Tag Archives: Pluto in Capricorn

Weekly Forecast November 24: Pluto Enters Capricorn, New Moon in Sagittarius

Hanging Heart, by Jeff Koons I feel as though we’re in some sort of weird time warp, in suspended animation, waiting for something to happen but not knowing what.

Pluto is in the final minutes of Sagittarius and re-enters Capricorn on Wednesday. As he slips out of the sign of the Archer — not to return for another 230 years or so — we’re shifting out of one reality and into a new one. Neith and I have written a lot about this and will continue to update you, but be prepared for some major belt-tightening and contraction.

At the same time, Uranus is stationed, preparing to return direct less than an hour before the New Moon in Sagittarius on Thursday. The energy of Uranus is electric and erratic, and it produces swift and sudden change. This will be all the more true, as all of the planets will be direct once the Magician wakes up. There is evidence that our ancient ancestors tracked astrological movements and looked specifically for periods when no planets were retrograde to undertake important activities. To put it another way, all systems will be go, and we’ll be making up for lost time.

Because Uranus also is the planet of unpredictability, there’s a good chance that we’ll see a sudden turnaround in some area of our lives, both individually and collectively. The nature of this reversal will depend on where Uranus is transiting your chart. Rising Aquarius and Pisces will be especially affected by this shift. I am Rising Aquarius and will keep you posted about what’s happening for me. If anyone else experiences something like this, leave a comment and let us know.

Neith already has written a lovely report for the New Moon. As she noted, Venus will be in favorable aspect to both Uranus and Saturn, which were in exact opposition earlier this month. For Venus to be in contact with Uranus just as he’s waking is powerful. If you’ve been stuck in issues of love or financial well-being, this will provide the shove you need to get you out of a rut and into a new groove. Just be forewarned that these things often don’t happen in the most convenient or pleasant way. Watch for developments on Friday and Saturday.

Mercury and Mars conjoin on Friday as well, although we could see the manifestations of this volatile combination at the New Moon the day before. In Sagittarius, Mercury doesn’t hold anything back and will blurt out the goddess-honest truth without stopping to think of the effects. That said, Mars knows exactly what effect he’s going for, so if someone has been wanting to give you a piece of their mind, have your deflector shields up. If you’re on the giving rather than the receiving end, do stop to consider whether the person you’re aiming at deserves the barbs. Even if they do, don’t say anything deliberately hurtful.

I have a feeling we’ll be in a much different place a week from today, so stay tuned, and keep those cards and letters coming.

Much courage and love to all…
Pat

Image: Hanging Heart, a sculpture by U.S. artist Jeff Koons, on display earlier this year at the Chateau de Versailles, outside Paris. When I first saw this photo, I thought it was a painting, as it is so surreal. It nicely expresses the surreal energy of this week and especially how I feel in matters of the heart. Photo by Stephane de Sakutin for Agence France Press.

New Moon in Sagittarius, November 27, 2008

All you Archers out there will be thrilled to learn that this is a quintessential New Moon in Sagittarius. Not only are the Sun and Moon conjoined at 5°49′ Sagittarius, but Mercury and Mars are within a couple of degrees as well. Yes, it’s time to celebrate Sagittarius!

It is fair to say we will all be feeling this stellium wherever it falls in our charts, urging us to think big and maybe take a chance or two. Sagittarius is interested in exploring different ideas and drawing concepts from many different cultures to build something new and interesting. With the drive of Mars in Sagittarius coupled to Mercury’s free-wheeling thinking in Sagittarius, this is a great time to travel to far away places, even if it’s only from your armchair. It is also time to put the intense introspection of Scorpio behind us for awhile.

Jupiter, Sagittarius’s ruler, is still in Capricorn, but he is conjunct Venus, and both are sextile Uranus, who stations direct three hours before the New Moon. This is a lot of creative, expansive energy looking for an outlet, and we might as well take advantage of it while we can. Indeed, from this day until the end of December, all the planets will be direct. So check and see what you have put off, because forward thinking is what will be rewarded.

Another big shift taking place the day before the New Moon is Pluto’s move into Capricorn, where he will remain until 2023. We have discussed numerous possibilities about what this move will bring and will continue to do so as Pluto settles into his new sign. In this chart, Pluto is exactly trine Vesta in Taurus, underlining the awareness of Capricorn being a feminine, earth sign and serving as a reminder of the inherent power abiding in nature. The season of Capricorn in the northern latitudes is one in which all the action in the growing cycle takes place beneath the surface, awaiting release to burgeon forth during Taurus’s season of late spring.

For now, the opposition between Uranus in Pisces and Saturn in Virgo is separating and will continue to do so until Saturn goes retrograde at the end of December. I am quite happy to catch a breather from this opposition before the second pass is exact on February 5, 2009. Right now, Uranus forms a lovely sextile with Venus and Jupiter, with Saturn trine that pair – a great pattern for actualizing and manifesting your favorite creative projects.

The Sabian symbol for 6 Sagittarius is, a game of cricket, with the keywords GROUP SOLIDARITY. Fairness and cooperation are needed to achieve collective goals. The stellium in Sagittarius on this New Moon encourages sportsmanship and fair play while keeping in mind it’s the process, not the result, that is important. We have spent far too much time and energy as a collective on “winning” during the Pluto in Sagittarius years, and now that Pluto is in Capricorn, we can start working together steadily to achieve our goals.

Let’s all enjoy this exuberant New Moon and brace ourselves for a wild ride over the next month. Remember to take time to express your appreciation for friends and family and practice kindness to all.

posted by Neith . . .

Of course, today is the day to write your New Moon abundance checks! Here’s how.

Ask Our Readers: Pluto in Capricorn

Neith and I have noticed an increasing number of searches for information about Pluto in Capricorn. In this week’s reader feedback column, we’d like to know what interests you about this event.

Are you worried, and about what? Are you wondering how it will affect you personally, or are you concerned about the economy or other societal issues? Or maybe you just want our take on it?

We also have a highly significant opposition of Saturn and Uranus, which has officially started and will last for nearly a year. Yet this aspect doesn’t seem to be generating nearly the interest of Pluto in Capricorn. Any feedback about why this is?

As always, tell us a little about your chart, if you know it. Sun, Rising sign, and Moon sign are all good, along with where Pluto is transiting your chart, if you know it.

Posted by Pat.

Saturday Archives: Pluto in Capricorn

As Pluto moves through the final degrees of Sagittarius, not to return to the sign of the Archer for more than 230 years, many of our readers have started searching for information on Pluto in Capricorn. Neith and I will have more to say about this timely topic in future posts. Meanwhile, here is an article I wrote for The Pisces Chronicles back in January.

I was going to edit out the information on the Washington State Ferry system, since it doesn’t affect most of you, but our situation here really does sum up the essence of Pluto in Cap.

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Well, it’s finally here, the big event that astrologers have been writing about for two years (some even longer).

I’ve held off writing about Pluto’s entry into Capricorn, because I felt that it was too early to start attributing certain events to an astrological phenomenon that hadn’t happened yet. It has been only in the past few weeks that I’ve started seeing signs that this momentous shift is occurring. And I’m not sure that we’ll see the real effects of this transit in 2008. First, we’ve got to wrap up Pluto in Sagittarius.

Pluto, named for the mythological god of the underworld, is associated with death, rebirth, and transformation. Capricorn is ruled by Saturn, the planet of limits, boundaries, and material structure. There’s a trend in modern astrology toward putting a more positive spin on challenging planets and aspects. I think this is mostly a good thing, but please don’t kid yourself that Pluto and Saturn are going to bring the pizza and beer so that we can watch back-to-back episodes of Star Trek while the Bushes and Waltons get zapped by gamma rays from deep space.

Of all the interpretations I’ve read of Pluto in Capricorn, the one word that struck me was “accountability.” I can’t remember who wrote that. If it was you, please let us know! Yes, there’s going to be accountability, and it’s going to shake up government and corporate structures worldwide. But who exactly are they going to be accountable to, and how is that going to happen?

As I wrote in a previous post, we’re having a crisis here on our little island of Vashon, 37 square miles with a population of 10,300. On January 11, Washington State Ferries gave us less than three day’s notice that it was taking two boats out of service for repairs. This was after unexpectedly retiring four aging boats last November.

Most of us are too shell-shocked right now to be mad. For many people, reduced ferry service has meant getting up an hour earlier, getting home an hour or two later, and going through the day in a haze of exhaustion. But already the inevitable questions are being asked. Why has WSF not properly maintained its boats? Why hasn’t it ordered new boats and increased capacity? Who is responsible?

Complaints to the agency are met with a phenomenal lack of accountability. “Don’t blame us, it’s not our fault.” To some extent, they may be right. It may turn out the governor herself is responsible, since budgeting decisions go straight to the top.
WSF is the largest ferry system in the nation, carrying more commuters to work daily than the Staten Island ferry. The ferries are considered part of our highway system — in other words, part of our transportation infrastructure. This is clearly within the realm of Saturn, and Pluto in Capricorn is literally exposing the cracks in the hull. Do I believe this is a microcosm of broader crises to come? Absolutely.

Back when the bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, it didn’t take long for people to start doing the math. We’re spending billions of dollars a day to bomb Iraq back into the Stone Age and ignoring our own pressing needs at home. A similar situation existed in the American colonies under England. We were being taxed without getting equivalent benefits in return, and we had no say in the matter. That’s when people tend to take up arms and rebel. It’s not a question of “if,” only of “when.”

Pluto in Capricorn is not, however, going to rid the world of hierarchies, as some have suggested. Hierarchies exist in nature. Otherwise, there would be no order. If you think that anarchy sounds romantic, talk to survivors of Hurricane Katrina or current residents of Baghdad. What many of us hope is that the current hierarchical structure will be replaced with one that is more just and equitable. It probably will be … but it’s not going to be installed by extraterrestrials with superhuman intelligence.

Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, though. Pluto enters the sign of the Sea Goat tomorrow at 6:37 p.m. on the West Coast. He’ll get barely 1 degree into Capricorn before turning retrograde on April 2 and heading back into Sagittarius in mid-June. We’ll have a little more than five months to process the message of Pluto in Sagittarius before he returns to Capricorn and remains there for the next 16 years.

What might those messages be? I wrote about this as part of my series about Pluto on the Galactic Core. Pluto in Sagittarius is about breaking down beliefs, especially religious dogma. Obviously, it hasn’t entirely happened yet, but I believe we are going to see the results this year of collapsed religious systems.

Pluto in Sagittarius has not been just about breaking down our religious beliefs, but also our scientific ones. The past 15 years have brought us tremendous breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe as advances in technology have allowed us to explore the furthest reaches of space. I’m working my way through Gevin Giorbran’s book, which, among other things, questions the validity of the second law of thermodynamics, one of the cornerstones of our understanding of the material universe.

Gevin’s book is fundamentally changing my view of time, and that means my understanding of astrology is going through a metamorphosis as well. Saturn rules time and the material world, and it might take the entire transit of Pluto in Capricorn before these new perspectives take hold in the mainstream and we apply them in our daily lives. Adjusting to these new concepts is another reason why I haven’t wanted to jump headfirst into Pluto in Capricorn. We’ve got some important prerequisites to complete before we move on.

Since 2008 is an election year, we’re also going to take a hard look at our political beliefs to assess whether they are serving us well. Back to our ferry example, what if it turns out that the Democratic governor we elected was responsible for leaving us stranded? What if legitimate studies showed that we’d be better off if the ferry system were privatized? We will all have to reconsider and entertain the “unthinkable.”

Happy Pluto ingress!

Posted by Pat

Saturday Archives: Pluto’s Retrograde

Pluto entered Capricorn in January but went retrograde on April 2 and has been back in Sagittarius for the past month. Here’s a post I wrote for The Pisces Chronicles, still relevant and worth revisiting.

The Tower, from the Haindl deck
When Pluto entered Capricorn in late January, we began seeing some effects in world affairs. …

Individually, the effects have been more subtle. Those who have planets or chart angles at 1 degree Capricorn or any of the other cardinal signs (Aries, Cancer, and Libra) have felt this transit the most, especially when Mars directly opposed Pluto on March 7. But all of us felt a rumble during the previous Full Moon, which squared Pluto and Mars. I had a couple of meltdowns myself, and Pluto and Mars aren’t in particularly difficult locations in my chart. Ultimately, those incidents created openings for better connections with others, but the going was turbulent there for awhile.

The dust is settling, and most of us have felt a shift. There are lots of potential reasons, astrologically, for this shift, but it feels to me like we assimilated some new energy. This is a transformational process, and anytime transformation happens, you can bet that Pluto is involved.

In the year leading up to his entry into Capricorn, Pluto conjoined the Galactic Core. During that time, many of us went through a deconstruction phase, and we also felt disoriented in space/time. Sagittarius is associated with religion, spiritual beliefs, and, ultimately, spiritual growth. The Archer aims for the truth, but an extreme manifestation of this sign is a mistaken believe that one has found Truth with a capital “T.” That’s where some of us seem to be stuck.

If nothing else, Pluto in Capricorn is sending us a clear message that beliefs have a serious impact on one’s external circumstances. In other words, there are practical implications. While changing your beliefs doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get what you want, clinging to outdated beliefs is a pretty surefire way to stay stuck in what isn’t working for you.

As Pluto turns retrograde and revisits Sagittarius from June 13 to November 26, we’ll get a chance to examine this whole process. I would especially encourage you to question where you may be operating on mistaken assumptions, as assumptions are the foundation of our belief system. You might call them the infrastructure of our personal thought matrix.

As an astrologer, I continually question the underlying assumptions of the craft, but I also try to root them out in my personal life – not an easy task, because our beliefs often are programmed into us at such an early age that we aren’t even aware that we have them. And we often continue to operate on these wrong assumptions even when presented with evidence that they’re invalid. Our mental filters are very powerful. That’s why it takes something like a heavy dose of Plutonian energy to blast them wide open.

One of the things I’ve worked on over the past several months is the belief that God, Source, Spirit, (fill in the blank) provides for us, whether through the Law of Attraction or some other mysterious mechanism, and that if we aren’t getting what we want, then we either aren’t “evolved” enough, don’t believe enough (because, after all, all you need to do is believe firmly enough), or somehow are failing to perform the rituals properly, haven’t purified enough, haven’t purged anger, hatred, jealousy, etcetera ad nauseam.

The wrong assumptions here are that failure is punishment, that a period of bad luck must be due to bad karma, consequences of past actions, choices we’ve made, and so forth. Although there does seem to be a widespread inability to accept the consequences of our actions and move on, there also seems to be an erroneous belief that we cause all of the bad things that happen to us, if not in this lifetime, then in previous incarnations.

What this erroneous belief does is to discourage failure and to make those who fail outcasts. However, failure is a means – perhaps the only means – to make new discoveries, change your life, and maybe even change the course of human history. Most scientists know this, as do entrepreneurs. Nine times out of ten, failure provides more insight and information than success, which can be so hit-or-miss that we often have no idea how it happened.

So how does one fail “successfully?” By being secure enough not to fear failure and knowing that failures, even successive ones, do not make you a failure. By understanding the role of failure in discovery and innovation. But most importantly, by being willing to give up your beliefs when they repeatedly fail to get the desired results all or at least most of the time. Too often, we take a success here and there as “proof” that our beliefs are valid, and we ignore the many incidences of their failure, which we prefer to see as anomalies.

I would love to hear from all of you about what beliefs, if any, you are questioning, and how this has impacted your life.

Love and blessings,
Pat

Image: The Tower, from the Haindl deck. This image represents upheaval, including the disruption created by the forced change of erroneous beliefs.

Fashion and Pluto in Capricorn

Trina Turk 'Spencer' tweed vest What’s hot in the fashion industry often reflects what’s happening in society at large, and this year we’re seeing a return to menswear in women’s clothing. I came across an article in USA Today magazine this past weekend about this trend and immediately thought of Pluto moving into Capricorn.

To quote Catherine Chow, co-founder of Tobi.com: “In these serious and uncertain times, we’re looking for some structure . . . to convey power and confidence.” She is referring the general economic climate, with stocks plunging, home foreclosures spiking, and the big rise in the cost of fuel, all signs of change and turmoil.

For the woman wearing masculine-inspired clothing designs, the idea is to project an image of being in control, the one in charge. What is more Capricorn than that? Capricorn is strongly associated with executives and others at the top end of the ladder of success and with a conservative pinstriped image. With many women in the work force looking to move up the ladder, choosing to project the right image is very important – Capricorn all the way.

We may see the atmosphere lighten up some this summer when Pluto moves back into Sagittarius, but this is not likely to last much past Pluto’s return to Capricorn late in the year. I for one would be delighted to see the last of low-cut jeans and high cut T-shirts, the oh-so-causal look that Pluto in Sagittarius blessed us with.

It will be very interesting to see what the fashionistas will have for us when the 2009 designer collections hit the runways later this year. As a group they seem to have a sense of the prevailing atmosphere. More cuffed trousers à la Katherine Hepburn, classy men’s vests with bow ties, and high-heeled oxfords anyone?