Pluto in Sag/Cap through the Signs (Part 2)

In my last blog I looked at the effect on the various Sun signs of Pluto's move from Sagittarius to Capricorn. I managed to get through half the Zodiac – from Aries to Virgo. So this time, if you have Sun anywhere from Libra to Pisces, I’ll be telling you what this shift of Pluto from Sag to Capricorn might mean: what 12 year phase is ending in your life, and what 15 year period is beginning

LIBRA Pluto has been transiting your Solar 3rd House since 1995, empowering your ability to think, to study, to write and to communicate. The 3rd is a House of Reason (as opposed to the 9th of Faith), and like all human faculties it has its dark side. The Libran quest is to achieve wisdom through understanding the complexity of people and events, and seeing that there is often no ‘right’ answer. The dark side of our culture is the belief that reason, via science, can explain everything, and in this way other means of knowing are shut out, and reason itself is corrupted. Pluto has been pushing you to become a human being who knows the power and beauty of reason, but who also knows its limits. On the one hand he has not allowed you to by-pass reason, and use easy ‘mystical’ explanations; on the other hand, if you are a one-sidedly ‘reasonable’ Libran, you may have encountered unreason, either in yourself or in a partner, that has pushed you to have a broader outlook.

This long transit has prepared you for Pluto’s entry into the watery 4th House, where reason finds it hard to have a foothold, but can at the same time provide some much needed perspective. Pluto is on home territory here, and you will be faced with emotional realities that will transform you, maybe through betrayals and ruptures within the family that wake you up; or maybe, if you are older, with the death of one of more parents, that moves you into the next stage of your life. Whatever the events, you will have a sense of deep shifts on an emotional level, of passing from one age of your life to the next, and an accession of self-knowledge.

SCORPIO Pluto has been transiting your 2nd House, pushing you to let go of some long standing attachments. You may have made a lot of money during this period, and then like the Scorpios Bill Gates and Ted Turner, loosened your attitude to it, and even begun giving some away. More broadly, Pluto has been helping you loosen the convulsive grasp you can have on what feels important to you, perhaps certain possessions, places, people or principles, but which can get outdated and stand in the way of your evolution. Change doesn’t come easily to fixed Scorpios, it can be a process taking years, but it is deep and irrevocable.

As you have become less one-sidedly determined by instinctual compulsions, your mind is being freed to explore other possibilities, and this is the meaning of Pluto’s entry into your Solar 3rd House. The Scorpio Bill Gates has been talking publicly about the importance of curiosity in just the last few days. A healthy Scorpio is true to his/her instincts, but can find it hard to take reason seriously. The next 15 years are going to open you up to the mental realm, to the power of reason and its capacity for another kind of truth, for objectivity and perspective, and for the exploration of new possibilities in life.

SAGITTARIUS This is the sign that Pluto has been transiting for the last 12 years, so he has been in your 1st House, getting you to look at how you are in some very basic and general ways. The fundamentalism, the rigidly held beliefs of whatever kind, that we have seen in the world over this period have been a very useful mirror for these tendencies in yourself – tendencies that all human beings, in our existential insecurity, in our need for certainty, share. To what extent are the beliefs that fuel you a positive expression of your faith in life, and to what extent an expression of hidden insecurities, whose time for exposure and transformation has come?

Positively, Pluto has empowered your optimism, your confidence, your faith in life, your sense of deeper truths, your ability to step out enthusiastically into new adventures. But he has also empowered your blindness, your reluctance to think before you act, the self-serving nature of some of your beliefs, and if you’re lucky you will have come gloriously unstuck! As a Sagittarian, you have the resilience to be able to acknowledge your hypocrisy, your blindness, your impatient foolishness, your tyrannically held beliefs, when finally your eyes are opened. I’m laying it on thick, but that’s because you can take it!

What Sagittarians need to do is to come down to earth, make their visions real and practical, and Pluto will be taking you here over the next 15 years as he enters your 2nd house of money. As the Native American saying goes: “Don’t tell me about your visions unless they grow corn.” More broadly, the second house concerns our talents and what they are worth. It will be a time of testing yourself in the marketplace, seeing what people are prepared to pay in hard cash for what you can do. Making the vision real, discovering that it is robust enough to withstand dirty, mundane, earthly reality.

CAPRICORN These last 12 years have been difficult for you as Pluto has transited your 12th House. Your natural tendency is towards concrete, practical, measurable achievement. This is what makes you feel that your life is worth something. Pluto has been forcing you into the 12th House, the most intangible, dreamlike place in the horoscope, and you have found it hard to ‘achieve’ and be productive in the way you like to be. You may have become depressed. But what Pluto has wanted of you is to listen to a different drumbeat, to have more of a sense of vocation with your life, where you are not the narrow judge of the value of what you do; rather, you need to get your sense of fulfilment through allowing something greater to work through you.

As Pluto moves to cross your Solar Ascendant, these wilderness years are coming to an end. You now have the capacity to listen to that different drumbeat, as well as the natural Capricornian ability to do something practical with it. Pluto will be empowering you to achieve a lot in the next 15 years, but he will give you a hard time whenever you get negatively Capricorn: when you get too narrow and cautious and result-oriented and proud; or whenever you decide it just isn’t worth the effort and slide into depression.

AQUARIUS You have been on home territory these last 12 years as Pluto has transited your 11th House. This is a House of group networking, of ideals and aspirations, and this period has coincided with the arrival of the internet, a fun-fest for Aquarians and their dreams. Neptune in Aquarius and Uranus in Pisces have further emphasised this. Globalisation, the continuing advance of technology, the beginnings of an ecological awareness on a worldwide scale and its resultant technologies. Aquarians have been having fun. They have been empowered by Pluto.

Like Sagittarians, Aquarians aren’t always that good at ordinary human reality, and Pluto has also been asking that of you. Yes, you can make all these contacts and friends, but how much of that is real, and how much just shared mental electricity? It has been time to identify your real friends, acknowledge those enduring soul connections as they turn up in your life, and this has given you depth as a human being. With Pluto in your 11th, you may have been through a big shift in your network of friends.

And like a Sagittarian (and an Aries!) you too can be rigidly ideological. And it’s because your ideas get disconnected from people, you get too ‘clever’, you mistake envisagements for visions. With Pluto passing through the 11th, such ideas will have backfired on you, perhaps painfully, forcing you to look at how people actually work, connecting you with them, and bringing your dreams and aspirations down to earth.

Brilliant as they can be, Aquarians can be one-sidedly conceptual, and this is going to make life hard for them as Pluto moves into their Solar 12th House. Not only is Pluto entering Aquarius’ Neptune House, but for the next few years Uranus – the ruler of Aquarius - will continue to be in Neptune’s sign of Pisces, and Neptune will continue to be in the sign of Aquarius. And during 2008, Jupiter will also be in your solar 12th House.

So they are all ganging up on Aquarians! You really are being asked to listen to yourself in a way that you are not used to. You are a fixed sign, you have a definite sense of who you are (remember Saturn is co-ruler of Aquarius), and you’re having to let go of that, and let your whole life be guided by something you don’t understand and can’t understand. You don’t fully trust it, and yet it is a siren call, everything can fall into place once you let yourself be guided in this way.

So this is your path and your challenge for the next 15 years. Every time you come from Will or Ideas, Pluto is going to undermine you. Let your sense of who you are be fuzzy so that it can soften. Be patient and make sure something really feels right before you act. And you’ll be surprised by the quality of what you do.

PISCES This has been a strong transit for you as Pluto has spent the last 12 years passing though your 10th House of career and vocation. The 10th House is not an easy place for the retiring, sensitive sign of Pisces. Pluto has been demanding you find your power out there in the world. But what he wants of you is your own power, your own confidence and strength, not that which you appear to have by virtue of your success, and which can easily be taken away from you.

Pisces is good at doing a disappearing act when faced with a challenge. So you may have spent the last 12 years struggling to have any impact at all, and felt miserable and hopeless in the face of Pluto’s demands: but, when you have finally achieved something, however small, it has been genuine and inspired and soulful. And that is all Pluto wants of you: he wants something that is real and that is in your case the voice of Spirit, at which you excel. The singer Pete Doherty is a good example of a Pisces faced with this 10th House challenge, but unable (so far) to meet it: he has disappeared into a world of drug addiction and of being the ultimate in self-destructive ‘cool’, and there’s no sign yet of him rising out of it. Pluto may yet force the issue before he finally leaves Sagittarius. Pluto will go all the way, and may in this case even mean death.

The other way that Pisces can disappear when faced with a 10th House challenge is to let the rest of the chart take over, and shape-shift to fit in with the world around you. You may well have succeeded, but you have also been betraying yourself big-time, and probably unconsciously. You’ll probably end up with some strange compulsions to compensate for this! As Pluto leaves Sagittarius, he may take you down, brutally, from the heights to which he has raised you. He may even destroy your career. But that is to get you to listen to that huge side of yourself, the Sun, your real centre. A good case in point is Gordon Brown, the UK Prime Minister. He has been very driven and very successful during Pluto’s time in Sagittarius. But people have always felt that the man isn’t quite right. He is actually very Pisces, he is a very feelingful, compassionate human being at heart, which we occasionally see glimpses of, but what we see mainly is the driven control freak who is in denial of all this. As Pluto reaches the end of his Solar 10th House, we have begun to see some spectacular disintegration of his career, a process that may continue over the next year. (What I feel with Gordon Brown is that at least he is a human being, however odd, whereas with Blair I have never felt that.)

Because what career needs to be for Pisces perhaps more than for any other sign is vocation. This is what you are emerging with from Pluto’s transit through Sagittarius, however germinal. Of course, you may be a well-sorted Pisces and have gone from strength to strength. Whichever, it is now time to bring that sense of vocation to a wider audience, to share it with the collective. This will be the meaning for you of Pluto’s passage through Capricorn.

A career is about you making your mark on the world. Fair enough, we all need to do that. But a vocation is a gift from Wherever, it is not yours, it is something that works through you, and it needs to be shared. Because it comes from a wider source, it speaks to the Collective, you are an agent for the transformation of the Collective: Pluto in the 11th. So whatever it is you do or are, you need to connect it out there. It may be by just having a few friends who understand your ravings. Or, if your gift is fully fledged, it is time to take it to a wider audience. Either way, you can trust in Pluto to empower your gifts and your sense of vocation if you have the courage to let others see it. This is often the stumbling block: people may be perfectly confident at ordinary tasks, but feel ridiculously shy and timid about their unique talents. So don’t be over-confident or under-confident. Just be real, and Pluto will empower you.