The Zodiac Club #9: Pluto Departs Capricorn
On October 11, Pluto's retrograde finally reached its conclusion. The outermost planet is now preparing to depart the earth sign of Capricorn for the last time in our lifetimes.
Hauntology Now! is the Substack of interdisciplinary artist, designer, musician, academic writer, and cultural critic J. Simpson, where he writes about all things hauntological, atemporal, philosophical, as well as sharing thoughts, reflections, and musings on music, movies, books, and life.
On October 11, Pluto finally returned to its regular rotation after going retrograde in May 2024. This backwards trajectory returned Pluto the earth sign of Capricorn one final time in September 2024. Now it’s resumed its forward journey, progressing into the air sign of Aquarius in earnest. This concludes a cycle that’s been in motion for the last 15 years, beginning around the time Obama took office. Thinking about how strange, surreal, and dramatic the last decade-and-a-half have been should give you a slight hint of how intense these transits can be.
On Pluto in Capricorn
Pluto is the planet of the Unconscious, of the shadowy unknowable forces that govern mankind. It’s intimately concerned with systems, power, and karmic cycles of Death and Rebirth. When left unexamined, it can become the herald of mass hysteria and psychosis, mob rule, and empty trend hopping.
As the last of the Earth Signs, Capricorn is primarily concerned with “mastery of the world of form, of the space-time reality and its boundaries, as well as to mastery of the self and self-responsibility,” as MoonOmens puts it.
They continue “As an archetype, Capricorn is associated with both internal and external authority, tradition, hierarchies, established systems and institutions, social rules and social order, aging, elders, and father figures. Capricorn has to do with the process of conditioning and the internalization of norms of conduct imposed upon us from the outside world.”
Together, Pluto in Capricorn has exposed the fault lines underpinning systems like banking, big business, governments, and top-down hierarchies. As Pluto enters Aquarius, we are being given a chance for something completely different.
On Pluto in Aquarius
One of my primary motivations for writing this newsletter (and for my philosophical and cultural writing in general) is the notion that we don’t understand these energies and trajectories very well. As an Aquarius myself, I feel like these questions have been haunting my peripheral vision my entire life. I’ve merely been trying to follow the threads to the best of my ability.
There’s been much talk about The Age of Aquarius since Astrology became mainstream in the ‘60s. It’s nearly always billed as a kind of Utopia, where humanity will come together, join hands and forget their differences, tra la la. While it’s a nice thought and something to strive for, we cannot forget that Uranus, the planet that now rules Aquarius, was discovered in 1781, right in-between the American and French Revolutions. While these conflicts had good causes and have done some real good in the last 250 years, they also left over 100,000. All of this to say, we need to also be wary of Uranian/Aquarius energy.
There’s more than enough doom ‘n gloom to go around, though. The world’s been ending at least every day of the last 15 years. My current theory is that Pluto is mainly able to do damage when left uninterrogated, most alarmingly depicted by the rise of Nazism when the planet was first discovered. That’s the main drive behind my fervor for Gothic Studies, teasing out hidden truths and things many would rather leave unspoken. I feel like an unwillingness, or inability, to talk about inconvenient truths and ask hard questions over the last 15 years has led to a lot of the drama. Yes, the financial collapse of 2008 left me feeling powerless and enraged. Was the rise of CryptoCurrency and the reported death of fiat currency the way to go, though? I don’t know.
The astrologer Dorje Kirsten wrote a excellent piece about Pluto transitioning into Aquarius, observing “You are being called one last time in this life of yours to set your intentions and build something great. You have worked on this for over 16 years.” On a psychological level, we are invited to investigate our limiting beliefs, our assumptions that this is simply how things are and how they must be. Paired with the psychic blast of the eclipses from the other week, the doors are wide open to a whole new future, perhaps one we might not even be able to imagine. We’ve got kind of a karmic blank check at the moment. How are you going to use yours?
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