September announces itself with a double blast. On the first day of the month, Pluto goes back into Capricorn — its last hurrah in that sign for 250 years — just as Uranus is stationing retrograde in the sky.
Pluto is the Drama Queen of the solar system; Uranus is the Gotcha planet. Both are closely watched by mundane astrologers because they often use worldly disasters to get their points across (case in point: the 7/13 Trump shooting under the conjunction of Mars and Uranus).
In our personal lives, too, both of these planets are notorious for disruption. But on a deeper level, they are not concerned with our personality. They use events and our personal vicissitudes only as channels, the way electricity uses wires.
The essential purpose of Uranus and Pluto is to serve up mega-doses of consciousness growth. They try to zap us into self-awareness.
Lightning and demolition
Uranus, the god of lightning, sends us a jolt of the unexpected to catch us off guard. It knows, better than we do, where we’re falling asleep (check your natal chart for where 27 Taurus resides). It will find a way to wake us up.
If you’re afraid of your routine being interrupted, be advised: your resistance will work against you. Uranus doesn’t issue its wake-up calls for the comfort of your personality. Its challenges are aimed at liberating you from unhelpful habits.
Pluto (death and decay) has been in Capricorn for 15 years, presiding over the breakdowns of governments worldwide. It has spent the past several months in Aquarius (as in: science and technology). Now Pluto has decided it has a bit of business to finish up in Capricorn, so it is headed back there until November, wrecking ball at the ready,
This final phase will serve as a coda to the past decade and a half, during which the bones of global societies have been stripped bare. In the big picture, it’s all been for the purpose of purification.
If ugliness and power plays have been involved, that’s to be expected, like dust rising from a demolition site. Sometimes construction workers even find bodies in the rubble.
Mind over matter
The Equinox this year, the first day of Autumn in the northern hemisphere, is on the 22nd. On the 26th, Mercury joins the Sun in Libra. This annual shift into Libra moves the Sun into an air sign: the realm of reason.
August set us up for this shift. It was buzzing with air, from the Mars-Jupiter conjunction (Mars is still in Gemini as the month begins; Jupiter remains there until June 2025).
Air is the element that accepts the reality of concepts.If you have a chart full of planets in air signs, thoughts are more real to you than material objects. You may not hold this as a conscious belief, though, because it doesn’t sit well with the consensual worldview of our era. We have been taught that physical reality alone is truly “real.” But if you have an air-preponderant chart, ideas are the more essential.
Air represents this primordial realm, where ideas exist before they become manifest. This is what was meant in the scriptures by “In the beginning there was the Word.”
Equal is as equal does
Of the three air signs, Libra is cardinal: the kind of air that initiates. Unlike other cardinal signs — we’re looking at you, Aries — Libra promotes a sober, relatively detached form of leadership. It role models through
rationality. The emphasis is now on those social constructs that purport to uphold justice, equilibrium and parity: the court system, laws, the DEI debate.
Libra doesn’t promise the achievement of these values, of course. That’s up to us. It just puts these issues in the spotlight.
What’s good for the goose
Libra is, famously, the sign of all things marital. While it does govern the institution of marriage, more broadly it governs marriage in a metaphorical sense: the contracts we form with peers. It’s about teamwork, whether personal, professional or otherwise.
Libra provokes us to think about whether each partner in a relationship is getting their full fifteen minutes of fame. A lot of attention will be paid this month to balancing responsibilities, either in a pure 50/50 way, or in the form of a quid pro quo.
Justice will have plenty of champions this season. It’ll get promoted by opposing teams, political factions, nations, races, and every other group that societies have concocted and sectioned off from other groups.
But it’s not about waiting around for society as a whole to achieve this ideal. Human collectives are slower to awaken than individuals. The concept of fairness is engendered and nurtured in the individual human mind. Otherwise, the outer world would never be able to reflect it.
