Pluto Enters Aquarius...
Pluto leaves Capricorn for the last time, and moves into Aquarius today, Tuesday 19th November, marking a major astrological shift that we will feel collectively, and that will reverberate for the next 20 years while it is in this sign. When an outer planet like Pluto changes sign, we will tend to feel the shift most acutely at that point. We have been prepared for this, as this is actually the third time Pluto has crossed from Capricorn into Aquarius in the past eighteen months. In March 2023, it moved into the sign of the Water Bearer and stayed for just a few months, as it retrograded and dropped back into Capricorn in June of that year. Then it made its second entry in January 2024, stationing at 2˚ Aquarius in May before retrograding back into Capricorn again in early September where it has turned direct again at 29˚ of that sign, and stayed for the past two months. This time the planet of the deep soul, and the psychological shadow, makes a proper commitment to Aquarius, and so we can finally say goodbye to Pluto in Capricorn, a passage of time that began back in early 2008.
Pluto is about the use, abuse, and realisation of power. It nourishes the shadows, feeding off what lies buried deep in the most unconscious part of the psyche; what has been repressed, overlooked, taken down, cast out and condemned. Pluto governs the areas of life that are considered taboo, and guards the mysteries that can only ever be partially understand by the enquiring mind, mysteries that can deepened into only when we are prepared to meet Pluto, or his queen, Perspehone on their own ground, and engage with them on their own terms. This requires us to surrender our desire for clarity, meaning and direction.
Jeff 'Wolf' Green, founder of Evolutionary Astrology, was the first to identify Pluto as the archetype of the Soul, and he identified two types of desire emanating from the soul; both evident in the Pluto archetype. Firstly, the desire to separate and forge a unique, distinct identity, through experiencing different relationships, accessing new forms of knowledge, understanding and life experience. And secondly, the desire to return to the source of creation - this will always intensify whenever the separating desire starts to establish itself as the 'everything', prompting a deeper sense of dis-ease to return, undermining the separative urge. And Pluto carries the karma associated with the soul. It is the the soul's unconscious desire for power and psychological control, and simultaneuously its compulsion to destroy the very thing that it strives for. You can think of Pluto as the 'shadow force', as the source of emotional. Green was also convinced that through integrating its opposite point in the zodiac (the polarity point), there is the opportunity also realise the soul's evolutionary impulse for deep healing and transformation. As Pluto moves through Aquarius now, the polarity point will be in Leo.
So with Pluto now in Aquarius, we must confront the shadow aspects of a sign that is so often idealised as a bestower of light, and anticipated as a harbinger of what is good. But the shadow side of Aquarius can reveal a cold and technocratic remoteness, more concerned with the ideological form of society that with its beating heart; a sign whose dispassionate distance and technological innovativeness might try to persuade us that Nature herself is replicable, improvable, even replaceable. Aquarius is, of course, a sign that inspires hope, service and the promotes the values that support community. It is the sign that bears the waters of life, and opens up the visionary possibility that we might rise above our difference, and experience a new level of togetherness, shared values, unity. Yet it seems, with Pluto’s passage through Aquarius, that we are destined to experience the dark side of Aquarius before we can truly realise this sign’s light-filled potential.
We had a taste of the shadow aspect of Aquarius, with Saturn’s passage through this sign (Dec 2020 - Mar 2023), and so we can look to this recent period of time for some pointers. Aquarius governs the form and architecture oflanguage, and conceptual thought, and Saturn the great organiser and record keeper, thrives in this sign. Many progressive political movements, which emphasise inclusion, diversity and social responsibility penetrated popular culture during that period, and environmental programmes that promote classic Aquarian slogans like ‘we are all in this together’ and ‘we are all collectively responsible’ really streamlined their narratives and strengthened their power base during that period.
At the same time, there has been a serious undermining of the importance of sense perception, natural rhythms, embodied learning, the acknowledgement of biological differences, coupled with an over-emphasis upon screen-based perception, algorithms, and ideological moralising. Social distancing and the removal of the requirement for close human contact become a normal expectation during the COVID era, and we become more reliant upon disembodied language and have been presented with ever-more abstracted conceptual frameworks to live by. And alongside of this, we have seen the accelerated implementation of AI, and the de-construction of the basic qualities of humanness in favour of a technologically-driven humanitiarian ideology.
There is a fundamental difference between the archetypal functions of Saturn and Pluto. Saturn’s role is to establish order in society, set the rules and enrol our conformity, while Pluto’s role is to destroy the integrity of conventional systems of control, and penerate the deeper, darker truths that lie hidden within our motivations and desires, especially the desire for power. And it is this journey toward the deepest truth of our being that underwrites our soul’s evolutionary path. Pluto works primarily at a collective level, and what we come to realise, as Pluto traverses through a sign, is that the shadow themes of that sign are exposed and as the consequences of that are wrought upon the world, there is an accompanying consciousness shift that transforms the collective narrative.
In the Pluto in Scorpio era (1984 - 1995), there was an intense collective desire to subvert and expose taboos, transforming sexual attitudes, and facing our fear of death. This period was characterised by the emergence of AIDS, and made us confront attitudes toward homsexuality and safe sex. The Pluto in Sagittarius era (1995 - 2008) forced us to confront issues of faith, and religious bigotry, we had to face the Sagittarian shadow of fundamentalist beliefs, and the Pluto narrative centred a lot around religious fundamentalism, a collective fear of what is foreign, or unknown, wars fought on religious grounds, the war on Islam, and so on.
The final throes of the Pluto in Capricorn era (2008 - 2023), have been characterised by the desire to restructure society and expose the corruption of corporate & governmental control (Capricorn themes). As the dark shenanigans of top-down power have been uncovered, people have lost faith in political systems of control, and corporate hierarchies. Society itself has broken down, revealing the fragility of the nation state and institutions that we might previously have trusted (if somewhat naively) are now deeply suspected of being corrupt. The dark side of Capricorn lies in that politcally strategic, Machiavellian maxim “the ends justify the means”, which can be used to justfy all manner of atrocities. Donald Trump has been elected US president just as Pluto leaves Capricorn, and whether you accept his critique or not, agree with his approach, or believe he will be succesful in it, he has promised to dismantle the state and to flush out the corrupt corporate and bureacratic players within its halls of power. One could hardly imagine a more appropriate swansong for the Pluto in Capricorn era! Whether that actually occurs remains to be seen. Will his new adminstration succeed in rooting out the toxic bureaucrats and technocrats that have disempowered and undermines democracy, or will it just be ‘screened out’, Aquarius-style, or replaced with something equally toxic?
What Can We Expect from Pluto in Aquarius?
If Pluto in Capricorn has shown us the untrustworthiness and distorted powerplays of top-down control, then I believe that the Pluto in Aquarius era will expose the ways in which democracy (an Aquarian ideal) is corrupted by power and manipulation, and the naive trust we have placed in social, cultural and spiritual utopias. In its shadow manifestation, Aquarius takes an aloof stand toward the human experience, removed from emotional involvement, a remote viewer fixated on ideals of progress, innovation and a reliance upon technological systems, and artificial intelligence. It is ironic that Aquarius is the sign that we most associate with the humanitarian cause, and this remains true, even in the midst of this. Ultimately Aquarius reveals to us the interconnected web of human interaction, and it blesses that with an inclusive attitude that welcomes all faiths, all paths, and acknowledges every different form of life as having an equal right to participate in the world. In order to attain this level of perception, though, Aquarius stands back and observes the world from a distance, intent on designing a better form and structure for society. This type of detached observation, design and experimentation can make Aquarius cold and heartless, and the systems that are produced can end up feeling souless, empty and somehow ‘too clean’.
One of the manifestations we are likely to see during the Pluto in Aquarius era is an increasing de-centralisation of power. We have been seeing this trend accelerate for a while in different contexts: for example through the rise of crypto-currencies, which potnetially displace power away from central banks. This could also be seen as a development of the Uranus in Taurus era. Aquarius grants us a peripheral awareness and its movements and ideologies are first formed at the margins of society, or in elite intellectual circles. We can see it in the way that alternative new media on the internet is becoming more influential than maninstream legacy media. We have seen in the last few years how ideas around race and gender, which were once the preserve of cultural studies departments in unversities, have now become mainstream topics of debate and governmental policy. These are just a few examples of Aquarian themes that take the focus away from the centre and toward peripheral opinions, movements and cultural shifts. With Pluto in this sign, we will have to deal with the shadow elements of de-centralisation as well. It could be quite an anarchic period, where the power of social ideologies and technological advancements sway over more traditional forms of hegemony.
One of the characters from myth that we associate with Aquarius is Pandora, (the ‘all-gifted’) and what does remains after all the ills of her famous jar (or box) are spilled, is the star of hope. I think the Pluto in Aquarius era may help us to strip away the false pretences of thinking that we can’t simply replicate the world of nature and expect it to deliver the same kind of sustenance that we all need to live fruitful, creative and spiritually nourishing lives. We are sensuously embodied beings with a soul that longs to return to an experience of wholeness, and however intelligent the ‘machine-human’ may become it will never be able to experience that longing of the soul’s return to original unity; and it will not become wise, as wisdom is born through the experience of human suffering and the healing journey to wholeness.
One of the primary capacities of the soul is the ability to distinguish one quality of experience from another, and Pluto, notwithstanding its destructive force and appetite for power, is a primary gateway to the recovery of soul. I believe it is through Pluto’s dark exposure of the profound impoverishment of an artifically intelligent world, that the fundamental importance of those differences will be realised. That deepest quality of Soul that Pluto stands for will break through the underbelly of human greed and the desire for power in whichever sign it dwells, and in revealing what is rotten about that sign, it will re-empower the human spirit to know the depths of its own darkness and to restore the beauty and integrity of that sign’s healing medicine from within that knowing.
As Carl Jung said:
“There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” (C.G. Jung)