We knew something was going to blow. For years now, astrologers saw that 2020 would be a year like no other.
We didn’t know that the transits would show up as a 21st-century plague. That was the blank that got filled in.
The offending microbe is a lot like Pluto, isn’t it? A teeny tiny little critter whose power is way out of proportion to its size.
Covid-19 is like the god of the Underworld himself, who, with his helmet of invisibility, can destroy great swaths of the world and make them over from scratch.
When things were still abstract
I’ve been thinking about how astrologers were viewing the 2020 transits before the virus was even a twinkle in the 
world’s eye. When the Capricorn stellium was just a cluster of raw symbolism.
It’s an interesting exercise, because back before we knew the specifics — when all we saw was pre-manifestation energy swirling around — that’s when we were getting the purest view.
When we connect with cosmic forces on that aboriginal level, we can sometimes make out what they’re really trying to tell us.
Top dog no more
The first thing American astrologers noticed was that those January transits were heading for the USA’s Pluto: a make-or-break test of the country’s superpower status.
The Pluto Return, peaking in 2022, is a time bomb with a long fuse. We figured the notorious stellium of January 2020 was the match that was going to light it.
Seeing all those planets crowded into America’s house of money, many of us expected an economic earthquake. (1) Despite the fact that it was an election year, it didn’t look like simple party politics. It looked more like what’s underneath party politics: plutocracy (Pluto in the 2nd house).
In the webinar I gave in 2018, I talked about how the passage of Saturn (karma) through this house was going to cut through the ideological noise, and push to the surface the deeper reality: that the USA is not about left-vs-right but top-vs.-bottom.
Eris square
What jumped out at astrologers in the Saturn-Pluto chart was an angry square between Pluto and Eris, the How-dare-you-ignore-me planet. (2) Now we are seeing these forces playing out in real time.
A surge in gun sales, for example, is an unsurprising expression of Eris in Aries (selfishness and aggression), the fire element at its most impulsive. Of particular note is the series of conjunctions Mars and Eris will make throughout 2020 (those dates are here).
From Capricorn (stringent public protocols, government officials), we are seeing plenty of unsavory examples of the earth element, such as the jostling by the already wealthy to capitalize on the chaos.
A manifestation is not the archetype it comes from
But these are stressed expressions of the symbols in question, not to be confused with their core potential.
We can learn from these crude examples, as we can from the specific forms of any archetype. They are great teaching tools because they express the symbolism in immediate, relatable ways.
But it is an astrological error to equate the examples of a transit with the transit itself. The particular way a planet is acted out, at any given time, is only that.
Gun sales are not why the Goddess invented Aries.
The transits are doing their job by raising the issue of selfishness, greed and other distorted impulses. It isn’t their job to make our plutocrats give up their power. It isn’t their job to make shoppers stop hoarding toilet paper. It’s our job. We humans have to figure these things out.
Have you noticed how much public discussion there is lately on the subject of selfishness?
Questions, not answers
The world is still in viral shock. The pandemic’s societal and global implications are nowhere near being fully
grasped, by anyone. The situation is a tornado of unknowables.
Astrology can be very useful right now, but not because it supplies answers.
If you subscribe to the belief that Earth is a soul school, to which we incarnate in order to develop spiritual maturity, then you probably believe that the whole point is to discover the answers for ourselves.
What’s marvelous about astrology is that it pinpoints, with elegant precision, what the questions are.
Pluto the python
Americans as a group are being asked at what level they identify with their country’s Cancer planets, which are being squeezed by Pluto like a python’s prey.
Will we react, low-level-Cancer-style, with xenophobia? We’ve seen plenty of people choose this option lately. For them, the white-picket-fence of 1950s America has morphed into a razor-wire-topped border wall.
Others have gotten in touch with a deeper level of Cancer, the sign of family. The phrase “flattening the curve,” already enshrined in the national imagination (joining the ranks of “We Can Do it” from the last world war) is essentially a vow of empathy.
Its logic is based not on individual benefit but on community survival.
Our collective addiction to our separation from each other has reached critical mass. – Stephen Forrest
The mass mind is buzzing with questions. Such as: What makes a society civilized (Capricorn)? What does it mean to be both an individual and a team player (Saturn in Aquarius)?
Can we recognize our medical workers and other front-line service providers for their heroism (high-level Aries)? Can we acknowledge gestures of professional integrity (high-level Saturn) — unremarkable in any other administration, perhaps, but exceptional in this one — like Mitt Romney’s and Anthony Fauci’s?
What will we learn, during this unexpected hiatus from business as usual? What will we infer about the sordid ways of late-stage capitalism? Can we use the economic breakdown to do something about income equality?
Will we be able to retain the recent improvement in the ozone, the fresh air in our shutdown cities, the surge of fish in Venice’s canals?
As individuals, we’re having our minds blown, and it’s presenting us with opportunities that are as radical as they are rare. We’re thinking about things we’ve always taken for granted.
Can we allow this crisis to help us examine our habits, our sense of entitlement and our complacencies, in order to live as if life really mattered (Pluto)?
Notes
(1) Apart from the obvious economic crisis, there are deep infrastructural changes looming in the background. A glimpse of our Uranus-in-Taurus future was included in the stimulus package.
(2) This was our heads-up that the weird collusion we’d been seeing all over the world between dictators and their impoverished fans was far from over. Less about populism than the rage of the powerless, the square is a long one. Its peaks this year are 2/26, 6/14 and 12/10. Its last exactitude is in October of 2021.
