Tortured and enlightened

Pluto enters Aquarius; reading recs for the astrological week ahead.

Welcome to the Saturday newsletter for paid subscribers, with esoteric and literary guidance for the week ahead. Today we’re talking about Pluto and offering reading suggestions for its upcoming transit through Aquarius, for the first of two New Moons in Aries this month, and more. Have a question for the tarot? Send it my way, and I’ll answer it as part of two-card tarot draw for the next Saturday offering.

With regards to Pluto-in-Aquarius, which happens (ohhhh fuck) this Thursday, astrologers tend to fall into two camps.

They’re either all doom-and-gloom, with 982-tweet-long threads about the French Revolution (which occurred the last time Pluto was in Aquarius) and 10-slide Instagram posts about the upcoming horrors of life under AI domination and corporate-surveilled virtual reality. Or they’re positively giddy, launching hours-long podcasts about the end of capitalism and more efficient healthcare and governance for the masses, portending that our technological prowess will expand without limitation as the Planet of Power enters the fixed air sign that’s come to be associated with technology, the internet, and human civilization-at-large.

I received my first cancer diagnosis when Pluto stationed direct on my Sun in late Capricorn in 2021. I’m sure you can guess which camp I mostly fall into.

Recently, though, I’ve been trying to move away from my own amazing ability to catastrophize everything, and instead use my woo impulses—my faith in the chaotic synergy of heaven and earth, all these whirling bodies through and across time and space, one of them being my own—to identify helpful orientations to hard times. To say plainly what I can know about the planets and the zodiac, from personal experience and astrological study, and then to use language, art, and divination, to set myself onto a path, into a plan.