Astro­log­i­cal Mus­ings — Mid-Year Review: Plu­to, Nep­tune, and Uranus (June 18, 2023)

(If you wish to lis­ten to the show instead, here is the link on BlogTalk or Apple Pod­casts)

As we approach the mid­dle of our civ­il cal­en­dar year in July, (but for us who fol­low “the stars” we mark this moment as hav­ing reached only one quar­ter of our Astro­log­i­cal year), I thought it would be help­ful to refresh our under­stand­ing of the var­i­ous plan­e­tary influ­ences and their mes­sages for us this year. As I have not­ed, the orbits of the plan­ets around our star, what I like to call “the dance of the plan­ets”, with their hier­ar­chi­cal and unfold­ing pat­terns, and their inter­sec­tions with one anoth­er, what we Astrologers call “aspects”, pro­vide us with a very rich source for the mean­ings and con­texts of what shapes our lives, and they can shine a light of some greater of less­er illu­mi­na­tion upon the unfold­ment or tim­ing of the sig­nif­i­cant phas­es in our human jour­ney here upon the Earth.

I will always stress that the plan­e­tary place­ments and motions do not “make” any par­tic­u­lar event or cir­cum­stance “hap­pen”. Sim­i­lar align­ments and pat­terns were tak­ing place thou­sands, tens of thou­sands and cer­tain­ly mil­lions of years ago. It is not pos­si­ble for us to under­stand what that might have meant to the var­i­ous life-forms liv­ing on the Earth long, long ago. All we can do is bring to bear our human con­scious­ness, our type of aware­ness and under­stand­ing of our­selves and the worlds around us; and, as we observe this dance of the plan­ets, as we have for many, many thou­sands of years mar­veled at the beau­ty of the stars above, we are able to see if what occurs “above” forms a cor­re­spon­dence with what hap­pens “below”. By this aware­ness of our rela­tion­ship with our fel­low celes­tial com­pan­ions, we may hope­ful­ly gain a greater under­stand­ing and per­haps even some wis­dom that comes from this inspi­ra­tion by these greater beings with whom we trav­el around our star, and to rec­og­nize and find sig­nif­i­cance, mean­ing and guid­ance for our human lives, as we cre­ate our sto­ry and dance with one anoth­er here on Earth.

So, as we have done before, let us begin with the out­er­most and most sig­nif­i­cant influ­encers (and I would argue these influ­encers as being much more impor­tant than those fea­tured on YouTube, Insta­gram or Tik­Tok!), let us con­sid­er these great com­pan­ions in our human jour­ney through the stars, and by that I mean let us review the mes­sages and mean­ings being impart­ed to us by the plan­ets Plu­to, Nep­tune, and Uranus.

Though we can and do look at each of these three as hav­ing their own spe­cif­ic role or place in the hier­ar­chy of Astro­log­i­cal influ­ences, I find it quite impos­si­ble, as you know, I find it impos­si­ble to tru­ly under­stand any one of them with­out also con­sid­er­ing the oth­er two as well. For they form what we might call a “Trip­tych of mean­ing”, as at the deep­est lev­el for me they are the Avatars of the Tri­ad of Spir­it, so that Plu­to, Nep­tune, and Uranus are the Will, Love, and Mind of the One. Their jour­ney through the Signs, and their series of aspects that they form with one anoth­er, cre­ate this most fun­da­men­tal Song of Spir­it for our solar sys­tem, and so equal­ly for us humans here upon the Earth.

Plu­to
For our pur­pos­es today, let us begin with Plu­to and its cycle of mean­ing for us now. Dur­ing 2023 Plu­to is begin­ning to move from Capri­corn into Aquar­ius, herald­ing a new peri­od of Pluto’s influ­ence for our world. Dur­ing Pluto’s time in Capri­corn since 2008 (and that con­tin­ues through parts of this year too), we have wit­nessed the break­ing down of the insti­tu­tion­al order that was found­ed in the lat­ter part of the 1700’s and first half of the 1800’s (that is, when Plu­to moved through Aquar­ius from 1778 to 1798, then Pisces from 1798 to 1853, and then final­ly into Aries from 1823 to 1853).

That means what we are expe­ri­enc­ing from 2023 to 2044, is that it should car­ry or have some of the same mean­ing­ful­ness, hold some of the same mes­sages and offer some of the same oppor­tu­ni­ties and chal­lenges as our ances­tors faced from 1778 to 1798, which is when Plu­to then as now focused its alchem­i­cal influ­ence through the lens of the mean­ings held by the Sign of Aquar­ius. What might that be?

The heart of Aquar­ius con­cerns the very nature of our hopes and dreams, which are forged and formed by the quin­tes­sen­tial qual­i­ty of our very nature in being human. That we are made human by the nature, qual­i­ty and type of our fam­i­lies, our fel­low­ships, and our com­mu­ni­ties, by the type of social con­structs we form to meet our needs for our­selves and for one anoth­er, and that we are the very means for our indi­vid­ual and col­lec­tive self-ful­fill­ment. What is at the heart of Aquar­ius is the future of who and what we will be, what kind of future are we mak­ing, what will our children’s, children’s lives be like, what kind of world will they have because of what we did and how we did it.

Since 2008, the insti­tu­tion­al struc­tures of the world have been warped and bent by their own inter­nal con­tra­dic­tions as well as by the exter­nal pres­sures brought about through his­tor­i­cal changes. Many insti­tu­tions met this moment and were found to be defi­cient or failed, some were test­ed and held to their intent and pur­pose, but they were changed (and are still chang­ing). But around the world humans have won­dered why, why now does it seem like the world, my world, is “falling apart”?

The answer quite sim­ply put is this, we are expe­ri­enc­ing this because it “is time”, as it also was in the 1700’s and the 1500’s, (and times before and times to come). That is because no struc­ture or sys­tem can remain for all time when the whole pur­pose behind cre­ation, embed­ded in the very nature of Spir­it, that all of life is dri­ven by the fun­da­men­tal imper­a­tive which is “to be and to become”, to move from one form of real­iza­tion and then into another.

The insti­tu­tions forged in the late 1700’s and 1800’s, these forms of meet­ing our needs were made to meet the needs of human­i­ty at that time. But we have changed, our dreams have changed, and the sys­tems we have to meet our needs must change too.

What Plu­to in Aquar­ius will show us is that it is not just the form that was wrong. It was not mere­ly a prob­lem with the sys­tems or struc­tures, because they did in fact “solve” the chal­lenges at their found­ing. But this is also true, those very solu­tions equal­ly cre­at­ed the very prob­lems and crises we now face. The real ques­tion we need to face now is what is the dream of human­i­ty, what will be at the heart of our dream for “a good life”?

What will form those dreams of that future “good life” is most cer­tain­ly being shaped by our new­ly “redis­cov­ered” under­stand­ing that all of life, that all of cre­ation here on Earth is inter­de­pen­dent and pre­cious, that the great­est rich­ness of this plan­et is life itself, and we should be “all for one and one for all”, yes humans, but for all of life as well.

What became the mantra for our so-called mod­ern world was the pur­pose of life was hav­ing “more of more”, lead­ing to end­less con­sump­tion as an eco­nom­ic way of being, and that has led to the wide­spread destruc­tion of the hier­ar­chies of life to meet our wants. This path of wan­ton destruc­tion has final­ly been met with the incon­tro­vert­ible Truth, which is that we can now see that there is a finite nature of what the Earth and all her life forms can sus­tain­ably con­tin­ue to sup­port so that we all may thrive. We need less quan­ti­ties in our life and more mean­ing­ful qual­i­ties of liv­ing with all of life.

Nep­tune
What Plu­to will bring every time to every realm is trans­for­ma­tion, as it holds the dri­ver of Cre­ation which is Alche­my, which we know and expe­ri­ence as the great cycling of Birth-Death-Rebirth. But Nep­tune is also part of the sto­ry, and it has been offer­ing anoth­er song in the cho­rus of spir­it to guide our steps in this time of change too. Since 2011 and con­tin­u­ing until 2026, we have been inspired and con­fused, we have expe­ri­enced illu­mi­na­tions as the veils between worlds thins, and equal­ly found our­selves stum­bling into shad­ows and fears, and all of this has been her­ald­ed by the pas­sage of Nep­tune through the Sign of Pisces. The bound­aries between the realms of Cre­ation, from the dens­est of phys­i­cal planes on up to the most ethe­re­al realms of con­scious­ness and spir­i­tu­al inspi­ra­tions have become more ten­u­ous, and great visions and trou­bling delu­sions have been thrown into our under­stand­ing of our world. We have watched and won­dered as our par­a­digms of belief have been warped and bro­ken, as our bound­aries between truth and fan­ta­sy, between what is fact and fic­tion have dis­solved and we have become unteth­ered from our for­mer cer­tain­ties in faith or sci­ence. We find our­selves in a time in which it seems that any­thing may be true, and yet noth­ing is what it seems. As Yeats famous­ly observed as world events seems to unrav­el and plunge us into ever greater clouds of despair and fears, we humans seem to divide between, “The best lack all con­vic­tion, while the worst / Are full of pas­sion­ate intensity”.

We can look to oth­er times when Nep­tune was in the sign of Pisces to gain some insight as to how we might under­stand the oppor­tu­ni­ties and dan­gers for us now. Two of Nep­tune pre­vi­ous pas­sages might pro­vide us with some insight. The time most like our own was from 1521 to 1535, as it was also a time with Plu­to in Capri­corn. I have described that peri­od as being much like ours, as an end of an age, where the Insti­tu­tion­al order was break­ing down and the Ide­o­log­i­cal realms were dis­solv­ing as well, where both the realms Sec­u­lar and Sec­tar­i­an were com­ing undone, where Civ­il Soci­ety and the Ideas that sup­port­ed it were rent asun­der, so that that the Civ­il and Reli­gious orders clashed over the realms of Church and State, and a strug­gle between col­lec­tive beliefs and indi­vid­ual con­science prevailed.

More recent­ly, Nep­tune was in Pisces from 1848 to 1862, and around the world in Europe and in Asia, and cer­tain­ly here in the USA, the under­stand­ing of what it means to be human, of how we should guide our rela­tion­ships with our fel­low humans, what­ev­er their ori­gins, what­ev­er their beliefs, to see one anoth­er as equal or unequal, led in the USA to the exis­ten­tial strug­gle over slav­ery in the Civ­il War. The clear­ly defined schism between one cul­ture and life­way and anoth­er was brought to a cli­max, and we thought the issue had been met and mas­tered, or at least that is what we told our­selves. Yes, Nep­tune is the Avatar that holds our beliefs, which we share in our sto­ries about one anoth­er. But the sto­ry of our strug­gle for jus­tice, equal­i­ty and equi­ty was not near­ly done, not at all.

In our cur­rent peri­od we have watched as the com­mon­ly held truths of soci­ety have again been erod­ed, ques­tioned and in some cas­es over­whelmed by a cacoph­o­ny of half-truths, con­spir­a­to­r­i­al imag­in­ings and delib­er­ate decep­tions that have spread through­out the minds of so very many by the pro­lif­er­a­tion of data streams with no appar­ent anchor­ing to some cen­tral beliefs root­ed in core val­ues and spir­i­tu­al truths. The very same ideals and half-truths have erupt­ed once more, for we real­ly did not over­come fears, and we find our­selves divid­ed once again.

Uranus
What Plu­to holds is the spir­i­tu­al truth of the unfold­ment of Cre­ation as the Alchem­i­cal Trans­for­ma­tion of Union and Rebirth; what Nep­tune holds is the spir­i­tu­al truth of the Com­mu­ni­ty of belief, of our sto­ry about our­selves and our world, (where we should ulti­mate­ly know that there is but One Spir­it), and we are here for one pur­pose only, which is to “love one anoth­er”. But the third Avatar of the Tri­ad of Spir­it, Uranus, holds for us the equal­ly insis­tent spir­i­tu­al dri­ve which is for Indi­vid­u­al­i­ty and Free­dom. The way I like to under­stand these three Avatars of Spir­it is that we are all upon the path of awak­en­ing in which we are learn­ing to live with­in our Cen­tered Wills, formed by our Uncon­di­tion­al Love and guid­ed by our ever-Freer Minds.

From 2018 to 2026, Uranus for us now is mov­ing through the Sign of Tau­rus, which we under­stand as the ves­sel of Val­ue, the hold­er of why, what, and how we form our world of val­ues. We can again have some per­spec­tive or under­stand­ing of what our peri­od asks of us by look­ing at the pre­vi­ous times of Uranus in Tau­rus, 1768 to 1775, 1851 to 1859 and 1935 to 1942.

The pas­sage in the 1700’s man­i­fest­ed in a mount­ing clash of ideas over the val­ue of authoritarian/monarchial rule ver­sus the cause of lib­er­ty and self-rep­re­sen­ta­tion lead­ing up to the begin­ning of our Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War in 1775. The peri­od of the 1850’s marked the time of our great strug­gle over the val­ue of our con­cep­tion of whether humans are equal or not, as the slave­hold­ing states strug­gled with the non-slave states as to whether future states would be admit­ted as “slave” or “free”, with that ques­tion being “answered” by our Civ­il War. The mid-1930’s to ear­ly 1940’s saw the strug­gle over whether, after the fail­ure of unregulated/unrestrained cap­i­tal­ism in the Great Depres­sion, how much of a role the gov­ern­ment should play in pro­vid­ing for the com­mon wel­fare, of our com­mon val­ues, as the USA found a mid­dle path between the ide­olo­gies of Fas­cism and Communism.

In the present Uranus pas­sage in Tau­rus, our the strug­gle over val­ues con­tin­ues as we find that the end of the strug­gle between Cap­i­tal­ism and Com­mu­nism, between the East and the West, that the West sup­pos­ed­ly won, has led to a world where the pro­lif­er­a­tion of more wants and the pro­duc­tion of more goods, and more wants and more goods, has led to the world-wide destruc­tion of life-forms and ecosys­tems on the plan­et. We have made a world where the val­ue that has only quan­ti­ty as a qual­i­ty, is destroy­ing all the oth­er val­ues of life on the plan­et and we find a lack of mean­ing­ful­ness in our lives.

Uranus-Nep­tune-Plu­to
So, it would seem that we are from Uranus hav­ing to reassess our val­ues once more, and from Nep­tune to recon­sid­er our rela­tion­ship to our fel­low humans and to all life-forms as being part of the greater com­mu­ni­ty of Spir­it, while Plu­to in com­bi­na­tion with these oth­er two of the Tri­ad of Spir­it will once again bring about a strug­gle over what our Hopes and Dreams will be now for the future world we are cre­at­ing for our descen­dants. Will they hon­or us, or will they not?

Though we may at times feel that these chal­lenges and ques­tions posed to us, the very exis­ten­tial strug­gles we find our­selves trou­bled by are over­whelm­ing and unsolv­able, we must remem­ber that the way the world is today, that is of our own mak­ing. Our ances­tors long ago, and we in this present day, have made and our mak­ing choic­es that have cre­at­ed these chal­lenges, and there­in lies our hope.

We can change; we must be the change.

The future for our­selves and for all life-forms on this plan­et depends upon us.

Let us meet this moment we made with courage, with love and with the faith that comes from under­stand­ing that we have with­in us the means to make a bet­ter world for one and for all.

Today we cel­e­brate one of the “four cor­ners” of the Zodi­ac. In each one of the four sea­sons that mark our jour­ney around the Sun, we seek to find our way through the spir­i­tu­al mean­ings held by the Lords of Light on this path made by Truth and forged by Love. The four car­di­nal signs of Aries and Can­cer, of Libra and Capri­corn hold us togeth­er in these four points of life and light, pos­ing the essen­tial four ques­tions for our jour­ney, which are: Who am I? Who are you? Where did we come from? Where are we going?

In this realm of Can­cer that we cel­e­brate and move into today, (although it is ever-present in our lives, always some­where in our own charts, and in every par­ti­cle of Cre­ation too), the answer to the ques­tion of our ori­gin, of our roots, of our cen­ter and spir­i­tu­al source is lov­ing­ly held for all time. But we must remem­ber this, that all of the signs are ever-present and part of this expe­ri­ence of our roots, and each sign must form an essen­tial part of being whole and cen­tered too.

The Cir­cle of the Liv­ing Ones, what we call the Zodi­ac, is not some col­lec­tion of zones in the heav­ens around our Earth. That just makes no sense at all. The Zodi­ac is one of the essen­tial foun­da­tions for the whole of Cre­ation, form­ing what I like to see as the Design-Body or the mas­ter Aura of Cre­ation, because they hold the Twelve Cre­ative Hier­ar­chies that are found through­out all of the realms and dimen­sions of the Uni­verse. The Zodi­ac is omni-present and com­plete, at the root of cre­ation and form­ing every par­ti­cle, being, star and galaxy.

Every­thing and every­one of us is formed with­in their own Aura or Elec­tro-Mag­net­ic Field, which is then equal­ly aligned and informed by the Aura of the Zodi­ac for the Earth, which is in turn aligned and informed by the Aura for our Solar Sys­tem, and then our Galaxy and so on. What we feel all around us are these wheels revolv­ing with­in wheels, vor­tices of ener­gy-forms danc­ing with­in vor­tices, because Cre­ation is the dance of Spir­it-Life-Con­scious­ness held and guid­ed by the Lords of Light, the Zodi­ac. It is these twelve cre­ative hier­ar­chies of spir­it which pro­vide the vehi­cles for the release of that which is behind the whole of Cre­ation, which is the Will, Love and Mind of the One. And because this is so, no mat­ter where you are, no mat­ter with whom you jour­ney now, you are always home and held in love by the One at the cen­ter of us all.

To expe­ri­ence Can­cer as our source, our ori­gin, our home, we must also real­ize that we have moved into the first of the Water signs, and we must slip beyond our mind into realms that must be felt. We feel these truths in so many ways, these gifts that come from being part of the sto­ry of Cre­ation, which begins and ends with the One. We feel what it means to be held by these ever­last­ing Arche­types and mor­tal beings too, by Moth­er-Father, Grand­moth­er-Grand­fa­ther, by all our liv­ing and lov­ing rela­tions, who hold us and bring us back to our cen­ter, back to our roots, back to our home right here and now, and also to the home we came from yes­ter­day, to our lives long ago, and even to worlds before, and even to the cen­ter of Cre­ation itself. For this is what lies at the cen­ter of us all, the One whose cen­ter is every­where and whose cir­cum­fer­ence is nowhere.

In Can­cer we hold our mem­o­ries, our sto­ries of what we were and what we shall some­day become. We start­ed long ago on this jour­ney, singing our songs as sparks of the Divine, striv­ing, search­ing, seek­ing, and lov­ing to become anoth­er star among the count­less stars.

By Can­cer you con­nect to the roots of you and to roots of one and all. You find your­self in your fam­i­ly, in the sto­ries about your ances­tors, as you care for one anoth­er because it is part of who and what we are, what made us and what will make our future too.

We were made from love, and we are here to love and be loved.

Here is the truth held by Can­cer, which is that we are all part of the one fam­i­ly of Spir­it, and that “we are all relat­ed”, and that what holds and guides us from the very begin­ning to the end of days is pure uncon­di­tion­al love.

We are all part of the Cir­cle of the Liv­ing Ones, held by the One and to one anoth­er by love.

This is the first truth, this is the root of one and all, that what we are here for is for love.

The Alchemist — by Jean Paul Laurens

Astro­log­i­cal Mus­ings — Mid-year Review

In my fourth show of 2023, I thought it would be help­ful to look again at the major plan­e­tary influ­ences for this year.

If you wish to sug­gest a sub­ject or top­ic for a future show, please email me as I would be hap­py to hear from you. My email is: billattride@gmail.com.

Here is the main link to Astrologer Bill Attride Radio:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/astrologerbillattride

Here is the link to the show on Sun­day June 18^th, 2023 @ 2 pm EDT:

https://www.blogtalkradio.com/astrologerbillattride/2023/06/18/astrological-musings-mid-year-review

The phone num­ber to call if you wish to ask a ques­tion dur­ing the live show is: (516) 531‑9638.

Please join me on Sun­day June 18^th, 2023 @ 2 pm EDT as we look at the cur­rent astro­log­i­cal indi­ca­tions and what they mean for you.

If you miss the show, it will be avail­able as a Pod­cast short­ly after on BlogTalk or my Apple Pod­casts.

Mer­cury by Dos­so Dossi

Who am I; What am I… Now, what is this?

It is held as a fun­da­men­tal truth in the Ancient Wis­dom, that the Cre­ative Pow­ers of the Cos­mos are divid­ed into Twelve Realms or Dimen­sions, and this divi­sion is mir­rored or matched by our expe­ri­ence of this by the essen­tial arrange­ment by the Lords of Time and Space held in the Zodi­ac. But we must remem­ber this, there is but the One…who became the Two, who became the Three, and from this came all the hier­ar­chies of Spirit-Life-Consciousness.

We also know from the Ancients, that there is but one “Self”, the One of all the selves, man­i­fest­ing in the Inner­most of the Inmost being of one and all. But we have many egos, and many oth­er spir­it-mat­ter forms or parts that make up the con­sti­tu­tion of the hosts for all monadic life-forms. And because of the many divi­sions into realms and beings of life we can under­stand that though it is true that all came from the One and abide in the One, from the most infin­i­tes­i­mal unto the great­est of hosts, we have always ques­tioned and strug­gled as to what is the source of the errors or of con­flicts that we see all around us, or as many have won­dered, if all is of the One Spir­it, what is the “ori­gin of evil”?

The Ancient Wis­dom answers, that this expe­ri­ence of evil is mere­ly the result of the con­flict of wills of all the evolv­ing beings, espe­cial­ly those who have lift­ed them­selves to some lev­el of self-aware­ness and who then oper­ate with more of qual­i­ty of choice or free will; and that we must under­stand that error or evil is the inevitable and nec­es­sary expe­ri­ence of the host of mon­ads who are mov­ing from unself-aware to ful­ly divine con­scious­ness over the course of count­less eons.

In Aries, we expe­ri­ence that we “are”, that we exist. In Tau­rus, we expe­ri­ence that we are some “thing”, that we are in our body (real­ly many mat­ter-forms or bod­ies, from the most ethe­re­al to the dens­est mat­ter). Just as the Uni­verse is formed of Spir­it and Mat­ter, or Spir­it-Mat­ter, so does in the Astro­log­i­cal hier­ar­chy of the Cos­mos we have Aries in a sense hold­ing the first realm of Spir­it and Tau­rus as hold­ing the first realm of Mat­ter. But once again, these two can nev­er be con­sid­ered sep­a­rate or apart while the Cos­mos exists, for every part of Cre­ation is Spir­it-Mat­ter, and then, of course there is so much more than this.

Now we have Gem­i­ni, the third in the first tri­ad of truth, and as much as you are One in Spir­it, and that you are made of many forms or bod­ies too, you are also part of the won­der of Spir­it that we call Mind or Con­scious­ness. Because just as much as every­thing is formed of Spir­it, and every­thing is formed as Mat­ter, so too is the entire­ty of Cre­ation formed as Mind or Con­scious­ness too. Now there are many lev­els and realms of con­scious­ness, from the most sim­ple and unaware of par­ti­cles or ele­men­tals to the most sub­lime and encom­pass­ing beings who form the Divine Hier­ar­chies of Creation.

All mon­ads are on a jour­ney of becom­ing, of unfold­ing and real­iz­ing their unique qual­i­ty of being, that unique self that we know as their Swab­hā­va or Quin­tes­sence. We all came from a Star as a unique spark of the Divine, and through our var­i­ous stages of real­iza­tion or self-devel­op­ment we have moved into ever more encom­pass­ing bod­ies and realms of self-real­iza­tion. But when we moved into this human king­dom, we entered the greater half of our jour­ney from a mere spark of the divine and clos­er to being a con­scious co-cre­ator of Creation.

Long, long ago we were ready to receive what must be quickened/awakened in each mon­ad at the prop­er time. Whether we look to the book shared by many, of Adam and Eve and the “act” that brought about their self-aware­ness, or to the many sto­ries, myths (or truths!), of the great ones who gift­ed to us our self-con­scious­ness, of the myths of Prometheus, of Lucifer, of Quet­zal­coatl, of Loki and what the Ancient Wis­dom tells of the join­ing of the Kumaras with us, in all these sto­ries we find the one sto­ry, which is that we are awake and self-aware because we are part of a much greater sto­ry of Spirit.

Today as we enter Gem­i­ni, and for­ev­er some­where in your chart, we bow down to those who passed the “light of under­stand­ing” to us, as it had been done unto them long ago. Because this is also part of the teach­ing. We are not one and apart, we are made of and by one anoth­er, by those who came before us and by our fel­low humans now. We can­not know with­out one anoth­er, because the very nature of self-con­scious­ness depends upon rela­tion­ships, it forms in our rela­tion­ship with the worlds around us and our rela­tion­ships with our fel­low humans.

The sto­ry of our jour­ney is also the sto­ry of Con­scious­ness. It can only be formed by shar­ing with one anoth­er, by telling one anoth­er our sto­ries, by lis­ten­ing to one anoth­er, by cor­rect­ing our errors of per­cep­tion and com­pre­hen­sion by shar­ing our expe­ri­ences, by free­ing our minds and hearts from the shad­ows and fears that blind us to the truth.

The key to wis­dom and truth starts with this, “Know Thyself”!

But the first step is to know that you will only know your­self when you see the oth­er as your­self. When you look into their eyes with no shad­ow or fear, and what you will see shin­ing there before you, in them and from you, is the Light Divine, the Love that is the One, the One whose cen­ter is every­where and whose cir­cum­fer­ence is nowhere.

It is then that you will know because it is true, that all of Cre­ation is shin­ing, that all of Cre­ation is alive and Con­scious, because it is all the One, and we are all here to live as cre­ators of the life Divine.

Astro­log­i­cal Mus­ings — Plu­to in Aquar­ius, Plu­to in the signs and what do we mean by an age?

(If you wish to lis­ten to the show instead, here is the link on BlogTalk or Apple Pod­casts)

As many of you know I have been speak­ing and writ­ing about Pluto’s pas­sage through Capri­corn since 2008 as the “end of age”. Nat­u­ral­ly, we might assume that the next pas­sage of Plu­to through Aquar­ius, which tech­ni­cal­ly has begun here in 2023, would mark the begin­ning of a “New Age”. But that rais­es a num­ber of ques­tions, the first ques­tion being what do we mean, or what do I mean by an “age”, or the end of an age, let alone “a new age”?

Many observers of his­to­ry have cat­e­go­rized peri­ods in his­to­ry, in var­i­ous areas and regions in the world as being of a cer­tain type or order, and they char­ac­ter­ized what some call “the tides of his­to­ry”, the rise and fall of civ­i­liza­tions and cul­tures over years, cen­turies and even mil­len­nia. Some eras or ages are rather long, oth­ers much short­er. And you prob­a­bly would not be sur­prised to see that many if not most of these rip­ples in time can be under­stood as being marked, informed, and shaped by the var­i­ous cycles of the plan­ets around the Sun, as well as by their inter­sect­ing cycles with one anoth­er. After all, our Earth is part of this larg­er sys­tem, the solar sys­tem, whose plan­e­tary cycles can be seen much like a giant forge of ener­gy-forms whose cir­cu­la­tions and per­am­bu­la­tions and rota­tions form what I call the “dance of the plan­ets”, and it is this which cre­ates the ener­gy-pat­terns we expe­ri­ence as “time”.

Jupiter/Saturn Muta­tion
For exam­ple, one of the most well-known cycles in Mun­dane Astrol­o­gy is the repeat­ed con­junc­tions of Jupiter and Sat­urn in a cer­tain ele­ment, (Fire, Earth, Air and Water), that demar­cate or indi­cate the type of his­tor­i­cal peri­od that cul­tures and civ­i­liza­tions are mov­ing through. We have just fin­ished a 200-year cycle in the ele­ment of Earth at the end of 2020, and we began a 200-year age of Air with Jupiter and Sat­urn meet­ing in Aquar­ius. The com­plete cycle for the Jupiter/Saturn align­ments in the four ele­ments is about 800 years long.

Anoth­er means for peri­odiz­ing his­to­ry comes from the pas­sages of the out­er plan­ets through the Signs indi­vid­u­al­ly, and also by the var­i­ous Syn­od­ic cycles that Uranus, Nep­tune, and Plu­to form with one anoth­er. A Syn­od­ic cycle is the peri­od of one planet’s con­junc­tion with anoth­er and those con­junc­tions can be viewed as being like a “new Moon” or a seed­ing of that’s plan­e­tary pair’s influence.

Pluto’s pas­sage through the Signs takes about 245 years and Nep­tune about 164 years and Uranus about 84 years. The longest Syn­od­ic Cycle is that of Plu­to with Nep­tune, which is approx­i­mate­ly 492 years, then comes Nep­tune with Uranus of around 171 years and final­ly Plu­to with Uranus of around 127 years.

Out­er Plan­ets Syn­od­ic Cycles
With regard to those com­bined syn­od­ic cycles, the most recent Pluto/Neptune cycle began in 1891–92, and the pre­vi­ous seed­ing was in 1398–99. I con­sid­er this influ­ence to be the rec­i­p­ro­cal rela­tion­ship of Divine Will and Divine Love, and for us forms the dynam­ic inter­play of how we man­age the mys­tery of union or of alche­my, as we learn to join togeth­er with­out los­ing our indi­vid­ual selves in one another.

The last Neptune/Uranus cycle began in 1993, and the pre­vi­ous seed­ing was in 1821. This plan­e­tary pair con­cerns the rec­i­p­ro­cal rela­tion­ship between “Freer Minds” or inde­pen­dence and uncon­di­tion­al love or com­mu­ni­ty, it holds the ever-unfold­ing dynam­ic ten­sion between our var­i­ous “kinds” of being and belong­ing to a com­mu­ni­ty as one of many, while also try­ing to live and being true to one­self as a “one of a kind”.

Final­ly, the last Pluto/Uranus cycle began in 1965–66, and the pre­vi­ous seed­ing was in 1850–51. This plan­e­tary pair con­cerns the rec­i­p­ro­cal rela­tion­ship between the Will and Free­dom, or Sacred Space and Freer Minds; it is the ever-unfold­ing dynam­ic ten­sion of striv­ing to being freer with­out caus­ing harm to anoth­er or oth­ers in their sacred space.

What this means is that in just the last 100 years or so we have had each of the three major plan­e­tary pairs begin new cycles, and per­haps that may be anoth­er rea­son as to why we are mov­ing through such a dynam­ic and tumul­tuous peri­od of change.

So, in a way we could say that 1891 was the begin­ning of an age, as was 1965, and also 1993. Indeed, there are realms with­in realms, cir­cles with­in cir­cles and for us to try and sort through and under­stand these mul­ti­ple influ­ences and ener­gy-forms is quite chal­leng­ing. But for our pur­pos­es today, let’s con­sid­er the cycle of Plu­to through the signs and see what mes­sages it might have for us.

Plu­to through the Signs
The pas­sage of Plu­to through the Zodi­ac takes about 245 years, and I believe it marks one of the more sig­nif­i­cant shapers for the series of phas­es in our spir­i­tu­al devel­op­ment as we trav­el through the halls of his­to­ry. Plu­to is crit­i­cal, as it holds for us, or is the Avatar for us in our solar sys­tem, for the essen­tial pow­er that is Alche­my, which is the heart of the spir­i­tu­al process that dri­ves Cre­ation. The beat­ing heart of Cre­ation is forged by com­bi­na­tions of the many ones who in their entire­ty form the Life and Body of the One. Spir­it moves into innu­mer­able forms of man­i­fes­ta­tion, which pro­ceeds as a series of cre­ative com­bi­na­tions of trans­for­ma­tions, which we expe­ri­ence and under­stand as Birth, Death, and then Rebirth into new forms. As I like to say, the whole of Cre­ation is the sto­ry of Spir­it danc­ing through Mat­ter-Forms, which are the tem­po­rary forms of mate­ri­al­iza­tions which by their very nature are mor­tal or bound by time.

If we take the “begin­ning” of the jour­ney for Plu­to through the signs, that is start­ing with Aries, then we should under­stand that the pas­sage from Aries to Tau­rus, from Tau­rus to Gem­i­ni and so on, should be viewed as the “sto­ry of Plu­to” in the signs, with the nature and mean­ing of each sign being trans­formed by the agency of Alche­my that is Plu­to. That would mean that a New Age of Plu­to would begin in Aries and would end in Pisces. In each of those pas­sages in a sign, we would expect to find the arche­typ­al-trans­for­ma­tion­al role of Plu­to to take the expe­ri­ences of that realm to the high­est of highs, and equal­ly to the low­est of lows, for us to expe­ri­ence in that sign the alchem­i­cal truth of Birth, Death, and Rebirth if you will. So, why did I des­ig­nate the pas­sage of Plu­to in Capri­corn as the “end of an age”?

My des­ig­na­tion or delin­eation comes from what Capri­corn holds or rep­re­sents, which is the Insti­tu­tion­al Hier­ar­chy, whether that be of fam­i­ly, com­mu­ni­ty cul­ture or civ­i­liza­tion. In Capri­corn we wit­ness or reach the apex and/or col­lapse of the devel­op­ment for that Plu­to cycle, the ful­fill­ment of what­ev­er ener­gy-form we are exam­in­ing, (which in our case is the broad­er human sto­ry of cul­ture and civ­i­liza­tion). What would come after, where we are now in 2023 until 2044, is our chal­lenge to reimag­ine the world we want to pre­serve or cre­ate now (Aquar­ius), and then in the last Sign of Pisces, the final chal­lenge would to be restore our faith and face down our fears. Giv­en our cur­rent cycle of Plu­to, the next new “age of Plu­to” will not tru­ly begin until 2068 when Plu­to enters Aries again.

With that in mind, let us see what the cur­rent cycle of Plu­to through the signs has been. We should arrange this both in date order, but we may also find it use­ful to con­sid­er the four sea­son­al sec­tions of these pas­sages, Aries to Gem­i­ni, Can­cer to Vir­go, Libra to Sagit­tar­ius and Capri­corn to Pisces to be insight­ful as well.

The first three signs, Aries, Tau­rus, and Gem­i­ni, form the begin­ning of the emer­gence of any age.

Plu­to in Aries
The begin­ning of the last pas­sage of Plu­to in Aries was 1823 to 1853, which most cer­tain­ly cor­re­sponds to the emer­gence of a new form of world iden­ti­ty, with the seed­ing of the mod­ern polit­i­cal and indus­tri­al age and the begin­ning of a world-wide glob­al­iza­tion of the polit­i­cal econ­o­my, as Plu­to in Aries her­ald­ed that a new type of order was tak­ing shape in the world. It wit­nessed what his­to­ri­ans call the first “indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion”, includ­ing the spread of the means of con­nect­ing and trav­el­ling that exceed­ed any­thing before that time ever in human his­to­ry, the railroad.

Plu­to in Taurus
The pas­sage of Plu­to through Tau­rus was from 1853 to 1884 and cor­re­spond­ed with the trans­for­ma­tion of the val­ues of the emerg­ing world order of that time, the rise of fac­to­ries and major indus­tri­al pro­duc­tion was the sub­stan­tial man­i­fes­ta­tion that would lead to the car­bon-based world order that we have now. In the USA, this strug­gle over our val­ues came to a cli­max with the Civ­il War, over the very ques­tion of the slav­ery, with the eman­ci­pa­tion of the slaves, and then their vir­tu­al re-enslave­ment with the counter-ref­or­ma­tion as the strug­gle for equal­i­ty and jus­tice in Recon­struc­tion failed, which led to the rise of share­crop­ping and Jim Crow in the south.

Plu­to in Gemini
Pluto’s pas­sage through Gem­i­ni was 1884 to 1914 and this cor­re­spond­ed with the trans­for­ma­tion through a surge of inven­tive­ness and new tech­nolo­gies that formed the spread of the infor­ma­tion net­works of the glob­al order, with lines of com­mu­ni­ca­tion that con­nect­ed and encom­passed for the very first time the entire world. In the USA, inven­tions such as the tele­graph, tele­phone, the spread of elec­tri­fi­ca­tion, and the auto­mo­bile and air­plane rev­o­lu­tion­ized the world.

The sec­ond three signs, Can­cer, Leo, and Vir­go, form the sec­ond qua­ter­ni­ty, and rep­re­sent the strug­gle with the foun­da­tions and the via­bil­i­ty of what began in the first quarter.

Plu­to in Cancer
Plu­to moved through Can­cer from 1914 to 1939, and the foun­da­tions of the world and human secu­ri­ty were dis­rupt­ed by World War One, the world-wide Great Depres­sion and the begin­ning of the Sec­ond World War. The very nature of secu­ri­ty which Can­cer rules, of one’s land and ter­ri­to­r­i­al integri­ty, was torn asun­der as peo­ples and nations lost their lives and their homes on a world-wide scale.

Plu­to in Leo
Plu­to passed through Leo from 1939 to 1957, and this pas­sage wit­nessed the epic strug­gles of world cen­ters of lead­er­ship and pow­er (ruled by Leo) vying for world domin­ion in World War II and into the Cold War. The epic con­fronta­tions of com­pet­ing sys­tems of belief led to the devel­op­ment for the very first time in human his­to­ry of a ter­ri­fy­ing real­i­ty, the weapons of war humans had invent­ed formed and still present an exis­ten­tial threat to life itself, in that we could destroy our world with our crafti­ness and tech­nol­o­gy, because our intel­li­gence had sur­passed our wisdom.

Plu­to in Virgo
Plu­to moved through Vir­go from 1957 to 1972, as the world became trans­formed by the devel­op­ment of new tech­nolo­gies and meth­ods of pro­duc­tion, which trans­formed the econ­o­my through sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies and rev­o­lu­tion­ary appli­ca­tions in med­i­cine, food pro­duc­tion, and the nature of work and liv­ing were trans­formed. Dis­eases were con­quered but new sources of human suf­fer­ing were forged by the dis­rup­tions of nat­ur­al sys­tems by the pro­lif­er­a­tion of chem­i­cals and oth­er human-made poi­sons into the world.

The third sec­tor of signs, Libra, Scor­pio, and Sagit­tar­ius forms the third quar­ter of the Astro­log­i­cal cal­en­dar, and it is in this sec­ond half of the Plu­to cycle where we can see that Pluto’s Alchem­i­cal force trans­formed the larg­er struc­tures of human life.

Plu­to in Libra
Plu­to moved through Libra from 1972 to 1984, and the trans­for­ma­tions of the soci­ety and cul­ture of the pre­vi­ous signs led to an erup­tion of changes in the qual­i­ty and the nature of the var­i­ous forms of rela­tion­ships in soci­ety, for sex­u­al rela­tion­ships, for racial and cul­tur­al divi­sions so that the more con­strained def­i­n­i­tions of social norms were bro­ken lead­ing to lib­er­a­tions for many and yet equal­ly the rise of counter-move­ments seek­ing to return to tra­di­tion­al ways of defin­ing hier­ar­chy and power.

Plu­to in Scorpio
Plu­to moved through (its own sign) of Scor­pio from 1984 to 1995, herald­ing trans­for­ma­tions of the world order as the essen­tial divi­sion of East and West was bro­ken down by the col­lapse of the Sovi­et Union and the open­ing of Chi­na to the world econ­o­my, which cre­at­ed the poten­tial for what some called the “end of his­to­ry” and the so-called tri­umph of the lib­er­al polit­i­cal eco­nom­ic order. What real­ly emerged in this so-called “peace div­i­dend”, led to the break­ing up of many of the for­mer alliances of the world in the con­tin­u­ing strug­gle between moder­ni­ty and old­er cul­tures and customs.

Plu­to in Sagittarius
Plu­to passed through Sagit­tar­ius from 1995 to 2008, and the realms of belief, truth, sci­ence, and reli­gion were trans­formed and dis­rupt­ed by advances in sci­ence, in com­put­ers, the spread of the inter­net and oth­er mea­sures that con­nect­ed every­thing and every­one, but equal­ly gave rise to a host of what we know as mil­len­ni­al move­ments, to fun­da­men­tal­ist and author­i­tar­i­an sys­tems seek­ing to base their cul­tures and gov­ern­ments as coun­ter­points to the lib­er­al world order that had been estab­lished in the Amer­i­can and French Rev­o­lu­tions, and their lat­er tri­umph over com­mu­nism. Instead, the rush into the brave new worlds led to cathar­tic erup­tions of a long­ing for a sim­pler order based for some upon what we know as “blood and soil”, as a return to tra­di­tion­al beliefs and prac­tices, and equal­ly to the mis­guid­ed attempts to pro­mote “democ­ra­cy” by impos­ing free­dom through destruction.

Final­ly, Plu­to entered the last quar­ter of the Zodi­ac, and the seed that was plant­ed in the ear­ly 1800’s would bear its final fruits. Here we have expe­ri­enced the tri­umph or fail­ure of over 200 years of his­to­ry and the painful real­i­ties and crises of the present day.

Plu­to in Capricorn
Plu­to moved through Capri­corn from 2008 to 2023, (and actu­al­ly will dip in and out of Capri­corn all this year), and it brought this cycle of Plu­to to its moment of reck­on­ing, with the test­ing of the insti­tu­tion­al orders of the world, with either the prop­er or improp­er wield­ing of Author­i­ty, with the via­bil­i­ty or inef­fec­tive­ness of Sys­tems (which Capri­corn rules) revealed for all to see. As these insti­tu­tions of the world were shook, reformed, or broke apart, as the orders of soci­ety from the fam­i­ly to the com­mu­ni­ty, in realms sec­tar­i­an and sec­u­lar held or crum­bled around the world, to many it seemed as if they were indeed at the end of age, and that the promise of a bet­ter future for human­i­ty was lost.

Plu­to in Aquarius
And now we have Plu­to mov­ing into Aquar­ius from 2023 to 2044, and so we are fac­ing the chal­lenge of the death and rebirth of our hopes and dreams for the future, which are forged and ful­filled by one anoth­er, in the expe­ri­ences of our fel­low­ships, our com­mu­ni­ties, and our social iden­ti­ties. What can we learn from the pre­vi­ous pas­sage of Plu­to in Aquar­ius, which was from 1778 to 1798?

That ear­li­er pas­sage in Aquar­ius encom­passed the peri­od of our Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War and its after­math, with our ances­tors’ failed attempts to form a loose Con­fed­er­a­tion of States, and to final­ly set­tle upon our present Con­sti­tu­tion of a Fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. In order to pro­tect the rights of any one indi­vid­ual and the well-being of the many, we formed a com­pact of “checks and bal­ances” to make pos­si­ble the dreams of many, while also pro­tect­ing each indi­vid­ual. But our fore­bears were as we are, imper­fect. And there have been many peri­ods in our his­to­ry since then when we have advanced and also retreat­ed on the cen­tral promise of the dream of self-ful­fill­ment. This was also the peri­od which saw the French Rev­o­lu­tion (1789–99), the pub­li­ca­tion of the Dec­la­ra­tion of the Rights of Man, the Hait­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, and the rise of Napoleon.

What Plu­to is bring­ing now from 2023 to 2044, is the neces­si­ty to reform/reformulate/transform our ideals and prin­ci­ples of com­mu­ni­ty, to under­stand that the strug­gle for a new soci­ety from 1778 to 1798 came out of the col­lapse of the old monar­chial sys­tems and mer­can­tile economies, and that a new order was ris­ing, with new group­ings of peo­ples filled with a dif­fer­ent vision of them­selves and the world they wished to make. Their hopes and dreams were dif­fer­ent than their ances­tors, and they were forced by cir­cum­stances or made the bet­ter choice to face the need to move away from beat­en paths and be path makers.

We, like our ances­tors did 250 years ago, have to face the world that we have made, the dreams we dreamt, the actions we took, which have led to our cur­rent crises and chal­lenges. The pur­suit of our old ways, of our old dreams and goals, by the same means and for the same rea­sons, that path not only makes no sense, but it is also not even pos­si­ble. We have to move away from the abso­lutist and ego­tis­ti­cal approach to this world and towards one anoth­er, where the right do what one wants is unteth­ered to the essen­tial truth of Spir­it, that first and fore­most we must be respon­si­ble, we must take care of one anoth­er, and that we can only live on this beau­ti­ful Earth if we do so in a sus­tain­able and lov­ing man­ner, or we will fail our­selves and our children.

We have to be bold, as Plu­to demands that we renew and trans­form the dreams we have for our­selves, for our chil­dren, and for one another.