We can sense this shift tangibly, even in the corporate world. By the end of the season, you’ll feel it energetically in your own projects at work, and team meetings take on a different quality. People look more inward, trying to find a sense of rest. The high energy of summer is over, and people are trying to figure out how to settle into a routine that will carry them through winter into spring. Oftentimes projects realign, reorient, reschedule, recalendar. People take stock of their backlogs.

You’re in a meeting with privileged information. There are layoffs coming for some of your friends, and you can’t tell them. You have to keep the secret, but you really want to get out there and gossip about it. That’s kind of like a negative example, but it could be a positive example: the boss announces the release of a fantastic product or service that you want to share, and you have too keep your mouth shut until the media blitz. That’s Mercury moving into Scorpio this Libra season: access to secrets, access to information, and not really being able to share those with others.

Enjoying Find Your Nova? The tip jar is open.

The Last Wind

Mars is one of three personal planets on the move this Libra season. Mercury and Mars both make their moves in the first half of Libra: Mars shifting out of Cancer, a water sign, into Leo, a fire sign. That gives Mars more strength, a little bit of a kick, a little more drive. Kind of like the last wind. Some of the last summer energy might seem like it’s surging up before its gone. You might feel like getting out for the last of the outside activities, to see the last amount of sunlight before fall fully sets in. It’s like the zoomies at night, the way children get them, or my sister’s dog, or puppies.

I was watching Brandi Carlile at Stanford’s Frost Amphitheater. She talked about this being the end of her tour: an exhaustion that sets in, but right at the end, in the last week, a resurgence of energy comes in anyway, that’s kind of like Mars entering Leo during Libra season, a close to one kind of energy even as Mars picks up strength. You’ll feel it in your body and in your outlook toward your routines, your life, your activities.

The Sun Sets the Season

The personal planets carry the most consistently fluctuating influence on the quality of time: the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars. Jupiter and Saturn move slowly enough that sometimes they don’t show a significant amount of change within a single month. Sometimes they do. Often it’s the personal planets, changing more frequently, that make the quality of time shift in noticeable ways.

The sun is the steady one. However long the sun takes to cross a sign is how long that zodiac month lasts, and the sun’s movement through each sign is an indicator and a measurement of the quality of light. Libra opens on the equinox, where the night and the day are again equal, and from there the sun proceeds to bring about a reduction in the light that’s available in the sky. You feel this reduction in your body, in a shift in the weather. It isn’t instantaneous. There’s still sort of a residual energy from the sun, but the shift starts here, and by the time Scorpio arrives, the scales will have tipped into the direction of darkness.

You’ll notice it if you’re paying attention. Something that maybe felt settled at the start of the season won’t feel the same by the end; it’ll have turned more internal. The garden shows it, and so does the kitchen, in the food you make and put up for later. Not everyone still cans, but if you do, this is when that starts to shift. It shows up on the laundry line too, if you hang wash out to dry, in how differently things dry.

The moon moves fastest of all of them, changing signs every couple of days. Month to month the pattern repeats in shape, though the specifics shift with whatever she’s connecting with along the way. I tend to cover the moon seperately, in her lunation cycle, from full moon to full moon, new moon to new moon, so I’ll park her here.

Mercury and the Secret It Doesn’t Want to Keep

Mercury governs Gemini, an air sign, and that’s its natural element: power and potency in air, an affinity with air through the movement of Mercury. Scorpio is water, and water tends to pull Mercury down and make it more introspective, a little more subdued, and that’s a quality Mercury struggles with a little bit. Mercury wants faster movement, and while movement is possible in water, its much slower. It’s like aqua ballet: dancers on a stage move fast through the air, but watch synchronized swimming at the Olympics and the movement through water is much slower. Mercury can’t move as quickly either.

There’s a piercing quality to Scorpio, the same one associated with Mars, a piercing quality like piercing secrets. Mercury likes secrets, but Mercury also likes to share secrets. Mercury’s not a holder of secrets. Often the mercurial qualities within you have to sit with your secrets much longer then you’d want to.

I’m saving Venus for last, because I think she’s maybe the one I want to focus on.

Venus and the Secret Worth Going Under For

Venus rules Libra, so with the sun in Libra, Venus rules the sun too. She’s already in Scorpio, going retrograde as an evening-star. Her retrograde motion starts turning her from an evening star into a morning star, and starting that process in Scorpio speaks to secrets again, bringing in the mercurial qualities we just talked about.

I’ve been writing several posts about secrets and esoteric knowledge, already drafted and being finalized, coming to Find Your Nova in the coming weeks. You can look forward to that.

When Venus submerges into Scorpio, these are occult secrets: secrets of the soul, secrets of time itself. Moving from direct motion into retrograde in Scorpio is a move toward inner discovery, an inner pathway of the spiritual self, looking for the inner qualities that feel nourishing and elusive. These are the secrets of Venus in Scorpio. Venus in Scorpio isn’t the megalomaniac, maniacal approach to power. It’s the power to uncover the inner parts of yourself that are restorative.

There’s a poison that comes with Scorpio, and Venus retrograde is about using that poison as medicine. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that phrase before: poison is medicine. But often medicine is poisonous. Antibiotics are toxic by their very nature. The right amount is medicine; too much is poison. Venus retrograde in Scorpio is about finding how to access the poison within you and within your life: anger, fear, ignorance, some of your deep personal toxins. Or you look out at your communities, your states, your nations, the online and real-world communities you’re in. What is the toxic zeitgeist? What’s filling it with anger, animosity, fear? What are people afraid of? What are people getting upset over? Those emotions, when they overtake you, can be a problem, but if you become aware of them, you can turn that energy inward: into your own behavior, into an analysis of who you are and why you do what you do, into how you contribute to that zeitgeist or work to mitigate it. Venus retrograde is moving into a pacification of the deeper, darker, inner poisons that you have within you.

Venus retrograde is associated with times like Ramadan, a time to fast, to go inward, and with the Christian tradition of Jesus in the wilderness. It’s an inwardly oriented period, one spent striving for that inner peace, and starting it in Scorpio turns that inner gaze on your own toxins, your own negativity.

You don’t want to let the negativity out, and you don’t want to turn it against yourself either. You want to take the energy that’s behind the negativity, not the negativity itself. That energy has a piercing, discerning quality, and you want to direct it inward, so you can bring about your own inner transformation and help bring peace and joy toward others.

By the time she moves back into her morning star phase, she’ll carry a significant amount of energetic power and qualities from this inner shift. It represents about 40 days: Venus retrograde, a stretch of time to spend with yourself, to pacify some of those deeper internal states.

If this was worth your time, the tip jar is open.

Bruno Liljefors painted three sparrows in a cherry tree in 1885, and in doing so captured something that ornithology alone cannot account for. The bird in mid-flight, its thin feet extended toward a single ripe cherry, carries what the ARAS material calls “an almost human, childlike sense of expectation.” It is not simply a bird reaching for food. It is a creature suspended between appetite and restraint, between the pull of the instinct and the pause that precedes it. The cherry hangs there, succulent and isolated, and the sparrow has not yet arrived. That interval, that held breath between wanting and taking, is where the archetype lives.

The ARAS source draws the connection directly: this image “echoes the crisis of temptation once visited upon humankind through Adam and Eve.” The sparrow at the cherry is a vernacular Eden, played out in a Scandinavian tree by a bird so common it barely registers as remarkable. This is part of what makes the sparrow such a resilient and underestimated archetypal image. It does not announce itself. It does not require a mythological pedigree or a rare sighting to carry its meaning. It arrives, as it always has, in flocks, in gutters, in the eaves of ordinary houses, and it asks its question without fanfare: what do you do with your appetite, and what does your answer say about who you are?

This essay moves through the sparrow archetype across three registers. It begins with the cultural and symbolic record, from Aphrodite’s chariot to Hokusai’s ink, from Bronze Age ritual vessels to the French naturalist who found the house sparrow “uncomfortably familiar.” It then maps the archetype onto its astrological correspondences: Venus across her dignities and phases, the 5th house’s joy, and the shadow’s natal signature in the 8th and 12th. Finally, it draws these threads together through the lens of Jungian individuation, where the sparrow’s dual symbolism, at once lecherous and humble, common and beloved, makes it precisely the kind of image the psyche needs when it is ready to stop suppressing what it has been taught to find embarrassing about itself.

Cultural and Symbolic Exploration

Common as Air

The sparrow’s most defining characteristic is its ubiquity. The ARAS material notes that because sparrows are so common, the name has become synonymous with “small bird in general.” This ordinariness is not incidental to the archetype; it is central to it. The sparrow is not the eagle, whose rarity confers automatic dignity. It is not the peacock, whose beauty commands attention. The sparrow is the bird that is simply always there, in the margins of every landscape, adapting to every condition, thriving in the gutters and the ventilation ducts and on the rooftops of the most unglamorous human environments.

Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, the eighteenth-century French naturalist, found this quality distinctly irritating. His description of the European house sparrow as “uncomfortably familiar and vulgarly lively” is itself a kind of psychological document. The sparrow offends a certain sensibility precisely because it refuses to be either rare or decorative. It colonizes the nests of other birds when it finds them useful. It builds its own nests in places that are structurally sound rather than aesthetically pleasing. It propagates with unself-conscious efficiency. Buffon’s distaste is legible as the response of a classical mind to a creature that declines to perform the dignity expected of it.

This is, of course, exactly the quality that makes the sparrow a shadow image. The shadow, as Jung understood it, is not the monstrous. It is the ordinary, the embarrassing, the appetite that persists regardless of how refined one’s self-image becomes. The sparrow does not apologize for eating. It does not attempt to elevate its nest-building into something more culturally respectable. It simply continues, in its teeming millions, to do what it does. And in every era that has tried to classify it as lowly, another era has turned around and exalted it for exactly the same qualities.

Aphrodite’s Bird

The erotic dimension of the sparrow archetype has deep roots in the classical world. The ARAS source cites Athenaios, writing in the late second century CE, on the appropriateness of sparrows drawing Aphrodite’s chariot, given their lustful associations. This is not an isolated literary flourish. Sappho, centuries earlier, had already placed sparrows at the center of her most famous invocation, calling on Aphrodite to come to her “with your swift sparrows” drawing her chariot across the sky. The sparrow, for the Greek erotic imagination, was the bird of desire in its most physical, least apologetic form.

This association is rooted in observation. Sparrows mate frequently and apparently without the self-consciousness that human beings bring to the same activity. Their reproductive energy is visible, communal, and unsubtle. To the ancient naturalist and the ancient poet alike, this made the sparrow an obvious emblem of Aphrodite’s domain: not love in its idealized, courtly form, but love in its bodily urgency, its reproductive drive, its refusal to be elevated beyond what it actually is.

The ritual vessel discovered at the Bronze Age site of Thera, its sides decorated with sparrows, extends this symbolic association back to at least the late sixteenth century BCE. That a ritual vessel would carry sparrow imagery suggests the bird was already understood as belonging to a sacred register of the erotic and generative, not merely the secular or the ornamental. The sparrow on a ritual vessel is the libido honored, the body’s generative power given its proper place within the sacred order rather than pushed to its margins.

The tension the ARAS material identifies, between the sparrow as lecherous and the sparrow as humble, is not a contradiction so much as two aspects of the same energy. The body’s appetite, unacknowledged, becomes coarse and compulsive. The same appetite, acknowledged and integrated, becomes the generative ground of a life. Aphrodite does not draw a distinction between the two. Her sparrows pull the chariot regardless.

The Exalted Common Bird

Against the erotic and the vulgar runs an equally persistent counter-current: the sparrow as the emblem of divinely attended humility. The Hebrew Bible, in Psalm 84, places the sparrow at the altar of God: “Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may have her young, a place near your altar.” The sparrow’s very commonness becomes, in this register, a kind of proof of divine attention. If God attends to something as unremarkable as the sparrow, the argument runs, then nothing that exists is beneath notice.

The New Testament deepens this further. Matthew 10:29 offers the sparrow’s market value as a measure of the infinite disproportion between that price and God’s attention to each one of them. “Are you not of more value than many sparrows?” The sparrow becomes a rhetorical anchor for the argument that the divine gaze is not selective, not reserved for the impressive, not directed only toward the rare and the magnificent.

Hokusai’s print from the Great Flower series, a sparrow among hibiscus blossoms, participates in a related Japanese aesthetic tradition. In the Edo period ink and woodblock tradition, the sparrow (suzume) was a frequent companion image to seasonal flowers and grasses, its presence suggesting the animate life that persists within the natural cycle. The suzume was not elevated or idealized in these prints; it was placed within a composition with the same care given to the blossom, the stone, the branch. It was worthy of attention because it existed, not because it was exceptional.

This is the sparrow’s gift in its exalted mode: it democratizes the sacred. It refuses the hierarchy that places some creatures, some people, some forms of life above the threshold of divine concern. The sparrow at the altar is not there because it has earned its place. It is there because the altar’s jurisdiction is larger than the categories that would exclude it.

Liljefors and the Suspended Moment

The Liljefors painting functions in the ARAS material as the archetype’s defining contemporary image, and it is worth dwelling on what Liljefors actually achieves. His late nineteenth-century Scandinavian naturalism, what the ARAS source calls “sharply observed,” is not the same as photographic realism. It is a style that captures the specific quality of animal life: its unselfconsciousness, its absorption in the immediate, its freedom from the retrospective self-awareness that complicates every human moment.

The sparrow in mid-flight does not know it is making a choice. It is simply moving toward the cherry. And yet the image, in its composition, creates the sense of a pause, a held instant, in which the choice has not yet been made and all possibilities are still open. This is what the ARAS material means by “that moment of choice the psyche continually faces: the pull toward instinct balanced against the pull toward transcendence.”

The painting resonates with the Edenic echo the ARAS source identifies not because the sparrow is a moral agent weighing its options, but because we are. We look at the painting and we supply the weight of the moment. We are the ones who feel the suspended quality of the bird’s extension toward the cherry as a question about appetite and consequence. The sparrow is the occasion for our projection of the oldest human dilemma. Which makes it an extraordinarily efficient archetypal image: it does its work through our looking, not through anything it does or intends.

Astrological Framework

Venus in Taurus, Libra, and Pisces: The Body’s Three Registers

The sparrow’s dual symbolism, erotic abundance and exalted humility, maps onto Venus across her three strongest dignities: Taurus, Libra, and Pisces.

Venus in Taurus is Aphrodite’s sparrow pulling the chariot. This is Venus in her most unambiguous embodiment: sensory appetite, physical pleasure, the body’s generative abundance, the joy of food and touch and propagation taken entirely on their own terms, without apology or transcendence. The Taurean Venus does not spiritualize desire. It inhabits it. This is the sparrow mating in the eaves, building its nest in the gutter, eating the cherry without hesitation or guilt. It is the erotic life honored as a form of sacred attention to what the body already knows.

Venus in Libra shifts the register: the appetite is still present but now oriented toward relationship, toward the negotiation between self and other, toward the social and aesthetic dimensions of desire. The Libran sparrow is less the bird reaching alone for the cherry and more the pair of sparrows on the branch, the erotic life as it exists in genuine contact with another. This is Venus in her second domicile, where the generative impulse takes the form of bond and exchange rather than simple appetite.

Venus in Pisces, her exaltation, carries the sparrow into its most spiritually permeable register: the desire that dissolves the boundary between the self and what it wants, the appetite that arrives as a kind of grace rather than a drive. Pisces is the sign where the erotic and the devotional are least distinguishable from each other. The sparrow at the Psalm’s altar finds its most natural astrological home here: the common bird in the presence of the overwhelming, the desire that has moved through its own nature far enough to arrive at something that resembles surrender.

As a nocturnal planet of the Moon’s sect, Venus operates most fully in conditions of dimness and interiority rather than the broad solar light. This is entirely consistent with the sparrow archetype: both the erotic dimension and the humble dimension of the sparrow’s symbolism are most visible in the margins, in the half-light, in the spaces that daylight consciousness tends to overlook. Venus’s sect affiliation tells us that her intelligence is closer to instinct than to reason, closer to the Moon’s tidal knowing than to the Sun’s declarative clarity. She finds the cherry by feel, not by calculation.

Venus’s joy in the 5th house is the archetype’s most direct astrological home: the house of creative expression, pleasure, children, and the body’s delight in its own capacities. The 5th is where the sparrow on the Thera ritual vessel lives before the moral split between the lustful and the humble has been imposed. It is the generative life-force in its undivided form, the appetite that has not yet been pushed into the shadow because it has not yet been told it needs to be.

The morning and evening star phases add a final layer to the sparrow’s dual symbolism. Venus as morning star, Lucifer, rises before the Sun: her desire is outward-facing, assertive, visible, leading rather than following. This is the sparrow in mid-flight, the appetite that reaches openly for what it wants. Venus as evening star, Hesperus, sets after the Sun into the gathering dark: her desire turns inward, reflective, more private and deliberate. This is the sparrow at the altar, the appetite that has learned to sit quietly with what it wants rather than immediately moving toward it. Both phases are genuinely Venusian. The sparrow that understands both is the one that has integrated its own nature most completely.

The 6th House: The Sparrow’s Daily Round

In whole-sign astrology, the 6th house governs daily routine, service, craft, and the body’s maintenance: the repetitive, unglamorous work that sustains life. It is not a house that announces itself. It is the house of the sparrow: present in every day, adaptive, industrious, unglamorous in its operations, indispensable in its function.

Planets placed in the 6th house often carry a quality of the shadow’s ordinary face. Their energy is not hidden in the dramatic sense of the 8th or 12th; it is hidden in the sense of being so constant, so woven into the texture of daily life, that it goes unnoticed. The 6th house planet works the way the sparrow works: in the margins, in the gutters, in the eaves, tending the life that the more visible planets inhabit.

The 6th house also governs what was traditionally called “small animals,” the sparrow’s domain in the most literal sense. But more significantly, it governs the relationship between the self and its own instinctual nature: the habits, the appetites, the bodily rhythms that persist regardless of what the higher faculties prefer to believe about themselves. This is the shadow’s ordinary face. The 6th house is where the Buffon-like part of the psyche encounters the parts of itself it finds “uncomfortably familiar and vulgarly lively,” and must decide what to do with them.

The 8th and 12th Houses: The Shadow’s Natal Signature

If the sparrow’s humble and serviceable face belongs to the 6th house, its shadow dimension, the erotic, the repressed appetite, the thing that reaches for the cherry, belongs to the 8th and 12th.

The 8th house governs shared resources, transformation, and what is hidden beneath the surface of a life. It is the house of the body’s depths, the inherited patterns and desires that operate below the level of conscious choice. Planets here carry something of the sparrow’s suspended moment: the energy that exists in that held instant before the appetite is acknowledged, before the choice is made. The 8th house planet wants the cherry. The question is whether that wanting is suppressed, which gives it more force rather than less, or integrated into a conscious relationship with the body’s actual nature.

The 12th house adds a further dimension: the shadow in its most sequestered form, the energy that has been not merely suppressed but exiled from conscious life entirely. Planets in the 12th carry the quality of the sparrow behind the wall, the desire that has been placed so far outside the territory of acceptable selfhood that the person barely recognizes it as their own. The 12th house sparrow tends to emerge sideways, through compulsion or projection, precisely because it has never been acknowledged at the altar where even the sparrow has found a home.

The Moon: Appetite, Instinct, and the Tidal Pull

The Moon is the astrological body most resonant with the sparrow’s relationship to instinct. In Hellenistic whole-sign astrology, the Moon governs the body’s rhythmic life, the ebb and flow of appetite, mood, and need. She is not selective about which instincts she governs: the hunger for food, the hunger for contact, the hunger for warmth, the hunger for belonging. She attends to all of them with the same democratic care that the Psalm gives the sparrow at the altar.

As the luminary of Venus’s sect, the Moon and Venus share a fundamental orientation toward the nocturnal, the instinctual, the interior. Where the Sun and Mars operate by direct assertion and solar clarity, the Moon and Venus know by feel, by rhythm, by the quality of the available light. The sparrow that navigates by this lunar intelligence is the one that finds its nest not by survey but by returning, again and again, to what already feels like home.

The Moon’s phase at birth carries particular relevance for how a person relates to their instinctual nature. The Full Moon native tends to experience the tidal pull of instinct as visible, even public, difficult to contain within private life. The New Moon native may find that their hungers are less available to conscious inspection, operating in the dark of the lunar cycle, closer to the 12th house sparrow than to the one in mid-flight. The Balsamic Moon native carries the appetite of a completed cycle, the desire that has been through many iterations and arrived at something close to wisdom about its own nature.

In every case, the Moon’s relationship to the sparrow archetype is fundamentally about acknowledgment. The Moon does not judge the appetite she governs; she simply reflects it. The task for the native is to develop the same non-judgmental attention to their own instinctual life that the Moon brings to the tides.

Cross-Cultural and Astrological Integration

The Shadow’s Feathered Face

The ARAS material’s most direct interpretive move is to identify the sparrow with Jung’s shadow: “the sparrow’s dual symbolism, at once lecherous and humble, common and beloved, makes it a fitting emblem for the shadow.” Jung argued that psychic wholeness depends not on suppressing the shadow but on reconciling it with consciousness. The sparrow models exactly this tension.

The shadow, in Jungian terms, is not simply the negative or the dark. It is whatever has been excluded from the ego’s preferred self-image. For a culture that prizes spiritual refinement, the shadow tends to include the body’s appetite. For a culture that prizes productivity and efficiency, it tends to include the capacity for rest and pleasure. For an individual who has built an identity around intellectual achievement, the shadow often carries exactly what Buffon found distasteful in the sparrow: the vulgarly lively, the uncomfortably familiar, the instinct that persists regardless of how elevated the self-concept becomes.

Integrating the shadow is not the same as acting out every suppressed appetite. The sparrow in Liljefors’s painting is still suspended in its moment of choice. The point is not that the bird should always take the cherry; the point is that the reaching itself, the honest acknowledgment of the wanting, is more healthy than the pretense that the cherry isn’t there. A person who has integrated their sparrow shadow is not more indulgent than before. They are more honest. The energy that was going into suppression becomes available for actual choice.

Astrologically, this integration tends to coincide with transits and progressions that activate the 8th and 12th houses, or that bring the shadow planets into conjunction with the personal points. These are the moments when the sparrow behind the wall insists on being seen: when the appetite that has been coded as shameful pushes back into consciousness and demands its place at the altar.

The Ritual Vessel and the Sacred Appetite

The Bronze Age ritual vessel from Thera, its sides decorated with sparrows, places the bird within a sacred context that predates the moral categorizations that came later. The sparrow on a ritual vessel is not yet divided into the lustful and the humble. It is simply present within the sacred container, part of the symbolic vocabulary available to a culture for articulating its relationship to the generative powers of life.

This suggests that the sparrow’s dual symbolism, the split between the Aphroditic and the Psalm’s version, may be a relatively late development in its archetypal history. Before the split, the sparrow may have been simply a bird of life-force, of the generative energy that propagates and flourishes and builds its nests in whatever structure offers support. The ritual vessel honors this generative energy directly, without the subsequent need to divide it into acceptable and unacceptable forms.

Astrologically, the 5th house, Venus’s joy, carries something of this pre-split sparrow energy. The 5th house is where the erotic dimension and the Moon’s appetite for delight converge in a register that has not yet been sorted into the shadow. Planets in the 5th often carry a quality of the sparrow on the Thera vessel: the generative life-force in its undivided form, available for creative expression precisely because it has not been pushed into the 12th.

Hokusai’s Line and the Sparrow’s Sufficiency

The Japanese tradition of the sparrow-and-flower print, exemplified by Hokusai’s sparrow among hibiscus blossoms, offers a final integration that neither the erotic nor the humble Western readings quite reach. In the Zen-influenced aesthetics of Edo period Japan, the sparrow’s value was not contingent on what it symbolized or what moral lesson it could be made to teach. The sparrow was simply the sparrow, worthy of a master’s attention because it existed, because it was alive in the present moment, because its small precise body in a precise composition with a hibiscus blossom was complete in itself.

This is the sparrow at its most integrated: not as emblem of anything, not as shadow or as saint, but as a living being fully inhabiting its own nature. The Zen tradition would call this quality suchness, the radical ordinariness of a thing that is entirely what it is. The sparrow in Hokusai’s print is not reaching for the cherry or refraining from the cherry. It is present with the hibiscus, which is to say it is present with what is actually there.

This offers an astrological correlate in Venus as evening star: not straining toward assertion, not pushing outward into the light, but settled into the gathering dark with whatever is genuinely wanted. The Venus that has integrated the sparrow’s lesson is not less desirous than before; it is more accurately desirous, wanting what it actually wants rather than what it has been told it should want, and finding in that honesty a sufficiency that no amount of suppression ever achieved.

Negotiation with self nature

The sparrow endures as an archetypal image because it refuses to be tidied into a single meaning. It is Aphrodite’s bird and the Psalm’s bird, the creature Buffon despised and the creature Hokusai honored with the same care he gave the hibiscus blossom. It is the ritual vessel and the ventilation duct, the erotic abundance and the humble service, the bird suspended between flight and appetite in a Scandinavian cherry tree in 1885.

The ARAS material identifies this refusal as the sparrow’s most significant psychological function: to model “the self’s ongoing negotiation with its own nature.” The negotiation is not resolved by choosing one face of the sparrow over the other. It is not resolved by deciding that appetite is always wrong or always right, that the common is always base or always sacred. It is carried forward, as the sparrow carries itself, by continuing to show up in the margins of every landscape, adapting to every condition, building the nest in whatever structure offers genuine support.

Astrologically, the sparrow’s lesson arrives through the Venus cycles that return us to the question of what we actually want and whether we can bear to acknowledge it honestly, through the Moon’s democratic attention to every appetite without exception, through the morning star’s willingness to lead with desire and the evening star’s willingness to turn inward with it. These are the moments when Liljefors’s bird extends its feet toward the cherry, and the image asks its question again: what do you do with your appetite, and what does your answer say about who you are?

The sparrow does not wait for the answer. It is already in flight, thin feet extended, expectation intact, moving toward the single succulent cherry with the full commitment of a creature that has never learned to be ashamed of wanting what it wants. That is not the whole of what the archetype teaches. But it is where the teaching begins.

I want to start with something more basic than planets or houses. The foundation of astrology is not a technique, and it is not a table of rulerships. These polarities, the sun and the moon polarity, are actually the origin of astrology. It is the movements of the sun and the moon that define astrology at its most fundamental and basic level. Every dignity, every aspect, every house cusp sits on top of that first fact, and it is easy to forget the fact once you are deep in the tables.

The two bodies do not behave the same way, and the difference is the whole argument. The sun is a single blazing point, fixed in its cycle, holding one place in the sky relative to the earth and moving through the zodiac in one steady repeating line. The moon does the opposite. It waxes, wanes, disappears, returns, and redistributes its light across a cycle that never looks the same twice. Where the sun holds, the moon changes. Where the sun is one thing, the moon is many things in sequence, and it never stops changing shape long enough to be called one thing at all.

At the same time, the dance between the sun and the moon is not exact. The moon’s sidereal period versus its synodic period are offset. They’re not precise, and that imprecision, between 27.3 days and 29.5 days, creates the spiral nature of the zodiac, so that it’s not exactly the same. A closed loop would repeat itself forever, an identical circuit chasing an identical circuit. What we actually have is a spiral. That is not a defect in the math. It is the reason the whole system is alive rather than a wheel turning in place, a living, evolving thing instead of a closed one.

Cosmic Symbolism and Cultural Structures

Carry that polarity into culture and it does not stay abstract for long. The lunar representing diversity, the solar representing singularity. The lunar representing a multiculturalist approach and the solar representing a monoculturalist approach. The solar principle stands for the individual, the patriarchal, singularity, a monoculturalist orientation. The lunar principle stands for the collective, the plural, the redistributive, a multiculturalist orientation. Neither of these is a value judgment. They are descriptions of two different shapes a culture, or a chart, or a mind can take.

The trouble starts when the solar shape stops describing and starts claiming exclusivity. Supremacy of any kind is a monoculture, the belief that only one culture deserves to survive. This can be monotheism, racial supremacy, class supremacy or any other type of ideology that claims rightness over others. Whatever axis it runs along, race, religion, class, the shape is the same: singularity has stopped being one valid orientation among several and started insisting it is the only one that gets to exist.

The same failure shows up outside of ideology, in the ground itself. A field planted in a single strain, and nothing else, can outproduce a mixed field in a good year, and it can collapse in a single bad one, because there is no genetic variation left in the soil to meet whatever the bad year brings. One blight, one pest that happens to favor exactly that strain, one season of unfamiliar weather, and the whole field goes down together, because every plant in it was betting on the identical set of strengths and carrying the identical set of weaknesses. A mixed planting loses some of its crop to the same blight and keeps the rest. An ideological monoculture fails for the identical reason. A system that has erased its own plurality has erased its own resilience along with it, and it looks strongest in the year right before the one that breaks it.

Astrology as a Poly-Philosophical Practice

Astrology inherits this argument as a practice, not only as a metaphor. I was just reading some threads. One person was saying (paraphrased):

What is the one true astrology? I’ve been studying Western astrology, but I hear all this stuff about Vedic astrology, and I want the one true astrology. I don’t want to study astrologies that are fake and false.

This is a monotheistic attitude towards astrology, and astrology is decidedly anti-monotheism. It opposes monotheism. It’s polytheistic, or poly-philosophical, by its very nature.

Vedic and Western are not competing answers to the same test, with one of them destined to be marked wrong. They are different dialects describing the same sky, and a dialect is not a mistake, it is a voice. All these different perspectives can come to a chart, provided that the practitioner establishes their own criteria for themselves. It’s okay to change your criteria over time; you don’t have to feel like you’re stuck, but you’re not going to be able to be effective in the analysis of the chart and the transits unless you have a perspective, unless you have something you’ve decided. That is what a dialect requires of the person speaking it. The techniques are learnable, house by house, sign by sign, aspect by aspect. What can’t be learned out of a book is your own system of understanding, and that is exactly why the sky needs more than one voice describing it rather than fewer. If you understand the core fundamental principles of the house, for the particular house system that you’re using, and the paradigm that you’re approaching things with, you can take your concept of the soul, your concept of evolution, your understanding of the house, and create a synthesis that is coming from your own lived experience. It’s going to be unique to you. My perspective is unique to me. Nobody’s lived the path of my life that I’ve lived except for me. That is the actual argument for plurality, not a courtesy extended to other dialects but a fact about where any single dialect’s authority comes from in the first place. As long as we become familiar with our tools, and we become familiar with our viewpoints and our understanding of those viewpoints, then we can facilitate the conversation that takes place in our readings with our clients, to move toward the intention that we have as a practitioner.

A single birth chart carries the same plurality inside its own borders. Readings are a collaborative expression of the moment of consultation between the people that are doing the readings. Nothing here is only one thing. When we look at a chart, the chart has a Gestalt, and at the same time there’s multiplicity within that gestalt. We can’t say that the gestalt is singular, and yet we can’t deny that the plurality of the chart has a realistic quality to it. A chart is one recognizable whole and several contradictory currents running through that whole at once, and it does not need to resolve the contradiction to be read honestly.

A Holographic, Integrated Cosmos

None of this makes the sun the villain of the story, and it does not make the moon the sole hero either. A chart with only lunar multiplicity and no solar center would never hold together long enough to be read at all, and a chart with only solar singularity and no lunar variation would never change, grow, or survive its own fixed identity for very long. Solar energy provides the center and the continuity, the fixed point everything else gets measured against, the thing you can return to and still recognize. Lunar energy provides the variation and the capacity for renewal, the fire and the seeding both, the reason the fixed point does not calcify into the only point. Neither one is optional, and neither one is the whole cosmos by itself.

That is the holographic point, not a fractal one: singularity holds a seed of multiplicity inside it, and multiplicity holds a seed of singularity inside it, the way the Taijitu draws a small dot of each color inside the body of the other. Even the view I am holding right now, of the sun and the moon and how they share a sky, is itself a lunar thing, subject to the same dance. As our own soul goes through its evolution, our view of soul and our view of evolution will thereby change accordingly. There’s never one right answer that is universally right for everybody, and universally right for the same person forever and ever. The rightness is always in change and in flux, and it’s a dance of listening to the music and moving in accordance with the music of the stars and the music of the spheres, the music of our lives, and dancing with that music, and moving our thoughts and our views and our habits to be in alignment with what the music of life is displaying for us at any point in time. It’s good to establish a view, then work with that view, and then review and reanalyze that view to see if it’s still valid, and then change the view to fit the circumstances of our life that are continuing to unfold for us as our own soul goes through its own evolution.

The true danger was never the solar principle itself. The danger is supremacy, the mistake of letting one principle dominate and forgetting that it must share the sky with change. A sun that remembers the moon is a center that still allows for renewal. A sun that forgets the moon becomes exactly the kind of monoculture the forest burns away.

Few images in the ancient world carry as much charge as a single, fixed stare. Homer’s description of the Gorgon’s head mounted on Athena’s shield—”a thing of fear and horror”—names something that recurs across nearly every culture that has left a written record: the belief that a look, delivered with sufficient malice, can wound, sicken, or kill. This is the Evil Eye, and it is worth taking seriously not as folklore to be outgrown but as a durable psychological and symbolic pattern. Jane Harrison’s observation that the Gorgon “was regarded as a sort of incarnate Evil Eye” points to something important: the myth did not invent the fear, it gave the fear a face.

What makes the Evil Eye archetype distinct from other forms of malevolence in myth is its precision. It is not violence in general, not curse in general—it is harm transmitted specifically through vision, through the act of being looked at. An Arab proverb captures the stakes bluntly: the Evil Eye “empties houses and fills tombs.” The one-eyed Irish figure Balor could kill with a glance. A Libyan basilisk, so the legend goes, could not survive its own reflection. Across these traditions the mechanism stays constant even when the mythic dressing changes: seeing is not passive. To look, in this framework, is to act on what is seen, and to be looked at is to be exposed to a force that can diminish or destroy.

This essay explores that pattern first through its cultural and symbolic history, then through the language of astrology, where a comparable logic of envy, exposure, and hidden hostility has its own long tradition. Both frameworks converge on the same insight, arrived at independently: envy is not merely a feeling contained within the person who feels it. It moves. It has a vector. And whether we call that vector a Gorgon’s stare or a badly aspected planet, the archetype asks us to take seriously the idea that attention itself can carry weight.

Cultural and symbolic exploration

The belief in a harmful gaze is genuinely old and genuinely widespread, appearing independently among Indo-European, Semitic, and Mediterranean peoples long before any of these cultures had sustained contact with one another. This independence is part of what makes the pattern worth studying closely: it did not spread from a single source and get retold with local color. It seems, instead, to have arisen wherever humans lived closely enough together that envy, scarcity, and visible good fortune created social friction.

One plausible origin, suggested in the source material, traces the Gorgon image back to something more practical than myth: early hunters displaying the severed head of a slain animal as a trophy, or the deliberately terrifying masks worn by shamans in ritual context. In both cases the purpose is the same—to project a face so fearsome that it stops an aggressor before contact is made. The Gorgon, with her writhing serpent hair, tusks, and protruding tongue, may be a mythologized memory of that older, cruder technology of deterrence: make your face so awful that no one dares approach.

But the Evil Eye proper is a step beyond simple fearsomeness. It is not about looking frightening; it is about the eye as a weapon in itself, independent of the rest of the face. This distinction matters. A Gorgon’s severed head could theoretically be avoided by looking away from her whole visage. The Evil Eye tradition insists that it is specifically the eye—the organ of perception—that carries the lethal charge, which is why so many protective customs across cultures focus on the eye directly: painted eyes on boats and doorways, blue glass amulets shaped like eyes, charms meant to meet and absorb a hostile gaze before it reaches its target.

The Balor legend from Irish tradition offers a variation worth sitting with. Balor’s single destructive eye was said to require several men to lift its lid, as though the eye itself had grown heavy with the accumulated weight of what it could do. This detail suggests that the Evil Eye is not always spontaneous or involuntary. Sometimes it is understood as a power that must be managed, restrained, kept mostly closed, because its user recognizes its danger even to bystanders. That is a notably mature piece of folklore: it builds in the idea that the possessor of a dangerous gift bears some responsibility for containing it.

The Libyan basilisk, unable to survive its own reflection, adds a further layer. If the Evil Eye is lethal to whatever it looks at, then a being whose entire nature is Evil Eye becomes lethal even to itself once the gaze turns inward. This is myth doing something psychologically precise: it encodes the idea that a force built entirely out of destructive projection cannot survive self-examination. Turn the same eye on itself, and it dies. There is a lesson embedded here about the fate of pure envy when it runs out of external targets.

This is where the source material’s invocation of psychological projection becomes useful rather than merely explanatory. Projection, in its clinical sense, is the unconscious expulsion of some disowned piece of the self onto another person, who then seems to carry a menace that actually originates internally. At its most destructive, projection behaves exactly like the Evil Eye as myth describes it: it creates a field of hostility between the person doing the projecting and the person receiving it, a field that both parties may sense even without being able to name its source. The myth externalizes what the psychology internalizes. Both agree that the transmission is real, even if its true origin is disputed.

And at the center of both the myth and the psychology sits envy. The Evil Eye is, in nearly every tradition that names it, specifically the eye of envy—not random malice, but malice provoked by seeing something desirable in another: beauty, wealth, health, a new child, good fortune of any kind. This is why so many protective customs in Evil Eye cultures are triggered by praise. A compliment, in these traditions, is dangerous precisely because it draws attention to the thing worth envying. Mortals and immortals alike are shown as subject to this dynamic in myth, which suggests something the source material states directly: envy is not a moral failing confined to the wicked. It is a structural feature of consciousness itself, capable of arising in anyone who sees something they lack in someone who has it. The Evil Eye, understood this way, is less a villain’s tool and more a shadow function of vision—the dark twin of admiration.

Astrological framework

Astrology, working from an entirely different set of premises, arrives at a strikingly similar picture of hidden hostility, envy, and the danger of exposure. Using a Hellenistic whole-sign framework, several placements map onto the Evil Eye’s core themes: concealment, malefic influence, the vulnerability created by visibility, and the specific wound of envy.

Begin with the traditional malefics, Mars and Saturn. Mars carries the heat of direct aggression—conflict, rivalry, the desire to overpower. Saturn carries something colder and more patient: restriction, denial, the long grinding influence of scarcity and limitation. Where the Evil Eye tradition speaks of a gaze that diminishes its target, astrology has long assigned a similar diminishing function to Saturn in difficult aspect or dignity, and a similar aggressive function to Mars. A chart in which Mars and Saturn combine forces against a placement tied to visibility or vitality—say, the Sun or the Ascendant—describes, in astrological language, something close to what the myth describes: a force that seeks to reduce what is bright by contact with what is hostile.

The houses offer an even more direct correspondence. The twelfth house, in whole-sign practice, governs private or hidden enemies—exactly the register in which the Evil Eye operates, since its harm is rarely delivered face to face. The Evil Eye does not challenge you to a duel; it works from the margins, from someone standing nearby whose ill will you may never confirm. The twelfth house’s traditional association with self-undoing and concealed affliction gives astrology a structural home for this exact anxiety: the fear of an enemy who cannot be identified, whose hostility must be inferred rather than confronted. The seventh house, by contrast, governs open enemies—known rivals, declared opponents. The Evil Eye belongs unambiguously to the twelfth house’s territory, not the seventh’s, which is part of why it produces such a particular kind of dread. An open enemy can be met. A concealed one can only be warded off.

The eighth house adds another layer relevant here: the house of shared resources, but also of the psychological undercurrents that pass between people without full conscious awareness—suspicion, entanglement, the sense of being affected by forces one cannot fully name. Where Evil Eye folklore describes a “noxious field” created between the one who envies and the one who is envied, the eighth house is the astrological address for exactly this kind of field: an exchange that is real, consequential, and largely invisible.

The Sun deserves particular attention, since visibility is the precondition for becoming a target. In Hellenistic technique, a planet described as combust—too close to the Sun’s rays—is weakened by proximity to that brightness rather than strengthened by it, an old paradox worth noting: nearness to what shines can burn as easily as it can illuminate. The Evil Eye tradition encodes a related paradox at the level of lived experience. To be seen, to be praised, to be visibly fortunate, is to become vulnerable in a way the unseen and unremarkable are not. This is precisely why so many cultures developed customs of deflected praise—the reflexive “not too bad” in response to good news, the refusal to overtly admire a healthy child in front of strangers. The instinct being managed here is astrologically coherent: solar visibility invites both admiration and its shadow.

Aspect doctrine contributes one more piece. In the whole-sign framework, certain sign relationships are said to be in a state of aversion—unable to see one another by any classical aspect, and therefore unable to communicate directly. Some interpretive traditions link this “zone of aversion” to influence that must travel indirectly, outside ordinary channels of exchange. This maps with real precision onto the Evil Eye’s operating logic. The envious glance does not arrive through declared channels of conflict; it arrives sideways, through proximity without open relationship, exactly as aversion describes planetary bodies that affect each other’s condition without a formal line of sight between them.

Finally, lunar timing offers a practical dimension long recognized in folk practice, where certain phases of the Moon were considered more favorable than others for protective rites, cleansings, or the making and consecration of amulets. A waning Moon, associated across many traditions with release and the shedding of accumulated negativity, would be a natural period for ritual work aimed at clearing a suspected Evil Eye affliction, while a waxing or full Moon—phases tied to increase and culmination—would suit rites meant to build protective strength before a period of expected exposure, such as before a public celebration or an event likely to draw attention and praise.

Cross-cultural and astrological integration

What emerges when these two frameworks are placed side by side is not coincidence so much as convergent design. Myth and astrology, developed independently and largely without cross-reference, both arrive at a three-part structure for describing envy’s danger: a hidden source of hostility, a visible target whose exposure creates vulnerability, and a channel of transmission that operates outside open, declared conflict.

The Gorgon’s stare and the twelfth house both describe an enemy who cannot be confronted directly. The basilisk’s fatal reflection and Saturn’s cold, self-limiting influence both describe a force that consumes itself once it runs out of external objects. The Arab proverb about emptied houses and filled tombs and the eighth house’s governance of shared, half-conscious psychological currents both describe harm that moves between people along channels neither party fully controls. And the widespread folk practice of deflecting praise finds its structural explanation in the Sun’s paradoxical vulnerability to what stands nearest its own light.

This convergence matters because it suggests the Evil Eye archetype is not merely a superstition that a more rational culture eventually corrects. It is a recurring attempt, made independently by many traditions using many different symbolic vocabularies, to describe something real about how envy behaves in human communities: unevenly distributed goods draw attention, attention draws a mixture of admiration and resentment, and resentment, when it cannot be voiced or resolved directly, tends to seek indirect outlets. Myth gave that process a face and an organ. Astrology gave it houses, planets, and angles of relationship. Depth psychology gave it the word projection. All three are describing the same current from different banks of the same river.

There is also a lived, embodied dimension to this pattern that both frameworks acknowledge without fully resolving: the discomfort of being looked at with mixed feeling, and the reciprocal discomfort of feeling one’s own admiration curdle, without quite choosing to, into something less generous. Anyone who has felt a flicker of envy toward a friend’s good fortune, even while genuinely wishing them well, has some private acquaintance with the archetype from the inside. This is likely why the myth insists that even the gods are not exempt from it. Envy is not confined to villains. It is a structural possibility built into the act of seeing something desirable in someone else, and the Evil Eye tradition, read this way, is less an accusation against particular malicious people than an honest account of a hazard built into social life itself.

The Evil Eye endures across so many unrelated cultures because it names something that has never stopped being true: attention is not neutral, and visibility carries a cost alongside its rewards. Whether encoded in a Gorgon’s severed head, a one-eyed Irish giant, a self-destroying Libyan lizard, or the astrological logic of hidden houses and averse signs, the underlying claim is the same. What shines draws both admiration and its shadow, and the shadow, denied a direct channel, tends to travel sideways.

Understood this way, the archetype offers less a warning to fear other people’s stares and more an invitation to notice one’s own capacity for both admiration and envy, and to hold that capacity with some honesty rather than projecting it entirely outward. The oldest protective customs—the deflected compliment, the amulet, the modest response to good fortune—were never really about controlling other people’s eyes. They were about managing the exposure that comes with being seen at all, a task that remains as relevant now as it was in the world that first imagined a Gorgon’s stare turning flesh to stone.

Some ceramicists dig their own clay. They go out to a riverbed or a deposit in the hills, fill buckets, haul them back, process the material by hand — wedging out rocks and grit, testing plasticity, adjusting the body before the clay ever touches a wheel. If that process is part of their practice, part of their story, part of what makes the work theirs — that is real. That is a legitimate aura choice, and it costs them something: time, labor, the particular frustration of clay that is never quite consistent from one batch to the next.

Most ceramicists buy clay out of a bag.

The bags come from a supplier who sources from a mine somewhere, mixes and processes the body to specification, and ships it on a pallet. The ceramicist opens the bag, wedges the clay, throws it on the wheel, and makes something. The work can be extraordinary. The craft can be masterful. The pieces can carry aura — story, intention, presence — that has nothing to do with whether the silica was quarried by the artist or delivered by a truck.

Neither ceramicist owes the other an apology.

This has always been the actual situation with tools in art. Painters who squeeze color from a tube — and tube paint had its critics when it arrived, though whether the controversy was as fierce as the story gets told is hard to say at this distance; the grinding-your-own purists are still around — are not cheating painters who grind their own pigments from raw minerals. Printmakers who use manufactured inks are not inferior to those who brew their own. And if a photographer shoots commercial film stock, what exactly has been surrendered? The degree of material self-sufficiency is an aesthetic decision — sometimes a financial one, sometimes a time one — but it is not the measure of whether something is art.

The question has never been the source of the clay. The question has always been what you do with it.

We are ten posts into this series, and the three words have done their work. Craft is what you put in. Aura is what makes anyone care. The mirror is what AI actually is — not a collaborator in the romantic sense, not a plagiarism machine, but a surface that reflects your material back at you with a particular kind of distortion. That is the whole shape of the argument.

Most AI output fails on craft. Nearly all of it fails on aura. That is an honest assessment, and it has nothing to do with the tool itself. Low-effort work is low-effort work whether you generated it in thirty seconds or labored over it for a week. The same has been true of every other tool handed to a person who wanted to make something without doing the work of making something.

I should tell you something about this series itself before it closes.

Every post in this arc was drafted using an augmented authoring system — ShakespeareAAS — that I built and use in my own practice. The process goes like this: I dictate voice notes on walks, long streams of thinking aloud, sometimes incoherent, sometimes surprisingly clear. The system ingests those notes, routes them through a structured drafting pipeline, and returns draft prose grounded in my dictated material and shaped by a style guide I maintain. Then I revise, cut, expand, approve, and reject until the text is mine in the way that matters — not every word generated by my fingers, but every argument, every example, and every turn of phrase sanctioned by my judgment. Sometimes the revision is light. Sometimes I throw out whole sections that missed what I was actually trying to say.

The irony of writing a series about AI authorship using an AI authoring system is not lost on me. It is, I think, the point.

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You’ve heard it without knowing you were hearing it. The lo-fi piano loop playing under the study-session playlist. The ambient swell behind the explainer video. The background track on the brand reel that sounds like music without quite being music. It fits. It functions. It asks nothing of you, and you give it nothing back.

That’s not a quality problem. The sound is often technically fine. What’s missing is harder to name, and naming it is the whole point of this post.

The series has been building toward this question. We’ve defined craft as skill: the technique required to execute something well. Aura, by contrast, is the perceived presence around a piece — the story, distance, wound, or intention that makes you care about the thing beyond its surface. Those two categories look like they should add up. Good craft plus aura equals art. But they don’t always compound. You can have one without the other. And the most common failure mode for AI-generated work isn’t what critics usually say it is.

The tool isn’t lazy. Nobody showed up to want anything.

The two places aura lives

Before we get to AI specifically, the framework needs one distinction it hasn’t made explicit yet: aura can live in two different places, and they behave differently.

Piece-aura is the aura that belongs to a specific work. It’s what you feel when you stand in front of a Rembrandt and understand, even without being told, that this object has a history and a presence you can’t fully account for. It’s the way a particular song feels like it knows something about your life. Piece-aura attaches to the individual artifact. It makes you want to know where it came from.

Creator-aura is the aura that belongs to the person making the work. Follow enough of someone’s posts, videos, or albums, and they accumulate a persona you track over time. The individual pieces may be thin (a fifteen-second clip, a quick sketch), but you keep coming back because you’re oriented to the maker, not the specific output. A TikTok artist or Substack essayist with strong creator-aura can hold an audience across thin material. The creator-as-performer is a real and legitimate model. It has its own integrity. But it’s a different bargain than piece-aura. The work is secondary to the performance of a self.

Both kinds of aura are real. Both can be art. But they’re not interchangeable, and conflating them is exactly where AI content tends to fail without anyone quite understanding why.

What AI floods tend to produce

The ambient tracks have no piece-aura because nobody built any. There’s no story attached to the piano loop: no originating moment, no wound it came from, no choice that felt like a risk. The lo-fi beat is optimized for non-intrusiveness. It was generated, filtered, uploaded, and it’ll sit on a playlist until it’s algorithmically replaced by another like it.

That’s not the machine’s fault. The machine does exactly what it’s pointed at. The failure is upstream, in the decision not to bring anything to the transaction beyond the desire to produce output.

There’s a lot of that out there. It’s not that AI attracts bad artists — bad artists exist in every medium. There are bad watercolors and bad novels. The tool isn’t the problem. The problem is that AI lowers the friction on the output side so drastically that people who would never have spent three months throwing pots can produce fifty tracks before lunch, and many of them genuinely believe that volume is equivalent to presence. It isn’t.

To make things worse, AI output often has the surface texture of craft. The chords resolve correctly. The sentences are grammatical. The image is composed. A technically deficient work at least announces its own struggle. Slick, competent, empty output announces nothing. It just sits there, occupying space that could be held by something that mattered.

Why creator-aura doesn’t fill the gap

The usual escape hatch, when people press on the hollowness of AI output, is to point to the creator’s persona. The artist builds a following. They show their process. Their story is interesting even if individual pieces aren’t.

Sometimes this works. The most successful AI-using artists, the ones genuinely moving audiences, tend to treat the production of work as a performance, not just an output loop. They show the iteration, the refusals, the dead ends. They connect their work to a coherent set of intentions you can track over time. In doing that, they’re doing something real: they’re manufacturing creator-aura with discipline and transparency, and the individual pieces become evidence of a larger project you’re following.

But creator-aura only carries you so far. It can’t permanently substitute for piece-aura in work that aspires to last. A musician with strong creator-aura who releases songs with no piece-aura will eventually feel thin. The fans who love them will say things like “I love what she’s doing, but nothing since the early albums quite got me the way that one song did.” That one song had piece-aura. The others coasted on borrowed presence.

This is the real stakes of what’s flooding the zone right now. A lot of it is creator-aura-free and piece-aura-free simultaneously: anonymous channels producing ambient tracks, stock image accounts posting AI illustrations without attribution to any human project, text generators filling blog posts with no point of view. Nobody is performing anything. Nobody wants anything from the audience except a click. The loop of aura — making something that earns a response from a person and carries that response forward — never closes.

Craft without aura is still craft

Here’s where the argument can go wrong, and I want to be precise: none of this means the work is worthless.

Craft without aura is still craft. A technically correct piece of ambient music might serve a real function — it fills a waiting room, it provides a study environment, it does the job it was hired to do. That’s fine. Commercial function isn’t an insult. A lot of human creative labor throughout history has been craft-for-hire with no pretension to aura, and it served its purpose without embarrassing anyone.

The problem isn’t craft without aura. The problem is craft without aura being mistaken for art: pushed into contexts where aura is what matters, where audiences are expected to care, where the implicit contract is that something was made for them specifically to feel. When the ambient track shows up in that context, when the AI illustration appears on the cover of a book that’s supposed to mean something, when the generated essay tries to build a relationship with a reader, the absence lands hard, even if no one can immediately articulate what’s wrong.

Chiang’s argument, as I’ve read it summarized, is roughly that current generative systems are designed to spare users from making choices — that the statistical averaging built into the model fills in most of the decisions that, in more demanding creative work, would be the actual craft. There’s something to this as a diagnosis. The default output is smooth because it’s the average of everything the model has seen. Aura, almost by definition, isn’t average. It comes from specificity, from choices that didn’t have to be made that way but were, from the willingness to be recognizable and therefore vulnerable.

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Right now, Mercury is very close to the sun. Often, in astrology, when a planet is this close to the sun, it is considered a form of debility. But when it happens that the planet is also in its sign of domicile, or exaltation, then it is considered to be in what is called its chariot, and that it is protected from any harm that might be inflicted upon it by the beams of the sun.

Virgo is both the domicile and the exaltation of Mercury, and its the only sign that is domicile and exaltation to the same planet. Mercury is the only planet that has both a domicile and exaltation in the same sign.

So this means that, for the entire time Mercury is in Virgo, Mercury is in a very powerful and positive condition, by its essential dignity. The time that Mercury is in Virgo is just a few weeks because Mercury is moving very fast. In fact, Mercury leaves Virgo and moves into Libra on September 10th of 2026, and this is actually a good thing, because when Mercury is moving fast, it is said to be rejoicing by speed. Mercury is not only in its sign of domicile, it is in its sign of exaltation, and it is moving fast, which means it has power to potentiate.

Mercury is a planet that often is associated with commerce, exchange, and transactions.

Universally, across the entire planet, this is a positive condition around these things. Not necessarily positive in the sense of good, but positive in the sense that they’re efficacious and moving forward quickly, so plans around these kinds of things, commerce and finance, exchange, communication, move forward effectively. This is on both sides of any kind of argument or exchange. It’s not calling sides one way or the other, but the entire phenomenon of exchange and commerce is accelerated, communication is accelerated.

Mercury is also known as the god of thieves, so it is a time to look to those that are trying to be deceitful and pay close attention to the deceit. Because if we are not paying close attention to things that are potentially deceitful, we could be deceived. It’s good to keep an eye out for those kinds of things, from a cautionary point.

When we look collectively at the financial impact of Mercury in Virgo, and the positive characteristics that it has with its own dignified nature, that lands heaviest with people who have Virgo in either their 10th house, 2nd house or 6th house, the houses of career, money and resources, and work and labor. These houses, with Mercury in them, or in relationship to Mercury, in a person’s natal chart, or if it’s passing through those houses by transit, carry that same weight.

People that have those configurations may feel emboldened to initiate and complete their actions that are related to commerce and finance, but they should also take caution, not act without proper risk assessment. Don’t make investments without properly assessing risk.

When a planet is in an exaltation, it can be a sign of its own grandiosity and its own inability to recognize its fault, similar to any kind of leader or ruler who is isolated from those that they govern. A planet in its exaltation feels emboldened like a CEO in a boardroom who’s not able to conect deeply with their customers. Mercury can have that potential to be a little bit bombastic with its activities.

It’s advisable for people to take caution and make sure that they’re measuring risk, but also not to fear acting. This is a time for bold action, and if there’s been any kind of investments or financial dealings that have been in the works, now is a good time to either initiate or conclude those things. Just do it with an eye towards caution around all these things, since even a planet protected in its chariot was never quite untouchable by the sun.

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In the last post I wrote about curation as a creative act the law can actually see: the selection, the arrangement, the human fingerprints on the assembled work. That argument was about legal recognition. This one is about what happens at your desk, inside the sentences, before anyone else sees it. It’s about craft.

When I was studying ceramics, learning to glaze was its own semester-long problem. You could buy glaze premixed in a bottle (cone six satin, iron red, commercial celadon) and it worked fine. Predictable. You brushed it on and you got what the label promised.

The problem was that you got exactly what the label promised.

Every other student with the same bottle got the same result. The glaze didn’t respond to your clay body, your silica content, your firing temperature. It had no relationship to the specific piece it was on. Instructors called it “store-bought” in a tone that said: not wrong, but not yet yours.

Making your own glaze meant something different. You started from raw materials: feldspar, silica, whiting, maybe iron oxide for color, bentonite to hold the mixture in suspension. You measured. You tested on tiles. You fired once and adjusted, fired again. The same base recipe behaved differently in oxidation than in reduction, differently on a stoneware body than on porcelain. Understanding why required understanding the chemistry, or at least the craft-knowledge equivalent of it: what each material contributed and what would happen when you changed the ratio.

That process had a name. We called it learning the material.

Working with LLM text is the same problem. The system has its own defaults, and they’re persistent. The defaults exist because humans produced them, not because the model is broken. Bullet lists everywhere. The “not X but Y” contrast move, used so often it has become a tic. Three-part rhythm: first point, second point, third point, brief synthesis. Em-dashes as load-bearing glue between ideas that haven’t quite earned adjacency. Whether these patterns are baked into the model by training or are just internet writing habits the models inherited, I don’t know — but they’re persistent and they’re recognizable.

Every one of those patterns appears in human writing. The model learned them from us. That’s actually the point: the model is doing what it was trained to do, optimizing for patterns that read, statistically, as coherent and helpful. When you get a response built entirely from those moves, you’ve received something that technically works. Predictable. Every other person asking a similar question gets a structurally similar answer.

This is store-bought glaze.

There’s an older precedent for the accept-or-reject loop, one that doesn’t feel threatening at all because we’ve been using it long enough that nobody argues about it anymore.

Grammar checkers. Spell check. Grammarly. Microsoft Word’s grammar checker, going back decades.

For years, every time you typed a sentence in Word, a colored underline could appear. Red for spelling, green (then blue) for grammar. The software would suggest a revision. You looked at the suggestion. Sometimes you took it. Often you didn’t, because the corrected version was technically grammatical but wrong for your rhythm, your tone, your specific effect. The sentence was supposed to start with “And.” The comma splice was intentional. The fragment landed harder that way.

Nobody claimed grammar check made you less of a writer. Nobody argued the resulting text belonged to Microsoft. The writer’s judgment, the sustained series of small accept-or-reject decisions, was obviously the creative act. The tool surfaced options. The person chose.

Predictive text on phones extended this further once smart keyboards became standard. You’re mid-sentence and the keyboard offers three words. Most of the time you tap past them. Occasionally one is exactly right and you’re mildly surprised. Occasionally one reveals that you were about to write something imprecise and you revise.

Working with an LLM is that same loop, expanded by an order of magnitude. The completions are longer. The suggestions are more developed. The number of accept-or-reject decisions per paragraph goes up. But the structure of the act, the human in the loop, judging, is not new.

Where it becomes craft is in what you refuse.

Letting an LLM write your paragraphs without intervention gets you the default glaze. The prose functions. It’s organized. It’s not yours. The sentence lengths march in approximate lockstep. The transitions use the same four connectors. Every concept gets its explanatory clause. The rhythm is median, calibrated to scan smoothly for a hypothetical reader who wants to absorb information without friction.

If your goal is information transfer with minimum friction, that result may serve you well. But if your goal is a prose voice that sounds like you, with your habits of observation, your particular way of pausing before a point, your instinct for which comparisons illuminate and which just pad, then you have to break the defaults.

This is editorial work, not mystical intervention. You read what came back and you notice: this sentence moves too fast, I’d slow down here. This list should be two sentences. This contrast is the “not X but Y” move and I just did it two paragraphs ago. This em-dash is holding together two thoughts that should be two sentences with space between them.

Ceramicists talk about fitting the glaze to the clay body. The glaze and the clay expand and contract at different rates during firing; if the fit is wrong you get crawling, crazing, or shivering — the glaze pulls apart, or cracks, or flakes. A glaze that works on one clay body fails on another. It has to be calibrated to the specific piece it will live on.

Voice is the same calibration problem. The corrections you make to LLM output are the adjustments. They’re not cleanup; they’re the craft.

None of this happens automatically, and it doesn’t happen fast. The first time you override a default, you might not be sure why you’re doing it, only that something feels off. That instinct is worth following. It develops. After enough repetitions you can name what’s wrong: the rhythm was three-part when the idea needed two; the bullet list fragmented something that gains force from continuous pressure; the “importantly” before the sentence was throat-clearing for a thought that would’ve been stronger without the warning label.

Experienced use of grammar check looked the same way. At first you accepted suggestions without much scrutiny. Eventually you developed a feel for when the software’s notion of correctness diverged from your actual intent. You accepted fewer suggestions. You understood them well enough to explain why you were rejecting them. That judgment was craft.

Augmented authoring with an LLM follows the same arc, compressed or extended depending on how seriously you treat the practice. What you’re building is editorial instinct calibrated to a new tool. The tool has tendencies. You learn them. You decide which ones serve you.

There’s still something left unaddressed, and I want to name it before the next post takes it up. Craft this deliberate, this clearly yours, can still produce work with no aura.

Aura is the other problem. It’s harder.

A ceramic artist can buy bagged clay, use store-bought glaze, fire in an electric kiln, produce technically accomplished pots, and sell them. That’s craft. Whether those pots are art depends on something the technique alone doesn’t supply. The work that follows this one is about why AI content, even well-crafted AI content, so often falls flat, and what the missing element is.

The Forrest Fire is a forest fire and forest fires are never about a single tree. The fire is not the forest. Its power to consume is complete. Its power to restore is also. In a good forest fire all the choking under brush is burnt away and the trees that remain can grow stronger. When we feel the fire within us and without us we are cazimi and we have become the purification the fire demands.

The elements have no morality. Fire included, and its important when we are looking at things elementally to understand how the elements interact with each other. What kinds of human behavior are signified by different elements? Words, and communication, and speech, and writing are of the element of air. The impact of air on fire is to strengthen it, to increase it, to feed it with oxygen, and to make it grow bigger.

When we’re talking about fire in its most pure elemental sense, when it is in a cardinal expression of its form, it’s dealing with bringing life and invigorating and growing things, the fire of life, the energy that comes into the initiation of things. When we’re dealing with a solid state of fire, a solid modality of fire, the fixed modality, we are talking about the fire that sustains light, the life functioning force, in a way that allows us to see and recognize the different life patterns that exist. The life pattern of being human is sustained by the solid fire element of being human. The state of being a plant or an animal, and living, and having a continuity of the expression of that living organism, that living being, is the solid state of fire.

The mutable expression of fire is in the consumption. It is the funeral pyre, upon which the phoenix both surrenders into its cremation and erupts in its later re-emergence, its reincarnation, the re-expression of the phoenix. So this fire, this mutable, double bodied expression of fire, is both the expression of aliveness and continuity and the expression of destruction and disolution.

The more air, the more words, the more air element that comes to the fire, the stronger and hotter it becomes and the more mutable the fire is. It is that searing, nuclear fusion level of heat that the flame brings when it is completly fanned with the air element. Right now, not only do we have Pluto in Aquarius and Uranus in Gemini, we have Venus in Libra. The quality of air is expansive, and it is all consuming in its state of purification. The hotter that fire becomes, the more purifying it becomes.

When it’s cardinal, the impact of fire is growth. In its solid state, the impact of fire is sustainment. In its mutable modality fire is transformative, we are in a state of the utmost mutability of fire right now.

The mutable fire sign is Sagittarius, and Sagittarian fire is the fire which, when it consumes, results in wisdom. This is non-partisan wisdom. This is non-binary wisdom. It is a type of wisdom that doesn’t have any morality. All factors, all components of the fuel, all things that are fuel to the fire, can be transformed from their base material into the white-hot wisdom.

We see this happening right now across the world, in many areas of life. We see this happening politically, in the ways the different countries are interacting with each other. We see this happening culturally, inside the cultural context of an individual country. We see it here inside the United States. We see it taking place in China. We see it taking place in Russia. So this is the internal expression of the transformation that’s taking place. Words are really being used to fuel and change and transform the way that fire is expressed, and to impact its strength and its growth. We see it where UN experts are warning of large-scale atrocity risk in Sudan, and where the attacks on non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur have drawn genocide accusations. We see it in what a United Nations commission reported in June 2026 about the killing of Palestinian children in Gaza, a finding that is itself contested and politically live. We see it in Myanmar, where the Rohingya genocide is still counted among the ongoing crises.

We see it even in our families. We might see it in our communities and in our nieghborhoods, but we might see it in our homes. We might see the words that we’re speaking to each other fanning the fire. Now this fire doesn’t have to be conflict. Conflict can be an expression of fire, but the fire element itself, and especially the mutable fire, is consuming. Conflict may be an expression, or the beginning, of that white hot fire element, but in its ultimate result the mutable fire expression is transformative.

And we see it within ourselves. In our own heads and in our own minds and our thoughts, the words that are taking place in our heads are feeding and fueling the fire within us each individually. We read the words on the screen and on the page. We hear things, the news on the radio, people talking to us. This causes internal words to create more cyclonic expression. We then speak words out loud, but in between the process of ingesting the air element of words through our sight and through our ears, we process that in our minds, and we have internal speak, internal dialouge of words that are going around and around in our head. These words are the element of air within us, inside of us, and it is fueling the fire of transformation within each of us individually.

If the words are air, and the air is what feeds the fire, then we have some choice in what we breathe into it. This is where the idea of metta becomes so important, loving-kindness, the wishing of well-being toward yourself first and then outward toward everybody else. It is not softness and it is not a way of putting the fire out. It is a choice about which air we hand to the flame, in what we say out loud and in the words running around in our own heads when nobody is listening.

As we see Venus and Uranus and Pluto in the sky, filling the element of air right now, the element of air is magnified. It is expanded, and it is brought together through a Venusian fluidity of ease, of expression, that creates the wind circling more and more and greater and greater until finally the fire within us sears away the impurities.

There’s that saying from Dune, the one about fear being the killer of the mind, and about letting it pass through you, and what is left when it has gone. I always have to go back and try to find that quote.

In that context, the fear was the air element, and the process of letting it burn through is the fire. It fans the flames, and then the fire consumes and transforms, that is what I was trying to connect here.

The process of searing those impurities away and transforming into wisdom can be disruptive. There’s no doubt about it. There is no doubt about it. We cannot get to the other side without going through.

Though how we go through it matters about as much as the fact that we have to go through it at all. Karuna is the word for compassion, and what it points at is a turning toward suffering instead of away from it, which is not sentiment, since it asks for honest seeing first, and the honest seeing is the uncomfortable part. We do not get to care about what is burning if we will not look at what is burning.

There’s a lot going on in the world and in our comunities. We see it. We see the real impact of our words being brought out into the world in the form of violence, both emotional violence and verbal violence, but also physical violence that is resulting in the death of individuals who are being killed as an individual, singled out.

We’re also seeing it impact entire populations in the form of genocide. And I’m not using that word bombastically. I’m using it to really talk about the efforts that are being taken to eliminate certain human gene pools. That’s what genocide is about, removing specific genetic traits. That’s what we see taking place around the world. We see it in many, many, many parts of the world, this idea that we need to purify the gene pool. It is in the zeitgeist for many people, tragically, who think that by eliminating some sort of gene from the gene pool they are purifying things, when in fact the only way that you can purify genetic strands is through the proliferation of genetic material in a greater and greater expression of diversity.

It is the diversity of genetic material that creates the purity of the survival, and it cannot happen through the destruction and elimination of genes. So these eugenic type people that feel like they can arrive at some sort of genetic purity through the elimination of life are deeply mistaken on how the very process of life itself propagates its ability to invigorate consciousness on a wider and wider scale.

That widening is worth being glad about, and mudita is the name for that gladness, the sympathetic joy you feel at somebody else’s flourishing instead of the accounting you run against your own. It is the opposite motion entirely from purifying by elimination. And when we feel the fire, within us and without us, upekkha is what lets us stay balanced and centered in the middle of it, which is what being cazimi actually is, sitting in the heart of the fire and not being burnt by it.

None of it is a way out of the fire. It is what we are doing while we are inside it, and it is how we might become the purification the fire demands rather than more fuel handed to the flame. In a good forest fire it is the choking under brush that burns, and the trees rooted deep enough to stand in that heat are still there when it passes, and they come back stronger. That is the part I keep coming back to, the forest afterward, and how much of it comes down to what air we are feeding the fire and how we choose to stand in it.

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.