Eris in the 4th solar house. Spiral Door aspect, Quaoar and Ixion in the 12th solar house. Pluto working toward the solar ascendant. Saturn in the 8th solar house. Chiron-Nessus conjunct in the 2nd solar house. Mars retrograde in the 7th solar house. Venus retrograde in the 8th and 7th solar houses.   Capricorn is the relationship house for Cancer, the career house for Aries, and the home and security house for Libra. This interpretation works for Capricorn rising as well.

MANY are considering scenarios around Pluto going into Capricorn, which technically begins in one year. I know the feeling, since I've been thinking about it since 1997. Personally, at the moment, I am boycotting reading anything on this topic by other writers, for what I will call religious reasons -- namely, that Pluto has not finished its extremely rare crossing of the Galactic Core, something we need to focus on and as best we can, understand while it's happening.
 
Rather than predict, we must mind our business and take the process of personal history, and world history, into our hands.
 
Pluto's crossing of the Galactic Core is not merely a "transit," but rather a transformation of how we experience, think of and feel Pluto -- which is another way of saying how we consider our own lives on the bottom-line level: call it what you will, life or death, the story of our soul's journey, or reckoning with the unstoppable force of evolution. It is a threshold event, not a passing phase. Any transit that happens just once in a lifetime is a threshold. Some that happen more than once (Saturn return, for example) are also thresholds. But every Pluto transit counts; we are never the same after a Pluto transit, and while we may complain while it is happening, we will surely miss it when it's over.
 
We need to consider that you've had Pluto transiting your 12th house for many years, and that has set a certain tone in your life, as well as an agenda, but the two may have existed in the deep background, as is the tendency of both Pluto and the 12th house. As Pluto pushes the endnotes of the 12th, the theme is indeed completion, but in order to grasp that, we need to understand what you've begun.
 
The 12th house is probably the most difficult of the lot. It is at once last (the 12th of 12) and first (the astrological day begins at dawn, when the Sun crosses the horizon, into the 12th). The houses each represent environments in the worldly sense of that word.
I sometimes call them stages of life, a double take on both theatrical stages, and stages of growth. If you're studying astrology, a good exercise is to randomly stop and ask yourself, "What house am I in?" Where are you physically in that moment, and on what stage of life are you acting out the primary drama of your life?
 
Like many things with a Neptune flavor, the 12th is difficult to see, feel, understand, explain or make a coherent image for. You cannot point to "it" because there is no it to point to. What it resembles most clearly are dreams, which are often chaotic under the best circumstances, and which have all their own rules. It also represents things so large, nobody really understands them. For most people, the 12th is like standing in the lobby of City Hall in Lower Manhattan, and trying to divine how New York City works. So in one respect it's the symbol of all that makes no sense, all that is too vast to comprehend, and the unknown that instills a bit of fear in a healthy person, but is also inspiring.
 
Then, turning this concept 14 degrees to the left, pointing it toward the southeast a little, and scratching your nose, it's the house of bliss and surrender. One of the most accessible places we contact the 12th is orgasm -- the real thing, the blotto kind, wherein everything ceases to exist, and you cease to exist in any recognizable form, and that's all just fine: the moment of totality, one of its most notable characteristics being that you cannot understand it. Something just happened, you were there, but you don't quite know what it was. You went somewhere, but you don't know where you went.
 
It is difficult to imagine two more contrasting images than Capricorn and the 12th house. Cap is the sign of everything you can ultimately make sense of, know the history of, and draw a diagram to explain.
 
We tend to hold a lot in the 12th house, in particular, the most of contents of the unconscious. (When dreams, a 12th house subject, bubble to the surface, we experience the unconscious semi-consciously, and sometimes we even remember). Anything we do not understand about ourselves, anything that scares us about ourselves, anything we hide from ourselves: these could be considered 12th house matters. You have Sagittarius in this house (in your solar chart), which suggests something about how you express your spiritual quest. Worldly though you may be, you definitely have one; you may just call it something else, or experience it as something so vast and all-encompassing that it's not its own thing, it's part of everything.
 
Pluto, for its part, is a focus point of growth. Where Pluto is transiting, we experience intense growth. It is growth as a matter of necessity; do or die type growth; the thing we cannot miss, and if we do, it comes back and finds us. In astrology at least as we understand it so far, Pluto is the court of last resort in the soul's journey, but it's also the prime mover, working just as easily as the first thing we can turn our attention to. First, last: Pluto works fine either way.
 
A 12th house Pluto transit is about making deep roots into your own relationship to the cosmos. I have a Capricorn friend I've known a long time. When I first knew him, he was always playing himself off as an atheist. During the course of Pluto in Sagittarius, I've noticed something interesting developing. Every time I would see him, he was making a new discovery that so far as I can tell required an extraordinarily open mind. For a while he was investigating certain specific UFO phenomena and what they meant to people; at another time, reincarnation. The material he would explore had to make sense, it needed to be carefully done, but there was never a question of something being too out-there or unbelievable. I am aware that the loss of a very close friend went a long way to shift his focus to what he knew was more important. But if I asked him today, I am sure he would say he has no use for God or a god concept, instead, drawing nourishment from a nameless universal source or the simple awareness that there is more to life than what we perceive.
 
Pluto in the 12th is also about facing one's worst fears, be they of isolation, death, surrender, or the idea that we're really all just prisoners of the world, trapped in vulnerable bodies subject to many cruel fates. While people tend to heap religion onto their backs and drag it around like the burden it usually is, your method of addressing all these things has transcended words and concepts and has happened in actual fact, following no special rules, and without the guidance of a holy man.
 
So now imagine Pluto going through your 12th house for the past 12 or so years, churning up and distilling down all this subject matter. We rarely go into the 12th, but Pluto, the most compelling force, has drawn you there like a homing beacon. Imagine that it's taken on all those fears, all your old beliefs, and all your unanswered questions. Now imagine that in the process of crossing the Galactic Core, it is going to have all that old material, old karma, if you will, vaporized. Imagine the concentration of billions of stars, clustered around a supermassive black hole, turning Pluto white hot and cleansing it of everything that is not true, that may have seemed true, that was too horrid to be true -- all of it -- and the Galactic Core vaporizing it like it was nothing.
 
This is a necessary step before Pluto enters Capricorn, and it works personally as well as it does culturally. Sagittarius represents what I will call "spiritual lessons," for unfortunate lack of a clearer term. For you when Pluto crosses your solar ascendant (the Capricorn cusp), it will be vastly better to not only leave all that old stuff behind, to surrender it to the cosmic ocean.
 
Sounds good, though you may be wondering what exactly you have to do about any of this. One thing that would help is if you expect yourself to suddenly become the person you have gradually been becoming all these years. Many events of your life have hinted to something, pointed in the general direction of something, or given you a clue as to what is possible. As Pluto works its way over the core and into the last degrees of Sagittarius, secretly dumping all that old material, there is likely to be a condensation process in your waking life, as if a strange liquid that was vaporized in the air is gathering on you and in you. What was a scent is suddenly becoming something you can taste and feel, and then see.
 
You may notice that what once held you back, principally your fears, is no longer a factor. Beliefs that no longer served you and in truth never did serve you so well, may cease to exist, and yet it's now up to you to recognize what has replaced them -- and what the natural consequence of that is. The entire basis for all your decisions will, as if you woke up a different person one morning, be something entirely other than what it was.
 
Now, while all this has been transpiring in a hidden dimension of your life, it would appear that you've been involved in a long process of negotiating your strength, power and position in the world. Indeed, the movement of your ruling planet Saturn through your 8th solar house (Leo) the past couple of years is something akin to a model of Pluto in the 12th, only in the most worldly terms, and projected into your relationships. A few metaphors or images that come to mind are being able to absolutely stand in the eyes, ears and feelings of someone you are intimately involved with; being compelled to determine what is absolutely fair, and stick to it even if others may not agree; or feeling your presence in the lives of other people as a vibrant, meaningful dynamic (in short, anything but what astrology textbooks say about Capricorns). Allowing yourself to be different, that is, to step distinctly out of the past and the agreements of the past, and to be yourself.
 
Let's switch houses, to the 2nd. In your chart, this is Aquarius, which is astrology's funny little way of saying what a radical you are, if indeed an impeccably dressed one. For a good portion of the time that Pluto was in your 12th, Neptune was (and still is) in your 2nd house. This is the symbol of self-doubt. It's like the numinous, self-questioning nature of the 12th house visiting what should in reality be the place you feel the most confident, and where you draw most of your resources. I am sure there have been many days in recent years you felt you had nothing at all, and others you felt you were blessed with everything.
 
Recently, Chiron and Nessus entered this house, more or less together. These planets push things to the surface very fast. Unlike Pluto, which will work at an issue for years, Chiron will push to the surface what has been there for years. The 2nd house has two main functions: it tells us what we have, and shows us what we lack, so that we may find it. What is perhaps most beautiful about Aquarius is its ability to invent what it needs: a gadget, a theory, a solution to a problem, or the right people. Aquarius on the 2nd house is about having radical values, though they may somehow never appear that way.
 
And what the presence of Chiron and Nessus in this house tell me is that you are becoming comfortable with just how original your viewpoint is, just how different you are, and indeed, fully aware of the fact that there is actually nobody like you. I will concede there are some for whom this may be a real crisis point. Some people have an utter panic attack when they notice they are not like everyone else, as if this somehow disentitles them to be alive or accepted by others. Don't mess with this kind of trashy belief. You have been through too much, you have earned your freedom every day, and you have answered too many of your own questions to be caught in what are in truth doubts that have no basis in reality.
 
One last comment, on Mars retrograde later in the year, in your 7th house -- your most intimate relationships. Starting now, you and a close partner need to be more honest about your needs. I would suggest that all this reaching for the roots in your spiritual life, and the life of your values, has a necessary expression in your relationships; they represent causes that have effects and consequences. And though someone close to you may have very different astrology than you do, they have enough in common with you to share many of the same points of growth.
 
Later in the year, you're likely to experience a situation in a relationship that leads you to question that relationship or the motives of the person or people with whom you are involved. There is no predestined answer to that question, and at the worst it represents seeing someone for who they are and asking yourself whether you feel like living with that. What is vital is that you keep your perspective; that you remember nobody holds anything over you, and that your emotional independence is right within reach. At best, the scenario will help you notice and identify with your emotional independence, and remind you that your safety in this world comes from you, and your relationship to something much larger than yourself. It is then expressed in relationships; you could say that when you feel safe, your safety finds a home among the people that you love.
 
Yes, you have done other things at other times -- but haven't we all?


CAPRICORN
For more information about your relationships, please see Cancer. This will give you an idea what is happening for those closest to you, and how they may experience you. For more information about your career, please see Libra. You can consider this an alternative take on your professional life, as it's an assessment of your 10th house. For more information about the home and security angle of your chart, please see Aries. This will give you greater detail on themes just covered in this horoscope that relate to home and security. For an explanation of the houses, please see this article.