Editor’s Note: parts of this post are excerpted from my article “Watching the Watchers: The Astrology of the National Security Agency”, originally published in the October/November 2013 issue of The Mountain Astrologer. -Matt

Mars describes how an entity asserts itself. The NSA’s Mars is in Capricorn, the sign of power and patriarchy, strategy and status, determination and decision making. This is the sign of the President and the Prime Minister, the Authority Figure and the Administrator, the Establishment and the Executive, the Four Star General and the Fleet Admiral, the Master Planner and the Man-In-Charge. Mars in Capricorn is considered an exalted (highly effective) placement because the fiery “charge” of Mars is sustained by the work capacity of Capricorn. Astrologer Raven Kaldera associates Mars in Capricorn with the Afro-Caribbean myth of Ogoun, a highly demanding, highly organized deity whose “area of patronage includes the police and the military”. (Source)

Mars tells us what things a person is willing to fight for. People with Mars in Capricorn (status) are often found fighting for cash, money, or other status symbols of a Capricornian nature such as their VISA black card(s). According to a report in Der Spiegel (Germany’s version of the NY Times), the agency extensively monitors international banking transactions “the transactions of customers of large credit card companies like VISA”. (Source) A number of commentators have expressed concern the agency has used its Ogoun like capacities for financial warfare to go beyond simply monitoring bank accounts and into actively manipulating them. On December 19th, 2013 the popular financial website ZeroHedge.com reported:

Hidden in the report which the White House panel on NSA released today is a stunning implication: that the U.S. government has been using its massive offensive cyber capabilities to change the amounts held in financial accounts and otherwise manipulating financial systems. Specifically, the panel’s report states on page 221 that (1) Governments should not use surveillance to steal industry secrets to advantage their domestic industry; (2) Governments should not use their offensive cyber capabilities to change the amounts held in financial accounts or otherwise manipulate the financial systems. (Source)

The NSA’s Capricorn Mars is in the 6th house of the workplace. Astrologers Sakoian and Acker associate Mars in the 6th house with workplaces which “involve machinery that consumes large amounts of power”. (Source) Given the NSA’s off-the-charts demand for large amounts of both electricity and computing power, it’s very fortunate to that its Mars in Capricorn receives a nearly perfect trine (supportive contact) from Jupiter (expansion) in Taurus (resource accumulation) in the 10th house of government. Jupiter describes where an entity experiences largesse. When placed in the 10th house of “Status Before the King,” the largesse will involve the King and his Court, or their modern-day equivalents: the President and Congress. Jupiter in the sign of Taurus suggests that the largesse will involve cattle and land, or their modern-day equivalents: cash and turf. The NSA’s budget is classified, so nobody knows for sure just how “fortunate” (Jupiter) the agency is when it comes to material resources (Taurus) provided by public officials (10th house); however, Steve Aftergood, director of the government secrecy program at the Federation of American Scientists, has estimated the agency budget to be approximately $10 billion annually.

Venus is the planet of love, style, self-worth, aesthetics and values. Scorpio is he sign of Shaman and the Spy, the Sorceress and the Super-Villainess, the Special Agent and the Super Sleuth, the Vampire and the Vampire Slayer, the Samurai and the Assassin. Astrologer Raven Kaldera associates Venus in Scorpio with the myth of Inanna, a Sumerian goddess who must “go down to the bottom of the pit and back up again, over and over, until it is a familiar place and has no power over her”. (Source) When Inanna finally emerges from her trip to the underworld she is accompanied by “an entourage of chittering underworld she-demons”. Repeated trips to the underworld affords Inanna the chance for “rebirth at a higher level of honesty . . . all who venture near had best hang on for the ride” Kaldera tells us. (Source) To illustrate: using the character’s first appearance on the show as his date of birth, Robert Vaughn’s portrayal of “Hunt Stockwell” in the 1980s television series “The A-Team” is a Libra with his Venus in Scorpio. (Chart) Stockwell, the audience is told, is the head of something called “Enhanced Intelligence Assets” (EIA), a highly classified outfit the show’s writers seem to have modeled after the “Intelligence Support Activity” (ISA), a real life organization whose astrology has been discussed on this site here. Like the goddess Inanna, Stockwell hails from the underworld (of U.S. covert operations) and is accompanied by an entourage of black suited he-demons armed with chittering sub-machine guns:

Venus in Scorpio really does believe in “till death to us part”. Stockwell, for instance, makes contact with members of the “A-Team” on the eve of their scheduled execution for a crime they did not commit. He provides intelligence that enables them to fake their own executions, escape prison, and then disappear to one of his safe-houses amid the haunts of Langley, Virginia (home of the CIA). Once the A-Team is ensconced in his web, he blackmails them into going on a series of high-risk (ie “suicide”) missions, reminding them that as convicted murderers and escaped fugitives they are now totally, thoroughly, 100% expendable. “If you fail, we won’t even ask for your bodies back” he cooly informs them.

Should, however, they “hang on for the ride” through a Plutonic underworld of plausibly deniable foreign policy interventions, Stockwell’s promised to acquire for them full presidential pardons. In other words, Vaughn’s Venus in Scorpio alter-ego is going to take the A-Team to “the bottom of the pit and back up again” in exchange for the possibility of “rebirth” as free men and the opportunity to come out from the shadows in which they’ve been hiding since the end of the Vietnam War. “All I need”, he tells their leader, “is your commitment” — the importance of which can’t be underestimated for this Venus placement.

As far as television shows go, “The A-Team” was simplistic, highly-sanitized Reagan era pablum but Vaughn’s portrayal of the Scorpionic Stockwell did briefly bring an intensely serpentine authenticity to the series. Whenever he appeared on the screen it was as though a totally different, far spookier, far more honest show had momentarily come on in its place. From his fashion sense (dark sunglasses, black suit) to his modus operandi (in the shadows), the Stockwell character was a textbook Venus in Scorpio.

Washington D.C. based attorney Jesselyn Radack is a Sagittarius with her Venus in Scorpio. (Chart) She represents NSA whistle-blowers Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, and William Binney — three men truly committed to opposing the surveillance state that is cataloging the fact you’re currently reading an article about the surveillance state. You could say that she is to the band of dissidents like Snowden and company what the Hunt Stockwell character was to the A-Team except that, unlike Stockwell, there are no doubts as to the nobility of her intentions.

The Stockwell character was, of course, fictional but the shadowy “network” he ran was actually anything but unrealistic. Consider, for instance, the insurance company American International Group (AIG), which has Venus in Scorpio in its incorporation chart. (Chart) The public thinks of AIG as simply the large insurance company that was somehow involved in the 2008 financial crisis. The reality is that there is much more to what goes on behind the closed doors of that company than most people realize. For starters, it’s been heavily involved in covert operations since World War II, many of which are not all together different than those run by the fictional Mr. Stockwell. A year 2000 Los Angeles Times article entitled “The Secret Agent (Insurance) Man” explains:

Newly declassified U.S. intelligence files tell the remarkable story of the ultra-secret Insurance Intelligence Unit, a component of the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA, and its elite counterintelligence branch X-2.

. . . the unit mined standard insurance records for blueprints of bomb plants, timetables of tide changes and thousands of other details about targets . . . “They used insurance information as a weapon of war,” said Greg Bradsher, a historian and National Archives expert on the declassified records.

The men behind the insurance unit were OSS head William “Wild Bill” Donovan and California-born insurance magnate Cornelius V. Starr. Starr had started out selling insurance to Chinese in Shanghai in 1919 and, over the next 50 years, would build what is now American International Group . . . (Source)

Venus in Scorpio can be the placement of “the femme fatale who uses her appeal to gain power over people” according to astrologers Frances Sakoian and Louis Acker. (Source) AIG is a multinational corporation, not a “femme fatale”, but the information contained in their insurance files could certainly be leveraged to gain power over people since people only insure that which is important to them.

Combine a Scorpio Sun’s orientation to psychologically intense confrontations with a Cancer Moon’s need for a secure home life and the result is a Sun/Moon pairing that’s passionate and powerful, magnetic and mysterious, compelling and self-controlled, armed with enormous reserves of emotional courage and a penchant for supporting people and causes “left for dead” by the rest of society. According to astrologer Jefferson Anderson, the textbook Scorpio/Cancer individual excels at anything requiring equal parts emotional intensity (Scorpio) and emotional intelligence (Cancer):

Never content with surface impressions, you like to probe beneath appearances to discover the genuine meaning and significance of things. Depth, imagination, and shrewd realism combine to help you excel at just about anything — and once absorbed in some endeavor, your concentration and dedication are matchless. (Source)

The Scorpio/Cancer capacity for “concentration and dedication” makes this pairing a particularly attentive parent, the sort who is extremely protective of their home and family — so much so that they can easily take things more than a bit overboard should they or those close to them be threatened. To illustrate: back in the 1980s the Soviet military set up a network of nuclear devices code-named “PERIMETR”, designed to automatically obliterate the entire planet should the U.S. ever attack the Russian homeland. Using its initial date of operation as its date of birth, the PERIMETR system is a Scorpio Sun, Cancer Moon. (Chart)

Astrologers Suzi and Charles Harvey observe that Scorpio/Cancers can lay dormant for long periods during which time they’re all “sweetness and light” only go to into “exterminator mode” on a moment’s notice at which point they will seek out the “sweet satisfaction of revenge”. (Source) PERIMETR was designed to, quite literally, lay dormant for long periods of time only to go into “exterminator mode” on a moment’s notice for the sole purpose of seeking the “sweet satisfaction of revenge” on an almost unimaginable scale. Also known as “The Dead Hand”, PERIMETR is for all intents and purposes the real life actualization of the “Doomsday Device” envisioned in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb:

Scorpio/Cancer is a very emotionally courageous pairing so here is something to contemplate, the implications of which require a good dose of emotional courage to process: PERIMETR is still active, still ready to obliterate the entire planet, and still plugged into the same computer it was originally plugged into back in 1984. (Source) Scorpio is ruled by Pluto while Cancer by the Moon so the Scorpio Sun, Cancer Moon pairing is similar energetically to a Moon/Pluto aspect, which astrologer Adrian Ross Duncan says should “develop the psychological skills that come so naturally”. If you feel the need to develop some good psychological coping skills in order to get your mind around the fact there’s an active Cold War era doomsday device still sitting around ready to blow us all to kingdom come, well rest assured you’re not the only one. As Peter Sellers’s puts it in Dr. Strangelove, “Why would you build such a thing? It’s absolute madness”.

While not technically classified, PERIMETR’s existence is still largely hidden from public awareness despite there having been two books recently published about it — The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy by David Hoffman and Doomsday Men: The Real Dr. Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon by Peter D. Smith. Both Scorpio and Cancer are famously tight-lipped about what goes on behind closed doors so it’s fitting that according to a 2007 article in Wired Magazine, “the Russians still won’t discuss [PERIMETR], and Americans at the highest levels — including former top officials at the State Department and White House — say they’ve never heard of it. One Soviet official who spoke with Americans about the system died in a mysterious fall down a staircase.” (Source)

Even if one can justify the creation of such a device under a theory of deterrence, it sure would have been nice if somebody had thought to disarm the thing once the Cold War wound down. Unfortunately, Scorpio doesn’t forgive, Cancer never forgets, and neither sign is known for letting go of grudges very easily. This is doubly the case when the grudges pertain to the sanctity of the home(land).

Using its on-air debut date as its date of birth, the show “24” starring Kiefer Sutherland as gonzo counter-terrorist agent Jack Bauer is also a Scorpio/Cancer. (Chart) According to Wikipeida, the show routinely deals with themes similar to those raised by a system such as PERIMETR:

. . . a typical plot has Bauer racing against the clock as he attempts to thwart multiple terrorist plots, including presidential assassination attempts, weapons of mass destruction detonations, cyber attacks, as well as conspiracies which deal with government and corporate corruption. (Source)

Astrologer Bil Tierney says the Scorpio/Cancer pairing possesses “heightened emotional sensitivity” and must routinely retreat for purposes of emotional regeneration or they’ll risk reaching their bursting point. During the show’s nine plus seasons on the air, Sutherland portrayed Jack Bauer as a paranoid, high-strung individual who never retreated and was thus almost always at his emotional bursting point. In his character’s defense, there was no denying his dedication to fiercely (Scorpio) defending his culture of origin (Cancer) from threats both foreign and domestic:

Of course, it’s not all doom-and-gloom for this pairing. Being so attuned to the watery world of emotions, Scorpio/Cancer often possesses a sense of humor that’s very well-attuned to the current psychological zeitgeist. Whoever came up with the line “It’s always darkest before it goes pitch black” was likely a Scorpio Sun, Cancer Moon.

Speaking of things going pitch-black, Scorpio/Cancer may make for one hell of a doomsday weapon but it also makes for a great scientist, doctor, or social worker attempting to prevent doomsday type events from occurring or helping others handle their aftermath. To illustrate: using its registration date as its date of birth, the website RadCast.org is a Scorpio Sun, Cancer Moon. (Chart) Established in the fall of 2013, the site compiles radiation readings taken by citizen-scientists across the U.S. and makes them publicly available in an easy-to-use online format. The site’s creators were inspired to build it after realizing that the ongoing nuclear crisis at the Fukushima nuclear planet in Japan is being completely covered up by the corporate media. Radcast is, in effect, operating as a detective (Scorpio) whose applied their penetrating investigative skills to defending home, food, family, and country (Cancer) from threats more than a bit similar to those posed by a nuclear doomsday device such as PERIMETR:

Stella Hyde says Scorpios are the “Vampire Slayers” of the zodiac while Cancer Moons have an instinctual knack for jobs involving property management such as lighthouse keeping. (Source) Radcast.org is essentially a crowd sourced slayer of the vampire that is nuclear radiation (Scorpio), one that operates as an information lighthouse (Cancer). It does so at a time when corporate lies, media disinformation, government cover-ups, and large scale denial are monsters (Scorpio) in the closet (Cancer), ones every bit as nefarious as automated mass murder machines like PERIMETR. Scorpio is the sign of the death and destruction but also of radical honesty and deep self-awareness while Cancer Moons require healthy home lives in order to survive. You can thus leave it to a Scorpio Sun, Cancer Moon like Radcast.org to be one of the few organizations that is radically aware (Scorpio) about the real deep-level threats to our homes and families (Cancer).

About the Author: Matt Savinar is a California licensed attorney (State Bar #228957), voluntarily inactive as of June 2013. He can be reached for questions, comments, or astrological consults at his contact page.