Let’s talk about the scariest thing there is….the future.
This upcoming year is about to bring some of what I like to call interesting events. “Interesting” is interesting because it’s not really polarized.
The main interesting but titanic events of 2023 are Pluto and Saturn changing signs, or rather in the case of Pluto dipping in and out of Aquarius.

Pluto, though downgraded from the status of planet (boo!) has some interesting qualities both astronomically and astrologically. It’s smaller than our Moon and located all the way in the cold and distant Kuiper Belt.
Its orbit is highly elliptical and unlike the planets in our Solar System it is inclined at 30° making it look like it’s travelling through the underworld. Because of this shape, the transits are highly variable in length. In travels through Scorpio in 10 years, but in Taurus it can take up to 30.

As god of the Underworld, Pluto is a bit of both the image of horror and the horror itself. If you remember your Greek myth, the appearance of Hades as a main character only happens briefly when he falls madly in love with Persephone and kidnaps her, causing the sorrow of her mother Demeter which in turn causes famine on Earth, but eventually results in the balance of the seasons. The rest of the time in stories, Hades’ role is that of a balance keeper, only wrathful when the rules of his realm are broken.

And so astrologically, as Pluto crawls through a sign it brings up all that is noxious underneath and exposes it to the whole world. For balance to be kept, impurities must be cleansed.

During the ‘83-‘95 Pluto in Scorpio years we had an underworld filled with intimate sins. The AIDS epidemic and the most notorious sexual serial killers (Dahmer and Gary Ridgway!) were in the focus.
Pluto in Sagittarius between ‘95-‘08 brought the horror as the radicalized man with the gun, a crusader or a terrorist (a matter of opinion, really). We got the shootings at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and all the others. And of course we got 9/11 and the special military operation response to that.

The common thing with these themes is that they all existed before Pluto went through the respective signs. Both HIV and serial killers existed before the 80s, as did school shooters and religious zealots. But we were not collectively fearing any of those.

Then Pluto moved into Capricorn in 2008. Capricorn deals with systems, with structures, with work and the ruling classes. Mind you, not the royalty which is Leo’s domain, but the ones who make the rules. It’s the government, not the king.
Capricorn is ruled by Saturn whose domains are the harsh realities of life which cannot be avoided. Death. Taxes. But in 2008 it turned out that taxes are not a harsh reality if you are a bank, you can crash the economy and be bailed out.
Then we got to see the cogs inside our system. The child labour behind the machines we are forced to use every day. The things which stand behind the foundational structures of our society. The…dare I say it? Patriarchy. The horror is the system within which we all exist. The underworld is filled with structures which are about to crumble.

And now, Pluto is moving into Aquarius. Not immediately, because it pops in and out of Capricorn for another few years still, but now we are beginning to see the arc of the 20 year story coming up.

Aquarius is also ruled by Saturn, and so it deals with systems as well, but systems of thought and technology. Aquarius is both dystopian and utopian. Aquarius wants to destroy the system and replace it with a new one. Aquarius is the future, Aquarius is AI, fusion energy, bioengineering, gene editing and cryptocurrency. But Pluto in Aquarius is  armed robots (really San Francisco?), social credit systems and Deus Ex Machina (the game, not the plot device). I cannot find a better and more descriptive real-life example of what it represents than the birth chart of Mary Shelley , who had Pluto in Aquarius on the MC (the point representing career and reputation). It’s the Neuralink human trials, it’s Skynet. Pluto in Aquarius is every Black Mirror episode, it’s a Phillip K. Dick novel, it’s the terror of the future, and it’s here now, preparing its bed for the next 20 years.