Pavel Durov Arrest Chart Does Not Compute

Dear Friend and Reader:

Mercury stationed direct in Leo at 5:14 pm EDT Wednesday. My experience playing in the realms of astrology and news reporting leads me to gather the facts during the retrograde, then look for a perk in information when Mercury goes direct. I’m writing this Wednesday and Thursday so I’ll conclude with what I learned.

There was some strange news this past weekend with the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov on Saturday evening. As Durov approached Le Bourget, the private Paris airport, a warrant was issued for his arrest. When he got on the ground, we are told that he was taken into custody and later charged with a diversity of crimes related to allowing others to commit crimes on his allegedly encrypted platform.

Since all major digital platforms are host and hostess to felons, why not also lock up Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk?

According to whatever data is available, Telegram is not even among the top 10 offenders. This issue should be a REALLY big deal. It’s the first time anyone whose company owns a platform is being held personally liable for what the users post.

Meanwhile, this kind of thing always sets off a free-speech panic, and 25,000 podcasts about your rights and all of that. It’s perfectly predictable. They’re coming for you next. Telegram users, depending on what they are doing, are likely to be concerned that they might get caught in an international dragnet. Under digital conditions, speech has never been more free, or less.

My Personal Impression of Telegram

Before I say a little about the chart for the supposed arrest, I want to share my impression of Telegram. The company is based in Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates. Personally, I was never drawn to the platform. You would think it’s perfect for the spooky side of my profession, but I find it repelling. Plus, I generally don’t use phone apps for any real work (hence, my lack of a meaningful presence on Instagram).

I’m not interested in the latest trend in online communication, which always seems to be a more complicated rehashing of email and SMS. I don’t care if all the cool kids are trying out the next great thing. I’m perfectly happy with my 1958 Hula Hoop. I still have cutting mats on all of my desks. I ride a pony to work every day. I bake my own bread and churn my own butter.

The desktop version of Telegram to me seems both ugly and incomprehensible. Your old Uncle Eric is a little dim, I admit, but I should be able to figure out how to find my way around an app that a billion people use. Staring at the screen wondering how to make it work for Planet Waves approximately 100 times, I decided there was no meeting between us and it.

Then every time someone sent me to Telegram for some Big Thing that would utterly thrill me, I practically fell asleep at the keyboard.

The Honey Pot (Honey Trap) Angle

However, that was not my real point of departure. (Nor was I concerned about one Telegram group that seemed dedicated to besmirching my pristine reputation; that much was funny.)

My concern was that all the cool kids were rushing to Telegram to conduct their top-secret clandestine meetings and share information, thinking it was a secure platform. That’s the state of mind if you go there: we are safe saying absolutely anything. So the platform gets all these rads and freaks and dissenters together in one place and…there they all are.

In one place. Having a great time. This is called a honey pot, which to me means a trap. Usually this refers to a romantic relationship used to gather information from a person. You can also arrange that into a beehive of data-gathering. They are related concepts.

I’m a devoted student of the digital realm, and I figured out what is going on here (online) after approximately five minutes of thinking about it, way back in the 1990s: when something is on the internet, it’s public. Period.

So I don’t post anything online that I don’t either want everyone to know, or expect they might find out. Even email is easily forwarded anywhere and also rendered into a publication (easy, like it takes three seconds). There is no such thing as “secure.” Anything can be cracked, if someone wants to badly enough. That’s your best security: either nobody notices you, or nobody cares about you.

But how convenient: having all the rebellious types gathered on one platform, which is in fact NOT end-to-end encrypted, and to which Pavel Durov and God knows who else has access to nearly all data.

Then They Arrest Durov for Kiddie Porn and Drugs

We are told by legacy media that Pavel Durov was arrested for negligently facilitating illicit activity, including distribution of child sex images and — wow — drugs. Yes, we’ve got trouble right here in River City! That’ll get everyone’s attention. We must clean up the streets and protect the innocent. Send out the posse.

It does seem that Telegram is a mainstream manifestation of the Silk Road. It’s the Dark Web gone suburban. You don’t even need the Tor browser.

Except this is obviously a joke, since everyone really associates Telegram with political dissent, anti-vax groups, the organizing of protests, government whistleblowers, document releases like those of Wikileaks, and various social movements.

Everyone understands that “hate groups” are going to come along for that particular ride. But with “free” speech, as anyone with a brain knows, you got to take the bitter with the sweet.

Also, this platform can be used by “security” services as a way to foment fake dissent, start phony organizations, and generally stir the pot in the wrong direction.

In case one is inclined to have their moral hackles raised by all this unseemly behavior, I would remind everyone that at the time it was introduced, the bicycle was seen as a moral outrage since men and women or perhaps same-sex “friends” could ride off into the countryside, unsupervised, and get a little nookie. The current technology environment is always a projection screen for moral indignation.

One Minute of Geopolitics

Many are thinking that the difference between Durov and the other owners of large digital platforms is that he hasn’t complied with law enforcement requests while Facebook, Twitter, etc., do. It’s worth noting that Apple has a rep for not decrypting iPhones for the FBI.

However, we don’t know that Durov has not cooperated — only that he is known for not doing so. All of Telegram could be an intel operation. It could be one giant Room 641A, where AT&T intercepted the entire internet and served it to the NSA.

Also, if Telegram is a trap, then you might surmise that it’s probably Russian, and if that’s true, then Durov’s arrest in France would be politically motivated against Russia. Yet the whole Russia thing is extremely complicated and Durov is supposed to be a dissident of Russia, not one of its operatives.

If you try to sort this stuff out, you will go crazy, particularly since nearly nobody knows much of anything. With “deep state” and “deep corporate state,” it’s all a bunch of speculation. We might reasonably expect to see some of this ingrigue depicted in the astrology. Before I go there, note that I have checked Durov’s natal and progressed charts (which have speculative timing), and the chart for Telegram going live on the Apple App Store.

But please note, I prefer not to write about the natal charts of newsmakers, especially if their chart is untimed. Let’s leave psychological astrology for the horoscope column. What I write about here in the news pages are the charts of news events. (Stay tuned for my reading of the presidential inauguration in 2025.)

Which Leads to the Arrest Chart

The reported time for Pavel Durov’s arrest is 8 pm Saturday night just outside Paris. At least we have that much. We have no photos, witness accounts, or anything of the kind. I have not seen a copy of the warrant or the arrest report. This whole vent falls into the category of a media rumor.

Astrology is the art of pattern recognition, and there are rules for how you think of elements in the scenario. It’s not tea-leaf reading or scrying using candle smoke on a mirror. The interpretation rules we use today go back about 2,500 years and any well-trained astrologer knows them (not so many). The “logos” in astroLOGy means there is logic you follow doing a reading. You have seen me do this quite a bit.

The chart for Durov’s arrest doesn’t look like the chart for an arrest. It does not look like the chart for a warning to other tech billionaires that they could be next. The chart does not look like much of anything. Maybe the time is wrong, but the publicly-reported time is what we’re testing out.

By “look like,” I mean that when you cast the chart for a school bus rolling over, you’ll see something in the chart that reminds you of that. The chart for a train wreck will look like a train wreck, and you can find the explosion in the chart for a gas facility blowing up. The 9/11 chart is very sneaky and loaded with covert activity. I could teach that chart in a full-day workshop.

This picture-matching is the first thing you do with any event chart. Sometimes you have to give it a minute, and think things through and work out the significations and the rulerships. Sometimes it’s so blatant that it’s funny. But seeing the event in the astrology is one of the first and earliest steps in really being able to read a chart.

So if I were teaching a class in mundane astrology (the astrology of world events), I would put this chart on the screen and say, “Find the arrest.”

So Let’s Do Just That

You are accustomed to my charts with 50 planets scribbled in. However, when I have an event I need to understand, I strip it down to the “seven lights in the sky,” the objects used by the classical astrologers. Those are the planets with assigned rulerships in the Thema Mundi and the Table of Essential Dignities. Without an assigned rulership, you cannot associate a planet with a house or a sign.

If a chart has a message, you will find it without the minor or modern planets. In fact, you must be able to do so. Thank you David Arner for showing me how this works, and making sure I understood how to do it. You can add modern and minor planets later, though the real story will always be on the layer of the original planets.

A chart is not a static object, and you need to see it as a thing in progress (in natal astrology, this is called reading progressions — that’s what they are there for). For example, the Moon’s course through its current sign is the time frame involved in nearly all mundane charts, and horary charts (the charts of questions). Also, planetary aspects that occur in the near future tell you what is developing. Once the Moon is done making aspects (goes void-of-course) and changes signs, the inning is over.

A lot in this chart comes back to Saturn retrograde in the 2nd house (you can safely ignore the lines; all of Pisces is the 2nd). That means money, and we know a ton of money is involved. But Saturn is not in conflict with anything. It’s not doing anything except sitting there. There is no dramatic tension. Aspects are all in the past (Jupiter squared it a week earlier; Mars did so as well — but those are over).

There is no relationship between the ruler of the ascendant (Saturn) and the ruler of the descendant (the Sun). There are no exact or applying planetary aspects present in the chart. Every aspect is separating. Mercury is stationing direct. That is potentially interesting; that might bring a development.

Here is the Story the Moon’s Aspects Tell

An event chart does not stand still. All the planets are moving, and to tell the story, you track their movements. To read, you start with the most recent lunar aspect and then plot each future aspect the Moon makes until it goes void-of-course before it changes signs.

Most recent aspect: Moon semi-square Mars. Okay that has some hidden tension, but not so much. And it’s a separating aspect. That’s what just happened. Then in the immediate future, follow the bouncing ball:

— Moon sextile Saturn (cooperative)

— Moon square retrograde Mercury (slight disagreement, with concealed data points due to the retrograde)

— Moon trine Venus (cooperative, hint of denial)

— Moon sextiles Neptune in Pisces then goes void (cooperative, not shown, indicating a disappearing act or behind-the-scenes resolution). When the last aspect is to Neptune, you really don’t have a clue what is going on.

There are no mutual receptions (planets occupying one another’s signs, which can serve as hints to a much larger problem). There are no applying mutual aspects between planets.

This reads like the chart for a lawn party, not an international security crisis. There is no actual clash indicated; no sense of military or legal action. It’s business as usual.

So I ask you: what’s going on?

With love,

PS — I’m not done with reading this astrology, but I’m not in a rush. And I’m interested in what you think. We will need to see how this situation develops, so much as we are able. But here is the chart with the modern planets, several asteroids, a few centaurs and Eris. Durov is a figment of the digital world, and this chart deserves a close reading from that point of view — which means factoring in at least Neptune, Pluto, Chiron and Eris.