Have you ever had a family member, friend or guest who had the compulsion when visiting your home to take something of yours with them when they left? They look around at your stuff, open the fridge, take a can of soda for the ten-minute ride home. You would offer it anyway, if they asked, but you wonder why they had to take your nail clippers when they are a small-ticket item found anywhere.

The astrological Pluto is a bit like that person, although rather than taking your nail clippers he would bend them into a new shape. Pluto must transform what it touches, taking it to the next level. Not only would the nail clippers be unrecognizable shapes of steel, Pluto might also have ripped out the vanity and mirror to get to the nail clippers.

Pluto is like this.

Pluto has been in Capricorn, in my house as it were, and is ready to move to Aquarius. This will happen in just a few days.

Pluto’s eyes were scanning my house, planning, looking for something. Knowing that Pluto is very strong, compulsive, and intense, I confronted him straight on. With Pluto, only total honesty will be effective as he will see through all, and I mean all, facades.

“Pluto,” I said, “is there anything you’d like to take with you as a remembrance?” I was trying to play it light and amiable.

“I want your financial system,” he replied.

“It’s kind of heavy,” I said to dissuade him. “You have a long trip home,” maybe you’d like something lighter like Facebook or Twitter?”

Staring at me with dark, Plutonian eyes, he replied, “I really wanted your healthcare system, but it’s way too heavy for my luggage. The financial system will do. And your nail clippers.”

Pluto in Capricorn

Pluto entered Capricorn in January 2008, the beginning of a global financial crisis. As Pluto leaves Capricorn, we’re back where we started – bank failures.

Pluto forces, it doesn’t ask. When we are intimate with others, we allow them to cross our physical, emotional, and mental boundaries. When we aren’t intimate, those similar activities can be crimes.

In 2008, Pluto forced a reckoning on a financial system that was not sustainable. In response, governments across the world plugged the sinking ship. The disliked, corrupt, and self-protective government made sure entire populations in developed countries weren’t standing in bread lines. A system “too big to fail,” is in effect a national system.

More recently, in 2020, when Jupiter, Saturn and Mars joined Pluto in Capricorn, government all but took over the globe. In the US, folks were told they could not work and waited for a check from the government – even those who are not socialists . . .

Capricorn transformation wasn’t less government, but more solid government as solution to problems that have become too large and complex for groups of individuals. And individuals are encouraged to fight which lessens the ability to tackle large problems.

Pluto is leaving Capricorn but only temporarily. Pluto will enter Aquarius on March 23 but will go retrograde (apparent backward motion) in May and be back in Capricorn in September. Pluto won’t return to Aquarius until January 2024.

That means we’ll feel comfortable that Pluto’s lessons on global infrastructure (banking and everything else such as government, healthcare, etc.) are over. We’ll have a summer of new energy until the fall when Pluto will probably remind us, again, that we haven’t pulled out the roots of the problem.

Pluto in Aquarius

Aquarius is group ideals, collective identity, idealism, brother/sister hood and futuristic and technological thinking.

When Uranus and Neptune went through Aquarius in the 1990s-2000s much technology was developed and loved, leading to collective use which then created new standards of business and social interaction.

Uranus brings the ideas, the inspirations. Neptune brings idealization and glamorization – the developers of technology are our new heroes and many a young person dreams of creating the next new tech that will change the world, or at least their corner of it.

Saturn entered Aquarius in March 2020 and almost at the point of the transit the globe went on a collective “lockdown” forcing people to stay away from each other. Saturn which contracts certainly contracted all things Aquarian. But at the same time, it forced dependency on technology for any interaction.

Now comes Pluto.

When Pluto is done taking the Earth’s financial system to the outer bounds of the solar system, what will he do when he comes back? What will he take?

In the early days of Internet and technology, a door was opened into a wider world. Today that door is used much differently, as a portal in rather than a view out. Our almost constant use of technology has fed information about what we want to see when we look out the door so now that is all that we will see, a reflection of our minds.

Maybe that’s what looking out has always been. Possibly this is Pluto’s lesson.