Moon Conjunct Saturn
I recently submitted my very first piece of art for exhibit and sale at the Urban Arts Gallery show Notes From The Margins. Curated by Essie Shaw, it is meant to highlight artists of color and to discuss the experience of being in predominately white spaces. My piece is called Moon Conjunct Saturn and is for sale for $2000. The person who purchases my piece will get a certificate of authenticity, a gift, and this accompanying essay. If you’re in Salt Lake City go see my art! :)
A Companion Essay by Jupiter Dior
As an astrologer and artist, I find that the philosophy of the creator matters. My philosophy is grounded in African and Indigenous spirituality, defined here as shared cultural philosophies, which are as scientific as they are spiritual. One of the core principles of these philosophies is that things do not exist in isolation, instead they can only be understood within their ecosystem, defined in their relationships, within the context of their environments. This is why I decided to include this companion essay, so that I can better express and convey the richness that context will provide the viewer of my piece.
The philosophy of astrology is very simple; As above, so below. The movement of the planets, fixed stars, signs, and mathematical points within the heavens represent, impact and influence what happens here on earth. This concept of interconnectedness is critical to the African, Indigenous, and otherwise pre colonial ways of being. Although there are many branches of astrology, most people are familiar with their sun sign, a simplified understanding of natal astrology. When I first conceptualized this piece I was at the beginning of my study of astrology. I wanted to create art about each of my placements, or the position of various astrological bodies at my time of birth. As I learned about and began to prepare for my Saturn return, the period where Saturn returns to the position it was in at your time of birth, the most pressing placement at the time to me was my natal Saturn moon conjunction.
The key to being a great astrologer is to understand the agreed upon symbolism, rooted in the several thousands of years of practice all over the globe.
The moon is the fastest moving planet in astrology, and changes signs once every 2.5 days. Saturn on the other hand, is the slowest of the visible and traditional planets and changes signs every 2.5 years. The dynamic between Saturn and the Moon in natal astrology then becomes one of tension, magnified by them being close together, or conjunct, in my natal chart.
If the moon represents my body, then Saturns conjunction symbolized a life marked by restraint, both internally and externally enforced.
If the moon represents my emotional expression, then Saturns conjunction symbolized discipline, and trouble expressing my feelings.
If the moon, in my 11th house of wish fulfillment, gains from my career and public image, represented my passion for the work I do in the world, then Saturn, in my 12th house of the subconscious and institutions, tight conjunction symboized delays, frustration, and redirection, especially ones that are the result of things outside of my control.
Even the creation of this piece was marred by delays. Initially started in 2021, the first version was lost due to abuse and a cross country move. Nevertheless, this second and final iteration of this piece is final, at its completion. I chose to show this piece here, at The Urban Art’s Gallery exhibit Notes from The Margin because I felt that the call for art expressing the experience of people of color in predominantly white environments fit not only the actual piece, but my work more broadly as an activist, strategist, and theorist.
There is more to astrology than just your sun sign and even your birth chart. In fact, there is an entire branch of astrology called mundane astrology that is used to analyze world history, study modern politics, and to predict and time different events. In fact I once used mundane astrology to understand the historical impact of The signing of the emancipation proclamation on The United States, the way it sees itself, its relationship to white people versus Black people, it’s citizens versus world citizens abroad, as well as how it influenced future racial dynamics. I traced the influence of the chart through reconstruction all the way to the present, and was able to make predictions about how the relationship the US government has with African Americans and Indigenous Americans specifically, as well as people of color more broadly, will grow and shift throughout time.
It was incredibly fun, and was possible because within the science of astrology is a pertinent truth. As Gucci Mane said “Every word means two things, so the white girl is my boo thing”. Where whiteness requires a binary categorization of existence, African, Indigenous and otherwise precolonial approaches are quantum, holding space for the multiplicity that makes us the one. As an astrologer, this manifests when a placement will show up as how we experience a problem and also the tools we need to create the solution, as is the case with the experience of being marginalized by whiteness.
As someone who grew up in predominantly white environments, I understand implicitly the weight of whiteness, and the way it has limited, shaped, and articulated the ways I have been able to grow. Within mundane astrology, Saturn rules things like our government, while the moon rules the people,or the citizens of the government. Although our government is not inherently white, it does act in allegiance to an ethos and political philosophy of whiteness, and like Saturn it restricts our movement, our bodies, and the free expression of our cultures.
Around the time I began to conceptualize this piece I had joined an initiative at the high school I graduated from in lieu of a 10 year reunion. We were working to uproot racism and especially anti Blackness from the fabric of the incredibly racist school system. With a multiracial coalition of current students and alumni spanning classes over 50 years, we began by taking data on the emotional, psychological, and developmental impact our time in the school system had on each of us, white people included.
I soon began to notice that the racism we experienced was way more than just hurt feelings and so called microaggressions of white girls asking to touch our hair, or comparing their summer tans to our skin. What was actually happening was that students core sense of self and self image were developing in ways that centered whiteness. The younger they were when they entered the predominately white environment, and the longer the time they spent there, the more damaging this phenomenon became. Unlike healthy children whos self image centers themselves, for the students and adults we surveyed, it was as if they developed to see themselves not as they were but as whiteness saw them.
This deep fracture in their psyche took years to repair and not everyone repairs it, but it was interesting to notice. The more I traveled, studied, and spoke to other people of color from similar backgrounds, the more prevalent this trend became. Experiencing the constant violence of marginalization, often by violent racists but also by people who just did not care to do better, disrupted their child development, and the creation of their core sense of self. The implications of this finding were immediate.
I’ve written and talked in the past about the nature of the Alchemical automaton, and its relationship to capitalist alienation. Where capitalist alienation seeks the estrangement of people from aspects of their human nature as a consequence of the division of labor and living in a society of stratified social classes, The alchemical automaton process takes that a step further by literally attempting to turn man into machine. This was one of the core functions of whiteness as it related to Black people, especially those descended from the enslaved, as we were the capital that created capitalism.
I chose to utilize a visible Black frame around texture meant to emulate the surface of the moon for this reason. Saturn rules both the color Black and the skin, and is associated with holding things together. I contrast that with texture meant to emulate the moon, specifically parts of the sea of tranquility. Saturn, here symbolizing the institutional power and weight of whiteness, becomes a box Black people and other people of color, are meant to shrink themselves to fit within. More than shrinking, the box of whiteness is an ever hungry beast seeking to consume all it touches, demanding we remove our legs, or hands, our joy, our sadness to keep it fed and us contained within its constantly shrinking borders.
The weight of whiteness manifests in so many ways. In every lynching we see blasted across social media. Every Black child who views Black dolls as uglier than white ones. Every Black person molested under the various iterations of stop and frisk. Every time they sit with the tension between the weight of having been molested so publicly, and the joy of not having been murdered as their body lay rotting in the street like so many others. Every Black parent who dies in childbirth. Every Black person who disproportionately receives amputations instead of comprehensive healthcare. Every Black Wall Street bombed. Every Cop City erected. Every black child denied celebration because their white teachers don’t like the way they advocate for themselves. Every black person with lead poisoning from old paint and even older pipes. Every time protest or advocacy is the only conceivable space for Black people to channel their grief.
The ever shrinking box called whiteness was never death by a thousand cuts. It’s wading through a pit as the dead and soon to be dead clamor around you. It’s knowing the way out but being blocked at every attempt. It’s wanting to honor the dead within tradition and having that weaponized to reify the box you and everyone you know, knew, and will know are trapped in.
To be Black in the US is an expectation of suffering, a constant, normalized destruction. It’s implicit, it’s required, and it will never be allowed to end through poetry or platitudes or by placing flower crowns on dead black men. Forced to validate the very binary that killed them, as if they have to prove they aren’t like those other black brutes in order to be deserving of justice for their unjust deaths.
Whiteness requires we be decentered in our own grief, swallowing pits of fear while creating infographics to post on instagram. Using our murders as springboards for lesson plans as our lynchings replay on the 24 hour news cycle. Postcards spreading like a virus, trauma infecting the Black people in witness with grief like a ticking bomb.
The grief I have is inexpressible. The words and meaning I need were destroyed by the maafa, the time of mourning that began with colonization in Africa and continues through the near constant destruction of whiteness. English can not express this despair.
But what I also have is anger. An anger that if expressed somatically would trigger an aneurysm, would coalesce into a blood clot that stops my heart in seconds. How much longer until the bomb explodes?
A key to understanding astrology is also in understanding the metaphor and symbolism. Saturn, within traditional astrology, is associated with Kronos, the greek god of time. Fearful that his children would rise up against him, he consumed them all. Only Jupiter escaped, before returning to free his siblings from his fathers belly. The consumption metaphor is apt, but so is the freedom one.
When I talk about being an alchemist, people often bring up the alchemist’s quest to turn lead (ruled by Saturn), into gold (ruled by the Sun). Although some European alchemists did make a literal attempt, throughout history the quest for Gold from lead was a symbolic one. African, Indigenous, and otherwise pre colonial cultures valued symbolism and metaphor, and these are the core principles of what we now call the occult. Metaphor expresses the essence and substance of a thing through it’s relationships and cultural context.
For me, as a multiply marginalized individual who has experienced state violence directly, recognizing the weight of the whiteness and the harm it has caused us and white people is critical, but it is only half the battle. Out of the ever present and unceasing weight of whiteness marginalized people have been able to create an explosion of diamonds, represented here through alchemical specks of Gold, that shine through even when the state tries to dim it or take it away from us.
A couple years ago I went to my Madea (my great grandmother’s) sister’s funeral, where they played her favorite old Negro Spiritual, We Are Soldier’s In The Army. The song dated back to before the reconstruction period, and included a line “We have to fight, although we have to cry. We have to hold up the bloodstained banner, We have to hold it up until we die”. As time has gone on, many of the old fashioned cultural relics have unfortunately fallen to the wayside, so this was my first time hearing this song ever.
As a child of enslaved people, it moved me to think about how much my Madea’s sister had seen. As someone who was raised with all but one of my great grandparents, and was already a teenager when they began to pass, it shook me to think of what a wellspring of knowledge was lost as that generation continued to go onto glory. To go from picking cotton and oranges, to now seeing Virtual Reality, it was dizzying to think about how much change they witnessed. Even as it was so sad to see how much things remained the same.
Since colonization began in Africa (and honestly since the internal colonization in Europe that created whiteness), there has been an unbroken chain of resistance that has risen up to respond to every lynching, every beating, every bombing, and everytime our environment is poisoned and we are left to die. That unbroken chain of resistance manifests in big ways, like Malcolm X and Martin Luther Jr. But it also manifests in the arguably even larger ways of our language, our foods, our music, and our dance.
How many ways have we turned the master’s scraps into a feast? How many art forms have we created in the slums and the ghetto that went on to shift culture world wide?
In addition to our unbroken chain of resistance is a shared cultural philosophy of deeply feeling our feelings, even as our feelings don’t change how we have chosen to act. As a song sung intra.communally, it reinforced our cultural commitment to choosing to share and acknowledge each other’s psychic load even if we couldn’t share the physical one. We are not meant to grieve in isolation. Decolonization is also removing the practice of turning our grief into a public performance in the hopes that it may inspire empathy and a choice to reject terrorism in the colonial powers. It returns to letting our shared grief strengthen our communal bond and resolve. Turning Saturn’s lead into the gold we see reflected in each other.
Often when I discuss whiteness this way I can feel the resistance from the audience. I may be perceived as angry, or mean, or too militant, in spite of my carefully chosen tone. But the thing I wish people who identify with whiteness understood is that whiteness is a choice. A moon saturn conjunction exists for less than 2 hours, astrologically, hence the fragility of this piece. The moon, representing the people, are always freed from Saturn’s grip, with Saturn trudging slowly behind them trying to catch up. The box we have been forced into may mutate with the advent of technology, but at its core it is very similar to the one whiteness pushes people who identify as white into as well.
What are the externally imposed weights on your neck? In what ways has whiteness alienated you from your culture, your art, your history, and your body specifically? Where have you cut off your arm, your leg, your joy, and your sadness in service of whiteness? Ecological disaster threatens us all, and often blocks your view of these beautiful mountains and you too are expected not to grieve. To go on performing labor, estranged from the human reaction of terror and concern. How would it feel to turn to your neighbor, your friend, your family and be held through your emotions? To share your psychic load, or to even only have it acknowledged? What gold would you create when you release yourself from the box whiteness has created for you, and instead worked to end this practice and philosophy which entraps us all?
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