PLUTO ENTERS AQUARIUS!!!

Today, we will experience perhaps the biggest astrological shift of the past 16 years. On Tuesday November 19th 2024 at 12:30pm Pacific Time, the planet Pluto will enter the zodiac sign of Aquarius, and will stay there for the next 20 years until 2044. This marks the beginning of a new generation and astrological era.

Pluto has been dipping into the early degrees of Aquarius for the last year and a half (from March to June of 2023 and January through August of 2024). But so far, it’s always retrograded back into the late degrees of Capricorn. Today officially marks Pluto’s long-term transition to two decades solidly in Aquarius.

If each planet were a type of life form, Pluto would most certainly be fungi. As the planet of death and the mythological Lord of the Underworld, Pluto’s role is to end and renew the life cycle, decomposing and harvesting nutrients, making them accessible for new life. Much like our mushroom friends, Pluto lurks in the shadows and darkness, its treasures hidden almost invisibly under the leaf litter. If you’ve ever discovered the joys of foraging, you’ll know that it can be a frustrating, nonlinear, intuitive, and greatly rewarding process. Such is the excavation of Plutonian shadow material, tapping into our deepest emotions and all the energy required to suppress them, alchemizing our pain and transforming its potential into power. This is the deepest form of healing, the essence of shadow work, bringing that which is repressed to the surface in pursuit of greater wholeness.

Pluto has been journeying through Capricorn since 2008, decomposing the societal structures represented by the sign of the sea-goat. That same year, the Great Recession began, exposing the rotten core of our late-stage capitalist economic system. Indeed, wealth inequality has skyrocketed during this period, with profits concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires while the rest of us stagnate or backslide financially. The Pluto in Capricorn era also saw a rising consciousness of human-made climate change and environmental destruction (despite an infuriating lack of response from world leaders). This era gave us the Me Too movement, revealing the toxic pervasiveness of misogyny and the patriarchy. The Black Lives Matter movement has highlighted the deadly continued impacts of racism and white supremacy. We’ve seen uprisings against corrupt authority figures, including the Arab Spring. And most recently, we’ve experienced increased awareness of the ethnic cleansing and genocide taking place in Palestine and elsewhere. Pluto’s message is clear: these kyriarchal structures cause nothing but suffering, and need to be dismantled at any cost.

Capricorn loves making rules; Aquarius loves breaking them. Capricorn represents authority; Aquarius rebels against it. Capricorn honors the past and traditions; Aquarius dreams of the future and visions. Capricorn focuses on its role in society; Aquarius prioritizes freedom and individuation to one’s highest potential.

Aquarius is the fixed air sign and the 11th sign of the zodiac. It corresponds with the 11th house, and is co-ruled by the planets Saturn (traditionally) and Uranus (in modern astrology). Symbolized by the water bearer, Aquarius brings us the human ideas of hope and freedom. It facilitates the deprogramming of our cultural conditioning so that we can connect with our authentic individuality, uniqueness, and even genius. As such, it’s associated with technology, innovation, human progress, and even astrology itself. 

But rebellion comes at a cost, and the shadow sides of Aquarius involve exile, isolation, alienation, and dissociation. Aquarius is paradoxically both the sign of the individual and of society, as it can see humanity most clearly from its aloof position. It represents organizations and communities, the cooperative social agreement that enables human advancement. Aquarius wants us to embrace our most authentic dreams and long-term goals, to live in alignment with them, and to find allies who can help us achieve those aims. We need other people to survive, and as humans our “tribal” instincts are incredibly strong, delicately balanced with our Aquarian uniqueness. This fixed sign needs to be stubborn in order to maintain its authentic individuality amidst the human herd mentality - and now it will spend the next two decades playing host to the planet of power struggles.

Aquarius is a “zoomed-out” sign associated with wisdom, elderhood, the long-term view of life, and the human collective. Similarly, Pluto is a transpersonal planet. Over 3 billion miles from Earth, it puts everything into perspective; it’s about the most ultimate truths, the deepest possible meanings of life, and our destinies in the grandest of schemes. As it travels through each zodiac sign, it transforms different fields of society. And it’s no coincidence that Pluto’s 248-year orbit corresponds closely with the average lifespan of an empire (which, by the way, has just expired for the United States).

Understanding astrology through the tarot: Pluto as Death, Aquarius as The Star, this transit as The Tower

As Steven Forrest writes, in Aquarian times, we either need to break through or we will break down. Both Pluto and Aquarius are associated with the traumas that wound us, and which often result in our alienation from reality in an attempt at self-protection. Nowadays, many of us bear daily witness to genocides and other horrors through the screens of our phones, leading to increased dissociation. A risk of this Pluto in Aquarius era is avoiding our pained hearts and living in our heads, inhabiting mental constructions that try to keep us safe from strong emotions. This air sign loves rational quantitative analysis, but we must also stay connected to intuition and remember that there is so much more to the world than what we can observe. True objectivity is a myth, and existentialism - though helpful in encouraging us to use the will and agency we have - risks ignoring the fundamental truths of context and interconnectedness. A related hazard is isolation - and we’re already living in an epidemic of loneliness, created by capitalism and exacerbated by the individualistic Western mindset.

The task before us now is to embrace our authentic individuality without veering into selfishness. It’s to figure out how not to betray our true selves or the human collective. It’s to love and accept others’ differences, recognizing that we’re stronger together as a diverse, interwoven human tapestry. It’s to decondition all the toxic beliefs that we’ve absorbed from swimming in the collective cultural soup since conception. And this is exceedingly difficult to do, especially because much of this conditioning tends to come from our loved ones, from the expectations and concerns of the people closest to us. In a way, it’s quite appropriate that Pluto is entering its Aquarius era soon after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 US presidential election, and not long before the Thanksgiving holiday. Many people are about to sit around the dinner table with their loved ones, struggling between the pressure to conform and the urge to rebel.

The last time Pluto journeyed through Aquarius was from 1777-1798. This coincided with the Industrial Revolution, which saw massive impacts on society resulting from the transformation of technology. That time period was also an age of political rebellion and upheaval around the globe, including the American, French and Haitian revolutions. Given the unstable political state of much of the world, and the increasing economic desperation of so many people under late-stage capitalism, I think it’s reasonable to expect more significant uprisings in the coming decades.

This is an exceedingly important time to learn from history. Aquarius has a tendency to reinvent the wheel and fully condemn the past, both good and bad. But progress purely for progress’s sake is dangerous, and we must always question whose progress we are prioritizing - and at what cost. Erasing culture and human memory are rarely, if ever, justifiable. Let us be wary of the revolutionary’s fixed mindset and the foibles of Robespierre. I hope we can allow ourselves to focus on relearning the old skills of human surviving and thriving that capitalism has tried to wrest from us, preparing ourselves and our communities for whatever’s ahead.

Of course, modern times also call for important new skills. As Pluto enters Aquarius, power struggles over technology are sure to manifest. Questions of privacy and surveillance will become paramount. Artificial intelligence will continue to rapidly transform the digital landscape to an unprecedented degree. We must remember that these tools are created by humans and reflect human values and priorities. We must always ask ourselves whose benefit they are really serving, and learn to protect ourselves and others against their exploitative tendencies.

Pluto is the planet of generations, and so its transits affect large swaths of the human population in various ways. For the baby boomer generation, this Aquarian era will see Pluto tensely opposing their natal Pluto placements in Leo. It is relatively rare for humans to experience a Pluto opposition, since it can sometimes take 125 years to manifest, longer than a (current) human lifespan. But Pluto moves at different speeds throughout its orbit depending on its closeness to the Sun. It’s been moving more quickly in recent decades, perhaps reflecting the rapid pace of our modern world. Pluto is at its fastest in the sign of Scorpio, which is the signature of my millennial generation. We will experience a square between our natal Pluto placements and Pluto in Aquarius. The boomer and millennial generations with fixed Pluto signs will go through the most tense, challenging Pluto aspects during this time. Gen Xers with Pluto in Libra will see a more harmonious trine aspect, whereas zoomers with Pluto in Sagittarius will experience a stimulating sextile as they come into adulthood. Eventually, we will see how the coming generation of Pluto in Aquarius children will transform the world.

Regardless of the year you were born, Pluto is transiting a particular house of your specific birth chart, representing an area of your life. Depending on the system of houses used, Pluto’s entry into the sign of Aquarius may or may not coincide with a change of houses in your chart. (I use the most common house system, called Placidus, where the sign and house cusps aren’t married to each other, unlike the whole sign house system.) However, this is still an excellent time to make sure you know which house of your chart Pluto is currently transiting through - since the corresponding area of your life will experience resulting upheavals and transformations.

If you’re curious to unpack how exactly this new Pluto era will affect your life and interact with your birth chart, schedule an astrology reading with me here.

Some people are fearful of this big Pluto transition, while others feel more excited and hopeful about the change. But one thing’s for sure: we can’t stop it, so we might as well embrace it. Every astrological transit is an unavoidable evolutionary necessity. The karma has ripened, and we are ready for whatever Pluto in Aquarius will bring - for the meaning we will make out of it. Pluto is often synonymous with pain, but few experiences are so motivating for human creativity and growth. This is an opportunity to learn deeply about ourselves and the universe. But the price of rebirth is destruction: we must let the old world, and old versions of ourselves, die first.