THE MOOD: Revolutionary Rumblings

Ironically, the date of the new year in the Gregorian calendar — January 1 — doesn’t have any particular astrological or astronomical significance. (Perhaps this is why it always feels like such a weird holiday?) Regardless, we continue to simultaneously exist in Western culture’s organization of time (into days, weeks, months, years, etc.) alongside the multitudinous, unique, and cyclical rhythms of the planets.

Given that, when I think of the 2024 calendar year, one of the major celestial events that comes to mind is Pluto’s ingress into the sign of Aquarius on January 20, 2024.

As the most distant of the major planets, Pluto takes about 248 years to make one complete cycle around the Sun and spends between 12-30 years in each sign. We had a preview of this transit last year when Pluto dipped its toes into Aquarius from March 23 to June 11, 2023. Aside from a brief retrograde back into Capricorn from September 1 to November 19, 2024, Pluto will remain in Aquarius from 2024-2044. (The last time that Pluto was in Aquarius was from 1778-1798!)

Pluto’s entry into Aquarius represents a massive, generation-defining shift that will unfold over the next twenty years. No astrologer can predict exactly what will happen with any transit. However, the astrological clock can point us to where we are in archetypal time, offering insights on themes, symbols, and energies that are ready to emerge.

So what might this all mean?

Archetypally, Pluto is the energy of raw power. It drives creation and destruction, reckoning and retribution, and transmutation and catharsis. It gives zero fucks about individual feelings because the tides of transformation cannot be contained. By forcing us to confront our most existential fears, Pluto shapes the psyche of decades.

Aquarius is a sign that focuses on systems, networks, groups, and causes. A cool air sign, it observes the human world at the 10,000-foot level. Its position of objective distance gives Aquarius a clarity of vision and an unusual — visionary, radical, and even shocking — perspective. Aquarius is an outsider and an intellectual because too much subjectivity, too much closeness, and too much ego sully the clarity of its analysis.

In Aquarius, Pluto thus wields power within the masses and within the airwaves — and has potential for good, ill, and everything in between. 

It could fuel the most revolutionary, radical organizing for progressive change. It could show us cult-y behavior, groupthink, and AI-generated everything. It could fundamentally shift communities, neighborhoods, and nation-states into new and currently-unimaginable formations. It could spawn never-before-seen technologies and never-before-seen consequences. It could be an era in which shit gets real with aliens. (Kidding but not kidding. Pluto’s short dip into Aquarius last year correlated with the strange emergence of Congress’ UFO hearings — and given its deep affiliations with things weird and futuristic, Aquarius is the “alien” of the zodiac.)

Whatever happens over the next two decades, Pluto in Aquarius is positioned to transform our notions of “power to the people” and what humanity looks like within an ever-expanding physical and technological universe. No small shift, indeed. Pluto would have it no other way.