In this week’s Planet Waves TV, I look at the charts for Sunday morning’s mass shooting at a gay club in Orlando. These shooting incidents would be meaningless if they did not comment on us and our society. Mars in Scorpio factors prominently into this chart. Omar, the presumed shooter, had his Sun right underneath Mars. This takes us back to the earliest discussions of this Mars retrograde — it’s about the intersection of religion and sex.
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Less Than Shocking, No Less Horrid, and the Facts of Life
Given the astrology of recent weeks, what happened in Orlando on Sunday morning is not surprising. Intense pressure from the Jupiter-Saturn-Neptune alignment has created a kind of background of intensity. Mars is slowing down to its station-direct, and the retrograde is getting old and deep.
One by one, there are triggers that release the energy. When a huge event like this happens, it seems to be blowing off energy for the collective. We deal with a lot of repressed rage in our society (American, in particular). This is compounded by repressed orgasm. To many the violence seems normal and sexual expression seems perverse.
From the Three Scorpios Series, Book of Blue. Photo by Eric Francis.
It would seem that in the case of the Orlando shooter, there was a contact to his personal chart that got him to take action.
Mars was moving retrograde over his natal Sun in Scorpio, square his natal Sun in Aquarius. He was under a lot of pressure, emotional tension both from within and from without.
His chart and its alignment to the current astrology speak directly to the well-known equation: repressed sexual energy turns violent. In this case, he directed his rage at a gay club, and given his natal Mercury and Venus retrograde in Scorpio, he clearly had questions of his own. It’s easy to forget that sexual orientation is existential. Consider how weird it is for you to step outside your declared and tested gender pattern.
Now add the pressure of religion (he was having his Saturn return in Sagittarius). Saturn is now in Sagittarius for all of us, applying the same pushing-down for all of us to some extent, and raising the question of what to do about how nearly all organized religion so copiously, casually and effectively makes sex and women bad in one gesture.
By that logic, we’re all doomed sinners; that is, until anyone stops and asks what’s going on. We’re now embarking on the last couple of weeks of Mars retrograde in Scorpio. Mars will move slower and slower, gearing down to the pace of Pluto and then seeming to stop. So we might expect these themes to come up.
The question is what to do when they do. We’re all good at pushing them down. It’s our most basic training as a human: hold in excrement, push down sexual feelings. That’s the level we’re being engaged with by something so prime and primal as Mars in this unusual condition in Scorpio.
With this comes, by default, some form of the question of death. Of course it’s always a personal question; to contemplate the death of anyone is to contemplate your own.
And to contemplate or empathize with the sexuality of anyone, or even the vaguest idea about it, is to make contact with your own. Why wouldn’t someone want to do that, except for the desire to appease some phantom mother- or father-figure?
We’re past the point of being able to decide which kind of repression we like better, or which is less worse (everyone knows both cause problems). Any person on a conscious path of growth, evolution, personal integration or whatever you might call it, doesn’t have the option to choose between them. Life is one reality; you are one person.
The Orlando shooting and its clear, bold astrology remind us that it’s time to address the facts of life, so that we may get on with living — or perhaps try for the first time.
Remember that because of the power of TV and Internet, these incidents don’t need to be everywhere, they just need to be anywhere. This one happened in one of the capitals of the United States, Orlando, one place just about everyone has been. Those who are plugged into the media are going to see this over and over, though the shock is going through everyone. The networks, looking for more content to fill the time, are now getting more and more gruesome interviews with witness and relatives: it’s an advertisement for grief.
The next thing that happens is that it’s necessary to cut off. It’s just too much. This is how we get the numbing effect; of being put into a trance by overload. It doesn’t help that for some reason people feel guilty for not tuning in, for not participating in the collective grief. It’s OK to find something else to think about, to do, to make.
Being a podcast addict helped in the time of the Orlando tragedy. I didn’t read the details till Monday morning. Got to enjoy my weekend. Glad I watched your YouTube video blog on the commute home this morning to use as a foundation for all the hate that will be thrown into the airwaves in response to the event. It’s a good buffer too!
I wonder if the charts of the victims pointed to this being where they would find their end to that life. I suspect so. It sure would help those they left behind to know this. Funny how people can believe in fate before they seriously believe in astrology. What will it take to enlighten them?!
Hey Eric —
Orlando is not Florida’s capital — Tallahassee is.
Though I forget that all the time, since Orlando is *definitely* one of this country’s “entertainment capitals,” with Disney World there.
Which makes for a very interesting substitution of capital… the hyper-reality of Disney World supplanting the actual seat of state’s government in our consciousness, in our ever-more-virtually lived lives?
Good point, Amanda. I never noticed that error of Orlando as the State Capital even though I know it’s not precisely for that reason. It being the main reason people go there. The Magic Kingdom of Fun. Bit ironic, eh?
Yes, and as Eric explained to me last night, he was not actually saying it’s a state capital, though the phrasing he used can be easily misconstrued that way. He was simply intending to describe it as, “an American center of culture, commerce, entertainment, and one of the most recognized names of a city in the world,” and as “a center of American life.” Which it is, absolutely.
Right, I am even wronger than that — I am saying that Orlando is the capital of the United States of America.
Oracle:
The personal is political? ?A story solution – how to change the emphasis to achieve this?
Feb 05, 1999
AQUARIUS – Weekly
Much of what we do in life focuses on the idea of becoming. We become the masters of our careers and become brilliant people and we become great lovers, artists and writers. For Water Bearers, the theme of this particular passage of your life involves unbecoming. That is, it’s a time of unlearning what is false, making a note of what no longer works, and what no longer serves your values, and getting rid of it. It’s a time of dismantling, so that you can make room for what is right and true for you at this important stage of your reality. Some of this unbecoming is going to happen whether you want to it or not; I suggest you remain very conscious of the process for about three weeks, and use this awesome power wisely and very deliberately.
I noted, Eric, that many of my co-shelter-mates were very disruptive this past weekend as if there were a full-moon, which I knew there was not. I suspect many of us were feeling this beyond stressed mars retro energy in scorpio … esp as the acendent was the aries point, I have to wonder if this denial of sexuality (thank you religion) has resulted in so many of these women (like myself) feeling the unworthiness, feeling this inexplicable rage at the world. I’m doing my best to keep boundaries (my Scorpio Moon tries to attach early and often but my AquaSun etal keeps a semi-detached clarity) and feel my way forward but I bump up against the catholics (who are running this show) and find (perhaps) the source.
So intriguing and horrible. Thank you, Eric.
m.
Eric, thanks for this piece–it can be hard to find the right words after an event like this.
While we are being ambushed by a lot of very different information on the matter, it can be hard to sit and think and feel for even just a moment.
Constant coverage causes us to go into “detective mode” trying to crack and reason why a person would do what he did instead of connecting with others. Media distractions don’t allow us to think for ourselves and consciously conforms us to whatever we are being fed.
I am thankful for spaces like this to reflect and communicate rather than becoming a brainwashed zombie ridden with fear.
Isn’t that what they are trying to make us feel? scared shitless?
Just moments after this event occurred we were blasted with headlines stating an “Islamic State Terror Attack” Those using terrorism want us to feel afraid, they want us to lose our ability to think logically and to let our emotions control everything–we cannot let them do this to us. We cannot allow them to try and disconnect ourselves from our minds.
Will a country free of muslims and guns make it a safe place? I’d be a fool to think that.
50 innocent people died on Sunday, this if horrific, of course. But I feel there is something to be said about the caring the of the now. 45 million Americans are living under the poverty line, 40 million children are sexually abused each year–let’s fight that.
Quite frankly terrorism will always exist, homophobes will always exist, guns will always exist. So lets mourn last weeks tragedy but also remember the reality–the living tragedies.
Thank you all,
b.
The gun issue is a huge red herring. The utterly intractable position of the NRApublicans that it’s OK for terrorists to have guns — otherwise we go onto the slippery slope — is designed to be maddening. It’s the pure Rove method: do not budge one millimeter. Nobody is claiming that the country will be 100% safe, but it’s a long way from there to the mass shooting of the day.
By the way they are right. The moment one rational decision is made about guns, that would lead to another. So the solution is to keep everything perpetually on the most insane and absurd level possible, lest anyone think such is weird.
http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting