (dissolution) to melt their spine (Saturn) will have to answer for it.

Pandora calling, she wants her box back

Saturnine law (karma) dictates that, at some point, the other shoe will drop. This may or may not come within our lifetimes, or in the form we expect. But in the case of this war, a failure to recognize the link between cause and effect is being played out explicitly and immediately. Trump’s military folly is a case study in unintended consequences.

Hey no fair mining the strait of hormuz, tweets our hopelessly overmatched Commander-in-Chief, utterly flummoxed at the idea that the country he attacked might fight back. Which is what happens in most wars, when you think about it. This is the shit they don’t get to on those cognitive tests. – Shower Cap

It takes a healthy, functioning Saturn to be able to understand causality. Here, too, Trump is a walking cautionary tale. Unable to connect the dots between his trashing of our allies and their reluctance to come to his aid, President Clueless seemed genuinely shocked that his pleas for help with Hormuz have elicited nothing but a global raspberry.

King of the world no more

It is not just Trump, the man, whose hubris is being smacked in the face by reality. It is the USA, as a world player. This war marks the irrevocable weakening (Neptune) of the reign of the Great Daddy of the World (Saturn).

Up until now, the rest of the globe was pretty sure Trump was a one-off. It was fairly assumed that after the bizarre clown show of his first term, the USA would come to its senses and revert to a Pax-Americana-style normalcy. With this military disaster, that faith has been lost.

But before we wring our hands in despair, let us ponder the transpersonal view. This perspective does not forgive or dismiss the horrors that spring from human folly. Rather, it considers even wrenching global paroxysms to be part of learning curves that are often too vast and inscrutable for us to fully fathom.

The outer planets bat last

This ghastly war, whose repercussions we are still not even beginning to grasp, is a trauma to the postwar world order, to be sure. But in a few years, or a few generations, non-astrologers may decide, along with astrologers, that the age of American hegemony had reached the end of its natural tether (US Pluto Return).

Maybe it will seem inevitable, by then, that NATO would morph into something else. Maybe the military will be thinking about the drone as being to warfare what the solar panel is to energy. Maybe historians will see this hideous episode as marking the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.

Who knows? All we know for sure is that unintended consequences always get the last laugh.

Images

Pandora by John William Waterhouse, 1896

Guernica graphic, Shower Cap blog