Blog
by Steven Forrest
Saturn is the planet that helps us grow up. Failing that, it just helps us get old. Neptune is our guide when it comes to the most bedrock issue of all—what we take with us out of this world, and that boils down to consciousness itself. “Wisdom” might be a good word for it, although that has nothing to do with passing any posthumous “multiple choice tests.” Neptune is that depth you see in some people’s eyes. Saturn is the quality of maturity. Both of them are constantly moving around everyone’s chart, stepping into the spotlight and back out of it. We grow with them in pulses.
By Steven Forrest
Bono and the boys sang, “Nothing changes on New Year’s Day” and that’s usually about right. There is nothing astrologically significant about the first day of January. Calling January 1st “the beginning of the year” is a Roman invention without any real basis in any natural cycle. The only astrological argument for it is that the date lies close to the northern Winter Solstice, which falls at the end of the third week of December. That Solstice—the longest night of the year—could naturally be a candidate for a true nature-based New Year’s since it marks the beginning of the return of the light. But the day we celebrate is off by ten days, and there are other equally compelling calendrical possibilities.
Of course if you are an Australian, even that is all backwards. For the Aussies, that bright summer day in December marks the outset of a descent into darkness, and who would want to celebrate that day as a new beginning?
In the modern system of rulerships, Pluto rules my own Scorpio Ascendant from the ninth house and Leo. Thus it is the ruler of my chart, and has left a very obvious mark on the outward shape of my life: I travel all over the planet teaching metaphysics and often getting treated like a king. That sounds a lot like Leo and the ninth house to me.
Closer to the heart of my methods, Pluto also rules my Scorpio south node of the Moon, so I have also wrestled with Pluto’s dark side in this lifetime and in others. I wrote confessionally about some of that in the final chapter of Yesterday’s Sky.
Back in the early 1990s, with Pluto transiting over my Ascendant, my publisher commissioned me to add a volume to a series they were doing about each of the planets. The Book of Pluto was the result. After being unavailable for a year or two, I am delighted to see the book coming back into print this month. I knew while writing that the ideas it contained would create strong reactions in people—that is very much the definition of Pluto. Sitting with a client experiencing a Plutonian time, I often say that, “if I am not making you uncomfortable, I am missing the point.” This is not about sadism! It is about the fact the during Plutonian times, material emerges from the world of the Shadow. It does so because we are ready—sometimes just barely ready.
The very day the progressed Moon hit my ninth house cusp, I flew back to China. That was October 13. As the symbolism suggested, I was ready for another big cross-cultural adventure. This time, I was not offered any frogs to eat – a mercy! But I certainly felt stretched, both in terms of my mythic horizons and my waistline. I’m not ready to face discussing the latter, so in this newsletter I will focus on my mythic horizons.
"Beware, beware, on October 5 the Greater Malefic enters the Sign of the Scorpion!!! Hell will rain down upon the innocent and guilty! Rising prices! Falling stocks! Earthquakes! Bad relationships, bad luck, and bad hair days!!"
I’m having fun of course. You can just about predict what the fear mongers are going to say. But as we all know well, with Saturn’s orbit of a bit under three decades, humanity has survived this transit countless times. As with everything else in astrology, it is not something to fear, it is something to use.
