Pluto in Capricorn and Neptune in Pisces: the New Reformation?

I’m starting to think that Pluto functions particularly powerfully in Capricorn. Look at the present transit: just under 4 years in, and we are in the thick of the Great Recession. Pluto’s last transit through Capricorn saw the American Declaration of Independence. And the time before that saw Martin Luther kicking off the Reformation.

Huge stuff that revolutionises the establishment, as you would expect from Pluto (transformation) in Capricorn (the establishment). In the first case, it was religious. In the second case, political (the French Revolution followed soon after.) And in today’s case, it is so far looking economic, though with clear political implications.

Why should Pluto function so powerfully in Capricorn? Maybe it is that Pluto, after his discovery, took on many of the attributes (such as death) previously associated with Capricorn’s ruler, Saturn. Maybe Capricorn, with its tendency to become encrusted and conservative, is like a red rag to Pluto who, underneath his demolition hat, is really concerned to bring about renewal.

In the 1520s, when Martin Luther was starting the Reformation, it was particularly the Church’s decadence, such as its sale of indulgences, that he was attacking. In what became the US in the 1770s, there was successful rebellion against the old-style established European Monarchy, heralding the rise of democracy across the western world.

Pluto in Capricorn destroys that which is decadent in the establishment. We don’t yet know what is being destroyed by Pluto’s present passage through Capricorn. Unlike the 1520s and 1770s, this transit is being intensified and made more dramatic by a square from Uranus. We can speculate: the West has had continual prosperity since soon after WWII. Taking it for granted, we have borrowed far too much and lived beyond our means. And growth has become an end in itself, a sacred mantra. That is decadence, an economic establishment that is no longer useful. The same with the American political system and European politics in the form of the EU. Both have recently shown they cannot work effectively in a crisis. That Democracy which was heralded by the last transit of Pluto in Capricorn has itself become decadent. America treats its political system as sacred and as an example to the world. It would be mega if that changed, but the astrological signs are that it will, particularly as the US comes up to its Pluto Return at 27 Capricorn in 9 to 10 years time.

The big question is what is coming next. Many people, astrologers and non-astrologers alike, can see a storm coming, particularly economically. In a way it’s obvious. My reading of the 2008 Pluto Ingress Chart is of a prolonged Recession coupled with deep structural change. I’m not thinking Depression, which suggests a much bigger drop in output and rate of unemployment. If Pluto was in Sag or Pisces, for example, I would be thinking Depression because you get boom and bust under these signs to a much greater degree, both being Jupiter and or Neptune-ruled.

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But Pluto in Capricorn is not like that. It is about creating solid foundations after an initial tearing down. In the Ingress Chart, Pluto is conjunct Venus and Jupiter and trine to Capricorn’s ruler, Saturn. I think this set of planets is probably a key to understanding the Recession. Saturn is Retrograde, suggesting Recession in order to restructure. Venus indicates that the economy is part of what Pluto in Cap will be addressing. Jupiter is the expansion that will return to the economy. And Pluto is gradually transiting all these planets. He will make his final crossing of the Ingress Jupiter in December 2012, a few months after the first exact square from Uranus to Pluto. This Pluto Ingress-Jupiter transit in Cap suggests the West re-formulating its ideas around economic growth, moving towards something more realistic and sustainable. For one, that means lower growth, and therefore new ideas around what matters in the economy: economic values, which is the Venus part of the stellium.

We haven’t hit bottom yet, but I suspect by the end of next year, after the Ingress transits and the first Uranus-Pluto square, we will be beginning to see a new kind of future; the Capricornian new foundation will be there, at least as an idea.

This, of course, is 2012 that we are talking about, a year that has its own mythology built up around it that can be quite apocalyptic. Remember the year 2000 also had this kind of mythology, and so have many years before that. Most prophecies do not come true, particularly these apocalyptic ones, and particularly ones that have become part of the collective and which do not have the proper discernment of a competent diviner behind them. When you are making a prediction, you are using intuition, but you have your own plumbing to pass it through first, and that needs to be clean. And there are all sorts of qualifications and justifications (if you are an astrologer) that need to be made around the prediction you are making. 2012 is a speculative prediction based on an extinct culture that has gained considerable collective momentum. I think that a lot of people probably do have a genuine intuition that a lot is going to happen in 2012, and western astrology backs that up, like it would for a lot of other years where a lot has happened.

I think it’s important not to let that genuine intuition be blurred by the New Age hype around 2012. These collective things do not have the discerning intelligence that an individual has, they scare people, and they are usually wrong.

I began this piece while thinking about the combination of Pluto in Capricorn and Neptune in Pisces, and when did that last happen? Because these 2 planets more than any other describe the age we are living in. The last time it happened was 1520-1531, when the Reformation began. This was a huge event, because the Church had so much power, and because it was so fundamental to the way people saw the world.

So not only was a major institution torn apart – Pluto in Capricorn – but people were also freed to have their own direct relationship to God, without the need for an intercessionary priest: this was Neptune in Pisces. Neptune is the mythologies we live by, and religion as myth (rather than as belief and dogma, which is Jupiter) comes under that heading. In Pisces, there are no barriers between you and God, it is the aspect of the mystic.

So that maybe gives us a clue as to the meaning of the age we live in now, which has the same signature as the Reformation. It is fascinating, because it is so unlikely, to find these 2 planets in the same signs so recently, and for such a huge and descriptive event to have occurred.

What we are looking for is the tearing apart of an encrusted establishment that leaves people free to experience reality for themselves. An establishment that has dogmas behind it. There are a few possibilities.

Politically, there is the dogma of democracy. We are led to believe that this is the most advanced political system, and that all societies will naturally evolve towards it, particularly if they get a helping hand, militarily if necessary, from ourselves. The democratic system, as I said earlier, is proving ineffective in the current crisis after 240 years, one Pluto cycle, in the ascendancy. To be ‘undemocratic’ is to be a bad person, and this dogma subverts free thought.

Economically there is the dogma of growth and free market capitalism. The economic success of the West has led to the belief that its political system, Democracy, must also be responsible for that success. So there is a tangle of beliefs here which will take a hit as the West becomes relatively less powerful and China, which is not a democracy, gradually becomes the leading superpower. The triumph in the Cold War confirmed the West’s belief in its own politics and economic system. The triumph of China will reverse that belief.

But if we are going to stick as closely as we can to the events of the 1520s, then we need to look for the undermining of a state-backed religious establishment that has undue power over people’s minds. That religious establishment is Science. The Ingress Chart for Pluto in Cap in 1515 had Pluto in a loose stellium opposite Jupiter, religion and belief. The current Ingress Chart also has Pluto in a stellium involving Jupiter, so a revolution in Science-as-Religion seems plausible.

Moreover, the Ingress Chart for Neptune in Pisces has 6 planets, including a New Moon and Jupiter, in Aries. This is very strong, and suggests new guiding mythologies.

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Science today provides the answers to the metaphysical questions that the Church used to provide. Like the medieval Church, it has state power behind it, and presents itself as the only possible reality. There is an enormous amount of freeing up of people’s minds that is needed here – it is a collective brainwashing as far reaching as occurred under medieval Christianity. Science, of course, has its validity: the brainwashing lies in the notion that it describes the only reality, the one true way of seeing the world.

The astrology is there, over the next 10 years, for this primitive way of seeing the world to start to fragment decisively (just as the events of the 1520s, dramatic as they were, were just a beginning – and beginnings are not always apparent at the time.)

The reason I think this may happen – and I am being speculative – is that we may be reaching the limits of Science at the micro and macro levels. In the middle ground, so to speak, Science continues to progress and technological developments occur apace.

But when we go down to the quantum level, or up to the galactic level, there are indications that the scientific paradigm may be breaking down. At the galactic level, there is the phenomenon of dark matter, an undetectable form of matter that allegedly makes up 83% of the universe. It has remained undetected ever since it was first postulated in the 1930s to explain the rotation of galaxies, which do not obey Newton’s Law of Gravity. In any other discipline, it would by now have been laughed out of court. I think it is a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Science has also been stuck for a long time at the micro level. For decades this counter-intuitive world has been described by a model that involves the notion of supersymmetry. But there has been no experimental evidence for it. Evidence does now seem to be being gathered, but it leads away from the idea! The quantum world is one that no-one can ever see directly, possessed of numerous attributes that the mind can never fully grasp, and which seems to become more complex and fragmented the more it is pursued.

Then there is the Holy Grail of Science, the Theory of Everything, that would unite the micro and macro levels in one Grand Theory. For some decades String Theory has been the leading contender.

For some time there were 5 competing versions, then someone united them all under M Theory, which posits 11 dimensions, some of them existing at a nano level and wrapped up inside other dimensions. The theory is still not complete, and has been criticised for being untestable and lacking predictive power.

I think my point is clear! At the micro and macro levels, science seems to have been stuck for some time. And it doesn’t seem to me like some Einstein needs to come along and resolve it all. Science is and always has been a model of physical reality, and as a model it inevitably has limits: the model will break down when pushed to an extreme. Those limits seem to me to be being reached, and this will have a profound effect on the way we see the world. Every schoolkid will one day learn that Science no longer works when faced with the extremely large and extremely small, and it is therefore just a tool rather than a metaphysical system to which all other disciplines should bow. Pluto in Capricorn alongside Neptune in Pisces seems a good place to start: the dismantling of a rigid orthodoxy and the freeing of the individual to have their own perception of reality. This cultural impulse could be further established as Pluto moves on to Aquarius, the sign of Science; and as Neptune moves into Aries, a place of new mythologies. And let us hope that in the process the West moves on from its 1000 year love affair with monotheisms.