Fall is such a small word. Fall. One syllable—neat and trite. It doesn’t announce itself and it doesn’t sound ostentatious. It’s a season, sure, but it’s a lot bigger than that.
Every planet finds its fall somewhere. The Sun in Libra (the fall equinox), the Moon in Scorpio, Mercury in Pisces, Venus in Virgo, Mars in Cancer, Jupiter in Capricorn, and Saturn in Aries.
Fall is a spiritual concept. It’s not something that is announced in the old books like domicile and exaltation. William Lily doesn’t even mention it. Detriment doesn’t quite exist in the old books either but we have so many words describing detriment, don’t we? There’s adversity, exile, there’s antithesis and there’s alienation. Detriment is the unnameable other and, so, we give it many names.
There’s one other word that is commonly used to describe fall—humiliation.
Fall is a spiritual concept because it talks about the great descent—the fall from Eden. This is the story of Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve are God’s first iterations of the human, the eternal ones, until they fall from the garden. They’re supposed to eat from the tree of life and, yet, they choose to eat from the tree of knowledge of both good and evil. They become aware of their nudity and they try to cover themselves with leaves. After their fall, they are banished to reproductive labor.
When Walter Benjamin talks about this story of Adam and Eve, he describes the fall of the word. Before the fall, language was creative. God spoke the heavens, the seas, and the earth into being. Adam was assigned the task of naming the creatures of God’s realm. He was given God’s tongue, which is a generative language. It’s only after the fall that bodies must make more bodies through physical reproduction instead of literary production. A language before its fall is able to create the world. A language after its fall can only reference the world.
Agamben talks about fall as well—he writes about the nude body in relation to the glorious body. Before the fall, Adam and Eve were clothed not in leaves or skins but in God’s glory. “The glorious body is not some other body, more agile and beautiful, more luminous and spiritual; it is the body itself, at the moment when inoperativity removes the spell from it and opens it up to a new possible common use.” The body in fall, on the other hand, is in “the condition of no longer being covered by the clothing of grace.” This reveals the body to “the light of knowability.” “To see a body naked means to perceive its pure knowability beyond every secret, beyond or before its objective predicates.”
And, so, what is fall or humiliation? It is a self consciousness and, with it, a self knowing. Planets in fall are hidden planets in the way that Adam and Eve covered themselves in their own shame. They are planets that cover themselves because they fear the wrath of God, because they fear disappointment. Detriment planets are supremely confident. When they refuse the promise of the planet, they don’t give a shit. This is because detriment is unnameable, because planets in detriment don’t see the point of the planet in the first place. Not so with planets in fall. Planets in fall understand the expectation of the planet and, in refusing it, understands disappointment.
It is important to note that planets in fall are not more difficult than planets in detriment. There is joy in refusing something that you do not understand but there is also joy in knowing the act of refusal.
Planets in fall are opportunistic—not in a negative sense but in a redemptive sense. The story that mirrors the story of Adam and Eve is the story of the prodigal son. In this story, the favorite son leaves the home, parties and otherwise has a great time, before running back covered in shame. The father redeems him by awarding him favors that he does not grant his second son, the son who stayed.
I tell my clients with planets in fall these stories all the time and I ask them what they see it in, what feelings come up, and what they notice. Everyone notices different things. Almost every Libra Sun I meet has a reaction to this overwhelming fear or knowledge of disappointing the father, almost every Scorpio Moon to this fear of not having enough, and almost every Pisces Mercury feels some type of way about not being understood.
So, yes there is a lot of wrath fearing for planets in detriment. There is a lot of hand wringing about falling short of expectations or the giving of something that no one asked for. There’s a lot of hiding what one does not want to change. But there is also the art of satire.
There is something about these stories of Adam and Eve, of the prodigal son, that is about youth and rebellion but also about being people who your parents did not expect to bring into this world. Gay people feel this often, I think. Gay people are trying to create relationships that do not mirror those of our parents.
And so, here is what I mean about planets in fall being opportunistic—they try to take things from a world that was not built for them and make something out of them. Planets in fall are like queer people wrestling with femmeness or butchness, making use of gender roles that were not built for us. Planets in fall are about the counterfeit Chanel bag that you dress up with anime keychains. They’re about Made in China, where brands go to die. Planets in fall are about costumes, about cosplay, and about wearing silly suits because the real ones take themselves too seriously. And this is Walter Benjamin’s point—the word after fall is not a real word but a counterfeit word. It has the appearance of the word but none of its invocation.
Planets in fall are sarcastic. They’re satirical. They can be funny but they don’t have to be. They understand tragedy. When a Sun in fall cosplays pride, they are doing just that—cosplaying. When a Moon in fall cosplays luxury, it presents the aesthetic of wealth without actually believing in it at all. Pisces Mercury tells stories that it does not believe in. A planet in fall creates illusions only to ask the question “do you believe me at all?”
Sure, planets in fall can be cynical or no fun at all. But they don’t believe that fun is for the winners. Planets in fall believe that there is pleasure to be had in humiliation, in satire, and in dressing up as all of the people you know with a certainty that you will never be.
