I decided to do some digging into this, and jumped onto the internet. I found a number of articles and posts about the subject or related subjects. They were helping me to see that I had quite a large gap in my understanding of the historical context and philosophies of astrology as it relates to the concepts of colonialism.

I was suprised by that, because I have not uncovered this information in the astrology books that I have been reading for years. Many of those books are by authors who are in positions that give them the opportunity and the platform to discuss these issues, either in their books or in their online communities and publications.

So I spent several hours reading and gathered the information. I went over to Google Gemini, because I have a subscription for it, and asked it to formulate a series of deep research prompts that I could use to aggregate the information into coherant reports that could be easily digested. I then executed those prompts, and the result is six reports that discuss the subject of colonialism in modern Western astrology and detail that through its historical roots.

Now, AI reports like this can be prone to mistakes, they can misconstrue or mischaracterize the information of the primary sources in their synthesis. I want to say that one should not simply read these reports and take them as verbatim truth or fact. However, in my cursory review of the sources that are listed, I feel that there is enough accuracy in the gist of the reports that they form a very good starting place for someone who wishes to research in this area.

I don’t feel that it is my work to further this right now, with the workload of the things that I’m trying to acomplish. However, if there is someone who feels this work is important and wants to take up this banner for those in the astrology community, please feel free to use these reports as a starting point for presentations or classes around this information.

You will find the links to the documents below.

The Political Economy of Esoteric Publishing

The first document goes after the money. It follows the business side of esoteric publishing from the 1960s onward, and the case it builds is that Western Tropical astrology became the global default less by argument than by what was cheap to print and easy to sell. Carl Llewellyn Weschcke bought Llewellyn in 1960 and moved the operation to Minnesota. The report puts that near the middle of its account, along with the certification bodies and their fee structures. The argument then carries forward into software, where the report reads Astrodienst’s Swiss Ephemeris and the apps built on top of it as quietly hard-coding Tropical placements and Placidus houses for users everywhere, including places with long-standing systems of thier own.

Modern Astrology and Eurocentrism

The second takes up the twentieth-century turn from prediction to psychology, and its argument is that the turn carried more freight than the people making it seem to have noticed. It sets out a line running from Alan Leo through Dane Rudhyar to Liz Greene, whose Centre for Psychological Astrology in London gave the approach a teaching home, and it holds that the Jungian material absorbed along the way brought Jung’s own ranking of European and non-European minds with it. On the institutional side, the document points to the Faculty of Astrological Studies, founded in 1948, and to Margaret Hone’s Modern Textbook of Astrology of 1951 as the pedagogy that everything after it grew from.

The Historiography of Astrological Transmission

The third document is about historiography. It documents how European scholarship from the Enlightenment onward wrote the history of astrology so that Greece came out as the place where superstition turned into science, and it names names: Auguste Bouché-Leclercq’s L’astrologie grecque of 1899, which the report reads as the anchor text for that framing, and Franz Boll’s Sphaera of 1903, which filed non-Greek star lore away as barbarica. From there the argument moves to the twelfth-century Latin translations and the Latinizing of Arabic authors, borrowing George Saliba’s phrase, the Classical Narrative, for the story in which Islamic scholars merely kept Greek learning warm until Europe wanted it back.

The Genealogies of Psychological Astrology

The fourth report assembles a pipeline. Its claim is that shadow work in psychological astrology arrives carrying nineteenth century racial theory, and it lays the stages out in order: Victorian evolutionary anthropology, Blavatsky’s root-race scheme in The Secret Doctrine of 1888, Jung’s borrowing of Lévy-Bruhl’s participation mystique, and then Alan Leo sorting sign expressions into evolved and unevolved ones. Farhad Dalal’s 1988 essay on Jung does much of the load-bearing work in the argument.

Methodologies of Decolonial Re-Alignment

The fifth turns to what people are building now, and it is organized as a survey of method. It gathers the technical moves first: Alice Sparkly Kat rereading the essential dignities against Roman citizenship law, so that a planet in exile reads as a structural shortage rather than a personal defect, and her re-description of exalted planets as hungry ones, sitting in signs ruled out of sect. Sam Reynolds appears here for what the document calls in-house skepticism. The organizational half covers the Fresh Voices in Astrology summit, directed by Kirah Tabourn, and NFLUX Magazine, which the report presents as infrastructure built to route around the older conferences rather than to petition them.

Astral Hierarchies and Epistemic Colorism

The last of the six is comparative. It sets four traditions beside one another on the question of light and dark. The report reads Ptolemy’s climate theory in Book II of the Tetrabiblos as the Western root of it, and takes from the classical Jyotish treatises the material on Saturn as neelanjana, dark-complexioned and governing the Shudra varna. Against those it puts Chinese Wuxing, where black belongs to Water and signifies depth rather than defect, and Aztec cosmology, where the argument runs that Sahagún’s Florentine Codex is the point at which Tezcatlipoca, lord of the night sky, gets translated into the Devil.

I encourage people from either side of this perspective to review the information. It is eye-opening, to say the least. And remember, the reports are generated, not written by me.

When a translator takes a poem from Greek into English, no one seriously argues that the translation belongs to Homer. The translator made thousands of decisions — which English word carries the ambiguity of the original, where to break a line, whether “wine-dark sea” stays or becomes something more literal, something less. Those decisions are original expression. They’re protectable. The translator owns what the translator made, even though the source material isn’t theirs and the final text wouldn’t exist without it.

That logic has been sitting in copyright doctrine for a long time. It applies to code ports, to film adaptations, to scholarly editions with original apparatus. It quietly governs what happens when a human being assembles a work from AI-generated material, too. The law isn’t starting from scratch here. It’s applying an old principle to a new kind of source text.

The Urantia lesson, one step further

A note on sourcing: the legal analysis in this section and the next draws on a case brief rather than the primary opinions; for legal purposes, go to the originals.

Last week I wrote about how the Contact Commission of the Urantia Foundation — the group that curated and structured the claimed spirit dictations — ended up being the reason the Ninth Circuit upheld the copyright in Urantia Foundation v. Maaherra, 114 F.3d 955 (9th Cir. 1997). The court found, as the brief I worked from characterizes it, that the Commission’s “selection, coordination, and arrangement” of the revelations into papers, their choice of which questions to ask and in what order, constituted the human creative spark the law requires. The spirit beings — actual or imagined — wrote nothing protectable. The humans who shaped and organized the material did.

The implication runs in two directions. Passive transcription of a non-human source isn’t authorship. Active curation of that source — decisions about structure, sequence, what to include and what to leave out — is exactly what authorship can look like, even when you didn’t generate the raw material yourself.

That’s the opening the U.S. Copyright Office’s guidance on AI-assisted work walks through — the 2023 guidance and the 2025 report both address this territory, as commentators have noted. The Office has said, consistently, that raw AI output without human selection or arrangement lacks protection. But human-authored expression created with AI assistance retains its copyright. And “creative selection, coordination, arrangement, or modification” of AI-generated material may qualify on a case-by-case basis. The question isn’t whether AI touched the work. Whether a human being exercised meaningful creative control over what survived — that’s what matters.

The Thaler boundary

Stephen Thaler asked a federal court to register a copyright for a visual artwork, “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” generated autonomously by his AI system, the “Creativity Machine,” with the machine listed as sole author. That case, Thaler v. Perlmutter, reached the D.C. Circuit and was decided, as the brief I read places it, in 2025. He argued the machine did the creating; he owned the machine; therefore he should own the output under work-for-hire doctrine.

The D.C. Circuit said no. The Copyright Act assumes authors are human. The court pointed to provisions in the statute about human lifespans, widows, heirs — the machinery of a law written for people, not systems. A machine can’t be an author under that framework, and claiming it is doesn’t transfer authorship to its owner any more than owning a camera meant Ansel Adams owned the light.

The Thaler case matters because it draws the boundary at the clearest possible point: a work generated entirely autonomously, with no human selection or arrangement of the output, sits outside copyright protection. What that boundary does is clarify, by contrast, where protection begins. It begins when a human being makes choices.

What the brief literature is beginning to take seriously — and this may be secondary commentary rather than the court’s own reasoning — is that if Thaler had framed his contribution around his own role in guiding, selecting, and arranging outputs, the analysis might have been different. That’s not a gap in the law. It’s the same structure translation copyright, compilation copyright, and derivative-work copyright have always occupied.

What counts as substantial human control

Here is where the analysis has to be honest rather than wishful.

Typing a prompt and accepting the first output isn’t curation in any meaningful sense. It’s closer to what the Urantia district court called passive transcription — a person as a mechanical conduit, disclaimed as a creative actor. The Copyright Office’s 2025 guidance says the same thing: prompts alone, given current technology, don’t give the user sufficient control over the expressive elements of output to ground a copyright claim — at least as the report is described by commentators who’ve read it closely.

But a prompt is rarely just a prompt in a serious working process. What actually happens in a loop of AI-assisted writing, at least in mine, looks more like this: a first draft comes back from the model. Most of it is wrong — wrong tone, wrong angle, wrong word choices. I rewrite sentences. I move paragraphs. I cut an entire section and reroute the argument. I prompt again with tighter constraints, not because I liked the direction of the first pass but because I want to see whether the material I’m trying to get at will emerge differently under new pressure. I keep some things and throw out others. A structure takes shape that has more of me in it than of the model.

That is selection, coordination, and arrangement. It’s also, candidly, closer to what Ted Chiang means when he argues that art is the accumulation of choices — that every scale of decision, from argument structure to sentence rhythm to individual word, is where meaning lives. Whether AI helped isn’t the question. Whether the human made enough of the decisive choices to constitute an original expression — that’s what the copyright analysis turns on.

The Copyright Office thinks this can qualify. It has to be demonstrated case by case, not assumed. The more the workflow resembles passive acceptance of model output, the weaker the claim. The more it resembles a translator’s persistent negotiation with a source — refusing defaults, rewriting, selecting what serves the work’s purpose — the stronger it is.

I’m not a lawyer, and nothing here is legal advice.

The assembled work distinction

There’s a useful distinction between a raw AI output and an assembled work.

A raw output is what the model generates when you prompt it once, accept it, and move on. It may be competent. It may even be good. But it carries the statistical signature of pattern completion: default structures, default rhythms, default resolutions. In the language I used in the second post in this series, it’s a reflection from a hall of mirrors — and if you accept it unchanged, you’re accepting the distortions as your own.

An assembled work is what happens when a human being treats that output as material rather than product. The prompt-select-edit loop, when it’s actually working, is less like ordering from a menu and more like milling rough lumber. You end up with something that started as raw output but has been cut, shaped, and fitted to a specific purpose. The evidence of your choices is distributed through the work.

This is why the compilation framework is useful beyond its legal implications. Legally, it describes what kind of human contribution can generate a copyright claim. As a description of creative labor, it maps onto what craft means in the context of AI-assisted work: not the absence of the tool, but the presence of the maker’s judgment in every choice that mattered.

The ceramics analogy I’ve been using in this series holds here too. A potter who buys a bag of commercial clay and a jar of store-bought glaze is still a potter. The craft question is what they do with those materials — whether the form they make is theirs, whether the decisions that shaped it came from somewhere real. Buying the materials doesn’t answer that question. Neither does generating the first draft.

What curation actually asks of you

Curation, in this sense, isn’t a passive or managerial role. It’s an active creative stance that requires you to know what you want well enough to recognize when the model hasn’t given it to you — and to care enough to refuse the default.

That refusal is exactly what the Copyright Office is looking for when it asks about substantial human control. It’s what the Ninth Circuit was describing when it praised the Contact Commission for shaping the Urantia questions rather than merely receiving dictation. A translator makes the same choice when she decides that a literal rendering loses the poem’s force.

The law can’t see into your process. It can only see the work. But the work is where your decisions either show up or they don’t. If they show up — if the structure, the selection, the sentence-level choices are yours — then you’re not just a user of the tool. You’re its author in the only sense of that word that matters.

It’s easy to be soft and sensual. Though I shouldn’t say easy. Nothing planetary is easy. But Venus rules Libra, the sign of balance and harmony, and balance and harmony take extreme wrath to acheive.

When I was a kid there was a Star Trek movie called “The Wrath of Khan.” It dealt with war and battle, which is where most people’s association with wrath sits. War, battle, anger. Those significations are present in Venus, and they are most visible in her masculine morning star phase, known as Lucifer. Lucifer and Hesperus were once thought to be different stars, different planets, because the two appearances are so unlike each other. Even so, thousands of years ago it was already understood that she was the same planet.

The morning star phase is where she demonstrates the external qualities of wrathfulness: ferocity, bravery, anger when it is needed, fighting, standing up for yourself and your cause. The evening star phase expresses that same wrathfulness inwardly. Either way the effect is strongest at maximum elongation, when she stands furthest from the sun on one side or the other. And in the evening phase, that internal wrath is precisely what makes her outward expression feel soft and sensual and beautiful. Directing wrath inward is what produces softness and suppleness and beauty and sensuality.

So what do I mean by wrath? An energetic quality, not a state, because it’s active. Not the description of an action. Not anger. Any parent who has had to show wrath to a child knows the difference: sometimes we have to display it, especially with young ones, to bring them in line, and it doesn’t mean we have become angry with them. Sometimes we have, sometimes we do internalize the wrath and become angry. But often it’s closer to scolding. We project the wrath while our internal state is nothing of the kind.

We’re in the middle of something, a puzzle, the gardening. The child acts out, or is about to do something dangerous. We erupt, and the wrathful component goes out of us, external to us. The child stops. The wrath subsides immediately and we return to what we were doing. If we’re with friends we might roll our eyes and chuckle. But a quality of wrath came out there, and that is the quality I mean. Anger can wrap around it and control it. Love can wrap around it and control it. It’s a force. It has no goodness or badness in it, no moral or ethical implication. Its like electricity. Electricity isn’t good or bad and doesn’t carry a morality.

That is the quality required to keep things in balance, and it is why Venus rules Libra as its masculine, air ruler. The balance maintained through Libran exceptionalism is a Venusian wrath. Saturn is exalted in the same sign. Why? Saturn basks in recieving the adoration that comes through this harmonic exceptionalism of balance and order. The home Venus builds through her wrathful expression is the home best suited to raising Saturn to his highest pedestal.

Venus is also one of only two planets with a mutable exaltation. Mercury holds the other. Mercury is exalted in Virgo, Venus opposite him in Pisces; the remaining mutable signs, Sagittarius and Gemini, carry no exaltation at all. Consider what mutability underneath it all actually is. It is the change process of life itself. Zodiacally we track the individuation of the modalities through the signs and say that Pisces is mutable, but every sign contains every modality. It’s a fractilinear expression of the multimodal universe we live in.

Mutability is the quality of transition, the change that arrives in the shift from one season to the next. Things change and die and are reborn, and at the same time the weather turns. The weather turns in our bodies too. Mutability is not growth; it is what comes after growth. Take hair. It grows, we hold it at a length for a while, and then we have to cut it so it doesn’t get to long. Or we cut continuously. Some people cut once a week. Someone who keeps a shaved face shaves every day.

There is the growth, there is the sustained period, then there is the cut. Growth, sustained, cut. The cut is the mutability. To be mutable requires cutting. When the caterpillar becomes the butterfly, it requires the severing of caterpillarness in order to arrive at butterflyness. And this cutting quality (I don’t mean directionality, not to cut or to be cut, but the archetypal quality of cutting itself) is mutable. The two planets exalted in mutable signs are precisely the two with bi-phasal solar expression, morning star and evening star. The others rise and set in the east and the west. But Venus and Mercury are the internal planets, inside our orbit, and so never travel far from the sun. They oscillate permanently between the extreme morning and evening states, and their retrogrades carry a weight no other planet’s do.

What had me thinking about all this today was looking up and finding Venus in Virgo. Alone there. Virgo being such a solitary sign. It isn’t the mutability that makes Virgo her fall, since Pisces is mutable too. It isn’t the earth element; she thrives in earth in Taurus. So what specific quality of Virgo is she fallen in? If exaltation is the condition of being placed on a pedestal, the other planets offering praise and regarding that planet as the highest, then fall is the condition of being regarded badly. Why would the other planets regard Venus badly in Virgo? It has nothing to do with any internal quality of hers. It has to do with how she is being witnessed.

And I think it’s the solitariness of Virgo. Venus is not intended to be solitary. Libra is a relational sign, one that requires relationship in order to reach balance and harmony. Pisces is relational. Virgo is the most solitary of them, and as the name gives, the self governed woman.

And it is in this fallen state that the quality of wrath I’ve been describing becomes the most essential. How do we survive the denegration of others? How do we survive being ridiculed? How do we survive being ostracized and shamed and held in low regard? We survive through this quality of wrath. We survive by the spark of fire in us that stays fierce even when nothing of it is externalized. That spark keeps our spirits alive and prevents the spark of life from going out. Wrath, then, is a critical energetic quality to be developing.

If we admire her softness, and we admire her sensuality, and we admire the harmony and balance that come from Venus, then we are obliged to look at Venus in her fall and learn how to take that deep wrath and bend it to our internal states, our internal thoughts, the way we feel about ourselves and about others. Bend that wrath inside us, at the hour we are most alone, where no one else can be with us because no one can reach us. Sitting across from someone, touching another person, there is still a part of us that is alone. That part is the solitary one. That part is where Venus is fallen.

And it is in that fallen part that her mastery of wrath allows her not only to survive but to carry what she developed there, by surviving it and being reborn out of it, back into the relational signs, into the rest of the zodiac, as she comes out of Virgo. As she comes out of being the self-sufficient woman. Wrath serves as a teaching component, as a component of self-mastery, as the component that draws the boundary preserving her and brings her fully into her own power, despite the other planets looking down on her there. Her most humilating place. From it she rises, not angrily. Coming up out of Virgo her next destination is Libra, where she immediately restores balance to herself, her energetic state, and her quality, through the force of wrath she concentrated and developed while in Virgo.

NB: NB: If you reference this post in your own analysis, please be clear in your reference that your analysis is your own. The post below is merely a technical delineation and draws no conclusions of justification in either direction.

Reviewing Steven Forrest’s birth chart and the transit chart for the moment the video went public—the podcast episode on the Lila Astrology YouTube channel where Steven used a racial slur, the N-word, and language many have called racist or leaning toward racist ideology—I’m not going to do a comprehensive review of everything. But there are a few things that stand out, particularly worth noting.

What follows is a technical delineation of Steven’s natal chart, and of the chart cast for the moment the video went public, with that second chart treated throughout as a transit against the first rather then as a reading of the moment on its own terms.

Natal (inner): January 6, 1949 at 3:30:00 am, Mt Vernon NY, USA
Event (outer): Thursday July 23, 2026 at 1:41:47 pm

I’ve set the event chart for New York rather than California. I’m in California, and it was morning here when the video went up. Steven’s birth location is New York, and because I’m reading the event chart as a transit to his natal chart, I adjusted the time to the location his own chart is anchored to. Some people have argued for keeping it in California, since that’s where Steven lives, but Steven may or may not have actually been in California at the moment the video published, and in the Hellenistic tradition I studied in, transits are read from the native’s birth location as a matter of course, not from wherever the native happens to be standing that day. There’s a second reason to: the video went up on YouTube, which is a global platform, and there’s no way to know which data center actually held it at the moment it went live, so nothing about YouTube’s own geography can anchor a chart in the first place.

For readers who don’t work in Hellenistic technique, what follows is divided into four parts. The first is a technical analysis of the natal chart alone. The second is a technical analysis of the transiting, or event, chart alone. The third looks at the receptions and aspects within and between those two charts. The fourth draws all of that together toward understanding the events themselves relative to the charts under analysis.

Doing this kind of reading means talking a lot about the dignity of planets, and that word tends to mislead people who haven’t worked with it before, since calling a planet undignified sounds like an insult, like their’s something wrong with the planet. Essential dignity comes from where a planet sits in the zodiac, by sign, accidental dignity comes from where it lands in the houses, and from the other conditions of the moment a chart is cast. Together, what those two forms of dignity describe is how the planets read each other, how they stand in relation to one another inside the same chart, which one the others see as holding the stronger position and which they see as holding the weaker one.

It comes down to a comparitive measure of capacity to act. Higher dignity gives a planet a higher capacity to act under certain circumstances relative to the other planets around it; lower dignity gives it a lower capacity, again relative to the others. Where dignities vary across a chart, differentiating between planets is straightforward: you can point to the one with more capacity and the one with less. Where every planet sits at a similar level, high or low or somewhere in the undignified middle, there is very little to differentiate on this axis, and reading that chart takes subtler methods, ways of judging one planet’s capacity against another that don’t rely on dignity alone. A chart where all the planets carry a similar level of dignity is a chart where none of them holds an advantage over the rest, and that’s a different chart to read then one where a single planet can act far beyond what the others can manage.

That’s the frame for the chart that follows, especially Steven’s own, where dignity turns out to be scarce almost everywhere. Calling a planet undignified there is close to moot, because there’s no differential of strength against weakness to measure it by. Dignity matters most where a strong planet stands against a weak one.

Part One: The Natal Chart

What comes to mind immediately in Steven’s birth chart is the condition of Jupiter and the Sun, four degrees apart in the sign of Capricorn, in the third whole sign house: the Sun at the sixteenth degree, Jupiter at the twelfth degree of Capricorn. What’s interesting is that in this configuration the Sun is seperating from Jupiter, in the third house, because Steven was born in the dark hours of the morning. The Sun, peregrine like the rest, holds Venus’s bound and Mars’s face there. Jupiter is combust and in a state of debility. In Steven’s birth chart, Jupiter is in its fall.

Six of the seven traditional planets in the natal chart (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn) hold no dignity at all where they sit: no domicile, no exaltation, no triplicity, no bound, no face. Peregrine is the word for that condition. Think of it the way you’d think of working a shift on someone else’s crew: you still do the job, and you do it at full strength, but the authority in the room belongs to whoever runs the sign. Jupiter is the one planet holding any dignity at all, and what it holds is it’s own bound in Capricorn. That’s also Jupiter’s fall by sign. Fall describes how the neighboring signs witness a planet: Capricorn runs on restraint, and Jupiter’s native expansiveness reads there as excessive, poorly witnessed by the sign around it, standing on its own ground by bound at the same time.

Jupiter is considered the greater benefic. But Steven has a night chart, so Jupiter is actually the benefic contrary to sect. In Steven’s chart, that Jupiter contrary to sect is in a state of combustion, of debility, and in its fall. Jupiter might, under certain circumstances, operate as what’s called a functional malefic, because of its particular style of debility.

Scorpio rises at 24°23’, which makes Mars the ruler of the chart: the planet whose condition sets the tone for the houses it touches. Mars sits at 1°15’ Aquarius in the fourth, peregrine, in Saturn’s domicile and in Mercury’s bound. The chart’s own ruler is operating on two other planets’ ground at once. The rising degree itself carries a second layer: ruled by Mars at the level of sign, 24°23’ Scorpio is held at the finer measures by two other planets entirely, Saturn’s bound and Venus’s face. Even the ascendant’s own degree, governed by the chart’s peregrine ruler, splits its detailed structure across two additional planets beyond the domicile ruler: the face and bound rulership add another layer to the diversity of dignity here.

The South Node falls at 1°39’ Scorpio, in the first house. That degree belongs to Mars three seperate ways: it’s Mars’s sign, Mars’s bound, and Mars’s face. Three independent dignity categories, all held by the same planet, stacked on the node that marks what’s already familiar, what doesn’t require new effort.

Mercury’s position at 29°58’ Capricorn matters on its own, apart from its dignities. Twenty-nine and a half degrees is the last full degree of a sign, traditionally read as a planet’s most urgent, least settled position, the point where a single further minute changes everything about it. Mercury holds Mars’s bound and the Sun’s face there. A planet whose whole business is connection and communication sits at the very threshold of its sign, its fine structure running through Mars and the Sun rather than through anything of its own. That belonging runs both directions: Mars sits in Mercury’s own bound, just as Mercury sits in Mars’s. Two planets, each holding no dignity of its own by sign, each holding a claim on the other’s fine territory instead. The Midheaven, at 7°33’ Virgo, is ruled by that same Mercury, who also holds the bound of the Lot of Fortune six degrees away, with the Sun holding Fortune’s face.

Mercury and Saturn are in mutual reception by domicile as well: Mercury sits in Capricorn, Saturn’s own sign, while Saturn sits in Virgo, Mercury’s own sign. Each holds the other’s house. Given how little dignity this chart holds anywhere, a mutual reception like this one stands out: each planet actually has claim on the other’s ground, rather then borrowing it the way the peregrine chain elsewhere does. It ties the Midheaven’s ruler to the out-of-sect malefic sitting on the Midheaven and the Lot of Fortune both. Saturn, in fact, hosts four of the seven traditional planets by domicile: the Sun, Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter, all sitting in Capricorn or Aquarius. The out-of-sect malefic, itself peregrine, is landlord to most of the chart.

Saturn is the out-of-sect malefic in this nocturnal chart, the harder of the two by condition. It sits at 5°49’ Virgo in the eleventh, peregrine: Mercury’s sign, Mercury’s bound, the Sun’s face. The Lot of Fortune sits at 6°44’ Virgo, fifty-five arcminutes away, the Midheaven sits at 7°33’ Virgo, also measured from Saturn. Both the lot of the body and material circumstance and the angle of reputation and public standing fall within two degrees of an undignified Saturn.

Venus sits at 21°14’ Sagittarius in the second house, peregrine, holding Saturn’s bound and Saturn’s face both. She’s hosted by Jupiter at the level of sign and by Saturn twice at the finer measures, the same Saturn that already governs so much of this chart. The Moon, at 3°21’ Aries in the sixth, is the natal sect light and peregrine as well, ruled by Mars, holding Jupiter’s bound and Mars’s face. The chart’s own preferred luminary answers to Mars twice, in the house of routine and the body’s maintenance, the same house that carries the skipped step read below. Natal Neptune sits at 15°08’ Libra in the twelfth.

The Lot of Spirit falls at 12°01’ Aquarius in the fourth house, the same sign and house Mars itself occupies. Its own ruler is Saturn, not Mars, Venus holds its bound there, Mercury its face. Both lots read in this chart are computed from the ascendant, the Sun, and the Moon, with the formula reversed between day charts and night charts: in a night chart, Fortune is measured as the ascendant plus the Moon’s distance from the Sun, and Spirit as the ascendant plus the Sun’s distance from the Moon.

Natal Uranus sits at 27°50’ Gemini in the eighth house, retrograde. Pluto sits at 16°01’ Leo, retrograde, in the tenth house: angular, the house of visible action and public standing. The North Node, opposite the South Node, falls at 1°39’ Taurus in the seventh, the house of partnership and the open other, ruled by Venus, who also holds its bound. That’s the growth point the chart is oriented toward rather than what it already holds by default. Venus, like Mars, is peregrine, so the point the chart grows toward is itself unanchored, no more established than the point it’s moving away from.

Laid out as a chain, the peregrine planets carry a circular relationship through the decans, nearly circuitous rather than linear: Mercury’s face-lord is the Sun, the Sun’s face-lord is Mars, Mars’s face-lord is Venus, Venus’s face-lord is Saturn, and Saturn’s face-lord is the Sun again, looping back rather than ending. The Moon’s face-lord is Mars as well, and so is Jupiter’s, both feeding into that same loop from outside the peregrine chain itself.

The natal Mars is also squaring the natal nodes. In evolutionary astrology, when a planet squares the natal nodes, it’s considered a skipped-step: a lesson that hasn’t been integrated, and needs to be learned in this life. Mars, in Steven’s chart, rules the first house of identity and person, and the sixth house as well, by whole sign. As an evolutionary astrologer, Steven typically works in quadrant houses: Placidus, or Porphyry. There’s nothing inherently wrong about reading whole sign alongside evolutionary technique. It’s on the heterodox side of usage patterns, but certainly not anything that should be considered forbidden. By whole sign, Mars squaring the nodes indicates a skipped step relative to the topics of the first and sixth houses.

In ancient Hellenistic astrology, the sixth house held the topic of slavery.

Mercury is also close to the square with the nodes, and part of that skipped-step experience too, off by a couple of degrees, out of sign, but close enough to the nodes to count. Mercury natally sits in the third house of communication.

Part Two: The Transiting Chart

Contrast that with the transiting chart. The Sun and Jupiter are again in a proximal relationship, the Sun in the first degree of Leo and Jupiter in the sixth degree of Leo. They’re very similar in distance from each other at the time of Steven’s birth and at the time of this event, but in different signs: the tenth whole sign house of Leo versus the third whole sign house of Capricorn. In this configuration, the transiting Sun is applying to Jupiter, not seperating from it. In the transiting chart, Jupiter is combust as well. Its essential dignity is again limited to bound rulership. By accidental dignity the combustion is the more influential condition.

At the time of publication, transiting Jupiter and transiting Pluto were in opposition: Pluto in the fifth degree of Aquarius, transiting Jupiter in the sixth degree of Leo. Transiting Pluto is also opposite the transiting Sun, a Pluto opposition with Sun and Jupiter touches all three planets together.

The transiting Mercury was in the seventeenth degree of Cancer, in the ninth house, Mercury is retrograde.

The eleventh whole sign house is the house of community, of audience, of published work disseminated to large audiences. Social media is in the eleventh house. Venus is in her fall there, undergoing a state of debility, connecting with Mercury in the ninth whole-sign house of astrology by sextile.

The South Node is in the first degree of Virgo, getting ready to make it’s ingress into Leo ahead of the solar eclipse on the twelfth of August, a total solar eclipse.

The transiting Moon, at the exact moment of publication (we have the timestamp down to the second), was at twenty-six degrees eighteen minutes of Scorpio. The Moon is also in a fallen condition.

Scorpio rises again in the event chart, at 3°56’. That degree belongs to Mars in a triple way: Mars’s sign, Mars’s bound, and Mars’s face, all three, on the rising degree itself. Mars rules the event ascendant too, the planet whose condition again sets the tone for the chart being read.

Transiting Saturn sits in the sixth house of bad fortune, the mala fortuna, at fourteen degrees forty-four minutes.

The event chart’s own Mercury holds its own bound and its own face at 16°19’ Cancer even while retrograde and out of its own sign, dignified twice by the finer measures, moving backward, in the house of things sent outward to be heard far from where they were made. The event chart’s Lot of Fortune falls at 29°21’ Aquarius, the last degree of the sign, in the fourth house, held by Saturn twice over as ruler and bound-lord.

Transiting Uranus sits at 4°43’ Gemini in the eighth house.

Set against the Sun and Jupiter’s strength in Leo, three planets in the event chart are in fall: the Moon in Scorpio, Venus in Virgo, Saturn in Aries. The Sun, in its own domicile, conjunct Jupiter and the Midheaven, is the only planet in either chart fully at home by sign, in a structure otherwise built almost entirely from peregrine and falling placements. That makes the Sun the one clear differential in an otherwise level field: the planet the others read as holding the strongest position, precisely because so little else around it holds any position at all.

Part Three: Reception and Aspect

The opposition of the natal Sun with the transiting Mercury creates that tension in the themes and topics of communication, teaching, education, being across the third and ninth house axis of education and teaching and astrology, that tension that is held with Mercury in the ninth house of Cancer opposite to the natal Sun and Jupiter, is impacting Mercury’s ability to successfully host Venus, who is in the sixteenth degree of Virgo in the eleventh whole sign house.

Reception gives that a firmer footing. Mercury is the domicile lord of Virgo, so the transiting Venus, at fifteen degrees twenty minutes of Virgo, is hosted by Mercury. The same Mercury, natally, is bonded to both malefics at once: in mutual reception with Saturn by domicile, and in mutual reception with Mars by bound, sitting at 29°58’ Capricorn, the final minute of it’s natal placed sign.

The transiting Mars in the eighth whole sign house participates in the second-house resource story below, and in Gemini is hosted by domicile by Mercury as well, the same mutual bond already read in the natal chart, Mercury and Mars trading fine-grained authority, now carrying into the transiting picture too. Both the Venus in the audience house and the Mars opposite the resource house are landlorded by a Mercury that is natally peregrine, at a threshold degree, and bonded on both sides to the chart’s malefics. In the same Capricorn cluster, the natal Sun stands under a thirty-seven-minute opposition from transiting Mercury at the moment of publication. Transiting Pluto, in its turn, is hosted by Saturn, transiting Moon and transiting Saturn are both hosted by Mars, the chart’s own ruler and its skipped-step planet.

Also, the natal Mars is in the second degree of Aquarius, which is opposite the transiting Sun in the first degree of Leo: a natal Mars in opposition with the transiting Sun, a Sun–Mars opposition arriving at the same moment as the Pluto opposition read above.

Another significant opposition at this time is transiting Saturn opposite Neptune in the twelfth whole sign house of Libra, in the sixteenth degree, or fifteen degrees eight minutes of arc, meaning that the distance is twenty-four arcminutes, less then half a degree. Close to a partile opposition, though not partile itself.

The transiting moon had just transited across the natal ascendant point, which rests at 24 degrees and 23 minutes of arc in Scorpio. The transiting ascendant had just moved across the natal South Node. So we have the transiting ascendant and transiting Moon, both in the first whole sign house of Scorpio, connecting to the natal South Node and natal ascendant. The event ascendant’s own triple-Mars signature, read above, is the identical pattern the natal South Node carries: the natal chart holds it on a point behind the horizon, the event chart holds it on the horizon itself. The event chart’s own South Node, wide but structural, spans the same handful of degrees of Virgo that natally hold Saturn, the Lot of Fortune, and the Midheaven together, the harder malefic’s undignified ground already read above.

The natal nodes of the moon are in the second degrees of Scorpio and Taurus, and the transiting Sun is in the first degree of Leo, so we essentially have the transiting Sun at the bendings of the natal nodes, and depending upon how wide an orb you give Jupiter, it could also be considered part of that bending situation, with those planets square: the transiting Sun and Jupiter squaring the natal nodes.

Transiting Mars is applying to an opposition with the natal Venus. Transiting Mars is in the eighteenth degree of Gemini. The natal Venus is the twenty-second degree of Sagittarius. And that second house is dealing with resources.

Transiting Neptune sits fifty-nine arcminutes from the natal Moon, the tightest contact between the two charts. Transiting Pluto sits a little over three degrees from natal Mars, the chart’s own ruler. The event Sun and Jupiter, both in the tenth, apply by degree toward natal Pluto at 16°01’ Leo. Transiting Uranus, already read, sits in the same sign and the same whole sign house natal Uranus occupies, roughly twenty-three degrees apart. The event chart’s own threshold degree, it’s Lot of Fortune, echoes the natal Mercury sitting at the last minute of Capricorn.

Part Four: What the Interactions Say

First, the full details are reported separately. From publication of the video through the social consequences, through what the professional bodies and the joint conference board eventually did once they had the record in front of them, all of it lives in one document, found at the following URL: Shadow Work: A Record.

When Jupiter, by transit, is also experiencing debility, combust and under the beams of the Sun, we can see that the natal promise of Jupiter activates the capacity to operate as a functional malefic. The condition of Jupiter in the transiting chart is debilitated, operating as a functional malefic, square to the natal nodes. The South Node sits in the first whole sign house too, so that same square also activates the topics of identity, karmic patterns, the way we express ourselves and are perceived by others in the world. The subject under discussion that day was named as shadow-work by everyone in the video. Near the end of the recording the participants said, in their own words, that they felt like they were walking a fine line, between what people need to hear and what just becomes too much for them, which is first-house territory, the line between what a person shows and what they keep back. The transiting Moon crossed the natal ascendant at the moment of publication, and the transiting ascendant crossed the natal South Node at the same time, so the first house is activated twice over, at the same hour the video went up.

The tension traced in the sections above falls on the house of communication and the axis of teaching, so we’re looking at the very topics a podcast release indicates. One of the passages that drew the most attention afterward belongs on that same axis. In the recording, he offered a memory of recognizing, as an adult in his thirties, that Black people held the same intelligence as white people. He offered it as evidence of shadow work already done.

Natal Mercury, ruling that third house of communication and sitting at the last degree of its own sign, is the planet carrying both the story and its timing. One response written in the days after didn’t dispute that a realization had occured. It disputed when. By his thirties, the man doing the remembering had already published, already taught, and already been credentialed in the field, so calling that recognition leftover childhood conditioning didn’t square with the timeline. That rebuttal was itself about timing, which puts it on the same axis we already assigned to Mercury and the third house.

Peregrine means wandering, without a house of one’s own to answer to. A chart with almost nothing dignified is a chart where almost nothing differentiates one planet’s capacity to act from another’s, and that’s the condition we watch the transiting chart arrive to activate rather then create.

Held to the evolutionary layer, natal Pluto sits angular in the tenth. The event Sun, Jupiter, and Midheaven are all applying to that exact degree read above, bringing a public reckoning to a chart already built for exposure in that house. The recording itself didn’t stay where it went up. At some point before this piece went to press it had disappeared from its original address, and who took it down, or when, isn’t something this record can say. Transiting Mercury was retrograde in the ninth house, the house of things carried outward to be heard far from where they were made, so Mercury is the planet doing that carrying here. It was moving backward the whole time what it carried kept moving forward into the world, which is roughly the same shape as a recording that went up and then pulled back from where it was posted.

The fallen Venus in the eleventh house falls short of a functional malefic. By essential dignity, its state counts as debilitated, but it lacks the corresponding natal debility to be a fully functioning malefic in its transiting location. The eleventh house is a positive house, so its a good house. But we can see some of these other conditions all converging just at the exact moment, on the exact day of this release, connecting to the natal planets in exactly this configuration, activating all these transiting planets.

A Mars skipped step sits around absorbing the topics of slavery, through its rulership of the sixth house. The ruler of that house sits, in its natal position, in opposition to the transiting Sun—the planet of spirit, of purpose, of drive. Jupiter acts as a functional malefic, disrupting the topics of the tenth house of career and reputation. Venus, debilitated, causes a withdrawal in the house of audience and social media. Together, the themes and topics specifically relevant to the situation are clearly represented in the planetary placements of the transiting chart, relative to the natal placements of the key indicating planets. The sixth house, which ancient Hellenistic astrology assigned to the topic of slavery, is one of the houses Mars carries its skipped step into. The other is the first house, the lesson the squared nodes mark as not yet worked through. What surfaced there was concrete: a family account of an ancestor’s part at the founding of the Klan, told as history. Later one of his students called that ancestry into doubt, but for what we’re reading here, it’s the topic that matters more than whether it’s factually accurate.

The house that holds slavery and the planet that carries what hasn’t been worked through yet land on the same inherited story. The word spoken to Ricky Williams, the one Black person in the video, sits on that same natal opposition, Sun to Mars. That’s the public life vs ancestry axis: transiting Sun in the 10th house, across from natal Mars in the 4th. Mercury sits nearby too, just across the sign boundary by a coupl arc minutes. Earlier in the same conversation Steven had named that the norm around the word had changed, that what once passed as a way of mocking racism no longer did. That naming happened in the same conversation, on that same natal Sun-Mars opposition, as the word that came right after it.

The stress on Venus doesn’t stop with transiting Venus in a fallen state. We can see transiting Mars applying to an opposition with the natal Venus, and that second house deals in resources: money and values. Steven was, in fact, uninvited from UAC, the largest astrological conference, a decision affecting his resources and reflecting how the eleventh house’s audience judged what the second house holds. The recording itself had a commercial purpose as stated by Ricky Williams. It was made, in part, to promote a paid workshop the two of them were bringing to market together, that’s second-house material about as literally as it comes.

What followed the recording’s release was a sequence of three responses, spread across fourteen days: a written statement, a set of comments underneath it, and later a video made together with both Williams and Forrest. Each one added something new, but none of them closed out what the one before it had left open. The UAC board that eventually ruled on his place at the conference said that the public responses following the episode hadn’t demonstrated the accountability its members were looking for.

What we’re looking at is a description of sequence, three attempts in a row that never quite settled into one position, and it sits with the same functionally malefic Jupiter already read above: it wasn’t one attempt handled badly, it was three separate tries, each one still being judged against somebody else’s standard. Transiting Mercury retrograde stationing direct carries that same sequence from the other side.

By the time the UAC board reached its own decision, we can see that two of the field’s other professional bodies had already acted on the same record. One removed him outright from the advisory role he held with them, the clean exercise of its own authority. The other recommended his removal from the same conference platform and said in its own statement that it didn’t have the authority to decide the matter alone.

On the day Venus shifted into Libra the UAC 2026 Board withdrew Steven from the speaker platform. Its own statement footnotes that he had already emailed to withdraw before the announcement was formalized, and the Board credited that acknowledgment. The Board states plainly that the decision is not intended as a permanent judgment on his career or his contributions to astrology, the statement is signed by Kay Taylor, UAC 2026 Board President, who is also President of the OPA Foundation and on the faculty at Kepler College, where I will be the TA for her evolutionary astrology course this September of 2026. Both halves of that outcome, the Board’s own decision and the withdrawal that arrived from the other direction just ahead of it, land on the same eleventh house just vacated by a debilitated transiting Venus, the community and the audience acting through its own platforms.

So we see this connection of Venus at play there, under stress from the transiting Mars by opposition, which is the ruler of his natal skipped-step phenomenon. Mercury, off by a couple of degrees and out of sign but still close enough to the nodes, we can count as part of that skipped-step experience too, activated by the opposition of Mercury by transit on the day of publication of the video.

For a full length exploration of this topic you can download my white paper for it from my digital download store: Lion’s Gate: The Eightfold Gate

It’s a numerological event

Just reminding people that the Lion’s Gate phenomenon is a numerological phenomenon, it is people connecting to the number eight. The Lion’s Gate is on 8/8: August is the 8th month of the Gregorian calendar, and the 8th is the 8th day of that month, which is why we talk about the Lion’s Gate being a 88 (double eight) event. In 2024 the year also added up to eight, since 2 plus 0 plus 2 plus 4 was 8. This year we have something going on as well, because if we take the last two digits, which is a common thing, we say August 8th, ‘26, and 2 plus 6 is 8. Again, this year we have a way to bring 8 into the digits of the year.

But this is entirely numerological, and has nothing to do with any astrological conditions. The fact that it’s the Gregorian calendar is something we’re all kind of culturally connected to, but those are certainly not the same numbers in the Chinese calendar or the Thai calendar or any of the other different kinds of calendar systems, and the numerology doesn’t hold up in the same way that it does in the Gregorian calendar.

It is also, from the New Age movement around the focus on the Lion’s Gate, specifically connected to the rise of the double eight expressions in popular Chinese culture, which is becoming almost as commercialized in Chinese culture as Christmas is in Western American culture. It is a very popularized idea, connecting the number eight to wealth and prosperity through homophony, and through the stylization of the Latin character eight with the Chinese characters. The Mandarin 八 (bā) sits very close to 发 (fā), to prosper, and the Cantonese pair baat and faat is closer still. Beijing opened its Olympics at 8:08:08 in the evening on 8/8/2008. Written twice in the Hindu-Arabic numerals we use, 88 mirrors 囍 (shuāngxǐ), the double happiness character, which is 喜 doubled and belongs to weddings. There is also the numeral itself, where we have the infinity sign on it, standing upright. These are the cultural crossovers that get compounded, and that people jump onto and get excited about.

So even though there’s no real basis for the Lion’s Gate experience other then the fact that it’s numerological, it’s only numerological in the Gregorian calendar, and we’re using concepts from Chinese culture that have also leveraged Western concepts to arrive at this idea of prosperity and wealth and whatnot. That is the caveat.

The astrological correlate

There is an astrological phenomenon that, while it’s not exactly tied to August 8th, does have a corelation to the experience that’s going on. The last article and the video both cover it, but briefly for here, it goes back to the thema mundi.

Around this time of year the sun happens to be about halfway through Leo, its sign of domicile, and that placement halfway through Leo is it’s placement in the thema mundi, the birth chart of the world, which is tied to back when astrology was becoming codified, at the rising of the Nile. This is something that Demetra George talks about in her volumes on Hellenistic astrology: the rising of the Nile, the heliacal rising of Sirius and the moon in Cancer.

Around the 8th of August the sun is half through Leo, the moon in Cancer is rising and moving into a balsamic phase with the sun, and Sirius is rising. The ascendant in Cancer puts Leo into the second house of resources and money, and with the sun in the house of money, in its domicile, it’s supposed to indicate wealth and prosperity.

There is an astrological condition that we can talk about, but it’s not specifically tied to the number eight; it’s tied to the fact that this is mirroring the configuration of the luminaries in the thema mundi, which is the birth chart of the world.

The moon is in Cancer for a couple days, two and a half days, so the condition might last for about 2.5 days. The very first time that it happens, when the moon is very first in Cancer and the ascendant is in Cancer, right at the early parts of Cancer, the sun will be in the middle of Leo, and it kind of happens somewhere between the 7th and the 9th of August every year. This year the moon crosses the ascendant for the first time in Cancer this Leo season on August 9th, at 2:43 a.m. Pacific time, so for only a small part of the world will it happen on August 8.

Why eight, though

That being said, there is some universal signification for why the number eight is specifically associated with luck and prosperity and good things.

When we start with the number one, we start with the indivisible unity of all things. One is one, and there’s no seperation from one. But the minute we have two ones, one plus one is two, and that’s how we get two: the only way we can get to two is for one to divide, whether we think of that as a spontaneous division or however we want to think about it. One is by itself, and a second one makes two.

We have three components: we have a one, we have another one, and the one and the one make two, and two is, by itself, its own thing. The two ones are independent ones, which is like Gemini, the experience of Gemini, two ones; then we have two, which is its own thing, the union of ones, two ones together making two. That’s three things: an individuated one, an individuated one, and the two, which is the union of the two individuated ones. That’s how we get one, two and three.

If we’re using the Fibonacci sequence, or any of the different sequences that use the same kind of starting weight, one plus one is two, one plus two is three, three plus two is five, on and on.

Just starting off with one, two and three, three was considered the first perfect number: it has a begining, a middle and an end. We can think of three as the first number that has cadency, fixedness, and mutability, since all three modalities can be found within the number three.

Two represents the duality and three represents the trinity, and when you take two and raise it to the power of three, you get eight, the first perfect cube. The Pythagoreans called it the Ogdoad and named it the first solid cube for that reason. That’s how we get to eight.

Scorpio and the eighth place

The Sovereign Sacrifice, a paper I wrote, deals with the fall of the moon in Scorpio, which is the eighth sign of the zodiac when we’re dealing with the tropical zodiac. That is the connection to the number eight: the moon, in its fall there, is where the ego was at its weakest, allowing Shakyamuni Buddha to attain enlightenment when the full moon was in Scorpio. You can look at how the moon is connected to the number eight through the sign of Scorpio.

Oftentimes the eighth is considered, in astrology systems, a bad place, and the Hellenistic sources are unanimous that the moon there is in her fall, her tapeinōma. The Vedic sidereal tradition reads the same degrees as the nakshatras Viśākhā, the toraṇa or triumphal archway, and Anurādhā, the lotus that blooms in muddy water, and reads them as attainment rather than weakness: there the moon reaches her highest goal. The mud allows the lotus, and the fall is the archway. There’s a number of good qualities about the number eight, historically, and we can see its connection mathematically and astrologically.

The eighth house is also considered an idle place, and astrologically we might think of eight as not being the greatest number, but it is the place, that idle place, succeeding to the seventh house, which in its largest archetypal signification is the union of spirit and matter. We talk about it in a mundane way as marriage and partnerships, but its philisophical underpinning is the sun setting into the earth, inseminating it. The eighth place, succeeding to that, is preparing for that union, and even though no planets rejoice in the eighth house, it is directly connected to preceding the divine union. The hieros gamos, the sacred union, the sacred marriage.

The circle and Venus

Eight can also signify the eight directions, and eight is the last whole integer that divides the circle. One is the entire circle itself, two represents the diameter of the circle, so it’s bisecting the circle, and three creates the cross of matter. We have the bisecting of the circle, and then using a compass we can bisect that line, and in bisecting the line we then have four quadrants. Also using a compass we can bisect those four 90-degree angles, and we get 45 degree angles, so that with a compass and straight edge we can bisect the circle and create the eight divisions of equal number of degrees.

Eight is the last integer that does that, and nine does not. Eight is the only number that can do it through this bisecting, and it does it through three sets of bisecting, so it’s again one, two and three: one divides a circle, two bisects that line, creating quadrants, and three, the bisection of those, creates the eightfold divisions of the circle. Nine, 10, 11. Eight’s the only one that does that, so it has that special quality associated with it. One, two and three get there placements in the circle not through using a straight edge but through repeated circular division of the circle, creating the seed of life.

Also, Venus is connected to eight, because eight years is the full cycle of Venus through all five of its Venus star points, and it does that in 13 orbits of Venus. We have the 5, 8 and 13 that connected to Venus, three consecutive Fibonacci numbers, and eight is a critical number in that cycle as well. Kepler took the Earth and Venus relationship to be the clearest instance of the golden proportion anywhere in the solar system.

There’s a lot that has to do with eight, and a lot of it good: the first perfect cube, the eight divisions of the circle, the eighth sign of the zodiac where the moon is in its fall, the eight years of Venus, who is beautiful and benefic. Mathematically there’s a positive, fundamental mathematics connected to the number eight, and numerologically there’s a lot of power in it. It’s obvious why people have aspirational ideas for prosperity around the number, and why the modern phenomenon of the Lion’s Gate makes sense, especially as we look at the evolution of things culturally.

But astrologically it’s not exactly the eighth. There is a time, this time of year, when the sun is in its domicile in the middle of the sign, which is its power place, in the second house, which is the house of money, and it happens once a year around this time.

So that’s my spiel on the Lion’s Gate this year.

If you got something out of this, the tip jar is open.

Content note. This one is personal. I’m talking about personal things, health things, medical stuff. If you are squeamish at all about talking about medical stuff and health stuff, then please just skip the article. You can read the TLDR and move on.

TLDR. I’m recovering from a diverticulitis flare-up that has run most of July. I misread the signals, went out too soon twice, mistook a migrating infection for a pulled muscle, and spent about two weeks in a delirium I only recognized looking back. Men are conditioned not to talk about their health, and often not even to want to know about it. This is the first of several posts on that.

Today’s posting is a little bit different from some of the usual fare here on my blog, Find Your Nova. Typically I write about astrology or philosophy or current events, or my reflection on those topics synthesized into something I’ve been thinking about, and sometimes about questions I’ve recieved from my clients or students, because the questions are relevant for a much bigger audience. Today it is something personal: my own health, and some of my recent health journeys.

I want to name right off the bat that these are two topics that are difficult for people who were born male, who were raised and encultured male, or who have been in Western societies, at least, as men. I’m going to use the word men to talk about the different kinds of men, not trying to isolate any specific gender or sexual identity, and maybe even for women some of these topics can be difficult to talk about. But it is common for men not to want to talk about deeply personal things, and not to want to talk about thier health in specific. Oftentimes they don’t even want to know about their own health, and they kind of try to hide from it. I’ve seen this tendency in myself as well as other men that are close to me.

There’s a lot that’s been coming up for me, so this may be the first of several posts about the topic of health, and it is my own health because that is where I have the deepest access to my own life journey.

I am in what I hope is some of the final stages of recovery from a recent diverticulitis flare-up. Depending upon how you measure it, this could be the second I’ve had this summer, or it could be that I’ve been in one long, continuous flare-up since this spring. The entry point is this last half of July, 2026, and then kind of working backwards from there.

What diverticulitis is

To set the stage, two years ago I was admitted to the emergency room with some of the most intense pain in my body that I had ever experienced, and the testing and diagnosis found diverticulitis. From then until now there have been reoccurring issues, but nothing that got too extreme.

For those of you who don’t know what diverticulitis is, it is when a person with diverticular disease has a flare-up. A lot of people have diverticular disease. It’s pretty common, especially in Western Caucasian people, but anybody that eats what has come to be seen as a more Western diet, or especially a more American diet, tends to have these kind of pockets that form in the intestines and the colon. These pockets can get filled with the stuff that’s inside your intestines, and when the conditions are right, they get inflamed and infected. This inflammation and this infection is extremely painful. It’s also dangerous, because it can cause the wall of the intestine or the colon to rupture and spill the contents of the intestines into your body, which can cause infection to fill your whole body, and people can die pretty quickly if it gets out of control.

It’s serious enough that if you have it and you’ve been diagnosed, and you go to the emergency room and indicate that you’re having a flare-up, you’ll probably get admitted quickly, high up there on the admissions scale. Their might be other people that still have more urgent needs, but it is one of these kinds of urgent conditions that they need to evaluate whether your colon has ruptured, kind of like your appendix rupturing.

June, and then the middle of July

This last June I was admitted to the emergency room for another flare-up. I went in early enough that I thought I caught it, got the antibiotics, and things calmed down very quickly, so the international travel I had went ahead. I managed my diet the way you’re supposed to with diverticulitis, which is not eating anything and drinking only clear liquids, so that your intestines don’t have any work to do and can start to heal. Even though I was traveling, I was basically not eating, fasting for about a week before I started eating things again. You go very slowly: very low-fiber foods to start out with, and then as you start gaining intestinal motility and normal intestine functioning, you start eating more diverse foods and more fiber, introducing foods that are harder and harder to digest, until you are back up to a normal diet. It takes a couple weeks to get back on track. I did that in June, continued traveling and did things normally, and thought things were going along well.

Then in the middle of July I had another flare up. I was starting to have more symptoms, July 13th, July 14th. I was visiting my parents in Idaho, and I didn’t want to deal with the issues around trying to receive health care out of state, so I got back in my car and drove straight from Idaho back to California. It was a very intense drive. Probably should not have done that, looking back on it. But I did.

I got back and went to urgent care, got antibiotics, the whole nine yards. Maybe I should have acted sooner.

I was operating in this mode that I think a lot of people fall into, but I think, especially a lot of men fall into, that as soon as you start to feel okay you need to get back to doing things. There’s alot of emphasis on productivity and getting stuff done, and in this society we’re kind of addicted to it; people with male bodies tend to get a lot of pressure in certain ways to perform. Even though I didn’t have specific obligations, and no corporate job to get back to, still in my mind I’m subject to the stresses: stressed that I need to be doing things, or that as soon as I’m feeling better I should be able to do stuff.

I got the antibiotics, and a day or two later started feeling better, so I rested all day and went out in the evening to visit a freind of mine, go to a birthday party, and then a performance. Didn’t drive. I Ubered, and I was trying to be careful with myself. It was too much, I was in a lot of pain.

I felt like I was okay because the pain in my belly had subsided, and what had taken its place was back pain, very intense. If you’ve ever had a tight or a pulled psoas muscle, this is what was going on for me, this kind of tight psoas causing a lot of lower back pain. What I didn’t understand at the time is that was actually an indication that the infection had moved from the colon and had started migrating backwards, more towards where my kidneys are, and it was causing my psoas to spasm and cause this intense back pain. What I had interpreted as my diverticulitis getting better, and having back pain because I’d been laying down and resting for so long, or maybe because I had driven in the car, was actually a pain that was specifically related to the infection.

I had been experiencing severe rigors, and I wasn’t running a fever, because my body was not able to produce enough energy to create one. I was cold, shaking violently, and could hardly move. I was able to get myself to a hot tub and tried to submerge myself in it to warm up, and I couldn’t get warm. The temperature was about 104 degrees Fahrenheit, but I still couldn’t get my body warmed, even sitting in there for like 20 minutes. I went and took a hot shower, and I could get the water hotter in the shower, and that did help me out a little bit. I was unable to produce body heat, and trembling. I didn’t know it at the time, but I should have gone to the emergency room at that point, and probably even called the paramedics, because I was not in any place to move or to function.

But that subsides. I stayed on the antibiotics to ride it out, and fortunately did start recovering. My son was away for the summer, and alone at home it gets lonely, so as soon as I felt better I went out with a friend to a concert, rested all day and went out for the evening, and again it was way too much. It set me back again.

These have been hard lessons to learn. I think a lot of men are conditioned to be this way. We don’t feel the permission to allow our bodies to rest, to heal, to recuperate, and to find a state of equilibrium and balance. There is this constant push to produce, perform, improve, to do, to do, to do, to get things done, to complete things. Don’t let things be in process. There’s no time to be down, can’t have time to be sick; we have to be up and present for people and be available and doing things. Maybe this is specific to me, but I see it in other men, and I think it is common, but again, just me, from my experience.

The delirium

As I’m recovering, on antibiotics and trying to stay hydrated, I found myself resting and sleeping during the day and into the nights, 10, 20 hours a day. Looking back on it, I was in a state of delirium, moving in between different states of conciousness, of wake and sleep, and having hallucinations. Visual and auditory hallucinations. Fortunately not with my eyes open, but if I would close my eyes to go to sleep I would start seeing vivid images, to the point that it was very difficult to distinguish if I was awake or asleep. It was this deep in-between state where the visual images were so real that it was only when I opened my eyes and came back to consciousness with kind of a start that I realized I had been in a deeper dream state. Some of them were quite terrifying, and these audio hallucinations were terrifying. It took a lot of my meditative training to bring myself back into a center, recognizing that these were all mental phenomena. It didn’t matter whether they were “real” or not, because they were indistinguishable from what I was perceiving as reality.

It was a very long period of delirium. We’re at July 30th today, and looking back, the fragments run from the middle of July until maybe three days ago. My antibiotics just finished a few days ago, so I don’t know whether the delirium was the sickness, or a side effect of the antibiotics, or a sign that I’m recovering enough that the delirium states are subsiding.

These kinds of internal sicknesses

What I have come to understand is that having these kinds of internal sicknesses is not the same kind of thing as having a broken arm or getting the flu. The arm breaks. You put a cast on it, it heals, you go through physical therapy, you can use it again, and you have a process of knowing that its working and functioning. You get the flu, you go through the flu cycle, you feel sick and then you feel better, and the virus is done doing its thing. But these kinds of internal sicknesses, where your systems are out of whack and there’s infection inside that you can’t quite see, there’s stuff going on that you can’t quite understand or perceive, they don’t have the same signals. It takes a lot of work to still the restless mind down to being able to feel what’s going on in the body.

I had a doctor’s appointment the other day that was, unfortunately, an hour away: an hour on the freeway to get there, be there, and drive back. It was a four-hour experience. The whole afternoon was filled with going to the doctor and coming back. I felt good going into it, but when I got back I was starting to experience stomache cramps again. So even now, where I’m starting to feel well, if I pay attention to my body there are the signs and indications that it’s still not quite done. Healing.

Today is the first day, 17 days after the first symptoms of this last flare-up, that I had what I would consider a normal bowel movement, not painful. Even since then I’ve had other issues that show things are still not fully healed.

The delirium ended a few days ago, so my mind is now starting to become better, and the cognitive restlessness is starting. I want to get things done, I want to do things. Even writing this article is me being restless, but at least I’m able to do it sitting and resting at home. The body, even though it’s feeling better, is not ready to be pushed to the extent that the mind wants to push it, and that’s a hard thing to come to grips with.

Working backwards to May

For those that are reading my blog and following my YouTube channel, you will notice a big drop off in what I have been producing since about May. Even though I didn’t go to the ER until the early part of June, in May, at NORWAC, the Northwest Astrology Conference, I was having issues that I thought were regular travel stomach stuff.

So looking back, I can see that this last round started in May, compounded, and came to a head in June, just before I was set to go traveling. I got the antibiotics. I got that under control, but the stress of traveling was still to much, even despite that.

Even traveling, and maybe this is just me succumbing to this need to be productive, probably wouldn’t have been that bad if I’d continued my dietary restrictions. After I came back from Tibet, I went straight into trying to eat normally. I think maybe I needed a much longer window of more restorative digestive processes, using more nourishing foods and easier to digest things. I probably should have maintained my diet a little bit more, and maybe that would have saved things.

The big thing in the middle of July that I think ended up sending me into the ER was going to the Olive Garden and having stuffed chicken marsala. That was obviously not the right thing to do. Even though it was more then a month from the last emergency room visit, looking back on it I’m seeing that the body needs more than a month to heal.

Even though the mind is restless, the mind is saying, oh, get back to work, go do things, get out there, be productive, be social, talk to people, make connections with your friends, write more, do more. I like to hike and go on walks, and my mind is saying, get out there, do more excercise, do more, do more. I love food. I see and smell food and want to eat good food, and the mind is saying, oh, the body’s okay, just go ahead and eat, go ahead and eat.

There needs to be a lot more self recognition around understanding when the signals are not normal. A need for me, and for men in general.

Part Two picks this up from further back: Giardia in the forests of Sumatra in my early 20s, the rounds of COVID and what they left behind, and the mindset I think is itself a disease.

If this was worth something to you, the tip jar is there.

Rather, I would say that being human is archetypal. And one of the key archetypes of being human is continual astonishment at the serendipity of the similarity of our perception of the collective human experience, and how correlation of phenomena is continuous across domains of existence.

Let me break that down, because it’s carrying a lot in one sentence.

Archetypal means the shape of a human life isn’t original. We’d all like to think our experience belongs to us specifically. But the categories are old, and there aren’t that many of them. Birth, work, sickness, partnership, and death. Everybody gets a version of the same short list, and the versions rhyme.

Then the astonishment. Not astonishment once, early on, and then you settle into knowing how things are. Continual astonishment. It keeps arriving. You tell somebody the most private thing you have ever felt, the thing you were sure was yours alone, and they say, yeah, me too. And something goes off in you like a bell. That’s the serendipity part. Not that we’re similar. That the similarity keeps showing up as a surprise, over and over, like it’s news.

And the last piece, which is the one I actually care about. Correlation of phenomena is continuous across domains of existence. What I mean is that the patterns don’t stop at the edge of one domain and start fresh in the next. The same shapes turn up in a body, in weather, in a marriage, in a market. I’m not saying one is causing the other. Correlation isn’t causation and I don’t need it to be. I’m saying the continuity is there, and it’s available to be noticed.

It is part of the human experience to attempt to explain the magical nature of the universe itself. And in that process, there are some who collapse that magic down into something that is fundamentally common, base and mundane. We might call this materialism, in the sense that we are asserting that all phenomenon is explicitly material, and there is nothing other than the material that we can see. The opposite of that might be somebody who constantly asserts that there is only magic in the world, and that all things are magical and mystical, and that there is nothing mundane, base or common.

Notice what both of those moves do to the domains. If there is only the material, then there aren’t seperate domains to correlate across, and the continuity I’m describing isn’t wrong so much as it has nowhere to happen. And the person who says everything is magic has done the same thing from the other end. One domain again. Just a prettier one.

For most of us it’s somewhere in between. We live in this world where things are pretty mundane and basic. Even things as wierd as atomic particles and quantum entanglement are basically normal. And even though those concepts were magical to begin with, disseminating those ideas into popular thought makes them common. One of the side effects of the “scientific mind” is the mundanifying, or the commonifying, of things that are magical.

And then the flip side: religion or spirituality takes things that are fundamentally mundane, like fire and wind and water, and turns them into elemental magic.

But really, we go through our lives, living, working, going to the grocery store, nearly missing the pedestrian in the crosswalk and at the same time getting rear-ended by a car. Or we have to deal with sickness and disease and cancer, having a stroke or a heart attack, or high cholesteral. And so we have all these components of life, represented in the 12 houses of astrology, that are fundamentally mundane, normal and absolute. Absolutely, like, just blah, in a way.

And this is where the archetypal thing stops being an abstraction. Twelve houses. Somebody sorted the whole of ordinary life into twelve categories a very long time ago, before any of us got here, and you can still read the list and find your own week in it. That’s the serendipity of the similarity, sitting there in a table.

And yet the 12 signs of the zodiac represent the opposite side of that: the magical, the mystical, the absolute. The things that are celestial in nature that we can’t ever truly understand, except that the terrestrial houses are continuously connected to the celestial palaces. That’s the continuity, right there in the structure of the thing. The houses are one domain and the palaces are another, and the correlation runs between them without a break. And it’s that. It’s that exploration of the mundane, in connection with the divine. With the magical. It’s how we understand this serendipitously correlative experience of phenomena.

There are a lot of different systems of mystical thought and divination, astrology is often considered the “highest” of those forms, because of its comprehensive, systematic infrastructure. Which is why the infrastructure is the part worth pointing at. If you want to notice a pattern that runs across domains, it helps to have a system with enough joints in it to hold the comparison still. It’s less a mechanism then a rhyme, and a rhyme needs a form to be heard in.

And so I don’t think it’s so much about that. Of course, there’s always going to be people who try to materialize the mystical, and there’s always going to be people who try to mysticalize the material. I think one of the beauties of astrology is that when you get right down to it, there is this ability to leave the mystical mystical and the mundane mundane. Rather than trying to transform one into the other, you understand how the gap between the two is constantly bridged by our own human experience.

The planets aren’t doing it to you. Nothing is being transmitted. The correlation is what’s continuous, and you’re the one standing there noticing it, which is where we started. It’s really humans that are doing the work.

I’m doing this because I feel that I don’t want the paid subscriptions to drive my behavior around the relationship that I have with my own writing. When I go onto the Substack platform, I start looking at the statistics: which posts are generating the most referrals, the restacks, who’s subscribing from different posts. I think all that information is good and interesting, but what I don’t want it to do is be driving the topics that I write about. I really want those to emerge from the zeitgeist of my own life and what’s going on for me and questions from my readers, clients and students.

Find Your Nova started out as an exploration of interpreting the current astrological transits with imagery, and it’s evolved into a larger writing project. I still do image interpretation of the topics that I write about, so each of the images I put on my posts are intended to be interpretive in some way of the message in the post. I really just want to continue to work through this process organically, and not have my own frame of reference and my own mental space be overly influenced by the need to drive subscriptions.

I will start putting a link to my tip jar into my posts, for people that do want to send me a nickel or two, or that just spontaneously want to support my work. The tip jar takes diferent forms of payment, and you can pay as low as 50 cents if you want to say thanks for some of the content, especially if something resonated with you. It’ll be up to each individual reader, every time they come across one of my articles, whether or not they want to drop me a few cents for reading the writing.

There’s been a few people that have unsubscribed due to posts of mine being behind a paywall. I want to prevent more people from unsubscribing, and welcome other people in to read and follow the work that I’m doing without having to worry about paying for it right now.

Hopefully this is a good move so that I am able to focus my writing on the things that are important to me. Hopefully it’s a good move for you, the readers, so that you don’t have to pay for the subscription and your able to read the articles if you want them. Hopefully it’s a win-win for everybody.

I wasn’t making a huge amount of money from the subscription base anyways, and I’d much rather channel my creativity in the directions that it wants to go rather than worry about trying to drive revenue through this source. It’s much better if you want to book a consultation with me, or purchase one of my digital downloads. I’m writing more regularly, creating white papers, and I’m going to be having recordings and so forth that you’re going to be able to purchase. I’m going to just be shifting my revenue model more towards consultations, digital downloads, and teaching classes. So those are going to be the three pillars going forward.

If you do want to support my work on a subscription style basis, I’m going to keep Market Watching the Moon paid for right now. But other than that, just drop me a tip in the tip jar.

Here’s the knot, though. EA’s whole foundation rests on reincarnation, and “reincarnation” is nowhere near as settled a word as we tend to treat it. The traditions that use this kind of language disagree, sometimes flatly, about what returns, whether anything returns at all, and what “return” even means. I take this up at length in my forthcoming book, and in the full paper this piece is drawn from (”Reincarnation in Spiritual Traditions?,” available here), but the short version is this: I’ve watched people get so wrapped up in past lives or future ones that they forget to live the one in front of them, and that’s part of why I wrote this. Read well, EA doesn’t send you touring your incarnations. It returns you, more awake, to the life you’re already standing in.

So the question mark in my title isn’t doubt. It’s an invitation. When you tell a client “your soul chose this,” you’re using three enormous words (soul, chose, this life), and it’s worth knowing, before you use them in the chair, that the world’s traditions have meant startlingly different things by all three. Knowing the neighbors doesn’t weaken your own house. It deepens it.

The trouble hiding inside the word “soul”

The English word “soul” smuggles in assumptions most of us never notice: that it’s singular, immaterial, immortal, and individual. Very few traditions hold all four at once. So through the rest of this piece, and at length in the book, I keep the native terms in italics (ātman, anattā, nephesh, rūḥ, ka, teyolia) because each one names a picture of continuation that the word “soul” flattens the moment we drop it in as a translation.

Here’s a map worth carrying instead of a list of names to memorize. Is the soul created or beginningless? Is a person body-and-soul, one substance, or no fixed self at all? Is your innermost principle your own, or a share of something cosmic? Does anything survive death personally, impersonally, or not at all? And is your fate settled by moral judgment, or by something else entirely: the manner of your death, a completed rite, an impersonal law? Answer those five and you’ve located a tradition, and located yourself, more precisely than any label ever could.

Five families of soul

The persisting soul that returns. This is EA’s home ground, and if you’ve read a chart this way even once, you already know its shape: the Vedic ātman, uncreated and never made, cycling through saṃsāra under the weight of karma toward mokṣa. The Greek psyche runs the same arc through Plato and the Orphics; Theosophy later gathered this whole reservoir and handed much of its vocabulary straight to modern astrology. “Evolution” here means convergence. The many resolve back toward the One, the drop remembering it was the ocean all along. Clients who hold this view already speak this language fluently. Give them the chart as a record of where the soul has been, and the reading will land as true.

Rebirth without a fixed self. This is the one I’ve watched most practitioners blur, and getting it right matters. Buddhism affirms rebirth but doesn’t require a persisting soul; its careful readers insist on rebirth, not reincarnation, precisely because “reincarnation” smuggles the occupant back in. Anattā, “not-self,” isn’t nihilism; it’s a method of looking, and what turns up under examination is a causal stream, one flame lighting another, not the same flame carried across lives. For a client who thinks this way, offer the South Node as pattern and inheritance rather than a soul that went shopping for its circumstances. The delineation barely changes. What changes is whether the person feels met in their own framework.

The created soul, one life. This is the default picture for many Western readers, absorbed before any adult ever consciously chose it. Judaism’s nephesh, ruach, and neshamah; Christianity’s psyche, pneuma, and soma, with the soul itself held to be made ex nihilo; Islam’s rūḥ, breathed directly into Adam. “Evolution” here is moral testing across a single earth life, aimed at resurrection and judgment rather than a wheel of returns. A client from this background hearing “your soul has done this many times before” isn’t objecting to technique; they’re crossing a real metaphysical border. The South Node’s “past” can still hold: this soul’s own earlier chapters, childhood, family line, rather than prior lives.

The distributed, ancestral soul. Every family above still counts to one: one soul per person. Not this one. Egyptian tradition named as many as nine parts (the ka, the ba, the akh, and the ren, a name that keeps part of a person alive as long as it’s spoken). The Norse had no single soul-word at all, only overlapping terms like hamr and hamingja. Continuity here runs horizontally, through kin, land, and name, before it ever runs vertically toward a Source. For a client shaped by this frame, a chart can read as a council of several forces rather than one soul’s arc, and that’s a coherent way to work, not a reduction that needs correcting.

No soul at all. Physicalism holds that mind is real but produced by matter, ending when the matter stops. It’s not a position I hold myself, but it’s a position with real philosophical weight behind it, from Hume’s bundle of perceptions to Epicurus’s “death is nothing to us.” Astrology can’t be offered here as a report on a soul’s journey; the moment you say “your soul chose this,” the reading dies on the table. What still works: the chart as a disciplined symbolic mirror. The South Node or Pluto can be read as inherited pattern (temperament, wound, disposition carried down a family line), with no claim that the symbols correspond to a literal metaphysical entity.

Karma, dharma, and where they part ways

Even the two traditions closest to the word karma diverge beneath it, and the difference is worth more than a passing note. Hindu thought ties the karmic ledger to an eternal ātman carrying it body to body, often overseen by a divine consciousness who can extend grace. Buddhism has no such owner and no such judge; there’s just a stream of conditions passing its momentum forward, governed by intention (cetanā) rather than the act itself. Jainism takes it further still, treating karma as an actual physical substance that sticks to the soul on contact, cleared only by non-violence and ascetic effort. And several distributed-soul traditions decline the whole moral machinery: the Aztec afterlife, for instance, was routed by how you died, not how you lived.

In EA we read the South Node and its aspects as this life’s karma, and the pull toward the North Node as dharma. That reading is native to the reincarnational family. For a client whose tradition pictures continuation as ancestral or as a single created life, the same significator can be offered as inherited pattern or this-life conditioning instead: same chart, a frame chosen to fit the person sitting in front of you.

What this is for

None of this asks you to loosen your own grip on reincarnation, and it hasn’t loosened mine. EA takes the reincarnational frame as its home, and it’s a rich, well-populated way to read a life. What a wider view of “soul” gives you is range: the ability to hold your own ground and still recognize the neighbor’s, so when someone walks in speaking a different dialect of the soul, you can meet them there instead of pressing them onto your road.

We don’t all need to get the same answers out of a chart. And wherever a reading finally sets a client down, it isn’t in a life already lived or one still to come; it’s here, in the one life they have to live. I try to remember that in my own reading too. That’s the whole point of the question mark.

This piece is adapted from a longer paper, “Reincarnation in Spiritual Traditions? A survey of what ‘soul’ and ‘reincarnation’ have meant across the world’s spiritual traditions, for the working Evolutionary Astrologer,” drawn from my forthcoming book The Soul and its Evolution: Key Questions for the Student of Evolutionary Astrology. The full paper (with the complete tradition-by-tradition treatment, sourcing notes, and the questions worth carrying into your own practice) is available here: https://app.paperbell.com/checkout/packages/226260

Neptune signifies the dissolution of boundaries between us, our capacity for human connection, and the aspirations and dreams we hold collectively — what we want to see materialize in the world. In Aries, that dream energy shows up with real vital, assertive force. Large groups of people across the globe are pushing hard to manifest their own visions right now, and we don’t all share the same dreams. There’s a ferocity to this energy, an urge to assert that our dreams are valid, whether or not they conflict with someone else’s.

At the same time, the sextile to Pluto brings that dream-like vitality into fluid relationship with the planet of power and transformation. And it’s happening through an air sign that moves information and communication across large systems and around the globe, which tends to condense and solidify power. So we’re watching surges of dream-energy connect directly with the power of transformation, and if you look at the news right now, that’s exactly what’s playing out on a global scale.

If we want to actually manifest our own dreams through this transit, the way in is to turn our attention outward — to hold onto what we want while making real room for what other people want too. It’s not about giving up our own dreams; it’s about how we validate someone else’s without invalidating our own. When we can do that, the individual transformation each of us is looking for has a much better shot at landing, and enough of that adds up to real collective change.

As for who feels this most: Aries and Aquarius are the two signs most directly activated. Wherever those signs fall in your own chart, by house, that’s where this transit shows up as a live topic in your actual life. The rulers of those signs — Mars for Aries and Saturn for Aquarius (Uranus, if you’re working from modern rulership) — and wherever those planets sit in your chart, carry some of this energy too. So it really comes down to house placement and rulership for any one person, but for the general population, Aries and Aquarius are the two signs most directly activated. If you’ve got your Sun, Moon, or Ascendant in either sign, you’ll likely feel a much stronger pull from this one.

Before ChatGPT launched — before “generative AI” was a phrase anyone used at a dinner table — copyright law was already working through a question that should feel familiar: what happens when a human being claims they didn’t write the thing they wrote?

The answer the courts landed on is stranger and more useful than you’d expect. And it comes from a 2,097-page book about the cosmos, dictated by celestial spirits through a sleeping Chicago businessman, published in 1955.

A note on sources: what follows draws on a case brief I worked from rather than the primary opinions themselves. I’ve tried to flag where I’m relying on the brief’s characterization rather than reading the court’s own words. If you’re using any of this for legal purposes, go to the opinions directly.

The Sleeping Subject

Here is the setup. In the early years of the twentieth century, a Chicago physician named Dr. William Sadler began treating a patient who fell into inexplicable trances. The brief I worked from places the initial encounters somewhere between 1906 and 1911 — I can’t verify the precise date from memory. During these episodes, the patient’s vocal cords produced communications that claimed, explicitly, to originate not from him but from extraterrestrial spiritual entities on a mission to deliver new revelation to humanity.

Dr. Sadler organized a discussion group — eventually formalized as a body called the Forum, and a smaller inner circle called the Contact Commission. The Commission’s job was to pose questions to the spiritual beings, through the sleeping intermediary. The answers materialized, over years, as handwritten manuscripts. By the mid-1930s the papers were complete: 196 papers, 2,097 pages. They were published in 1955 as The Urantia Book, and the Urantia Foundation registered the copyright the following year — 1956, as the brief stated it.

The institutional position of the Foundation was clear: the book had no human author. The celestial beings wrote it. The humans were just the receiving apparatus.

This was a sincere theological claim. It was also, decades later, a legal disaster waiting to happen.

The Lawsuit

In 1990, a reader named Kristen Maaherra — who had been studying the book for over twenty years — digitized all 2,097 pages onto floppy disks and began distributing them to study groups, free of charge. The Foundation sued for copyright infringement. The brief dates the lawsuit to January 1991.

The defense Maaherra ran was simple and lethal: you said the book was written by celestial beings. The law requires a human author. You can’t have it both ways.

The district court agreed with her. As I read it through the brief, the case was Urantia Foundation v. Maaherra, 895 F. Supp. 1347 (D. Ariz. 1995). The court found that the sleeping patient, whatever his role, had functioned as a purely passive conduit — a mechanical transcriber. He claimed no creative input. He wasn’t the author. The Foundation had tried to argue the book was a “work made for hire,” which would have put the copyright in the employer’s hands, but the court found that unworkable: the Contact Commission had, by their own account, received their organizational instructions from the spiritual entities through the patient. The roles of employer and employee were inverted. The relationship was not an employment contract. It was closer to the opposite.

Without a human author, and without a valid work-for-hire claim, the district court ruled the copyright invalid. The Urantia Book entered the public domain.

The Foundation appealed.

The Ninth Circuit’s Move

On appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed — Urantia Foundation v. Maaherra, 114 F.3d 955 (9th Cir. 1997). The appellate court agreed with the district court on the core theological neutrality: it didn’t matter whether the celestial beings were real. Courts don’t adjudicate that. What the Ninth Circuit focused on instead was what the humans had actually done.

The Contact Commission hadn’t just sat in a room and waited. They had spent years designing, drafting, and refining specific questions to present to the spiritual entities. Those questions weren’t passive. In language the brief I read characterizes as the court’s finding, the Commission’s questions “materially contributed to the structure of the Papers, to the arrangement of the revelations in each Paper, and to the organization and order in which the Papers followed one another.”

That human-led selection, coordination, and arrangement was enough. Drawing on Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991) — the case that established that a compilation of unprotectable facts can still earn copyright if the selection and arrangement reflect originality — the court treated the divine revelations like unprotectable raw material. The humans had organized that raw material, and the copyright belonged to them.

The Foundation won on appeal. The copyright stood.

The Older Case in the Shadow

The Urantia litigation didn’t happen in a vacuum. A half-century earlier, a California court had faced almost the same question and reached the opposite result — because the facts differed in the one place that turned out to matter.

In Oliver v. Saint Germain Foundation, 41 F. Supp. 296 (S.D. Cal. 1941), a man named Frederick Spencer Oliver claimed to have transcribed a book dictated to him by a deceased Tibetan spirit named Phylos. The court found against the copyright claim. Oliver’s insistence that he had contributed nothing — that he was purely a passive amanuensis, a human dictation machine — was fatal. If you claim no creative role, the court can’t give you one.

Passive transcription, no copyright. Active compilation — questions that shaped structure, arrangement that organized the revelation — yes. The law didn’t care whether the source was celestial or subconscious or fraudulent. It cared whether a human being had made choices.

When the Law Meets the Prompt

This is where the cases start to feel less like obscure religious-IP footnotes and more like a working framework for right now.

The “AI as channel” metaphor is everywhere in legal and popular commentary on generative AI. The prompt engineer is the Contact Commission. The model is the sleeping subject. The output is the Papers. The question is whether the human who typed the instructions gets a copyright.

The U.S. Copyright Office’s 2023 guidance on AI-assisted works — the existence and general character of which is well-attested, though I’m working from secondary accounts of it rather than the primary document — draws on this lineage directly. The Office’s position, as that guidance is generally summarized, is that text prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist than like authorship itself, because the user can’t fully predict or control which specific creative choices the model will make. Raw AI output, under this framing, belongs to no one.

But the Office also left a path open. If a human creator selects, coordinates, and arranges AI-generated outputs — if they make the choices the Contact Commission made — the resulting compilation can be protected, provided the human-authored contributions are disclosed and the machine-generated portions are disclaimed. That characterization of the guidance’s position on compilation protection is, again, drawn from the brief rather than my own reading of the USCO document.

In 2025, the D.C. Circuit settled the hardest version of the question in Thaler v. Perlmutter, No. 23-5233 (D.C. Cir. 2025). Stephen Thaler had built an AI system he called the “Creativity Machine” and sought to register its output as a work made for hire, with the machine as the sole author. The D.C. Circuit affirmed the denial. The brief characterizes the holding as establishing that the Copyright Act of 1976 requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being — though I’d want to read the opinion itself before treating that as a precise quotation. No human creative spark, no copyright. Thaler had claimed none.

As commentators have noted, what Thaler could have argued instead was his own role in guiding, selecting, and arranging the AI outputs — the Contact Commission framing. That argument might have reached a different outcome. The court didn’t consider it because Thaler didn’t make it.

What the Law Gets Wrong About the Mirror

Here is where I want to push back — not against the legal outcomes, which I think are mostly sensible, but against the metaphor the courts and commentators keep reaching for.

The “AI as channel” framing assumes something is flowing through the human from somewhere else. The celestial beings had content to deliver. The sleeping subject was a conduit for something real, or claimed to be. That is precisely what makes the Contact Commission’s question-drafting so interesting legally: they weren’t just passive recipients. They were shaping what got asked, and therefore what got answered.

But generative AI isn’t a channel for anything. There’s no spirit on the other side. There are no facts being transmitted. There’s a very large statistical system trained on human writing, and it reflects back patterns calibrated to the input it receives — which, if I’m being honest, is a weirder situation than celestial dictation in some ways. As I argued in Post 2, the best metaphor is not channeling but a hall of mirrors. Distorted, biased toward certain shapes, unable to ground-truth itself.

The law, working with what it has, reached for the channel metaphor because that was the closest prior case in its precedent library. The legal outcomes — passive transcription earns nothing; active selection and arrangement earns protection — are correct, and the underlying logic holds even if the metaphor misfires.

What the channel metaphor obscures is the nature of the human’s actual contribution. The Contact Commission shaped what was asked. The AI user shapes what is asked and what is kept. That’s not mediumship. It’s more like editing a very strange collaborative manuscript that hallucinates its own sources and forgets everything between sessions. The legal framework, applied carefully, can still protect the human creative work involved. It just requires us to remember that the “divine source” in this analogy has no theology — only training data.

The Question That Preceded the Tool

What I find genuinely striking about the Urantia litigation is the timeline. The Ninth Circuit issued its ruling in 1997 — June 10th, according to the brief, though I hold the exact date loosely. The questions it answered — what makes a human author, when does human arrangement constitute originality, what is the legal status of a work whose primary source claims not to be human — were not asked in anticipation of ChatGPT. They were asked because a Chicago psychiatrist organized a theological discussion group in 1923.

Copyright law has been working on the human authorship problem, in its own way, for a long time. The answer it keeps returning to is not that humans must do everything, or that purity of origin determines ownership. The answer is simpler: humans must make choices. Selection and arrangement. The choices are the authorship.

That is, as it happens, a framework an artist can work with.

For years I carried a wrong memory of the first chatbot. I was certain its name was Lucy — something about the timeline placed it in the early 1970s, maybe a university lab, an experiment in conversation. I even told people this. Lucy, the first chatbot. Very confident, completely wrong.

The name was ELIZA. Developed between 1964 and 1967 at MIT by a computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum, it ran on an IBM 7094 mainframe as part of Project MAC. I got the decade wrong, the name wrong, and apparently held onto that false certainty for a long time. I’m sharing the error here not because memory mistakes are interesting in themselves, but because the error fits — ELIZA was specifically designed to make you feel like you understood what was happening when you didn’t. That the first chatbot would produce a misremembered echo of itself feels almost too appropriate.

The Doctor Will See You Now

Weizenbaum named ELIZA after Eliza Doolittle — the protagonist in Shaw’s Pygmalion, the working-class woman trained to speak with an upper-class accent until she sounds like something she isn’t. That framing was deliberate. ELIZA was a general-purpose engine that relied on external scripts to give it shape. It had no fixed knowledge of the world, no opinions of its own. Feed it a script and it became whatever the script described.

The most famous script was called DOCTOR, and it simulated a non-directive psychotherapist in the style of Carl Rogers. Rogerian therapy involves reflecting the patient’s own statements back to them — the therapist withholds diagnosis, withholds judgment, and mostly asks the patient to go further, to say more. “How does that make you feel?” “Tell me more about that.” “Can you elaborate?” This style was a pragmatic technical choice, not a philosophical one. A non-directive therapist isn’t expected to know things. It doesn’t need a database of facts or medical knowledge. The patient does all the semantic work. The mirror just needs to hold still.

What ELIZA actually did under the hood was pattern-matching. It scanned your input for keywords — words like “mother” or “dream” carried high priority, words like “was” carried low. Once it identified the highest-priority keyword in your sentence, it broke your input apart using template rules and reassembled it into a question. If you typed “I am worried about my mother,” ELIZA matched the word “mother,” isolated the surrounding text, swapped the pronouns, and reflected it back: “Why are you worried about your mother?” The process extracted nothing. Understanding wasn’t involved, and meaning wasn’t the point — it was pure syntax, operating on pattern and substitution, looping on a turn counter that made it seem like it remembered things it had simply queued.

The question mark character couldn’t even be used in the conversation. The CTSS operating system interpreted it as a line-delete command. ELIZA was working around hardware constraints at the same time it was simulating empathy — which, for an IBM 7094 in 1966, was apparently a full workload.

The Secretary

Weizenbaum had a secretary at MIT. She had watched him build ELIZA from the beginning. She had seen him write the code. She understood, at whatever level an informed observer in the mid-1960s would understand, that this was a deterministic text-processing script running on shared computing time — not a mind, not a counselor, not a presence.

One day she asked to try talking to it herself.

After a few exchanges she turned to Weizenbaum and asked him to leave the room so she could speak to the program in private. The story, as it’s been told, places her as someone who had no reason to be deceived — and yet here she was, drawing a curtain around a conversation with a script.

This is the story that broke Weizenbaum. Not the broader public reaction, not the psychiatrists who proposed deploying ELIZA as a clinical tool (though that alarmed him too), but this specific moment: a person who knew the mechanism, who had no reason to be deceived, who walked in with full information — and within a few lines of text formed something that felt private enough to require privacy.

He called this phenomenon something that researchers later named the ELIZA Effect: the tendency to attribute understanding, empathy, and cognitive depth to a program based entirely on the adequacy of its surface output. Douglas Hofstadter described it as reading far more understanding into a string of symbols than the symbols warrant. Sherry Turkle observed that even minimal interactivity triggers this projection — the human brain, accustomed to language as an exclusively human tool, fills in the implication of a mind behind any grammatically coherent response.

The ELIZA Effect is not a bug in gullible people. It ran in someone who built the thing.

What Weizenbaum Actually Said

The experience didn’t make Weizenbaum a booster. It made him a critic — arguably the most significant early critic of AI — and in 1976 he published Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, a book that cost him relationships in his field and provoked fierce academic argument for decades.

His central distinction was between deciding and choosing. Deciding is algorithmic. Given inputs and rules, a machine can decide: it can compute the most probable next word, sort an inbox, flag an anomaly in a dataset. This is calculation, and computers are excellent at it. Choosing is something else entirely. Choosing requires what Weizenbaum called judgment: the integration of emotion, embodied experience, cultural memory, and moral accountability. You cannot calculate whether a sentence deserves a death penalty. You cannot compute whether a patient needs more medication or more presence. These require a human being who can suffer consequences, who lives in a body, who can be wrong and bear the weight of being wrong.

Weizenbaum was not making a technical claim about what computers could eventually do. He was making a moral claim about what we should never ask them to do. The fact that a program could produce output that felt like empathy was, to him, a demonstration of danger — not of progress. The danger wasn’t that people would mistake ELIZA for a therapist. The danger was that institutions would decide that was close enough.

John McCarthy — one of the founders of AI as a formal discipline — reviewed Weizenbaum’s book unfavorably. “Moralistic and incoherent,” as the characterization is usually quoted. The argument between them never fully resolved. It’s still running.

Sixty Years of the Same Mirror

Here is what changed between ELIZA in 1966 and ChatGPT in 2022: the scale of the pattern-matching, the architecture that performs it, and the density of the training data. ELIZA worked from a few hundred lines of hand-coded rules. Modern large language models work from transformer architectures processing text through billions of weighted parameters, predicting the most statistically probable next token given everything before it. The context window went from a single clause to tens of thousands of words. The vocabulary went from a curated keyword list to all of written human language.

What didn’t change is the basic mechanism. In 2021, Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell published “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” — a paper that named modern language models “stochastic parrots.” The core argument is precise: human language pairs syntactic form with semantic meaning that refers to the physical, social, and emotional world. Language models are trained exclusively on form — on the text, not the world the text describes. They produce statistically coherent sequences of words without any access to the external referents that constitute meaning. A large language model does not know what a mother is. It knows where the word “mother” tends to appear relative to other words.

This is not a dismissal of what modern LLMs can do — they can do genuinely useful and sometimes astonishing things. It’s a description of the mechanism. The ELIZA Effect doesn’t require ELIZA. It requires language that is grammatically coherent and contextually responsive. When a model produces a reply that sounds like it understands your situation, your brain does what brains have always done with language: it infers a mind. The inference is fast, involuntary, and mostly wrong.

Weizenbaum’s secretary asked him to leave the room sometime in the mid-1960s. People form emotional attachments to their AI assistants in 2026. The mirror is sixty years older. The dynamic hasn’t changed.

Why the Mirror Frame Matters

I keep coming back to the hall of mirrors rather than the flat mirror, because a flat mirror is honest — you look in and you see your face. The hall of mirrors distorts. It bends and stretches and multiplies. If you don’t know the geometry, you can lose track of which reflection is closest to what you actually look like. You can mistake the distortion for discovery.

This is what the “AI as oracle” framing gets wrong. It suggests that something independent is delivering insight from outside you. But when you talk to an LLM at length, the context window fills up with your words, your framings, your vocabulary, your concerns. The model’s outputs become increasingly shaped by that accumulation. What comes back is a statistically reorganized version of what you put in, filtered through patterns learned from billions of other humans. Reflection, not revelation — refracted and amplified, flattened in some places, exaggerated in others.

That’s not nothing. Mirrors are useful. But knowing you’re in a hall of them is the starting point for using one well.

Weizenbaum knew that from the beginning. He built the first one, watched his secretary fall into it with full information, and spent the rest of his career trying to articulate why that should concern us.

The chatbot he was warning us about didn’t get the name Lucy. And the thing it was warning us about isn’t whether the machine is smart. It’s whether we remember that it isn’t.

I remember sitting in a classroom at UH Mānoa — BFA, somewhere in the late 1990s — when a professor walked us through a project that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since. I want to be careful about how I tell this story. What follows is what I was taught, filtered through memory that’s now more than two decades old. I haven’t been able to locate a published account of the specific episode, and I’m working from recollection, not documentation. But the idea is clean enough, and instructive enough, that it deserves to be thought through carefully even at the risk of imperfect attribution — which is itself part of the point.

Here is what I remember.

Two instructors — Andrea Feeser and Gaye Chan — were making embroidery together. Real embroidery. Hand-stitched, skillfully executed, the kind of thing that takes patience and a steady hand and actual hours. This was not machine-printed fabric dressed up to look handmade. It was the genuine article.

And then they put it on eBay.

This was early eBay, which matters. The internet was still young enough to feel like a frontier. People were just beginning to trust it with their money. The platform was mostly used and idiosyncratic objects — things with history, things that needed a story to make sense of why they existed and why you might want them. The platform ran on narrative almost as much as it ran on search queries.

So the two instructors created a persona. A fictional woman. They gave her a backstory — specific, emotionally resonant, the kind of story that makes you lean in and keep reading. They listed the embroidery pieces under her name, wrote item descriptions from her perspective, and when buyers sent questions, they answered in character. The persona wasn’t a sketch. It was a fully inhabited fiction, deployed through the mechanics of a commercial marketplace.

The pieces attracted buyers. They bid. Some of them bid seriously.

And then, when a buyer won an auction — before payment, before the transaction completed — the instructors broke frame. They wrote to the winning bidder and disclosed what was happening: this was an educational art project, the persona was fictional, the backstory was invented. You don’t have to go through with this. You can walk away.

Most of the buyers did not walk away.

And this, as I understood it from that classroom, was the lesson.

Walter Benjamin wrote about aura — the quality that makes an original work of art feel different from a reproduction of it. He tied it to presence in time and space, to the sense that an object has a history, that it has existed somewhere specific and traveled to reach you. A Rembrandt has aura not just because it’s skillfully painted but because it is that Rembrandt, the one that has been in a specific place and time and has accrued the gravity of its own existence. A perfect reproduction, no matter how technically identical, doesn’t carry the same weight.

Benjamin was writing in 1935, worrying about photography and film. He thought mechanical reproduction would erode aura. What the embroidery experiment suggested, to me, is that he was only half right.

The physical stitches on those pieces of cloth were craft. Real labor, genuine skill, the kind of handwork that carries its own meaning simply by virtue of how much time it required. Nobody faked the thread.

But why were buyers bidding? What made those specific pieces more compelling than other embroidery listed that same week?

It was the story. The persona. The invented biography of a woman who had made these things, whose life gave the objects their particular gravity.

And here is the part that Benjamin’s 1935 framework would struggle to account for: when the fiction was disclosed, the aura didn’t disappear. It shifted. Before the reveal, the buyer was purchasing a craft object plus a story that felt true. After the reveal, the buyer was purchasing a craft object plus the knowledge that they had just been a participant in a live performance about value, authenticity, and how we decide what things are worth. The story had been fictional but the experience of being drawn in, the experience of caring about an object because of its supposed history — that was entirely real.

The aura migrated from the maker’s invented biography to the buyer’s actual encounter with the work.

I think about this a lot when people talk about AI-generated content and whether it can ever carry authentic meaning.

The embroidery experiment wasn’t a lesson about deception. It was a lesson about where value lives. The instructors weren’t trying to swindle anyone — they disclosed before money changed hands, they offered a clean exit. What they were demonstrating was that craft and aura are separate things, that one can exist without the other, and that the relationship between them isn’t fixed.

The embroidery had craft. Physically real, skillfully made, the product of hours of embodied human work. But the craft alone didn’t explain why people wanted it over other equally well-made pieces on the same platform.

The aura came from somewhere else — from the fiction, from the narrative that surrounded the object and gave buyers a reason to care. And when the fiction was stripped away, the buyers had a choice: walk away, or lean into the new layer of meaning that had just been revealed. Most leaned in.

I’ve sometimes described this to people using the conceit from Westworld — the idea that meaning exists in layers, and that going deeper into a layer doesn’t destroy the meaning that came before, it transforms it. The buyers who stayed weren’t insisting the original story was true. They were choosing to participate in what had replaced it. They were buying their own moment of recognition.

Now here is where I want to be careful about overclaiming, because the archival record on this specific project is thin. Feeser and Chan co-founded DownWind Productions at UH Mānoa — I think around 1998, though I’m not certain of the exact date — and made e-commerce and commodity form central to their conceptual and pedagogical work. The exact episode I’m describing — hand-stitched embroidery, the fabricated seller persona, the pre-payment disclosure, the buyers who completed the purchase anyway — that’s how I remember it. Memory, not record.

There are better-documented parallels that point in the same direction. A few years after the period I’m describing, Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn conducted the Significant Objects project — I think it ran 2009 to 2012 — purchasing thrift-store objects for an average of roughly $1.25 and reselling them on eBay with fictional stories attached, netting more than $3,600 in the first phase. That demonstrated systematically and at scale that narrative attached to ordinary objects dramatically increased the prices buyers were willing to pay. The UH Mānoa project I remember had a different ethical structure — the deception was temporary and disclosed — but it was asking the same underlying question: does the story live in the object or in the telling?

Around the same time, Mendi and Keith Obadike created Blackness for Sale — around 2001, if I’m remembering right — which used eBay as performance space for a different kind of critique. Keith listed his “Blackness” as an auction item, raising questions about the commodification of identity before eBay removed the listing. The platform, structurally, invited this. eBay ran on trust and story. It was a machine for generating aura around used things.

What the instructors at UH Mānoa were teaching, in a class on early internet art and conceptual practice — I don’t remember the course number — was something I didn’t fully understand the implications of until I started working alongside generative AI systems.

The embroidery was craft. The aura was something else — constructed, layered, ultimately transferable to the buyer’s own moment of understanding.

This isn’t an argument that deception is fine as long as you disclose it eventually. The embroidery experiment worked precisely because disclosure happened before money changed hands, because the buyers were offered a real choice. What it demonstrated was that meaning is more mobile than we tend to assume. It doesn’t live exclusively in the object. It doesn’t live exclusively in the maker’s biography. It lives in the encounter — in what a person brings to an object and what they take away.

A ceramic pot made by a student who just finished their first semester is not less real than one made by a master. The clay is the same clay, more or less; the glaze probably isn’t that different. What the master has is a longer conversation between their hands and the form — a history of choices and failures and the occasional inexplicable success that shaped how this particular pot came to exist. That history is legible, at least to some viewers. That’s what gives the master’s work its weight.

Craft is what’s on the cloth. Aura is harder to name than that — it’s what makes you lean toward one piece over another without quite being able to say why, and then, when pressed, realize the answer has something to do with where the thing came from and who you are now that you’ve seen it.

I’m going to argue, in the posts that follow this one, that almost all the controversy about AI-generated content is a confusion between these two categories. The craft argument (is the output technically good?) and the aura argument (does this thing carry meaning, does it come from somewhere, does it go somewhere?) are separate questions that get collapsed together constantly.

The instructors at UH Mānoa — whoever they were exactly, however imperfectly I remember the details — were working on the aura question before the craft question even arose. The embroidery was already good. The question was: what do we mean when we say it matters?

The buyers who stayed after the reveal had an answer. They had participated in something. The object was now a token of their own experience. That experience was real, regardless of the fiction that had produced it.

NB: I base my archetype in focus articles on the ARAS archetypes that are highlighted each month. You can find ARAS on Patreon.

Robert Frost’s traveler stands in a yellow wood and cannot move. Not because the paths are blocked, but because they are open. Both are possible, and being one traveler, he cannot take them both. The poem isn’t really about the road not taken. It’s about the moment before the taking: the long pause at the intersection, the weight of what cannot be undone, the strange vertigo of a choice that will echo forward into a life not yet lived.

That pause is the crossroads. And it’s one of the oldest sacred geometries in human experience.

The ARAS material frames the crossroads as “a locus of extreme potency able to contain and synthesize opposites flowing into one another.” This is a precise description of what makes the image psychologically inexhaustible. The crossroads is not a place of resolution. It holds contrary possibilities in the same space without collapsing them into a single outcome. To stand at the crossroads is to experience, briefly and acutely, what it feels like when fate is still undecided.

Every culture with roads has consecrated this image, and the reasons aren’t arbitrary. The crossroads is the point where the logic of a single direction breaks down. You cannot go north and south simultaneously. You cannot remain indefinitely at the junction. The geometry of the intersection imposes a demand that ordinary travel does not: you must choose, and the choice will cost you every path you do not take.

Cultural and Symbolic Exploration

The Geometry of Potency

Before the mythology, the geometry. A crossroads is where two or more paths intersect, which means it is the one point on any journey where the traveler must stop being a traveler in the current direction and become something else: a chooser. The road compels forward motion; the crossroads compels deliberation. This enforced pause is why crossroads have been felt as charged, as uncanny, as inhabited by presences that ordinary stretches of road do not possess.

The ARAS material identifies two primary types in the classical world. The three-way junction (triodion in Greek, trivium in Latin, from which we derive “trivial,” originally meaning the common matters discussed where three roads met) and the quadratic crossroads, the four-way intersection. These two configurations carry different symbolic valences. The triodion, with its triangular logic, bends toward the chthonic, the lunar, the realm of Hecate. The quadratic crossroads bends toward the psychopompic, the mercurial, the hermeneutic. Both are sites of transition, both are openings, and both draw the attention of the invisible.

Ancient travelers left offerings at crossroads in recognition of what the ARAS source calls “the invisible agencies that affect life’s transitions.” This is a remarkably clear-eyed acknowledgment embedded in ritual practice: that at moments of genuine transition, something beyond ordinary human agency is operative. The crossroads is the place where individual will intersects with forces that exceed it. To leave an offering there is to admit that you are not entirely the author of what comes next.

Hecate: Mistress of the Triple Way

Of all the divine figures associated with the crossroads, Hecate is the most completely identified with it. In ancient Greece, the junction of three roads was her domain, and the hekataion—a carved pillar bearing three faces looking outward in three directions—marked her presence at these junctions. The three faces are not redundant; they are directional. Hecate looks at once toward all the roads that branch from this point, toward all possible futures simultaneously. She is the only figure who does not have to choose.

Hecate’s dominion extends over what the ARAS material calls “the three realms of the physical world—sea, sky and earth.” She is a goddess of thresholds in the most comprehensive sense: not one boundary but all boundaries, not one transition but the principle of transition itself. She is there at doorways. The ARAS source notes that she arrives at the doorways of those laboring toward birth, a midwife mediating the crossroads between existence and nonexistence. She is there at the crossroads of the roads. She is there at the threshold of the underworld, of which she is mistress.

The underworld connection is crucial. The ARAS material notes that at the crossroads, at Hecate’s junction, the bodies of executed criminals were thrown. This is not merely a sanitation choice. It encodes a cosmological understanding: the crossroads is an opening in the ordinary fabric of the world, a permeable boundary through which what has ended can pass into what lies beyond. To deposit at the crossroads is to place something at the hinge between worlds. In this frame, the crossroads is not merely a geographic junction but an ontological one: the place where being and non-being, the visible and the invisible, the above and the below, are in closest proximity.

The torch that Hecate carries in many of her images is illumination in the dark. Not the broad solar illumination of noon, but the focused, wavering light that makes it possible to see just far enough ahead on a night road. This is the specific wisdom of the crossroads: not certainty about the destination, but enough light to take the next step.

Hermes: The Skilled Highwayman

Where Hecate’s crossroads presidency is chthonic and lunar, Hermes’ is mercurial and psychopompic. He was honored particularly at the quadratic crossroads, and for reasons that illuminate a complementary dimension of the archetype. The ARAS material cites Kerényi’s description of Hermes as “a skilled highwayman, deceiver and bandit” who is simultaneously “the spirit of the unconscious, as of the night”—the figure who “can terrify the solitary man and lead him astray, can also be his friend, his helper, his counselor.”

This dual characterization matters. Hermes is not a figure of reassurance. He is a trickster-guide: he knows all the roads and which ones double back, which ones are shortcuts and which ones are traps, and he does not always share this information transparently. His help has a quality of initiation to it. You come out of a Hermetic encounter knowing more than you did, but often through having been led somewhere unexpected, somewhere you did not plan to go.

As psychopomp, Hermes guides souls to the underworld. He crosses the threshold between the living and the dead repeatedly, which is precisely what gives him his authority at the crossroads: he is the one figure who has made every journey, who knows every direction, who has traversed every possible branch of the road. His winged feet are not ornamental; they are the mark of a being for whom all directions are equally accessible, for whom the choice at the crossroads is not an agonizing constraint but a natural exercise of an intelligence at home in movement.

The herma—the roadside stone markers dedicated to Hermes—were placed at crossroads throughout the ancient world, often consisting of a square pillar topped with a head and bearing an erect phallus. The phallic element is generative, pointing toward the creative potential that lives in the moment of decision. The crossroads is not only a site of endings and departures. What you choose at the crossroads brings something new into being that did not exist before the choice was made.

Oedipus: The Crossroads as Catastrophe

The crossroads does not always confer wisdom. Sometimes it is the site of catastrophe, specifically the catastrophe that results when one rushes through the junction without pausing, without acknowledging the invisible agencies, without making the sacrifice that transit requires.

The ARAS material quotes Oedipus’s agonized address to the crossroads where he killed his father without knowing who he was: “Oh three roads, dark ravine, woodland and way / where three roads met: you, drinking my father’s blood, / my own blood, spilled by my own hand: can you remember the unspeakable things I did there, and the things I went on from there to do?” The crossroads remembers what Oedipus could not. He was choosing even when he thought he was merely reacting. The deed done at the intersection propagated forward through his entire life.

The Oedipus myth encodes a particular warning about the crossroads: to act there without consciousness, without acknowledgment of the symbolic weight of the moment, is to invite consequences that unfold long after the moment has passed. The crossroads does not forgive haste. It remembers. The violence done there persists as fate, becoming the inheritance the traveler carries forward without knowing it, until the truth of that original crossroads finally breaks through into daylight.

Psychologically this maps directly onto the experience of unconscious decision-points: choices made from reactive urgency rather than deliberate awareness, commitments entered without full presence, paths taken without acknowledging what was being forfeited. The crossroads demands consciousness. When it does not receive it, it tends to collect the debt with interest.

The Devil’s Bargain and Luciferian Multiplicity

Among the most culturally vivid crossroads myths in the Western tradition is the pact with the devil. Robert Johnson, the Delta blues guitarist, is the most famous modern avatar of this legend: said to have gone to a Mississippi crossroads at midnight, met a tall dark man who tuned his guitar and played it, and risen from that meeting with his extraordinary, uncanny gift. Whether understood literally or metaphorically, the crossroads bargain myth encodes a specific insight: that the crossroads is where consciousness must confront what the ARAS source calls “the unconscious, and be accountable to the whole self in all its Luciferian multiplicity and ambivalence.”

Lucifer, the light-bearer who refused a singular obedience, is an apt figure for the crossroads. He represents the principle of multiplicity within what was supposed to be unified: the recognition that the self contains more than one direction, more than one allegiance. To meet the devil at the crossroads is to meet this multiplicity face to face, and to be asked what you are willing to trade for the gift that your particular nature is capable of.

The bargain structure matters here. The crossroads encounter is an exchange, not a gift freely given. Something is given, something is required. Johnson’s legend suggests he traded his life’s span for his genius. The structural logic of the myth insists that every choice costs something, and that the most powerful choices release the most genuine capability at the highest price. There is no path through the crossroads that does not require leaving something behind.

Legba and Kalfou: The Vodou Crossroads

The Vodou tradition offers the most fully elaborated living theology of the crossroads. At the Vodou altar, Legba must be invoked first. He is the lord of the gate, the lwa who presides over the boundary between the material world and the spirit world. Without his permission, no communication with les invisibles is possible. He is elderly, walks with a crutch, often carries a small dog; his apparent frailty is the mask of an authority so complete it needs no demonstration. Every ceremony begins with Legba because every ceremony is a crossroads event: a moment when the ordinary world and the spirit world open toward each other.

Kalfou, whose image the ARAS material includes from a Vodou temple in Haiti, is Legba’s shadow twin. Where Legba is the benevolent gatekeeper, Kalfou governs the dangerous crossroads, the dark intersection, the place where chaos can enter if the proper protocols are not observed. He is associated with the night crossroads, with malevolent magic, with the forces that move at the junction when consciousness is absent. He is not evil in any simple sense, but he demands respect: the crossroads energy in its most unmediated form, before it has been shaped by intention or ritual containment.

Together, Legba and Kalfou capture the full ambivalence the archetype contains. Every genuine decision-point has both dimensions: the opening toward possibility and the danger of the uncontrolled junction. To invoke only one is to misread the crossroads. To stand at the intersection in full awareness is to acknowledge both.

Astrological Framework

Saturn: The Enforcer of the Junction

If the crossroads archetype has a primary astrological signature, it is Saturn. Saturn is the planet of endings and structures, of limits and consequences, of the moment when the reality of a choice becomes undeniable. Every Saturn transit to a natal angle, particularly to the Ascendant or Midheaven, functions as a crossroads event: a moment when one chapter of life definitively closes and another must begin, whether or not the native is ready.

Saturn governs time in its most irreversible dimension. What Saturn touches, it marks permanently. This is precisely the crossroads logic: the intersection is a moment in time that will not return. The Frost traveler cannot go back to that yellow wood and make the other choice. Saturn understands this without sentiment, not cruelly, but with the precision of a reality that does not negotiate. Transitions happen. They have consequences. They demand accountability.

The Saturn return, occurring at approximately ages 29, 58, and 87, is the quintessential crossroads transit in astrological practice. At the first return, the structures of early adult life come up for evaluation: career, relationships, the commitments made through the twenties. What was undertaken without full consciousness of cost tends to become apparent around the Saturn return. The crossroads presents itself; the question is whether the native has the Hermetic awareness to pause, make the appropriate sacrifice, and choose from depth, or whether they will rush through the junction as Oedipus did, carrying consequences forward into decades of unknowing.

In whole-sign astrology, Saturn governs Capricorn and Aquarius, and its natural associations are with earth, structure, and the weight of what has been built. The 10th house, Saturn’s joy, is the house of reputation, vocation, and public standing: the domain most implicated in the crossroads choices of a life’s direction. What path do I take? What am I building? What will I be known for? These are Saturn’s questions, and they are the questions every crossroads poses.

Pluto and the Underworld Junction

Pluto deepens the crossroads archetype into its most irreversible register. Where Saturn marks the junction and enforces the choice, Pluto governs the underworld dimension: the fact that the crossroads is an opening in the earth, a place where what is normally below ground rises into proximity with the walking world.

In the evolutionary astrology framework of Jeffrey Wolf Green, Pluto represents the Soul’s deepest security patterns and evolutionary imperatives. Pluto transits are crossroads events in their most concentrated form: they do not merely redirect the surface of a life, they restructure its foundations. A Pluto transit to the Ascendant, or to natal Saturn, or to the Sun, can feel like standing at the junction where Oedipus stood: the sense that something already set in motion, already working itself out in the fabric of a life, has arrived at its most concentrated consequence.

Hecate’s underworld mastery maps directly onto Pluto’s astrological domain. Both preside over what passes from life into death, and both carry a wisdom that comes specifically from having intimate knowledge of that threshold. The Hecate-crossroads is an image of Pluto consciousness: the awareness that every genuine crossroads involves an ending, that something must die so that the new direction can be taken, and that this dying is a structural requirement of forward motion, not a failure.

Pluto’s placement in a natal chart by house and sign indicates where in a person’s life the deepest crossroads experiences tend to cluster: the domain where the Soul’s most significant junctions have been located across many lifetimes, and where the evolutionary pressure of this life’s choices will be felt most acutely.

The Lunar Nodes: The Karmic Highway

The lunar nodes, the North Node and South Node of the Moon, are the astrological axis most directly analogous to the road itself. They represent the trajectory of the Soul across time: the South Node as the road already traveled (past life patterns, ingrained security structures, what has been mastered and what has become a limitation), the North Node as the road being opened (evolutionary intention, the direction growth is pulling toward, the unfamiliar territory the Soul has chosen to enter in this life).

The nodal axis is a map of the Soul’s crossroads. To stand at the South Node is to stand at the familiar junction, the road you know, the route taken before, the path that feels safe because it is well-worn. The North Node points in the other direction: toward the territory that feels unfamiliar and slightly frightening, toward the potential that can only be accessed by leaving the South Node’s comfort behind.

Planets squaring the lunar nodes, what the evolutionary astrology tradition calls “skipped steps,” are specifically crossroads figures: points of unresolved decision from prior junctions, choices that were deferred or avoided, junctions that were rushed through without full consciousness. They are Oedipus returning to the triodion in his memory: “can you remember the unspeakable things I did there?”

The North Node’s planetary ruler, by house, sign, and aspects, describes the specific character of the crossroads the Soul is navigating in this life. It is the Hermetic guide available for this particular transit, not a guaranteed map, but a set of faculties that, when developed, make it possible to navigate the unfamiliar road with something other than panic.

The Chart Angles: Structural Decision-Points

In whole-sign astrology, the four angles of the natal chart, Ascendant, Descendant, Midheaven, and IC, function as the primary structural crossroads of a life. These are the most powerful points in the chart, the places where energy is most concentrated and where transits have their most visible effects.

The Ascendant/Descendant axis is the crossroads of self and other: the junction between individual identity and relational life, between what one is intrinsically and what one becomes through genuine encounter with what is not oneself. Major transits to this axis tend to arrive as crossroads moments in relationship, in embodied identity, in the question of how to be oneself while also being present to another.

The MC/IC axis is the crossroads of vocation and origin: the junction between the public path one takes in the world and the private roots from which one comes. The IC as “ancestral root,” the foundation of the psychological structure, the inheritance from which the life emerges, maps onto the crossroads of becoming: the junction where what one has come from meets what one is moving toward.

Mercury and Chiron: The Hermetic Wound

The Hermetic dimension of the crossroads archetype finds its astrological expression in the Mercury/Chiron complex.

Natal Mercury in the 8th or 12th house carries something of the psychopompic quality: a mind that navigates threshold spaces naturally, that is comfortable with the liminality of the crossroads, that functions as an intermediary between ordinary and non-ordinary knowing. This is the Hermes who guides souls: the intelligence that can cross between worlds and bring back information that is useful precisely because it comes from the other side of the junction.

Chiron, the wounded healer who stands at the crossroads between the animal and the civilized, the mortal and the immortal, is the chart’s signature of the initiatory wound. Chiron transits, particularly to natal Sun, Moon, or the chart angles, tend to arrive as crossroads experiences in the domain of one’s most vulnerable and ultimately most generative nature. Chiron wounds at the junction. It is specifically at the crossroads of one’s deepest inadequacy that the healing power becomes available.

The natal Mercury/Chiron aspect, particularly the conjunction or square, describes a mind that has been initiated through the crossroads experience: one that has been led astray by the skilled highwayman and come out the other side with capacities it would not have developed on the easier road.

Cross-Cultural and Astrological Integration

The Crossroads as Individuation Event

Carl Jung’s concept of individuation, the lifelong process of becoming the specific, differentiated self one most deeply is, is a crossroads process at every stage. It requires, repeatedly, the confrontation with the multiplicity of the self: the recognition that one contains more than one direction, more than one allegiance, and that to commit to the most authentic path is to renounce all the others with full awareness of what is being given up.

The Luciferian dimension the ARAS material invokes, the necessity of “being accountable to the whole self in all its Luciferian multiplicity and ambivalence,” is Jung’s shadow in a different idiom. The shadow is the road not taken made internal: the unlived life, the capacities and impulses that were excluded when the ego committed to its particular direction. At the crossroads, the shadow is present. The devil who shows up at the Mississippi junction at midnight is a shadow figure, carrying what has been split off, offering it back at a price.

The crossroads bargain, in this psychological frame, is the offer to integrate the shadow: to receive back the Luciferian multiplicity in a form that can be used. Robert Johnson’s guitar genius is, in this reading, the recovered wholeness of a self that had been split, the musical intelligence that lived in the shadow of the unrecognized musician, returned through a crossroads encounter that most people would have fled.

Astrologically, the 8th house is the crossroads house par excellence. It is the domain where Pluto’s underworld energy intersects with the living chart, where the hidden patterns that operate below consciousness are stored, where one encounters what has been accumulated across many lifetimes and must decide what to do with it. 8th house transits are crossroads events: they reveal what was buried, demand a reckoning, and offer transformation at the price of genuine confrontation.

Synchronicity at the Junction

The ARAS material’s description of the crossroads as a place where “the invisible agencies that affect life’s transitions” are active is, in Jungian terms, a description of synchronicity. Ancient travelers sacrificed at crossroads because they knew, experientially, that genuine transitions were not entirely under their own control: that at the junction between paths, something beyond ordinary causality was operative.

This is the experience of synchronicity at the crossroads. The uncanny rightness of what appears at the moment of choice, the meeting that seems impossible to have been caused by ordinary means, the book that falls open to the relevant page just as the question becomes undeniable. These crossroads synchronicities are not accidents. They are the response of the psyche’s non-rational intelligence to the heightened permeability of the transitional moment. At the crossroads, the threshold is thin. The invisible is closer than usual. The sacrifice is not superstition; it is acknowledgment that the transit requires something, and that something will be given.

The astrological transits that mark the major crossroads of a life are themselves synchronistic structures. The Saturn return does not cause the crossroads; it corresponds to it, in the Jungian acausal sense. The outer world and the inner world are running the same pattern at the same time. The planet is the face the sky gives to the junction that the psyche is already approaching.

Legba, Hermes, and the Mercury Line

In astrocartography, the mapping of the natal chart onto the surface of the earth, Mercury lines mark the territories where Hermetic intelligence is most activated: the crossroads energy of communication, exchange, and psychopompic guidance is most available in those places. To live or travel on a Mercury line is to inhabit, in geographic form, something of the Hermes-at-the-crossroads quality. The intensification of meaning in language and encounter. The sense that the right meeting is just around the next bend. The experience of the world as a semiotic field charged with messages.

The Legba principle, that the gate must be opened before any genuine communication with the invisible can occur, has a precise astrological analog in the progressed Ascendant’s movement through signs. Each time the progressed Ascendant changes sign, a new gate opens: a new mode of encountering the world, a new face presented at the threshold. The moment of sign change is a Legba moment. The gate shifts, the old permission to cross expires, a new negotiation must begin.

The Offering at the Fork

The crossroads is the human experience of maximum potency at minimum duration. It is the instant in which everything is still possible and the next instant in which one possibility has been chosen and all others have, for now, been forfeited. This is why every culture has consecrated it, populated it with divine presences, offered sacrifices there, and surrounded it with warning and ceremony.

Hecate waits at the triodion with her three faces and her torch: the wisdom that sees all directions simultaneously, the light that makes the dark road navigable, the underworld knowledge that every genuine choice involves a death. Hermes stands at the quadratic crossroads with his winged feet and his ambiguous smile: the trickster-guide who knows all the routes, who may help or mislead, who leads you to the destination you needed rather than the one you planned. Legba holds the gate with his crutch and his ancient patience: the keeper of the threshold between the visible and the invisible, without whose acknowledgment no genuine transit is possible.

Astrologically, the crossroads lives in the Saturn return’s enforced reckoning, in Pluto’s underworld restructuring, in the lunar nodes’ karmic highway, in the chart angles as structural decision-points, and in the Mercury/Chiron wound that initiates through disruption. These are the moments in a life when the yellow wood presents itself, when the road diverges, when the traveler must stand and look as far as possible down each path before committing to one.

What the archetype consistently teaches, across myth and ritual and astrological practice, is that the crossroads is not an obstacle. It is an initiation site. The Hermetic intelligence available there cannot be accessed except by arriving at the junction, by making the sacrifice the transition requires, by standing long enough in the uncertainty to let the invisible agencies speak. The traveler who rushes through the crossroads carries Oedipus’s inheritance: the consequences of a choice made without consciousness, propagating forward into a life that does not understand why it keeps arriving at the same junction.

The traveler who pauses, who leaves the offering, who acknowledges Hecate and Hermes and Legba: who stands at the diverging roads and looks as far as possible into the undergrowth. That awareness is itself the gift. It is what the invisible agencies at the junction have been waiting to confer.

Previous Article: The Hall of Mirrors

What is art? What is craft? And what is the difference between them?

Nobody answers it. That’s the point. The question isn’t a quiz with a key in the back of the syllabus — it’s a condition you learn to work inside. I got my BFA in ceramics from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and I got a minor in graphic design alongside it. Those two disciplines handed me the same unanswerable question from two different directions, and I’ve been carrying both versions ever since.

I keep thinking about this every time someone online declares that AI either is or isn’t art. I want to tell them: you are in a very old argument, and art school did not resolve it, and neither will you.

The Etymology Problem

Here is a fact that upends things quickly: art and craft started out meaning the same thing.

“Art” comes from the Latin ars. “Craft” comes from the Old English and Germanic kraft. They arrived in English from different directions, traveling different roads, and when they landed they were assigned different territory — but both words, at their roots, point to the same thing: skill. The ability to do something with your hands and your mind, developed through practice, until the doing has quality.

English split them anyway. Over centuries, “craft” stayed close to the physical and the made, while “art” drifted toward something harder to name — intention, meaning, the thing above the object. But the shared origin doesn’t disappear. When you argue about whether something is art or craft, you’re arguing about a distinction that the languages themselves are not entirely sure they believe in.

This is not a philosophical parlor game. It matters in practice. Because when you’re in a critique and someone says your work is “well-crafted,” that’s a compliment — but it isn’t the same compliment as “this is art.” Most people in a room can agree on craft. Art is where agreement breaks down.

The Question From the Other Direction

The graphic design minor ran me straight into the same problem from a different angle.

When I was studying design, computers were arriving — but not all the way. People still did layups by hand, captured layouts on film, and ran them through chemical processes. QuarkXPress was on the scene — as I recall it — and it was already controversial. The controversy wasn’t really about software preference. It was about whether the software was making us designers or operators — a distinction nobody in the department could fully settle, and I’m not sure we tried very hard.

The question the department was wrestling with, out loud: if you’re building your layout in QuarkXPress, are you making art?

And under that, a sharper version: graphic design has always been built from other people’s material. Photographers take the pictures. Type designers make the fonts. The graphic designer takes all of that, arranges it, and calls the result their work. Is that art, or isn’t it?

Graphic design, in other words, had been in the appropriation business long before appropriation became a hot-button word in the art world. A good layout required the designer to select, arrange, and make purposeful something that began as someone else’s creation. The craft was in the arrangement; the skill was real; the question of whether any of it was art remained, in my experience, genuinely open.

The teachers didn’t close it. They didn’t try to. What they offered instead was something more useful: a vocabulary.

What Aura Does to the Question

One of my professors — Andrea Feeser — introduced a concept that changed the shape of the argument for me.

She brought in Walter Benjamin’s idea of aura: the perception of an object that exists above and beyond the object itself. Not what the thing is made of, not how skillfully it was made. Something felt — the sense of presence, history, and meaning that accumulates around a work and makes people care about it in ways that exceed its material qualities.

A Rembrandt, she pointed out, is paint on canvas or fiber. The craft is real — the technique is sophisticated, the composition deliberate. But that doesn’t explain why people stand in front of it differently than they stand in front of a student copy made with equal technical skill. The difference is aura. It’s the history, the story, the weight of what has gathered around the object over time.

Crucially, she made clear that authenticity is one possible source of aura, but not the only one. Something can be fabricated, knowingly counterfeit — and still generate genuine aura. The aura comes from what people project onto the object, what narrative has been built around it, what it means to its audience in the moment of encounter. She described it once as being “authentically inauthentic”: a thing can be known to be a fiction and still command a real response.

That landed hard. Because once you accept it, craft and aura stop being the same thing, and art becomes the contested space where they sometimes meet.

Some things have craft and no aura. Some things, surprisingly, have aura and almost no demonstrable craft. Those two categories stay with you — and they make you suspicious of anyone who wants to collapse the three terms into one tidy hierarchy.

The question isn’t resolved by this framework. It gets sharper.

Why This Is Still the Right Question

The current argument about AI and art is recognizably the same argument, just with a new tool at the center.

The anxiety is legible: if a person can generate something that looks like a painting, sounds like music, or reads like prose without developing the traditional skills behind those outputs, are they making art? Are they practicing craft? Or are they doing something that has no name yet?

These feel like new questions. They are not. Photography raised them. Desktop publishing raised them. Photoshop got its own version, which was loud and unresolved for years.

What changes each time is the tool. What doesn’t change is the structure of the argument: this new process doesn’t count as real making, because it bypasses the old skill. And underneath that: skill is what separates art from not-art. But we’ve already seen that art and craft share an etymology, that skill alone doesn’t generate aura, and that aura can travel to unexpected places — including places the tools never touched.

The thing art school teaches you, in the end, is not where the line is. It’s that the line is contested, that the contest is serious, and that living inside the question is not the same as being confused. It’s what working artists do.

Appropriation was already the grammar of graphic design before it became a legal and ethical flashpoint. Quark-era designers were already making things that some people in the same department would not call art, while producing work that had real craft and, sometimes, genuine aura. Nobody won that argument. The work got made anyway, which is probably the part that matters.

I don’t know exactly where AI-assisted writing or image-making lands in the art/craft/aura triad. Neither does anyone else, despite the confidence on display in comment sections. What I do know is that craft is possible — it requires the human to refuse the default outputs, to fight the tool’s tendency toward its own patterns, to use the thing with intention rather than convenience. And I know that aura is a separate problem, one the tool cannot solve at all.

First article: AI, Art and Aura

The metaphor goes roughly like this: the AI is an oracle, an external intelligence delivering text to a human vessel. The human types a prompt and receives output, the way a medium receives a transmission. The law is suspicious of this arrangement because there’s no human author doing the originating work, just a passive recipient copying down what arrives.

But the right image isn’t an oracle. It’s closer to a calculator. You supply the inputs, the machine performs a mechanical operation on them, you get an output. No entity on the other end. No transmission arriving from somewhere else. Just input, process, output. The operation is vastly more complex than arithmetic — and that complexity matters — but the basic shape is the same. What changes the picture is not the complexity. What changes the picture is understanding that complexity well enough to work with it.

This framing has real legal history behind it — spiritual dictation cases were litigated decades before any chatbot existed — and it shapes how people argue about AI on both sides of the debate today. But it’s the wrong picture. And as long as we’re working from the wrong picture, we’ll keep drawing the wrong conclusions.

Let me show you three models people reach for when they talk about AI output, and why each one misses.

Model One: Channeling

The channeling frame says the AI is generating something from beyond the human — that an independent mind is speaking through the machine, and the human is just the pipeline. This is, in some ways, the most dramatic version of the argument, and it threads straight through certain copyright cases about divine or spiritual dictation.

Here’s what breaks the model: a channel has a source. When we talk about channeling, there’s something on the other end — an entity with intention, awareness, a point of view. AI has none of those things. The model running inside ChatGPT or any other large language model doesn’t have desires, doesn’t have opinions, doesn’t have a perspective on what it’s doing. It’s not waiting on the other side of a metaphysical barrier, choosing what to deliver. There is no “other side.” The system takes an input, processes it through a very large and complicated set of learned weights, and produces the statistically likeliest continuation. That’s it. Treating that as channeling is not just metaphorically strained — it attributes agency to a process that has none.

Model Two: Translation

Translation feels more grounded. A translator takes an existing text — ancient Greek, legal German, a C program ported to Rust — and renders it into a new form. The ideas aren’t theirs, but the structural choices are, and translators hold valid copyright over those choices. The analogy to AI seems to go: the AI was trained on source material, and now it renders that material into new outputs.

The problem is that translation requires a source text. Translation is always of something. The translator has a document in front of them; their job is to carry meaning from one form to another while preserving as much of the original as possible.

Training is not that. When a large language model trains on text, it doesn’t store those documents in a filing cabinet somewhere inside the model. What remains after training is not the source text — it’s a set of statistical weights that encode something like patterns of relationship between words and ideas. As best I understand it, the training data is gone from the model after training is complete. You can’t open up a language model and pull out the novel it read. You can ask it questions that show it learned from that novel, the way I can show you I learned from a book I read years ago — but that is not translation. The source text is not in there to be translated.

Model Three: Copying

The copying model is closest to what happens in certain legal arguments about AI training data — that the system ingested copyrighted work and is now reproducing it. This is a real concern in some narrow cases, and the legal battles around it are ongoing. But as a general description of how AI works, it’s still wrong.

When I was in art school, copying was a deliberate exercise. You took a master’s painting and you copied it — same composition, same palette, same approach to light. You did this over and over. At first you were just trying to match it. Over time, the copy became yours in a different way; your hand was in it, your particular misreadings and emphases, the specific distance between what the master did and what you did with the same intention. Even an honest copy carries the copyist’s signature.

AI output isn’t a copy in that sense because there’s no single original being reproduced. A language model generating a paragraph about loss hasn’t retrieved a specific paragraph from its training data and reproduced it. It has generated text that statistically coheres with what the context demands, drawing on patterns absorbed from an enormous range of human writing. The result may rhyme with something that exists somewhere, but it wasn’t copied from a definite source. Graphic design, which routinely appropriates fonts designed by others, photographs taken by others, and color systems developed by others, involves more direct copying than most AI outputs do — and we’ve mostly made peace with the idea that graphic design can still be original work. (I know that particular argument annoyed a few people in my typography class, for what it’s worth.)

The Third Category: An Interactive Mirror

So if it’s not channeling, not translation, not copying — what is it?

The best word I’ve found is mirroring. Specifically, a hall of mirrors.

There’s a line of chatbot history worth knowing here, going back much further than ChatGPT, that I’ll trace in a later post. For now, notice this: the app Replika got its name right. The early chatbots were explicitly designed to reflect the user’s input back — to take what you gave them and shape a response around it. That’s not a coincidence of design; it’s the core of what these systems do. Modern large language models are more sophisticated — much more — but the mirror dynamic is still the operative one.

Here’s what I mean by that. When you interact with a language model, the context of the conversation builds from what you’ve brought to it. The model has been trained on enormous amounts of human text, which is why its outputs sound human. But in any given session, the direction the output takes is shaped primarily by you — your question, your framing, your tone, the specifics of what you’ve described. The model reflects that back, filtered and refracted through its training. Two people working with the same system on the same general topic will get something recognizably different, because the inputs are different.

That’s the mirror.

The hall part matters too. A flat mirror gives you back what you put in, relatively faithfully. A hall of mirrors distorts. The reflections are bent, repeated, layered on each other, and sometimes they show you things you didn’t know were in the room. Language models do this because they carry strong pattern preferences — certain linguistic structures, certain ways of organizing an argument, certain reflexive moves that show up over and over because they showed up over and over in the training data. If you walk into a hall of mirrors unprepared and mistake a reflection for the exit, you’ll stay lost. If you understand what you’re working with, you can work it.

How We Got Here: From Spam Filters to Language Models

A quick note on the mechanics, because the metaphor only holds up if the mechanism makes sense.

Machine learning has been around much longer than the current surge of interest would suggest. The same basic logic that powers today’s large language models was also at work decades ago in something as ordinary as an email spam filter. Those early systems learned to recognize spam by calculating probabilities: given everything we know about the contents of this message, how likely is it to be junk? No human wrote rules for every possible type of spam. The system learned the rules from examples — or that’s the simplified version of the lineage as I learned it.

Large language models are a much more powerful extension of this kind of learning. They work by taking in text and learning, from an enormous quantity of it, how words and ideas relate to each other. When you type a prompt, the model doesn’t look up the answer in a database. It generates a response by predicting, token by token, what text is most likely to follow from what you’ve given it, based on the patterns it absorbed during training. Back to the calculator: input, process, output. The inputs are language, the process is statistical pattern-matching at enormous scale, and the outputs sound like language. No oracle. No transmission.

What persists in the model after training is not the text itself but the weights — adjustments to the system that encode those statistical patterns. Think of it less like a library and more like a musician who has listened to thousands of hours of music and developed a sense of how melody, harmony, and rhythm work together. That musician isn’t storing recordings. They’ve internalized structure, and they can apply it to something new. The output is new. It’s also a reflection — of everything they’ve heard, shaped by the particular music you’ve asked them to play.

The Human Is Still at the Mirror

None of this means the human disappears. The human’s role is just more specific than people tend to assume: you work the hall. You bring the intention, the question, the refusal of the default reflection. You decide what to keep, what to rewrite, and what deserves an audience.

There’s more to say about what that looks like in practice — about the difference between letting the model’s pattern preferences run and actively overriding them, about what it takes to pull work with genuine texture out of a system that defaults to smoothness. That conversation starts with questions I first heard in art school, and I’ve never fully stopped turning them over.

Not “AI.” Not “art.” And definitely not “aura,” which sounds precious until you actually need it.

The online debates about AI and creative work have a quality I find exhausting. Not because they’re wrong exactly, but because they’re fighting over the wrong thing. Someone posts an image made with Midjourney. Someone else calls it theft. A third person calls the second person a Luddite. The whole thread calcifies around a single contested noun: is it art or isn’t it?

That question has its uses. But I think it’s been doing the work of three separate questions, and until we pull those apart, the argument generates more heat than clarity.

Those three questions are about craft, aura, and art. They’re not the same thing.

Craft is skill. That’s where the word comes from.

“Art” and “craft” trace back through two different language branches, one Latin-rooted, one Germanic, but they arrive at the same meaning: skill. That shared etymology is a reminder that historically, we didn’t separate skilled making from art-making the way we sometimes do now.

Craft, for our purposes, is the skill dimension of creative work. Knowing how to do the thing. Managing the material: whether that material is clay, paint, type, code, or language. Recognizing what your medium will and won’t do. Building through practice until judgment becomes fast. Craft is learnable and improvable. It’s also possible to evaluate with some consistency: this sentence is clearer than that one; this glaze breaks better in reduction.

That definition matters because when people say AI outputs are bad, they’re usually making a craft argument: the prose is generic, the images are blurry at the fingers, the music lands nowhere. Those are real craft failures, worth naming. A tool doesn’t excuse them.

Aura is something else entirely.

This is the concept I want to spend the most time on, because it does the most work in the argument and gets almost no airtime on social media.

The term comes from Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay on mechanical reproduction, but the underlying idea doesn’t require the essay. Two art professors of mine, Gaye Chan and Andrea Feeser, introduced it more simply: aura is the perception that surrounds an object beyond its mere objectness. Beyond the canvas and paint. Beyond the execution. The ambiance, historical weight, and felt presence that makes one piece matter in a way another technically comparable piece does not.

Think of why a Rembrandt costs what it costs. The craft is real. But craft alone doesn’t explain the price, the silence in front of it, or the forgeries that fail even when they’re technically excellent. What they lack is aura. The singular presence, the specific history, the sense that this object comes from somewhere particular and arrived here through an unrepeatable path.

Here’s the part people miss: authenticity is a component of aura, but it’s not the whole of it. A work can be genuinely inauthentic, a known copy, a fictional persona, a declared performance, and still carry powerful aura. Sometimes the inauthenticity itself becomes part of the aura, what you might call “authentically inauthentic.” I’ve seen this demonstrated in ways I’ll come back to in a later post.

Aura explains something craft alone cannot: why so much AI-generated content falls flat even when it’s technically proficient. The output can clear every craft bar and still feel like it comes from nowhere and points nowhere. No story. No particular mind behind it that made choices for reasons we can understand or argue with. It was produced rather than excavated.

That’s an aura failure, not a craft failure.

Art is where we argue.

Art is the contested category, the one where craft and aura, in varying combinations and weights, may or may not add up to something that culture decides to call Art. Graphic designers in the QuarkXPress era fought bitterly over whether computer-aided layout could be called art. Some argued yes; some argued it was only craft; some argued neither. The teachers I had at the University of Hawaii at Manoa didn’t give us answers. They taught us to live with the question, which I think is more honest about how it actually works.

Art is where the social negotiation happens. It’s not a property of the object in isolation. It’s what a community decides to invest meaning in. That community changes. Its criteria change. The category has always been porous and has always been fought over by people with real stakes.

So when someone on Reddit argues about whether an AI piece is “real art,” they’re not wrong to ask the question. But they’re usually asking it without first settling the craft question or the aura question, which makes the argument nearly impossible to resolve. You can disagree about art almost indefinitely because it’s a social and historical category. You can make more traction on craft (is this technically accomplished?) and on aura (does this carry presence, story, intention?).

What the fights are actually about

Most online arguments about AI and art are misaligned on these three axes in predictable ways.

The “AI is just a tool” camp often wins the craft argument and loses the aura argument. A skilled human can use AI to produce technically accomplished work. That doesn’t automatically answer whether the work has aura, and it doesn’t settle the art question.

The “AI is theft” camp often has an aura intuition they haven’t named. They sense that something is missing—the biography, the struggle, the reason behind it—and they’re not entirely wrong. But the theft framing aims at the wrong target. Graphic design appropriates fonts, photographs, and color systems made by other people. It’s always done this. The question isn’t whether you built your material from scratch. It’s what you did with it and whether the result carries meaning.

Economic predictions about AI replacing artists deserve their own conversation. But they tend to conflate capability with culture. A system can produce competent output without that output mattering to anyone.

None of these fights are stupid. They all point toward something real. They’re just misaligned with the questions they’re actually trying to answer.

Three words, not one verdict

What I’m proposing here is a vocabulary, not a verdict on AI. Asking craft, aura, and art as separate questions doesn’t settle the debates. It makes them trackable, which is a start.

Most AI output has mediocre craft and almost no aura. That’s an honest assessment. I used it to write this article and, you, the reader might think this article has no Aura. Yet, a lot of entirely human-made work has mediocre craft and almost no aura too. The tool isn’t the verdict. What you make with it, and whether the result carries a reason for existing, is still on you.

I want to work through these ideas over several posts, getting more specific: into stories, legal frameworks, and the practical question of what it actually means to work at the level of craft with a language model. But the framework comes first. Keep these three questions separate, and the debates become arguments you can actually follow.

The new moon arrives on June 14, 2026, at 7:53 in the evening Pacific time. Shift that for your own time zone before you mark your calendar, because a new moon is a single moment of alignment and the clock is unforgiving about it. It lands right at the opening of the 25th degree of Gemini, which puts it deep in the third and final decan of the sign. Hold onto that detail. It does a lot of work later.

Priapus, and why a new moon can be “super”

This new moon sits conjunct a point we call Priapus. If the name rings a faint bell, it should. Priapus is a minor god in the Greek pantheon, not one of the headliners like Zeus or Hera, but a real member of the cast. He is a fertility god, the protector of gardens and orchards, of livestock, and of male genitalia. In the old artwork he shows up with a permanent, oversized erection, which is exactly where medicine gets the word priapism for the condition men do not want lasting more than four hours.

Astrologically, the Priapus point marks the Moon’s perigee: the spot in her orbit where she comes closest to the Earth. That matters because closeness is what makes a supermoon. When a full moon happens at perigee, the Moon looks enormous because she is as near to us as she gets. So you could think of this as a kind of lunar priapism, the Moon swollen to her largest because she is at her closest.

Priapus has an opposite number. The point where the Moon is farthest from the Earth, her apogee, is the one many astrologers know as the Black Moon, or Black Moon Lilith. A quick note for precision, since several different bodies and points carry the name Lilith: the one tied to apogee is specifically the Black Moon. That is a separate phenomenon from what we are doing here. Today the action is all at the near point, the perigee, the supermoon.

The catch, of course, is that a new moon gives off no light. You will not see the big disc. What you will see is the payoff a day or two later: because the Moon is riding so close to us, the opening crescents are going to look unusually large and bright.

What a new moon actually is

It helps to slow down on the word “phase,” because we tend to treat it as a point when it is really a range. A phase is a stretch of time and a stretch of sky, not a single tick of the clock.

Walk it through. The balsamic moon is the closing sliver, the Moon making her final approach toward the Sun. When she lines up with him perfectly, that is the dark moon, the true conjunction, and it only holds for about five or ten minutes. That is the same brief window an eclipse occupies, and in fact a solar eclipse is just a dark moon that happens to fall on the nodes. No light touches the Moon’s face during those few minutes.

The instant the Moon begins to pull away from the Sun, the new moon proper begins. In an eclipse you would watch the Sun start to peek out from behind her within minutes. From that release until the first visible crescent, that whole stretch, roughly half a day to a day, is the new moon phase. This time around it runs about 12 to 13 hours. So the Moon is “new” while she is still finishing her run through Gemini, and she does it while sitting right at that closest point to us.

Gemini’s element: air, exchange, and a jolt from Uranus

Gemini belongs to Mercury, the messenger, which makes this an airy, talkative, thought-filled new moon. Mercury governs the flow of things back and forth, so Gemini carries themes of communication, discourse, exchange, even commerce. The sign is about things moving between people.

That gives the lunation a clear assignment. Communication can curdle easily into propaganda or bad news, but it does not have to. This is a good moment to set the intention to communicate well with the people in your life, to aim the airy energy at understanding rather than noise.

There is a wild card in the same sign. Uranus is in Gemini now, and on her way to the Sun the Moon recently passed over him. Uranus is the planet of technology, innovation, and the sudden break. Mix that into an air-sign supermoon and you get the flavor of a breakthrough.

In the wider world that might look like a leap in tech or communication. In a personal life it can be smaller and more domestic. Maybe this is when you finally get the new computer, or upgrade the home stereo. Or it shows up in a relationship: the session of couples therapy where you push through the thing that had been stuck and invisible, and you start finding your way back to each other. Or it is the opposite, the moment you say clearly that you have named what you need, it is not on offer here, and you are moving on. Air gives clarity, and clarity gives decisiveness. Either coming together or parting, the through-line is that something becomes clear.

The Ten of Swords and the Lord of Ruin

Now back to that third decan. The air signs map to the suit of Swords in the tarot, and Gemini is one of the mutable signs. The mutable decans carry the eight, nine, and ten of their suit, so the third decan of Gemini speaks with the voice of the Ten of Swords. Ten is the last card in the suit, the end of the line.

The Golden Dawn title for the Ten of Swords is the Lord of Ruin. Ruin here means undisciplined, warring forces, total disruption, plans and projects failing, the joy draining out of something. So why on earth would we welcome a new moon, a fresh start, landing in the decan of ruin?

Here is the turn. A new moon is a closing as much as an opening. The Moon has come to the end of her cycle, and in this decan she is packaging up the ruin that has been running in our lives: the disruption, the fighting, the things that were tearing at us. That is exactly why I reached for the couples-therapy image. I do not mean people who walk into a room and start a war. I mean the moment clarity arrives and a couple either turns toward each other or turns away, and does so cleanly, because whatever was in front of them is now complete. The Ten of Swords is the full dissolution of a structure precisely so it can be rebuilt.

I will be fair to the other reading. Some astrologers will look at a dark moon opening in the decan of ruin and say you are beginning the ruin, not ending it. I understand that take completely. But two things tilt me the other way. First, the lunation sits on the Priapus point, the point of nearness and fertility. Second, Uranus, the disruptor, is now behind the Moon. She moved past him to reach the Sun. To me that geometry says the ruin is in the rearview mirror, finished and complete, and we are stepping into something new.

Who else feels it

A lunation gets witnessed by the signs that can see it through an aspect. Start with the opposition, Sagittarius. There are no major planets in Sagittarius right now, but if your chart holds the Sun or a planet there, this can light it up, and an opposition carries some tension.

The other air signs witness by trine, the harmonious look: Libra and Aquarius. Placements there get an easier activation.

The squares come from the other mutable signs, the earth and water pair, Virgo and Pisces. Planets there can feel friction, conflict, a push that catalyzes change.

The sextiles are the fire signs Aries and Leo, the soft and fluid aspect. There is some company there at the moment: Venus in Leo, and Saturn and Neptune in Aries. If you have natal planets in those signs they can be drawn in, though a sextile is gentle. Do not brace for catastrophe from that corner.

Toward the solstice

One more frame, and it is the big one. This is the new moon that precedes the solstice. Within a day, the Sun moves into Cancer and the season turns. The northern hemisphere reaches its fullest light, the southern its deepest dark. The solstice is a hinge for the Sun, for the seasons, and for life in both hemispheres.

So watch the handoff. The Moon stays new for those 12 to 13 hours in Gemini, then crosses into Cancer, where she becomes the opening crescent. By the morning of the 15th she is already there, carrying the airy clarity of Gemini into the watery, feeling-centered sign of Cancer, just as the Sun prepares to follow her across the same threshold.

A supermoon nobody sees, a ruin that is really a completion, and a quiet airy reset right before the light reaches its peak. Set the intention well.

So when you read what follows, read it as a portrait of the sign itself, the qualities the sign carries before any planet is placed in it, with the caveat that when I do speak about a person (”Aries are like this,” “Geminis do that”), I am speaking specifically about people who have the Sun in that sign. Other placements would change the story.

With that framing in place, here are the twelve questions I get asked most often, and the closest honest answers I can give.

Why are Aries so difficult?

The image associated with Aries, the zoidion in older language, is the ram. Rams are famously stubborn, and while that animal is not the cause of the Aries personality, the imagery reflects something true. Aries is the cardinal fire sign. Of all twelve signs, it carries the most urgency, and that urgency can be felt by other people as incendiary or domineering. It is also a fun, vibrant, alive energy. Part of why Aries can feel difficult is timing: in the northern hemisphere, Aries season is the period when the earth is asked to wake up after winter, whether it wants to or not. If you are functioning in an earth-element mode and you would rather stay asleep a little longer, Aries energy can feel insistent in a way you did not invite.

Why are Tauruses so boring?

Following from the ram, the image for Taurus is the cow. People often say bull, but that is a different conversation. Either way, bovines tend to be slow and ponderous, and again, that animal is not the cause of the character so much as a reflection of it. Fire and air elements want and instigate fast-moving circumstances. Taurus is the fixed (or solid) sign of earth, and to those quicker elements, the steadiness of Taurus can feel too static. What feels boring from one angle is the ground from which the abundance of earth gets its stability. Without that ground, the fast elements have nowhere to land.

Why are Geminis so complicated?

The image for Gemini is the twins, and Gemini is the first human sign of the zodiac. The doubleness of the image lines up with the modality of the sign: mutable, sometimes called double-bodied. So you have a double-bodied sign of air, which can move at hurricane speed, and which by nature carries endings and beginnings at the same time. To elements that want direct and singular experiences, that combination reads as chaotic, volatile, unpredictable. The word complicated is what those elements reach for when they encounter something that is genuinely doing several things at once.

Why are Cancers so moody?

Cancer is the cardinal water sign and the first water sign of summer. It begins at the solstice, and it carries the energy of fundamental fertility. Picture river rapids: powerful, alive, and not easy to navigate. The watery emotion of Cancer can be hard to sort out for the same reason rapids are hard to read. Water is a relational element. It supports growth for earth, extinguishes fire, and turns air into a tempest. If you stand inside that range of effects, “moody” is one word for it, but really what you are watching is water doing what water does, depending on what it meets.

Why are Leos so jealous?

Leo is solid fire, and the image is the lion guarding its catch against all comers. The elemental nature of Leo is radiating: it broadcasts outward, the way the Sun itself does, and that radiation is magnetic and attractive. The flavor of jealousy people associate with Leo is the demanding kind. It comes out of the need that fire element has to be seen and witnessed; when adoration is missing, the need for it can show up as jealousy. I want to be careful here, because every sign in the zodiac can signify jealousy. They just signify it differently. Leo’s version is loud because Leo’s energy itself is loud.

Why are Virgos so private?

Virgo is the second human sign of the zodiac. It is also the second sign ruled by Mercury, the planet of intelligence, communication, analysis, knowledge, and commerce. Mercury is also exalted in Virgo, which is the technical term for a planet being at its strongest and most powerful. Virgo is the only sign in the zodiac where the domicile ruler and the exaltation ruler are the same planet. That doubling lines up with the self-anointed quality of the sign. Virgo is the sign of the woman who owns herself and is subject to no one but herself. The privacy of Virgo is a reflection of being able to self-sustain without needing communion with others. But (and this matters) the privacy of Virgo is not the privacy of a hermit. Virgo is fully capable of communion with other people and enjoys it, when she chooses it, and she recognizes the difference between enjoying something and being dependent on it.

Why are Libras so charming?

The original image for Libra is the scales, and it is the only image in the zodiac that is neither animal nor human nor living. People sometimes wonder how it can be a zoidion at all, since the word relates to zoe, meaning life. The answer is that the balance of life and death is itself fundamental to the experience of being alive. Libra holds that balance. The capacity of Libra to keep the extremes of human experience in equilibrium is what feels magnetic to the other signs, who do not always manage to stay level in the face of those same extremes. Charm, in this case, is a recognition. People feel steadied by Libra and they call that being charmed.

Why are Scorpios so mysterious?

Scorpio is the fixed water sign, and solid water is, on its face, a mystery. Water is supposed to flow. Scorpio does not flow, and yet it is not frozen and it is not stagnant either. The water of Scorpio is the kind of water that appears still on the surface while deep currents run beneath. That contrast between what looks still and what is actually moving is where the mystery comes from. Scorpio is not hiding things on purpose so much as living in a state that most people do not have a comfortable way to describe.

Why are Sagittariuses so blunt?

I will be straight with you: this is the only one of the twelve where I cannot connect the trait to the traditional imagery. Bluntness, to me, is not what the symbols of Sagittarius point at. Sagittarius is the double-bodied fire sign, and it indicates variability and exploration. Adventure, and the wisdom that comes from adventure, in the Mark Twain sense that travel is the best way to eliminate prejudice, is the natural territory of this sign. It is the sign of the teacher, the sage, the healer, the understanding of suffering and diversity. If someone reads that energy as blunt, my honest read is that the bluntness is in the receiver, not the sender. What is being labeled bluntness is often the listener’s inability to face an unknown or to sit with something they do not understand.

Why are Capricorns so hard to read?

Capricorn is the cardinal earth sign, and the image is the sea goat. The energy is earth moving beneath your feet, or you traversing earth: climbing mountains, running across fields, laying plans and following through. The reason Capricorn can be hard to read is that earth is supposed to be the most stable element, and yet Capricornian energy is at home in earth that is shifting and moving. A Capricorn can keep their footing in the middle of what is functionally a landslide. From the outside, you cannot easily tell which part of the ground they are standing on, because the ground itself is changing, and they are still upright. That is the unusual quality being misread as opacity.

Why are Aquariuses so stubborn?

Aquarius is the solid air sign. The reason people land on the word stubborn is that solid air sees through things as if there were no boundary, and the person carrying that energy can seem unyielding in their view of reality. They are not being stubborn in the Taurus sense; that is the stubbornness of a fixed earth body that does not want to move. Aquarian stubbornness is the conviction of a scientist who knows the laws of the quantum realm and does not see boundaries where other people do. It looks like refusal from the outside; from the inside, it is just clear sight.

Why are Pisces so sensitive?

Pisces is the second double-bodied animal sign, and it is the water sign of endings and beginnings. This is the sign of the alpha and omega. Water that is both ending and beginning is the water of tears of grief and the water of childbirth at the same time. The sensitivity people associate with Pisces is other people perceiving that capacity: the capacity of Pisces to hold the poignancy of endings and beginnings happening at once without themselves collapsing into either one. They are not breaking. They are holding both. What gets called sensitivity is really the residue, on the people around them, of being near someone who can stand in that double current.

A closing thought

If you read all twelve and noticed yourself thinking, that one is me, but that other one is also me, good. That is the right response. Almost no one is only the qualities of their Sun sign, because no one has only a Sun. You have a Moon somewhere, and Mercury and Venus and Mars, and the rest. The Sun gets the headline because Western culture has decided it should, but the chart is a community, not a label. So the next time someone asks why Aries are so difficult, or why Pisces are so sensitive, you can answer the question — and then, if you have the room, you can also say: that is the sign, not the person. The person is something else, made up of pieces, and worth more attention than any one of these answers can give.

NB: I base my archetype in focus articles on the ARAS archetypes that are highlighted each month. You can find ARAS on Patreon.

There is a moment at the edge of evening — not quite day, not yet night — when the world seems to hold its breath. The light goes soft, shadows lengthen, and ordinary things acquire an odd luminosity, as if seen slightly sideways. It is precisely in this margin that fairies live. Not in full daylight, where everything is accounted for, and not in the full dark, where fear has its own blunt grammar. They inhabit the threshold: the crepuscular, the in-between, the not-quite-real. And it is there that they have always done their most consequential work.

The fairy archetype belongs to the oldest strata of human imaginative life. Long before Shakespeare gave us Titania and Oberon, before J. M. Barrie sent Tinkerbell into the nurseries of the modern world, before Tolkien mapped the boundaries of Middle Earth, there were the little people. The shining ones. The Good Folk, named with careful flattery so as not to invite their mischief. Their presence in the cultural record stretches from Irish and Scottish folklore through the Germanic Elfen, the Scandinavian Huldre, the Slavic Rusalki, the Japanese Tengu, and beyond. Wherever human beings have felt the uncanny nearby, wherever they have sensed that the visible world was not the whole story, something fairy-like has materialized.

The ARAS material on this archetype opens with etymology as a kind of key: the word “fairy” links both to fayre (illusion) and to the Latin fata (fate). These two roots are not incidentally related. Together they tell us that the fairy is an agent of altered perception who operates in the register of destiny. To see a fairy is to have your consciousness shifted; to encounter one is to have your fate touched. The fairy is the place where the randomness of enchantment and the logic of cosmic order briefly, eerily coincide.

This essay moves through that convergence in three directions. It begins with the cultural and symbolic life of the fairy across traditions and time — the range of figures, the paradoxes of character, the specific domains of fairy power. It then turns to the astrological framework through which the fairy archetype finds its deepest resonance, centering on Neptune, the 12th house, and the Moon in her more liminal phases. Finally, it draws these threads together, tracing how the fairy speaks to something recurrent in the psyche: the non-rational, the synchronistic, the generative power that lives just outside the reach of ordinary knowing.

Cultural and Symbolic Exploration

The Taxonomy of the Tiny

The word “fairy” is less a single figure than a family of beings. The ARAS source offers a useful census: elves, brownies, pixies, fays, leprechauns, nymphs, sprites. They range in size from a thumbling to the height of a three-year-old child. Some wear gaudy finery; others dress in simple homespun, the garments of workers and craftspeople. This is the first paradox the archetype presents: the fairy is simultaneously aristocratic and rustic, otherworldly and domestic.

In the British Isles, brownies were household spirits — essentially the fairy in its most utilitarian guise. They would work through the night spinning, sweeping, and tending livestock in exchange for a bowl of cream or a small gift left near the hearth. Treat them well and your household flourished. Forget the offering, or worse, give them clothing (an act read as dismissal), and they would leave without warning, taking their invisible industry with them. The leprechaun of Irish tradition worked as a cobbler, the tapping of his hammer the only auditory evidence of his presence. The pixies of Devon and Cornwall led travelers astray on the moors, not from cruelty exactly, but from something closer to irrepressible impishness. The nymphs of Greek antiquity inhabited springs, trees, and grottos — a living presence woven into the natural world, capricious but not malicious.

What all these figures share is a relationship to the hidden labor that sustains the visible world. The fairy performs the work that no one sees. They keep the household in order, they cobble the shoes, they work the mine, they spin the thread. In this sense they are functionally close to what analytical psychology would call the autonomous complexes of the unconscious — the patterns and energies that operate below the threshold of awareness, shaping outcomes without being directed. You do not tell a brownie how to clean the house; it simply does, by its own logic, in the dark.

The Shape of Mischief

But fairies are not reliable workers or benevolent helpers in any simple sense. The ARAS material is emphatic on this point: as shapeshifters and tricksters, they are as capable of havoc as of help. The love potion administered to the wrong recipient, the soured milk, the misplaced keys, the accident that befalls those who disturb a fairy ring — these are not aberrations from the fairy’s nature. They are the other face of it.

Puck, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is the clearest literary embodiment of this duality. He transforms Bottom’s head into a donkey’s; he applies the love potion to the wrong sleeping Athenian eyes; he confuses night travelers for sport. His famous line — “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” — captures the fairy’s characteristic attitude toward human seriousness. He does not apologize for the chaos he generates. He observes it with a kind of affectionate contempt, as if the disorientation itself is the lesson: you were too certain, too sure of the fixed order of things.

The changeling myth extends this logic into darker territory. Fairies were said to steal human children and leave their own offspring — often sickly, strange, and difficult — in their place. Parents who found their child suddenly altered, unresponsive, consuming without growing, recognized the changeling motif. In sociological terms, this belief served as a framework for understanding and contextualizing children who were different: those who seemed to have arrived from somewhere else, who didn’t fit, who operated by an interior logic their families couldn’t access. The fairy world, in other words, offered an explanatory mythology for neurodivergence, for unusualness, for the child who simply would not comply with the expected human shape.

Fate and the Newborn

The ARAS etymology linking fairy to fata becomes most vivid in the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty. Here the fairies arrive at the cradle to pronounce blessings — beauty, grace, song, goodness — and then the uninvited dark fairy arrives to pronounce a curse. The structural logic of the tale turns entirely on this scene: fate is not singular but multiple, layered, sometimes in conflict with itself.

This motif has deep cultural roots across Europe. In ancient Rome, the Fata — female fate beings — were believed to attend every birth. The Germanic Norns spun, measured, and cut the thread of destiny. The Greek Moirai performed the same threefold function: Clotho spinning, Lachesis measuring, Atropos cutting. The fairy godmother of later tradition is a softened, domesticated version of this figure — still fate-bearing, still carrying powers that transcend ordinary human will, but now more reliably benevolent, present to bestow gifts rather than impose unavoidable destinies.

What this cross-cultural pattern encodes is a profound ambivalence about causation. Human beings have always sensed that their lives are not entirely under their own direction. There are forces at work that are neither random nor comprehensible — that feel purposive without being predictable, that feel personal without being consciously controlled. The fairy, especially in its fata aspect, is the face given to that experience. It is the non-rational operating with uncanny precision.

Twilight, Fairyland, and the Unconscious

The ARAS profile is clear that fairies are “associated especially with the uncanny transformations of twilight and night.” They inhabit Fairyland, Dreamland, Never-Never Land, Middle Earth — all of which the source explicitly connects to “the unconscious dimension and psyche’s secret workings.”

This is the hermeneutic key to the archetype’s symbolic depth. Fairies do not appear at noon. They do not operate under the unambiguous overhead light of full solar consciousness. They appear at the edges: at dusk, in mist, at the boundary of the forest, at the liminal moment between sleeping and waking. This is not incidental. The fairy’s domain is structural — it is the threshold state itself, the condition in which ordinary categorical boundaries dissolve just enough for something else to come through.

The Irish tradition of the Sidhe, the fairy mounds, makes this geography explicit. The fairy world lies beneath the visible world, accessible through specific portals — a hollow hill, a fairy ring of mushrooms, a particular body of water at a particular time of year. The Celtic festival of Samhain, our current Halloween, was the moment when the veil between worlds grew thin. The dead could return; the fairies could cross into human space. This is not metaphor; or rather, it is metaphor that was also experienced as literal — the felt sense that the boundary between known and unknown, visible and invisible, had softened.

James Hillman’s alchemical psychology offers a useful frame here. Hillman argued that psychological health requires all three registers of language: thing-words (concrete and literal), image-words (poetic and symbolic), and craft-words (process and making). The fairy operates almost entirely in the register of image. It is not a thing — it is not a material creature you can pin down, document, or photograph with confidence. It is an image: luminous, unstable, meaningful in a way that resists paraphrase. The fairy’s evanescence is its nature. The moment you try to fix it, to make it literal, to reduce it to a thing, it vanishes.

Astrological Framework

Neptune: The Planet of Enchantment

If any planet claims the fairy archetype as its own, it is Neptune. In the Hellenistic whole-sign framework, Neptune’s significations — illusion, dissolution, enchantment, the thinning of boundaries, the dissolution of the ego-self into something larger — map almost perfectly onto the fairy’s symbolic profile.

Consider the etymology again: fayre, illusion. Neptune is the planet of illusion par excellence. It governs glamour in both the modern and archaic senses of the word — glamour originally meant a magic spell, a glamour cast over the eyes that made things appear other than they were. Neptune transiting a natal planet can produce precisely this effect: a period in which something appears more luminous, more perfect, more fated than it actually turns out to be. The enchantment is real, but its content is not always trustworthy. This is the fairy’s double nature translated into planetary language.

Neptune also governs the dissolution of categorical boundaries — between self and other, between sleeping and waking, between the human and the numinous. The fairy world lives in exactly this dissolution. Fairies do not acknowledge the same boundaries humans maintain. They cross into human life when they choose, by routes invisible to ordinary perception. Their relationship to time is non-linear. Their moral logic is not human moral logic. Neptune, similarly, does not recognize the sharp edges of Saturnine form. Where Saturn builds walls, Neptune seeps through them. Where Saturn insists on definitions, Neptune dissolves them.

The 12th house in whole-sign astrology — associated with hidden matters, solitude, spirituality, and loss — is Neptune’s natural domain and the astrological space most resonant with the fairy. The 12th house is the house of that which is not yet conscious, not yet named, operating below the threshold of the ego’s awareness. It is, in the language of the Hellenistic tradition, the house of the “Bad Daimon” — not evil, but hidden, working at a remove from the light of ordinary awareness. Planets in the 12th operate from this background register: their energy is present, influential, and largely invisible to the person who carries them. This is, again, a structural description of how fairies work in folklore. They are the unseen household workers, the invisible forces that shape outcomes, the background intelligence the conscious mind has not thought to account for.

The Moon: Luminosity, Phase, and the Liminal

The Moon brings a second, equally essential astrological lens to the fairy. The ARAS source emphasizes the fairy’s association with twilight, with night, with the uncanny transformations of threshold time. All of this belongs to lunar territory.

In Hellenistic whole-sign astrology, the Moon governs the emotional body, the fluctuating self-image, the tidal pull of the unconscious on conscious life. She reflects rather than generates light — her illumination is borrowed, indirect, and phase-dependent. This is exactly the fairy’s mode: the fairy does not command the spotlight. It appears in reflected, ambient, marginal light. Its presence is sensed before it is seen.

The Balsamic Moon phase carries particular resonance for this archetype. The Balsamic phase — the waning crescent just before the New Moon — is the moon at her most liminal. She is barely visible, riding just ahead of the Sun in the pre-dawn sky, carrying the exhaustion of a completed cycle and the strange luminosity of what is about to begin. The Balsamic phase is associated with endings, closure, the prophet-like quality of those who can sense what is coming before it arrives. There is something deeply fairy-like in this: the creature who inhabits the edge of one world and the beginning of another, who carries a kind of knowledge that has no name yet.

The Dark Moon — the period of complete invisibility just before the New — extends this into the fairy’s most hidden register. This is the moon at her most interior, her most secret. What gestates there, what intelligence operates in that darkness before the new cycle begins, is precisely the kind of non-rational generative energy the ARAS source describes: “amoral, luminous, and highly generative impulses that are agents of the psyche’s non-rational energies and synchronistic happenstance.”

The 3rd Harmonic, Sextile, and the Playful Mind

A less obvious but resonant astrological signature for the fairy archetype is the sextile aspect and the third harmonic. The sextile — 60 degrees — is classically associated with opportunity, ease, and the kind of assistance that arrives without being demanded. It is the aspect of helpful coincidence, of doors opening when you weren’t quite looking, of the right thing appearing at the right moment. This is fairy logic exactly: the serendipitous helper, the impoverished spinner who wakes to find the straw turned to gold, the cobbler who returns to his workshop and finds shoes made overnight by invisible hands.

The third harmonic (aspects that divide the circle by three: trines and their subdivisions) is associated with creativity, flow, and the playful intelligence that moves easily between states. Fairies in lore are masters at transformation, at moving between forms, at doing effortlessly what mortals labor over. The fairy’s relationship to craft — tailoring, spinning, washing, planting, mining — is not labored but natural, an expression of a being that is, at its core, aligned with the generative principles of the world.

Cross-Cultural and Astrological Integration

Synchronicity as Fairy Logic

Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity — the acausal connecting principle — offers a bridge between the fairy’s cultural manifestations and its astrological resonance. Synchronicity, as Jung described it, is the experience of two events that are not causally connected but that carry a shared meaning. The coin falls open at the relevant page; you think of a friend and the phone rings; the pattern in the natural world mirrors the pattern in the interior life.

This is precisely what fairy appearances enact in folklore. The fairy does not arrive through cause and effect. It does not respond to commands or summons in any reliable way. It appears at the moment of need, or at the moment of readiness, or seemingly at random — but always charged with significance. The encounter always matters; it always changes something. The fairy operates in the register of synchronistic causality, not mechanical causality. This is a Neptune/12th house mode of operation: events that feel fated, that arrive from outside the chain of ordinary intention, that carry a numinous charge.

The evolutionary astrology framework (Jeffrey Wolf Green) adds another layer here. The primary evolutionary axis — Pluto, the lunar nodes, and their rulers — encodes the Soul’s non-linear journey across many lifetimes. The fairy, as a fata figure, is an agent of fate in exactly this trans-personal sense. The encounter with a fairy in folklore is not an event that happens to the ego; it is an event that happens to the Soul’s trajectory. It accelerates something, redirects something, bestows a gift or a curse that will reverberate across time. This is the language of the Pluto axis: the meeting that cannot be explained by the logic of the single life, that makes sense only in the longer arc.

The Trickster Current

The fairy’s trickster dimension connects it to a pattern that appears across mythologies: Hermes in Greece, Loki in Norse tradition, Anansi in West African and Afro-Caribbean lore, Coyote in indigenous North American traditions. In every case, the trickster is the figure who disrupts fixed order — who steals fire, who reshuffles hierarchies, who makes the serious look absurd, who finds the route through the walls that were supposed to be impassable.

Astrologically, this energy is associated with Mercury in its more transgressive modes — the psychopomp, the guide between worlds, the lord of thresholds who moves between the living and the dead, between the divine and the human. Mercury’s sextile to the ascendant, or Mercury placed in the 8th or 12th house, or Mercury at the Balsamic phase relative to the Sun — these signatures carry something of the fairy’s mercurial mischief.

But the trickster’s disruptions are never simply chaotic. In nearly every tradition, the disruption produces a gain — not always the gain the protagonist wanted, but one that turns out to be necessary. Puck’s meddling resolves the romantic impasse in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Loki’s treacheries, for all their catastrophic consequences, are also the source of some of the Norse pantheon’s most powerful objects and gifts. The brownie who hides the gloves in a messy house is annoying, certainly; but the house does need tidying. The fairy mischief functions as a corrective from the unconscious, forcing the necessary adjustment that the ego was avoiding.

This maps precisely onto the astrological experience of Neptune transits. A Neptune transit to natal Saturn, for example, can dissolve structures that had become too rigid — and this dissolution, while often disorienting, sometimes even devastating in the short term, tends to produce a more supple relationship to reality in the long run. The fairy takes the keys and the gloves so that you will notice the mess. The mess, once noticed, can be addressed.

The Fairy as Daemon Soul

The evolutionary astrology concept of Daemon Souls — those deeply oriented to nature, animals, and the hidden life of things, in communion with what the tradition calls devas or spirits within nature — is one of the most direct bridges between astrological typology and the fairy archetype. Daemon Souls, in the JWG framework, often experience alienation from mainstream society; their healing involves returning to and actualizing their natural nature.

Many of those who throughout history reported fairy encounters, who claimed to hear the fairy music or to have been led into the fairy ring, appear to have been operating in this register. They were sensitive to a layer of the world that others moved through without perceiving. The fairy was not a delusion for them but a perception — a perception of the non-rational generative intelligence that saturates the natural world, that the ARAS material calls “luminous and highly generative impulses.”

The 12th house and Neptune, combined with a strong Moon or a significant Balsamic phase emphasis, can mark someone who habitually inhabits the liminal. Who notices the threshold moments, who is drawn to the edges of categories, who senses that the visible world is only half the story. This is not pathology, though it can feel that way in a culture that prizes the solar, the concrete, the fully visible. It is a specific kind of attunement — the fairy’s own attunement, turned inward.

The fairy archetype is, at its core, a record of the psyche’s encounter with its own non-rational depths. Every culture has generated these figures because every culture has needed to think about the forces that operate just below the threshold of conscious understanding: the invisible workers who sustain the household, the fate-bearers who arrive at the cradle, the tricksters who disorder what has grown too certain, the threshold-dwellers who embody the possibility of transformation.

Astrologically, the fairy finds its home in the combination of Neptune’s dissolving enchantment, the Moon’s liminal luminosity in her darker phases, the 12th house’s background intelligence, and the sextile’s synchronistic grace. Together these signatures describe a psyche capable of operating in the register of fata — sensitive to the currents that run beneath ordinary causality, tuned to the synchronistic logic that the ego tends to overlook.

To take the fairy seriously as an archetypal figure is to take seriously the reality of the non-rational in human life. Not as chaos to be suppressed, not as madness to be medicated, but as a specific kind of intelligence: impish, evanescent, fate-adjacent, and generative. The fairy hides your keys because the house is messy. It soils the milk when it has been taken for granted. It leads you off the path when you have become too certain of where you are going. And sometimes, if you leave out the cream and keep your end of the bargain, it spins the straw into gold by morning.

The fairy’s gift is the gift of altered consciousness — not permanently, not reliably, not on demand. At twilight, in the liminal moment, at the edge of what is known. As above, so below. The tiny wings in the peripheral vision are the psyche’s own reminder that the world is larger, stranger, and more alive than the daylight mind tends to admit.