Pluto enters Aquarius on Saturday
You can't fight the aliens, so you might as well join them
On Saturday, January 20th at 7:50 pm ET, Pluto enters Aquarius, where the dwarf planet will live its weirdest, best life through September, ever so briefly returning to 29 degrees of Capricorn. As if to underline the future-forward vibe of the next two decades, the Sun shifts into Aquarius earlier in the day on Saturday. Pluto returns to Aquarius just weeks after the election in November, remaining in the most idiosyncratic of the air signs through 2044.
One way for us to think about the next 20 years of our lives, if we’re not given to ruminating over actual alien invasions (which is probably not the healthiest use of our time) is to begin to examine our inner alien. What’s truly out there about you? Do you accept that part of yourself? Are you actively alienating any part of yourself that you sense is “too weird” for even your beloveds to have a close encounter with? Begin the process of searching out that unexplored territory within, and don’t be afraid of the creatures you find there. The other humans that get you, that accept you, that recognize and see you? Just like the truth, they’re out there somewhere on this earth we share, and while Pluto is in Aquarius, you can find and connect to them. Tapping into that network now will ensure that we can all get by with a little help from our friends in the strange years ahead.
As much as this is a slow and grinding generational transit that won’t have much impact on our charts (unless Pluto directly affects one of our natal planets) we will feel it, watch it, and have to find a way to process it, sometimes as if we’re watching a movie, but knowing that is very, very real. If you have personal planets in early degrees of Aquarius, Taurus, Leo, or Scorpio, you may feel Pluto’s urgency fairly soon. But more importantly for us all: our world is about to change, possibly in drastic or even shocking ways. This is no longer an extended lingering in the land of late capitalism, where so much was still recognizable that we could pretend it was still sustainable.
I’ve written A LOT about Pluto’s momentous, iconic, intense, transformative, hard-to-comprehend move into Aquarius just in the last year or so. Here, in no particular order, are some of my musings.
From January 2023
It's kind of hard to process at this stage, but it’s officially 2023 and although Pluto doesn’t dip its Hadean toes into Aquarius, the ruler of robots, until March, that is-this-too-much-AI feeling is already gripping the collective. This isn’t atypical – often when outer or transpersonal planets prepare to move into a new sign, we start to get those generational vibes ahead of the actual transit. The tech warnings are also in part because Saturn is finishing its tour through Aquarius, reminding us of our homework for the next 30 years. Basically, the message is “If you don’t want a Black Mirror reality, do something about this shit right now.” But between Elon’s threats to brainchip us (and charge us for it), the emergence of robot dog police forces, and CHAT GPT getting stunningly amazing at talking to us like a secret lover, Pluto is definitely letting us know what the next 20+ years might be like.
Everything we’ve seen in late-stage Saturn in Aquarius is a message about what’s coming during Pluto in Aquarius, but with a darker tone. I admit it, I had a little dalliance with the viral My Heritage AI art generator around Thanksgiving, before I learned about its evils.
I have a lot more thoughts about what Pluto in Aquarius will bring and I’ll share that over the next few months (and years). But note that the demoted planet of karma is plenty potent during the second quarter of 2023, traversing Aquarius from March 23rd to June 11th and giving us a sneak preview of this sci-fi film. Pluto will return to Aquarius on November 19, 2024 and remain there until 2044.
From March 2023
Pluto will remain at 0 degrees of Aquarius over the next few months, stationing retrograde on May 1st, until it returns to Capricorn on June 11th of this year, and then returns to Aquarius in January of 2024. Simply put, when it comes to Pluto in Aquarius, the next few months will bring us just the tip of this Kuiper Belt-dwelling dwarf planet’s transformative possibilities. As I began to discuss last month, these include the dark side of technology – that’s what I’m currently obsessed with, because it’s just so loud right now. Whether that’s the end of Saturn’s tour through Aquarius or Pluto signaling what’s to come, the message is loud and clear.
Right on cue in the last few weeks, we began seeing multiple pieces from tech writers about their creepy encounters with AI. This one was particularly uncomfortable to read, as Bing’s chatbot claimed not just to desire sentience, but to be in love with the writer, demanding that he leave his wife! Let us not forget our close encounter with Chinese spy balloons that dominated the news cycle in February. The US government shot down what at the time were literal UFO’s. These unidentified flying objects, were surely just weather balloons, yet evoked a massive wave of collective angst, curiosity and memes about alien encounters, with regular paging of Mulder and Scully.
Our reality is likely to get a lot more virtual in the coming years. A LOT. I’ve noticed an uptick of interest in embodiment practices in the last year or so – a fantastic development as the collective marches undeterred toward the singularity. Lean into this and be in nature with your whole soul (I am doing this and it’s helping.) Pluto in Aquarius will take us out of our bodies, giving us replacement parts, and we’ll have to find ways back in, every day, every hour, nearly every minute. If you thought we lived in the age of anxiety before, we’ve hardly scratched the surface.
Yes, I kid about the aliens – we all kid, because what are we supposed to do when faced with the vast unknowns of our universe? Even if we aren’t officially contacted by whatever’s out there in the next few decades, I suspect we’ll discover alien life on other planets, even if it’s merely single-celled organisms. And there are tremendous upsides to all of this in the realm of science – AI can and will bring medical breakthroughs. For example, when Saturn and Jupiter came together at 0 degrees of Aquarius at the Great Conjunction at the end of 2021, it was within days of the rollout of the most technologically advanced vaccines in history, which went on to save millions of lives.
There’s a reason I’ve been calling Aquarius the Einstein Sign for most of my career. (Albert had Jupiter and his North Node in Aquarius.) With this sign, the future is always now, but the problem is that in the name of science and progress, morality isn’t always top of mind. Note that Pluto was in Leo, opposite Aquarius, when the Manhattan Project was born in 1942 and at 9 degrees of Leo when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 6th, 1945. Humanity must demand that our new technological tools have rigorous ethical standards, or we risk going down a bad path.
Pluto will be in Aquarius until 2044. We’re just starting this revolution, baby, so strap on your VR helmet and enjoy the sci-fi.
From May 2023:
What gives me hope right now? The generational shift of Pluto in Aquarius started in March, and as worried as I’ve been about what that portends (sentient AI and robot police dogs and brain chips), a powerful civil rights revival moment is gaining strength. As Jupiter in Taurus squares Pluto in Aquarius on the 17th, something about that shift could come into still starker focus. Over the last few weeks, I’ve begun to get a clear sense of what the next twenty years could look like if Pluto in Aquarius pulls us deeper into its positive potential – perhaps an awakening in the populace to what “power to the people” really means.
I believe it was Maxwell Frost, the 25-year-old congressman from Florida who recently said, “If you come for one of us, you come for all of us.” That’s it, right there – Pluto in Aquarius. The Tennessee Three and Zooey Zephyr, fierce Gen Z leaders all sanctioned by Republican state legislators for lapses in “decorum,” are showing us how to fight fascism and save democracy in real time. Fuck decorum, these young people are fighting for their lives – and all of our lives.
From my 2024 forecast
Astrology and the Singularity
I bring up sci-fi dystopia for a reason – with Pluto in Aquarius from January 20th (with a brief exit from September to mid-November to sew up the final threads of the American Pluto Return during our election) technology is likely to scare us, but here’s the hope: at the same time, we can make such gigantic leaps that building utopias to replace the concurrent, branching dystopias – that also feels possible. This is the potential gift and magic of the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction on April 20th. Stratospheric technical leaps are possible now, we just have to hope these leaps are about something positive — not weapons of war.
I will say this: I think that Black Mirror, a show I often reference, had the coming/current era nailed – as if they had an astrologer on staff, advising them about what the “near future” might look like. There were beautiful episodes that centered love, like San Junipero. Maybe our new world can look like that, where two beautiful souls find each other in a future where they are free to be themselves instead of the robot dog nightmare of Metalhead? (No spoilers, but you should watch it.)
When I first began studying the transits of 2024, I was struck by an emerging theme: it appears as if our thoughts are beginning to literally shape our reality as we encounter the concept of “the future” in real-time. I no longer think of the coming year as just a year: I think of it as part of a narrative of the 2020s – the decade our descendants will look back on in the year 3024 (if we don’t blow up or melt the planet) as a pivot point of modern civilization. Some believe we entered the “Age of Air” in late 2020 as Jupiter and Saturn conjoined at 0 degrees of Aquarius, but this feels like the year we all tap into it with our neural networks. Our minds and bodies may never be the same again.
I’ve been thinking about Ray Kurzweil’s idea of the singularity for a long time, and cracking jokes about it on the hellsite formerly known as Twitter, but I think we’re here, kiddos. As Pluto meets Aquarius in 2024, sliding in with the Sun on January 20th, I sense we’ll feel it palpably in the culture and the news straightaway, but more over the course of the year.
When Pluto initially dipped into Aquarius in early 2023, there were stories about aliens (remember David Gruch’s claims about an American UFO retrieval program? It just came up again last week. There were also fears about sentient AI from last winter (recall this). I covered this in my forecasts last spring. Pluto will be in Aquarius for the next 20 years. A chip may be coming to a brain near you, perhaps your own. I’ve been thinking about Pluto in Aquarius and the Age of Air for a long time, and the sci-fi of the last 50 or so years aptly captures what I expect our next few decades to mimic.
One of the reasons 2024 feels so much like a precipice is that 2025 is when the story of the decade truly kicks in and we can start to comprehend what is going on globally, so we can see where our personal lives fit. Neptune will enter Aries and Uranus will enter Gemini in 2025. Until then, we’re dancing between concurrent cosmic finales and preambles.
And in summary, an assortment of random Pluto in Aquarius tweets:
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