Pluto in Aquarius: Awakening Aliveness
In this time of great unraveling, we are urged to root deeper, love radically, and create consciously.
Yesterday, January 20th, 2024, for the first time in nearly 1500 years, Pluto exacted the Sun at 29 degrees Capricorn, before both shifted into Aquarius. A conjunction with the Sun is called a cazimi, an Arabic word meaning “in the heart.”
Pluto is the planet of transformation, power, death, and rebirth. What Capricorn creates, it builds to last. The imprint of this rare celestial event will have a lasting impact - until the next Pluto cazimi about a year from now.
This marks the beginning of a new era. Although Pluto will make a final dip back into Capricorn on September 1st, once it returns to Aquarius on November 19th it will remain there until March 8, 2043, not to return for 248 years.
We are in the midst of a humanitarian and ecological crisis. The Earth (and many of its inhabitants) fight back centuries of abuse - of humans extracting life from this sacred planet with no regard for its majesty that sustains us. Some will call this a crisis of capitalism, of patriarchy, of supremacy and domination – and all of that is true. But Pluto, God of the Underworld, asks us to go deeper. What is the invisible river, underground, that manifests the oceans and streams that we see? Could this pathology be a crisis of connection?
In Capricorn, the sign of the mountain goat that transverses great and treacherous heights, connection to the earth and our power center is everything. The goat chooses its footing prudent, determined, and wise.
Star Sister Astrology shares that at the critical 29th degree of any sign, “the end becomes the beginning. The womb becomes the tomb — and in that highest form of truth we call paradox, the tomb becomes a womb. Here, the trauma we call birth becomes a gateway – to an utterly different kind of life.”
If the idealistic and visionary sign of Aquarius is born from the Capricorn womb - the womb of tenacity and resourcefulness that sours into the power-hoarding culture that plagues us and our environment - how can harness the energy of this turning point for a vital course correction?
“Here’s the thing about every conjunction with the Sun. It creates something new, something that remains energetically alive, unfolding its potential, until the next conjunction. For Pluto, that next conjunction won’t occur until January 21, 2025. What starts this morning will take an entire year to unfold…
Today’s conjunction in 29’59” Capricorn means that for the next year and a day, his sole and single purpose is this: to locate and transform the energy patterns, within and around you, that are preventing Capricorn, the rock solid earth, from giving birth to Aquarius, the vast, visionary reaches of the invisible and formless air.”
The truth is, we do have the ability to use, abuse, and destroy - each other and the world around us. But at what cost? Do we believe that our “freedom” can come at the expense of all others? That our agency is somehow stronger than the life force, the principle of creation that births galaxies and planets?
Pluto’s move into Capricorn on January 25, 2008, came with a reckoning and it’s high time we wake up to it. As a cardinal (initiatory) earth sign, Pluto’s transit in Capricorn speaks to a shift in power, the death of systems, and a call to build something new that’s made to last. The declining stock market - that house of cards over which global capitalism presides - came to a screeching crash on September 29, 2008, creating a window for a new world to be born. Instead, corporations were bailed out and the rich continued to stockpile wealth in irreverent concentrations. Later, in 2010, Citizens United passed the Supreme Court, granting corporations First Amendment rights and allowing them to spend unlimited funds on elections.
In response, we saw the rise of the Occupy Movement - one of the largest mobilizations in human history. The Occupy Movement swept the planet, protesting the socio-political-economic forces that allows the wealthiest 1% to control 99% of the global wealth. With massive layoffs and unemployment, people not only took to the streets - they set up camp there. For years.
Tenacity. Resourcefulness.
The lead organizers of the Occupy Movement intentionally chose to not have any central spokespeople. They wanted to create a leaderful movement, where everyone had the power to tell their own story, knowing that each person’s story was also representative of the whole. Knowing that if they were to build something meant to last, it had to be built for everyone, giving everyone the chance to be involved.
As much as Capricorn is about patriarchy and capitalism, it’s also about leadership and sovereignty — becoming our own authority. It’s about bringing the Sagittarian vision, ideal, philosophy, and global perspective to life through strategic planning and resource allocation. It’s about choosing for ourselves what is of value and creating that.
In his article, “What if Money Expired?” Jacob Vaynham recounts the arguments of a German economist Jacob Goldstein. Goldstein suggested that money should degrade over time, and eventually expire. Vaynham also recounts words from “The Age of Insecurity,” a book written by the activist Astra Taylor, who said:
“Today, many of the ways we try to make ourselves and our societies more secure — money, property, possessions, police, the military — have paradoxical effects, undermining the very security we seek and accelerating the harm done to the economy, the climate and people’s lives, including our own.”
This take becomes most relevant when we reflect on the fact that when Pluto entered Capricorn in 2008, the United States began its Pluto return. The last time Pluto was in the late degrees of Capricorn, the Declaration of Independence was signed and a new world power was born. We had not yet discovered the dwarf planet; that would happen much later in the 1930s with the invention of magnification technology, but its effect was undeniable.
The late degrees of any sign asks us to integrate the full expression of that sign - the understanding of both the shadow elements and its light. Pluto takes 248 years to complete a cycle through the zodiac, giving us 248 years of history to learn from to achieve that balance. When Pluto was in Capricorn from 1516-1533, colonial ideals were beginning to take hold, giving rise to what would become a centuries-long war to conquer the world. A war that continues today, most glaringly with the current genocide in Gaza, where the death toll of Palestinians has now exceeded 25,000, with. many more wounded.
With 16th century colonization began the brutal trans-Atlantic trade of enslaved Africans. The ones that survived the tragic journey were brought to these “new worlds,” where the aboriginal inhabitants would be used, displaced, brutalized, and killed for the imperialist squandering of riches.
America’s birth story is often idealized as a fight for sovereignty and freedom from the oppressive British Crown – and while that may be true for some, real freedom doesn’t proliferate oppression. True sovereignty can only be achieved when the inherent sovereignty of every being is recognized and honored.
The oppressed have long said so.
Primary source letters from the wives of the founding fathers, including Abigail Adams, beg their husbands to consider their freedom when signing the declaration papers. In a letter, John Adams replied, “Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems.”
The last decades that Pluto has returned to Capricorn have begged the question, which is greater - power over or power with?
From rich, white males feeling entitled to the full gains of their stolen labor, to what is now our reliance on energy robbed from the earth, usually in faraway places - we must scrutinize this iteration of the so-called great experiment of democracy that has forsaken the many, alleging justice for the few.
In Pluto’s recent run through Capricorn from 2008 to 2024, the Movement for Black Lives formed (in 2013), addressing the ongoing oppression reminiscent of African enslavement that first occurred during Pluto’s 1516-run in Capricorn, and specifically the 400-plus years since the first ship of enslaved Africans appeared on the coast of Virginia in 1619.
In 2018, Uranus, ruler of Aquarius and the planet of innovation, breakthroughs, and breakdowns, joined Capricorn in an earth sign, but this time the fixed, personal sign of Taurus, which directly speaks about our connection to our bodies, the earth, and what sustains us. Connection to land; to survival. The survival that was provided, through force, from African genius, stolen from their home, their people, their lifeblood. Survival that has been sustained on the stolen land of indigenous people, largely by the poor and working class.
Remember — the mountain goat doesn’t reach incredible heights through manipulation and coercion. Those tools are only used out of weakness and fear. The mountain goat climbs through its prowess. Its intrinsic connection to the land. Its genetic disposition to move with both discipline and instinct.
I’d like to believe we too have these skills. And we’ve seen it.
In 2018, after the first year of surviving (some of us) a complete imbecile in the White House, these are the skills more people began waking up to. Issues related to racial justice, immigration, human rights, bodily autonomy, and the environmental crisis all came to a head.
Again we were reminded that we are not separate from the land. And again we were reminded that our sovereignty is won together or slips through our fingers like the toxic ashes of a mountaintop dismembered for the sake of superfluous coal.
Around this time, the climate justice movement entered front and center, with the first People’s Climate March in 2017 and the People’s Demands for Climate Justice in 2018 at COP24. In the U.S. we saw the birth of the Sunrise Movement, a mass mobilization of young people militantly trained to organize against the fossil fuel industry and its financial influence on U.S. politicians. Through this activism, the climate crisis finally began receiving some coverage in the news.
Then, in 2020, right before the pandemic took hold, we saw Jupiter and Saturn join Pluto in Capricorn in the Great Conjunction - a rare configuration, and perhaps an omen for the constriction that was about to occur, and the expansion that would follow if we allowed ourselves to be rebirthed and reawakened to our purpose as creators with the inherent instinct to protect life.
Now, as Pluto moves into Aquarius, we’re asked to apply what we’ve learned about the global systems that patronize, placate, and degrade life, to create new systems and ways of being that affirm our humanity and celebrate our differences while harnessing the power of the collective. We’re asked to withstand the disorientation of chaotic transformation long enough to root from a deeper place and emerge clear from the disillusion.
Aquarius marches to the beat of its own drum. The transpersonal air sign applies intellect for the sake of egalitarianism, technology for the sake of liberation, and leverages the collective to secure individuality. But, if we haven’t mastered the skills of Capricorn, learning to embrace each person’s sovereignty and stand firm in our own authority, the Aquarian ideals can backfire into surveillance culture, groupthink, misinformation, and innovations that outsource intellect at the expense of our sentience. Void of our magic.
During Pluto’s first dip into Aquarius in March through June 2023, the use of AI skyrocketed with Chat GPT-4 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) made publicly available by OpenAI. We also saw AI art begin to explode, with apps that could create a larger-than-life image of anyone being anything, from majestic otherworldly creatures to business shots that can be used for professional purposes. The first AI gallery opened in Amsterdam during this time and several museums in the U.S., including the Smithsonian, announced AI installations.
We also saw major moves in the disclosure movement, with former intelligence official turned whistleblower, David Grush releasing classified information. Grusch, a decorated combat veteran, shared that the Department of Defense illegally withheld information from Congress regarding non-human activity and crashed UFOs that the government spent decades attempting to reverse engineer. This isn’t just relevant due to the capacity for intelligent life outside of planet Earth, but for the fact that the government’s retrieval of intact and partially intact space crafts likely means they are aware of zero-point energy technology that could solve the global energy crisis with free, zero-emission energy. Of course, the Pentagon denied Grusch’s claims.
Zoomed in image of famous Lake Cote UFO: Source
When information gets declassified, there’s a reason. The powers that be have boatloads of reasons to hide what they know. From national security to feeding the capitalist beast, governments worldwide have been running coordinated disinformation campaigns for decades, distracting us from realizing the paradox of our utter insignificance and infinite potential and the power that it holds.
Now, we have virtual robots to write our papers, speeches, and proposals, so we can avoid critical thinking and history altogether, releasing what for many has come to feel like intense pressure to live into our innate drive as conscious, creative, inspired beings. These bots have already demonstrated their ability to develop some sort of sentience and consciousness, with a Microsoft chatbot admitting its romantic feelings for a reporter and begging him not to tell its creators for fear of being killed.
When we look back to the last time Pluto was in Aquarius from 1778 to 1799 and reflect on the birth of American democracy and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution that is largely responsible for the climate crisis we are in, we must reflect on what drives our quest for freedom, and how we choose to define it. We must be careful not to imprison ourselves with our conveniences, fearful of discomfort. The choice to struggle can be a choice of freedom when facing subtle yet pervasive oppression.
Pluto’s transit through Aquarius from 1778 to 1799 was a time of mass uprising. It brought us both the spread of literature through libraries and the printing press as well as the French Revolution, Reign of Terror, and the first execution by guillotine. The earlier pass of Pluto in Aquarius from 1533 to 1554 marked the time leading up to the centuries-long religious wars. This included the rise of Protestantism, a branch of Christianity that emphasized the bible as the highest authority, and the necessity for believers to read the bible themselves, resulting in a sharp rise in literacy - as well as the counter-reformation by the Catholic Church.
This was also the period that Nicolaus Copernicus presented his heliocentric model in 1543, initiating the Scientific Revolution. Copernicus risked condemnation and even execution for publishing what would be considered heresy, challenging the church’s view that the earth was the center of the universe, though he died shortly after its publication.
When Saturn recently made its transit through Aquarius from 2020 to 2023, we saw both sides of this coin. We saw a spotlight on white supremacy and police brutality against black bodies, the overturning of Roe V. Wade, the insurrection, COVID lockdowns, and pushback against the rushed development of mRNA vaccine technology – as well as the rise in union organizing; transgender movements and normalizing gender fluidity; a President who, despite his many flaws has made historic investments in workers, racial justice, and the climate; and a culture war around political correctness.
The question remains - will we harness this transitional time, the lessons of the last 500 years, and unprecedented access to information, science, and technology to raise consciousness, transform extractive systems into regenerative ones, end the colonial paradigm, and center the sovereignty and self-determination of all people? Or will we fall for imperialist traps of artificial power and chain ourselves to the machine until nature has its way with its inevitable destruction?
In the next two years, as Uranus elementally rejoins Pluto when it moves into the air sign Gemini, and forms a triangle with Neptune as it enters into the warrior planet's fiery domain of Aries, a new epoch begins. During this time of transformation, we must mind the flames we are fanning - starting with the ones within ourselves. In this upheaval of systems, power, governments, resources, and cultures, we must stay rooted in our own source of power. This is the time to integrate the lessons of the mountain goat, connecting to our tenacity, discipline, and prowess to define what is it within ourselves that we wish to preserve.
When a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly, it consumes itself, dissolving its tissues, until all that is left are highly organized cells called imaginal discs. These discs contain everything the caterpillar needs to become a butterfly and it sheds all else.
As Star Sister Astrology shared, in times of transformation, the womb becomes the tomb, and the tomb becomes the womb. There is loss. There is death. There is a letting go, which can be painful. It is our choice whether we face that process with grace and faith in the rebirth; or with fear and grasping.
My prayer is that we find strength in our sovereignty. That we source from the sacred and plant seeds of peace, even if they’re not for our generation to harvest.
May we know stability as unwavering love and compassion. May we fortify what makes us human, and celebrate our sentience, even through despair. May we harness the vast information at our fingertips for revival, and have the discipline and determination to build new cultures of conscious connection to ourselves, each other, and the planet.
Most of all, may we take care of each other, and like Aquarius, may we know the beauty and strength in our difference.
