Mars Opposing Pluto — The Final Moment of an Epic Mars Cycle

Hey, everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/]. Happy Friday, everybody. Today, we are going to revisit the entire journey of this Mars Pluto opposition, because although Mars and Pluto are opposing tomorrow, this is actually the third time that they have opposed one another.

So we're going to look back over the last two oppositions leading up to this one, including the Mars Retrograde. And I'm going to give you some tips for tracking that entire cycle in light of the opposition that's happening tomorrow, which is the final sort of installment in the Mars Pluto saga.

I'm going to give you five topics to meditate on that can help you track the entirety of the cycle, which can help us as we connect with the events that are taking place with the Mars Pluto opposition over the weekend. So that is our goal for today.

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Anyway. On that note, let's turn our attention to the real-time clock. Here I go. So we are here on April 25. We're in Taurus season now. We've had a very dynamic week thus far, and tomorrow we will see Mars opposed Pluto.

So I'm going to advance this by one day, and you'll see that tomorrow, April 26, the opposition is exact. This opposition will really be in effect if we give it a few more days—all the way, let's give it three degrees of separation—all the way until about next weekend.

So you get a full week of Mars separating from Pluto. That's a fair range to say. You know, within this period of time, you may also notice the ongoing effects of the transit. Ancient astrologers said that within three degrees, applying and separating was when the promised events, or karma, so to speak, would blossom and appear.

And within that range, it's a little mysterious. The thing I always compare it to is a full moon. You know, on the morning of a full moon, you may really feel and notice the energy the evening of the day after. There's a kind of range within which astrological symbolism expresses itself in linear time, and it's a little mysterious how that works, but ranges are typically used in all astrology for that reason.

So although the exact opposition is tomorrow, give it about a week. I would say most likely you'll feel the most intense form of the opposition today, tomorrow, and Sunday. I think that's most common in my experience.

But what I want to do now is I want to give you some more advanced tools for tracking this transit, and the way to do that is to look at the entire cycle that Mars and Pluto have been through. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to back this up to the beginning of this dynamic, which came all the way back in the last months of 2024.

Notice how far back the two planets go when it comes to their configuration with one another. So I'm going to take you through all of this and then give you some tips for how to use this information to track what's happening tomorrow, because this is not the first time that the two planets have opposed one another. They've been through quite the process.

In ancient astrology, aspects work by whole sign as well as by degree. So Mars and Pluto technically begin opposing one another in early September of 2024. That early September is the time at which Mars enters Cancer and is therefore in a whole sign opposition with Pluto, who's at the anaretic last 29th degree of Capricorn.

That's pretty significant. Mars is also in its fall in Cancer—a challenging place, a place that also offers a lot of healing for Mars-related themes and Cancerian themes. We've talked a lot about that on my channel over the past months.

Let's go forward and bring this up to the time that they first oppose while Mars is in direct motion. Now I want you to write these dates down—the reason, and this is optional. Obviously, I'm assigning homework, but you get to choose if you want to do it or not.

So Mars opposes Pluto between November 2 and third of 2024. At that time, the two planets are opposed in Cancer and Capricorn, and both are at the 29th critical anaretic degree. That's a pretty powerful encounter for these two planets.

And you may remember that at the beginning of November, but if you don't remember what was going on, go back in your emails, go back in your text messages, go back in your—you know, the pictures in your phone or your Instagram or Facebook or Twitter posts or whatever it is, or X or whatever they call it now.

So the reason I say that is because that's what I recommend my students do when trying to track transits from the past that maybe they don't have the best memory for. Just go back and look at some of the places where you store your day-to-day thoughts and activities and exchanges. That's pretty good for social media, text messages, emails, and you may get, then, a hit for what the critical mass of the moment was.

By that, I mean what was changing. Mars Pluto is a force of change—the evolutionary force of necessity, forcing death, forcing rebirth, a kind of creative, explosive, catalyzing, eruptive quality to Mars and Pluto. So what was that force looking like around early November for you? That is part one.

Now, the reason I say write these things down is because I'm also going to give you five topics to meditate on, and I want you to ask yourself the questions or look at these meditation topics around these dates. So that's why it's important that you take a moment and just jot these down and then do a little memory work.

I promise you, if you do this with some care and intentionality, you're going to learn a lot. This is, you know, astrology—as much as we want it to be, "Just tell me. Just tell me what it means. Tell me what happens." Astrology is a process of karma and evolution occurring across cycles in time.

If you only ever stay glued to the current moment and what's happening right now, what it means right now, you will miss the larger arc. It would be like saying, "I just want to see one episode in the middle of the third season of, you know, Outlander"—that's the show that my wife and I watch. You could see that and you'd be like, "Oh, I have no idea what this is. It was a good episode," but you will miss the entire story arc.

So do that work. It's worth it. Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox. So we continue on. Mars enters Leo in early November, and we know that it took its time, and then Pluto entered Aquarius around November 20. Now they're configured again by whole sign opposition.

What happens? Well, we know by early September that Mars stations around the sixth and turns retrograde, and then is heading back into the degree-based opposition with Pluto, which occurs—whoops, here we go—right in the beginning of the new year.

We're looking at them around January 2 into the third, opposing while Mars is now retrograde. So here's the second period of time: early January. Just ask yourself, what was happening in early January? In what way was I changing? Where was the evolutionary force of necessity happening? What was being catalyzed? What forces were erupting? Where was I seeing the need to transform or change with some urgency? What power struggles or conflicts was I facing?

And then you can also look back to November—early November—and say, when was that early November encounter, or what was happening then? And how were these two periods tied together? So again, just noticing.

Now we're going to see Mars then retrograde into Cancer. Takes a long time in the sign of Cancer. And of course, we've just had Mars leave Cancer at long last. Difficult Mars retrograde, honestly. Then Mars is gradually moving forward through the month of March, and here we are in April, and it was on the 18th that Mars switched back into Leo.

So now here we are for Saturday, April 26, where they collide one final time. So now we're talking about late April, right? Early January and early November as three points in time connected archetypally and thematically to the entirety of the Mars retrograde process.

You could look at two sets of houses. You could look at the Leo-Aquarius set of houses in your birth chart. You could also look at the Cancer-Capricorn houses, though I think that for the sake of this weekend, you're probably going to get more out of the Leo-Aquarius axis, and that is what I covered in the horoscopes on my livestream yesterday.

So, noting these things, here are five topics to meditate on. These are questions that I would ask in relation to that early November, early January, and now late April trifecta of Mars-Pluto oppositions.

The first would be family karma and parental karma. With Mars in Cancer and Mars in Leo, you have the signs of the moon and the sun. These signs, among other things, can refer to mothers and fathers. They can refer to matriarchs and patriarchs. They can refer to family karma, broadly speaking, parental karma, broadly speaking.

So in what ways, along the lines of these three occurrences, have you been noticing or actively working to change your family karma? What ways have you been noticing family karma playing out? By family karma, what I mean are the relationships with your family members, maybe some of the hurts or wounds that we—almost all of us have some—that come from how we were raised, and usually it's a—for most of us, at least—it's a mix of good and bad.

And then there's often questions for people who have kids of their own, with respect to how you're parenting, what you're passing on, what you're actively working to change within your family lineage. And you could do that work, obviously, whether you have kids or not, but sometimes it becomes very vivid when you have parenting responsibilities of your own.

So family karma, parental karma, would, broadly speaking, be one major way of tracing the arc of those three oppositions: early November, early January, now late April.

Number two: a process of martial revision or setbacks. So martial revision means anything that you are revising with respect to the topics that Mars rules. So let's say there have been revisions with how you are working with Mars on a psychological level—let's say anger, willpower, frustration, assertiveness, directness, boldness, courage, the facing of fear, how you handle fear and anxiety, how you take action in the world.

In what ways have you been asked to revise something? I think of a very basic way for me that I've been seeing this play out in terms of the training regimen that I've been going through while Mars is retrograde, which is not surprisingly wrapping up. My coach is having me wrap up with this phase as the retrograde's concluding and the last Mars opposition is taking place, because the process began when the first two opposed in early November.

So a process of revising my training program—my macro is like everything. That's a very simple, mundane example, but it tracks very easily for me around the three oppositions. So a martial revision could be how you're exercising, or the exercise or healthcare regimen that you have—insofar as Mars represents things like athletics and exercise and stuff like that.

But it can be deep. How do you handle anger? How do you handle conflict? And then there may be some connection between martial revision—like getting better at handling conflict—and family karma, right? So you can end up tying any of these together.

Setbacks would also be: Where has your will, your sense of direction or ambition, felt like it's been thwarted or blocked? "I thought I wanted to go in this direction, then I faced some setbacks or some delays." Retrograde can be about dealing with setbacks, delays, reversals of fortune, the plot somehow getting flipped on its head.

So track along: early November, early January, now late April. What setbacks have you faced? What hurdles came into your path that you had to get over? Do you see those changing now?

Number three: a refining of will, anger, force, action, and courage. Now, I kind of mentioned this in number two, but I find that Mars retrogrades are fantastic for becoming more aware of what works and doesn't work when it comes to the expression of anger or action or force or will.

Maybe I had to face some fears. Maybe I had to develop more courage around something. Maybe I had to be patient rather than impulsive. Mars retrograde will sometimes curb our appetite or curb our enthusiasm and say, "You need to develop better restraint with respect to your will, your force, your actions in the world—better discernment. Know when to act and when to wait."

So any way in which you've just been refining your blade—the Mars blade, let's call it—and again, track that out: early November, early January, now late April.

Number four: dealing with frustration. One of the things that—I'll just use this example again, of the training regimen that—a new training regimen I started under the first Mars-Pluto opposition that's now just finishing under the final one. Initially, knowing that I was going to be revising elements of my program, I felt like, "Oh, this is going—this sort of, what do I want to say? My expectations have had to adapt," right?

And so that means that I'm frustrated because I'm not getting what I wanted, or I'm not going where I wanted, because I'm changing approaches and strategies. And so when something comes up that frustrates you, you can give up, you can quit, or you can persevere.

How we deal with frustrations is maybe one of the most obvious forms of, I guess, what feels like cosmic testing that I've ever seen in my practice. It's very common when people have transiting Mars hitting their—or transiting Pluto hitting their natal Mars, for example—that they'll go through periods of time where they just feel disempowered, or they feel frustrated, or they feel blocked.

And then it's a matter of not getting angry, not throwing an existential tantrum, and sort of dealing with it, coping with it, developing the staying power and the perseverance to work through something that's frustrating you.

If we learn to see the things that frustrate us as opportunities to refine, to grow, to build character and patience, I think it helps. It doesn't always make anything easier, but I do think it helps. So where has there been a process like this that I'm describing taking place? And again, look back at these punctuation marks: early November, early January, now late April.

And then five, which is something I focused on this week in other episodes: what needs to happen as a matter of evolutionary necessity right now that has been building and building and building and developing and moving beneath the surface through this whole period.

You could look back and just say, from early November up until now, what plates beneath the surface are shifting and may cause some psychic earthquakes in my life? But they need to happen. The status quo needs to be disturbed. New actions need to be formed or taken.

New initiatives—or forcing a conversation that's not easy, or maybe "forcing" isn't the right word, but acting in ways that you know you have to—it must happen now. There's a sense of the hexagram 28 again, right? Critical mass—the ridge pole is sagging. If I don't do something, the whole thing is going to fall apart. Act, change, evolve, or die, right?

It's got that—not literally, but it's got that ominous feeling behind it, like, "You better do something." And also, you know, by this exact same token, it's like, if you were patient, if you were careful, if you rode through the whole process, could you be reaching a critical breakthrough right now?

You know, the other meaning of critical mass in the I Ching that reminds me of this transit is the idea that acting right now as a matter of necessity has a powerful creative effect, and you can't avoid this moment. You have to, sort of, you know, step into it.

So what does that look like right now? Where do you feel that kind of pressure to grow? Let's call it that.

Now, I want to note—just because I think it's important that people who consume astrology hear this somewhat regularly from astrologers—not all transits hit for everyone. Right now in your chart, there could be a Jupiter transit that is really stealing the show. You know, there could be a Neptune transit that is way more interesting and important than this Mars-Pluto opposition, especially if it's not touching into angular houses, if it's not connecting by degree to planets in your chart.

So if all of this feels like, "Geez, this feels big and sensational, I'm not really experiencing much," I have two pieces of advice. One, learn astrology at a deeper level, because when you can track your transits with more sophistication and understanding of where transits are hitting in your natal chart by degree and hitting planets by degree or angles, you're going to know how much to turn the volume up or down on mundane forecasts you hear from people like myself, because you know exactly how strong it really is in your natal chart.

The other thing—well, I lost my camera. Let's try this again. Whoops, here we go. The other thing that you're going to notice—or the other piece of advice that I have—sorry, I lost my train of thought because my camera actually hit a button that turned my camera off.

So first of all, just if you study astrology more, you're going to know where transits hit, right? And then you know how much to turn the volume up or down on, you know, the Mars-Pluto oppositions or the Mars retrogrades, or whatever the case might be.

But the other thing that I think is important to be aware of is just that when you track astrology and you pay attention to it, you will often notice the transits around you rather than happening to you, especially if they're not hitting in your natal chart.

You might see, "This transit is really affecting my spouse or my sister," or "It's really affecting my coworker, my boss," or "I just saw it happen in the workplace," or "A friend of mine." Even if something isn't affecting us personally, I think that the opportunity to consciously connect with the kind of daily movements of these symbols is a powerful form of meditation, and it will often reward you—when it's not hitting you personally—in terms of giving you just profound insight by being able to see it in what's happening around you.

So I like to say—I like to remind people of this, because sometimes you listen to a channel like this and you think, "God, there's all these huge transits happening, and some of them hit and some of them miss." Well, this is why, and this is also why—a nice little segue here—that I recommend you come study with us, because when you can become your own astrologer, it gives you just a next-level understanding and working with everything.

And if that's just for you and your spiritual practice, there's just nothing more valuable, in my opinion, for people who like astrology. On a second level, a lot of people who develop these skills, like it or not, are going to be really valuable people to read for others. And sometimes you don't want that. You're like, "Oh, I don't know," but you might have a gift, you know?

And then other times, people are like, "I just really want to use this to help other people, because I love the language and I want to help people grow." That's a fantastic reason to come study with us as well.

So after I sign off here, check out the informational video that I've tagged on, and I will see you all next week. Alright, take it easy, everyone. Bye-bye.