The Uranus-Pluto Square: Threshold in Time

There is no lack of lore about 2012, a truly mythic year. Isn’t it interesting, in and of itself, to see this degree of fuss made about a calendar year? From interpreters of the Mayan calendar to Hollywood screenwriters, 2012 has an impassioned following.

From the point of view of Western astrology, the buzz is not so easy to pin on one singular year. Celestial events don’t fit neatly into the demarcations of the Gregorian calendar, especially the really far-reaching ones; they are too vast to be understood within the confines of a solar cycle. But it is in 2012 that the biggest transit of our era, the First Quarter square between Uranus and Pluto, twice comes to exactitude (6/24 and 9/19), out of seven passes total.

What will it bring?

What 2012 brings to us depends solely on the level of awareness we bring to it. Only one thing is certain: whatever its outward manifestations, the year to come marks a point of no return. Though we’re not at the beginning of the Uranus-Pluto transit nor at its end, we can confidently say that 2012 represents a threshold in time.

The cosmos is throwing down the gauntlet. Humanity is going to have to make some critical decisions about life on Earth.

The Longest Arm

During 2011 we watched the Uranus-Pluto square approaching its exactitude like a revolutionary advance guard. Everywhere in the world, infrastructures are dying. At the Autumnal Equinox, the square was closer than ever, and the more temporary seasonal transits triggered it.

That’s when Occupy Wall Street was born, an expression of the transit’s need for deep social overhaul. OWS took off like a thunderbolt, as do all events born of outer-planet transits. Within days, the protesters’ message was shaking windows and rattling walls like a tempest, all over the world.

The military-political wing of the Uranus-Pluto square first arose in the Arab world in armed clashes between dictatorial regimes (Pluto) and revolutionary elements (Uranus).

Its financial wing has been reflected in global debt crises: in particular, the debt debacle in Europe, where the wealthier countries are scrambling to keep the contagion of bankruptcy from their own economies.

In the case of Italy, Ireland and Portugal, a breakdown of the economic infrastructure has caused whole regimes to topple; in England and France the people are seriously unhappy with their rulers. This blends the two primary meanings of a Capricorn transit of Pluto: monetary and governmental systems.

The crisis of the Euro is an outgrowth of the revelations that were presented to the world four years ago, when Pluto first entered Capricorn with the Wall Street meltdown.

Head in the Sand

It was then that a lot of people who had never before thought about such things found out how intertwined the world’s financial markets are, and how inescapable one country’s problems are from every other’s.

What’s going on in Europe would probably freak Americans out more than it is, if they paid more attention to international news.

After February 2012, when Neptune goes into Pisces to stay, it will be less and less feasible for Americans to pretend that catastrophes elsewhere don’t affect us. Neptune in Pisces will emphasize the universals of existence of Earth. Walls built to keep immigrants out will start to look ever more ridiculous. Environmental policies that fail to consider the degradation of other parts of the world won’t work. Separatist notions of all kinds will be rendered irrelevant. American insularity is becoming anachronistic very fast.

Cancer Suns under stress are notorious for retreating in isolationism; and we are heading into a period when the USA’s Cancer Sun will be under tremendous tension. Uranus and Pluto will be in a Grand Cross with the Sibly Sun-Saturn square. The national habit of isolating will be tempting to fall into; but it will be disallowed by the nature of the world’s crises, which will serve to inter-connect us whether we like it or not.

To the extent that the country resists the call of Neptune and Chiron in Pisces—which are still conjunct the US Moon as the year begins—Uncle Sam will be in for quite a struggle over the next four years; most obviously in terms of environmental, financial and foreign policy.

Crisis in the Old Country

The Euro crisis that started to peak in early November, is a good example of this interconnectedness. On the level of the collective unconscious, the news that Mother Europe could be sustaining such a catastrophe was an earthquake underneath the firmament of our notions in the Western world about the stability of civilization.

This is the kind of thing astrologers have been issuing warnings about, for years, with Pluto in Capricorn—the sign we associate with civilizations and their infrastructures. That when it came up against Uranus, the planet of radical shake-ups, all those old assumptions about civilization that have been taught in dusty old textbooks for centuries would be rent asunder.

There was a stunning expression of the tension between Uranus (ordinary people) & Pluto (the powers-that-be), around Halloween; just a brief little flash that expressed the transit’s symbolism to a tee. The Greek president said he wanted to submit a referendum to the populace, about how to get out of their mess.

This shocked the pants off the geopolitical/ financial cabals that control the world’s money. Imagine following the will of the vox populi! The idea was quashed almost as soon as it began; but what a statement of the Uranus-Pluto square. The notion was pure Uranus, the planet of democratic impulses; and it was smothered over the course of a few days by the G20 powers playing the role of Pluto.

Change

But there is a deeper level of Plutonian function that has nothing to do with people on power trips. Pluto is the Natural Law of breakdown and renewal, and it is being accelerated right now by Uranus’ square to it.

When we study Pluto dispassionately, watching it operate within human cultures over long swaths of time—think of the rise and fall of the Roman empire—we see that this is the same force that ushers everything in the universe through the cycle of birth, death and rebirth again.

Pluto does not kill; it rips the masks off decay. It certainly doesn’t cause something that is healthy and vital to suddenly drop dead. It just walks up to a corpse that’s already teetering and—poof—blows it over, so it falls crashing down. Uranus is lighting the fire underneath the whole process, quickening it and intensifying the urgency. Traditionally called the Great Awakener, Uranus is inciting revolutionary vigor into the denizens of Earth.

Together these two planets are making radical change irresistible.

Jessica Murray

Jessica Murray trained as a fine artist before graduating in 1973 from Brown University, where she studied psychology and linguistics. After a stint in political theatre in the heady early ’70s, Jessica moved to San Francisco and began studying metaphysics, where she has had a full-time private practice in astrology for more than 30 years. Her book, Soul-Sick Nation: An Astrologer’s View of America, is available through her website, mothersky.com.
In addition to her column in Daykeeper Journal and the monthly Skywatch on her website, Jessica’s essays appear in “The Mountain Astrologer,” “P.S. Magazine” and other publications. Jessica can be reached by email.