Mars in Leo opposes Pluto in Aquarius
Patrolling the unconscious Mind: consciousness moving into the Solar world, or descending into the unconscious mind of the herd.
Mars’ most basic archetypal function is the birth event. All things begin in the grove of the War God- this grove is Aries, in astrological speak, Mars’ springtime territory.
Pluto also provides a beginning of sorts, but it is the initiation of Darkness. Pluto seizes the conscious impulse and drives it underground, where it simmers in the Will to Power, a barren and generally unwanted realm, but one that we must all confront.
Archetypal territories are not always simple to define. The Gods do not always act in predictable and simple ways.
When we use seminal myths of the ancient world as the basic building blocks to guide us in our understanding of the archetypes, the parameters of a God’s territory becomes somewhat clearer.
The recent opposition between Pluto and Mars highlights the profound differences and agreements between the archetype of Mars as it transits Leo, and Pluto as it slowly begins to grind its way through Aquarius.
Mars is a visible celestial object, this archetype has millions of years (who knows really) as an integral part of human consciousness. Mars has a certain accountability to humanity since we have this archetype deeply embedded in our psyche, in both the conscious world and in the subconscious.
Pluto is not visible to human eyes. Pluto presumably has been circling the Sun in the same general location where is is now just as long as Mars has in its respective heavenly domicile, only Pluto has been until recently invisible to us and unaccountable to humanity. A planet at the edge of the solar system is no less significant in the Universal scheme than one that is far closer in to the Sun and a neighbor the Earth, but our experience with it is limited. We are certainly influenced by things too small, too distant, too obscure or simply beyond our scope of meaning-making.
Humans are geocentric, our very existence depends on the earth. We are so entrained by cults of Gnostic escapism and sci-fi dystopia that this idea may even sound novel. Scientific materialist or universalist new age religious viewpoints may try to convince us that we have the capacity to place our consciousness anywhere, they even tell us that we are star seeds who originate elsewhere- and those things may be true to some extent, but this abstraction is fraught. We are of this Earth, our consciousness does not reside elsewhere nor can it derive meaning from anything but the Earth. We have no other context.
We are Earth-bound, we have no choice in the matter. We may be able to remote view Mars or Pluto, or Alpha Centauri for that matter, and hypnotic regression may allow us to tell fascinating stories about past lives in those places, but the realm of remote viewing and hypnotic regression belong to a different aspect of human consciousness than the visible and rational world of observation and documentation which have given us a history with Mars, and some degree of consensus in the metaphors that we project onto the Red Planet.
The Hermetic principles tell us that what is above corresponds to what is below. There is one set of universal principles that are applicable to all of Creation, for All is Mind. But that does not give our rational capacities immediate access to adequate context to understand what is far above.
We do have a great deal of context to help us understand what is below. What we can do and have done, primarily, is to project upward and outward the more tangible and verifiable logic of what is below, upon that which is above.
To the best of our understanding, ancient people did not have a concept of the subconscious, and synchronistically, the planet Pluto entered the field of human awareness just as we started to systematically study this aspect of ourselves. The subconscious is both far removed from our rational mundane life, as it is essential to explain our bizarre self-hatred and self-destructive tendencies, which are parts of our holistic makeup.
The planet Pluto represents the parts of ourselves that are thrust into shadow, mostly unavailable to our conscious mind but still very real and percolating continuously. Just as mythological Pluto erupted from the earth to abduct Persephone, the subconscious is not always passive and occasionally erupts into the conscious world, and it is always attempting to find a balance, just as Pluto brought Persephone into balance.
The human mind remains equally active as we sleep, just as when we are awake, and life frequently presents us with things that we are simply not prepared to face or process. This is partially because the arc of narrative of life tends to poke at unresolved constellating conflicts that we experience early on in life, and more often than not we don’t have the skills, vocabulary or fortitude to move toward resolution. Sometimes we identify with trauma as if the dysfunctional coping mechanisms we develop to deal with it were the bedrock of our identity. We sometimes hold onto the pain, guilt and self-loathing that simmer beneath the surface as if these things somehow protect us- but they only protect us from ourselves, and from our own self-realization.
It is my thesis that the true occulted focus of ancient astrology was on fertility, that the ancients created the Zodiac as a highly sophisticated story of the year in constant flux, and the drama of the planets tells us how we must steward Life on the planet.
Fertility is the drive to live and procreate, and in psychological terms this is known as libido: the messy, generative and destructive interplay of masculine and feminine forces as they move creation forward. This is central to our identity, whether we like it or not. Those things that knock us off track from individuating and expressing our authentic self to land us in the Underworld of Pluto. The denial and suppression of biological sex, hormones and the archetypal consciousness that arise from these building blocks of humanity leads to psychological stress or cognitive dissonance and a type of self-negation. As a result, it is common to adopt a victim mentality and even take on victim ideologies to make this loss of territory seem OK. Ultimately, these damaging events help to define us.
Pluto has a primary role in the Battle of the Sexes: he is the abductor of Persephone, but the entire myth is a metaphor for the life force as it leaves the fertile seasons- Spring and Summer- and falls into the dark half of the zodiac. The dark half of the zodiac is the more introverted and feminine side of the zodiac, and Pluto is only in his element in darkness. Pluto is a hypostasis for the Mercurial psychopomp who guides us through a dark night of the soul.
It is facile and wrong to imagine that Mars does not inhabit or emerge from this Plutonian territory as well, but archetypes do not ever have hard edges, they exist in a continuum. If this part of the masculine archetype were an iceberg, Mars would be the part that you CAN see, Pluto is the part you cannot.
We could imagine the subconscious to be a pressurized fluid dammed and contained only by a few weak limiting and congealing factors, mainly the ego and the superego, yet this fluid is being constantly affected by nature- the consequences we receive naturally of our biology and conditioning, our thoughts and actions, and by our internalization of the collective, family, the crowd, society and its constant barrage of inputs that subtly demand compliance.
Mars is quietly working at the threshold of the dark realm of the Goddess, in collusion with Pluto, to take control of the materials he is presented with as they take form, and it is his mission to to build something constructive, useful and authentic that serves and advance the needs of the individual. Mars is most closely related to the ego in the place where it is called on resist the feminizing forces of society that tend to negate our individual spark. While his work may be relatively quiet in the dark, what emerges into the light is often anything but subtle or quiet.
Mars in Leo especially seeks to serve the individual and enhance the process of individuation, since Leo is the domicile of the Sun. This placement doubles down on Mars’ kinetic heat and adds the more external, radiant power of the regal solar archetype. This archetype seeks to lead and to demonstrate masculine power.
Of course, this can easily go over the top. The plumage and strut of the male bird who makes his grand show in mating season may be imposing to rivals and birding enthusiasts, but in the present human paradigm the cocky male who shows these tendencies will often be the target for castration or emasculation by a feminized herd.
Pluto in Aquarius is in the domicile of Saturn, the dark and internal realm of the collective, and is focused on its traditions, norms and rules- or the resetting and destruction of those same forces. There is great power to be harnessed in the collective, and this power is very easily abused when it is set to capture and redirect the individual’s natural need to find their own path. The demos or crowd is an extremely malleable, stultifying and congealing force that sucks people in who have lost touch with Nature, their essential need to discover and hone their consciousness into individual conscience.
Pluto in Aquarius can be the impulse behind the social engineer who sees this world as dangerous and random, who sees humanity as unfocused and chaotic and therefore tries to create order. To do so he manipulates psychology and behavior. He pushes the raw emotional buttons- guilt, shame, purposelessness, self-hatred and self-negation, feeling rejected and alone- to form the crowd into a roiling and churning creature of many hands and many heads, all moving in quorum.
Martial forces are often coopted into the service of the Herd. Anger, overt aggression, physical violence, misdirected resistance and knee-jerk separation into a state of self-isolation all play into the hands of those who would divide and rule.
Mars and Pluto are essentially dealing with the same raw materials. Mars is accountable to us, though he is certainly the most volatile of the planets, while Pluto is extremely slow moving and unaccountable. Pluto’s influence is therefore much more paradigmatic or epistemic, moving with the long term changes of human psychic development or devolution.