After a year and a half of moving back and forth between Capricorn and Aquarius, Pluto makes its final entrance into Aquarius on November 19. After that, it stays in Aquarius for 20 years, marking a new era. Since 2008, Pluto, aka Hades, aka Lord of the Underworld, has inhabited the sign of Capricorn. Pluto is a dwarf planet located in the Kuiper Belt of our solar system, and it takes 248 years to orbit the sun. Being such a slow mover, it represents long and thorough processes of irreversible transformation. Its methods include destruction, death, and revelation that lead to regeneration and rebirth. This is seldom a comfortable process as Pluto will force a confrontation with loss and powerlessness. Many could curse Pluto for imposing gratuitous cruelty and suffering, but this would be a misinterpretation. Pluto puts us in touch with the zenith of our powers as well: birth and creation. Those lessons don’t come cheap.
During its tenure in Capricorn, all things hierarchical, authoritarian, status-conscious, and credentialed have been tested by Pluto’s ruthless inspections. Among Pluto’s other duties are uncovering decay, corruption, stagnation, and infection. It exposes the underbelly of all it touches and shines light into the shadowy corners of our individual and collective psyches. In this way, Pluto can be quite healing as it purifies what is toxic and clears the way for new and healthy growth.
Over the past 15 years, corruption has been unveiled at every level of global government, our carceral systems, and judicial systems. We’ve witnessed corporate greed to the level of endangering the planet and the health of all beings. Capricorn is a sign that is highly cognizant of how society is organized. When Pluto trains its gaze on the underpinnings of society in the USA, it finds a wobbly foundation that keeps extracting from itself to build its own mythology. The projection of power and control without the substance to support it is a shadow side of Capricorn.
The last three years of Pluto’s journey through Capricorn have been especially significant for the story of the USA. Due to retrogrades, and its snail’s pace, transiting Pluto has been hovering around the degree of its placement in the nation’s horoscopic chart. Effectively, the United States has been in the throes of its Pluto return. Similar to solar returns (our birthdays), when a planet returns by transit to the place it was when we were born, an old cycle completes and a new one begins. The character of the cycle resembles the character of the planet. In the case of Pluto and the United States, we are closing the books on 248 years of certain ways of holding and expressing power and control. Over the next several years, we’ll begin to see glimmers of new possibilities opening up.
Pluto has already made two ingresses into the sign of Aquarius (March 2023 and January 2024) before retrograding back into Capricorn. Each time it did, we got small previews of the topics that Pluto will address when it finally commits to its work there. In Aquarius, Pluto will begin to pick at the dark side of information technologies, science, social networking, and progressivism. It will ask about the drawbacks of infinite progress and living up to social ideals versus individual, imperfect, human need.
One of the most interesting features of this particular transition from Capricorn to Aquarius is that we’re moving from one expression of Saturn to another. Saturn is the planetary ruler of both signs: Capricorn being the feminine, earth expression, and Aquarius being the masculine, air version. In both contexts, Saturn is a gate-keeper. On one side of the gate is Capricorn: the tried and true, sturdy, and familiar. On the other side is Aquarius: the experimental, disruptive, and the unknown. Both signs, while very different, work with limits. Capricorn works with the limit of life in a decaying body, and the finiteness of linear time. By immersing its experience in the physical world, death gives life meaning. Aquarius seeks out limits for the sake of surpassing them. It consistently breaks whatever container it’s in with its ability to envision something better—always better, more perfect, as if it came directly from the mind of god.
As Pluto sits at the threshold between these two signs, it leaves Capricorn forever changed—hopefully humbled by its hubris and the degree to which it let fear motivate an unquenchable desire to escape mortality. May Pluto, upon its entry into superhuman Aquarius, not lose sight of basic humanity.
