Jul 2022
The God of Secrets

Kicking off the month is a square between Mars and Pluto (peaking 7/1-2), fire vs. earth. The warrior planet is maximally bellicose in Aries, where it’s been for more than a month.

Mundane astrologers will be watching the headlines for inflammatory discord. Those who track their personal transits will be watching their compulsions.

Mars in Aries can be rash but courageous. Under ordinary circumstances, its aggression is like a brush fire: flaring up fast and fading out just as fast. Ego attachments may be released as suddenly as they are aroused.

But these aren’t ordinary circumstances. There’s an added ingredient to this transit: Mars is being powered by Pluto this month, a planet that doesn’t release anything until it has been thoroughly chewed up and spit back out.

Release and remodel

Pluto seeks out something that needs re-modeling (e.g. a building, a relationship, an ego) and breaks it down, in order to release something hidden within it. As July opens, Pluto is using Mars, the personal will – yours or somebody else’s — to conduct this makeover.

If you’re feeling unaccountably obsessive, it’s because your desire nature is being fueled by something bigger than itself. (This webinar looks at what happens to personal planets when combined with transpersonal ones). Two weeks later, the Sun and Mercury oppose Pluto (peaking 7/16-19), serving as a bookend to the Mars square.

Ask yourself whether something gave you a sucker punch as the month began: an external event or an internal one. Mid-month, you’ll get a chance to plumb its meaning.

Shame

Pluto transits tend to strike at the underbelly of whatever they’re targeting. (To identify what’s being targeted for you, personally, check for natal planets in the late degrees of cardinal signs.) They get the survival chakra buzzing. Despite reassurances from our rational mind, we feel the episode as a life-and-death matter.

Transits like these call our attention to something that’s normally hidden. It may be a sore spot that we may not even realize is there; perhaps because nobody around us wants to look at it either. Pluto governs taboos, and the sense of emotional danger that surrounds them.

One signal of its presence is shame, an emotion that requires a shared social context. A modern variant is the mass shaming that happens on social media: reputation-killing, feared for its destructive power, devoid of consequences for the hordes of anonymous shamers. Collectives tend to express archetypes at a lower level of expression than individuals, who are (ideally) in control of how much awareness we bring to things.

Hard aspects of Pluto are especially valuable for the person seeking self-knowledge, because they can force us to see, and then integrate, abandoned aspects of the psyche. This material requires courage to look at. Repressions get locked away for a reason.

Use this month’s transits to bring them up from the basement into the light of day.

Chaos

The Neptune/ Jupiter conjunction, in and out of orb these past few months, has left us fogged in on many levels. Societies have been swirling around in chaos and paranoia, while also exhibiting unusual bouts of compassion. As individuals, many of us have been lost in self-delusion, while others have been inspired with artistic visions and spiritual yearning.

Neptune’s squares this month with Mercury (7/2-9) and Venus (7/13-14) offer us a chance to integrate what was unleashed in April and May. Use them to understand the mysteries of Neptune.

Listen to its messages not with your mind but your soul.