Pluto's Cycle through the Stars

In her latest Visual Astrology Newsletter, Bernadette Brady has the really interesting idea of tracing the path of Pluto through the heavens from early last century to well into this one. It is interesting not just because Pluto in many ways defines the times we live in, but because Pluto strays way off the ecliptic and so passes through constellations that are not a normal part of the zodiac, but which still have their traditional meanings.

Here is a key excerpt:

"Pluto's cycle through the stars.

If we start the cycle as shown in Figure 1, you will notice that Pluto moves through the top of the constellation Orion and actually sits on the tip of the club. This last occurred in the year 1914 and as Pluto moved onto the weapon of the great heavenly warrior king, World War I erupted. Pluto will, of course, be on Orion's club every 248 years, so it is interesting to note that in the previous occurrence in 1666 that it was the year of the Great Fire of London 2 - 6 September, 1666.

Pluto then moves towards the ecliptic and crosses it (moving south to north) and as it crosses over this point of the two hemispheres, it also passes between the feet of Castor and Pollux, effectively splitting the two twins. It is "coincidences" like this that remind me that the sky, for astrologers, is an enchanted place, for the central issue of the mythology of these twins is that of polarity. Thus to have Pluto, with all its symbolism of polarity in modern astrology, cross from one hemisphere to the other and, at the same time to be "splitting" the heavenly twins is a strong pictorial representation of the nature of this constellation and this planet. Now the last time Pluto split the twins and crossed hemispheres was in 1930, the time of the Wall St Crash and resulting world Depression.

From 1951 to the late 1960s Pluto was traveling through the stars of Leo and entered this constellation through the head of the lion, stressing, I believe, the heady arrogance of the West as it fought against communism and strove for global capitalism in this period. However as Pluto "rolled" down the back of Leo, in 1962/3 it reached the star Zosma. This star is the point where the lion's back was broken by Hercules and as such is associated with the theme of perpetrator /victim. It is a star of suffering, of minority causes and of being "crushed" by a heavy hand. In this period of the early 1960s, as the US was establishing a military base in South Vietnam upgrading the conflict of the Vietnam war there were also race riots in Birmingham, Alabama. The authorities heavily crushed the African-Americans at that time and this lead to the eventual arrest of Martin Luther King. From these two issues - the race riots and the upgrading of the Vietnam conflict, lead to the emergence of the Peace Movement of the 1960s as well as the human rights movement respectively. Thus as Pluto "rolled" down the back of the Lion and over Zosma the floodgates of human rights and of the peace movement opened."

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