The Salt Lodge
Inspired by a moon oracle card that became impregnated with salt crystals after absorbing liquid from a weeping salt lamp.
Brutal reality: confronting the Pluto square Pluto transit
“Pluto square Pluto” is an astrological transit that occurs when the current position of Pluto forms a 90° angle to Pluto’s position in your natal chart. For those of us who are early millennials, born with Pluto in the last degrees of Libra or first degrees of Scorpio, the square forms with Pluto in the last degrees of Capricorn or first degrees of Aquarius.
Not everyone experiences a Pluto square Pluto transit in their lifetime. Due to Pluto’s extremely elliptical orbit, the time the planet spends in each sign differs vastly. So one person could have this transit in their mid thirties, and another in their mid eighties—should they live that long. For anyone turning 40 this year, you’re in the middle of this transit and have been feeling the weight of it since at least the first ingress of Pluto into Aquarius (which happened in March 2023), and likely some months before that.
Anatomy of a Plutonic shift: a parable
If you have ever googled “when does Pluto move into Aquarius” and been mightily confused, you’re in good company. The answer is not simple and the meaning in the choreography of this series of astrological movements is difficult to grasp.
These days, the whole internet is familiar with the concept Age of Aquarius and it’s astonishing how ubiquitous discussion of Pluto’s movement into Aquarius has become. This is an indication to me that the current Pluto transit is already unlike any other. Even those who don’t consider astrology remotely useful will readily agree that we seem to be at the end of an era, on the cusp of something new that is terrifying in its strangeness and unpredictability. The old ways aren’t working and the new ways have yet to be conceived, at least by us third rock surface dwellers.
October 28 full moon eclipse: Heads up, eyes open in this zone of acceleration
The world feels like a deeply uncomfortable place, the result of many wills being asserted, pulling and stretching the collective in multiple directions. Mars and Venus conjunct in Scorpio are 6° from the sun, in direct opposition to the moon and Jupiter: a battle of authorities while the rest of us scatter underfoot.
During this epic ox pull, the full, eclipsing moon will conjunct Jupiter at 11° of Taurus and then Uranus at 21° of Taurus, all within 24 hours. This is a time when red storms, whether figuratively emotional or literally hurricanes, swirl faster and bigger as the energy input increases.
The saga of now
This story doesn’t even start with Earth, or with the chunks of rock that used to be the fifth planet from the sun. It involves treachery, conquest, planetary destruction, genocide, slavery, souls in great pain, souls with great love. It sounds familiar because we can’t seem to stop ourselves from playing out versions of this story over and over again.
There are monsters in this story, and figures of great evil who enjoy cultivating the appearance of goodness, justice and benevolence. They wield power not only through violence and oppression, but through the manipulation of empathy. In public, they may seek compromise, but they will never adhere to the terms of any agreement. Their primary goal is to control minds and have others fight, kill and die for them.
Full moon in Capricorn: Gnomonic Expansion
Tight, tense, locked in, frozen up, on edge. Feels difficult to think long term or gather momentum. Maybe it’s just me. But if you also have natal inner planets in mid to late degrees of cardinal signs (Cancer, Capricorn, Libra or Aries) this full moon is adding weight to the already significant pressure of Pluto retrograde in Capricorn, squaring/opposing the other cardinal signs. There are also squares happening between Uranus in Pisces and Mars/Venus conjunct in Leo. To add insult to injury, Pluto is also squaring the nodes at 0 degrees of Taurus/Scorpio as they prepare to change signs (Aries/Libra) in a week or so.
What this illustrates to me is the increasing grinding dissonance between the crumbling built world, conceived and constructed to extract and collect energy, and the real needs and desires of those who inhabit it. Brokenness and failure is all around, so clear and transparent, but we are unable or unwilling to repair, rebuild, rework—perhaps because a significant percentage of us still buy into the fantasy that achieving “happiness” is the goal of the one life we have to live on Earth.
New moon in Gemini: Think weird thoughts, feel weird feelings, open to the NEW
We’re entering a point in time where the masculine and feminine polarities in ourselves seem reversed. The urge to shape and act is united with the chaotic feminine, who understands destruction is as essential to “making new” as construction. The urge to receive messages and energies from beyond what’s readily available is united with the wise, centred masculine, who understands that all is a grand play of polarity, bobbing and weaving, emerging and fading.
We are coming into a revival of the arts of the ancients, but not in a way that returns to all the old ways. Neolithic people were taught the arts of civilization from extraterrestrial/extradimensional friends. And the kind of “civilization” that we require for the peace and happiness and quality development of soul & spirit is quite different than everything we’ve seen so far. But the instructions are with us, implanted and inspired.
New moon in Taurus: M A C R O C O S M
I had trouble getting cards to come out of decks despite multiple rounds of shuffling. My Astro deck produced only one card: “Opposition.” This point in time requires a perspective shift akin to the shift between Newtonian and non-Newtonian physics. There at points at which the rules that have always governed the world we know cease to work any longer. There are forces exerted on our planet the effects of which we have no way of measuring or understanding.
The Shapley attractor is one such force, pulling thousands of galaxies towards it in a huge cluster and away from an opposing “supervoid” called the dipole repeller. It’s almost like witnessing a cosmic cell division, the implosion / separation that produces life. Maybe this is still the first breath of creation, a single burst of life that lasts for a universal moment and then collapses back into nothingness.
Full moon in Scorpio eclipse on May 5-6, king’s coronation and power shifts
“You are a weak monarch in a dangerous interregnum.”
The above quote is from the latest episode of Succession, but it made me think of King Charles. For months I’ve been wondering why the court astrologers would schedule a coronation hours after a lunar eclipse in Scorpio, which will conjunct Charles’s natal sun almost exactly. Steve Judd, a London-based astrologer, has made a few comments about this (see his youtube channel) and confirms that it’s very weird scheduling, pointing to some deeper working.
What is that deeper working? I’ve been discussing this with an experienced mystic friend of mine, Chrissy, who lives in the UK. Based on several card readings and numerological examinations and my own opinions, what seems to be happening is a renegotiation of the terms of “kingship”. Charles is his mother’s opposite, astrologically and otherwise, and many astrologers believe that he won’t be long for the throne. What I see in the cards is that the coronation eclipse is a merging of power between the monarchy and another force.
