Living in revolutionary times is only wonderful and romantic when you are in
your teens and twenties. When you are over fifty, it messes with your
retirement! Because, like it or not, when you are older than forty-something,
you are established, even if you’re not part of the
Establishment. ~ Lee Lehman
Sputnik was launched October 4, 1957, with Pluto at 1 Virgo. The first moon
landing on July 20, 1969 had Pluto at 23 Virgo. But before you wonder about the
23 degrees, consider that the last landing on the moon was by Apollo 17 in 1972
– the year that Pluto’s retrograde cycle took it back into Virgo for the last
time.
It’s very easy to see the “can-do” engineering attitude
as Virgo. For this brief moment in our history, nerds were cool. But let’s be
honest: this was the space race – the USSR and the USA were in a contest
over national pride. In other words, what we saw being played out through
Virgo was the overbearing mutually assured destruction contest of superpowers,
which also resulted in an insane arms race that continues to have severe
environmental danger 40 years later.
Thinking about
these past passes, I propose the following adjustment to our understanding of
Pluto’s transit through a sign: Pride goeth before a
fall. We can accordingly note that, while the Pluto in Virgo
engineers succeeded spectacularly in getting us to the Moon – we didn’t stay
there! We didn’t develop a colony, we
didn’t follow up with an
observatory. The moon launch became a dead end instead of becoming the gateway
to the exploration of our solar system. President Kennedy perfectly embodied the
Pluto in Leo call to put a man on the moon – but he said it while Pluto was in
Virgo. The vision that got us there couldn’t encompass the concept of knowledge
and engineering for its own sake – once the deed was accomplished, the funding
was cut. We went for the wrong reason, and having gotten there, couldn’t sustain
it. Pluto in Leo was gone, Pluto in Virgo spent, and the needs of Pluto in Libra
would direct our attention elsewhere.
In the words of President Lyndon Johnson:
“It's unfortunate, but the way Americans are, now that they have developed all
of this capability, instead of taking advantage of it, they'll probably just
piss it all away.”
Extracts pirated from Hope in the Time of Pluto in Capricorn
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