The Most Exciting Elements of Pluto’s Entrance into Aquarius

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology. Happy Friday, everybody. Today, we are going to take a look at Pluto's entrance into Aquarius. In the month of December, I took a look at Pluto's entrance into Aquarius; I think it was a four or five-part series, and that series explored Pluto's entrance into Aquarius from the standpoint of the kinds of shadows that we might see.

Pluto is naturally a planet that puts us in touch with those things that are unconscious or shadowy, which does not mean evil or bad. By the way, it is just one of the natural things that Pluto does to put us in touch with things that are hidden or unseen or unconscious, and sometimes that means putting us in touch with the shadows morally, or, you know, the that which is dark or even like demonic, those are Plutonian words.

But Pluto is also a planet that creates tremendous regenerative force, and whatever sign it enters, it unleashes a creative potential in the sign that is truly tremendous. Sometimes, that comes through the destructive quality of Pluto; for example, in the tarot, you have the sequence of the tower card and the star card. There's sort of the devastation followed by the envisioning of new things and the kind of grace or recovery or healing that comes after loss or destructiveness.

In the same way, we have the cycles of creation, maintenance, and destruction, for example, in Indian philosophy. So, obviously, this runs throughout the Tao Te Ching and Taoist philosophy as well that you have periods where things build and sustain and then slowly start to fall apart, and then the process begins again, and we see that even in our four seasons, we see the same kind of cycle.

So it's interesting because Pluto really straddle that line between the tremendously destructive decomposition and often sort of a violent sort of purgatorial discharge, just like like a volcano blowing up, and but with that is a transformative power that the volcano is not just destructive, although it can be but it's also deeply transformative and if you imagine that the what's being released from volcano is also rich, fertile, powerful energy.

So, on that note, today, I want to look at the five most exciting features of Pluto and Aquarius into Aquarius, which is happening coming up here, and I'll show you on the chart in a second considering how powerfully regenerative and the kind of that sort of deep creative power that comes from Pluto as well. So what are the most exciting features of Pluto and Aquarius will be the subject of today's talk.

Anyway, before we get into it, don't forget to like and subscribe to share your comments and reflections if you have them. Also, what did you notice when Pluto entered Aquarius last year? Did you notice anything right away? I would be curious to hear your thoughts.

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Here we go. So we have Pluto on the verge of entering Aquarius; here we go. So the Sun crosses Pluto, by the way; we'll be talking about that in a separate video. But as this happens, the Sun and Pluto both enter Aquarius on the same day as January 20 into the 21st, when we see the transition happen. From this point forward, Pluto will be in Aquarius all the way until about September 1 and then around. I think it's a 17,19, something like that of November. It's in the last degree of Capricorn again.

So Pluto ingresses on January 20, and then it's in Aquarius all the way until September 1, at which point it retrogrades into Capricorn and then from September 1 to November 19. It's in Capricorn on the 19th it re-enters. Aquarius. So that's kind of the schedule for Pluto and Aquarius this year. But the question we really want to ask ourselves is not just right now, or this month, although, you know, we may experience some of this right away. But you know, if we just take everything out in the chart here, but Pluto, let me just do that real quick, and we just take a look at what Pluto is going to do.

I mean, look at let's go forward and show you how long we're all the way into this is 2043, right, and if I just go by some months, enters Pisces in 2043 retrogrades back into Aquarius, and it's in January of 2044 that it finally moves into Pisces to stay I believe, let me just double check that. Yeah, so you know, that's like 20 years, you know, that's a good time with us a good two decades worth of Pluto into Aquarius because of its eccentric orbit. Pluto does not stay in all of the signs for the same amount of time. So it's going to spend a lot longer in the sign of Aquarius than it did in Capricorn, which is more like 15 years, if I remember correctly, something like that.

So I think that there are some really significant things to look forward to about Pluto into Aquarius, and now that we visited some of the shadows in the series that we did recently, which, if you haven't checked out, you might want to go back and take a look at that. But one of the most exciting features of Pluto into Aquarius.

So I think that I have five today, and we'll be adding to this and continuing to cover Pluto and Aquarius this month, especially taking a look at that Sun-Pluto conjunction on the day of the ingress. That's a potent signature that I think we'll spend some real time with next week.

Number one on the list of most exciting features about Pluto's entrance into Aquarius and its stay in Aquarius for almost two decades is that Pluto is in the sign of Aquarius if we're thinking about Pluto as the release of Titanic's creative power. Yes, some of it will be destructive.

Let me tell a story that I think fits nicely because it's a story that probably all of you have had. Have you ever gone through a really, really difficult breakup? Maybe it was with a job, or maybe it was with a friend, maybe it was with a lover, maybe it was with a family member, and you know, choosing that you couldn't have them in your life any longer something. The pain and the difficulty are tremendous. But you know what it feels like? Not everyone may have this exact idea. Maybe this template of experience is not the exact one that you've had. But maybe you know someone who has.

As soon as you get past the difficulty initially, I don't know, breaking the news, telling someone you're leaving or telling a boss or leaving the job or a partner that you don't want to be together any longer or something like that. There is this tremendous feeling that some people would maybe describe as freedom. But it's also like this huge amount of primal libidinal creative energy, and there's always some instructions that come with it.

For example, when you break up with someone, be careful that you don't use that energy and dive into another relationship too quickly; it'll often be a rebound. There's a creative impulse, it's, you know, and I call it libidinal because the creative and the sexual impulse are so tied together; we create life through that impulse, obviously, sometimes. But the Plutonian energy that's released is so creatively powerful, and it's, it usually comes right off from having let go of something that was kind of toxic, and maybe was holding that creative energy hostage somehow, and now it's been released and so that's the tremendous power of Pluto.

Now, placing that into the sign of Aquarius is interesting because one of the things that Aquarius represents is something in the world of philosophy that might be called a universal, and it goes back to, you know, the roots of archetypal thinking in the ancient world which we sometimes we attribute to Plato, but it's really older than Plato, and we see very visions of it in, you know, many different philosophical, religious, mystical traditions in the ancient world.

But it's the idea that there are universal images or archetypes that we become, we become, we dedicate ourselves to them, for example, as a collective now speaking as a collective, because that's something Aquarius also tends to signify is humanity at large, as opposed to the individual, although there's this tremendous tension in Aquarius in that sign between the individual and the group, between individuality and collectivity. We'll talk more about that in a little bit.

But the thing that propels humans along a course is the ideas that we embrace, the ideas slash images that we embrace, as archetypal foundations for a society. So the thing that moves our story along is, for example, an idea about how a society should be operated or held together. Monarchy. Democracy.

You get what I'm saying, and there are so many other examples of matriarchy or patriarchy, whatever. The point is that human beings have always adopted images slash ideas ada, archi, archetypal, you know, archetypes are interesting because they're both ideas philosophically, but they're also images. They're not just abstract principles or intellectual. They're not just conceptual. They're concepts married to actual embodied imagery.

Justice has always been depicted in pictures throughout history; you know, holding the scale blindfolded or beauty is Aphrodite. Do you know what I mean? So when you think of an archetype, and you think of ideas and Aquarius, universals don't just think of principles or philosophies; think of ideas and how we tend to see them embodied in images that relate to the central world that we inhabit. The gods are clothed in ideas, and ideas are clothed by the forms of the gods, and you can't separate the two.

But anyway, humanity needs universals; we evolve, and we grow. Our story collectively is told according to the ideas that we have, and what's so powerful about Pluto and Aquarius is that we can get in touch with, like, really profoundly exciting new ideas.

Some of them may come in the wake of destructive elements in the human soul and in humanity at large. But we can't underestimate what powerful new archetypal images and ideas will guide us forward, and we need them. I mean it; I listened to a talk recently by Nightlight; there's a Nightlight student, his name was Peter Young, and he's like a Ph.D. in philosophy or something, and he did a story; I think you'd find it on YouTube.

Anyway, he was talking about how modern sort of secular self-help psychology has not necessarily done us all the best favors in the world. It was a really smart and interesting talk, at least I thought it was, and in the talk, he said, You know, when we focus on the importance of individual values, and just like the prescription for growth individually, is to just locate identify which values are really important to your happiness and then focus on them.

The problem with that is that when, when values are considered to be highly subject, that they're considered to be subjective, then we, it's like, you're free to value whatever you want, and your happiness is utterly relative and totally dependent upon you just pursuing your own happiness according to your own decisions about values, and he said, Well, what about universals?

For example, a claim that Aquarius will make, and this is unique to the sign, not like being identified as an Aquarian, but just the sign. It is better to live a life that is aimed toward the ideal of a wise woman. Imagine like a grandmotherly sage, who is compassionate, who is a healer, who, you know, has some kind of temperance, or the Buddha or Christ or Mother Teresa, I mean, you name whoever, that it's better to aim toward those qualities, those universals like peace, patience, compassion, kindness, tolerance, mercy, justice, love.

You know, it's better to aim your life toward those things than to just be like, you know, I value having money, or my own values suggest that having as many things as I can really makes me happy, and so I mean, not everyone. I don't think a lot of people listen to this kind of content or anything like that, right? But the point of his talk, which I really thought was compelling, was that, like, humans need universals. If we don't have universals, then, for example, we're heading into an election year, we can elect a person to office, and I'm not telling you who that person is or isn't. I am not here to give my political opinion.

The conversation about a leader and whether or not a leader ought to embody those universals that we think of as enobling, humanity, setting out an example. I mean, I think the claim that Aquarius makes is that a leader ought to be a servant who is compassionate, who is merciful, who is thoughtful, and not perfect or right, but Aquarius likes to make the claim that we can be better. That if we hold up universal ideals, now, of course, there's always a potential that being a perfectionist or, you know, kind of being like ungracious and inflexible and trying to be good at the cost of being human, that's always a shadow for Aquarius; we looked a lot, we looked at that issue a lot in the series I just did, covering the shadows of Pluto and Aquarius, which is like, some kind of intolerance about just being human.

The flip side of that is that we need universals. We need the Bodhisattva standard, we need the Buddha to look up to in a sense, we need characteristics that aim us toward our higher potential, and there's no shortage of of that in Aquarius, and there's a kind of insistence that we can do better, and I believe I am of the mindset, even though I argued you heard me in the four-part series, I did, arguing, you know, sort of resolutely saying we need to be just human, and that the shadow of Aquarius is obsession with progress and intolerance toward our human weakness and our human frailty and so forth.

But at the same time, two things can be true at once. We can strive to be like a bodhisattva, so to speak; I'm just going to use that as an example. Whether it resonates or not, you get what I mean?

We aim to be a bodhisattva while also accepting ourselves as, you know, just little souls, just little human being souls, you know. So, the point of this is just to say that there's something in Aquarius that despises, like relativity of individual values that sort of discards the usefulness or importance of universals, a universal being like for in the Platonic sense, it would be goodness, justice, beauty, truth, illuminated enlightened human beings. Right. So that's so powerful.

It's amazing that Pluto and Aquarius can truly help us be more enlightened by elevating our standards and pointing us toward universals that are latent, like potentialities and our own nature. Anyway, you can think about that.

Number two is that new ideas create new worlds. Another really exciting thing about Aquarius is that it's not just new ideas that we can that can elevate us, and that can be personal or collective. But it's also that new ideas can create new worlds, new realms of participation, new realms in which we are invited to be creative and participatory; I mean, if you think about it, the advent of the internet has created something that's created many worlds, you know what I mean think about how many worlds upon endless interesting little niche worlds have been created of participation through the idea of the internet.

Which, by the way, was really coming about and coming into its full form as Neptune was entering Aquarius. Also, some really important developments happened when Saturn was in Aquarius. So I think one of the most exciting things we have to look forward to is, I mean, there are problems with the worlds that, you know, Pluto and Aquarius can create some things that, like, oh, you know, we were talking about the shadows of technological progress, for example, and so forth. But new ideas create new worlds, and new worlds are what we need. There's a reason that we keep making them: we're curious beings that want to explore.

The thing we have to remember is that I believe this; I believe that the Divine is out there saying, explore, create; believe it or not, there's nothing at stake, even though there's tons of suffering and pain in our world, there is a lot at stake, but ultimately, in the scope of eternity. You're just fine. You know, create, explore, there's going to be a play of light and dark when you do so. You'll learn a lot, and don't worry; no one's holding anything against you on the level of eternity.

Number three, humanity needs a soul history. I want to read you guys something. This is from one of my favorite books that I've been utilizing as I'm writing some lectures for my new third-year program in counseling for astrologers. It's called Healing Fiction by James Hillman. You guys know he's kind of like an intellectual sensei in my life. I really like him.

He's talking here about the importance of case histories in therapy and he says this, it is in this sense that case histories are fundamental to depth psychology, not as empirical fundamentals or residues of the medical model, nor as paradigmatic examples demonstrating one or another theorists plot, do they earn our attention? They are subjective phenomena, soul stories. Their chief importance is for the character about whom they are written, you and me. They give us a narrative. A literary fiction that de literalized our life from its projective obsession with outwardness. By putting it into a story, they move us; this is case histories, as in the stories of clients that they take into therapy. They move us from the fiction of reality to the reality of fiction.

They present us with the chance to recognize ourselves in the mess of the world as having been engaged in always being engaged in soul-making, where making returns to its original meaning of poiesis; I think that's how you say that soul-making as psychological poiesis, the making of soul through the imagination of words, perhaps our age has gone to analysis not to be loved or get cured, or even to know thyself, perhaps, we go to be given a case history, to be told into a soul story and given a plot to live by. This is the gift of case history, the gift of finding oneself in myth. In myths, gods and humans meet.

I want to remind us that the story of Ganymede, the human being depicted in the constellation of the water pourer, is the only constellation that is truly the story of which is truly about the meeting of gods and mortals and the fascination the mutual adoration and fascination of the gods, to mortals and mortals to Gods. I am fascinated and enthralled. There's a kind of desire and even love that they have for one another in the Ganymede story, and there's also a way in which we're held captive by the gods and the gods by us.

So, the reason that I see that passage from Hillman is really important is because Aquarius is a sign that helps us identify who we are as people as a collective. By virtue of putting us in touch with new mythology, which is to say, new connections with the gods, and the gods making new connections with us that illuminate and shift our understanding of who we are.

Humanity needs a soul history; we need a case history, which is to say, Pluto is in Aquarius, and we're going to go to the universe with new problems that we present just like someone would to a therapist.

But as Hillman said, maybe we don't go to a therapist to get cured, to get fixed, to get loved. Maybe we go because we're given a new story. We're given a story, and once our life is a story, boy, it's so much more interesting because then we get to method act, we get to see what happens, we get to be involved in a universe, a cosmos, if you remember that distinction from the last talks I did. That is sold, and we need new mythos to live by, and in the gods need people also to live through in new ways, and it's a kind of way of looking at the reality itself as being sold and relational and living and choosing and participatory, as opposed to it being like a giant clock or something.

Number four is that humanity needs to meet itself in new ways, which I was just saying. So, I won't say too much more about this point other than with new ideas, new worlds, the pursuit of universals, and looking at our shadows in light of all of these things. Looking at the need for universals comes up because the shadow creating new worlds often produces new shadows. We need a soul history with the universe; we go with problems, and the universe gives us new mythology to live by, a new way of relating to our problems and new stories, and so in all of those things, they hold up a kind of mirror to us, we get to know ourselves in new ways.

Number five, we need to understand what makes us unique as a species as well as what sets us apart as individuals. This is one of the tensions apparent through the Leo Aquarius axis as a whole or the Sun-Saturn dynamic as a whole. Collective awareness has a way of joining us to something bigger than ourselves, which is truly profound.

But also collective awareness can have a way of its shadow is to ignore or almost like cancel out the importance of the utterly unique, the idiosyncratic, the specific, the particular universals, like the One are naturally opposed to the individual or the many, and so we have to look at the dichotomy between individuality and collectivity.

Those two things together can they both can happen; Pluto and Aquarius are going to help us understand ourselves as a species in new ways while also helping us understand the important tension we have to hold between collectivity and individuality. Truly, none of us are, you know, our gender, our race, our religion or family background, our mistakes, our achievements.

Truly, we are so unique that all of those things are just the Temporary means by which we continue to explore our infinite souls, you know, but on the other hand, those things aren't. You can't just throw them out, either. I get quite annoyed when people try to say your soul don't doesn't matter. As you know, your gender, race, sex, creed, background mistakes, blessings, achievements, none of those things matter.

Well, yeah, they do, you know, what I mean? They matter a lot. So, can we hold the tension between that, too? Not looking at each other in terms of categoricals? We'll also figure out how to acknowledge that the categories of our lives play a part in the shaping of our moving sense of who we are.

Anyway, I find that as a powerful opportunity that, this tension can be looked at in-depth because it's one that we probably need to look at in-depth as our species is becoming more vividly interconnected. It's tempting for the individual to get blotted out, or as you could say, the opposite as our world gets increasingly more individualistic. It's easy to feel like you If you're not a part of anything bigger than yourself, so that tension, the holding and amplifying of that tension, is one of the great creative potentials of Pluto and Aquarius.

Anyway, that's good for today. I hope this was helpful. As always, I hope it gives you some good things to think about as Pluto enters Aquarius and gives you some fun things to think about heading into the weekend. We will be back next week, so don't forget we've got some new programs started. If you need any tuition assistance help, you can be sure to take advantage of that over on the website for the masterclass series, which starts next week, Roots and Spheres, which just began with the year three program in counseling astrology. That's it. Have a great weekend. Bye