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Pluto in Sagittarius
by Jessica Murray
December 2003
At this writing (early 2004), we have about four more years of
Pluto through Sagittarius, four
more years to get our collective values straight. This transit has a lot
to accomplish, and when it’s over it will not be back for a while. Every
two and a half centuries, when Pluto goes into Sagittarius, the world is
given thirteen years to re-establish its essential values.
For the past couple of millennia, the business of establishing
essential group values has belonged more-or-less exclusively to religion.
In the Holy Roman Empire, this was simple: there was only one Church in town.
There was just one definition of Right-and-Wrong. There was no confusion
about what was moral and what wasn’t; it was all written down. One True Faith:
the no-nonsense solution to the Sagittarius problem of establishing an ethical
consensus. Things have gotten rather more complicated since then, and not
just because we have several One True Faiths competing for the title.
Pluto, which leaves nothing at face value, is asking us to dig
down into the essence of the sign of religion. The first question we should
be asking is: Why is Sagittarius the sign of religion? What is Sagittarian
about religion, or about academics or philosophy or long distance travel?
What are the core impulses that drive this sign?
To get to the
heart of an astrological symbol, we need to go back to its elemental definition:
Sagittarius is a fire sign in mutable mode. Fire signs are about passion,
not reason. Though it often comes across as intellectual, Sagittarius is
not really interested in ideas; it is interested in ideals. Ideas are dry
and impersonal, whereas ideals engage the heart. 1
Spiritual impulses number among the pursuits Sagittarius rules,
but an idea does not have to have God in it to be Sagittarian. Secular social
expressions of Sagittarius existed long before the Church’s monopoly on higher
truth, and have been proliferating since the Age of Rationalism broke up
the monopoly.
So what makes an ideology Sagittarian? Sagittarian visions are
more ambitious than mere mental constructs (air); they are felt to be pathways
to righteousness (fire). The directionality of fire is out and up. A Sagittarian
idea is one which promises to expand the perspective outwards and lift the
spirit upwards.
A Sagittarian idea may be brilliant, wildly subjective or completely
insane; Sagittarius does not subject its inspirations to gradations of workability
or logic. Eugenics is an example of Sagittarius applied to race; manifest
destiny is an example of Sagittarius applied to geography. The defining feature
of this sign is neither the cleverness of its ideas nor their empirical validity,
but the fervor with which they are espoused. Sagittarius governs not facts
and figures, but belief systems.
Pluto has been in Sagittarius since 1995, intensifying belief
systems from the aboriginal (paganism) to the mainstream (American Protestantism)
all over the globe. We would do well to remember that a do-or-die extremism
characterizes whatever sign Pluto occupies. As the transit has destined,
we’re all warriors for the truth these days, whatever we fancy the truth
to be. Palestinian self-determinationists, Zionists and Right-to-Lifers all
wield the fiery sword.
Particularly remarkable is the transit’s galvanization of a couple
of areas which are usually thought of as resolutely secular: politics and
money.
In American public discourse, Pluto has turned even the most intellectually
vacant viewpoint into a great Right-and-Wrong crusade. We now hear the word
“evil” invoked as often in international commentary as we do in Sunday school.
Where governments once accused each other of being in breach of international
law, now they accuse each other of being in breach of divine law. Even the
hapless gods of enemy combatants are being impugned by our military leaders
as being less “real” than our own. Every public figure with an agenda is
bearing the cross and prosylitizing the word.
Even more noteworthy is the way the transit has been stirring
the loins of those whose holy grail is financial power.
In the chart of the USA, Pluto resides natally in the 2nd house
of material resources, which poses a particularly knotty problem for the
world from the point of view of ecological survival. The current transit
has transformed greed, which has always been our national liability, into
a religion. The talisman of this religion is oil.
Plutonian operations are not pretty. When expressed with a low
level of consciousness, the Dark God lays to waste whatever it touches. Pluto
in Sagittarius signals a great macro-cyclic bomb shelling of old versions
of Truth in order to clear the stage for new ones. At this point in the 21st
century, the towers crashing down are temple and church spires: doddering
old ideologies which have lost their vitality. The religions we see faltering
are those whose ethical logic cannot withstand modernity; otherwise even
Pluto would be unable to get rid of them.
Today’s gay-marriage resisters and abstinence-only promoters are
in the same club as the bearded old theologians calling for the stoning of
prostitutes: they are fighting for viewpoints which are past their expiration
date. By Plutonian Law, anything that has outlived its usefulness must undergo
the throes of death, which, unless welcomed with grace, can bring out the
ugliest in any creature.
Footnotes:
1 It might
seem logical to give secular thinking to Gemini and religious thinking to
Sagittarius, but the idea is prompted by societal-specific considerations
rather than archetypal ones. That there is any distinction between spiritual
search and the rest of life is a cultural construct. The rigorous imposition
of a separation between the sacred and the profane was a Judeo/Christian/Islamic
invention, a strategy of theocratic power, not a reflection of some inherent
conflict in the human mind. The true distinction between Gemini and Sagittarius
has to do with the automatic, analytic mind as opposed to the synthetic mind;
and with particular information as opposed to overviews. Back to article
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