Pluto’s Move from Sagittarius to Capricorn

Planets change signs all the time, so what’s the big deal with Pluto’s move into Capricorn?

Pluto is the slowest moving planet, with an orbit around the sun of a bit more than 248 years. While the sun goes through the entire zodiac every year, and the moon cuts through it every month, it takes Pluto about two and half centuries!

Because Pluto’s orbit is very elliptical, it spends varying amounts of time in each sign. He really drags through Taurus, for example, while he zips through Scorpio and Sagittarius. He’ll spend a little more time in Capricorn than he did in Sagittarius. Slow moving planets tend to bring about deeper and lasting changes. Pluto, being slowest of all, is considered to bring about the deepest changes.

Sagittarius is the sign of religion, foreigners and “other” cultures, and philosophy. Pluto’s trek through this sign, which he entered in 1995, has had obvious radical effects on these areas. Looking back a dozen years, who would have thought that religion would become so powerful a force in politics all over the world? We’ve seen nearly every religion sprouting some form of fundamentalism, and even the more moderate branches of most religions have been in a very conservative cycle.

On the other hand, also consistent with the searching and seeking of Sagittarius, we’ve also seen an explosion of spirituality apart from traditional religion. You can measure this in many ways, from the size of the New Age section at the bookstore to the number of translations of the Tao Te Ching now available. We’ve truly moved into a time when the spiritual traditions of every culture have become available to every other culture.

With Pluto in Sagittarius we’ve seen the popularity of the (somewhat materialistic and narcissistic) book The Secret. While Deepak Chopra was just getting started back in the early 90’s, he’s now joined by a number of New Age teachers. Note how Wayne Dyer, for example, transitioned from psychology-coach to spirituality-guru.

At best, we’ve been able to explore spirit from numerous different perspectives, and we’ve put spirit back into our collective conversation. At worst, we’ve fallen into a kind of spiritual materialism, marked by either rigid adherence to outdated dogma (if you’re of a more conservative bent) or spiritual thrill-seeking (for the more experimental).

Now that Pluto is leaving Sagittarius, many of these things will start to move to the back burner. No, religion and spirituality won’t go away, and the issues we’ve been dealing with will remain. In fact, we have an entire generation of children born with Pluto in Sag to keep working these issues out throughout their lives.

But, believe it or not, in a couple of years the idea of things like religious terrorists will start to fade. They won’t go away, but they’ll have a much smaller place in our collective consciousness. With Pluto in Sag, many people have been more willing to fight for their beliefs than to live by them, and even those who try to live by them may have fallen for a very rigid interpretation - Sagittarius can certainly lead to unbending dogma. It’s a sign that’s at its best when seeking the truth, but doesn’t do so well when it thinks it’s found it.

Spirituality will still be part of our lives, as will religion, but not in the same way they have been over the last dozen years. In some ways, they will seem more “normal” and many of the more extreme forms will simply disappear. Maybe you haven’t missed Bible Study on Friday nights for five years... then you’re on your way home, and you remember that great movie that’s on TV tonight... and you could get Chinese food delivered... (just kidding - if you go to Bible Study, you’re not reading this!).

Sagittarius is ruled by Jupiter, the cosmic inflationary principle. During his stay in this sign, Pluto has indeed led us to inflate just about everything. We’ve Supersized our meals, our cars and our homes. Although obesity is well known to be a problem in the United States, it’s begun to show up in more and more places all over the world. It wasn’t hard to predict that fuel prices would eventually soar, but we’ve created huge McMansions to guzzle fuel throughout both the heating and cooling seasons. Working again on the idea that “more is more” we’ve ignored fuel efficiency in favor of DVD players in the back of our minivans.

Sag’s inflationary principle has produced a number of economic “bubbles” from the Tech Stocks bubble of the late 90’s to our current (or recent) housing bubble. With Pluto in optimistic Sagittarius, no amount of evidence could ever convince people that there would ever be a price to pay for extravagance, in any of it’s forms. As he moves into Capricorn, an earth sign, the high-flying mindset is likely to come in for a landing. Capricorn is ruled by Saturn, almost the opposite of Jupiter in his Spartan ways.

Pluto has a way of working by bringing about the extremes. We hold on to outdated forms all the more tightly, we even bring them back from the dead, in order to fully experience them and eventually to let go of them as we move into the future.

So what will happen with Pluto in Capricorn?

Capricorn is the sign of our institutions. The last time Pluto was in Capricorn, we had the American Revolution, so you can see that radical changes are a real possibility. What is going to happen, basically, is that our institutions are going to get a major overhaul.

This doesn’t mean that we’ll wake up on January 25th and create a new form of government. In fact, true to Pluto’s modus operandi, there will be at many points over the next fifteen years when we see things moving to a much more conservative and traditional position. As we saw religious fundamentalists in Sagittarius, we’ll see a different kind of fundamentalist in Capricorn, one with a demand for “law and order” and respect for government and corporations.

It isn’t too hard to see that our institutions are not working for us, at least in terms of many pressing issues. The status quo isn’t helping the environment, or the ever-growing gap between the rich and the poor of the world. Part of the problem is that we’ve let our institutions get out of our hands - for example, until recently voting turnout in the the U.S. was very poor. Pluto will “help” us to understand that the collective is the personal.

But what happens when “doing the right thing” in a social sense threatens the value of your 401k?

What happens when preserving our civil liberties might mean living with more uncertainty?

What happens when protecting the environment means changing your lifestyle - not just recycling, but actually consuming less? Actually wanting less? We have, after all, constructed an economy based on everyone always wanting more. If Americans, particularly, weren’t in debt up to their eyes, the economy as we’ve created it would collapse.

These are some of the issues we’ll be dealing with as Pluto moves through Capricorn. As always, Pluto casts his shadow ahead of him, and we can see some of these issues in the news already. Environmental awareness is growing, the world economy is very shaky, and political instability is reaching very high proportions in many places. Notably, fuel costs are soaring, which is having an effect on everything else.

It seems that Pluto tends to work on us by making things worse before they get better. We have to remember, though, that we all play a part in how Pluto manifests. We each bear some responsibility for how the collective responds to the challenges Pluto throws our way.

The ingress of Pluto into Capricorn occurs on January 25th. Of note, this ingress is “angular,” or very powerful, in New York City, so this is one place to watch to see how things will be changing. Mars will cross the ingress line on December 31st, 2007, and again on March 18, 2008. The latter date, especially, is one to keep an eye on.

One way to get a sense of how a planet will manifest in a sign is to watch the news on the day of the ingress. The stories which are prominent will usually foretell the theme of the planet’s stay in that sign. While we can’t know the news of January 25th ahead of time, here is a sobering thought -

In the United States on the day of the ingress, “Rambo” is being rereleased in theaters.


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