Mars and This Mad, Mad, Moment
On gaslighting, fascism, and navigating our very violent summer
Last summer belonged to Venus, and the rest of this year, I regret to inform you, belongs to Mars. Yet you cannot despair; there’s too much work to do, and pleasure to be had.
Mars is LOUD right now. He is sharp, demanding, cutting like a knife and charging at us like a bull in late Taurus as we hurtle toward his conjunction with Uranus at 10:05 am ET on Monday — the first day of the RNC. This transit burst onto the public scene last night as it built toward perfection, and thankfully we may feel it a bit less as it dissipates this coming week.
Mars enters Gemini on the 20th, where he will not be quiet, moving into a conjunction with Jupiter and a square with Saturn on the 14th and 15th of August, respectively. Mars squares Neptune in early September and is opposite Pluto on November 3rd — two days before the election. Then on December 6th, Mars stations retrograde in Leo.
One thing I’ve learned by studying sexuality and astrology as a paired practice is that we can use small doses of Venus to “spot treat” our Mars problems. I’ll write more about how we can do that for the body politic over the coming weeks and months. You can also learn exactly how to do this in your own life by reading the Venus and Mars chapters in my book, Sex and Your Stars: A Sexologist’s Guide to the Erotic Energy of the Zodiac, out on July 30th but available for preorder right now. My author copies just arrived last week, and I did an impromptu unboxing before the world hurtled off its axis. See me with those scissors? It’s kind of a Martian image.
If you have been remotely conscious since last night around 6 pm, you probably know that the former president had his ear grazed by a bullet shot by a would-be assassin at a rally in Pennsylvania. And if you follow any astrologers, you may by now know how eerie the timing was: from our perspective, this is textbook Mars conjunct Uranus on fixed star Algol, almost exactly on Trump’s MC — the part of the chart that symbolizes “public life.”
Sometimes I make predictions and hope they’re wrong. Yesterday’s events in Pennsylvania were not something I wanted to be right about. If you know me, you know that I despise Trump, MAGA, Christian Nationalism, and everything the far right stands for with every fiber of my being. But I’m against political violence because I’m a grown-ass adult and I realize that it cannot coexist with a functioning democracy. Here’s what I said about this transit on June 25th on Instagram:
The Mars-Uranus conjunction doesn’t perfect until mid-July but it’s already in orb this weekend. As one of the most volatile aspects of the summer, it marks all the major political events of the next month: the debate, Trump’s sentencing in NYC, and the Republican National Convention. Keyword: explosive. The conjunction is on Trump’s midheaven, the place of public life, speaking to anger and violent vitriol, unexpected events, and sudden blowups. He’s likely to be PISSED and he’s going to project all of his violent fantasies onto the public, stirring up his deranged MAGA acolytes. In our personal lives, this can feel like anxiety, heightened nervous energy, shakiness, insomnia, irritability and heightened sensitivity. If you have any personal planets in the last decan of fixed signs, you’ll feel this the most. This looks like a major *surprise* event. With Uranus, you can only expect the unexpected. But you can also secretly hope that a certain evil fascist who is afraid of sharks… get eaten by one.
What I didn’t go into detail about in that post was Algol, a major feature of Trump’s chart. Algol is known alternately as “the demon’s head, “the demon star” and “the ghoul” and it sits atop Trump’s natal MC — making him into a kind of mass projector for violence. He’s been doing this since he descended the escalator in 2015, but now we see his astrology in the starkest, most literal terms. With Mars and Uranus on this demonic star, Trump almost lost his own demonic head.
I just heard a woman on MSNBC tell Katy Tur, “I saw President Trump’s blood” — as if she were in a reverie and witnessed her godhead bleeding on a cross. As if she wished she could have dipped her fingers in that blood and anointed her forehead with warrior paint.
The MAGATs often sound like that and have sounded like that for years: delusional, crazed, drunk on his elixir of racist hate and simultaneous absolution for that hate, a sea of red hats bowing down in supplication to the worst man New York City has ever chewed up and spit out. The images we’re seeing, even from networks we know to rely on logical and unbiased reporting, they are fascistic — Trump bloodied, with his fist in the air, chanting, FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT. These images may as well have been narrated and choreographed by Algol himself. And we’re seeing them as often as we saw the planes hit the towers after 9/11.
There are calls for “unity” from politicians after the assassination attempt, and I don’t know about you, but I have no plans to “unite” with people who want to police my uterus, criminalize birth control, end gay marriage, bring back sodomy laws, send tens of thousands of people to concentration camps, burn every last book about sex education, arrest and deport journalists, reverse every climate change mitigation, decimate the entire administrative state, and make me swear fealty to the Christian Nationalist flag. Ain’t gonna fucking happen, folks.
Last night I tweeted: The violence-lovers are mad about the violence they seeded, tended, and foisted upon the world.
This is where I stand now, watching this fascistic narrative unfold. We don’t have to face this with an eruption of violence against the violence of their lies, however. We can dismantle their lies about why this happened, their lies about who Trump is and has been, because we know that Trump is responsible for the violence we have all inherited. He created the climate that delivered that bullet so close to his Algol-adjacent head. And we can’t allow him to shift the narrative midstream, just because he almost took a bullet.
Another of my tweets last night: Political violence is never ok, but it is pure gaslighting to extend sympathy to a man who marinates in violence, extols violence, encourages violence, and is running a campaign that is LITERALLY THREATENING MASS VIOLENCE UPON MILLIONS OF AMERICANS IF HE WINS
Despite threats and media narratives telling us Trump is just a normal candidate who deserves respect, we must tell the truth about him and his plans for us. He is still the same fascist, wannabe dictator whose hate has been documented since the 1970s, and the actual father of Project 2025 (this links to an excellent explainer of what it is) despite his recent claims to the contrary. He deserves not a shred of sympathy now that the violence he has fomented for years has been leveled at him.
So as we approach summer’s halfway mark, drink liberally from the cup of Venus in Leo, remember sweeter times, and know that even when it all seems so bleak and frightening, we simply must taste what our tongues desire. As one of my besties just said to me after talking about this shitshow, “I’m gonna go get ice cream.”
I think we should all take that advice. Eat the ice cream. Reach for the pleasure. Feel the Sun on your face. Touch your lover. Hug your beloved fur baby. Let the breeze of a river kiss your face. Let your toes sink deep into sand as you stare into the sea.
These Mars months may not be easy, but if we savor the soft spaces, we can and will survive.
That was EXCELLENT!!!!
WELL WRITEN AND SPOT ON ACCURATE.