The Sun Conjunct Pluto in Aquarius — Well, That Escalated Quickly

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

Today we're going to take a look at the sun conjoining Pluto in the sign of Aquarius, as Mars is also ingressing into the sign of Aquarius and moving into an engagement with Pluto within three degrees. That'll take place by early to mid next week. So I'm going to give you a list of things to watch for today.

Given this sun Pluto conjunction, I sort of jokingly subtitled this talk, "Well, that escalated quickly." The reason for that is that as the week has gone on, we have had more and more and more Plutonian conjunctions. As those conjunctions have taken place, now we have sun and Mars going through, which are arguably some of the most dynamic and forceful of the group.

We had Mercury and Venus previously, and that's a big deal. But you know, when the sun and Mars get involved, things tend to heat up a little bit more quickly. So yeah, I'm going to give you a list of things to watch for today, given this archetypal combination, as well as a bit of a foreshadowing for Mars, but we will be looking at Mars's conjunction of Pluto early next week as well.

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If I speed this up a bit, take it forward to next Tuesday, January 27, Mars will be conjoined Pluto in Aquarius. Kind of transitions across Pluto between Tuesday the 27th and Wednesday the 28th. So we are still in the mix of a lot of Plutonian dynamism. And today I want to focus on the sun's conjunction to Pluto in Aquarius.

But also, you know, more broadly speaking, the upcoming Mars dynamic as well, because they're both pretty much right there with Pluto at the same time. You're going to feel Mars in a much more acute way next week, and we will be covering that separately, but I'll give you a list of things to watch for.

And this is something that could apply to today, over the weekend and all the way through the middle of next week, when Mars conjoins Pluto. But again, we'll have some separate coverage on the kind of specific dynamics of Mars Pluto again at the early part of next week.

All right. Anyway, five things to watch for given this archetypal combination. The first one that I have is safety through persecution. Let me try to explain this and why it tracks for sun, Pluto and Mars. Pluto in Aquarius is a Saturn-ruled sign that has a lot to do with collective social dimensions of our human experience, where we find ourselves identified or aligned culturally or in terms of the religious, spiritual, political, ideological categories, the moral compass, the aesthetic tastes that we have, the sexual orientation that we have.

Those categories are a real part of our human experience, and they're important. Most of us, we find ourselves, and we individuate in and through the experience of these categories. Well, here's where I fit, here's where I don't. It's a big part of it. At the same time, there is always the binary of Aquarius/Leo, in many ways, reflects the tension of never being able to fully identify with any category of identity or culture or aesthetic or value or doctrine or dogma.

They're important for our lives, but we also tend to resist becoming conflated with them, because we're not concepts, we're beings. We're not thought structures or paradigms. We're living beings. And so there's this dance that's always happening with Aquarius and Leo, that's like this.

When the sun and Mars get together with Pluto in Aquarius, there can be this rising impulse to define our safety or our sense of belonging and safety, let's say they kind of go together, in terms of whoever is unsafe or wrong or the problem, and we feel that this is what provides us with a stable sense of identity or moral certainty or belonging or religious or political righteousness or whatever.

And this is human. This is a temptation that we all face at different times in our life, some much more extremely than others. And um, the sun Pluto conjunction can expose survival instincts. It's very Plutonian around power and legitimacy and control. And Mars approaching that Pluto sharpens the instinct to act on those survival narratives in terms of trying to defend ourselves against others who might persecute us or persecute others that we think of as a threat.

I think the key teaching point here is that persecution is a false solution to fear. Right? When we persecute other people, "you don't belong here, you're not legitimate, you don't have the right paperwork," or whatever the case might be. "You're not a part of the right team. You're not on the right side of history." Any of this, when it's done in the mood or tone of persecution, it can offer us a sense of psychological relief by projecting a threat outward, but it always deepens the very insecurity that it claims to solve.

This is something that I recently listened to Thich Nhat Hanh talk about, who I think was a real luminary. Pluto with Mars and the sun all at once its shadow can say, "here, here's how you feel empowered: you eliminate whatever is threatening your sense of power." And that can be a real trap, because what what's missing in that is empathy.

Anyway, these are topics that are so much in the air right now. Number two, I have called the trap of categorization, and all of these are different angles of the same jewel you might say. So Aquarius is a sign that excels at abstractions and systems and classifications. Like we wouldn't have engineering or rocket science or astrology, or, you know, so many other beautiful things without an air sign like Aquarius that represents, archetypally, the ability that we have to put things into systemization and to systematize and to classify and to make things conceptual and, in a sense, abstract.

Now, the problem is that when that kind of abstraction is directed at people or a person, you know, again, I was mentioning this at the beginning, but one of the most fundamental truths about being human is that we are irreducible. We can't be reduced to a category or a classification, and the moment that we lose curiosity about that irreducible core, then dehumanization becomes easy and cruelty becomes rationalized.

"You deserve this because of the category that I'm putting you into," even morally. I think about how so many luminaries have taught us, well, if there's someone that you perceive as an enemy in whatever area of life and however you're perceiving them as an enemy, whatever reasons you have, it's never justified to dehumanize someone.

You know, categories also exist. They're also real, and they have real impact on the world. Genocide, I'm thinking, when I was in when I was in college, I did an almost semester-long study of the Rwandan genocide. This was, for me, like, I don't know, 2001 when I was in college. And so the Rwandan genocide, I remember right was like, the 90s. I think it was the 90s anyway.

So one of the things that was said over and over by a variety of psychologists, sociologists, commentators that I was reading from different perspectives from within Rwanda and outside, who had done humanitarian work and so forth, was how genocide functions time and time again throughout history, because of the ease with which we can put someone in a category rather than seeing their soul.

It would be, I think, too much to say that categories don't exist and aren't a sort of integral part of our human experience. Like I experience the reality of people looking at me differently when they hear I'm an astrologer. That category socially has had real ramifications in certain social settings in my life. I don't deal with marginalization compared to anything, compared to what a lot of people deal with, you know.

But that's a small example of how, wow, someone is completely not seeing me because they're putting me in a bin of "astrologer," and they think astrologer means whack job. You know, small compared to people getting dragged out of their cars in Minneapolis right now. You know what I mean? Like I have seen nothing.

But one of the fundamental truths of being human, I'll say it again, is that we are irreducible, without exception, all of us. And the ancient animistic framework that astrology is situated in sees all life in the cosmos this way: irreducible, conscious, alive, participatory, relational, subjective.

And so categories play a role. They're like a kind of language. They convey a certain kind of information, but we have to be so careful, because if not used without using those categories lightly, as a way of exchanging value and as a way of exchanging meaning, they often become the quickest way to lose our humanity.

And this is a great paradox of the sign of Aquarius, a very human sign, a sign that was called humane, but Saturn-ruled. Now, another thing to watch for with these transits is ideological violence that disguises itself as moral progress. This is something Thich Nhat Hanh warned against specifically when I was watching a talk with him.

He was talking about, you know, this is a perennial debate that you know has happened in many spiritual traditions, which is like the cushion or the street. You know, do you withdraw from the world, or do you engage with it, say, in the spirit of activism, or something like that?

And one of the things that he talked about was, first of all, he, in that talk, he essentially said that it's a false dichotomy. There's no reason that one has to be right and the other wrong. There's no reason that the two also can't coexist. So I'll just reiterate that I found that very enlightening.

But one of the things he said, and I think this is important, is that he said that any kind of language or actions that justify harm, exclusion, silencing, coercion, shame, judgment, moral self-righteous anger or ideological violence, driven at someone in the name of goodness, morality, progress, the future, what must be done for the sake of virtue and a better future, that all of this is a trap that perpetuates the cycle.

And it's not the what, it's the how. What I love that Thich Nhat Hanh said in this talk is, it's not that, you know, some people might misunderstand spiritualists saying something like this to be saying that you should just stay on the cushion. This was part of Thich Nhat Hanh's talk I thought was really enlightening. You know, it's not about staying on the cushion. It's about making sure that you're still on the cushion while you're on the street.

That it's the how you engage, it's the how you participate. I'm not going to tell you what that means for you, but I know that it can become a real big deal when these kinds of transits take place, because Pluto in Aquarius tends to intensify beliefs about collective destiny, about the collective vision of goodness or virtue or illumination or a better future that people inevitably fight over.

Every generation believes that it stands at history's decisive edge. That belief is not new. The belief that we are at the brink of salvation or damnation, apocalypse and revelation or a great leap forward in consciousness is itself cyclically renewed in every generation.

There's a great book that was written about this very topic called The Great Year, by Nicholas Campion, an astrologer and historian of astrology, and that book talks about the fact that the human experience of history shifting spaces and moments is perennial, and that it's absolutely not unique. It's as rhythmic as the astrological tides and all the great synodic cycles.

To feel like we are at the brink of destruction, we are at the brink of a great leap forward, both often co-arise with one another. And they tend to co-arise, by the way, and Richard Tarnas has done such great work to shed light on this. They tend to emerge when we're in periods of time where outer planetary configurations are especially dynamic.

And this is one of those years: Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Pluto trine, Jupiter Pluto oppositions. We're in the midst of a Jupiter Saturn trine this year within its synodic cycle. Huge collective year, huge. Can't understate that. It is at just these points in time where so much can feel like it's at stake in terms of the real cost of human life and suffering and marginalization and cruelty and evil and darkness.

Like all of it can feel just right in front of us, and yet we have to be so careful that we take on the challenge of not resembling what we resist, not resembling what we actively fight to overcome.

Feels so long ago to me. I remember when I lived in DC, and I remember, I want to say it was Michelle, it was either it was either Obama or it was Michelle Obama saying, when they go low, we go high, or something like that. And apart from the political context in which a statement like that is made, I think that I can't think of one spiritual teacher from one tradition I admire that doesn't say exactly that.

And that this is the kind of transit that says, yeah, can you believe what you believe without being a dick? You know, for all of us. Can you believe what you believe while retaining compassion? Can you love your enemy? Can you love your neighbor? Even if you don't see eye to eye? It's so basic. But my God, have we lost it?

You know, that's how I feel, and I say that not because I stand in judgment like you, you all, or some vast unnamed group, has lost it all, because I feel myself losing it. I feel myself losing that at times when being right becomes more important than being human. Violence can wear the mask of virtue, and that is, to me, true across political, ideological, religious, institutional, human spectrums, human categories of all kind for thousands of years on planet Earth.

Nobody ever thinks, for the most part, nobody ever thinks that what they're doing isn't the right virtuous thing, the right virtuous direction, the best ennobled kind of civic or social direction. How could it be that and be cruel and inhuman and judgmental and violent? If we lose that, we've lost the plot.

So there are periods of time. And last time Pluto was in Aquarius, last time Neptune was in Aries, we had civil and Revolutionary Wars. I'm going to say more about those things when we get closer to Saturn Neptune. I won't go into that so much today, but there are inflection moments, collectively, where some of these struggles take on literal, physical dimensions of violence and physical resistance.

And sometimes that's part of life. Sometimes that's a destiny that somehow we can't avoid. Who am I, you know, to suggest that something like that doesn't sometimes need to happen? I don't know. But I do know that every generation has always had peacemakers and peace teachers.

I've spent a lot of time over the past couple of years sitting with Quakers in Minneapolis. Quakers are activists, if you don't know, they have a long history of activism, but their activism extends from a very deep, receptive space of listening and silence. I've learned so much from them.

I'll just say that the next one on my list here is the use and abuse of power in the name of the future, very similar. But Pluto is a planet that governs power and coercion. Aquarius governs systems, collectives, long-range vision. Mars coming into the mix here brings decisive and sometimes ruthless execution.

And so words like necessary, inevitable, for the greater good, sometimes these happen in actual demonstrations of brute force, violence and power. Now that can be verbal or mental or emotional, but it can be literally physical. And so we have to be careful, because these transits, especially given Neptune and Saturn drifting into the sign of air, you know, zero Aries gathering at zero Aries pretty soon, are pretty combustible.

I think that I keep thinking of, I keep hearing the peaceful, wise vibrations of Thich Nhat Hanh, who I must have listened to 100 hours of over the past couple of months. I hear his voice, and I have this prayer inside of me. And it might be, I don't know, maybe it is a delusional prayer. I don't know, but I pray, please, whether it's this lifetime or 30 more lifetimes, help me become like that beautiful spirit, that beautiful soul, that peaceful, wise, steady, loving presence.

I think a question for us right now is number five on my list here. Let me transition. There's like a Venn diagram, you know? I think of Venn diagrams. There's like an overlap between our personal sphere and then let's call it like a third house sphere. It's like your neighborhood, your peers, your siblings, it's like the village. Third house life is like village life.

There's a village that we all inhabit, like an ecosystem that's pretty daily. It has its own rhythms. You know, and I grew up in a small town up north in Minnesota, and you know, it's like, I think of the third house a bit like a small town. I think a good word is village.

So there's my personal life, in my family, in my bedroom. That's like my most, especially as a Cancer, I guess it's like my little space. But then that little space starts to span outward, and that little circle finds itself in the bigger circle of my house, my family, my neighborhood, like that.

And there's overlaps between different collectives that we exist in. I remember asking a teacher of mine in the yoga tradition, how do I find my contribution to collective peace, to collective well-being, to some greater good in the larger world, not just what's good for me, but what's good for humanity?

And he said it comes from getting to know yourself and getting to know who you are, understanding the gifts that the universe or God has given you, understanding what that is is sort of part one. And it's interesting because in India, the understanding of your dharma is something that's cultivated, often for young people, through a kind of preparatory stage that's very spiritual and immersive, the part of the ashram stages in classic Indian philosophy.

Not that any of this is ideal. It's not perfect and lived experience, of course, you know. But ideally, as a system, it's interesting because it suggests that we have to get to know ourselves and what is really authentic and real about us, what our gifts are.

And what stems from that is an ability to know where there are meaningful overlaps between who we are and where we can find the authentic sharing of our dharma, our God-given gifts, that can contribute meaningfully and positively to the world and to other people. And finding that is treacherous.

And the reason that finding that can be so treacherous is that collective containers are places that we often lose our soul in. They don't have to be, and ideally they shouldn't be. But one of the reasons that it's so easy for us to lose our soul in collective containers is because, this is just my personal belief speaking, we don't place enough emphasis on, for example, in youth, we don't place enough emphasis on initiation, psycho-spiritually, psychologically, however you want to put it.

By that, I mean initiatory experiences that take you deep within yourself, that show you shadow, that show you light, that show you the fabric of your own nature and your character. We don't have those experiences. We don't privilege them as much. You know, I don't think that we go to college and all this, and like, there's a level at which some of that initiates us.

But a lot of the thinkers that I've really appreciated, James Hillman, some of the... I remember Terence McKenna saying this, is that the loss of those experiences on a sort of shamanic, spiritual, collective level... And I grew up in the Christian church, and there was some of that in the Christian church, but I think by and large, Christian culture doesn't have enough of it, or not at a level that is maybe kind of raw enough. That's I can only speak from my own experience. I had some of it.

But anyway, when we have that level of personal initiation, then frequently what we find is that it becomes easier to find the right containers and spaces to share our dharma with the world, which is a spiritual sense of duty that we have to bring something of our light into the world to contribute to the good, to the well-being, to what is virtuous and rooted in light and love.

I suspect that for many people, a lot of us, try to find our soul by collective validation, and that there's a certain amount of validation and selfhood that we can find within collectives. But there's always been this binary, archetypal opposition psychologists have talked about. Spiritual traditions talk about it, where there's certain parts of yourself that you are irreducible again, they can't be found in social categories, in social constructs of any kind.

And those elements of selfhood, that feeling that you're just inhabiting yourself comfortably, it's hard. We have to have interior experiences, mystical experiences, shamanic experiences, flow states, trance states, whatever brings them about. I sometimes feel like we don't have enough of them. I don't, I don't, just again, just kind of wandering opinions here.

But it becomes really hard to figure out who I am, where do I align? Where do I contribute in meaningful ways that do not lose my soul, but that also are in line enough with who I am and what my gifts are? Can I engage in the right spaces with as much fullness of my authentic character as I can without surrendering myself to a category?

I don't have it figured out, guys. I don't. But I know that this is the path. It's a meaningful path. It's a noble struggle to be a part of, and I'm glad to be a part of it with all of you. You know, it's a real blessing.

And for many people, that process of figuring out who you are and where you belong is, as I was going through this list, something that is fraught with physical danger, with cruelty, with death and with terror. I've not had to experience that. I might have been bullied in high school or had some life experiences that were hard and, you know, like everyone, it's hard to figure out who we are and where we fit in.

But I haven't had to be dragged out of a car half a mile from right where I live, like I've seen happening. Anyway, okay, I'm going to sign off for now. I pray sincerely that we all find grace and intelligence in the midst of these transits and these times that we're living in.

And it really is a blessing and a privilege to be able to have astrology in my life, and I'm sure you would agree in yours, to be able to help walk us through these experiences and these troubled times. And I hope that these topics generate within us more empathy and compassion for one another.

All right, that's it. Take care. Bye.