Feb 2020
Out with the Old
There is not a lot of planetary activity this month, as if the sky is giving us a breather. It knows we are busy, trying to integrate the lessons of last month’s stellium.
Flanked and fortified by three other planets — and an asteroid and a lunar node — January’s conjunction of Saturn and Pluto kicked off a cycle several decades long.
They are two degrees apart as February begins.
Venus squares
The next few major transits are noteworthy mostly because 
they highlight this unfolding drama. Venus, in Aries from Feb 7th to March 4th, will provoke, one by one, the major players huddling together in Capricorn.
She squares Jupiter on 2/23, Pluto on 2/28 and start to square Saturn (peaking 3/3). This series may show up in relationships, as the intensity of the stellium gets pumped into our emotional connections.
Buzzing web
Spiraling at whirlpool velocity, the state of the group mind is perfectly symbolized by the internet: that buzzing web of the collective unconscious, its myriad bits frantically poking in and out of consciousness.
For chaos magicians and many other contemporary occultists, the internet serves the same purpose that the “astral plane” does for traditional magicians, as a kind of psychic ether that can transmit their willed intentions. — Gary Lachman
Humanity at large, and the natural world that we have bent to our collective will, is fragmented and destabilized.
The group mind seems to be having a collective nervous breakdown.
Goodbye to all that
That doesn’t mean we, personally, have to break down. What helps here is to remember that chaos is a function of dying macro-cycles.
The world is having a hard time getting up to speed, but astrologically the writing is on the wall. The 
economic commonplaces of the past Saturn-Pluto cycle, starting in the early 1980s, are obsolete now.
Pluto’s job since 2008, when it entered Capricorn, has been to pulverize the credibility of cultural traditions. The assumptions that have long defined global power have fallen away.
The Capricorn configurations throughout 2020 are signaling that a lot of what we grew up expecting from our society is null and void. In much of the world right now, people no longer expect base-line standards of propriety from their leaders, many of whom no longer follow the rules of their own governments.
Global makeover
All things Capricornian are being made over, top to bottom. As globalization replaces old-school nationalism, cyber-espionage will further transform (Pluto) the role of government itself (Saturn) as the cycle unfolds. (This webinar summarizes these and other teachings we’ll need to need to absorb, to cope with Pluto’s upcoming tenure in Aquarius.)
Trying to hang onto the way things were – e.g. old-fashioned pre-digital-age elections – is an exercise in futility. But until the new realities sink in, the overriding feeling is that we’re in a period of post-normality.
We’ll get a glimpse of the new normal when Saturn and Jupiter conjoin in Aquarius, at the end of this year.
Getting real
Meanwhile, each one of us is trying to find our place amidst the maelstrom. The wisest of us are grounding 
themselves in the centers of their own charts — the coded map that expresses our soul’s desire to incarnate during this era — while steering clear of the avoidance and distraction of the hive mind.
This month our primary goal should be to face, head-on, the existential questions that the Saturn-Pluto conjunction has raised. Their pairing is a cold splash of sobriety. Saturn governs the aging of organic entities, Pluto governs the ultimate surrender of our physical form.
Both are planets of mortality. Whatever house they’re passing through now, in your chart, will show you where you are getting a vision of how to squeeze the most out of every living moment.
A tip o’ the cone hat to astrologer Frederick Woodruff for these words from the mystical philosopher Gurdjieff (a Capricorn):
Your problem is you think you have time.