Sagittarius II: Neon

Mutable fire: luminosity, artificial light, spectacle

• Atmosphere: Neon

• Sign: Sagittarius

• Plant: Mycena lux-coeli (heavenly light mushrooms)

• Planet: Moon + Mars

• Dates: 3 December – 12 December

• Tarot: 9 of Wands

The beauty of her

Under electric light

Tears my heart out

Every time

- PJ Harvey, ‘Electric Light’

Sagittarius II is Neon. It is a kaleidoscopic atmosphere that shifts moment to moment. It is mutable fire.

Kening Zhu’s illustration is trippy and wild; like the night sky has opened up and turned into a videogame with a psychedelic trail leading into the heavens.

The Moon provides the unwavering luminosity that names this decan.

But it is also Martial, and connected to battle, striking while the iron is hot, and faking it until you make it.

Neon can also appear to be magical – a form of unnatural fire.

Christoph Ribbatt, in his book on the history of neon, recounts a story of one community’s reaction to the unearthly glow of neon.

The town seemed to be burning. The telephone rang at the fire department headquarters in Missoula, Montana, way out on the American prairie. A man was calling from Rattlesnake Gulch, 26 km away. He reported a glow right over Missoula; he was so beside himself that the fireman had trouble calming him down. Then he asked the caller whether what he thought was a blaze was long and rectangular. When he said it was, the fireman assured him that it was not flames lighting up the night but the neon sign of the Florence Hotel in Missoula. It had turned the night sky red in that year of 1928.

The artificial light of neon caused panic in the 1920s when it was used for neon signs and people weren’t yet accustomed to it. In the eyes of ordinary people, there was an unnatural danger to neon – it read as a natural disaster. This is before neon lights were so ordinary that they light the night artificially, and interfere with our circadian rhythms.

The energy of Mars can power heat and light but it can also keep us running on empty – as with the exhausted, but tense, figure apparently still fighting a battle that has recently ended in the Nine of Wands – the tarot card connected to this decan.

The artificial nature of neon light represents the wired and ennervating nature of 24-hour capitalist culture – there is no natural break in spectacle, action, or consumption.

But it can also be parties, childlike pleasure, and colourful fantasy.