Call of the Wild: Can You Hear Me Now?

Stories like this are always great teaching tools. The more absurd or emphatic an event the more the planetary positions (and chart angles) are highlighted.

I spoke with a Verizon official to get an estimated time for this event and it was between 11 am and noon (*) on July 17th.

The short version of the story: A woman entered a Verizon store in California without a mask on, she was asked to leave, she refused. The store’s manager called 911, and the women then proceeded to lower her pants and urinate on the floor in a corner of the store. Cops arrived to arrest her and while doing so found a cache of stolen goods in her bag, stuff cockroached from an adjoining sporting goods store.

So high-jinx and criminality that’s displayed in public would have Mercury and 10th house associations throbbing — and sure enough, the chart for the adventure has a Virgo ascendant (which Mercury — god of thieves — rules) with the Moon (females) and Venus (an older-than-a-child female) conjunct the mid-heaven of public (oops, Freudian slip — typed ‘pubic’ there which is my way of knowing that this is worth amplifying) happenings or displays.

The Gemini mid-heaven is a high-noon Mecurial iteration — an event for all of the world to see (or read about). And with Venus and the Moon conjunct in Gemini — both of those markers link over — another iteration — to Mercury (Gemini’s ruler — in Cancer, as well as the chart’s ruler par excellence). All this Mercury, all of this Gemini, all of this trickster acting out.

Mercury in Cancer (unedited instinctual reactions — that can be highly imaginative) makes an applying square aspect (gathering storm and ‘cloud burst’) to an impulsive Mars in Aries in the 8th house of clandestine criminality: stolen sporting goods (Mars-ruled) hidden in a bag (the 8th house).

Add scatological behavior (8th house is associated with elimination and expulsion, especially with Aries on the house cusp) and we’ve slipped into another dimension of ‘the return of the repressed’ — as kids we just shit and pissed ourselves willy-nilly, often as ways to punish our parents who we might have experienced as controlling or, worse, blind to our existence.

The 25 degrees Cancer Sun (conjunct my natal Sun) indicates that this event would capture my imagination and have resonance as a form of unique self-expression (Sun), which is doubly true as my solar return this year had an exact Sun-Pluto opposition on the chart’s horizon.

With Pluto also conjunct my ascendant natally, all kinds of literalized Pluto themes and myths satisfy my craving for weird pathologies or taboo-shattering behavior. Anything that makes people stop and do double-takes intrigues me. As John Waters once remarked, “Without obsession life is nothing.”

With Pluto also conjunct my solar return’s ascendant, I would become a ‘town crier’ for Pluto performances this year and next — crime, power plays, black magic, primordial rage meltdowns, but also ways of seeing and reading events from an underworld perspective/appreciation — where there’s no moral perspective only a sequence of images that capture the reader’s imagination and then make her think in new ways about astrology, etc.

Too, presently I’m working with astrologer and friend Jessica Murray on a deep dive take apart of the USA’s upcoming Pluto return. Stay tuned for more on this project. Part one is here.

So, anyway, that’s enough — or as William Blake said “Enough! Or too much!”

Feel free to supplement my take on this free-spirited event over on Facebook. (I also loathe Verizon — so reading about this 911 call this AM gave me a fun frisson).

(*) I came up with a near 11 am time for the event by studying the photo of the cop cars in front of the store — no shadows were present so for the latitude of this event’s location, in California, I went with something leaning towards 11 am, re the Sun’s position in the sky at that time.

Natch, I could be off by an hour, but as Geoffery Cornelius tells us it’s more about the astrologer’s approach to the chart than the actual time.