Dear Friend and Scorpio:
 
WHEN WE TALK about the movement of Pluto, we are considering a planet that personally tells you something about the story of your life; and we are talking about the history of the world. Pluto takes roughly 12 to 20 years to pass through a sign. The roughly part involves how the sign changes blends in over the course of a year; 2008 has been the year of the transition from Sagittarius to Capricorn, which settles in next week. It will last until the transition to Aquarius in 2023-24.
 
We owe ourselves a retrospective of the Pluto in Sagittarius era on a cultural level, and this is planned for Next World Stories. It has all gone by so much, so fast, and seemingly without lasting meaning. Everything that has occurred in the outer life of the culture seemed profoundly important in its moment, but so much seemed to come to nothing.
 
Yet underneath all that movement was a process that, much in the style of Pluto, has often remained unconscious. Remember that Pluto the god wears a helmet that renders him invisible to mortals. To me this process represented a spiritualizing process; an actual experience of mass-scale individual ensoulment, working deep beneath all the "isms" that have driven us nuts the past 12 to 14 years. Seeing and understanding the Pluto process is particularly meaningful for you, who are trying to understand the mysterious growth process unfolding underneath what you think of as your life.
 
I'll see if I can boil this down to one central metaphor: the transition of Pluto from your 2nd to 3rd houses; from Sagg to Cap, using those archetypes primarily. See if you can follow. As a Scorpio, you have Sagittarius in the 2nd solar house of your chart; the second chapter of the story of your incarnation. The sign immediately following one's own is one of the most meaningful because it represents the true values system. Usually the 2nd house exists in potential, like money in the bank.
 
Scorpio and Sagittarius are radically different signs; water versus fire; fixed versus mutable; emotional versus visionary; introspective versus outgoing. Sagittarius has a reputation for being generous and upbeat. Scorpio is famous for being possessive and moody. But Sagittarius is part of you, and vitally so. It is your spiritual bank account, and spiritual it is. You are made of both signs, really, in whatever measure you care to mix them.
 
What can activate or make that potential real? How about a 12-plus year transit? Particularly of a planet so closely related to you, Pluto. Slowly and deliberately, Pluto has moved through Sagittarius, your 2nd house, in an extremely event-filled journey. This you know. Give yourself a brief summary of your life since the mid-1990s; write a chronology. Look for peaks in late 1999; the summer of 2001 through mid 2002; the summer of 2005; and a long process with its own distinct feeling from 2006 through 2008. Notably, in 2006 the status of Pluto was changed from planet to a kind of minor planet; it now bears minor planet number 134340, something that was unthinkable just a few years ago. But thanks to the discovery and naming of 136199 Eris, the solar system is a different place than we began the Sagittarius journey in late 1994.
 
In public discourse, the Pluto in Sagittarius era is associated with expansion on every front; with globalism, that is, capitalism taking over the whole globe; with the bizarre rise in theocracy (government controlled by religious ideology) in both the Middle East and the United States; with a sense of planetary awareness, including climate change and (more lately) noticing the way that the world economy is interconnected.
 
What we have not talked about is the spiritual dimension to this transit, which is inevitable with Pluto working its way along the sign associated with all such concerns. Its journey included making conjunctions to the Great Attractor and then the Galactic Core, two points in space that are central to our understanding of the cosmos and which point, in simple terms, to the origins of time and the heart of God/Goddess.
 
This has personal meaning to you, deeper than for most. In essence, you have been pushed, pulled, invited and compelled to traverse your true spiritual quest. At times you went willingly. At other times you were dragged kicking and screaming. At still others you found yourself immersed in situations you did not fully understand. But again and again you made contact with your core ideals; you tested them out; you pulled into them like a hand into a glove.
 
Let's put it this way: being spiritual is not about what you profess to believe. It is the way your experiences have taught you to connect to what you hold deeply true, and then to express that as an authentic way of living. That way of living is curiously opposite and yet the same as who you understood yourself to be, prior to this transit; that is the paradox of adjoining signs.
 
We meet that paradox again as Pluto makes its way into Capricorn; you could not have two more different signs than Sagittarius and Capricorn and yet potentially expressing the same intention in different ways. Capricorn is placed in your 3rd house using the solar house system.
 
The 3rd house is eminently practical; that is how it must be. It covers subject matter such as our language skills, how we think, and where we live, in terms of our neighborhood and the people who inhabit it. If the 2nd house is your values, your 3rd house represents your immediately accessible belief systems. The 3rd house is like your operating system; it's the place you apply your values. To have Capricorn there might feel like running Windows 96, and at other times like you are caught in the patterns of your grandparents.
 
This can be stressful if you are forward thinking, devoted to growth and take a broad view of the world; there are times when, despite you, your own mental process resists putting the new information to work, or even acknowledging that it's real. And here is where Pluto in Capricorn comes into play.
 
Imagine that Pluto, as it moves through Capricorn, is infused with the energy of Sagittarius. Being Pluto, it has a touch of Shiva, a touch of Dionysus and a bit of the Underworld. When it touches the matrix of Capricorn, it's going to open the way to revising your mental patterns. They will all, one by one, come into question. You have done the deep work of coming to terms with your values; now comes a longer, more challenging process of making sure that your thoughts actually match what you value.
 
This is not an expansion process, Sagittarius style; it's about renovating and rebuilding what already exists. It's about clearing space in the interior of your mind that is occupied by things that no longer matter to you; with scripts and programming left there by your parents and their ancestors; with antiquated notions of how life is supposed to be that our DNA is quite literally strewn with.
 
Through this process you reconnect with something inherent about your connection with tradition -- the one that is much deeper than what passes for such. Norman Rockwell, Republicanism and the rules of dating are not traditions; they mock something that is much more profound in the human spirit. That something is a sense of our lineage, of our existence, and of our language: and all of these things, as will have room to thrive once so many false beliefs are cleared out of the way.
 
And this, they will be -- sooner than you think. One result will be gaining an unfettered freedom to express yourself; the freedom to speak your mind, and the freedom of your mind to identify with your soul above all else.
 
Happy birthday, Scorpio.
 
Yours & truly,