Pluto in Aquarius I.
Friday January 19, 2024
I have been spending some time imagining young Venetia Burney having breakfast with her mother and grandfather on a drizzly morning somewhere in England in 1928-29…. She is 11 years old: that phase in a young girl’s life when there is still so much innocent wonder, and magic everywhere - but also the immanence of an impending shift from her childhood to maiden phase. And something about this - and blood - has already brushed up against her consciousness in a big enough way she asks Mother or Grandfather a question — or a series of them even, — and both guardians of her young life are prompted to tell her a story.
Venetia LOVES stories. She must have done … How else would she have been led into making what she hears about shadows and underworld, and pain and death : and blood: — into a proposition, entirely surprising to the two adults listening to her, making an uncanny connection.
“… but when you die, Mama, where do you go?”
Where is Father Now?
What would she have said, startled? Or did she, mother to her young one: a Demeter to her Kore - the young flower waking up to her own nature — leave it to Grandpapa, master storyteller?
“Let me tell you how I came to understand what happens,” the Elder so much closer to the Truth may have took it upon himself to cast some light on this delicate subject.
I like to imagine this to be the case, all the more poignant because he may have known, intimately, what it is like to be at the gates of hell — and then immersed. He may have been a veterean of World War One, having seen first hand what men are capable of doing onto each other. Or he may have lost a son…
And - but? - then, in the interim war years - with an even bigger wave of destruction on the way, making Europe the continent that was washed away in blood - a new planet is discovered, making news and headlines. In the paper, on the radio…
“You see, my dear child,“ Grandfather might have proceeded leading her on sure feet into a mythic realm that she was able to ingest, digest, and transform in a way that still leaves me in a state of awe. The child, the spirited 11 year-old girl descended, met with a three-headed dog that salivated fertilizer for Aconite , under the command of his master, who got himself a queen while she was out picking daffodils in the springtime, leaving her mother in such a state of rage she changed the climate to get the Olympian Gods‘ attention— and finally, her daughter back, albeit only for half a year... — Venetia followed every detail closely. Nothing escaped her acute attention. Until when the story ended, and Grandfather picked up his morning newspaper, making a comment about the discovery of a new dwarf planet at the very edge of our solar system - and that the Astronomical Society was looking for a name — pensively, the girl put down her fork and said, quite clearly:
“Maybe it should be named Pluto,” startling her mother bigly for a second time that morning.
🌱
All this is unknown, and just one way of intuiting into, and exploring how the story of an 11 year old young lady, a bright comet bursting into the hall of fame of those who look to the stars and planets for answers - might have unfolded. She probably had more conversations with Grandfather about how to submit a naming application; sealed the postage stamp on the envelope while her mother was studying her precise and quiet intent in seeing this all through — we don’t know.
All we know is that Pluto was in the sign of Cancer at the time, realm of the Moon and the archetypal Mother. By the time the Second World War was in full swing, Pluto had moved into Sun-ruled Leo, sign of the archetypal masculine and Father, bringing darkness at noon over the world; and generations upon generations of trauma in its wake and appearance in the collective — and - but? - also: the largest potential for us to also wake up to our destructive, shadowy ways as a species, in person and collectively — and Heal. Together.