The USA & Pluto, the End of an Age
The USA & Pluto, the End of an Age
Today’s discussion is about the cycling of the planet Pluto through the sign of Capricorn. It goes around the solar system in about 245 years, and into Capricorn on a periodic basis. So, if we look at this , and we are going to talk about why this is so, but if we look at Pluto going through Capricorn which is the thing I’ve been talking about since the mid 2000’s and Pluto is back in Capricorn starting in 2008.
The last two times before this was 1516 to 1532, a very long time ago, and then more recently 1762 to 1778. That period would raise eyebrows, wow that’s when the USA was born, and sure enough the USA chart has Pluto in Capricorn (and we’re going to talk about that). And then, our time right now, Pluto went into Capricorn once again in 2008 and it lasts until 2024.
Capricorn
Capricorn is the sign of institutions, of how we take our human needs and how we meet those needs and rather than just always winging it and being spontaneous we create systems within a family certainly, as well as building on that family model in terms of communities and larger organizations, in companies and regions and nations in the world. We create all these instruments of our own that serve ultimately to meet our needs for one another and to one another in significant ways, and those systems are amazing and resilient and purposeful and infused with our intelligence and love and can last for a long time.
But this is the nature of the world, of the physical realm: nothing lasts forever. Things will eventually fall apart and need to be remade and redone and that’s what we’re encountering when Pluto goes through Capricorn. The institutions we have created are now failing us. Whether it’s the individuals in the institutions who have “dropped the ball” or aren’t of the caliber we need them to be, that they do not understand their mission and how to carry it out, or because the institution itself has been falling apart for some time. Or, equally because the system it’s serving, the needs that are evolving and changing, and how we meet our needs and deal with the changing world, have gone out of phase with the institutions or they have gone out of phase with it, so that institutional form no longer solves the problem.
So I made this shorthand analogy that in the 1500s we moved from, (looking at Europe only but it’s true in many places in the world, and it is increasingly becoming more true universally as we go to a one kind of world in our connectivity), we went from feudalism to monarchies, the breaking down of a feudal order and the rise of monarchies. Flashing forward to the 1760s and of course then it’s the fall of the monarchies and the rise of parliamentary democracies.
And, of course, that’s what’s falling now, it’s all coming undone, and so in each of these periods not only did the political and cultural, the economic and other systems become transformed because they had to be to meet the changing way we understand and meet our needs, but it also led or required or really made a new kind of human person. The people or humans in the 1500s would not be like you and I, and the people of the 1700s, though more like you and I, would still not be you and I; they were not driven by the same visions and goals and dreams and notions of what it means to be human. Yes, there are many things that carry forward and would be understandable, but truly a different kind of character and person was evident then. And we’re going through our own change now, a very big one. A new kind of person emerges in each era, a new kind of human type you could argue. And so, in each period, what happened is that the very solutions that were meeting human needs, that were formed in that period, those ways of being become the very limit or obstacle that causes the system to fail. And so, it must make way for the next order in realms spiritual and mental emotional and physical.
Pluto
So why Pluto? Pluto is the will or the avatar of the Will I like to say. It is the third aspect of the divine which is held as a triad by the three outer planets of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Now, of course, they’re just timekeepers and placeholders and avatars of this, this is universal energy. This triad of spirit is formed by, in this context, of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto forming us into ever freer minds, ever deeper unconditional love, and ever more truly centered wills. And, that’s the third aspect, Pluto the will. And, it is by the will or by Pluto that each entity, and here we are talking about humans, but each entity is formed into its own sacred space and for us humans that is something we have become now more self-aware and ever more conscious about, about our spaces.
Pluto as the avatar of the will rules the processes of transformation, of spirit moving from one form or manifestation to another, which are those most wonderful and magical and mysterious processes of progressions that we see in so many realms, in all the realms. But most intimately for us we experience this process as the mystery and joy and the awe-filled challenge of birth, death and rebirth. It is through combination that really and truly creation exists and unfolds: From the one emerges the many, developing from what are the infinitesimal’s I like to say, the monads of spirit, the spark of the divine at the core of everything. These combine to form as we call them and know them as atoms, which combined to form molecules, and into various substances, and into organisms, eventually leading up to the planets and stars and galaxies. All of creation exists because of what is fundamentally known scientifically as chemistry, but it’s known in the ancient wisdom as alchemy.
Pluto & USA Chart
Pluto in the USA chart and its opposition to Mercury, this is the key as we are looking at the USA now, and we are a country born with Pluto and its most important relationship is to Mercury. What is happening this year in 2020, and it was building in 2019 but this year 2020 and into 2021, we are having the planet Pluto go over Mercury in the US chart and then over Pluto. And I will talk about when this has happened before in various ways, but this is the big one because it’s our Pluto return, so it really stands apart from the other times.
Pluto is in the second house of the USA chart and Mercury is in the 8th house. The 2nd House of a chart is the inherent value of that being which indicates for us as a country that the USA’s value or strength is rooted in the ability we have, which all beings, but we especially as a nation have, the essential nature of our value or strength is our ability to combine and transform values, to remake and renew and restore and rebuild. Pluto is the USA’s rising planet, it leads us through life, which truly makes the USA an Alchemical Nation.
What is the value, the true value of the USA, (and I would argue really of any human group)? It is the value of its people, it is their physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual development. It is their resulting capability, each of us, to be alchemists. It is to live and love, to live and work in combination with one another. And it is by this, this forge of union, this alchemical space of combination, that we elicit our own growth, individually and for one another.
This is how spirit grows; it is how we make possible our growth, and it is how we are ceaselessly changing one another and our world.
Mercury & Pluto
Mercury is in the opposite house in the USA chart. Pluto is in Capricorn, Mercury is in Cancer, and we are a Cancer nation. The USA, with the Mercury in the 8th house, is a country that is driven to probe beneath surface appearances. As Pluto rules the sign of Scorpio, and Mercury is in the 8th house which is like the eighth sign of Scorpio, this is the house that deals with going deeper than any place else to discover and to connect and thrive through transformational networks, such as manifested in our transportation, communications and research efforts. The eighth house is the realm of unions; it is the very space of alchemy. So, both the Pluto in the 2nd House of the USA chart, and with mercury the ruler up thought and education and commerce in the 8th house of joint endeavors, the USA will always reveal its strength, its spiritual strength, in the magic and mystery of alchemy, the power of combinations.
We saw this in the beginning as we came together as a people, who had separated ourselves from other times and places and cultures, and we tried to make a New World here. We choose to work together, volunteering to help one another, raising barns together, and in so many other ways, helping one another and reaching out to one another to form these combinations which elicited our great growth.
Breaking free from former boundaries and prejudices and limitations, we changed ourselves and the world. For the USA our true value, our real strength and our most essential truth is most perfectly reflected by our national motto. Those founders knew what they were doing, they were wise men and they were wise women, who understood what they were about. What they inscribed on the seal of the United States was our motto, “E Pluribus Unum”, “Out of many One”.
Mercury opposite Pluto
This opposition of Mercury to Pluto in the USA chart, (the very aspect that is being activated right now by Pluto going over Mercury and then over Pluto), can in its most positive manifestations lead to a mind or consciousness that is more able to probe beyond the limits heretofore accepted. It is by this that the light of awareness is drawn to go ever deeper in an attempt to discern the noumena behind the apparent phenomena of the world.
It is one of the instruments that steers all who have this to constantly strive to follow the path of truth. However, Pluto ruling “the Will” requires a person to have learned to turn that will back upon themselves first and foremost, to use their will for self-mastery. But, when Pluto is developed or exercised without a truly centered will it can often lead to a very dark place, and create an energy-form that becomes driven by fear, by shadows and destructiveness, and that mind or those minds grabbed by this form become obsessive and controlling in their thought. This misuse of the Will creates divisions and self-blinding, and the loss of judgment in reason which can ultimately result in a descent into madness.
Either you’re in control or you’re out of control, and this is the key for everything, but especially when it comes to controlling our minds. And that’s part of the challenge and task we’re all undergoing right now, here faced with such great pressures in our lives personally, and regionally and globally. We must keep our minds centered and calm even in the face of the greatest of fears. Because if we don’t do that, we will not be able to find a way through this challenge.
Pluto in History of the USA
The historical alignments of Pluto with Mercury and Pluto to itself in the chart of the USA are interesting. The last two times before now was 1933 to 1937, and I wrote about this in my forecast for 2019 because it was building in and you could read that here.
From 1933 to 1937 Pluto was conjunct Mercury and was opposite to Pluto. and that was when we went through a great crisis in America and changed fundamentally the way we organize our work and Commerce, our understanding of Value, and how we treat one another in terms of value and as producers and creators of values. That was the new deal, that was FDR, and it set in motion a kind of economy and culture from the late 1930s and early 1940s that continued all the way up to the end of the 1970s.
But of course, it began to become undone and that “solution” did not work so well, given certain choices that were made in the 1960s and 1970s, and things were falling apart. So, there was a calling to shift or change that way of structuring things, and Pluto wasn’t going to “say” which way it’s going to go, but it was time. That is when Pluto lined up squaring the USA Pluto and squaring the USA Mercury, which is more of a clash or conflict, and a breaking between one side and another. That was the “Reagan revolution”, where again there was a reset of the economic way of life and it affected culture and everything else.
That carried us forward to this moment now, and so we’re in the next iteration. Now Pluto is opposite Mercury and it’s going to come to conjunct itself. This is a bigger moment more like the 1930s but perhaps even bigger because this is a Pluto return, so it is fundamental in terms of a reset.
The Choice
During each of these periods though, as well as in our own, we have faced the challenge and a choice. And, the challenge is always:
“Will we be fearful; will we divide from one another and lose our greatest value and strength which is our love for one another? Or will we be inspired by the actions of our heroes and true leaders who call upon us once again, and always, to help one another to pull together, to sacrifice for one another, to love one another?”
This is the only choice before you now; will you help or will you be the problem? Major crises create a break. I always think of crises and consider the Chinese ideogram for “crisis” is made up of two ideograms, Danger and Opportunity. I’ve always held to the notion that what that means is that if we face a crisis well, then we will rise above that dilemma and find a new way. But if we get frozen in fear, then we fail to rise, and we fall backwards.
Basically, it is our challenge to grow and move to the next level. So, major crises create a break between one form of life and another, whether in an individual or group or a nation, or in our case really the whole world. And it challenges us to break from the old way into another form of life.
There is nothing that focuses anyone’s mind, let alone a people or nation or even now today the entire planet, than the one inescapable fact we “immortals in mortal frames” have to face in this or most any extreme crisis, and that of course is the fear of death.
Until the vast majority of people know that their children and their companions and loved ones and colleagues, that their friends and even strangers are safe, we are going to remain far away from any sense of normal in our world.
The world that was will not be the one we return to; there is no returning. The problem we are now encountering was created by the world we had made. People often ask me what planet or alignment caused this crisis, what indicates COVID-19. And, I say nothing in the planets made this; we made this.
Life on Earth
We have made choices good and bad for generations, setting in place a certain engine of growth and development that was wondrous and wonderful in terms of what it provided. But it also created great destruction and pollution and disruption to the natural world, which is now also confronting us.
So, I will always gently remind any questioner that the planets did not cause or create this. The planets can only provide insight with regards to the meaning, and the timing, of any circumstance. But in our human-formed world, which this is, the content of what we face now, and always will be, is ours. We made this world, again with all its wonders and its horrors too.
The good news there is that then we are the ones who can change it; we made it; we can change it. We have more than enough evidence before us now in our biosphere, in all the realms of life on this planet, that the very ways in which we had been meeting our human needs, whether in terms of power or food or shelter and transportation, and also many other ways, that it is those very systems that are now threatening the very complex web in the hierarchy of life on this planet.
And so, we must understand (or remember, because we knew this before) that spiritually and scientifically all higher life forms depend upon the entire range of life forms below it. And life is leaving the planet now at an increasingly rapid rate. That not only makes our world less bright and beautiful, but it is also a direct threat to our own very lives too.
We are going to have to pull together to face and overcome this present crisis, and we will. But those very responses, our amazing creativity, our wondrous inventiveness, our ingenuity harnessed to and always guided by our compassion, and love for one another, will change us and we will enter into a new world in the months and years to come.
The New World
People want to know, when is the new world coming? We are making it now; it’s changing before your eyes and there is no going back. But our most important values and qualities will be reaffirmed secured and renewed by what we do now.
We are going to shine in this moment because we love one another, and we see that love in small and larger acts of sacrifice and saving every day now. We are healing ourselves and our planet and it is from this that we will be the seed humans for a better world for our children and their children too.
Well there’s so much to talk about here; I’m almost about to break into tears myself, considering what we’re going through. But we’re all going through it; and, I know we’re all going to be crying a lot and laughing and sharing and helping one another get through this. And, that is what we’re here for, we are here for one another. And no one is alone.
So, all of us need to reach out, connect to one another, reach out but don’t touch. It’s a strange thing we; humans always hold each other. We ache to hold each other, we want to kiss and hold and stroke one another, and we cannot now.
And, that is our love now, in that very inaction in that form of our love now. But we can do so much for one another and we are, and we will continue to do so.
And we long for that day, we will get to that day, when we will not have to pull apart physically, but we can join together and laugh and hold one another again.
