Dweller on the Threshold: The United States' Pluto Return PART ONE

An exclusive excerpt for WOODRUFF subscribers from my new private report, available in January of 2022.

IN MY NEW PRIVATE REPORT, Dweller on the Threshold: The United States’ Pluto Return, I'll venture to illuminate one of the most difficult transits to the United States’ horoscope. Namely, the natal house position of the planet Pluto in the sign Capricorn and the unraveling overture related to the nation's Pluto return in 2022.

PART TWO of the report is here.

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“The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a variety of morbid symptoms appears.” — Antonio Gramsci

IN HER BOOK Soul Sick Nation: An Astrologer Looks at America, astrologer Jessica Murray suggests that

“...our individual reality and our collective reality are two sides of the same coin. Every culture is blessed and benighted with its own peculiarities, each of which is tailor-made for every individual who chose to belong to that group.”

This begs the puzzling question of volition regarding one’s birth, the notion that the soul zeroes in on where to land and set up shop during any given lifetime.

But regardless, and if you are an American reading this inquiry, you can simply pause and sense the atmosphere and mood that’s in the air right now. Notice how our government handled COVID-19. Ponder how compliant some of us are when faced with an invisible enemy, while others have politicized the moment, turning the Republican party into a death cult.

Our compendium of group actions and reactions is part and parcel of the American experience. Different from how, say, Icelanders are facing the pandemic.

So yes, a country is an abstract of each unique individual that lives within its boundaries. And with that in mind, yes, every country has a birth chart.

“No one knows how you become French — no one knows where Germany comes from— it sort of emerges from the mist. We know the afternoon, July 4, 1776, and we know how to become an American. You come here and assent — then you're an American. You're in. You're it." —George Will

As Will remarked, it’s quite easy to mark the birth of the United States (a more arduous task—sometimes impossible—for other nations or states). For the US we know the exact date. And historians and astrologers, over the years, have rectified the ‘birth time’ to a near-exact moment.

A blueprint for the collective psychology of a country is marked by its moment of independence—just as a person comes into the blueprint of his or her own being after escaping the womb room of his mother, who as Alexander the Great once put it, “...demands an exorbitant rent for nine months lodging.”

And a Pluto return also demands exorbitant repayment, especially when configured as the planet is in the United State's second house of accrued wealth, power, and ownership.

The Returns

You’ve most likely heard about—and maybe lived through—your Saturn return, and this same cyclic formula is applied to all of the planets, including the Sun and the Moon.

Your birthday is a Sun return, the solar “I am” principle is reignited when the Sun returns to its natal position in your chart, coloring your next journey around the Sun.

A Jupiter return is a twelve-year cycle that, for each of us, revitalizes our enthusiasm for life. Our Jupiter return confirms that it’s OK to trust in the impersonal nature of reality.

The Saturn return, around the age of 28, is our first attempt to step onto the stage of life as an autonomous being—free from our family matrix—our parents’ binding teachings and proscriptions.

A Pluto return no one ever lives to experience unless they are a vampire or Rip Van Winkle.

Pluto takes 248 years to make a single orbit around the Sun and return to its place in the birth chart. A person can’t experience this return—but a country can.

And the United States is experiencing its Pluto return right now, the exact return—to 27 degrees of Capricorn—will occur in February of 2022.

With Pluto presently located at 25 degrees Capricorn, we are well within the orb of exactitude—a whisper away from the exact date of the 2022 return.

Right Here, Right Now

What made the opening phase of the US’s Pluto return so emphatic is that Jupiter had linked with Pluto back in March of 2020, forming a conjunction—just as the coronavirus pandemic gained traction.

With the US’s natal horoscope containing a Sun Jupiter conjunction, Americans are already predisposed to ‘larger than life’ experiences, a kind of grandiosity embodied in the compelling fantasy of Manifest Destiny. A proclivity that’s also echoed in our horoscope’s Sagittarius ascendant.

The 2020 Jupiter/Pluto moment was akin to the cosmos saying, “Well, since Americans can’t seem to register anything unless it’s exaggerated (Jupiter on the Sun) here’s a confrontation with death that is time-stopping, all-encompassing, and seemingly directed by Steven Spielberg.”

You could say that 2020’s Jupiter conjunction to Pluto amplified the prelude to the nation’s actual Pluto return in 2022. And with it, all of the themes astrologers associate with Pluto: breakdown, decay, rebirth, and titanic shifts in power. All of those experiences feel inescapable, free from the nonsense of partisanship—like an epic equalizer—which death always is.

But worse, especially for Americans, is that this crescendo into a death state has occurred without any logical meaning.

Jupiter conjunct the Sun, in an individual’s birth chart, can be read as someone who has a specific philosophical view intertwined with all of his experiences. Life (the Sun) has meaning (Jupiter) because some higher-order, enlightened type of reason, or divine protector, decrees it.

The problem with Pluto's subatomic nature is that there is no moral purpose. As Albert Camus wrote in The Plague, the microbe has no meaning.