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Pluto entered Capricorn in 2008 and spent 15 years in that sign of materiality and infrastructure before slipping in and out of Aquarius beginning in 2023. As the planet of creative destruction and deep transformation, as it travels through the signs Pluto uncovers and reveals the decay of human life which is ready to be eliminated. Rather like the vultures who serve as the clean-up crew after the death of an animal in the woods, Pluto’s destruction isn’t chaotic or discordant; instead it cleans up the detritus from the old ways to pave the way for the new.

Next week Pluto leaves Capricorn for good (until it returns in 245 years anyway!) and moves fully into Aquarius. Astrologers everywhere this week are bemoaning their failure to predict the winner of the U.S. presidential election. I too attempted a prediction, making the assumption that we were done with Capricorn and the focus on money and wealth and the power of the material world. I was wrong about the election winner but I was correct about one thing: We are moving into a post racial world. The voters who chose Trump as their candidate were among the most diverse in American history.

I invite you to revisit this article which recaps the astrology of the past 15 years to help us make sense of where we are today. Next week we welcome Pluto in Aquarius and I have some revisions to make now that we have tiptoed into these energies over the past year or so. Meanwhile I offer these words from Herman Hesse about “the strange power and possibility of such societal phase transitions.” (Many thanks to The Marginalian which offers a consistent thread of inspiration and creative thought.)

Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilisation. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence. …

You will, instead, embark on the longer and wearier and harder road of life. You will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace.

I feel that this is a very basic truth of life, one that we most fully understand when we ourselves are going through a transit of Pluto to our own chart. Resistance in these times is futile; we must instead let go to the power of creative destruction and use the infinite power of hope to create change in the world that brings light into the darkness.

The symbol for Aquarius is the Water Bearer which is odd because Aquarius is a very dry sign – ruled by Saturn traditionally with Uranus as the modern transformational rule, Aquarius is the quintessence of rational thinking and logic.  But the water that flows through the amphora in the image of Aquarius symbolizes the wisdom of life that flows from the heavens, through intuition and the higher mind (the Uranus connection).  With Pluto entering Aquarius next week this shift into a broader perspective will help us to make this adjustment into a multifaceted awareness and new awakening.

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