The Capricorn New Moon and Pluto's Swansong
Thoughts on the first lunation of the year, sea goat winter-maxxing, Mars' triumphant heliacal rise, and the imminent Plutonic changing of the guard.
“An élite of the dead became stone
in Katarina Churchyard
where the wind shakes in its armour from Svalbard.
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One wartime winter when I lay sick
a huge icicle grew outside the window.
Neighbour and harpoon, unexplained memory.
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Ice hangs down from the roof edge.
Icicles: the upside-down Gothic.
Abstract cattle, udders of glass.”
An excerpt from “Six Winters” by Tomas Tranströmer
Some Januarys are better than others for resolutions: and this is one of them. The planet of our indomitable will, Mars, just emerged from the underworld in its heliacal rise on January 9th at 3 degrees of Capricorn. Mars’ new cazimi cycle dawned in its water domicile of Scorpio this past November. Until now, however, the red planet was lost to the Sun’s dazzling glare, secreted under Sol’s beams since September.
Mars in Scorpio is already cloak-and-dagger but its machinations have been even more covert within that solar hall of mirrors. Perhaps invisibility has been necessary for the germination of courageous new plans and campaigns — and Scorpio knows something about biding its time in the shadows.
Now Mars rises, empowered, low on the Eastern horizon before sunrise, in the sign of its exaltation: Capricorn. There’s something much more dignified about this Mars. Its teenage belly fire has been mastered. The sea goat’s tail plunges deep into the realm of the emotions — but it’s not subsumed by these passions, like Scorpio. Its slotted goat eyes are always fixed on the middle distance of the peaks it will methodically ascend. Emotions are indeed observed in tranquility.
Mars’ heliacal rise also trines Jupiter and sextiles Saturn, whose bathysphere plunges deeper into the more brackish fathoms of the collective unconscious. Yesterday’s New Moon further sacralized the rebirth of a will to power that’s decidedly more measured. Within the temple of Saturn, Mars is focused on retribution (after months of rapacious martian excess). The coming days are well-starred for setting the prototype of constructive habits and that will bolster you through the many sea-changes of this year.
Mars is a major player in the saga of 2024 too, a year where the Mars-ruled anaretic degree hosts a great deal of planetary action. January is the best month by far to clarify what we’re willing to cross swords for — as well as the deadweight that needs to be severed to lighten our loads for the climb ahead.
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I experienced Mars’ rebirth all too literally this past week, plunged through a portal of fever and severe respiratory illness. As Saturn’s iron-band tightened around my lungs, I spent entire nights semi-lucid in the bath, taking only the lightest of breaths to conserve my energy for the battle ahead. The night I finally surrendered to sleep, I felt like I was warged into the Martian intelligence of my fever. Somehow I was inside the temples of my lungs: feverish visions of the honey-combed domes of Moorish palaces in Grenada, where I’d summered over Venus retrograde. The stonework was breathing in increasingly intricate carvings. Niches within niches. Balustrades melting into sloes of candle wax.
After a night of the most acid fever dreams ever, that deathly hoof was off my chest. I emerged from my covid nest into a Kimberley that was suddenly winter-maxxing. Wandering the forest in Lois Creek after the first real snow of the season, the silence was so absolute it had its own timbre and vibration. These are the gifts of the sea goat: the type of stillness that awakens extra-sensory faculties. Even illness’s dead stop had me traveling interstitial halls of my body, normally unexplored.
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As a year of momentous endings and beginnings — the first act in a three-year changing of the cosmic guard — I do think our mettle will be tested. Major cycles of Uranus and Neptune build to a crescendo in 2024, before both outer planets change signs in 2025. We are in transition. The unveilings of the apocalypse are dropping their first curtains this year.
Pluto is the first to usher us into the emergent aeon, ingressing into Aquarius in earnest later this month, on January 20th (apart from a last Capricornian death rattle for a few weeks in the fall). And so begins a brave new age of aerial gods, monsters, power grabs, and fear-harvesting focused on our skies.
As Pluto’s tenure in Capricorn winds to a close, it’s not surprising to see the meme-cycle flooded with a Looney Tunes level crescendo of conspiracy discourse. The planet of invisibility, buried treasure, and mycelial networks of influence is having a bit of a moment as the USA’s Pluto return runs to a close. Because what is conspiracy-brain if not an attempt to seize back power: to position oneself as the righteous truth crusader among the sheeple. The main character in a sea of NPCs. And in the absence of cultural outlets for the fear, alienation, and anxiety of this age, conspiracy has offered its pseudo-religious shelter.
The Epstein documents. Stephen Hawking’s sexual proclivities. Florida mall aliens. Jews in tunnels. No matter that the revelations of the Epstein dossier will not improve the material conditions of the working class one iota. And the tunnels in question appear to be a relic of the covid age, as the Hassidic Jews in NYC brought their banned worship underground (very Jupiter in Capricorn indeed). In any case, I can’t help but think about the ways serious social grievances are neutralized by memes — our rage against the machine dissipated through the mimetic sluices and locks. The petrification of ironic detachment is very Saturn, indeed.
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It will be interesting to see where conspiracy blooms in the Pluto in Aquarius epoch. Answering to Saturn still in membranous Pisces, I could see further leakage and hybridization across the echo chambers that exist. Mutant conspiracy cults far stranger than anything we can imagine now. The ripples of alien discourse this past summer also make me think that extraterrestrial threat could be wielded as a weapon of Plutonic control in the coming decades. While Saturn was in Aquarius, the object of our anxiety was “in the air”, whether in the form of viral particles or 5G “radiation”. Even the spy balloon “helium-punk” of last Aquarius season hint at the Plutonic fearscape to come.
We can’t talk about Pluto in Aquarius without acknowledging its Leonine foil. Perhaps I’m overly hopeful but I can see the alienation of mass atomization transforming into a fruitful muse over the coming years. Just as the pressures of war-time censorship produced intricately coded art and poetics of evasion, I can see our appreciation deepening for the human chaos that still wriggles through the mining of data sets. Perhaps the internet will further fragment into paywalled islands of “human” content, while the influencer content grind is increasingly outsourced to AI.
Within the seas of mid journeyed dreck and dopamine harvesting slop, I do remain hopeful that a premium will always be placed on content that is clearly ensouled. Like the Sun rising each morning, the radiance of Leo just is, and requires no external validation. The mimicry of humanity by AI could be exactly the push we need to create art that is chaotic, surreal, deeply weird, and absolutely unmappable.
On that note, this monologue by a puppet bird about a teen breaking Tetris is the rallying cry for 2024 I didn’t realize I needed:
Pluto’s ingress into a new sign often spawns powerful new technologies, while attempts to control these breakthroughs intensify too. The IDF’s AI-based system called Hasbora — The Gospel, in English — is a canary in the coalmine for the Pluto in Aquarius epoch to come. Transforming Israel into a “mass assassination factory”, according to Democracy Now! the AI system can produce targets at lightning speed. Atef Safadi writes, for The Conversation, on what could possibly go wrong:
“AI systems may increase the human tendency to trust suggestions from machines (this is highlighted by the Habsora system, named after the infallible word of God), opening up uncertainty over how far to trust autonomous systems. The boundaries of an AI system that interacts with other technologies and with people may not be clear, and there may be no way to know who or what has “authored” its outputs, no matter how objective and rational they may seem…Perhaps one of the most basic and important changes we are likely to see driven by AI is an increase in the speed of warfare.”
I can’t help but think of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s rapturous praise of technological innovation in the Futurist Manifesto (published when the Sun was in Aquarius), where he exclaims that “the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”
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On a personal level, Pluto’s shift into Aquarius will likely first register as a lightening in in the Capricorn house of your chart. An impossible knot suddenly loosens. A new spaciousness opens in exploring the topics of the house where Pluto suddenly is not.
I remember the relief of finally leaving the endless droning of cicadas in an Andalusian mountain village this past summer. I’d somehow adjusted to the sound but didn’t realize the toll it was taking on my mental health until I experienced the absence of it.
It may be difficult to clock the new katabasis you’re being initiated into with Pluto in Aquarius. However, it’s worth noting what subliminal anxiety finally starts to disperse. What is no longer so dreadful to look at. And to notice what’s rushing in to fill the void. Remember: this is the last Capricorn New Moon of our lifetimes to be co-present with Pluto. The seeds you plant in this part of your chart will be less mysteriously blighted. The soil may feel less hard. Beginning again, less relentlessly fraught.
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For now, the steady momentum of Mars in Capricorn blesses the seeds sown this New Moon. Though all of our Capricorn planets answer to a Saturn in the throes of a spiritual crisis, there’s a balm to be found in sheer bloody-minded repetition. Yesterday, I broke in my new cross country skis with laps around a nearby field, as the sun’s theoretical warmth shimmered through the ice fog. Apricity, by the way, is my new favorite obsolete word: meaning the light of the winter sun.
Anyway, is there a sport more Saturn-coded? My friend calls them misery sticks but the masochist in me appreciates the physical relentlessness. The way it empties the mind. With every lap, I carved my circuit deeper, repetition generating its own speed and momentum. Leo Tolstoy, who has Mars in Capricorn, said “the two most powerful warriors are patience and time”. And I feel that.
The New Moon’s trine of Uranus reminds me as well of the freedom of the invisible moon. The imaginings that are only possible in the fertile dark. Not yet tasked with growing a silver skin of celluloid, to reflect and make palatable the Sun’s ferocious glare, the new moon is for itself. Not domesticated like a mirror. Or quartered and made to miss parts of itself. Sol is in utero and what’s being birthed may not yet have a name. Allow your desires to be elastic as moth goo.
Endless content is churned out every lunation about how to best “use” a particular Moon. But on the other side of illness, I’m content to allow the mysteries of that sea goat tarn to keep churning. To “never / get it clear down in the soily waters”, to quote Denise Riley. As we approach a low of minus 39 tonight, I’m simply grateful for this moment to rest and read Proust under every blanket I have as the deer paths in my yard ossify and the stars are tumbled to aching points of flint.
I’ll end this on a ragged prayer into the void. Patti Smith has Mars in Capricorn and “Piss Factory’s” stream of consciousness invective is a reminder that this placement is anything but dispassionate. In fact, it rails passionately against everything that would make a stone of the heart. xoxo
-39? Where are you? Great write up. Thank you.