Pluto through the bounds of Capricorn

A story of transformation spanning 14 years of history

On January 3rd of this year, Pluto quietly slipped into the Egyptian bound of Mars in the sign of Capricorn. I didn’t pay much attention to this development at the time, but I’ve come to realise it was hugely significant. The dwarf planet’s journey through tropical Capricorn’s five bounds has a dramatic story to tell: a saga of societal transformation passing through the realms of Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn and Mars, and spanning the past 14 years of world history. It seems we’ve reached the tale’s violent denouement.

Pluto’s role is to enact transformation by unleashing the roiling forces of the underworld. Its transits can be experienced as painful brushes with mortality, journeys to Hades that must happen so that rebirth can take place. This can mean literal death, but more often a kind of ego-death, and a challenging confrontation with repressed aspects of ourselves. In Gods of Change, Howard Sasportas called Pluto “the servant of wholeness” and wrote of how it forces us to accept the “primitive, instinctive and unregenerate side of our nature” so it might be integrated constructively into the psyche.

In mundane astrology, Saturn’s sign of Capricorn is connected with governments, tradition and senior figures in society. Pluto’s grinding traverse through this sign has brought to light deeply uncomfortable truths about societies, including corruption in the financial system, pervasive racial and gender disparity, sexual violence and political repression. It’s been a painful but necessary process, one supercharged by the amplificatory powers of social media— and it isn’t close to finished. But my research suggests we can better understand what’s happened by considering Capricorn’s five bounds.

Bounds, also known as “terms”, are unequal divisions of each zodiac sign into five zones, each ruled by one of the traditional planets, except the Sun and Moon. If you’re unfamiliar with them, I suggest you read this excellent article by astrologer Maria J Mateus. They’re one of the more mysterious techniques of traditional astrology, given that we don’t know the rationale for how their boundaries were determined. Suffice to say that bounds are like rooms within a house, or states within a country. They seem to place limits on what planets inside them can do, applying restrictions to their range of action based on the nature of the bound’s ruler.

There’s more than one system of bounds—here I’ll be using the so-called “Egyptian bounds”. In this system, the first 7 degrees of Capricorn are given to Mercury, the next 7 to Jupiter, the next 8 to Venus, the penultimate 4 to Saturn, and the final 4 to Mars. (The last bound of every sign always belongs to one of the two “malefic” planets, Saturn or Mars.)

Here’s a close-up of Capricorn and its Egyptian bounds, showing Pluto’s current position, half-way into the bound of Mars:

What follows is my own research on correlations between Pluto’s journey through the five bounds of Capricorn and the history of the past 14 years. I’m not claiming my take is definitive: like everything I publish here, this is a work in progress. I hope astrologers of other backgrounds are inspired to carry out their own research on similar lines.

One last thing: due to retrograde motion, Pluto’s progression through the bounds isn’t orderly; it moves in and out of them—two steps forward, one step back—as the Earth’s own orbital trajectory shifts our perspective. We can consider that Pluto’s business within a particular bound begins with its first ingress and ends when it leaves it for the last time.

Without further ado, here goes…

Mercury (January 2008 - December 2011)

The 2008 Financial Crisis, Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, Bitcoin

• 26 January 2008 - 13 June 2008

• 27 November 2008 - 24 February 2011

• 25 May 2011 - 23 December 2011

One of Mercury’s traditional significations is trade and markets. And so it was that Pluto began its transformative business in Capricorn in the financial sphere. The stage had been set with Pluto moving through the exuberant Jupiterian sign of Sagittarius: the US real estate market grew red hot, mortgage lenders became increasingly reckless about whom they lent money to, and investment banks found clever ways to camouflage and trade ballooning risk in the financial system.

The whole house of cards collapsed in late 2008, after mortgage borrowers began to default on their payments in huge numbers and banks with excessive exposure to the mortgage bond market like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns went bust. With the entire global financial system about to disintegrate, governments used Plutonic quantities of public money to bail out banks that had supposedly become “too big to fail”.

The banking industry survived—and is almost certainly still up to its old tricks—but trust in the financial system and in political structures that support it was dealt a severe blow by this saga, and continues to deteriorate to this day. Bitcoin, a revolutionary technology with the goal of transforming the global monetary system, was also born during the same period. This is surely no coincidence. (Both the financial crisis and Bitcoin’s emergence also correlate with the Saturn-Uranus cycle that reached an opposition at the same time.)

In Hellenistic astrology, Mercury’s functions are to contest and destabilise. Mercury questions, provokes and deconstructs. Occupy Wall Street, a protest movement against economic disparity and the influence of money in politics, emerged in September 2011 as a reaction to the bailout of the banks. Through the Mercurial means of dissent, an uncomfortable truth was revealed: the extent to which the economic system was rigged for the benefit of a tiny minority of the population, the so-called “one percent”.

Around the same time, in the Middle East, the first rumblings of the Arab Spring began to stir. Most states in the Arab world had been ruled for decades by ruthless autocrats supported by the West. Early protests took place in Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria in 2008, among other places. On 4 January 2011, a Tunisian man named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after enduring relentless harassment from government officials. His death is seen as the moment that ignited the Arab Spring. Protests quickly spread to almost every country in the Arab world, and within months once comfortable dictators like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali were ousted or, in Gaddafi’s case, dead.

Jupiter (February 2011 - November 2015)

War in the Middle East, Black Lives Matter, same-sex marriage

• 24 February 2011 - 25 May 2011

• 23 December 2011 - 25 January 2015

• 18 July 2015 - 30 November 2015

One of Jupiter’s functions is to expand whatever it comes into contact with. With Pluto in the bound of Jupiter, we saw an expansion of the Arab Spring protests that began while the planet was in the bound of Mercury. In Syria, Libya and Iraq, the demonstrations led to bloody and protracted armed conflicts. In the chaos of these warzones, the Islamic State, a fusion of Plutonic brutality, Jupiterian religious zeal and Saturnine traditionalism, emerged and proclaimed its short-lived caliphate in 2014.

Jupiter is also associated with some of the better angels of our nature: freedom, idealism and justice. We can see a Jovian influence in the character of the Arab Spring, which was at its heart a fight against despotic rule—an impulse towards freedom, in other words. The French Revolution, with its motto of “liberté, égalité, fraternité”, took place while Pluto was in the Jupiter bound of Aquarius, another Saturnine sign.

Black Lives Matter was also born in this period, in July 2013, following the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin. The movement focused on Jupiterian themes—justice and liberation for black people. But it was also deeply Plutonic, in the sense that it focused on bringing repressed truths about racial injustice to the surface of American awareness.

There were significant expansions in gay and trans rights during this time and the subsequent Venus period. Same-sex marriage became legal in a great number of jurisdictions around the world, an expansion of the freedom to marry to a much wider contingent of human beings. Bearing in mind the age of the institution of marriage, we can also see this as a dramatic transformation of Capricornian tradition. Wikipedia’s timeline of same-sex marriage shows a dramatic increase in locations adopting the policy from 2012-13 onwards, a trend that continued with Pluto in Venus’s bound—and notably dropped off after that.

Venus (January 2015 - December 2019)

The Trump Presidency and #MeToo

• 25 January 2015 - 17 July 2015

• 29 November 2015 - 12 February 2019

• 10 July 2019 - 20 December 2019

Donald Trump’s administration represented a transformative episode for the United States. The man who tweeted his way to the presidency consistently gave voice to ugly undercurrents in American society that had previously been left unsaid. He spoke the unspeakable, horrifying and delighting citizens in equal measure. America’s self-image changed, the world’s image of America changed, and if the country was divided before Trump, it was doubly so when he was done.

But why might this episode have taken place with Pluto in the bound of Venus? Well, our thesis is that Pluto creates transformative crises using the means at its disposal in its current bound. In this case, the means was a Venusian figure: a reality TV star and celebrity—who happened to have Pluto in his first house.

Howard Sasportas wrote: “Pluto transits entail meeting the primitive, instinctive and unregenerate side of our nature. Feelings of anger, hurt and pain from childhood, greed, envy, jealousy, and infantile desires for omnipotence and power; unbridled sexual yearnings and ferocious destructive urges - all these and more lie festering in the deeper recesses of our unconscious mind… before we can transform anything in ourselves, we first have to accept that it is there.” By bringing certain ugly realities into the open, Trump unwittingly created the possibility for change.

It’s no coincidence that it was under Trump’s watch that the #MeToo movement came to prominence. The president himself had boasted of his abuse of women and supposed freedom to “grab them by the pussy”. Now, women around the world began to publicly declare their experiences of sexual assault at the hands of men. Dozens of senior figures in the entertainment industry were accused of sexual impropriety and faced legal proceedings or were forced from their positions. The reality of the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and assault was made plain for all to see. Dark Plutonic truths were brought to the surface, with transformational consequences for gender relations that continue to unfold.

Saturn (December 2019 - January 2022)

COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests

• 12 February 2019 - 10 July 2019

• 20 December 2019 - 28 February 2021

• 29 June 2021 - 3 January 2022

With impeccable timing, the COVID-19 virus emerged just as Pluto entered the bound of Saturn in December 2019. The beginnings of the pandemic also correlated with the conjunction of Saturn and Pluto that came shortly afterwards in January 2020. The virus is estimated to have taken the lives of more than 6 million people and sickened half a billion.

One of its many consequences was a drastic empowerment of government, evident in the unprecedented imposition of lockdowns forcing people to stay home across the planet—a very literal manifestation of Saturn’s traditional signification of limits and restriction. A new battle between competing priorities—personal liberty versus state responsibility for public health—began, and seems likely to become one of the defining issues of the Aquarian age we’re living through.

Following the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020, Black Lives Matter protests against racism and police violence spread across the United States and parts of the Western world. In June and July of that year they took new form, in the toppling of statues of men associated with the slave trade. Astrologers have rightly correlated this development to the iconoclastic square between Saturn and Uranus that came into orb around this time, but Pluto in the bound of Saturn speaks of a similar dynamic: a transformation of our relationship to history and to old figures formerly seen as respectable. Slavers once celebrated and immortalised in stone were banished to the Plutonic realm.

Mars (February 2021 - January 2024)

The invasion of Ukraine

• 27 February 2021 - 29 June 2021

• 3 January 2022 - 23 March 2023

• 11 June 2023 - 21 January 2024

• 2 September 2024 - 19 November 2024

Pluto first moved into the bound of Mars at the end of February 2021, at a time when most people’s attention was still focused on the COVID-19 pandemic. It was at this time that Russia began its first military buildup on Ukraine’s border. Amazingly, the Wikipedia article on the prelude to this year’s invasion specifically cites March-April 2021 as the time of the initial tensions of the conflict. Hindsight is always 20:20 in astrology, but this should have been a signal that what was beginning to stir then would come to fruition in our current time, when Pluto returned to the bound for a longer stay.

Around the same time, in early May 2021, conflict broke out between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, a part of the world strongly resonant to Plutonic energies. (Israel itself was founded around the time of a Saturn-Pluto conjunction.) Given the pattern we’ve observed with Ukraine, it seems reasonable to suspect that, sadly, there could be a resumption of conflict in Israel and Gaza this year. I hope I’m wrong. (As an aside, zodiacal releasing for Israel’s chart from the Part of Fortune suggests the country is entering a very dangerous period on 14 April, during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.)

The ramifications of the war in Ukraine are impossible to estimate at this point, with possible consequences spiralling off in every geopolitical direction. The US and its allies have cut Russia off from the global financial system. Moscow is moving close to China, and a new Cold War—or worse—may be getting underway. Last week EU leaders announced a “tectonic shift in European history” as they described plans to re-arm following decades of reliance on American military power for the continent’s defence. We may be witnessing the end of the unipolar era of the United States as sole global superpower.

We should also ask ourselves: what repressed truths is the war unveiling? Most obviously, we’ve seen the real face of Vladimir Putin. But other truths are surfacing, too: a surprising bloodlust among those cheering on the fighting on both sides; the difference in concern for the victims of this war versus those of other conflicts; and the West’s own role in stoking geopolitical tensions.

Pluto won’t permanently leave Mars’s bound until January 2024. The last time it was in this part of the zodiac, on 19 April 1775, the American Revolutionary War began: a transformative conflict that shook the British empire, the Capricornian establishment of the time. Perhaps this war will turn out to be just as consequential.