“What good is sitting alone in your room?”
- Sally Bowles (Liza Minelli), Cabaret
Indeed, Liza. This is the existential question the Pluto in Libra generation is continually asking themselves.
Welcome to Part 4 of my monthly series on Pluto generations! In case you missed the previous installments, be sure to check them out: Intro to Pluto, Part 1: Pluto in Cancer, Part 2: Pluto in Leo, and Part 3: Pluto in Virgo.
But first, I have exciting news to share, courtesy of Substack: You can now read Fifth House Astrology in the new Substack app for iOS.
With the app, you’ll have a dedicated Inbox for my Substack and any others you subscribe to. New posts will never get lost in your email filters, or stuck in spam. Longer posts will never be cut off by your email app. Comments and rich media will all work seamlessly. Overall, it’s a big upgrade to the reading experience.
The Substack app is currently available for iOS (it’s a great reading experience on the iPad). If you don’t have an Apple device, you can join the Android waitlist here.
While you’re browsing Substack, check out some of the other astrology and divination-themed newsletters that I enjoy: Cosmic Edges, The Mercury Papers, and Incandescent Tarot. Happy reading!
And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming!
As we discussed in the previous installment on Pluto in Virgo, Gen X is somewhat squishy, demographically. As such, there’s a case to be made to divide it astrologically into two cohorts: Pluto in Virgo (born roughly 1956-1972) and Pluto in Libra (1971-19841). Personally, as a card-carrying member of Pluto in Libra, I can vouch for the distinctions between these two cohorts generationally.
Paging: Our Other Halves
Pluto in Libra is ruled by Venus, planet of love, pleasure, beauty, and art. Venus’ mission is to relate, harmonize, please, beautify, and enjoy. Libra is a cardinal air sign that initiates things in the social sphere. Symbolized by the scales, Libra is constantly balancing, weighing, and is concerned with justice and fairness in all its forms.
Libra is also constantly looking for its other half. The sun is in fall or depression in Libra, as it’s exalted in the fiercely independent opposite fire sign of Aires. Basically, Libra struggles with being alone. Any planets in Libra are looking for ways to relate to other people. When this planet is Pluto, this quest takes on obsessive tones.
As we’ve been discussing in this series, Pluto takes whatever it touches to extremes and potentially corrupts the significations that it takes on in any sign. In Libra, this is the realm of relationships, pleasure, art, and recreation.
It’s no wonder that this generation was maligned as slackers in our youth in the late 80s and 90s, which was dominated by the venusian pastimes of music and art (remember zines?), hanging out, and hooking up. Actually, we were just taking Pluto in Libra to its logical endpoint of an exaggeration of the venusian priorities of fun, art, relaxation, and romance.
It’s telling that the period of Pluto in Libra kicked off with the release of the movie Cabaret, about an earlier so-called decadent period, peaked with the rise of disco and the iconic nightclub Studio 54, and wrapped up with outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, which had an outsize, and devastating, impact on artists, particularly gay men.
Venusian Distortions
It’s worth noting here that the conjunction of Pluto and Saturn in Libra in the early 1980s, which coincided with the start of the AIDS epidemic, was the last time these two heavy-hitter outer planets conjoined before their meeting in Capricorn in early 2020, just as Covid-19 emerged in China.
But, whereas Covid-19 can be caught through the depressingly banal and ruthlessly efficient (Capricorn keyword) method of. . . simply walking into a room with others, HIV, as we know, is often (though not always) spread through what we might characterize as pleasure-seeking, and therefore venusian, behavior — sex and drugs.
(The Pluto-Saturn conjunction before the Libra one was in the 1940s in Leo and coincided with polio, which tended to afflict children, a group that embodies Leo’s youthful energy.)
We even see Venus’ imprint on what used to be termed venereal disease (now known as Sexually Transmitted Infections or STIs, in case anyone’s been living in a monastery), with the root of the word literally signifying “diseases of Venus.”
We see in this generational cohort, which absorbed lessons of life and death in sex ed class, an intermingling of venusian themes of pleasure, relationships, and recreation with plutonian themes of transformation, destruction, death, and epochal change.
It’s no wonder we just wanted to head over to the Land of the Lotus Eaters and forget about it all.
Which is where Studio 54 comes in. If you haven’t seen the eponymous documentary, it’s worth a watch, as the story of the rise and fall of the legendary nightclub epitomizes Pluto in Libra themes (sex! drugs! tax evasion! organized crime! Liza Minelli! Honestly, Liza was everywhere during Pluto in Libra, when Pluto was sending an energizing sextile to her Pluto in Leo. . .):
When Disco Was King
And here, as your resident dancer, cultural critic, and amateur dance historian, I insist that we take a detour to reflect on the quintessentially Libra dance form of. . . disco. Remember that Saturn is exalted in Libra, imbuing this artistic sign, which counts dance as one of its expressive strategies, with saturnian qualities of restraint, structure, and control.
As immortalized in Saturday Night Fever (1977), disco is a cool and refined dance form often done in partners (Libra!) in which control, form, and line are prized over the loosey-goosey do-your-own-thing style of dance that characterized the previous decade, as popularized by the self-expressive Pluto in Leo Baby Boomers.
Fighters for Equality
Each sign exists in opposition to its antithesis — for Libra this is the fire sign Aires — and experiences a dynamic tension with its opposite, often displaying different versions of the same qualities.
To paraphrase astrologer Kelly Surtees, Libra is Aires in a pink coat.
Whereas Aires is the warrior, Libra is a different kind of fighter, one who pushes for social ideals, especially equality, through the legal processes symbolized by its scales of justice.
And, indeed, the Pluto in Libra era was characterized by the continuing movements for civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights. Further progress was made on these fronts, particularly with LGBT+ rights, when the Pluto in Libra cohort were young adults, when Pluto in Sagittarius was sextiling their natal Plutos. A couple of decades later, when Pluto was in Capricorn and squaring their natal Plutos, gay marriage was legalized in the US and elsewhere.
Life is a Cabaret
This generational cohort has its share of beautiful, artsy folks, many of whom are just a famous for their various relationships as for their careers: Snoop Dogg, Jared Leto, Winona Ryder, Toni Collette, Eminem, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jaoquin Phoenix, Cameron Diaz, Jude Law, Chloë Sevigny, Ben Affleck, Christina Bale, Angelina Jolie, Penélope Cruz, Charlize Theron, Kate Winslet, Drew Barrymore, Gael García Bernal, Heath Ledger, Katie Holmes, Reese Witherspoon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Hilary Swank, Alicia Silverstone, Ashton Kutcher, Orlando Bloom, James Franco, Liv Tyler, Christina Ricci, Jake Gyllenhaal, Serena and Venus Williams, Natalie Portman, Elijah Wood, Britney Spears, Anne Hathaway, Kristen Dunst, and Beyoncé.
Speaking of Beyoncé, who knows something about marriage and being an artist (and being in a two-artist marriage), here she is, embodying the literal goddess of love and beauty along with her backup dancers, with what could be this generation’s mantra, Put a Ring on It. (Note the martial flash of her wrist gauntlet, a reminder of the Aires-Libra tension.)
Stay classy, Pluto in Libras!
If you’re looking at a birth date on either edge of this range, be sure to double check Pluto’s placement using an ephemeris or by generating your birth chart, since Pluto can move back and forth a bit between signs when changing from one to the next.