Something Else – Sun Conjoins Pluto

Reminder: The Daily Astrology feature is off for the holiday today. It will be back at 12:01 am EST tomorrow, Tuesday Dec. 27. – amanda

Pluto is now becoming something else.
— Juan Revilla (in 1999)

After renewing its cycle with a New Moon over the holiday weekend, Luna enters Aquarius today, hinting that we have recently embarked upon something more than just a new season. Later this week, Sun will function to broaden that hint by conjoining Pluto in Capricorn. The solar conjunction with Pluto is a very nearly annual event, its date slowly advancing through the years. As such, it symbolizes the growing discrepancy between the slow advance of human consciousness and the rapid pace of human events.

We are on the threshold of a new year that will reveal the depth of that incongruity and compel us to catch up. We can start by allowing the light of awareness to shine where Pluto lives in each of us, and realize that we, like Pluto, are now in the process of becoming something else.

Our knowledge of Pluto’s existence was made possible because astronomy became something else. It was discovered in 1930 by indirect observation. Nearly everyone at the time envisioned astronomers squinting through an eyepiece. Some still do. In fact, the process had transformed. By the early 20h century, scientists were comparing photographs, lots of them, detecting new objects in the solar system by their motion against a field of distant stars. The idea that Pluto’s discovery symbolized the creative potential of transformation was lost on most people, however. Maybe it was the fear.

Long before the 20th Century, the quest for knowledge had encountered the fear of change. From Galileo to Darwin, that fear obscured the fact that science changes nothing except awareness. Thus a great divide developed between consciousness as a value and pre-conception as a cause. Somehow, the perception of planet Pluto got caught up in that divide. Maybe it was the name.

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