Pluto in Capricorn, 2008 - 2024
By Catherine Kenward
www.astrologess.com

Pluto's passage through Capricorn will mark the emergence of a new global financial system. We are not looking at the reshuffling of the cards in the same old game but at the beginning of a radically different approach.

Pluto is the slowest moving planet. With a cycle of approximately 230 years, it will visit each sign only 4 times in a thousand years. Pluto works to bring transformation to each sign through which it passes and the areas of life that particular sign represents. Pluto spends more time in certain signs than in others, always traveling it's fastest when moving through Scorpio (1983 -1995) and the signs on either side of Scorpio, Libra and Sagittarius. Conversely, it moves it's slowest when passing through Taurus, where it spends about 35 years as opposed to the 12 years in which it zips through Scorpio. When Pluto speeds up, the rate of change in the world around us increases at a bewildering pace.

In 2008 Pluto entered Capricorn where it will be spending the next 17 years. Capricorn represents the power structures and hierarchies of society and Pluto's passage through Capricorn will transform these structures and shift the balance of power. Pluto's previous transits through Capricorn reveal this with dazzling clarity.

Pluto last transited Capricorn from 1762 to 1778. This was the time of the American Revolution (1775 -1783). Shortly after Pluto moved into Capricorn the protests against British rule and its taxation of the American colonies began steadily intensifying, climaxing with the outbreak of war in 1775. After the American Revolution, other countries followed suit, first and foremost in 1789 with the beginning of the French Revolution. Up to that time absolute power had rested with the aristocracy. The establishment of democracy in America challenged the idea of the divine right of kings, that God had given power to the king and to go against this was to defy God. Democracy replaced the aristocracy and gave their power to the people. Even if this meant white male landowners, it was tremendous at the time and shook the concept of the god given rights of monarchy to its core.

230 years before this, during Pluto's previous transit through Capricorn (1516 -1532), another revolution had challenged the absolute power of that time, the power of the Catholic Church. In 1517, the year after Pluto moved into Capricorn, Martin Luther tacked his edicts to the cathedral door in Wittenberg and the Protestant Reformation began. At that time the Catholic Church held supreme power in Europe and even kings had to bend the knee and beg for blessing from the Church. Ultimately the Protestant Reformation took that power from the Catholic Church and gave it to the aristocracy. The classic example of this was Henry the VIII's schism from Rome and his establishment of the Church of England (1531), set up to rubber stamp whatever the King wanted to do.

On the American continent, this Pluto transit saw the fall of the Aztec Empire in 1521 and that of the Inca in 1532 - 33, so the ultimate and absolute powers of the New World fell during this period also.

Each time Pluto passed through Capricorn there was a revolution that broke the current authority's stranglehold on power and introduced a radically new system. First the Catholic Church held ultimate power then the monarchies had that power. Just years before these revolutions happened no one imagined that new ideas would emerge that could challenge power and actually succeed. The Protestant assertion that each man had a direct relationship with God and did not need the church as an intermediary or that the power of kings would be usurped by the great unwashed were truly radical at the time.

Now Pluto is in Capricorn once again and the question is, "Where does ultimate power lie these days?" I propose that the power is in the hands of a global corporate and financial elite that subverts the power of nations and has reduced our democracy to a joke. Whether you are on the political right or left, most will agree that the government doesn't represent the voters anymore. It represents the will of the corporate lobbyists whose money calls the shots in Washington.

During the last two transits, the coming changes were apparent almost as soon as Pluto went into Capricorn. Look at the timing. Pluto goes into Cap in 1517 and the very next year the Reformation begins. Pluto enters Cap in 1762 and by 1765 the Virginia Assembly is challenging the right of Great Britain to tax the colonies. Why did Britain need all that tax money? They had an empire to uphold and armies of colonization to support, chiefly those in India and Asia. Taxation without representation was the American colonists biggest complaint.

The cracks in our financial system became abundantly obvious in 2008 just as Pluto entered Capricorn. The writing is on the wall. There will be a revolution in the very nature of how the global financial system is structured. Some speak about the creation of an economic model that is not based on debt. But this is not going to happen tomorrow. In the previous transits of Pluto through Capricorn, the challenge to the old system may have been immediately apparent but the actualization of that change took until the very end of the transit, almost 17 years.

Despite the specter of turmoil in the coming years, it is heartening to realize that we are witnessing the beginning of something truly new and different. There is a progression, an evolution at work here. During each of these Pluto Capricorn periods, power was wrenched from the hands of an elite group and individuals and nations were given more control over their lives and the societies in which they lived.