Mars Conjunct Pluto — A Reckoning in Aquarius

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/].

Happy Monday, everybody. Today, we're going to take a look at the transit of the week, maybe one of the biggest Mars transits of the year, and that is Mars conjoining Pluto in the sign of Aquarius.

I've got a list of five things to watch for today, and then the coverage will continue as the week goes on. We will do some more horoscopes, reminding you of the whole sign house location, and I've got a little deeper meditation written as well, but today we'll cover it first from that kind of, kind of put it into an archetypal vacuum, and look at the major themes that are likely to come up when Mars and Pluto can join in this sign. So that's our agenda for today.

Before we get into it, remember to like and subscribe, share your comments, your reflections. Where are you at right now in life? I hope you're all doing well. It's been a lot. Transcripts can be found on the website, Nightlight astrology.com, if you haven't subscribed yet, please take a second to do so.

If you like this work, you like this channel, we need support. People subscribing. It helps us grow and sustains what we do. So thank you very much. I'm going to take you over to the website, because during these turbulent times, you may or may not have heard that we're in the midst of a 40 day meditation challenge.

I was really inspired by the Buddhist monks walking for peace right now, and I was thinking a lot about what I can do in my corner of the woods here in Minnesota. So events, go to Silent Sundays, and you'll find the schedule listed here for our meditation meetups. Scroll down and you'll find that the 40 day sit is happening Monday through Saturdays, 9:30am Eastern Time, and then on Sundays, at 11:30am Eastern Time, the free link to join is there.

You just need to use that passcode that's listed there as well. Come sit with us. We sit for 20 minutes Monday through Saturday, just briefly. What good way to start your day? It's free. And then Sundays, we meet as well. So that's something that could help you regulate your nervous system during times where there's just a lot to process personally and collectively.

Then from my heart to all of you, I hope that that is useful. Couple of other things happening. If you go to the events page as well, you can see that the speaker series is we're in the midst of the speaker series, and there's some good talks coming up. So check those out the readings, affordable readings are there tiered pricing, so that nobody's priced out of getting astrological service.

I perform horary readings. That's the I do natal consults, but only in the context of my training programs. At this point, trying to hand the reins over to a lot of other people who are talented and need time to to grow and develop. Our third year course is about to start. Masterclass just started, and the guild membership just started. Not too late to join any of those. So check all that out.

And now let's turn our attention to the real time clock. So here we are, Monday, January 26 hard to believe. We're almost a month into the new year already, and it has been an Aquarius. It's been an Aquarius mosh pit. And look, today, Mars is within a degree of Pluto. Tomorrow, they'll conjoin.

By Wednesday, they'll they will be only a degree of separation apart. It's going to take all the way until Friday, until they get two degrees apart. Give it that full three degree range of separation that we like to see that is taking us all the way through Saturday and oh, by the way, it is today into tomorrow that Neptune enters the sign of Aries.

And so that will also be part of our coverage for this week. The flash point of Neptune entering Aries, that zero Aries marker at the exact same time that Mars is conjoining Pluto is it's just so epic. I don't even know what to say about it. It's like, wow, that's interesting. And no doubt you can, I can promise you that we are also going to have, we have Neptune and Aries coverage this week.

We've got horoscopic coverage of Neptune in Aries archetypal coverage, and we're also tracking that Mars Pluto conjunction this week. So that's really our focus for this week, because those are two of the biggest events happening side by side of our calendar year. You know what I find really wild about this stage of the what I find really wild about this, this calendar year, astrologically, sorry, I couldn't find my words, is that so much of the most powerful astrology happens in the first two to three months of the year.

There's other powerful astrology. Don't get me wrong. It's not like you're going to be like, ooh, the rest of 2026 is a snooze, but perhaps the most dynamic is January, February and March, right off the bat. So it's pretty wild to just enter right into like an astrological blender. But here we are, and I want to give you today a list of five things to watch for.

Given the conjunction of Mars Pluto that's taking place this week, even though Neptune entering Aries could easily have led off the week, I chose this one because Mars Pluto is a bit more dynamic, and I think will punctuate the Aries. The ingress into Aries a little bit more brightly. Outer planets changing signs are a big deal.

The Ingress week or two is a big deal. The first degree of a new planet in a new sign is always changing. Whole sign houses in our chart, so that's why we will dedicate some time to it this week. But that's just my reasoning for why I chose Mars Pluto today. So five things to watch for. We're going to add to this as the week goes on, and refine it with horoscopes.

But the first one, let's be real. It's collective power struggles, power struggles within groups, power struggles within networks, power struggles that intensify and move through collectives, what we might call movements. Movements can be cultural, they can be political, they can be ideological. They can be about things that bring people together across boundaries that would typically separate or divide.

That's the powerful thing about Mars Pluto in Aquarius is that it has the power to galvanize people into collective affiliation or unity and directedness toward a creative aim, a desire, a goal, defending, protecting something, fighting for something or just doing something. It doesn't even have to be fighting, just doing something that might typically divide people.

I find that this is true, a stupid example, really, but like when you go to a sports arena, and I love sports, when, when, when I go see a basketball game or something like that, you know, I'm sitting next to a whole bunch of people and cheering with them and treating them like they're my brothers and my sisters, even though we probably vote differently.

We I'm into astrology. They probably think that they, if they knew that, they might think, what a what a jerk. You know. So anyway, the point is that there are certain things that bring our collective focus together for a purpose that can also help us transcend boundaries that might otherwise divide us. This is one of the most galvanizing, interesting parts of Mars and Pluto combining in the sign of Aquarius that we can watch for at the exact same time, power struggles or conflicts within such groups, movements or collectives are also common where division is more of a theme between different groups or collective categories.

Let's call it. Let's call it that are vying for power or dominance, whether that's an organization or an institution or a company or a place of education, an online community, an activist group, a professional network. Mars will bring confrontation, and Pluto will galvanize that by saying, let's, let's bring this conflict up from a place that has been almost ready to boil for a while, and now it's reaching a point where conflict or some kind of confronting is not only necessary, but unavoidable.

And there can also be ways of exposing things that have been unseen and Mars will somehow act as the trigger for a volcanic release of unconscious material. And you will often see that that through things that show up in the collective that become like icons of something that we're all avoiding, that we're all not talking about.

There are certain inflection moments that where you know, even a person who is not so engaged with the news cycles, that doesn't get so involved in current events or headlines, will often see something in the world happening, and it is, though, even for someone relatively disengaged, it brings up the feeling of being a part of something that they don't usually consider themselves a part of.

So it has a way of pulling people into collective identification, if it's been lacking or maybe not even lacking, that it could be, but it could also be just not on their radar. And then something comes onto your radar where there is a need to engage in the collective level of reality. Pluto Mars and Aquarius will will pull you in by virtue of their events and things that happen that capture headlines that make you go, Oh, wow, there's something happening historically that is, is like the Venn diagram of my personal life overlapping with history.

And it's it can feel invasive. Or intrusive at times and so and sometimes it is. Sometimes it enters like a force of persecution. Think about a lot of people right now in different parts of the world who are experiencing the collective forces of history and these outer planetary movements as very invasive. So these are the dark things about Mars Pluto and Aquarius that you know, they're just hard to square up to and like deal with.

The other thing that can happen around collective power struggles is we struggle with how to find a sense of social or collective belonging or participation, while retaining what makes us individual and never reducible to a social category or social experience or identification, like concept. And so these tensions are real, and they are often augmented or amplified by people telling us what to think or how to feel or how to act or how to belong, or they will threaten us with ostracization or exclusion if we don't obey.

And that can happen around any anything. Really. There's no place that I haven't been a part of where that hasn't been present liberal academic institutions and, you know, open minded yoga studios. And it's like it just happens everywhere, you know. So we have to watch for it and not think we're above it. Because when we think we're above it, that's often when it sneaks in, you know, kind of sneaks in the back door, so to speak.

All right, let's go on to number two on my list, which is ideological rigidity and force. Aquarius has this uncanny ability to harden ideas into abstract principles, which can be very useful in terms of organizing developing visions and principles to create by means of or to make change in the world or in ourselves or to by means of which to study or develop a business, taking ideas and forming them into like concrete principles, they become like engineering blueprints that we can design and build things by.

So it's pretty incredible. And that force can become more pronounced, and plans and ideas can start to crystallize into like blueprints for design. When Mars and Pluto get together, Mars was a god of science in the ancient world, especially when Mars was paired with mercury. It's not right now, but they're co present, but not like a conjunction.

Those two planets hanging out in the same temple will often obviously Mercury Mars can bring like verbal and mental acuity or sharpness, but their combination was also associated with the sciences, with things like inventiveness and surgery and precision, skills and tools that require the analytical mind. So what's really fascinating about this conjunction is the power of ideas to form decisive plans and actions.

And that's really exciting. But the exact same combination can take abstract principles, harden them. Mars Pluto will add a bit of coercive energy. And beliefs will justify things like social pressure, social intimidation, social bullying, moral absolutism, especially in the name of progress reform or some greater blueprint design that you feel like everything is someone or you me, whoever feels like everything is headed for for the sake of the greater good, if it if the plan and the vision for some better social situation or social reality involves a lack of basic kindness and decency to other people, a basic respect for the humanity that people are not reducible to categories, then we have a problem, and Mars Pluto will become an instrument of sometimes kind of like authoritarian suppression, domineering.

It can be very tyrannical. Now number three, Mars Pluto in Aquarius will bring sudden breaks from Alliance, alliances, friendships, groups, or even ideas or paradigms or conceptions of thought that no longer hold viability. So decisive severing is a Mars Pluto theme where, if you're leaving a group or an institution is losing members, or alliance of some kind is collapsing.

The the breaks may be abrupt, but also there's a sense of them being overdue, or it's necessary for this break to happen right now. So schisms and break. Cuts and divisions will be pronounced when Mars and Pluto get together, but that severing is often due to splits that are ideological or rooted in different paradigms and different ways of seeing things and different ways of seeing what the future ought to look like.

That is a very common thing for Mars, Mars Pluto and Aquarius just taking we haven't seen so many of them in my lifetime that I'm speaking from that level of experience, more so from the combinations of the two planets and what I know about Aquarius. So let's go to number four on my list, which is technological or system flash points.

Now Aquarius, because it has such a 20,000 foot view, big, vast, fixed air quality, is often associated with systems of knowledge, systems of information, systems of technology. I mean, it's not surprising that it was Neptune entering Aquarius when the world wide web came about. It's Pluto entering Aquarius as AI is exploding.

There's a real connection to that fixed mental space of Aquarius and the development of technologies and systems of information, infrastructures, systems of thought, not just ideological beliefs, although that's there too for Aquarius, but it's about whole systems of technology, like the electrical matrix and grid of planet Earth that exists, or different systems of energy that exist, that are being harnessed and used, different systems of information that exists.

Ai, the internet, you know, Wi Fi systems, all of these kinds of things have a kind of Aquarian nature, symbolically. So sometimes what happens when you get these powerful alignments in Aquarius is that there will be these kind of with Mars Pluto in particular, like forceful interventions, shutdowns, data breaches, aggressive forms of regulation, whistleblowing, power struggles, and it usually will involve things like, Who Controls information, who controls platforms, who controls data, who has control over shared resources.

And there will be, often infighting or schisms that arise in relation to this kind of thing. This combination, for example, will bring into question things like, how is information being used, and for what end? Who benefits or wins because of this manipulation of information? Those kinds of things are very Mars Pluto and Aquarius, even if it's not easy to see what's what, the very conversations that tend to emerge are like this.

The debates that people have are like this. So these are things to watch for. Now, the last one on my list is, on a personal level, the most reliable expression of Mars Pluto energy tends to be where someone becomes excessively willful or domineering or assertive or aggressive, even violent, and that's something to be very careful of in ourselves.

First and foremost, excessive use of mental or ideological force, suppressing other people, telling them how they ought to or should behave in ways that dehumanize the other, pride and arrogance, intellectually, especially when it becomes a kind of a presence of bullying or intimidation. Mars Pluto in Aquarius will refuse to comply.

That's the phrasing I'm looking for, Mars Pluto and Aquarius will say, You can't make me do anything. There is a way in which the sign of Aquarius frequently resists any and all kinds of social categories, saying I'm irreducible, but it often does so in ways that are more about resistance, and I'm not going to comply, almost like a punk rocker form of resistance.

You know, the Saturn ruled nature of Aquarius tends to set up resistance to authority or tradition as a kind of oppositional dynamic. You have to be very careful with that dynamic, that even if you're refusing to comply in some way that you don't do so in a way that you know provokes a cycle of a kind of vicious cycle, refusal to comply and the energy of negation.

I'm not doing this. I won't identify with that. You can't make me do or be something I'm not very Mars Pluto in Aquarius. But if you do it in a way that tries to harm other people, shame other people, or put other people down rather than just standing your ground, you'll tend to engage in a cycle of karma that will be perpetuating pain and suffering, there's a pressure that reveals fault lines when Mars and Pluto get together, and sometimes it's not just big, destructive moments that occur, but it's moments where you see where the fault lines lie, and that clarity can feel destabilizing and a little bit ominous, but useful.

So those are, that's my list of five things to watch for. Given the Mars Pluto dynamic, very powerful, we got to talk about Neptune, getting into Aries. We got to do some horoscopes for both. We got to talk a little bit more about Mars Pluto. So that's our agenda for the week. It's a big, big week.

Remember that If you are just dealing with overwhelm, you know, these when the collective and the personal intersect in big outer planetary moments like this, it can, it can be the feeling of trying to empty an ocean with a Dixie cup, and you know, in terms of trying to process it emotionally, because it it feels like, well, I should be able to process it.

There's a pressure we place on ourselves, maybe a bit of a heroic pressure, even with Neptune entering Aries, to say, Well, I have to be able to make sense out of this and do something, and know who I am, and know where I stand, and know what's right and know what's good, and that can all be true, and it can be a lot to process, and we don't have to come to all of those conclusions instantly, and it really does help if we sit down and care for ourselves, let ourselves breathe a little bit.

Nervous system regulation is crucial to being a constructive, peaceful, but peacefully vibrating soul in whatever spaces in your life you're making your contributions. So I'll leave it there. Remember to check out. Oh, what's on the altar this week? Of course, hey, we've got some cool stuff on the altar. Let's show you.

Okay, let me get oops. Here we go. All right, let's show you what is on the altar. Now, earlier this year, I think it was last year, at some point, I put up a little statue that I have of the Grateful Dead, and I didn't think I'd be adding that to my altar again anytime soon, but Bob Weir just passed, and that made me really sad, and so I'm just honoring him as a spirit soul who on a level of creativity and dedication to following the music and following the Muse and giving his life to something bigger than himself.

He's a real artistic inspiration, and really honestly, a spiritual inspiration. And to me, someone who also came in at a time where I was sort of trying to figure out elements of my own masculinity, and he was someone who just showed me how beautiful and vibrant and creative that the masculine can be. I just deeply appreciate him.

He's kind of a hero to me. So anyway, a little tribute to Bob Weir on my altar this week. Hope you all are doing well. We'll see you again tomorrow. Bye, everyone.