Jupiter conjunct Pluto, 12th November 2020
We are at the dynamic moment in which an inner-world change is beginning to precipitate into an outer-world change; whether the change is carried to completion depends on our not interfering, and on our seeking guidance from the Sage [Higher Power] … and following it. (Carol K. Anthony)
A big year, 2020: three major new planetary cycles beginning after a hiatus of eleven years. It began, in January, with Saturn and Pluto meeting on 22° Capricorn, whose signature has been lockdown and the structural crises precipitated by, of all things, a virus. In April and June, Jupiter met Pluto on 24° Capricorn and their third and final meeting occurs on 12th November on 22° Capricorn, revisiting the very degree of the Saturn-Pluto conjunction. (The third new cycle to begin is Jupiter-Saturn, meeting in Aquarius on the Winter Solstice.) A year, then, when we have seen an extraordinary focus on Capricorn, described by Alice Bailey as ‘this most material of all the signs … the battleground of the old established order and habits and the new and higher inclinations and tendencies’.[i] It is in this sign that ambition and the hunger for status become most craven, but Capricorn is also the sign of Initiation, when spiritual aspiration supersedes the clammy-handed, worldly variety.
Pluto’s voyage through Capricorn is revealing the havoc wreaked by excessive materialism, and exposing the degree to which the hidden underpinnings of our systems of control and governance are rotten. Materialism, in essence, is a worldview from which spirit and a sense of the sacred have been excised: if you can’t see it or measure it, it doesn’t exist. The rationalism arising from this worldview can take us very far in investigating, explaining and designing metrics for our lives on Earth, but it doesn’t touch the question that gives us our humanity: ‘Why?’ (let alone, ‘What’s the point?’) In fact it leaves us in a senseless universe of random activity where human longing for meaning and order can seem, at best, romantic. This is a great perversion of truth and one that causes immense suffering.
Jupiter is the planet that quests for meaning and faith. Its work is to seek expansion and opportunity, to discern the patterns, laws and principles that lend coherence and significance to life. Jupiter in Capricorn is in its ‘fall’, exhibiting its lowest register of expression, which can be characterised as being on the make, in pursuit of self-gratification and the devil take the hindmost. Jupiter’s buoyancy, magnetism and love are blocked here and it takes some kind of crisis to drive Jupiter’s expression to a higher register where it may once more operate as the stalker of faith in life. Pluto is that crisis, calling time, switching the lights on and kicking out the reprobates at Jupiter’s party, driving the register of Jupiter’s expression higher by dragging it down into the depths. Depth awareness is the challenge and the gift that Pluto brings.
Pluto demands a change in Jupiter’s loyalties and it poses a question to all of us: is your ultimate concern for your little life and your material satisfaction or are you able to raise your sights to include a concern for other lives and for the deep wellbeing of Life in general? Pluto is subjecting Jupiter and Capricorn to a process of relentless regeneration, impelling us to include the non-material, the subtle, the Unseen in our context of significance. I don’t say it lightly, but economic hardship has a role to play in the readjustment of our values, harsh as that is in people’s lives. Jupiter is a wonderful resource as a meaning-maker and a faith-keeper; it shows us the grain in the wood of the Way It Is, the path of becoming that allows the creative power of life to flow into our world. These qualities of meaning and faith we sorely need now. Pluto’s way is to drill down and drive things deep. It is injecting Jupiter into this fraught degree of Capricorn, in order to wrest from it understanding and the opportunity to shift our register.
The Jupiter-Pluto conjunction is the focal point of a cardinal t-square, squaring Mars in Aries on one side and Venus in Libra (conjuncting the Moon) on the other, suggesting a stand-off between self and other, masculine and feminine, war and peace. This could manifest as acts of aggression, particularly towards women; it points to a predicament in our understanding that habitually sees the Other not only as separate but as a threat to Self. Such polarisation is painful, as we have been witnessing in our social and political culture generally, and is a distortion of the truth of our fundamental interconnectedness. Our suffering is in proportion to our denial of that truth.
The possibility of this grand finale of 2020’s conjunctions in Capricorn is that we begin to share a sense of our current opportunity and determine to have faith in our shared future. We need both faith in life (Jupiter) and spiritual aspiration (Capricorn) to go through the challenge of the present moment. The lunar consciousness (which pertains to our habits and emotions that keep us clinging to security, stuck firmly within the compound of the known) is ever the saboteur of our ability to find our way forward. It is essentially neurotic and obstructs the Way It Is; it is strengthened by our departure from real-life encounters in the physical world in favour of the virtual realm, which is only ever a reflection of the real just as the Moon’s light is only a reflection of the Sun. Our current evacuation of embodied experience is a danger for us: the human task it is to bring spiritual forces to the physical world, not to the panoply of attention-harvesting devices to be found Online! Quite simply, we need to be connected to each other and to physical reality, just to be OK.
At one level the signature of Jupiter-Pluto is the ruthless control of the impulse towards freedom. It is for us to remember and embody the Way It Is, which is in essence free and beyond external constraint. Our experiences can, if we choose, be used to hone our attention and our appetite for the meaning, faith and freedom that Jupiter bestows.
[i] Alice Bailey, Esoteric Astrology, Lucis, 1951: 170.
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