Year of the Crowning 2023
2023 will begin with a Mercury retrograde period — the first of four in the year to come.
Mercury Retrogrades in 2023:
•December 29 — January 17 (in Capricorn)
•April 21 — May 14 (in Taurus)
•August 24 — September 15 (in Virgo)
•December 13 — January 1 (in Capricorn)
This feels fitting for a year that will require a lot of looking back as a means to finding our way forward. This is magnified by the fact that we’ll have two Mercury retrograde periods in Capricorn — the sign we are trying to leave behind as Pluto makes its slow transition into Aquarius.
As I said in the previous article, we have a lot of unfinished Capricorn business to sort out — individually and collectively. It’s time to restructure our lives to build new foundations for new realities, leaving much of the detritus of the past behind. This is not an easy task. It requires resolve — a very Capricorn quality indeed. And the planet of resolve — Saturn — is about to make a big move itself.
Soul Work
On March 07, 2023, Saturn ingresses into Pisces. After spending a challenging two years in its own sign of Aquarius while locked into an intense square-off with disruptive Uranus in Taurus, Saturn now moves into the more soothing waters of Pisces. Fittingly, this shift is inaugurated by a harmonious aspect with the nodal axis, allowing us a more gentle approach to healing past emotional traumas (South Node in Scorpio) and finding our way to a more embodied future self (North Node in Taurus).
This is in stark contrast to 2022, when Saturn had spent much of the past year in a difficult square aspect with the nodes, creating more of a “tough love” environment with regards to our healing process. Now, a more gentle touch from the old taskmaster will be required, and welcomed!
But it also means we will need to get more serious about our beliefs, hopes and dreams. This is the initiation of a two-year period of soul work. Any of our recent tendencies to get lost in fantasy, devolve into daydream, or try to wish away unpleasant circumstances will now be met with a harsh reality check.
Saturn is about to “clean house” on all deceptive spirituality. A lot of the false prophets, fake gurus, phony psychics, and out-right spiritual scam artists will likely be exposed during this transit of Saturn in Pisces. Good riddance!
We’ve been under the rather seductive spell of Neptune in Pisces since 2012. On the positive side, it has certainly promoted a great expansion of our notions about what constitutes spirituality within our society, as we’ve moved beyond traditional religions and explored many “new age” practices while reviving some long-lost techniques. But this period has also fostered a lot of pseudo-spiritual bullshit, quite frankly.
With Saturn coming into the Pisces picture, there will need to be more discernment between valid spiritual practices and techniques, and mere woo-woo posturing. We will begin the process of separating the metaphysical wheat from the chaff. It may be painful to have some of our cherished spiritual or religious notions harshly discredited. But in the end, it will be good for our soul’s evolution.
This debunking will not be limited to the spiritual or religious realms. It will also bring needed clarity to many political, social and cultural delusions that have cast a diffused and insidious haze over our collective sensibilities. A lot of bad actors have intentionally muddied the waters in terms of what is reality and what is fantasy. It’s even been suggested that we have entered into a “post truth” era.
But while Saturn moves though Pisces, we might expect a “truth revival” as many deluded dreamers, scheming tricksters and outright liars hit a wall and face some pretty harsh karmic retribution. Therefore, we’d all be wise to perform a sober reality check on all of our own belief systems, lest we suffer a similar fate.
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Big Time Healing
On March 12, 2023, Jupiter conjuncts Chiron in Aries, a potent symbol for the potential for some “big time” healing to begin. With this conjunction comes the promise of new healing modalities, and a possible shift in attitudes towards health care in general, and perhaps even some major medical breakthroughs.
Conversely, it could highlight the gross mismanagement of our current healthcare system, shining a light on inadequacies, and stimulating big ideas on how it can be improved, reformed or overhauled. It may also coincide with new insights into the use and efficacy of all the new mRNA vaccines that have gained recent fast-track approval during the coronavirus pandemic. These are very “novel formulations” (a very Aries thing), and we might expect the debate over their widespread use beyond inoculating for coronavirus variants to become big news at this time.
Either way, it seems likely that “Big Pharma” ( an apt expression of Jupiter & Chiron) might be a big issue with this transit. But it may equally motivate many on an individual basis to seek alternative and more natural forms of health and healing. Chiron is a “natural healer” and the patron saint of homeopathy. He is the healer, the shaman, the medicine man, and his boost from Jupiter might inaugurate new trends in natural remedies, plant-based medicines and psychotropic therapies. A new era is beginning here.
Cosmic Do-Si-Do
On March 23, 2023, Pluto will move into 0º Aquarius. Symbolically, this is a pretty big deal. In many ways, it may indicate a new milestone in the slow dawning of the Aquarian Age. But like any new beginning, there are many “unknown unknowns” unexpectedly greeting us at this threshold.
As we consider the rich archetypal character of Pluto (planet of the underworld and the powerful depth of unconscious drives and urges) entering Aquarius (sign of radical technological innovation, scientific breakthroughs, revolutionary freedom, and idealistic social consciousness), we can expect some lightning-fast developments to start hitting us at warp speed.
Something world-transforming, unexpectedly disruptive and completely game-changing is looming on the event horizon, as the next 20 years of Pluto in Aquarius will likely coincide with a complete transmutation of life on this planet as we know it. By the time Pluto leaves Aquarius in 2043, today’s world will be as unrecognizable as the world before electricity.
That’s a pretty bold claim.
Now, it’s not going to happen all at once, overnight. But the signs of this new Aquarian revolution are already manifesting everywhere. Scan any news feed, periodical or professional journal, and you find a world that’s abuzz with talk of artificial intelligence, the metaverse, VR, AR, quantum computing, nuclear fusion, gene splicing, cybernetics, etc., etc. The future is approaching fast, and we’re about to get a sneak peak at the coming attractions.
But it will only be a glimpse.
From March 23rd until May 1st, Pluto takes its initial steps into the brave new world of Aquarius. But then it will station retrograde at 0º Aquarius and start to retreat. By June 11th, it will have moved back into Capricorn for the remainder of 2023. Unfinished business!
This is the meta-theme of 2023. Pluto is dancing a cosmic do-si-do on the threshold between Capricorn and Aquarius. The message is clear: we can’t move forward into the brave new world and the promises of the future until we fix the broken old world and the failures of the past. Full stop.
So yeah, while 2023 will be easier in many ways in terms of the heavier transits, this little Pluto dance is likely to cause some major anxiety and hand-wringing about the state of the world and where we’re collectively headed.
And if you have any planets or sensitive points in your chart between 27º of Capricorn and 1º of Aquarius, you are likely to feel this anxiety personally. Additionally, those with planets near the cusp of Cancer & Leo, Aries & Taurus, and Libra & Scorpio will also be highly attuned to these shifting frequencies.
But don’t worry, we’re all in this together. We are all in the process of a collective rebirthing. It’s just that some of us are feeling these birth pangs more acutely than others. Those who are attached to the Capricorn archetype might be clinging on to the old structures and refusing to leave the womb, while those who are aspiring to the Aquarius archetype are dropping head first into the birth canal and feeling the pressure of that life-threatening gauntlet.
Pluto is nothing if not intense!
Which is why it is the planet of:
life, death and rebirth;
agony and ecstasy
the dark night of the soul and of cathartic transmutations
We are being born again. We are leaving the womb of the history of the 20th century. We are entering the world of the 21st century and beyond.
2023 is the Year of The Crowning. And we are all gasping to take that collective first breath.
But that probably won’t happen until 2024. Because there’s a good chance of complications. The umbilical cord of the past has us tied up in knots. There is still work to do. We all need to learn to become our own astrological obstetricians.
There are many more exciting and stimulating transits coming our way in 2023, and over the course of the next few months we’ll begin looking ahead with greater focus so we can prepare ourselves to leverage these cosmic opportunities with greater clarity and conscious awareness.
But as we close out 2022, let’s be grateful for the lessons already learned, and remind ourselves that — on a soul level — we chose this time to incarnate in this lifetime. We chose to be here to bear witness to these times. Keep choosing your light!
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