Here in the spring of 2015, Pluto is halfway through Capricorn. Its square with Uranus, having hit exactitude for the last time mid-March, has officially begun its assimilation phase. Our cells have started digesting it. Its lessons are slowly being absorbed into the troubled body of the Anima Mundi.

But early April is beset by severe aftershocks. From April 5^th-10^th the Sun and Mercury in Aries will conjoin Uranus and square Pluto, our first post-exactitude test.

By now, we will have identified most of the old bones that need burying (Pluto). This month we’re being tested on how imaginative we can be with their burial.

It’s appropriate now to verbalize⁽¹⁾ or conceptualize (Mercury) the convulsive themes of the past several years, both collectively and in our individual lives.

Halfway point

Pluto in Capricorn (2008-23) has been merciless to the world’s obsolete social structures (Capricorn), squeezing their pockmarked corruptions into full public view. Economic verities all over the world have crumbled since the ingress seven years ago.

Seismic shifts (Uranus) have occurred in the fortunes of the world’s death-dealers (Pluto). China, of all places, has overtaken Germany as the third-biggest global arms exporter.⁽²⁾

There’s been a massive die-off of the world’s governments. Left-wing and right-wing populist movements are toppling political establishments from Madrid to Paris. Egypt has gone from Washington-supported despotism to Arab Spring to homegrown military despotism. Violent jihadists have cut swaths through the Middle East.⁽³⁾

Here at the midpoint of this riff of breakdowns, explosions and revelations, let’s take a moment to take stock.

Ideally we have learned the value of dispassionate perception. Compassionate, yet dispassionate: this is the transpersonal point of view. Even terrible cataclysms are understood to be just the cosmos doing its thing. From Nature’s perspective, all decay is equal. It’s Pluto saying, Nothing personal, but you’re no longer viable.

From the vantage point of planetary cycles, moreover, what’s happening is nothing if not predictable. Among humanity’s Capricorn institutions (monetary systems, governments, borders), those that contain dis-integrity have been disintegrating.

It’s happening in each of our lives, too. We could get all bent out of shape about the process, if we wanted to insert human drama into a neutral organic operation. But that just creates suffering, which we can’t blame on Pluto. The gods are not doing this to be unkind, not even the dark god of decay.

Public conversation

Granted, decay is not pretty. Nobody likes to look at road kill, and nobody likes to be part of a civilization in devolution mode. For many people the first step of Pluto work is the hardest: to commit to not looking away.

The distractions of pop culture are not helpful in this regard. In the bright, shiny, media-driven West, the public conversation is a mess. Politicians have all but completely lost the moral legitimacy to serve as guides through global crisis. Journalism is flailing as it tries to find its place among digital platforms.(4)

Says the English filmmaker Adam Curtis: “Events come and go like waves of a fever…We … live in a state of continual delirium, constantly waiting for the next news event to loom out of the fog – and then disappear again, unexplained.”

But amidst the rubble of the old forms, we’re seeing new forms arise. We’re hearing new voices rise above the fray. Curtis’ documentaries, for example, have that rare and precious quality of inspiring genuine understanding. They offer “a counterpoint to the thin, narrow and increasingly destructive stories told by those in power today.” They serve as a warning against allowing our minds and spirits to be deadened by the news media, with “stories …so simplified that [many people lack] the perceptual apparatus to see reality any longer.”

Curtis is one of the many courageous souls who have stepped forward in this time of mass trauma. His latest film, Bitter Lake,talks about “why the stories we are told today have stopped making sense.”

One of its themes is how leaders in the west began to buckle under the engines of global finance.

Big Money

Pluto is the planet of taboo.⁽⁵⁾ Over the past several years, it has outed cultural taboos left and right, whittling down to almost nothing the handful of traditionally unmentionable topics.

Consider American pop culture. By contrast with a few years ago it has become floodlit with raw, topical openness. We have sitcoms about gay hook-ups, we have legal debates about transgender bathrooms, we have Bill Cosby unmasked as a serial rapist. Is there anything that’s still in the closet?

I can think of one: capitalism. Free-market capitalism remains, snug and smug, hunkered down in the dark of mass unconsciousness. Sixty-odd years after Joe McCarthy and seven years after Wall Street wrecked the world economy, it is still verboten to question this economic model. Even on the level of sober academic debate, the mainstream media won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.

It is the last creaking bastion of Capricorn (economic systems) to be looked straight in the eye, and evaluated on its merits.

The writer Steve Fraser argues that, in the USA, the Left has tied itself into a pretzel trying to avoid the obvious link between social injustice and capitalism. Mainstream liberal thinkers have pumped their energy into every new idea that could conceivably rectify society’s ills — everything except indicting global capitalism.

Environmental despoiling arouses righteous eating; cultural decay inspires charter schools; rebellion against work becomes work as a form of rebellion⁽⁶⁾; old-form anti-clericalism morphs into the piety of the secular; the break with convention ends up as the politics of style; the cri de coeur against alienation surrenders to the triumph of the solitary…⁽⁷⁾

Despite having the greatest income inequality gap in the developed world, Americans have yet to quibble with the system that created it.

Will this be the epiphany of the USA’s Pluto Return?⁽⁸⁾

Pluto prayer

Many meaning-seekers have become adept, in recent years, at spotting the parallels in our own personal lives of these great global themes. We’ve noticed that certain parts of ourselves that we once thought utterly stable have completely broken apart.

When Pluto makes one of its biannual changes of direction, as it does this month, if we listen we can hear stone walls creaking and crumbling — in the news reports and within ourselves as well.

Pluto turns retrograde on 4/16 at 15½ Capricorn. If we’ve been getting the transit’s messages all along, what happens for us then – internally or externally — will feel like confirmation. It’s strong for several days before and after the day of the station, but Friday April 16^th, the day itself, is the perfect time to do a ritual.

If you feel so inspired, you might find a small disposable scrap of something, and ask it to symbolize a pattern in your life that has outworn its welcome.

Maybe you ask it to represent the image of success that you got from your parents. Or a definition of leadership or competence (Capricorn) that you inherited from a media role model (like Bill Cosby, for decades before his crimes went public). Or your society’s conception of what a “real grownup” looks like: the kind of work a person has to do, the kind of outfit they have to wear, to be taken seriously. Whatever your little scrap represents, it has shoulds attached. It once promised to glue your life together.

It doesn’t any more. It can’t.

Light your altar candle in a ceramic bowl, perhaps with sand or pebbles in it (broken-down [Pluto] rocks [Capricorn]).

Direct your attention to the sacrificial scrap.

Think about how you were helped, once upon a time, by the structures it symbolizes. The work uniforms, the laws and rules, the schedules and penalties that introduced the idea of responsibility into your life. These things gave you an incentive to draw boundaries. Thank them for doing the best they could, over the years, to ground you with a sense of definition.

Now give a nod of appreciation to the truth-tellers, the thinkers and artists and filmmakers like Adam Curtis, whose bold intelligence serves as a whetstone for the Pluto work we all must do.

Now light your scrap with the candle, throw it into the bowl, and watch it turn to ash, without looking away.

Notes

1 A transit that pairs Mercury with any of the outer planets is a call to invoke the gods: to use the voice to call down the divine.

2 Of course, its five percent share remains puny compared with the combined 58 percent of the USA and Russia.

3 I discuss the astrology of the global situation in this month’s column in DayKeeper Journal.

4 In many parts of the world, honest politicians risk being toppled by coups (e.g. in Venezuela by the CIA; in Maldives by the army, with a wink and a nod from India and the USA). Journalists have been hounded and assassinated with increasing ruthlessness (the Philippines and Russia are in the top six of countries with the most murdered journalists).

5 Discussed at length in my webinar, “Working with Pluto.”

6 Consider the young titans of Silicon Valley, who, while presenting themselves as a new counterculture, are just as single-minded in their pursuit of profit over all other social values as the generations of moguls before them.

7 From The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power, by Steve Fraser.

8 The US Pluto return has three exact hits in 2022. See “Right Use of Power,” The Mountain Astrologer April/May 2014.