Week of Feb 6 - Merc exits post-rx shadow
Week of Feb 6 - Merc exits post-rx shadow
Mercury conjoins Pluto, enters Aquarius
Timeline:
Mon, Feb 6
☿ ✱ ♆
Mercury sextiles Neptune
1:26 pm ET
♑︎ 23°46’ ♓︎
Tues, Feb 7
☿
Mercury leaves post-retrograde shadow
5:21 am ET
♑︎ 24°21’ ♑︎
Wed, Feb 8
♀︎ ✱ ♅
Venus sextiles Uranus
12:29 am ET
♓︎ 15°03’ ♉︎
Fri, Feb 10
☿ ☌ ♇
Mercury conjoins Pluto
12:16 pm ET
♑︎ 28°58’ ♑︎
Sat, Feb 11
☿ → ♒︎
Mercury enters Aquarius6:22 am ET
♒︎ 00°00’ ♒︎
Notes:
Per my hiatus, I didn’t intend to write much of anything this week, but I ended up out-of-the-blue having the energy and inspiration to write yesterday evening, so I got a bit of something for you all today, mostly about Mercury.1
During the first part of the day yesterday (Sunday), I had a nice time doing work around the house and was grateful to have the energy to do so.
The South Node is passing over my twelfth-house Scorpio stellium, and I haven’t exactly been bursting with energy lately, but I can thank the Full Moon in Leo (in my ninth house) for lighting me up yesterday. I tend to enjoy writing and sharing my thoughts when the Moon is in Leo.
During the afternoon yesterday, after the Full Moon went exact, I shaved my head, using a safety razor for the first time. It left my head bloody, but I think I got the hang of it now.
The Sun rules the sign of Leo, and if Leo is about big, flamboyant hair, then with the South Node passing over my natal Sun, shaving my head feels like an appropriate variation on this theme.2
Mercury has been in the sign of Capricorn since December 6, which is remarkable, as the fleet-footed messenger doesn’t tend to stay in any single place for too long.
Here’s what I wrote about Mercury last week:
It exits its shadow [on] Tuesday, February 7, shortly after midnight Eastern Time, at 24°21’ Capricorn. Mercury will leave Capricorn a few days later, on [Saturday] February 11, and we will feel like we are finally able to move beyond that which has been occupying our minds since Mercury entered Capricorn in early December.
Alternately, when Mercury leaves Capricorn, we may find that we simply don’t have the energy or interest in what’s been consuming our minds the past couple months. It will be time to move onto something else.
But before Mercury enters Aquarius, it will make contact with Pluto, the lord of the underworld. This will be the final time a planet will conjoin Pluto before Pluto enters Aquarius on March 23. Pluto has been in Capricorn since 2008, so this final conjunction is a big deal.3
In The Archetypal Universe, Renn Butler describes the Mercury-Pluto planetary combination as follows:
A passionate and probing mind, a potent blending of willpower and intellect, a relentless and profound curiosity, a gift for deep analysis and questioning, “penetrating insight” into emotional causes and motivations, an ability to recognize the deeper significance in small details, urges to get to the bottom of problems, the probing instincts of a sleuth or detective, an interest in depth psychology or criminology, a study of the shadow side of the psyche, a tendency to think and talk about sex. Deep and persuasive communications, intense conversations, arousing opinions, urges to speak the forbidden, blasphemy and heresy, iconoclasm.
A little below this, Butler expounds on the shadow side of Mercury-Pluto:
A tendency toward mental fixation and struggle, fear of polluting one’s mind with dark or heavy images, obsession with one train of thought, extreme or fanatical opinions, “a mind ready to explode.” Bad attitudes, antagonistic beliefs, harmful and destructive comments, aggressive dogma and propaganda, tendencies toward mental domination, intellectual power struggles, desires to change other people’s minds forcefully, urges to impose one’s intellectual or philosophical model on the world. An inclination to ask loaded questions or make others confess, an interrogative style of speaking, a habit of bad-mouthing and sharing the dirt on others, intense or destructive gossip, nasty rumors and mudslinging, attempts to destroy others verbally, muckraking journalism, intrusive reporting, the poison pen or tongue, devastating insults. Crude speech, a foul mouth, an obsession with sexual innuendo.
The Mercury-Pluto conjunction will go exact on Friday around noon. This energy can be intense, but we will feel a shift about 18 hours later when Mercury enters Aquarius at 6:22 am Saturday morning.
That’s it for this week. Be well, everyone!
I am only choosing to write when the energy is there for it. With Mercury transiting Capricorn (my second house), astrology hasn’t been at the forefront of my mind. Instead, I’ve been focused on my relation to resources so that I can better take care of my physical and mental well-being.
Last week I wrote,
This Full Moon invites us to shine in the areas we are most meant to shine. The sign of Leo is ruled by the Sun, so look at the whole-sign house the Sun occupies in your chart and at the whole-sign house in which Leo lands in your chart to see the areas of life in which you are destined to shine.
On The Astrology Podcast, Austin Coppock spoke about the horrors associated with Pluto transits (transcript available here):
Pluto does real things as it moves through the signs, but it also shapes and warps and focuses the collective imagination.
One of the things you see really clearly is the site of horror moving with Pluto’s sign change.…With Pluto in Scorpio (early ’80s to mid-late ’90s), it’s the serial killer, like the sex-murderer, the Dahmer, the John Wayne Gacy. It was all about the intimate, hidden, murderous individual.
Then in the latter portion of the 90s up until 2008, you have Pluto in Sagittarius. …[Y]ou have Columbine early on in that, the first big school shooting, and then you also have 9/11.
And so the figure of horror becomes very Sagittarian: they’re wielding a bow. A bow is in a sense the precursor to the firearm, the murder at a distance thing: they’re going all over the place, the terrorists are over there, we’re gonna fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here. That was the Bush administration thing.
And then when Pluto moved into Capricorn (2008-2009), the site of horror becomes the structure that we live in, which is Capricorn, the laws, as well as the past. …[I]t’s like, Oh, no, the structure that we live inside of is the site of horror, literal, structural horror.
And so we’re looking at the movement… of [the] imaginal focus of horror (with Pluto in Aquarius) to the future, to imagine the story of the terrible future. …It’s very like, Oh my God, are we headed in this direction? Does this mean this? There are real dangers, but then there’s also like… taking a tiny thing and making a big fucking deal out of it. We also do that with terror, fear does that as well.
Adding to Coppock’s comments, Diana Rose Harper bring ups techno-dystopia as a Pluto-in-Aquarius theme and Chris Brennan mentions the horrors of HIV/AIDS as a big feature of Pluto in Scorpio. In regard to Pluto in Sagittarius and Pluto in Capricorn, I am reminded of something said by Jasbir Puar, the author of a very post-9/11 book titled Terrorist Assemblages (2007). This was at a talk I attended in 2013, and Puar spoke about how we were no longer in a post-9/11 moment, but a post-2008 moment, which brings to mind the shift from Sagittarius to Capricorn. The crash of 2008 and its aftermath can very much be framed in terms of structural horror. And we can see the various social movements of this Pluto-in-Capricorn period, from 2008 until now, as responses to structural horror and terror, whether at the hands of banks and corporations or police and the state, really anywhere there is a structural imbalance of power (Me Too, for instance). Pluto in Capricorn has been about structures and power.
My natal Pluto is at 29° Libra, so right now is my Pluto quarter return, and right now feels very Plutonian for me on a personal level, especially with Mercury having now joined Pluto in the third decan of Capricorn.