Astrological Musings — Mid-Year Review: Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus (June 18, 2023)
(If you wish to listen to the show instead, here is the link on BlogTalk or Apple Podcasts)
As we approach the middle of our civil calendar year in July, (but for us who follow “the stars” we mark this moment as having reached only one quarter of our Astrological year), I thought it would be helpful to refresh our understanding of the various planetary influences and their messages for us this year. As I have noted, the orbits of the planets around our star, what I like to call “the dance of the planets”, with their hierarchical and unfolding patterns, and their intersections with one another, what we Astrologers call “aspects”, provide us with a very rich source for the meanings and contexts of what shapes our lives, and they can shine a light of some greater of lesser illumination upon the unfoldment or timing of the significant phases in our human journey here upon the Earth.
I will always stress that the planetary placements and motions do not “make” any particular event or circumstance “happen”. Similar alignments and patterns were taking place thousands, tens of thousands and certainly millions of years ago. It is not possible for us to understand what that might have meant to the various life-forms living on the Earth long, long ago. All we can do is bring to bear our human consciousness, our type of awareness and understanding of ourselves and the worlds around us; and, as we observe this dance of the planets, as we have for many, many thousands of years marveled at the beauty of the stars above, we are able to see if what occurs “above” forms a correspondence with what happens “below”. By this awareness of our relationship with our fellow celestial companions, we may hopefully gain a greater understanding and perhaps even some wisdom that comes from this inspiration by these greater beings with whom we travel around our star, and to recognize and find significance, meaning and guidance for our human lives, as we create our story and dance with one another here on Earth.
So, as we have done before, let us begin with the outermost and most significant influencers (and I would argue these influencers as being much more important than those featured on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok!), let us consider these great companions in our human journey through the stars, and by that I mean let us review the messages and meanings being imparted to us by the planets Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus.
Though we can and do look at each of these three as having their own specific role or place in the hierarchy of Astrological influences, I find it quite impossible, as you know, I find it impossible to truly understand any one of them without also considering the other two as well. For they form what we might call a "Triptych of meaning", as at the deepest level for me they are the Avatars of the Triad of Spirit, so that Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus are the Will, Love, and Mind of the One. Their journey through the Signs, and their series of aspects that they form with one another, create this most fundamental Song of Spirit for our solar system, and so equally for us humans here upon the Earth.
Pluto
For our purposes today, let us begin with Pluto and its cycle of meaning for us now. During 2023 Pluto is beginning to move from Capricorn into Aquarius, heralding a new period of Pluto’s influence for our world. During Pluto’s time in Capricorn since 2008 (and that continues through parts of this year too), we have witnessed the breaking down of the institutional order that was founded in the latter part of the 1700’s and first half of the 1800’s (that is, when Pluto moved through Aquarius from 1778 to 1798, then Pisces from 1798 to 1853, and then finally into Aries from 1823 to 1853).
That means what we are experiencing from 2023 to 2044, is that it should carry or have some of the same meaningfulness, hold some of the same messages and offer some of the same opportunities and challenges as our ancestors faced from 1778 to 1798, which is when Pluto then as now focused its alchemical influence through the lens of the meanings held by the Sign of Aquarius. What might that be?
The heart of Aquarius concerns the very nature of our hopes and dreams, which are forged and formed by the quintessential quality of our very nature in being human. That we are made human by the nature, quality and type of our families, our fellowships, and our communities, by the type of social constructs we form to meet our needs for ourselves and for one another, and that we are the very means for our individual and collective self-fulfillment. What is at the heart of Aquarius is the future of who and what we will be, what kind of future are we making, what will our children’s, children’s lives be like, what kind of world will they have because of what we did and how we did it.
Since 2008, the institutional structures of the world have been warped and bent by their own internal contradictions as well as by the external pressures brought about through historical changes. Many institutions met this moment and were found to be deficient or failed, some were tested and held to their intent and purpose, but they were changed (and are still changing). But around the world humans have wondered why, why now does it seem like the world, my world, is “falling apart”?
The answer quite simply put is this, we are experiencing this because it “is time”, as it also was in the 1700’s and the 1500’s, (and times before and times to come). That is because no structure or system can remain for all time when the whole purpose behind creation, embedded in the very nature of Spirit, that all of life is driven by the fundamental imperative which is “to be and to become”, to move from one form of realization and then into another.
The institutions forged in the late 1700’s and 1800’s, these forms of meeting our needs were made to meet the needs of humanity at that time. But we have changed, our dreams have changed, and the systems we have to meet our needs must change too.
What Pluto in Aquarius will show us is that it is not just the form that was wrong. It was not merely a problem with the systems or structures, because they did in fact “solve” the challenges at their founding. But this is also true, those very solutions equally created the very problems and crises we now face. The real question we need to face now is what is the dream of humanity, what will be at the heart of our dream for “a good life”?
What will form those dreams of that future “good life” is most certainly being shaped by our newly “rediscovered” understanding that all of life, that all of creation here on Earth is interdependent and precious, that the greatest richness of this planet is life itself, and we should be “all for one and one for all”, yes humans, but for all of life as well.
What became the mantra for our so-called modern world was the purpose of life was having “more of more”, leading to endless consumption as an economic way of being, and that has led to the widespread destruction of the hierarchies of life to meet our wants. This path of wanton destruction has finally been met with the incontrovertible Truth, which is that we can now see that there is a finite nature of what the Earth and all her life forms can sustainably continue to support so that we all may thrive. We need less quantities in our life and more meaningful qualities of living with all of life.
Neptune
What Pluto will bring every time to every realm is transformation, as it holds the driver of Creation which is Alchemy, which we know and experience as the great cycling of Birth-Death-Rebirth. But Neptune is also part of the story, and it has been offering another song in the chorus of spirit to guide our steps in this time of change too. Since 2011 and continuing until 2026, we have been inspired and confused, we have experienced illuminations as the veils between worlds thins, and equally found ourselves stumbling into shadows and fears, and all of this has been heralded by the passage of Neptune through the Sign of Pisces. The boundaries between the realms of Creation, from the densest of physical planes on up to the most ethereal realms of consciousness and spiritual inspirations have become more tenuous, and great visions and troubling delusions have been thrown into our understanding of our world. We have watched and wondered as our paradigms of belief have been warped and broken, as our boundaries between truth and fantasy, between what is fact and fiction have dissolved and we have become untethered from our former certainties in faith or science. We find ourselves in a time in which it seems that anything may be true, and yet nothing is what it seems. As Yeats famously observed as world events seems to unravel and plunge us into ever greater clouds of despair and fears, we humans seem to divide between, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”.
We can look to other times when Neptune was in the sign of Pisces to gain some insight as to how we might understand the opportunities and dangers for us now. Two of Neptune previous passages might provide us with some insight. The time most like our own was from 1521 to 1535, as it was also a time with Pluto in Capricorn. I have described that period as being much like ours, as an end of an age, where the Institutional order was breaking down and the Ideological realms were dissolving as well, where both the realms Secular and Sectarian were coming undone, where Civil Society and the Ideas that supported it were rent asunder, so that that the Civil and Religious orders clashed over the realms of Church and State, and a struggle between collective beliefs and individual conscience prevailed.
More recently, Neptune was in Pisces from 1848 to 1862, and around the world in Europe and in Asia, and certainly here in the USA, the understanding of what it means to be human, of how we should guide our relationships with our fellow humans, whatever their origins, whatever their beliefs, to see one another as equal or unequal, led in the USA to the existential struggle over slavery in the Civil War. The clearly defined schism between one culture and lifeway and another was brought to a climax, and we thought the issue had been met and mastered, or at least that is what we told ourselves. Yes, Neptune is the Avatar that holds our beliefs, which we share in our stories about one another. But the story of our struggle for justice, equality and equity was not nearly done, not at all.
In our current period we have watched as the commonly held truths of society have again been eroded, questioned and in some cases overwhelmed by a cacophony of half-truths, conspiratorial imaginings and deliberate deceptions that have spread throughout the minds of so very many by the proliferation of data streams with no apparent anchoring to some central beliefs rooted in core values and spiritual truths. The very same ideals and half-truths have erupted once more, for we really did not overcome fears, and we find ourselves divided once again.
Uranus
What Pluto holds is the spiritual truth of the unfoldment of Creation as the Alchemical Transformation of Union and Rebirth; what Neptune holds is the spiritual truth of the Community of belief, of our story about ourselves and our world, (where we should ultimately know that there is but One Spirit), and we are here for one purpose only, which is to “love one another”. But the third Avatar of the Triad of Spirit, Uranus, holds for us the equally insistent spiritual drive which is for Individuality and Freedom. The way I like to understand these three Avatars of Spirit is that we are all upon the path of awakening in which we are learning to live within our Centered Wills, formed by our Unconditional Love and guided by our ever-Freer Minds.
From 2018 to 2026, Uranus for us now is moving through the Sign of Taurus, which we understand as the vessel of Value, the holder of why, what, and how we form our world of values. We can again have some perspective or understanding of what our period asks of us by looking at the previous times of Uranus in Taurus, 1768 to 1775, 1851 to 1859 and 1935 to 1942.
The passage in the 1700’s manifested in a mounting clash of ideas over the value of authoritarian/monarchial rule versus the cause of liberty and self-representation leading up to the beginning of our Revolutionary War in 1775. The period of the 1850’s marked the time of our great struggle over the value of our conception of whether humans are equal or not, as the slaveholding states struggled with the non-slave states as to whether future states would be admitted as “slave” or “free”, with that question being “answered” by our Civil War. The mid-1930’s to early 1940’s saw the struggle over whether, after the failure of unregulated/unrestrained capitalism in the Great Depression, how much of a role the government should play in providing for the common welfare, of our common values, as the USA found a middle path between the ideologies of Fascism and Communism.
In the present Uranus passage in Taurus, our the struggle over values continues as we find that the end of the struggle between Capitalism and Communism, between the East and the West, that the West supposedly won, has led to a world where the proliferation of more wants and the production of more goods, and more wants and more goods, has led to the world-wide destruction of life-forms and ecosystems on the planet. We have made a world where the value that has only quantity as a quality, is destroying all the other values of life on the planet and we find a lack of meaningfulness in our lives.
Uranus-Neptune-Pluto
So, it would seem that we are from Uranus having to reassess our values once more, and from Neptune to reconsider our relationship to our fellow humans and to all life-forms as being part of the greater community of Spirit, while Pluto in combination with these other two of the Triad of Spirit will once again bring about a struggle over what our Hopes and Dreams will be now for the future world we are creating for our descendants. Will they honor us, or will they not?
Though we may at times feel that these challenges and questions posed to us, the very existential struggles we find ourselves troubled by are overwhelming and unsolvable, we must remember that the way the world is today, that is of our own making. Our ancestors long ago, and we in this present day, have made and our making choices that have created these challenges, and therein lies our hope.
We can change; we must be the change.
The future for ourselves and for all life-forms on this planet depends upon us.
Let us meet this moment we made with courage, with love and with the faith that comes from understanding that we have within us the means to make a better world for one and for all.
