Change is afoot wherever the outer planets appear in our charts. The Saturn-Pluto conjunction in Capricorn has been a key transit these past months and now they are being joined by Jupiter. This cluster will dominate throughout the year, drawing our attention to those areas, personal and collective, where change is underway. How are we cultivating awareness of what needs change in our life and attitudes, how do we participate in facilitating those changes, and how do we practice inner flexibility so that we are limber enough to do so?
The kinds of change that Saturn-Pluto signify combine in varying configurations and levels of intensity, shaped by Saturn’s retentive pressure and Pluto’s removal of all but what is essential. This can look like processes of transformation (Pluto) through contraction and limitation (Saturn). Pressures around responsibility (Saturn) building the heat necessary to reveal what is of deep necessity or value (Pluto).
In Capricorn the way these changes are being expressed, their tonality, is an earthy vigorous one. An active seeding energy, Capricorn wants to build. This can be seen in the way the heat stays on, so to speak, with ongoing issues and events keeping our attention on the underlying matters that are indicated by the house they are transiting in our birth chart.
But make no mistake about it, Saturn-Pluto also has to do with falling apart, as Saturn symbolizes structures (outer and inner) and Pluto the inexorable processes of transformation. Whatever life structure, habitual attitude, relationship, or story no longer provides real sustenance to the psyche, in other words is no serving life, Pluto comes along to dismantle. In the language of biology, Pluto is a decomposer who, like fungi and bacteria, “break down the chemical bonds that hold the molecules of dead things together and release the main elements of life from their corporal bonds, freeing them to be used again.”[i] There are an awful lot of endings going but all this decomposing is for the sake of new life. Pluto arrives showing us how our energy that is trapped in old complexes and worn out situations is ripe for resurrection.
Hecate by William Blake c. 1795
If there is a divinity, a movement of consciousness, who sees the value of this process for the sake of soulmaking, it is Hekate, goddess of garbage and magic.
I think Hekate offers us insight into the kind of consciousness most conducive to navigating this time because it is she who witnesses what is afoot, understanding with her night vision that falling apart is necessary at times.
Hekate was the goddess of crossroads, the trivium or place where three roads meet. In the classical era she became associated with the underworld, the ghosts of the dead and magic, and the cloaked face of the dark moon. These show how Hekate has to do with liminality because crossroads, the moon and magic all deal with transitions and change.
This is one of the keys to Hekate’s relationship to Persephone. When Hades abducts Persephone from a field where she is alone gathering flowers, Hekate is the only one who hears Persephone’s cries as she descends into the underworld in Hades’ chariot, the only witness to Persephone’s change of being as she goes from daughter to wife and Queen. Hekate pays attention at the thresholds. She personifies a perspective in the psyche that watches, listens to our struggles with calm and full attention.
Hekate is that aspect of our consciousness where we, Hillman writes, “observe our own catastrophes with a dark wisdom that expects nothing else.”[ii] Her expecting nothing else is not nihilism, rather it is her understanding that entering the underworld, the dark night of the soul or falling apart are part of the deal. And there is soul involved when things go wrong. Hekate’s witnessing at the thresholds of these dark passages reminds us that this too is a sacred place and therefore there is something of value here.
To bring Hekate consciousness to the Saturn–Pluto conjunction means not asking “why is this happening”, rather “what is the soul purpose of this event (the falling away, the changes, the losses, endings, and even our resistances to these movements)?”
I mentioned Hekate was the goddess of garbage. In her religious cult practices household garbage and food scraps were sacrificed to her.[iii] These “suppers of Hekate” were laid at crossroads for the goddess at the new moon. This is deep magic – to take our waste, the stuff we don’t see any use for or do not want to eat, our dirty, hopeless messes and turn them over as offerings to the goddess. We look for the myth in the mess of our lives and remember that Hekate’s blessing is to “make sacred the waste of life, so that it all counts, it all matters”, says Hillman.[iv]
So the myth in the mess of the Saturn–Pluto transit, if they are transiting your 2nd house, may have to do with taking responsibility for what matters to you and discovering what you have to offer the world requires relinquishing old attitudes and attachments. If they are transiting your 7th house, the development of inner authority is necessitating changes in how you relate to others, what you need in your relationships.
Throughout the year the Capricorn stellium will be touched by the Moon as she moves through the zodiac every two days. The Moon is a manifester, so paying attention to what the Moon is doing in relation to what is coming up in your life can help create some insight into the changes Saturn–Pluto are seeking. That Hekate was worshipped at new and full moons underscores the invitation to pay attention to the lunar rhythm at this time. May it be illuminating.
“I cannot tell if the day
is ending, or the world, or if
the secret of secrets is inside me again.”
[i] Eugenia Bone, “Decomposition: An Easter Story”, The New York Times 3/31/18
[ii] James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld (1979), p. 49
[iii] Lewis Richard Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States volume II (1896)
[iv] James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld (1979), p. 40