• PLUTO ENTERS AQUARIUS FOR A BRIEF STAY

  • Pluto in AquariusPLUTO ENTERS AQUARIUS FOR A BRIEF STAY

    On the 23rd of March, Pluto will enter the sign of Aquarius for a brief three-month stay before retrograding into Capricorn for the last time.

    Pluto entered Capricorn in November 2008 and will leave the sign for the last time in late November 2024.

    Pluto was discovered on the 18th of February 1930 by an American laboratory assistant who resided in Arizona. The planet was at 18° Cancer, a degree which has since been linked to Plutonian issues. The name Pluto was selected from thousands of suggestions and came from an eleven-year old English girl called Venetia Burney.

    Pluto is a tiny planet and was relegated to dwarf planet status by astronomers in 2006 causing quite an uproar in the astrological world. This category could well fit Pluto since one of its characteristics is also down-sizing!

    Pluto has an elongated orbit staying longer in some signs than others and it employs 284 years to complete its orbit so we will be looking way back into history to discover what happened during the last two Pluto transits in Aquarius.

    Pluto in the myth.

    Pluto as the Roman’s named him or Hades as per his Greek name was one of three sons of Kronos (Saturn), the other two being Zeus (Jupiter) and Poseidon (Neptune). Pluto was given the reign of the underworld after he and his brothers decided to split up the rule of the Universe between them.

    The Underworld was where the souls of the dead awaited judgement and they were prevented from leaving this place by a three-headed guard dog called Cerberus. Pluto was gifted a helmet of invisibility by the Cyclopes and so spent most of his life totally invisible in the Underworld except for the rare times he emerged and one of these was to kidnap his niece Persephone and take her for his bride. The two agreed that she was to spend one third of the year in the Underworld and the remaining two-thirds above ground, symbolising that winter occupies one third of the year and just as no fruit grows in the wintertime, so no children were born from their union.

    Pluto is connected to power, transformation, death, birth, the subconscious, the shadow, taboo and the occult among many other characteristics.

    Aquarius is associated with the original, the inventive, the humanitarian, the unpredictable and the unconventional among many other qualities.

    The Pluto transit during the years 1532 to 1553 saw the advent of countries fighting over religion as the Church of England broke away from the Roman Catholic church to found a religion on its own as King Henry VIII proclaimed himself head of this new Church of England.  Pope Paul III started the Roman inquisition. Spain and Portugal conquered and colonised faraway lands in the hope of gaining great riches.

    So Pluto’s stay in Aquarius in the above period was destruction and transformation in the name of religion and trade.

    Whilst the years 1777 to 1798 witnessed an intestine fight for the American colonies (the American revolution) on one side the British on the other the Americans aided by the French. In 1783 the British government acknowledges the American independence. The Industrial revolution began in Britain in 1760 and quickly spread throughout Europe. 1788 saw the start of the French revolution.

    So, in this period in time there was a destruction of the aristocrats and dominating governments giving more freedom to the people and allowing them a say in what was going on, likewise a huge movement forward in the technology of the cotton (and not only) industries meant more production and more profits.

    The upcoming transit once firmly established will begin in January 2024 and continue until January 2044 with another two-month return of the planet into the sign of Capricorn between June 2023 and January 2024.

    This time I believe the theme will be a revolution of technology as we now know it and this could go either way. Or the destruction of modern technology in favour of something more “user-friendly” and less invasive or a hyped-up technology embracing all facets of our lives.

    Here are a few background aspects that involve Pluto and the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction which took place on the 21st December 2020 at 0°21’ Aquarius. Jupiter also aspects these points as well as squaring Pluto.

    The Jupiter-Saturn conjunction took place in the Air sign of Aquarius and ended a 600-year period of the conjunction in the Earth signs, except for the last but one conjunction which took place three times in the Air sign of Libra between December 1980 and July 1981, preparing us, as James Hillman wrote in his Book “The Soul’s Code”, “to leave behind consumerism and adopt a sense of community”.

    Pluto was already in Capricorn during the most recent conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn and both these planets had just left Capricorn. Pluto entered Aquarius on the 23rd March, just over a month ago, and on the 1st of May it will station to turn retrograde at 0°21’ Aquarius, exactly on the Jupiter-Saturn degree.

    Just before Christmas last year, I attended a webinar where Lee Lehman was delivering a talk about the imminent ingress of Pluto in Aquarius and she said something that really piqued my interest. Lee said that when Saturn transits a sign he lays down the rules that regulate that sign and then Pluto comes along and implements those rules. Saturn’s stay in Capricorn led to new rules and regulations involving governments and Pluto’s stay there caused upheaval to the status quo resulting to this day in many still unfinished problems for several countries around the world. Saturn’s stay in Aquarius has been laying down rules about gender equality and the use of social media. There have been several attempts (barely successful) to regulate the news that appears mainly on Facebook and Twitter with the recent hostile take-over of the latter by Elon Musk last year. (I deliberately will not be delving into the pandemic in this talk). Now that Pluto hits the degree of the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction and lingers there for around 40 days we should begin to see a Pluto-like transformation of Saturnian responsibility regarding the Aquarian topic of social welfare as well as a Jupiterian increase and generalisation of the Saturnian fear about an Aquarian fanatical authority (ruled by Saturn) and nationalism (ruled by Jupiter). I think that by the end of the Pluto transit in Aquarius the social media as we now know it will no longer exist and there will more than likely be more class and gender equality as far as riches and privileges are concerned.

    Pluto will also be squaring the transiting nodal axis for a long time this year, it began with the planet’s entrance in Aquarius and will continue until the planet re-enters Capricorn on the 11th of June and then again come into force as the nodal axis enters the Aries-Libra axis on the 17th of July remaining in a 5° orb until the end of November this year. Pluto square the nodal axis usually hints at a block of power of some kind with people being unable to express their ideas and society at large suppressing whatever actions they might want to undertake. Ambition is huge but the audience isn’t willing to listen and people may see each other as a threat leading to disruption and destruction. The square from Jupiter magnifies all this of course whilst Pluto remains in Aquarius.

    Looking back to the house ruled by Capricorn that Pluto has been transiting for the last 16 years what has been transformed/irrevocably changed in your life during that time?

    So, what might we expect during this long transit of Pluto in Aquarius? Here are a few suggestions:

    In Aquarius, the planet is more focused on looking ahead to understand how the structures organized by Saturn’s passage in Aquarius could be rebuilt using new techniques to improve what is old and known.

    New laws that concern gender equality with greater tolerance towards “different” things and people, an ability to accept that there are many facets of “right and proper” and that these could all give the same result. And certainly a new way of conceiving and using technology, especially the “social” networks, which will certainly not be as it they now or as we try to imagine them!

    Rules could be implemented for the good of the community rather than that of a small part of society.

    We may be, or at least I hope, on the verge of a new collective awareness of our world and we may find that this current, “old and known” structure no longer fits our new direction, while a new altruistic consciousness will replace the selfish structures that have been in existence for too long.

    Great social changes are within reach if we have the courage to grasp and implement them.

    “The real voyage of discovery is not about looking for new landscapes, but about having new eyes.”

    Marcel Proust

     

    Bibliography

    https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780191735615.timeline.0001 accessed 17 March 2023

    https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780191735615.timeline.0001;jsessionid=40CF69BB395A08FBAB43760E587B03DD accessed 19 March 2023

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