Borrowing Fire From the Gods

 Where I stand in this

I have a personal affinity with the trans-Saturnian planets. In my own chart, Uranus sits right on the Ascendant in Sagittarius, and Pluto is unaspected in the tenth house, in its own sign. In astrocartography, my Uranus meridian line runs almost directly over Amersfoort -  within 85 kilometres orb of my home in Amsterdam. I live, quite literally, in a place on this planet where I feel, encounter, and see Uranus expressed: through myself, my surroundings, and the life I lead. What good fortune, and therefore no coincidence, that I ended up studying astrology of all things - that abstract, systemic body of knowledge that itself belongs to Uranus's domain. One of the countless possible expressions of that same planet.

This transit also squares my unaspected Pluto at 2° Scorpio. That stirs deep waters in me, and brings them into motion.

An unaspected planet doesn't stay silent forever - it waits for a transit to give it its voice.

 Pluto and the collective shadow

This transit isn't only personal. Pluto in Aquarius confronts the collective with what lies buried beneath our systems: institutions, ideologies, technology, the infrastructures with which we order our lives without ever really questioning them. What the collective doesn't want to see doesn't disappear - it goes dark, and waits for a moment to come to light after all. That is the shadow in the Jungian sense: not evil itself, but the unconscious, the repressed, the part of ourselves and our society we'd rather not see in the mirror.

That Pluto is currently retrograde makes this no less confronting - quite the opposite. A retrograde Pluto doesn't burst outward, it forces revision: old abuses of power, silenced truths, collective denial being stirred up again before it can be truly processed. A trine is a flowing angle, not a painful one - but flowing doesn't mean painless. It simply means the material finds a passable route, instead of forcing itself outward violently as with a square. In other words, we're now given a chance to look consciously at what would otherwise have surfaced by force regardless.

The collective's shadow is not any one person's fault alone - and yet each of us is one of the places where it becomes visible.

The language of the trans-Saturnian planets

An important feature of the trans-Saturnian planets is that they govern us more than we govern them. We can mostly ride the waves they bring, rather than consciously give shape to them - as is possible with the planets through Saturn. Precisely because of their slow movement, these planets mostly reveal collective currents: in the sky, we share much of this transit with our generational peers. Anyone born between 1984 and 1986 will likely feel this current trend especially strongly right now.

From a Jungian perspective, we could say that the archetypal forces we call planets want to be lived. Through insight into our chart, we can bring unconscious patterns into the light, give them room, contain them, or make them more conscious - especially for the planets through Saturn. The trans-Saturnian planets are harder to direct, so to speak. They live us, more than we live them.

What we don't carry consciously, we carry unconsciously

Prometheus and Pandora: the stolen fire, the opened jar

We know the myth of Prometheus. As a Titan, ever foreseeing - his name literally means "the one who thinks ahead" - he chose Zeus's side in the war against the other Titans, and was rewarded with permission to shape living forms. He fashioned humankind in the image of the gods and saw, more clearly than the gods themselves, how vulnerable his creation was: cold, defenseless, without fire. Without Zeus's consent, he slipped into Hephaestus's forge, hid a spark in the pith of a fennel stalk, and smuggled fire down to earth.

Zeus's revenge was merciless. He had Prometheus bound with unbreakable chains to a rock in the Caucasus mountains. Every day an eagle came to tear out his liver; every night it grew back, so the torment could begin again the next morning. Not a single punishment, but one that repeated endlessly - until, after many centuries, Heracles shot the eagle down and set Prometheus free.

It's a myth that lends itself easily to this transit. Uranus is the fire: the spark of insight and awareness that was never simply humanity's to have, but was stolen - or given - against the established order. Pluto is what comes after: not a punishment endured once and left behind, but an organ that keeps healing only to be torn open again. Transformation that doesn't move in a straight line, but cyclically - until, somewhere, liberation comes. The longing for growth in consciousness, for spiritual or divine insight, is ultimately what drives us into a corner. And yet: Prometheus, too, was freed, after the long night.

The fire we steal in order to see is the same fire that later consumes us - until it sets us free again, too.

Prometheus's punishment wasn't Zeus's only revenge. Humanity too, having received the stolen fire, would pay. Zeus had Hephaestus forge a woman - Pandora, whose name means "all-gifted," because every god gave her something: beauty, eloquence, curiosity. She was sent to earth with a jar she was never to open. But her curiosity - like Prometheus's, only without his foresight - won out. She opened the jar, and every evil it held - sickness, misery, death - poured out into the world. Only Hope remained at the bottom, trapped, or held back just in time.

That final twist has been read differently for centuries. Is hope the one thing we kept amid all the evil - or is hope precisely the cruelest thing withheld, so that we never fully despair and never fully see clearly either? For Pluto in Aquarius, that's a precise question. Whatever rises from the collective jar - and this autumn and the years ahead will bring plenty of it - the question isn't whether we face the evil, but what we do with whatever hope still remains, somewhere, at the bottom.

That this question about hope and belief arises now is no coincidence. Neptune has been retrograde in Aries since July 7th - the planet of faith, illusion, and the unseen withdrawing to review what we actually base our trust on. At the same time, Jupiter, the planet of hope, meaning, and expansion, stands in exact opposition to Pluto in Aquarius this month. That, too, plays out collectively: what we believe, what we hope for, and what the shadow sets against it, is being questioned this entire season - not only through Uranus and Pluto, but through nearly the whole field of outer planets at once.

Pandora didn't open the jar out of malice, but from the same hunger to know that made Prometheus steal the fire - the difference lies in what happens with that knowledge afterward.

In closing

What is trying to get attention here, in me and in all of us? What fire are you already carrying, without quite daring to look at it?

Until next time,

Melanie

#Uranus #Pluto #UranusTrinePluto #Gemini #Aquarius #transSaturnianPlanets #Jungianastrology #astrocartography #Prometheus #ContemplationsOnSpirit