Even though science no longer views Pluto as a planet, astrologers still use it, especially now. Pluto’s influence is never ambivalent or passive. It represents profound transformation, power, purge, the afterlife, death, birth and rebirth, good and evil, redemption, the underworld, everything that is secret and hidden. In other words, not much fun.
In the past, its extremes were best symbolized by Hitler and Gandhi. In today’s world, they are best symbolized by the Dalai Lama at one end and autocrats like Putin and on the other end, a supreme court that expands gun rights on the same day that they ban abortion, stripping women of a right they’d had for 49 years.
When the U.S. was born – the day the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia – the country’s natal Pluto was at 27 degrees and 33 minutes of Capricorn. You can see it in the inner circle, 2nd house.On Feb 22 2022, Pluto returned to that exact point. A Pluto return happens every 248 years, so this is the U.S.’s first such return. That date was also a palindrome, meaning it reads the same backward and forward.
A Pluto return generally means the destruction of power structures and norms and a gradual rebuilding from the ashes. You might say this country has been in a Pluto return since Pluto entered Capricorn in 2008 – the election of the first black president, followed by the electoral win of grifter trump, an insurrection and attempted coup, a pandemic that Biden handled well, the Jan 6 committee, the invasion of Ukraine and now, the banning of abortion.
On the day that the supremes released their abomination, Pluto was at 27 degrees and 56 minutes of Capricorn – it’s there in the outer circle, 2nd house. In other words, just 23 minutes away from an exact to the minute conjunction. That number, 23, is important. In the I Ching, hexagram 23 is called Splitting Apart. You can read more about it and the people who have kept track of that troubling number here.
Many of us had hoped the Pluto return would result in something positive, a true shift in consciousness – and perhaps it still will. But right now, folks, it looks like we’re at the gates of Gilead, the fictional world depicted in Margaret Atwood’s brilliant book, The Handmaid’s Tale. Clarence Thomas has already alluded to gay marriage and contraception as on the chopping block. That should mean that interracial marriage would be there, too. But since Thomas is married to a white woman, my guess is that won’t happen. Or it will be grandfathered in.
But what all this amounts to isn’t the protection of the unborn. It’s about the control of women. It’s the beginning of an autocracy.
So if you have considered leaving the U.S., now might be the time to do it.
Pluto will enter Aquarius on January 21, 2024. It will turn retrograde and slip back into Capricorn, where it will be on election day in Nov 2024. Then, on November 20, it will enter Aquarius again. Mercury will also be retrograde on election day, as it was in 2000, when the election was too close to call. And we all know where that election ended up in – in the supreme court, which handed Bush a win.
So where will the country be by Thanksgiving or Christmas of 2024?
I don’t have any idea.
