Alexei Harlamoff “Portrait of a Georgian Princess”

Her mind is Tiffany-twisted, she’s got the Mercedes bends. She’s got a lot of pretty pretty boys that she calls friends. Today, Venus descends from on high in Libra, into the catacombs of Scorpio, where spirits and shadowplay tempt her around corners and down the alleyways of her mind. She has a date with the dystopian, and these are her notes from the underground. Beyond the veil, she transcends, and transforms—a glamorous apparition, full of mystique and macabre, her joys and her sorrows tattooed on her body as well as her heart. She comes alive at night, in the house of the rising sun. Our evening star shines in her film noir—no colors anymore, she wants to paint it black. 

Federico García Lorca described the spirit of duende—that emo feeling of raw, authentic passion and pathos that comes through certain art forms—as comprised of four elements: “irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical.” As Venus moves through Mars’s sign, she will encounter a square to Saturn, an opposition to Uranus, and a trine to Neptune, and we can expect the presence of the duende, and of the daemon, to be heightened. And, as Mars will be in Venus’s home sign of Libra for most of this transit, the two lovers in mutual exile become star-crossed, or crossed stars rather, full of both enmity and longing. An existentialist wave washes over us. We play with pain, we dance with complexity, we weigh dark and light. We feel the kundalini serpent awaking, twisting our guts and plucking at our heartstrings, running along our spines and up from the depths of our loins. And we stab it with our steely knives but we just can’t kill the beast.