The Beginning of the End ... or the End of the Beginning?

Quite a Kid, T. C. Gardstein, 2003

So long an absence, so many planetary changes, so little time.

We are teetering on the edge of Pluto in Capricorn, assuming the crash position for Pluto ingressing into Aquarius this Thursday for the first time since 1798. We are still getting our sealegs with the newborn Aries season and Saturn in Pisces (as of 3/7; Saturn spends 2.5 years in a sign). The New Moon at 0'50" Aries Tuesday at 1:23 p.m. EDT is especially important as it's a critical degree, and most likely will launch us in the Northern Hemisphere into spring with a bang.

Plus, the U.S. has only been on Daylight Saving Time for a week. So we have literally just jumped ahead by an hour as well as being on the verge of a major Plutonian shift, a cosmic quantum leap on a par with the monolith of 2001. The rumblings of this new era have already been afoot in the form of a new generation of chatbots, but we ain't seen nothing yet.

Pluto is not going gentle into that badass Capricorn, to be sure. It's been one institutional crisis after another; not surprisingly, institutions and the status quo are associated with this Cardinal Earth sign. We came into this era with the financial collapse of 2008, during which we bailed out the banks that were "too big to fail," and just two years later the Citizens United case gave the green light to unfettered corporate interests in politics. Corporations essentially were recognized as people with the right to free speech and unlimited donations, though people still could not fight City Hall.

The Uranus-Pluto square of 2012-15 terrified astrologers, as it was the chief aspect of the Great Depression 84 years earlier (and the out-of-context "end of the world" prophesized in the Mayan calendar) -- but it was the deranged Saturn-Neptune square of 2016 that proved more dangerous, with the rise of Trump.

The Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 2020 was the signature of the Covid pandemic. Our home planet Earth itself is ill, as the climate emergency ramps up floods, draughts, extreme heat, extreme cold, and extreme storms. The U.S. Pluto Return of 2022 was marked by an increase of mass shootings at home and a war on women, although Neptune in Pisces continued to soften the long-standing War on Drugs. And once again, failing banks are scandalous, pearl-clutching news.

I am hoping that Pluto in Aquarius brings the kind of monolith that will advance technology in such a way that we can actually save the planet even if we are toast as a species. What concerns me at the moment is that Pluto backs up into Capricorn two more times before it moves into revolutionary, electrified Aquarius for good (well, for the next 20 or so years, anyway). In other words, Pluto will be at the tail end of Capricorn during the election of 2024.

Yikes.