Thursday, in the midst of Mars retrograde, we’ll experience the first of three eclipses that will occur over the next six weeks. The order will be a solar eclipse in Cancer, followed by a lunar eclipse in Aquarius, and then a solar eclipse in Leo.

The lunar nodes (which indicate the approximate location of eclipses) are backtracking from the Leo/Aquarius axis to the Cancer/Capricorn axis.

Though the nodes remain in Leo and Aquarius for now, we’re about to experience the first in a series of eclipses along the Cancer-Capricorn axis: a partial solar eclipse in Cancer, exactly opposite Pluto in Capricorn.

A solar eclipse is a version of the New Moon, where the Moon and the Sun align not just by longitude but also by declination. In other words, rather than passing a little above or below the Sun, the Moon passes right across the disk of the Sun. There are several types of solar eclipses. Thursday’s is a partial, which means the Moon is slightly misaligned with the Sun, though it’s an eclipse nonetheless.

By exactly opposing Pluto, I mean that the opposition between the eclipse and Pluto aligns to about 40 arc minutes, or two-thirds of a degree, so it’s right in the pocket.

No matter how you look at this event, it represents a focused growth process of some kind. There are likely to be distinct, unusual events associated with it, both in the world around us and also in our individual and inner lives. Of course, we live in times where so much seems to happen, yet somehow, so little actually does.

The result for many people is a struggle for meaning, engagement, and even just relief from monotony, boredom, pressure and living as if on railroad tracks. Nothing quite says “meaningful” like an eclipse opposite Pluto. Given the usual density of consciousness, many experience Pluto as a kind of do-or-die proposition. It can feel like a confrontation with “ego death,” which means change, which is often confused with death. This resembles the style of the Death card from the tarot, which describes a transition within life.

The key with Pluto and eclipses is to guide your energy toward less dense, rather than denser. “Energy” means thought patterns; and not everyone is willing to make the effort, or is open to the idea that it’s possible or could be beneficial. It’s also easier said than done, with all the anxiety going around, and society pulled so tight you can flip a quarter on someone’s aura.

There’s a necessary degree of willingness to be submissive to existence called for with this event, and taking things direct to the soul level.

Soul is not a thing. It’s a process: of creating oneself, learning through struggle, and cultivating an inner orientation. That means an interior life, connected to purpose and what some call God; if you need a definition, think of that as “conscious relationship to existence, where existence relates back to you consciously.”

That often happens through an experience of confronting extreme fear, which usually translates to the fear of change. These days, it also translates to fear of sex, one of Pluto’s specialties. Pluto opposite Moon-Sun-eclipse can represent an encounter with one’s sexual shadow — one’s worst fears, deepest desires, guilt, shame, or whatever — specifically, which one has denied.

Mars retrograde in Aquarius, running in the background of this event, has similar implications. One translation is “mass denial of desire.” If the internet is indeed a pseudo-astral plane to which we’ve ascended, we may be under a collective delusion that we inhabit forms of binary code instead of flesh-and-blood bodies. One possible remedy for this is to consider how good it can feel to have a body, and what you might enjoy doing with yours.

(134340) Pluto is Now a Minor Planet

While we have Pluto in focus, this is a good opportunity to recap some recent history of this intriguing world. When Pluto was discovered in 1930, scientists found an odd, small kind of object in an unusual location in space, just beyond Neptune, previously thought to be empty.

Many, many asteroid and centaur discoveries later, in 2005, an object that would later be named Eris was spotted orbiting our Sun.

Because Eris was thought to be bigger than Pluto (which turned out not to be true) that forced the discussion of whether Pluto is really a planet (don’t ask me to make sense out of that; I cannot).

In the summer of 2006, there was a kind of political coup at a conference of astronomers in Prague, and Pluto was demoted from “planet” to “minor planet.” This is not minor as in minor leagues, where they hit a lot of foul balls; it’s closer to minor scale in music theory, in every way equal and in some ways more interesting than a major scale.

The minor planet category has many sub-groups, though essentially it’s one massive category, contained in one catalogue, which is really a list where everything gets a designation called a minor planet number. Pluto and Eris were designated “dwarf planets,” along with Ceres (previously known as the first asteroid). Eris became (136199) Eris and Ceres remained (1) Ceres, the first of the lot.

The upshot with Pluto is that something known for 76 years as a planet suddenly, one fine day, ended up in the minor planet catalogue as (134340) Pluto. Minor planets tend to describe psychological processes. This is one way to think of Pluto, if you set aside how the World Trade Center fell to the ground like dropped marionettes, during the aspect Saturn opposite Pluto in the summer of 2001.

Yet most of the impact of that event (which still persists) was on the psyche.

Sept. 11 was designed and exploited as a psychic attack, and spun into a kind of panic to start wars, shut people down and control the population.

People are susceptible to this kind of mass-fear event. With the eminently personal Moon and Sun aligning in an eclipse opposite Pluto, we need to be cautious about the potential for manipulation of this kind.

Some Mythological Implications

Many asteroids are gathered along the axis of 20+ Cancer and 20+ Capricorn, with an unusual cluster emerging from Greek mythology in particular. One of them is Antigone (conjunct the eclipse), a story that juxtaposes human law against divine law. When confronted with this, where does one place one’s loyalty? To one’s true calling to do what is right, or to do what the state or the emperor says is right?

This may also involve “parental law.” Do you do what your parents say is right, or do you do what you feel is right for you? This question has greater implications than we may recognize most days. It’s an issue that runs most people’s lives from the background.

A point called Meliboea is conjunct Pluto. Look that up in Wikipedia and you get six different references to one name, which reminds me of how everyone has a vastly different version of Pluto in their minds. Pluto is like the “hero with a thousand faces,” only more like the anxiety attack/sex panic/morbid terror/spiritual teacher/desire nature with a thousand faces.

A point called Byblis is conjunct the eclipse. This has a few permutations, though one we might resonate with is the issue of whether it’s possible to make someone love you. This would include the agony of attempting to do so. One image of Byblis is a wellspring of tears of unrequited love.

One point of this eclipse seems to be confrontation with the fact of our humanity. Mars tracking backwards through Aquarius is questioning our identification with, and tendency to morph into, “digital robot,” and Thursday’s event is an opportunity to explore that question thoroughly and make decisive changes in our relationship to the technological sphere. Pluto lining up with the Moon and Sun is entirely human: physical, emotional, biological, sexual and mortal.