on the astrology of the guillotine (and AI)
a li'l history with your lunchtime
Astrology for Writers is an exclusively reader-supported publication. If you enjoy today’s work, please share it by forwarding this email, sharing on social media, or sharing it on Substack.
Monthly subscriptions are $7, yearly subscriptions are $70, and both include membership to a super-active Discord with like-hearted writers.
ICYMI
🎨 Book a mini-reading with me, “Unsticking Your Creative Practice: A Mini Reading to Jumpstart Your 2025.”
🎧 Listen to the new Call Your Coven episode, “Welcome to Imposter Syndrome.”
Guillotines are making a comeback.
At least, the imagery of the guillotine and what it represents. Increasingly loud cries of Eat the rich! are accompanied by guillotine references on TikTok, even by new songs.
Astrologically, they’re right on time.
In 1792, the then-governing body of the French Revolution, the National Legislative Assembly, approved the use of the guillotine for executions. Pluto was in Aquarius, and Saturn was in Aries. This energetic set-up may look familiar, since Pluto is currently in Aquarius, and Saturn moves into Aries next month.
Guillotines are a death machine that embody both the Saturnian craving of security and Plutonic obsession with power. (Saturn and Pluto are also, incidentally, two of the planets that most explicitly deal with death, and Aries is the head, so — quite literal.)
But what strikes me most about the guillotine, as a former scholar of the French Revolution and as a historically-minded astrologer, is the now-forgotten way that it was promoted as a more humane form of death.
In many ways, guillotines were the AI death machines of their time.
There was an argument for the guillotine in the 1790s that it was a humane form of execution. And ostensibly, that was true. The guillotine was fast. You weren’t at the whims of the executioner’s aim as a human being, or the blunter axe that often required two swings. (Think of Anne Boleyn’s famous last words to the executioner, admonishing him to mind her “little neck.”) Guillotines were a kind of AI outsourcing of a human job that sought to eliminate human error.
But in eliminating human error, in making death more “humane,” this innovation perversely enabled a hitherto-unthinkable number of executions.
In astrology, much is made of how tyrannical forces often arise out of difficult aspects (the conjunction, the opposition, the square). But there’s an easy sextile between Saturn in Aries and Pluto in Aquarius that still brings about an incredible rise in conservatism and tyranny — all in the name of “humaneness” (that most Aquarian virtue).
More than 10,000 people were executed by guillotine in two years. There are 365 days in a year. 10,000 people. It’s an unthinkable number and would have been an unthinkable number if they were still relying on human executioners.
There is a sense in which the weapons of war rolled out during this period, weapons that purportedly “help,” actually proceed to do significantly more harm.
The AI of it all.
While the guillotine is associated with eat the rich!, with the beheadings of Louis and Marie Antoinette and varied members of the nobility, the truth is that the vast majority of those 10,000 guillotined were commoners. Many were the political opposition of whatever party held power at the time, or Parisians thought to sympathize with them. Crime by association, as it were. The crime of loving a person who held a belief different to the legislative majority, or of being that person yourself.
Times — they do not change. And yet, we persist.
If you are interested in learning more about the history of the world-defining astrology we are currently experiencing (including said guillotine!), of periods of the past where humanity has lived through Saturn in Aries, Uranus in Gemini, Neptune in Aries, and Pluto in Aquarius (and survived), I have a recording you may enjoy: We’ve Been Here Before: A Historical Retrospective on the Astrology of 2025.
Thank you for reading this edition of astrology for writers. If you enjoyed it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, or sharing on social media or Substack notes!
This is so smart. It's making me think not only of the Aquarian virtue of "humaneness" but also the Aquarian quality of distance. I really appreciate many versions of Aquarian distance but it can show up like "let's do the humane thing by taking the human element out of it," creating efficiencies (or the illusion of efficiency) that do the opposite of what the stated intention was.
It also brings to mind the idea that technological advancement is always seen as “progress” — but for who?