When the Tiny Little Planet of Great Big Power crossed that line into the first degree of Capricorn, humanity was introduced, once again, to a new chapter in its evolution. Pluto’s tenure through this no-nonsense earth sign will restructure humanity’s vision for about 15 years.
To understand the implications of this momentous threshold, we must factor in everything else that was going on when Pluto made this first crossing (it was only the first of several crossings, since throughout 2008 Pluto will be retrograding back and forth between early Capricorn and late Sagittarius. But the first is the most telling). Hovering around this ingress zone is Jupiter, with which quick little Venus met up on the first of February.
We would miss much if we tried to sum up the meaning of this crossroads in a single buzz-phrase. Our challenge as transit-trackers is to press our imaginations into service, and consider all the many layers of meaning signified by this period. Each layer has a lesson to teach. Perhaps most significant of all, though the hardest to sum up in a singular thought-form, is the far-out (and not just in the hyperbolic sense) concept of the Galactic Center, with which the ingress conjunction coincides. Even to simply allow our awareness to embrace the fact that there exists a fixed point at the center of our galaxy is to inch ourselves towards a quantum leap of understanding.1
The next decade and a half is going to be about that quantum leap.
The assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the election-fraud riots in Kenya, landslides in Indonesia, the movement to impeach the American president (which, despite its almost-total absence of mention in the national mass media, has moved from the realm of taboo ideas [Pluto] to the Congressional floor [Jupiter]) will number among the themes history will remember as epitomizing the transits at the tail end of 2007. The presence of Mars, which stationed direct on January 30th opposed to Pluto, will continue to make the shift hard not to notice. Mars tends to triggers events; and given its link to Pluto, in its unconscious form the transit will keep stirring up formidable power plays.
Meanwhile, there is something to learn here that reaches beyond the specifics of the event level. There is a shift in the wind that is palpable to all who are sensitive to the world moment.
On the individual level the meaning of this opposition is to teach us about ego and power. Each of us must keep a sharp eye on how we use our will (Mars) as a servant of the Laws of Nature (Pluto, the organic principle of decay and renewal). To work it the other way around – that is, if we allow a blind desire to get our own way (Pluto) to dictate our actions (Mars) – we create serious karma. In other words: it majorly backfires.
Under a transit like this it is not necessarily unhealthy to experience feelings that border on the obsessive, as when we pump our energy into a project with life-or-death focus; but there is a difference between the appropriate use of control and the craving to control-for-the-sake-of-control. We will have more to say on this piece of the transit puzzle next month, when the Mars-Pluto once again reaches exactitude on March 6th and 7th.
Meanwhile, to get a bead on the big picture, we must get to know Pluto in Capricorn. It is now setting the stage for every other transit that comes down the pike. What will the planet of death-and-rebirth have to say to the world in this brand new sign?
Before we attempt an answer let us consider the concept of transit sequencing. It is a given in astrology that one sign follows another for a reason. The order in the zodiac of the twelve archetypes tells us that the issues of Pluto in Sagittarius were meant to segue into the issues of Pluto in Capricorn. The fire issues of the former period were a preview for the earth issues of the next.
The last 13 years of Pluto in Sagittarius taught humanity — in some hideous ways and in some revelatory ways – about the big wide world out there. Sagittarius, the sign associated with long distances and foreign entities, took Pluto into territory that stretched formerly provincial perspectives into unimaginable places. Geography-challenged Americans learned how to find Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine on the map, whether they wanted to or not. The local hamburger restaurant put risotto on the menu. Globalization sprang to life with dizzying speed, as did people’s awarenesss about the horrors it created in the Third World. New information coming out about, for example, how the sugar industry is based on near-slave labor in the West Indies and about the decimation of Mexican family farms in the age of NAFTA educated many middle-class consumers about the difference between “free trade” and fair trade.
Capricorn is often misconstrued to be about money, which is probably because the modern industrial world is so obsessed with money that all earth signs are immediately linked with it. In fact the entities under Capricorn’s rulership have to do with finances only indirectly, if at all; what they are about is vested authority and structure.
Capricorn governs infrastructures: a person’s skeletal framework, including her psychological ones (e.g. emotional boundaries); a collective entity’s borders, its bureaucracies, its government and its corporations.
Pluto in Capricorn and the individual
For each of us individually, the coming years will augur a stripping down of whatever Capricorn-ruled issues we each have that have outlasted their expiration date. The structures in our lives are going to be given the once-over. The gluing-together mechanisms we’ve been using, logistically and psychologically, will be subjected to a long, fifteen-year parsing. Do these cohesive devices still work? That’s all Capricorn cares about: whether something works or not. The fancy theorizing of Sagittarius is no longer the mode-du-jour. Now the emphasis is on grounding our lives in practical values; and any habits that don’t produce results — not just material results, but results in the sense of encouraging the productive development of our life purpose — can now be thoroughly eliminated. As we know, Pluto shows no mercy when we hold onto our dead old ways just because we’re emotionally attached to them.
Readers whose charts feature a planet in the early degrees of a cardinal sign are already in the midst of an all-out purge.
Corporations
In the mass mind, the meaning of these entities will undergo profound changes in the years to come. As we can already see, the unique role of corporations in the postmillennial world is under the spotlight as never before.
Most Americans alive today remember when the whole concept of Big Business was accepted without a shred of ambivalence by a cheerful and compliant populace. Corporate growth was seen to be the product of a wholesome, prosperous nation, and was equated with modernity, patriotism and “progress.” Every post-war childhood echoed with the gung-ho refrain, “The business of America is business.” It was during these years that the preternatural power of the modern corporation started to be quietly put into place; to the point where, at this point in American history, the legal rights of these abstract financial entities in some cases outstrip the rights of individual human beings.
But corporate power will be the subject of intense scrutiny under Pluto in Capricorn. Just as Pluto in Sagittarius drove the issue of religion to heretofore-unimaginable extremes in order to expose its workings, we should prepare ourselves for similar dark theatricality to infuse the contest of the upcoming years: corporate power-vs.-people power.
Government
The world’s perspective on government – the concept of government in general, and specific governments in particular — will be similarly turned inside-out. In nation states all over the world, we will see a gulf widen precariously between the two parallel story lines which traditionally run concurrently in the mass mind: that of the received-wisdom version of what’s happening in their government, and the Plutonian version, which spells out the ugly realities behind the scenes.
Pluto governs the unsavory underside of a given subject, and its perspective is almost always disdained as too distasteful to look at. Looking at the rot within a collective institution, like one’s government, is as unsavory as looking at maggots on road kill. To a populace in denial, Pluto’s insistence that we look anyway will be welcomed with about as much enthusiasm as was its insistence, when in Sagittarius, that we look at the fact that the beloved neighborhood priest was a pedophile.
In the USA, for example, the received-wisdom scenario of the presidential election is that the Democrats stand for ending the war in Iraq, and the Republicans stand for an endless occupation. As presented by the mass media, the Democrats’ rationale is encapsulated with the buzz-phrase “phased withdrawal; and the Republicans’ is summed up with the shibboleth “maintaining American interests and safety.” Yet compared to the Plutonian version of what’s going on, both are meaningless.
Despite all the blathering, pro-and-con, about “troop withdrawal,” none of the candidates and none of the corporate media are talking about the thousands of “counter-terrorism” units that will remain indefinitely in Iraq, a country which, so we are told, would otherwise be in danger of being taken over by “terrorists” – a term that is universally left undefined (in fact, it seems to mean any Iraqi who objects to his country being occupied).
In all the major candidates’ scenarios it is a given that American “advisers” would be embedded in the Iraqi Interior Ministry, whose use of torture (Pluto) is now public knowledge.2 The fact that there are sixteen permanent American bases in Iraq (that’s right, their official description unapologetically uses the term “permanent”), as well as the fact that the US Embassy in Baghdad is the largest in the entire world, would seem highly relevant statistics to mention in all this talk about “withdrawal,” yet one hears not a peep about them.
And who are the “ambassadors” who will stay to mind the shop? Among the top brass in this cadre of CIA-trained diplomats are the same gentlemen whose hands are still bloody from setting up death squads for the counter-insurgency in El Salvador, as well as from the earlier Phoenix program in South Viet Nam whose chief strategy was the assassination of populist leaders. Moreover, protecting these personnel will require a substantial gun-toting force – though it will presumably be verboten to call them “troops” any more. Their official designation will perhaps shift from “military” to “paramilitary.” All told, this adds up to from 50,000 to 100,000 Americans who would not go home with the soldiers.
The picture is one of an ongoing war that is tucked far away from the headlines, as similar US-directed “dirty wars” in Latin America have been. We will have moved from a hot, speechy-preachy issue (Pluto in Sagittarius) to a cool, covert one where only its managers know what’s going on (Pluto in Capricorn).
As the Pluto transit continues, the abyss between the received-wisdom perspective on these issues and the Plutonian one will grow too wide to breach without a breakdown. Not only nationalistic delusions but nationalism itself will be among the sacred cows slaughtered, as we will see in due course.
Though they are never a pretty sight, Plutonian processes have no other purpose than the exposure of hidden truths to the light so that transformation may occur.
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Notes:
1 See late December’s Skywatch for more on The Galactic Center: https://www.mothersky.com/skywatches/200801_skywatch.html
2 “The Baghdad regime is …a Shiite dictatorship. The recent lessening of the violence in Baghdad largely is due to the ethnic cleansing of its Sunni population. At least 50,000 detainees are imprisoned [in Iraq] today without charges or trial dates. The US is paying Sunnis to fight Sunnis, funding the Shiite-dominated security forces and has increased its bombardment from the air by fivefold since last year.” Tom Hayden, Ending the War in Iraq(Akashic Books, 2007).
