The Solstice is power-packed this year. The most important transit of our era is coming to a peak.

The Uranus-Pluto square is exact to the minute of arc on December 14^th and 15^th,⁽¹⁾ and the whole month reverberates with this clash of planetary titans. What’s more, on the solstice itself (Dec 21^st), Uranus makes a direct station. It’s a cosmic acupuncture needle to jolt the global body to attention.

And here’s the cherry on top of the plum pudding: This needling takes place on the New Moon, so it is fueled by the energy of beginningness.

Tail end 

The transits of mid-November set us up for what’s happening now. If you didn’t already know what your hot-button issues were, the Mars-Pluto-Uranus square a few weeks ago should have made it clear.

Ask yourself whether any Pandora’s boxes sprang open around Nov 10^th-13^th Did any power plays reveal themselves? Ancient shames may have stirred in their slumber. This month, new information about those dramas is coming whooshing in.

The tail end of the year is always a good time to cop a perspective, but these transits are making it especially appropriate.

 Six Years of the Cross

Consider the contours of your life since 2010. That year saw the first multiple collision of Uranus (sudden change, revolution) and Pluto (death/ rebirth). Since then, in various combinations with other planets, these two heavy hitters have been on the attack against stasis and complacency in a thousand different ways.

Consider how much our collective life has changed. Take the attitudes towards gay marriage. Look at the way tech has revolutionized our lives. Countless little commonplaces have been rendered obsolete: the way we used to mail letters, make phone calls, take pictures, lock a hotel room door.

The way we see ourselves as citizens has radically changed over the past six years.⁽²⁾ The socioeconomic expectations that many of us absorbed in childhood have been gradually undermined. For most people in the USA, with its dogged focus on material success, an essential sense of security has disappeared.

Disparities between rich and poor have grown grotesque. As appalling as it is from the point of view of financial injustice, it’s been equally traumatic from the point of view of mass psychology.⁽³⁾

A fear of insolvency reverberates throughout the mass mood, for old people —  for the Boomers, now aging en masse  — as well as for the young, just starting their careers in the face of massive student loan debt, sketchy online colleges and credit crisis.

Meanwhile the online world of pop culture has become a life-mediating phenomenon unlike that of any other era of history. There is now no distance at all, psychologically or actually, between ourselves and our information. Plugged into ear buds, we walk around with it millimeters away from our brains. We carry it around in our pockets, next to our hearts. Soon we’ll be wearing Google Glass on our faces.

And everything is happening much, much faster.

Go back to your chart

Against this backdrop of surreally intensified group experience, individuals have been trying to find ways to live authentically, doing our best to roll with the punches. Depending on the peculiarities of our own natal chart, we’ve been either ignited by the challenges, struggling to catch up, or left feeling a sucker-punched casualty of the times.

Those of you with natal planets in the path of transiting Uranus and Pluto have been through a microcosmic version of the revolutions and death throes in humanity at large. You’ve been mirroring all these group dramas with identity crises, personal meltdowns and unforeseen liberations of your own.⁽⁴⁾

Here is how to get the most out of the Uranus-Pluto square. Whenever it is activated by a trigger transit,⁽⁵⁾refer to your chart. Look for the parallels between cultural explosions (high-visibility crime, viral trends, scientific breakthroughs) and explosions in your personal life. Try to see how “acts of god” in the outer world (fires, freak storms, lightning strikes) mirror your inner world. This is Applied Astrology 101.

Connecting the dots between outside experience and subjective experience is what astrologers mean by As above, so below. In tracking these synchronicities, you are practicing Hermetic Law. At the same time, you are absorbing the lessons the transit wants you to learn, on a profound, sub-rational level.

Creative shock

This month we’ll feel Uranian agitation buzzing around in our immediate surroundings, and we’ll read about Plutonian freak-outs in the headlines. But keep in mind that this transit does not have to be negative or fearsome.

For those on a path of consciousness, the collective is a poor role model. Groups tend to play out cosmic lessons in much cruder ways than individuals are able to. Only if we maintain an attitude of detached observation do we learn from our society’s example. This is done by interpreting outer events symbolically, and matching their themes to our own karmic path, per the law of As Without, So Within.

Take the Uranus station coming up on 12/21, a week after the square’s exactitude. In a group chart, it may show up as sudden destruction of some kind – a riot or an electric storm, for instance. But in your own life, depending on its placement and your level of understanding, it could show up as a wildly creative insight, or a bizarre and unlikely event that revitalizes you.

Even if you find the experience shocking or traumatic, know this: The only thing Uranus wants to shock is our limited thinking, and the only thing it wants to traumatize is our complacency.⁽⁶⁾

Notes

1 This is its sixth of seven total exactitudes. The last one is just before the Spring Equinox on March 15,^th 2015.

2 The Wall Street meltdown of 2008 coincided with the entry of Pluto (decay) into Capricorn (financial infrastructures).

3 In the USA, with its great myth of being free from class distinctions, the populace is suffering from a poignant culture lag. The equation of Americanness with the middle class is so deeply entrenched in the country’s self-image that millions of people whose socioeconomic status has slipped way down the ladder nonetheless still identify themselves as middle-class (many of the working poor, struggling with multiple part-time jobs to make ends meet, disdainfully reject the label “working class.”) Since the Cardinal Cross began, the conflict between people’s self-image and their actual reality has been growing, adding psychological confusion to financial strain.

4 To render these generalizations specific to your own life, you need to locate the transiting position Uranus and Pluto are in right now, by house and aspect. This identifies where in your life Uranus’ disruption and Pluto’s breakdown are taking place.

5 As happened in October with Venus, in November with Mars, and this month with Uranus’ station and the New Moon on the solstice.

6 Discussed in detail in my webinar “Understanding Uranus.”

Solstice Sun print by Richard Menard; Beggar drawing by Arthur Rackham; Pandora’s Box book sculpture by wetcanvas