I’m lying in bed, drifting into the fuzz of sleep, when I realize something is strangling me. Oh, it’s just my choker. It’s just Mars lightly holding me by the throat. I’ve gotten so used to wearing it, I didn’t notice that I’d left it around my neck when I took off the rest of my clothes. In a way, I was the one who was strangling me after all; I wrap Mars around my throat and let him lightly choke me all day, each time that I put on a collar.
If you know me, you know I can’t shut up about cosmic sympathy and the astrological correspondences. (If you want to know more about this topic, I moved my 3 paragraph rant to a note at the end of the post, so scroll down to read.) In brief, the idea is that everything in the cosmos is an expression of one or more of the planetary deities, and all of those things that a planetary god “rules” are fragments of that god's body within us and in our exterior environment. There’s no giant humanoid entity named Venus out there, rather the agglomeration of all the things Venus rules, from rings to dessert to the human uterus to the physical planet, make up the body of Venus. In Stoic cosmology, all things in the universe are connected through pneuma (breath or spirit) which permeates all things and gives inert primary matter a form, core qualities, and a way of being. The relationship we have to everything around us—objects, subjects, even concepts—is also the relationship we have to the deity that rules over that thing, because it is part of the pneumatic body of that god. To use or interact with a material, or to perform particular actions, is to cultivate your relationship to the divine force that permeates that thing.
A year ago, I was doing a workshop on cosmic sympathy and the astrological correspondences at an event organized by the collective Flores del Desierto at the art and community space Pandeo in Mexico City. Looking around the room I realized that even though the malefic planets (Mars and Saturn) correlate with the most painful and challenging life experiences, they are the rulers of almost all of the countercultural objects and practices that I saw around me. Everyone in the room had tattoos and piercings and were wearing spikes or pointed jewelry (all things ruled by Mars). In the market at the event, they were selling BDSM gear, toys, and clothes, and as I paged through my dictionary of astrological rulerships and thought about the core qualities of each thing, it was obvious that every single one belongs to Saturn: bondage, domination and submission, sadism, and masochism, torture, chains, whips, dungeons, ropes and restraints. There were of course lots of skeletons and skulls, the part of the body that Saturn rules, even more than usual, since the event was a few days after Día de los Muertos.
Many of the practices of BDSM and kink, and the countercultural aesthetics of punk (and many many other counter- and sub- cultures), can be seen as ways of directing or channeling malefic energy. Really the “bad” things about both Mars and Saturn are only charged that way if they’re done to you, without your consent. In this way, in BDSM, informed, continuous consent becomes a metaphysical tool for unlocking a full and profound experience of malefic energy without the trauma and harm that would usually come along with it (ideally of course, that’s not to say that harm and trauma can’t and don’t occur). If you want to dive down the rabbit hole of pleasure, violence, and the complexity of consent, watch Johanna Hedva read their incredible essay “Can I Hit You?” or read it yourself in their book How to Tell When We Will Die.
Beyond the usual pleasures of autoerotic asphyxiation, lightly choking yourself with a dog collar throughout the day ambiently distributes the energy of Mars in a more benign way that still evokes the pneuma of violence. More extreme body practices (cutting, burning, branding, suffocation, suspension, etc) seem to get closer and closer to Mars or Saturn, doing definitional violence to the body (damaging tissue), but in environments of care that can hold both the agony and ecstasy of that violence. A few weeks ago, I assisted my friend Aom with a public performance of suspension, using my bodyweight to hold down the metal armature on which they would be suspended by a rope tied to two large hooks pierced through the meat of their shoulder blades. I felt an inarticulable connection between everyone and everything in the room during the performance, like we shared a common shimmering, shivering body and all of us breathing with and toward Aom, suspended and dangling. Afterwards they told me that they were glad it had been a public performance because it didn’t feel like they were in pain alone, not like it was their individual pain, but a kind of channel to express and give form to all the different, ineffable pains that each of us in the room was feeling.
Aom suspended, photo by Ada Navarro
I started to think of these countercultural aesthetics and practices as multigenerational rituals, acts of magic, or planetary remediations, that contain and focus the destructive forces of Mars and Saturn, performed by the people who are most impacted by the malefics’ worst significations like violence, aggression, repression, and servitude. That's not to say marginalized people somehow have more Mars and Saturn experiences, just that those who enact Marsian violence and Saturnian control are most often those who have social and political power, and those who suffer from it the most are people who don’t. Astrology is like that: Saturn, for example, in Hellenistic astrology, is both the slave master and the slaves. The entire institution of slavery is ruled by the greater malefic, so the slave doesn’t experience Saturn “more” than the slaver, but one of them is suffering from the malefic energy and the other one is feeding on it. The empire already channels the malefics in all of the rituals that maintain the systems of heteropatriarchy, racism, and imperialism. The rest of us, who don’t have daily practices of enacting violence and servitude on others, are inundated with malefic energy and need to do something with it.
Ironically, the dominant society that is fundamentally built on war and forced servitude is also appalled by the aesthetics of Mars and Saturn; simply having a face tattoo can make you nearly unemployable in most professions. This contradiction creates an opening for those symbols to antagonize, satirize, and ultimately reject that culture and its benefic facade, at the same time as it draws those who are trying to find a way out of the labyrinth of social control toward each other. Three-inch spikes on jewelry harnesses the guard energy of Mars (they’re pretty much dog collars after all, the quintessential Mars animal) to intimidate and scare off people who are afraid to acknowledge the malefic register of experience, while at the same time calling together those of us who are saturated in the malefic runoff of the self-destructing capitalist world order.
I unhook my spikes for the night and the guard dog goes to sleep, and since Mars has had his fill of choking me for the day, and I’ve had mine too, he drifts off and dissipates, and the soft comfort of lunar fog seeps into everything.
@01800_sataninheels of Flores del Desierto
(NO ME TOQUES = DON'T TOUCH ME)
*Note on Cosmic Sympathy:
Cosmis sympathy is the Stoic belief that everything in the universe is interdependent and connected by a divine force that permeates the cosmos and literally holds it together, and therefore all manner of things on all different scales, from planets themselves down to the smallest identifiable objects and organisms, are iterations of the same core energies or spirit (pneuma). Astrologically, cosmic sympathy provides the philosophical underpinnings of “correspondences” whereby every object, concept, and subject in existence is under the auspices of a corollary planet: Mars rules warfare, knives, and wrestling; Mercury rules thieves, communications technology, and sparrows. When Mercury is retrograde, computers are more likely to break not because of some malicious intent on the part of Mercury, but because your computer is an iteration of Mercury— or more accurately, they are mutual parts of the same object/organism/process— therefore Mercury and all things it rules are experiencing a state of retrogradation together.
The dominant contemporary cosmology only includes the possibility of material cause and effect, but the Stoics had an entirely different conception of bodies and physicality. In their cosmology, there are two types of matter: primary matter—inert, generic material with the potential to take physical form, but no qualities of its own, and pneuma (breath or spirit), which fills and animates primary matter, giving it its unique characteristics and spirit. A knife is not a knife until it is filled with the pneuma of Mars and takes on the form of sharpness and the nature to cut.
While primary matter is constrained to physical cause and effect like in the rational materialist model of the universe today, pneuma is not fixed inside of primary matter, but animates it and interconnects all things through its more expansive, discontinuous body. So a cactus, a knife, and the planet Mars might have completely distinct bodies on the level of primary matter, but pneumatically they all share the body of Mars. This view deviates from the Neoplatonist natural science model that sees the planets as having a causal effect on terrestrial affairs through their heating, cooling, drying, and moistening properties (the most commonly held cosmological explanation for how astrology works that began in the Hellenistic period and persisted for centuries and centuries of the tradition). In the Stoic conception, pneuma unites and connects all things in the universe, so there need not be an “objective” connection for two or more discontinuous things to move in concert with each other. Mars does not cause knives to change or behave differently, rather Mars and knives are part of one discontinuous pneumatic body, so both inevitably move together in synchronicity. Physically your finger isn’t drawn toward the blade of knife when, say, Mars and Mercury are both retrograde and conjunct, but on the pneumatic level a dangerous and erratic Marsian body is interacting with a clumsy and vulnerable Mercurial one, so don’t expect one not to slice the other.