Welcome to the final installment of my series on the Pluto generations of those living today! In case you missed the previous ones, be sure to check them out: Intro to Pluto, Part 1: Pluto in Cancer, Part 2: Pluto in Leo, Part 3: Pluto in Virgo, Part 4: Pluto in Libra, Part 5: Pluto in Scorpio, and Part 6: Pluto in Sagittarius.
From today’s installment on, my Pluto dispatches will be occasional, forward-looking, and speculative, not ruminations on the cultural developments of Pluto eras past (or present, in the case of this installment).
“Everyone’s a winner, we’re making our fame
Bona fide hustler making my nameAll I wanna do is-
And a-
And take your money”— MIA (Pluto in Libra), Paper Planes (2008)
Today we’re going to get serious, like the kids born in the past 13 or so years. Like cut-to-the-chase Capricorn, I won’t mince words: times are tough and so are these kiddos.
Additionally, since no one reading this has Pluto in Capricorn (unless my 12-year old is being precocious), I won’t be highlighting the work of anyone from this present generational cohort, as they’re mostly too young. (If you want to reflect on the previous go-round of Pluto in Capricorn, just go and read Jane Austen — Sagittarius sun, Virgo rising, Libra moon conjunct Saturn, with Mars conjunct Pluto in Capricorn — whose novels highlight the class hierarchies and ambitions at play in the classic marriage plot.)
Most importantly, keep in mind that the story of this era isn’t over just yet; we’re all still living through it.
The oldest members of the Pluto in Capricorn generation, which overlaps fairly well with the demographic cohort of Gen Alpha, were born beginning in 2008; the youngest ones haven’t arrived yet1. In fact, we’ve almost entered one of the periods of transition from one Pluto era to the next, in which Pluto’s retrogrades move the generational dwarf planet back and forth between adjoining signs.
Pluto will enter Aquarius for the first time in about 250 years in March of 2023, but will then retrograde back to Capricorn in June of that year, reentering Aquarius in January of 2024. We then have another retrograde that brings Pluto back into Capricorn in September 2024, with a turnaround and reentry into Aquarius, this time for good, in November 2024. Pluto in Aquarius will then last until around 2043-44 (!).
In Capricorn, Pluto is ruled by stern taskmaster Saturn in its nocturnal earth sign. Saturn limits and denies, but also builds structures that last. These structures are generally material in Capricorn, and often involve money, since Capricorn is interested in hierarchies and status, which money builds and supports. Institutions, governments, and faceless bureaucracies in general fall into Capricorn’s briefcase.
Winners Take All
Pluto entered Capricorn in 2008, exactly as the recession of that year in the US came into sharp focus, suggesting that themes of extremes of wealth and poverty and economic hierarchy would be subject to Pluto’s distortions in this era. The recession kicked into gear as Jupiter transited its sign of fall in Capricorn, co-present with Pluto, a signature that repeated itself a dozen years later in 2020, with Saturn there as well, during the pandemic. The beginning of Pluto in Capricorn was marked by contraction, a classically saturnian motif, with the loss of assets, jobs, and status.
Children born into this era, particularly on the earlier end, who are now in middle school, may have absorbed early lessons of frugality and a hyperawareness of economic concerns. Many families responded to economic stress with an emphasis on their children getting ahead in school, through hook or by crook, leading to a “Hunger Games” of public school admissions in some cities that reached insane proportions before crashing and burning in the pandemic amidst cries for greater equity (in a foreshadowing of Pluto in Aquarius, perhaps).
Indeed, as the Pluto in Capricorn era got underway, the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement highlighted economic inequality and the influence of big money on politics. Frugality, saving, and stretching one’s money became not only popular, but chic, as Macklemore (Pluto in Libra) and Ryan Lewis (Pluto in Scorpio) remind us in the delightfully wacky throwback Thrift Shop (2012). The song explicitly references saturnian themes of the elder by holding up “your grandpa” as a fashion icon:
You Win or You Die
Yet the Pluto in Capricorn era wasn’t just about highlighting economic inequality. We had Downton Abbey, which premiered in 2010, for that, a soapy and uncritical take on the age-old upstairs-downstairs relationship. (But who will Lady Mary marry??)
While we might not have been aware of it, back in the relatively halcyon (?) days of the 2010s, back when prestige appointment television was king, we were treated to a kind of Pluto in Capricorn primer, over years, of what happens when a society is hollowed out from within by corrupt leaders consumed by ambition and challenged from without by existential threats.
As Cersei Lannister famously told Ned Stark in the first season of Game of Thrones, “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.” When ambition and lust for power, plutonian distortions of Capricorn’s hierarchies of material power, take precedence over the wellbeing of the many, then suffering is unavoidable.
Whether you viewed the White Walkers as an allegory for the inexorable threat of climate change or as a general stand-in for any dire threat from beyond (say, nuclear war, as a currently salient example), the upshot was clear: humans need to stop messing around fighting each other and focus on the existential threats at hand. (Another foreshadowing, perhaps, of humanity’s next season: Pluto in Aquarius, in which the gang bands together in gritty cyberpunk style and turns back encroaching authoritarianism and climate change? One can only hope…)
After the bust of the early years of Pluto in Capricorn, great wealth was amassed by a plutocratic few (who in true GOT-style seem consumed by a private competition around who will colonize the solar system), while many others have become radically displaced due to economic hardship compounded by a once in a generation pandemic. Indeed, the current Pluto era seems poised to end on a note of economic collapse, mirroring its beginning.
Generation Covid
Which brings me to the kids. Our kids. We all have them in our lives, whether as our own children, children in our families, or those in our neighborhoods and communities.
This is, of course, Generation Covid.
Whether they were older kids whose budding independence was crushed by lockdowns, or toddlers who haven’t seen their masked teachers smile, this generation has been marked by the pandemic in ways that the rest of us can only imagine. It may take another generation to understand, truly, what the after effects on them may be.
The astrology of pandemics in history often correlates with the conjunctions of Saturn and Pluto, which occur roughly every 40 years. Before their meeting in Capricorn in early 2020, Saturn and Pluto last met in Libra in the early 1980s when AIDS emerged. In 2020, Jupiter in Capricorn seems to have expanded the plague signature, turning the novel coronavirus into a worldwide pandemic.
Those children born closer to the height of the pandemic carry this astrological signature in their natal charts, just as anyone born at a particularly fraught historical moment carries the astrology of that time in their chart. And many kids, as experts have noted, aren’t alright. Rates of depression, suicide, and behavioral issues are way up since the pandemic. We need to do more to help this group, which is our future, after all.
It will take time, but time will move on, as already seems to be happening. Pandemics end; new eras begin. Childhood difficulties can become sources of strength, with the proper support, of course.
I, for one, am optimistic. The playground outside my building, where my own kids played when they were little, where I spent countless hours chatting with other parents, recently fully reopened after over two years. It was closed initially due to the pandemic, but then the closure continued because of a nearby construction project. In the ensuing years, I’ve come to think of the shuttered playground as a metaphor for a generation of children whose formative years have featured social distancing, the disaster of online school, and masks as daily wear. But recently, the scaffolding came down and the playground once again rings with the shouts and laughter of young children. It’s a hopeful sign.
Speaking of the kids, here’s my Pluto in Capricorn son’s favorite song from his happy-go-lucky cartoon days, in which the gang from Teen Titans GO! cheekily explain how a pyramid scheme works, a Pluto in Capricorn childhood anthem, if ever there was:
Some Plutonian Reflections
Whew! It’s been quite a journey doing this series, and I’ve really enjoyed delving into the closets, dance floors, video collections, mixtapes, movie theaters, tv shows, and jukeboxes of the past. I’ve also learned a few things along the way:
People have strong feelings on which demographic cohort they should belong to! This is natural, since our generational cohort follows us through life, often sharing similar milestones along the way, and often in a similar fashion. Yet, because the Pluto generations don’t always match up with the demographic categories (i.e. the Baby Boomers generation is thought of as beginning post-WWII, but Pluto in Leo began just before the war), there can be some mismatches between what cohorts people think they should be in and which one their Pluto placement falls in.
This is especially true around the beginning or end of a Pluto period or generational era when there are some gray areas. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, as an astrologer, I think Pluto placements are the best indicator of where anyone falls into a given generation, over demographic labels. That the demographic labels and Pluto placements mostly overlap just supports the power of the Pluto archetypes and how they manifest culturally in our world.
Gen X really needs to be broken into two generations! Some of the most passionate commentary centered around this often-overlooked generation. The question was raised about who — those born in the 1960s or 70s — were the “real” Gen Xers. After I published my Pluto in Virgo installment, I learned about a relatively new generational cohort, identified as Generation Jones, which roughly overlaps with Pluto in Virgo (late 1950s-60s — Barack Obama is a prime example).
This article, which mentions no astrology whatsoever, includes descriptions of this generation, such as hard-working, inventive, and adaptive, that could have been cribbed from an astrology primer on Virgo keywords. I’m convinced and have jumped on the Generation Jones bandwagon, and believe this designation matches better with Pluto in Virgo, and Gen X with Pluto in Libra. Gen Jones, anyone?
We need to drop Xlennials and other weird in-between designations. Xlennial, a term coined to capture an awkward 5-6 years in the late 1970s and early 80s (mostly Pluto in Libra but a bit of Pluto in Scorpio), is such a niche, tiny cohort of births as to be pretty much useless as a generational descriptor. I think the problem here is that Gen X itself was too big, without Generation Jones to absorb the earlier members. Let’s face it: people born in the late 50s have little in common, culturally, with those born in the early 80s. Additionally, transitional Pluto periods, when Pluto leaves one sign and enters the next, but then goes back and forth over a period of (sometimes) a couple of years (such as we’ll see soon with Pluto in Aquarius), aren’t clear cut times.
People born during these times will sometimes be in the same school class as those with the adjacent Pluto placement, suggesting a time of cultural crossover. If you were born during one of these transitional times, you will surely feel it, as your peer groups will likely include those from two different Pluto generations. This is a good thing! Lean into the possibility that you could help bridge generational differences!
And if you really want to drill down into smaller generational cohorts, look at those who share the same Neptune, Uranus, and even Saturn signs within your Pluto generation, with whom you will share even more. This is why high school and college reunions are so cathartic — those folks are literally your generational twins, sharing most of these outer planet placements!
Generational differences are real but they don’t have to define or limit us. We’re are members of families that contain multiple generations and know or work with people of different generations. It’s too easy (and often lazy) to dismiss someone by their generational cliches, which often reflect plutonian shadow sides: they’re just a nostalgia-soaked member of the Greatest Generation, a narcissistic Boomer, a workaholic Gen Jones, an indolent Gen Xer, a Millennial with an ax to grind, a crusading Gen Z.
People are always more than their generation, though they may be more or less connected individually to their generational themes (the natal chart revels ways in which this manifests). In general, as with so much social discourse today, which focuses on division, I think we could all benefit from deepening relationships outside of our generations and honoring the perspectives and lived history of others from different eras. We all have wisdom to share, gleaned from Pluto’s school of hard knocks. Let’s listen to, and honor, each other and our experiences.
Thank you for reading along with me during this series! I look forward to working more with Pluto generations in my own astrological work and practice. If you’re curious about your natal Pluto placement and how it may tie into the larger themes of your generation, book a consultation with me to explore your Pluto narrative :)
And look out for my Pluto in Aquarius spotlight, coming next March!
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.