Alex's Asteroid Astrology

I seem to recall some perspicacious astrologer recently writing that this would be the year when the shit hit the fan for Donald Trump. Oh, wait … that was me. Well, we’re only a quarter of the way into Trump’s Solar Return year, and things do seem to be shaping up that way, don’t they? I know we keep having to say “Worst. Week. Ever.” when it comes to this White House, but truly, could things get worse than the week of September 2^nd, 2018?

Actually, yes. They can. And will.

Hard to imagine that this particular Week from Hell started off late, with a three-day holiday weekend preceding it. But there was enough drama packed inside the remaining four days to fill a month of Sundays, as my old granny would have said. It started with a bang on the first day of the truncated work week, with the release by the “The Washington Post” on Tuesday September 4 of excerpts from Bob Woodward’s forthcoming expose “Fear: Trump in the White House”, chronicling the hapless President as he careens from self-created crisis to self-defeating Tweetstorm. Woodward, who has a knack of bringing down sitting presidents (think Nixon and Watergate, which he exposed), reports that numerous aides and staffers, from Cabinet level officials on down, consider The Donald to be unfit, unqualified, unintelligent and dangerous to America’s national security. This is news to anyone? Woodward, you’re slipping.

The Donald fumes at the site of his next Trump-branded property: “I said GOLD lettering!”

Then on the 5^th the excrement fully collided with the rotational cooling device, as “The New York Times” published an anonymous (or “anomynous”, as the semi-literate Trump would have it) op-ed from a senior official in the Trump administration, asserting that s/he was “part of the resistance”, a group of close advisors working to protect the nation from the President’s worst ideas, whims and excesses. The piece also alleges that early on, Cabinet officers were involved in discussions about a possible 25^th Amendment solution to this mess, but rejected it as too extreme Constitutionally.   Support for this concept that the President is an idiotic enfant terrible was provided by no less a personage that Donald Trump himself, who just that week had tweeted to excoriate AG Jeff Sessions for actually prosecuting two Republican congressmen accused of corruption, since that would endanger “safe” GOP seats in the upcoming elections; and then proceeded to demand that the Justice Department investigate the “Times” to discover which of his servants had dared to exercise their First Amendment rights at his expense. I mean, seriously? This is the President? Of the United States?

Then on Thursday the 6^th an actual President came out swinging, putting Trump and Republicans firmly on notice with a blistering analysis of the former’s incompetence and unfitness for the job, and the latter’s total lack of spine, not to say cojones, in allowing him to go unchecked. Barack Obama’s speech was an unprecedented departure in modern times of the unwritten rule that former presidents do not criticize their successors (or their predecessors, for that matter, a nicety Trump has rejected from the outset), but these are not normal times, and someone had to give voice to the GOP elephant in the room.

‘What fresh hell is this?’ Trump must be thinking. Well, I’ll tell you – in part, it actually does have to do with Hel. Nope – not a typo; Hel is an asteroid, named for the Norse goddess of the Underworld and her eponymous abode, and the root of our word “hell.”

Norse goddess Hel in her Underworld realm; an 1889 work by Johannes Gehrts

And right now, not only is Donald Trump undergoing a Hel Return, with the transit body coming back to its natal degree, but this is happening with Saturn at station in the sky directly opposite! And on Trump’s natal Whitehouse!

At this point, I really have to apologize to my readers for not taking notice of this point before. All I can plead is the presence in the heavens of 17,000+ named asteroids, and not enough time in the day. But this one really slipped through the cracks, and I’m sorry, because revealing its truths earlier would have explained a lot.

So let’s go back to the drawing board, and take a look at Trump’s Hel, which he imposes on us as our head of state. First off, we can agree that Hel, or hell in the Christian cultural tradition, is an image of well-earned suffering, agony, punishment and hopelessness; there is no reprieve, no way out, it’s an endless exercise in misery and torture for those who have been justly condemned there by their own actions. Asteroid Hel functions as a marker of this type of energy, a metaphor for where we find ourselves tortured, tormented, punished or hopeless; it’s our personal connection to the abyss. At 3 Cancer, Trump’s natal Hel conjoins Mercury (his mind, thoughts and statements) at 8 Cancer, squares his Neptune (deception, illusion, delusion, fantasy and insanity) at 5 Libra, and opposes his asteroid Whitehouse (the presidency and Oval Office) at 4 Capricorn.

A typical intelligence-inspiring pose from the President

So we can surmise from this that Trump’s own mind is a continual torment to him; understanding, as he must, his own intellectual inadequacy, his incapacity for mental greatness, and feeling overwrought and distressed at what this disability says about him, he tries to compensate, painting himself as the smartest boy in the room, trying to bluster it out, because he simply cannot face the truth of his own cerebral void.   He’s cunning, yes; and street smart, crafty; but he has no intellectual curiosity or capacity whatever; he is famously not a reader, even revels in that fact, and more than one associate has portrayed him as barely literate, with the Presidential Daily Briefing having to be given in chart, picture or PowerPoint format, if his attention is to be held at all. Woodward’s new book cites SecDef Jim Mattis as stating that Trump has the comprehension and intellect of a “fifth or sixth grader.”

The square to Neptune is Trump’s lifeline, his way out of the mental morass of his inherent lack of comprehension. It provides the cunning, allows him to deceive others, to portray himself as intellectually gifted when in fact, quite the reverse is true. But he’s not only fooling others, he fools himself. He retreats into a fantasy world where he really is great, the best at everything, with supreme mental ability: in his own statement, “I know words. I have the best words.” The problem that has grown over the years is that he actually believes this! It’s no longer a ploy, or a front, or a con. Perhaps driven by incipient dementia, living inside the Hel of his own creation, he really thinks he’s superior in his glorious inadequacy. That’s why he goes “volcanic” when a close associate pricks his fantasy bubble and exposes him to the world. The dissonance between observed fact and his self-soporific fiction cannot be rectified, and is a searing indictment of the ridiculous self-image he clings to so pathetically.

“Does this suit make me look fat? I always knew it would come to this; but I have the best worms.”

So far, so good. When he was just an incompetent businessman and self-promoter, defrauding contractors and cheating employees, running casinos into the ground and conducting his televised dog-and-pony shows, he wreaked his destruction and havoc over a comparatively narrow range.

But now he’s the leader of the free world.

And this brings us to Hel’s most telling aspect of all – the opposition to Whitehouse. For once Donald Trump’s rhetoric (Mercury) and deception (Neptune) took him to the Oval Office (Whitehouse), his personal Hel became our collective hell. How prescient was The Donald, in the days before the 2016 New Hampshire primary, when he stated that “the whole country is going to hell.” At the time I’m sure he didn’t intend it as an indictment of his future “leadership”, but it remains a startling presentiment of things to come.

A foreshadowing of Trump’s Hel-ish influence may be seen in the nation’s chart, where asteroid Hel falls at 8 Libra, forming a T-Square with Trump’s natal Hel-Whitehouse opposition, and exactly squared his natal Mercury. It’s his ideas (Mercury) that are wrong-headed, and his rhetoric (also Mercury) that causes so much of the damage, while his internal torment (natal Hel) becomes our own (USA Hel), as long as he sits in the Oval Office (Whitehouse).

The Amazing Trumpskin displays his predictive powers

But Hel, like all astrological bodies, is a reflecting point, double-edged, both a giver and receiver of its energies, and as much as we may decry the hell Trump is putting us through from his Oval Office perch, it’s nothing compared to the hell he’s enduring himself, with daily, even hourly, attacks on his carefully crafted self-image. That’s why he clings so desperately to his base, and the positive reinforcement their adulation gives him – you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, but apparently you can fool approximately 35% of them most of the time. He might be a pitiable figure if he weren’t such an uncompromising ass. As it is, the Trump biopsy has been returned – he’s a cancer in the American body politic and must be cut out as quickly as possible, if the patient is to survive.

Putting the situation into bold relief at this time is Saturn’s direct station, which occurred on September 6^th, ground zero for Hell Week. From 2 Capricorn, Saturn closely opposes not only natal Hel at 3 Cancer, but also transit Hel, swiftly moving to its natal degree from 0 Cancer. Saturn has been intermittently opposing natal Hel and crisscrossing natal Whitehouse for months, from its first approach in January 2018 (just as the first administration tell-all book, Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury”, was released) through the retrograde over the summer (during the NATO and Helsinki summits, with their concomitant blowback), and now preparing to give the final coup-de-grace as it moves forward once more over this already tattered terrain.

The Saturn transit has a way of evoking harsh criticism and imposing unwanted lessons, true, but it’s also exposing the underlying reality, cutting through Neptune’s layers of illusion and delusion (remember, it also squares Trump’s natal Neptune during this period), crystalizing the position of affairs, and offering a realistic appraisal and assessment of the situation. It is opening eyes and hardening hearts, stiffening resolve, and steeling us to do what must be done. A Constitutional crisis is at hand, and Saturn is not disposed to treat lightly with offenders, or those who stand passively on the sidelines. As transit Hel returns to its natal place in Donald Trump’s birth chart, September 20-26, 2018, it resets his capacity to experience his own personal hell, with Saturn standing by to ensure that punishment is harshly meted out.

A modern take on Hel, accenting her ability to strip us down to barebones essentials

So much for Hel in the sky and Trump’s psyche. Had I known of its existence then, I’d have added it to his Solar Return interpretation in June. Looking back now, we find SR Hel at 5 Gemini, opposing SR Karma at 4 Sagittarius, which is itself conjoined natal asteroid Troemper at 2 Sag, The Donald’s personal celestial marker. This is a clear signal that a time of reckoning is coming this solar year, a period when Trump will be called to account for his prior deeds, words and decisions, and that the result will only add to his inner torment.

We did note at the time that one of the stationary bodies in that SR chart, points which exert an inordinate influence on the native for the year, is asteroid Roberts at 29 Aquarius, running in tandem with Damocles at 27 Aquarius, that point of doom hanging unseen overhead. Then it seemed clear that Roberts represented Special Counsel Robert Mueller, with his ongoing investigation into Trump’s misdeeds and illegalities, including (but not limited to) conspiracy with foreign powers to affect a US presidential election, and obstruction of justice.

But Roberts is an equal-opportunity symbol, not exclusively for Mueller – any Robert can “tag in” on the celestial free-for-all, taking advantage not only of Roberts’ embedded qualities, but also the disaster-evoking properties of its handmaid Damocles.

The Art of the Schlemiel: Donald Trump negotiates living space with his new landlord. Have you got anything in Circle Nine?

Enter Robert “Bob” Woodward, the “Washington Post” reporter who brought down the Nixon presidency with his investigation of Watergate. His reputation is unassailable, his books impeccably reported, and his latest effort, “Fear: Trump in the White House” promises to be another nail in the administration’s coffin. And there’s a second celestial referent for “Robert”, the feminine form “Roberta”. We can now see that in the SR, Roberta at 5 Cancer conjoins natal Hel, opening a further window into Trump’s personal abyss. Refining that picture yet further, there is an asteroid “Woodard”, for Woodward, which at 18 Cancer lies just two degrees off Trump’s natal asteroid Nemesis at 16 Cancer, that point of self-undoing and obstruction from others.

Natally, Roberta at 27 Sagittarius widely opposes Hel, identifying both Mueller and Woodward as potential hell-beasts in Trump’s biography. But perhaps more meaningfully, Roberta also conjoins asteroid Achilles at 24 Sagittarius, a point which describes a weakness or vulnerability, something inherent which threatens to destroy the native. Both terrestrial Roberts, Mueller and Woodward, have an innate ability to catalyze Achilles’ potential and evoke its pitfalls. Putting the bow on this package of cosmic irony is natal asteroid Woodard, which at 3 Virgo is exactly sextile natal Hel and squared natal Troemper, but also conjoined the 29 Leo Ascendant, implying that Bob Woodward has the capacity to influence how others view Trump, affect his public image for good or ill, in ways that are highly personal to him (Ascendant/Troemper).

Bob Woodward’s latest book, “Fear: Trump in the White House” could help tip the balance toward impeachment

As the excerpts from “Fear” became public on September 4^th, transit Woodard and Roberts opposed each other from 21 Leo and 17 Aquarius (the latter still running with Damocles, now at 23 Aquarius), forming a T-Square with transit Jupiter, ruling publishing and encouraging wide dissemination and publicity, at 17 Scorpio. And transit Pluto at 18 Capricorn was exactly opposing Trump’s SR Woodard at 18 Cancer, making him the muckraker-in-chief du jour for the year.

When the “Times” published that anonymous op-ed from a White House official on September 5^th, asteroid Whitehouse at 18 Taurus was exactly trine Pluto, ruling secrets and scandals, at 18 Capricorn, which together formed a Grand Trine with the Sun at 13 Virgo. The Sun’s opposition to Neptune at 15 Pisces creates a Kite and brings in the Neptunian energies of anonymity and invisibility, as well as the author’s self-professed sacrifice and martyrdom of the “resistance” in the administration, struggling to preserve the nation from Trump’s worst impulses.

Trump surrounded by possible authors of the “New York Times” op-ed

But who’s the culprit here? Who penned that op-ed? Looking at PNAs for the usual suspects on the day provides a wealth of suggestions but no firm answers. Two prime candidates are White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Counsellor to the President Kellyanne Conway, both represented by asteroid Kelly at 17 Libra, and Kelley at 3 Libra. On the 5^th, Kelly squares Pluto, while Kelley squares Hel. Seems likely. But let’s not forget AG Jefferson “Jeff” Sessions, with a definite axe to grind: asteroid Jefferson at 23 Capricorn conjoins Pluto and also Mars at 29 Cap; sounds like a grudge match to me!

Even family members are not above suspicion; Melania and Ivanka are also Trumps, after all, and asteroid Troemper at 25 Libra is still within orb of squaring Pluto, while Melanie at 23 Virgo is in trine; Ivanka at 7 Virgo conjoins both the Sun at 13 Virgo and newsy Mercury at 0 Virgo, while squared Nemesis at 12 Gemini, making her another possible candidate her father’s undoing.

But perhaps the most likely perp in this in cloak-and-dagger caper is Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, whose celestial bona fides on the day in question are quite impressive. Both asteroids James at 14 Virgo and Matti at 15 Virgo conjoin the 13 Virgo Sun, making him a strong focus of the day, but cloaked with Neptune’s invisibility by their opposition to the Great Dissembler at 15 Pisces. James and Matti also square Nemesis at 12 Gemini, affording an opportunity for Jim Mattis to act as a check on the Commander-in-Chief. UN Ambassador Nikki Haley also fits the profile, if less definitively, with asteroid Halley at 15 Gemini conjoined Nemesis and in a T-Square with Sun-Neptune. Personally, my money’s on Mattis.

President Obama lays out the case against Trump at an Illinois speech, on the day of the Saturn station

Which brings us to September 6^th and Barack Obama’s fusillade against Trump, Trumpism, and Trump enablers. At its most basic level, we can see the Saturn station that day as representative of the battle between the two presidents, with Saturn ruling chief executives. But we’re a bit hampered here in the specific by the lack of a truly close asteroid referent for the 44^th president. Heretofore I have used asteroid Barry, which is the name by which the youthful Obama was known.

At 17 Libra on the 6^th, Barry closely squares Pluto and is inconjunct Whitehouse, a symbol of taking off the gloves and entering the fray with devastating criticism for the administration. In questing for another suitable PNA, I found asteroid Barucci, closest in spelling to “Barack”. At 7 Gemini, Barucci conjoins Nemesis at 12 Gemini, with Barucci also conjunct Trump’s SR Hel at 5 Gemini. This seems to fit the facts nicely. Especially when we see that natally, Trump has Barucci at 6 Gemini, and was therefore experiencing a “Barucci Return” when Obama fired his warning shots. Natally, Barry appears at 15 Scorpio, closely trine natal Nemesis at 16 Cancer, reinforcing the role Obama may play in Trump’s life.

The wear-and-tear of his own private Hel seems to be showing on the President, but it’s still “thumbs up” as we march to Hades

It was certainly a week of consequence, one calculated to make even the most self-delusional man in America sit up and take notice. But will it make a difference? Will Republicans finally wake up to the realities of the situation and join with Democrats to remove this danger to the state? The celestial timing is right, but the politics are not quite there.

But the law of diminishing returns may kick in after the Midterms, when an electoral drubbing for Republicans may finally help them find their political backbones, make common cause with their Democratic counterparts, and do the right thing, consigning Donald Trump to the torments of his own private hell.

Well, we can always dream…