Uranus-Pluto Square: It's for Real, Yo

6.20.12


Drumroll, please: IT has arrived. As of this week (Sun Jun 24, to be precise), Uranus and Pluto move into their first exact square.

The single era-imprinting astrological aspect is no longer merely looming in the ethers, gathering itself in the proverbial sky like a storm-cloud you can see miles away as it blows into town. We are now in its eye.

If you have followed my work (or, really, that of almost any competent astrologer) over the past two or three years, you've already heard about this Uranus-Pluto square. Though these two planetary heavyweights haven't officially struck the 90-degree-angle to each other until now, we have been within its standard 5-degree orb since mid-2009… and the whispers of its influence were certainly beginning to breathe down our necks before then. Personally, I trace my own observed awareness of the first Uranus-Pluto inklings to late 2008, when the dual events of the financial markets' crash and the polarizing election of Barack Obama signaled an intensification in our collective discussions (or, perhaps better put, arguments) about who deserves what, and why.

To summarize once again, whenever Uranus and Pluto come together in any hard aspect (i.e., conjunction, opposition or square), we witness a period of increased societal unrest and turbulence, during which issues of human rights and social welfare are more loudly addressed. Astrologer-academic Richard Tarnas does a great job of detailing the historical specifics of what he calls these 'epochs of revolution' associated with Uranus-Pluto contacts. The last two of these revolutionary Uranus-Pluto periods in our recent history were (1) the mid-1960s, a time so renowned for these qualities that 'The Sixties' has essentially become a brand-name for describing progressive social change, and (2) the Great Depression during the first half of the 1930s, which followed the massive financial crash of 1929 and led to debates about the consequences of free markets, government interventions, and unequal distributions of wealth which uncannily mirror the content of today's public discourse.

Let that sink in: In making sense of where we collectively are right now, our two closest reference points are The Sixties and The Great Depression. And this astrological energy is only reaching its first of seven exact Uranus-Pluto squares, lasting through 2015… and remaining within orb-of-influence through 2017. When the next history books are written, much of this current decade will ultimately prove to reflect a similar such dramatic turning-point.

Likewise, in our personal lives, we'll each face our own individual pressures to revolutionize or suffer—some more potent or painful than others, based upon how the Uranus-Pluto square interacts with our own unique natal charts.

Uranus in Aries is a radical inspirer of self-actualizing freedoms, spurring us to instinctively rise to whatever impulse for action or assertion will generate innovative forward motion. Uranus in Aries is not cowardly, nor especially thoughtful. Rather, he will courageously lurch ahead even when he isn't sure what will happen next or after that, just to express some, any, energetic release.

Pluto in Capricorn smells the churning threats to its commanding authority… and, if he hopes to hold on to his power as a successful resource-manager, must either transform his management contract, to address changing circumstances and ongoing problems which have worsened, or tighten the grip of his iron fist. Pluto in Capricorn wants to stay on top. Whether he opts to do so by increasing his responsiveness to other players' adapting needs or moving to crush their oppositional influence will all depend on his own position along the altruism-vs.-greed scale.

We are already living this, of course, together navigating this touchy conflict between two formidable astro-gods and the archetypal energies they symbolize, neither of which is great at compromise or eager to back down. We know we're observing the clash between Uranus and Pluto in motion whenever we see renegade citizens marching in the streets, blocked and/or beaten by uniformed agents of the centralized law… unions of singular workers pitted against 'budgetary-restraint' strategies handed down from those on high (and bankrolled by capital-accumulating privatization warriors whose personal fortunes could easily neutralize a budget deficit here and there)... so-called 'developing' nations revving their own economic engines while the Big Boys figure out how to contain (and profitize) their rogue colonies… any peculiarly inconsistent method for deciding which humans' rights are worth waging a war for, and which seemingly aren't, depending upon which power-players draw what sort of personal benefit from either supporting or toppling a status-quo structure… and how violently we common people seem to hate one another based on relatively superficial identity differences, while those divisions between us are actively fed so as to conceal the real evil wizards behind the curtain.

These reflections, in my mind, all boil down to a single stark image in my head: One privileged person holding a disproportionately vast amount of food in his hands, while masses of hungry individuals converge around him. Will he share what he's got with them? Will he consult with them to jointly devise methods for establishing longer-term solutions to the mass hunger? Or will he retreat to the castle tower, as the masses below grow angrier? And will they find a productive manner for challenging this unfair privilege, withholding their participation in the social contract until their needs are also met? Will they develop radical new methods, wholly outside the existing tyranny, for sustaining themselves? Or will they simply storm the fort and bloodily behead the greedy miser?

Beyond these hypothetical imaginings, of course, are our real lived lives, where we each contend with versions of such politics in intensely personal ways: Something is no longer working as it once did—or, if we're being honest, maybe it never really worked that well to begin with. The red-flags we earlier ignored or papered over have now devolved into major life-catastrophes. One area of life is being severely hindered or restricted by our ceaselessly continuing with some dissatisfactory pattern in another. We desperately crave to be freed up, even as we can't imagine how not to continue as we have. Our ability to make peace between two increasingly divergent sectors of our existence is pretty badly failing us.

As I've said before, under this type of disruptive epoch-defining astrology, there is simply no going backward to the imagined idyll of our past. In fact, even hoping to tread in place, putting in just enough to barely keep your head above water, is not enough of a response. We must think revolution, if we not only want to save ourselves but thrive as never before… while, at the same time, finally addressing those gnawing problems we haven't adequately handled in the past. Then, we must act it, bravely but compassionately, knowingly embracing the chaotic bumps that are an inescapable side-effect of creative progress.

June 2012 is a month that astrologers have long been pointing to as a decisive moment in the unfolding of this generation's abrupt advance: because Uranus and Pluto finally perfect their square, and also because that happens in conjunction with the last Venus transit of our lifetimes while she's retrograde, as well as eclipses and a Jupiter sign-change, all events with a strong Gemini signature. The Gemini effect has blessed our brains and nervous-systems with hyperactivity, bestowing social energy and mental quickness that enables us to conjure the alliances and ideas we need to help us revolutionize. But this month's astrology has simultaneously brought a lot of life-changing situations to a head, delivering relationship beginnings and endings, familial births and deaths, geographic moves and professional redirections… and a whole host of other such personal indicators that the writing's on the wall. The past has passed on.

Scary and liberating, all at once.

Welcome, officially, to the Uranus-square-Pluto era. Tagline: All bets are off.

Further reading: Thanking the Times (11.20.09)