Your self-driving car might drive off a cliff, but don't worry!

Mercury Cazimi notes 2023

As Mercury passes through the Sun today it marks the mid-point of its retrograde cycle at 11 degree Taurus. News headlines read “Don’t worry!” as another bank crashes and AI continues to hurtle forward uninhibited, unregulated into unknown territory. Unbelievable!

Mercury retrograding through Taurus brings revisions in the area where Taurus inhabits your chart. It poses turnarounds with regard to your material world, $, luxury items, property and cattle, what you’re sustaining yourself with, and where you’re invested in securing long-term growth. This year, Mercury stationed retrograde on April 21st in close proximity to Uranus. Because of this, the usual kerfuffle that Merc Perks bring is injected with an extra dose of destabilisation and surprise. Uranus loves surprises, and Mercury is the trickster. Combined in Taurus, they bring unexpected new possibilities into view by disrupting that which we have become overly reliant on.

Mercury passes through the Sun at 11* Taurus, May 1, 2023

It wasn’t that long ago when Mercury turned retrograde. You might recall the news that Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon both lost their jobs on the same day, and then Jerry Springer died. Mercury governs information generation and dissemination, journalism and telecommunications. Esoteric astrology places Uranus as the higher octave of Mercury, combining their governance of information and technology and taking it to another level, or frequency. Uranus accompanying Mercury this year reinforces the doubling down in those areas, and adds extra oomph being an outlier.

Check out this crater that an asteroid made in Western Australia, and the way new life has shaped itself since.

Coupled with this Mercury Cazimi today is the stationing of Pluto in Aquarius; Pluto is turning retrograde for the first time since it left Capricorn in March, 2023…and what happened in March? Silicon Valley Bank crashed on the 10th, followed by Signature Bank on the 12th. And what happened today? First Republic Bank folded and was acquired by JP Morgan-Chase bank. The first headline I saw read something along the lines of a ‘financial situation that hadn’t been…since 2008’, the same year Pluto entered Capricorn. Are you seeing the pattern?

This actually requires a longer post about Pluto to really unpack the details, but for the sake of keeping this cazimi-like (brief & illuminating the core principles), let’s just say that Pluto doesn’t fully leave Capricorn until November 2024, and Uranus won’t fully leave Taurus until April 2026. Read this as: expect major disturbances and fundamental changes to any system of security and technology in this time frame. We’re not only entering a whole new world, we’re creating it as the old falls away.

CNBC’s coverage of the First Republic Bank story today read:

“The banking system remains sound and resilient, and Americans should feel confident in the safety of their deposits and the ability of the banking system to fulfill its essential function of providing credit to businesses and families,” a Treasury spokesperson said.

Sorry. What?!

This is like a car company telling consumers that their cars are safe even though their self-driving vehicles keep driving themselves off cliffs. No! The banking system is not sound and resilient, and confidence is not a natural response after disaster. & a bank’s essential function is not to provide credit, it can only do so because of its essential function of profit & control.

The combination of our current eclipse portal energies coming through the same sign as Uranus presents uncompromising changes that have shaken what we perceived as steady ground beneath us, and cracked open new potential and possibility: while the banking system is failing, concurrently other forms of currency are created and alternate ways of trading considered. Supply chain issues stress our accustomisation to convenience, drawing us back into co-creation and the patience of natural rhythms.

Many are pausing to assess their personal investment of trust in systems outside of themselves. The fear is not that a man-made system fails, that’s a given. The un-nerving personal earthquake Uranus brings is realisation about the profundity of personal sovereignty, and that any disconnect from ourselves, our bodies and true community renders one dependant on systems that pathologise the anger and frustration of those they oppress.

If these shit-disturbers are making contact with your chart, and you’re not voluntarily getting off this merry-go-round in whatever way it personally impacts you, eventually a fundamental shift will express the Taurean pent up resistance to change. Uranus and Pluto are effectively moving fundamental furniture around, but it’s the swiftness of the inner planets, like Mercury turning retrograde, that land these changes in our personal, day to day reality and shake us into awakening. Until then, they’re just concepts and bigger picture issues that affect those people over there. On a personal level, this Mercury Cazimi might feel jittery in the body and nervous system, illuminating what needs to shift and move so change can occur.

As for AI, the open letter in March appears to have done literally nothing to halt the roll out. Regardless of how many people ‘in the know’ wave warning flags, the profit and greed machine drives it onward. It begs the question, if these people are not central to this roll out, and don’t have enough sway to stop it, then who does? Who is actually pushing this forward?

Because AI is in the early bird catches the worm stage, and much of what we know about it is coming through devices, I continue to ask people I know how it is affecting them personally. In the last month I’ve heard direct stories from other astrologers and artists concerned about plagiarism, another friend had a family member working in the mining industry lose their job along with thousands of others because they were being replaced by AI. Fun fact: it’s more likely that a miner will pick up an iPad in 2023 than a spanner. Another friend teaching in academia had to go back over all student papers that were submitted since 2022 because she kept noticing that students were repeatedly using the word heinous, which she found odd. Turns out, everyone who used the word heinous had written their papers using ChatGPT. Heinous is a good word to sum all of this up, really.

Mercury is about to pass through the Sun and the last thing I want to be doing while that happens is staring at a screen. I hope you are able to invite in the quietude that listening requires, be it alone or in company, and find the sturdiness within as the cards fall around us. Breaking on through to the other side requires us all to shake off things that have been fundamental to our comfort here. Disconcerting as that may be, to bring in a new world, new models and new ways of being we have to be able to first envision what else is possible and release what doesn’t work. The more connected you are to nature, to yourself and to those around you, the less shocking all of this will be as it unfolds.