How y’all doing with Pluto in Aquarius?
It slid into this new territory a few days after the Equinox last month, when the solar year and the lunar cycle were both brand new.
On a collective level, Pluto’s new placement heralds a reckoning with the Tech Revolution and the nature of intelligence. Still in the first degree of Aquarius, the Great Dismantler is going to get us thinking about humanity as a species (discussed in this webinar).
Pluto and you
How the new Pluto era will play out for each of us depends on the intricacies of our individual charts. The transits of other planets, being more quickly-moving, are usually more palpable than those of Pluto, whose changes might not be recognizable until years later. But knowing its current position in your chart tells you what’s slated for top-to-bottom renovation.
As in a home remodel, sometimes walls need to be broken down first. Sometimes the exterminator has to be called in, to identify the source of an unsavory smell. A project as momentous as rebirth necessitates some kind of preliminary destruction.
It’s useful to know where to start excavating the rot.
The little guys meet up with the Big Guy
As April gets going, Mercury is the first planet to slam into Pluto. Freshly ingressed into Taurus, Mercury squares Pluto on 4/3. The tenacity of earth (practical matters) and the intransigence of air (mentation) are butting heads.
If something is preying on your mind, don’t ignore it. Dig into it like a miner with a pickaxe. A buried idea wants to be uncovered.
Fixed signs are notoriously immovable, especially at the middle degree — which is where Mercury is when it stations retrograde on the 21st of this month. But there is a reason why fixity fixates. When the mind is focused this intensely on a specific idea, it is able to burrow into the heart of it and make that idea its own.
Also last month, Saturn went into Pisces, the second most dramatic ingress after Pluto’s. Through April, Saturn will move through the first five degrees of this slippery sign, so take note of where in your chart the early mutables reside.
Those parts of you will be asked to take responsibility in some way: to act like a grown-up; to tighten your belt. To put up or shut up.
When Venus and Saturn square on April 14th, this challenge will be universally felt. Ordinarily, Venus is prone to light entertainments when in Gemini. But Saturn is not about fun and games.
Boundaries will be drawn. We may need to revisit some basic agreements in relationships.
Animals all
Every year when the Sun moves into Taurus — this year it’s on April 20th — we tend to feel the call of gravity, as the restless fire of Aries settles into the stalwart solidity of earth.
Although we humans tend to deny our animal natures, during these weeks of Taurus such denial is especially ill-advised. Now’s our chance to get back in touch with corporeality.
We are creatures of Terra. Not only on the Earth, but of it.
On the very day of its ingress, the Taurus Sun squares Pluto. This sets up a confrontation between these two aspects of our humanness: our abstract minds, which we humans imagine put us into a whole different league from the other animals, and our sensate physicality, which is our main tie to the Earth plane. Like the centaur, we are both beast and brain.
The Pluto transit may provoke a power struggle between these two sides of ourselves. Our goal should be to deny neither of them.
Title image: Centaur Looking at Fish, by Arnold Böcklin 1878
1920
The Bull, by Paulus Potter 1650
