Pluto In Aquarius

 

Oil painting of Hades abducting Persephone. 18th Century. Oil on wood with gilt background.

    Hades is the Greek god of the underworld.  In astrology he is known as Pluto and he's about to enter into Aquarius which is my sun sign.  He's also simultaneously going to be conjunct my natal Sun/mercury conjunction (Mercury is just one degree from my Sun).  I also have my Medium Coeli at 19 degrees of Aquarius  and the south node of my moon at 29 degrees.  For those of you not fluent in astrology, that all means I've got a lot of Aquarius energy and Pluto is about to be all up in my business.  Astrologers use what are called "orbs" when talking about the angles between planets.  Depending on the planets in question, the orb can get wider or smaller.  With the lights (Sun and Moon) it's mostly agreed that a 10 degree orb on either side puts the planets in an operable conjunction.  It is an applying conjunction as the transiting body is moving towards the natal planet, and it's a separating conjunction once it's past and on the other side.  Pluto first got within a 10 degree applying orb to my natal Sun in February of 2019, retrograded away for a while, and then in January of 2020 made it back to a 10 degree orb and has been within that 10 degrees ever since.  

    That was an interesting year thanks to Covid-19.  Personally I did really well during Covid.  I was working as an over the road truck driver hauling hazmat tanker for Kenan Advantage Group at the time.  One of our clients made hand sanitizer and another made n-95 masks.  Needless to say, I didn't miss a day of work due to being considered an essential worker.  As I was over the road I mostly just stayed in my truck and didn't have to deal with people.  Really the only time I had to be in a communal area was to go into the truck stop for a shower.  I carried all of my own food with me in a thermoelectric cooler and cooked it in the truck.  I had an inverter in the truck, and so I could use appliances such as a toaster oven or a single electric stove eye.  I did not buy food on the road as I did not want to die from diabetes, heart disease, and obesity which are the number one killers of Americans (I'm not going to go hunting stats down as this is gonzo and that's close enough).  I started that over the road venture in September of 2017 due to necessity.  I made about 500k in six years driving a truck as a company driver.  When I quit in January of 2024 I was making a 90k per year salary.  I had gained 65 pounds, but I was home every day by then.  When I started trucking, I was gone for two weeks and home for 2 days.  But all good things must end.  China decided to play different games with the chemical I was hauling, BASF got competitive, and one day my job up and vanished.  It was go back over the road and just be home on the weekends again, or go and do something different with my life.  

    Well I did something different.  2 days before my 44th solar return (birth day) was my last day of work as a truck driver.  My last day of work was the 20th of January 2024.  It was technically the last day of my two week notice, but it was a Sunday and they didn't need me to work.  Interestingly, Pluto entered Aquarius for the first time on that day.  It made it to 2 degrees 6 minutes on 5/2/24 and went retrograde (which is when the planet appears to be moving along the ecliptic in reverse).  On October 12th it made it to 29*38' of Capricorn and moved back direct.  Today it will re-enter back into Aquarius and it will be there until 2044 which is 19 years.  It will be less than 2 degrees away from my sun/mercury conjunction and in the same sign.  I'm going to have to deal with Pluto in Aquarius on my Sun/Mercury, then Medium Coeli (also known as the Midheaven), then my lunar South Node which is at 29*.  It's not just me that's going to have to deal with Pluto in Aquarius.  You, dear reader, will have to deal with it as well.  

    What does Pluto in Aquarius mean?  I've been trying to figure that out for myself for the past year.  It can mean everything from you will acquire a buried hoard of gold while digging a hole in your back yard (I mean I dig holes in my backyard), to you are going to die along with your momma, pet chinchilla, parrot, and horse that draws your buggy to, or perhaps all 5 at the same time due to a drunk driver while taking your newly discovered gold to the money gettin' place on that horse drawn buggy of yours.  Who am I kiddin', I'm sure you have a motor wagon by now it being 2024.  Don't worry, if your Sun/moon (or any other planet for that matter) is not in Aquarius (conjunction), Scorpio/Taurus (square) or Leo (opposition) you should be just fine. Pluto, like all of the planets in astrology, means a whole lot of things.  Everything in astrology works on a polarity, just as everything in reality does.  Positive and negative is just a fact of corporeal life, and it goes all the way down to the words you are reading just being an on or off signal via very small transistors.  I believe in destiny and fate.  

The Three Fates by Paul Thumann, 19th century

    Is astrology about your life being fated?  First we must make a distinction between fate and destiny.   Now usually the concepts of fate and destiny are considered to be essentially the same thing.  That would have been the case in ancient Greece, at least as far as we know, and it's the case in most all dictionaries.  It seems pretty clear with the three Moirai of Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos.  Now these three were the daughters of Nyx who was the primeval embodiment of night, who was herself the daughter of Chaos, who was the void state that existed before existence, so that's all we are dealing with here.  They're just the granddaughters of Chaos.  At any rate, even Zeus could not change their dictates.  They decided your "lot" or fortune which was the length of your life and everything falling between your first and last breath.  When horoscopes first began being applied to individual people, which was some time after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt around 332 B.C., it was mostly about your fate.  How long would you live, where was your "lot of fortune," and all sorts of different techniques more akin to "fortune telling," than what Astrology has advanced into.  Before Hellenistic astrology it was Mesopotamian and Egyptian and they were separate astrologies (there are other forms of astrology that do not pertain to this Western timeline such as Chinese or South American).  The Hellenistic period combined the two forms, added to it, and the nativity was born.  Before that point astrology was mostly what's considered "mundane" astrology, and that is about how the planets effected your kingdom and not how they pertained to individuals beyond the fact that they were in your kingdom or not.  Obviously these are very broad strokes as I am not a licensed, ensured, and bonded historian of astrology.  

    Today, for the most part, the modern day Hellenistic astrologers seems to be on the side of fate.  As in the nativity (horoscope) can tell you when you are going to die.  There is such a thing as "end of life technique."  I don't know it, and honestly I have no desire to learn it (although being a Gemini ascendant I likely still will due to being fated by that sign to do just that sort of thing).  I'm not immune or averse to irony.  I see fate as being something you have no control over, like that drunk driver that ran over you, your momma, pet chinchilla, racoon (why did you have a pet racoon anyways?), and horse that was drawing your horse drawn buggy.  Destiny on the other hand is something we make happen.  Destiny is also shown in your nativity.  Destiny will not happen without your conscious effort.  The real gold in astrology is the ability to know about these energies, to put a name to them, and thereby gain some power over your fate.  It's not that you cheat fate, it's that fate is a gray area, and there must be room for destiny, and we are more free than our ancestors were psychologically.  Why not?  Reality supposedly just boiled itself into existence via some type of quantum bubble which I have no ability to understand (nor do the theoretical physicians of physics who prognosticate about such things).  Well that is as random as Chaos herself.  You can believe that you're just the result of a cosmic fart of Chaos if it floats your dead horse drawn motor buggy , but I'd prefer to believe in such things as purpose, meaning, lives beyond death, reincarnation and, yes, astrology while I'm at it.  Again, if the choice is between a Chaos fart and divine purposeful destiny, than I will chose the later thank you very much.   

The Night of Enitharmon's Joy, showing Hekate and the Moirai, by William Blake, 1795 (Tate Gallery, London)

    Which brings me back to Pluto entering Aquarius and conjuncting my Sun/Mercury conjunction.  

    Also, before I move on, lets take a moment and be thankful for the visionary art of William Blake.  I just can't get enough of his artwork and visionary poetry.  

  Pluto is associated with death.  Transits of Pluto can correlate to deaths in your life.  Does it have to correlate to that?  No it most certainly does not mean that your entourage of exotic pets and horse drawn race cart are all going to have to die (wait...why in God's green earth do you have a horse drawn race cart?  What even is that?)  My feeling on the matter is that if you do the work of individuation, and if you learn what all of these psychological archetypes are about, what this language of astrology is communicating, than you can perchance transmute some negativity into positivity.  Perception is really a powerful force in the human generated reality that we all must inhabit together.  Like attracts like.  If you go around worried about this Pluto transit to your sensitive nativity point (in my case Sun/Mercury) than there's a good chance something bad is going to happen.  What if you know that it's coming and you sacrifice something else intentionally to Pluto (like your 90k salary)?  Am I trying to bargain with the lord of the underworld?  No, I'm not.  What I'm saying is that maybe he's giving me an option.  Maybe, like everything else in existence, this to is a polarity.  It's true that for something new to exist something else must die, or give up it's energy.  For you to exist, at a minimum, plant life must die.  When we reap what we sow we simultaneously kill it.  Hopefully that plant produced some seed before the reaping!  For something new to come into existence it has to be composed of some matter and energy that composed something else before.  That something else before has to metaphorically die if not literally.  Pluto also means metaphorical death.  In fact most of astrology is just that, metaphor.  We are dealing with right brain soul stuff here.  Images are not words, and a thousand words still do not make the image just as the map is not the actual territory.  It's just a depiction.  

    What do I know?  I'm just another very imperfect human.  I am wrong from time to time, and I can admit when I am wrong (it happened like 20 years ago...or was that my last life when I was wrong about something I mean?...not when I admitted to it😁).  Well, we can all be wrong, but when it comes to matters of fate and destiny, it seems to me that we are dealing with the realm of faith...mostly.  One has faith in god, or gods, the soul, spirit, afterlife, and the like.  However, when it comes to astrology working, that is not faith.  The reality of astrology can be discovered scientifically, but not in a lab.  If we see science as the scientific method, and not as Scientism as religion as is so often proselytized by the gods of science, than we can certainly call astrology a science.  However it can't be weighed on a physical scale, nor seen through a scope of any kind (well...there is the telescope).  And?  Where is your mind?  You can't put that on a scale and weigh it either. Unless you think your mind is just the meat in your cranium, and you think all of everything you've every experienced was just electrochemical reactions in that same bit of meat that got farted out of the afore mentioned cosmic butthole.  I wouldn't recommend weighing your brain by the way, and science would agree with me there...you won't survive it.  I don't care what Elon says (has he said that?).  And by the way, Newton, yes that Newton, was a very adept practicing astrologer and occultist.  

    More importantly, however, astrology is an art.  It's a very human art that's applied to the mind, body, and soul.  It's a real art, and a science, and it's been around since we were able to see the night sky and wonder about it.  Before screens, like the millions of years that sentient and focusing eyes have been a thing, some early hominidae looked up and saw the most amazing thing it had yet seen.  "What is that?" it would have thought in whatever grunting sounds meant that.  Followed by "what does it mean?"  That's how long life on Earth has been looking at the stars and contemplating their meaning.  Human culture grew up around those amazing lights in the night sky, as well as the two lights in the day sky (sun and moon).  Language likely developed to talk about them.  At least by the time of fire we were sitting around talking about them.  What else would we have talked about north and south of the equator around the winter solstice when it got dark so quickly.  There are about 13 1/2 hours of darkness on the winter solstice.  We don't need that much sleep.  After the lovin' was all finished wouldn't we look up next to the fire and wonder?  Not much could have been more mentally stimulating to our early ancestors.  

    Pluto in Aquarius is going to bring some changes.  A.I. looks to be a part of the picture.  Prometheus and Hades are going to tangle for 19 years.  What will that look like?  Shocking discoveries of meaning?  The singularity?  The Matrix.  Orwel's 1984?  Hopefully there will be a new revolution in meaning.  A Scorpio Aquarian mind?  My wife is a sun sign Scorpio, and I am a Sun sign Aquarian, so maybe my children will contribute?  What of the babies born with Pluto in Aquarius?  What will they be like?  The singularity is supposed to be around the time Pluto is finished with Aquarius around 2044, if you believe in that bit of technotriumphalism.  Deep psychological meaning is going to meld with technology and individuality.  Humanitarian issues are going to continue on the ascendancy.  Issues of social justice and what it means to be human and not machine will become very prominent as they already are doing.  Machine intelligence versus human intelligence.  Frankenstein incarnate...FRANKENCHINCHILLAS!  That sure looks like the singularity to me.  Personally I'm not going to be downloading my consciousness into the cloud.  I don't think that is possible, but that won't stop people from trying.  I'm sure Elon will have the technoprogressive monkeys in line to download their meatspace up the singularity a-hole.  Is that how it will work, like Chaos just takes the fart back?  Maybe Kurzweil knows?  I'll be going the other way.  I'll take the snake drawn chariot straight to Hades before I'll plug my mind into a Matrix Musk hole.  I guess I'll see you in Hades!  😜