Guest writer: The Super-Square of Pluto and Uranus
If you were Uranus in Aries, you’d be surreal too
Pluto at seven degrees Capricorn, Uranus at seven degrees Aries. Square as a carpenter’s tool, give or take a few minutes and seconds.
And what a square it is.
The great god of the underworld with all his charged goodies—sex, death, rock-n-roll—duking it out with the great god of revolution, genius, and rule-breaking of all kinds.
Squares are misunderstood, feared, loathed even. If you’ve got a square in your birth chart, you’ve had to learn to reconcile a seemingly irreconcilable conflict in your own personality. Mars square Venus, say, sex versus love, aggression versus accommodation. It’s a tough one, a huge challenge to any ego.
Success is by no means assured, and many a relationship, many a lifetime, has been dashed on those reefs. Even done successfully, it hasn’t been easy. Nor has it made the conflict go away, but it has forced you to come to some greater understanding, some new understanding, of what you value in both sex and love. That’s the gift a square holds.
Then what gift can this square hold, coming as it does in the portentous year 2012? In a year that has many people hoping for the best, while fearing the worst, an omen like this one can seem, well, ominous. Yet it’s good to remember that, since the dawn of humankind, this very special square was always going to be in the sky when 2012 finally rolled around. It is part of the danger and the opportunity that the cosmic calendar, call it Mayan or otherwise, has always held in store for us. Now it’s up to us to use it to our advantage.
There are a couple of ways to look at it. One is to observe what’s actually going on. Pluto vs. Uranus is in the sky for everyone on the planet, so everyone is partaking at some level. You can also be reasonably sure that each of those slow-moving, invisible planets will manifest both a positive face and a shadow side.
On the shadow side, it’s not hard to spot the “Plutocrats” facing off against a ragtag coalition of revolutionaries and other Uranian types demanding that they share the wealth.
All over the world, the simple fact is that we’re living in a time of extreme inequality of wealth, certainly the widest gap between rich and poor in the past fifty years.
They don’t call them plutocrats for nothing. Pluto, after all, is associated via its rulership of Scorpio with the 8th House, that magnificent old mansion with the shuttered windows and the gargoyles, built with other people’s money, and rumored to be host of weird doings, orgies, maybe even … murder. Scary place, one we all need to know better.
You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave…
To make this shadowy connection to wealth and business embarrassingly obvious, Pluto first entered Capricorn, that most-cliché-ridden symbol of the banker/businessman, in January of 2008. Though little-noted by the bankers themselves, this cosmic shift set the stage for a handful of enormously bloated super-banks to very nearly blow up the bus on an IED of worthless-yet-deadly mortgage-backed securities, credit default swaps, and other equally opaque financial booby traps. And to put a fine sheen of irony on the whole disaster, it was an IED invented, armed, and buried by the bankers themselves, poor dears.
Not to worry about Pluto, though. Plutocrats always have many friends in high places. Thanks to infusions of unimaginable amounts of public cash, the world was saved from what might very well have been a catastrophic bout of economic pneumonia. Instead, we got the worst downturn since the Great Depression. The Plutocrats got bonuses. Other people’s money, indeed.
That’s dark Pluto, with its love of money, power, and manipulation. We’re all capable of it. We’ve all indulged in it, to some extent. Most of us have been burned by it at some point, and subsequently sworn it off to the best of our abilities. Plutocrats, on the other hand, are exceptionally good at it, have made a career of it.
To get a sense just how much of a career, try placing this square of ours on a “natural” chart, with 0˚ Aries rising and 0˚ Capricorn on the Midheaven. Pluto is sitting smack dab in the 10th House, the place where big splashy careers are made—Capricorn careers, business and banking careers, Jamie Dimon-Lloyd Blankfein-style careers.
No, dark Pluto has worked hard to game the system and emphatically does not want to share all that luscious wealth. Pitted against that negative energy, Uranus in Aries, eager for change, grows insistent.
What revolution looks like these days
Wall Street was Occupied last fall. Outraged, thousands of Uranian rule-breakers took to the streets of our financial districts attempting to do what they do best: start a revolution.
True to form, they took everyone by surprise (especially those alert watchdogs in the media, too much of which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dark Pluto Inc.)
They may own nearly everything, but they don’t know everything, those dark Plutonians. If they did, they could have looked to the sky to see this one coming.
That the “revolution” sputtered and went temporarily underground again is hardly surprising, given the entrenched nature of Pluto. Power and money never give up without a fight. It’s far from over, though; this square stays potent well into 2016, and as we’ve seen, Uranus is famous for its surprises.
At least, we should hope that Uranus is not done yet. Astrologer Steven Forrest notes that the danger with squares is not the grinding friction and heat they produce; that’s simply how intractable problems get worked out. The real danger is that one side or the other will “win.” Squares are cosmic signposts telling us that its time to wrestle a demon, time to confront an issue that we’ve ignored.
In a birth chart, you’ve got your whole lifetime to get it done. In the ever-changing skies of current life, you have to jump on it, or it will jump on you.
The contrast between the new and the old is not always poignant and beautiful; sometimes it’s forced, ugly, chaotic. Uranus in Aries in square to Pluto in Capricorn represents a time when those who insist on clinging to the past will be forced to change in unexpected and uncomfortable ways.
Here’s the thing: no one (aside from the tiny minority of Plutocrats themselves) thinks the current situation is the least bit fair, or should be allowed to continue. The history of plutocracies is not a hopeful one. They hold on.
Wakey-wakey, Uranus in Aries is poking you. You sleep at your peril.
Then, inevitably, they drag everyone down with them into ruin. Greed may be good for the few, for awhile, but in the end decadence sets in, defenses grow lax, will gets flaccid. All those barbarians at the gates, all those resentful ninety-nine-percenters feeling left out for too long.
Ask the ancient Romans about that one. At that point, there’s no will left in the people, no spirit to defend a system that clearly is not in everyone’s best interest. The kinds of defense that money buys only defend so much.
On the other hand, no one in his or her right mind wants the Uranian revolutionaries to seize the halls of finance and power and set up a regime of their own. Historically, that tends to bring out the criminality to which dark Uranus is prone. Ask the Russians, the Chinese, the Cambodians, and any number of other unfortunate nations how their revolutions worked out once dark Uranus took over. (The major exception so far has been the good old USA.) As Forrest says, either alternative will be a disaster. So what’s the answer?
We’ve seen dark Pluto at work. What about wise Pluto? What if the intensity and power of the deepest, most courageous sort of knowledge of the human heart and mind were brought to bear on the problem of the distribution of resources? I know, I know, that’s just crazy talk, wild-eyed Utopian thinking like those Uranian whackos are always muttering over their hemp tea …
Hey, wait a minute. The Cosmic Scheduler has just dialed up Super Square, an epic meeting of the minds on exactly this issue. And it’s done so in and around the year 2012, when after long centuries of frenetic consciousness-raising, the collective awareness may finally have reached a tipping point.
Hades’ rulership of the underground realm included precious metals. The word ‘plutocrat’ is related to the Ancient Greek for wealth, ‘pluton’, (Πλούτων), which became Pluto when the Romans appropriated Greek mythology.
And if dark Uranus just wants to tear down the walls, string up The Man, and roast marshmallows over the flames of revolution, wise Uranus is a certified genius, an outside-the-box thinker, the kind who wants his community to flourish. Sure, Uranus in Aries is going to be a little hotheaded, a little impulsive, just as Pluto in Capricorn will tend to be set in his ways. It is a square, after all. Wise Uranus will use that fiery Arian energy to push for change. Wise Pluto will insist that the change doesn’t get out of control.
As we struggle forward to a new understanding of how to hold wealth, the old understandings—top-down communism, say, or unbridled capitalism—ain’t going to cut it this time.
The Earth can’t take it anymore. Another century of warfare, heedless exploitation, and fossil fuel addiction, and we’re all toast. I’m not speaking figuratively.
Yet wise Uranus and wise Pluto, with the Neptune assist from a wide sextile forming over the next three years, will hammer something out, something shiny and new, assuming we all bring our A game.
Patrick Hutchins
hutchins@bigsky.net
Related articles
- The Moon’s cycle and the Uranus Pluto square (laraowen.com)
- Why Everyone Is On Edge: Round 1 of the Uranus/Pluto Square (omtimes.com)
- The Uranus Pluto square and the personal planets (laraowen.com)
- Clow on the Uranus Pluto Square (deniselefay.wordpress.com)
- NorthPoint Astrology Journal: Your Guide to Planetary Energies for August 20-26, 2012 – by Pam Younghans (jhaines6.wordpress.com)
- Centre for Psychological Astrology (thestarryeye.typepad.com)
Please make the font darker. This is really hard to read.
Thank you.
If you are referring to the email you get directly from WordPress, they apparently send an automatic email that uses the font colors from the blog entry itself. Because the background of the blog is black, one usually has to use a lighter color in contrast.
On occasion, I can use a darker color, but generally only if it matches the artwork. The artwork determines the overall look of the blog, including the font colors. This is done from a design perspective. A lot of the information in the entry is contained in the artwork, and since the email they send you doesn’t show you the artwork (I don’t think it does, anyway) you’re missing a lot of the point of each blog entry by relying solely on the email, if you don’t actually come to the blog to see what the entry looks like. A lot of the point of this blog in particular is visual.
However, I too find most colors really hard to read on a black background, it has to be said—a lot of people like using black blogs, and they can be hard on the eyes. Black blogs often make my eyesight go all woogly. I’m always surprised people keep reading this blog, given that problem.
so thanks for reading, or trying to, anyway.
Hi Patrick,
I enjoyed your article.From one whose Sun just experienced Pluto’s transit & Moon Uranus’s,on the angles of a G.Cross,i agree with your observations and points.I feel the shift in the wind but dont hold out for for an enlightened revolution en mass as the people have been inundated with so much false data,brainwashing,biological/physical compromising etc etc….that i see chaos to wake up those on the fence and deeper understanding and impetus to evolve & rise above for those with the proclivity to the wiser aspects of this square.
Michael
Great article! Thanks for sharing. These are interesting (nail-biting) times, indeed…It will be nice when this square is is passed!
Ah, yes. I tried to read it on my phone. I could see the art, though (love the Remedios Varo, btw.) Reading it on a computer monitor is much easier. great post now that I can see the font!
Yes, not all technology makes using technology easier. One of our many postmodern conundrums.