After The Tower Comes The Star
The election, The Tower, Aquarius, and Inanna
Last night, watching the election returns, I was definitely dissociating. Sitting on the couch with my cats and husband, I stared numbly at the electoral college count. By the time I went to bed, I knew that there were some important swing states still on the board. I tried to sleep with a bland sense of hope, but I definitely had a sense for where things were heading.
The election results were one of the last offerings of Pluto in Capricorn, and felt so much like a “Tower Moment,” a famous event referencing The Tower card in the tarot, where the structure of our world is hit by a bolt from the beyond. And though it creates a crisis, in the tarot, The Tower is followed by The Star, a card of deep healing.
The Tower is associated with Mars, planet of war and conquest, while The Star is connected to Aquarius, the community oriented water-giver, and the sign Pluto enters on November 19th. I’d like to look at the charts of the candidates and the United States together, as well as examine the themes of Pluto in Capricorn and Aquarius, to help us find our way toward The Star.
The Charts in Question
Yesterday I tried to create a video for Instagram where I looked at Harris and Trump’s charts, to show people what was going on with their transits. It felt like a potentially interesting teaching moment, showing people astrology in action.
What I noticed right away was that both Harris and Trump were being activated by the recent Venus-Jupiter opposition in Sagittarius/Gemini, in different, but notable, ways. Harris had the opposition on her AC/DC axis, her Part of Fortune, and her North and South Node. Venus was also approaching a conjunction to her POF and South Node. This transit is highly particular to her, because the angles are involved. The angles of the chart change degrees by the minute, and so are the most particular data points we have about an individual in the entire chart. This transit aligning with her AC/DC axis + Part of Fortune seemed supportive. I also thought it was interesting that the asteroid Pallas was conjunct her Mercury in Scorpio, conjuring images of the feminine strategist (Pallas) speaking to the masses (Mercury).
Trump was also activated by that Venus-Jupiter opposition, as it aligned with his own Sun, Moon, and Nodal axis. This felt less overtly empowering because it was less particular to his chart than Harris’s AC/DC activation. Everyone born on Trump’s day was born with that soli-lunar alignment. And although that soli-lunar opposition is in fact an eclipse, it just felt less specific to me than Harris’s transits.
What Trump had going on that she did not, was Uranus activating his midheaven, tightly squaring his natal Mars in his first house of self. The planet of sudden change squaring the planet in Trump’s chart that governs strength, bravery, and honestly, base macho tendencies (Mars is the warrior) in Trump’s house of “self” must have been a magnet for energy coming his way. This transit was in play earlier this year during his first assassination attempt, conjuring a shocking series of events. I’m not saying that Trump’s win is shocking, now, but just noting that he had this powerful “outer planet” lighting up one of his super important chart angles, at the time of the election.
I’m not here to try to figure out, with astrology, why anyone won or lost, but I did want to render to you what I, as an astrologer, was working with. The reason why I didn’t share these insights yesterday was that even though I saw what I saw in the transits, I had intuitions otherwise about outcomes, and held back. Astrology isn’t supposed to be about “being right,” and it felt like an insult to the art to try to squish everything into place. Plus, my nerves were shot.
The Chart of America & its Pluto Return
The next place to turn is the natal chart of the United States, also known as the “Sibley Chart,” which holds insights into what kinds of transits and transformations this country is going through, at the moment. This is where we begin to see the narrative of our national “Tower Moment” emerge.
Since February of 2022, we have been in the belly of the United States’s Pluto Return,1 which is marked by Pluto “returning” to the same degree it was in when the country was “born.” Pluto’s cycle is about 248 years, give or take, which means human beings will never have a Pluto return, but other, more long-lasting entities, will. Pluto returned to his natal degree, passing 27° Capricorn, back in February of ‘22.
Richard Tarnas writes in Cosmos and Psyche that we can discern symbolic attributes of the modern outer planets’s meanings by looking to the significant events of the time period in which they were discovered. Pluto was discovered in 1930, a time when fascist ideologies around the world were growing in popularity. Later in that decade, scientists developed the atom bomb, which allowed for instantaneous mass death on the battlefield. Thus Pluto’s themes are heavy and dark: power, obsession, corruption, death, rebirth after tremendous struggle, and oriented to the shadow of the collective. His moment of “return” brings those themes into sharp focus for us all.
It has been written by others that empires die after about 250 years, which aligns perfectly with Pluto’s own cycle, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Now that Pluto has returned to the place in the sky where he sat at this country’s “conception,” he is taking us down an uncharted path. Our systems have unravelled and so many are suffering. There is mass dissent and chaos. This is the final blow of Pluto in Capricorn.
Remember, Pluto entered Capricorn back in 2008, at the beginning of the sub-prime mortgage crisis here in the US, which I personally see as the kick-off for so many of our systemic inequities to this day. Maybe it’s memorable to me as the first crisis of my young adulthood; I was in college at the time. That is, of course, not counting 9/11, which happened when I was in middle school, living in a haunted post-Columbine educational landscape.
Symbols of Capricorn & Aquarius
Capricorn is the sign of structure. Of time. Of laws, regulations, and scaffolds of power. Capricorn climbs the mountain with a sense of both grit and imagination. The brightest kind of Capricorn energy is creative, world-building. As Pluto hovers at the 29th degree of the goat-fish, we’re grinding through the shadow version of that sign, underbelly exposed, and all.
On November 19th Pluto will enter Aquarius and stay there until 2043, activating the archetype of the water-bearer. Aquarius is a fixed air sign ruled by Saturn. Capricorn is a cardinal earth sign ruled by Saturn, as well. We call Capricorn Saturn’s “nocturnal” sign and Aquarius Saturn’s “diurnal” sign. Capricorn can be a bit more involuted, focused on personal goals, while Aquarius is more idea-oriented, turning towards the crowd.2 When Pluto moves into Aquarius, we will find ourselves in a radically different social landscape, and I believe this election has been one of the more important wake-up calls for those who weren’t heeding all of the signs up till this point.
Pluto in Aquarius is an invitation to put the power back in the hands of the people. Pluto in Aquarius will be marked with technological advances and futuristic leaps of the imagination, but for most of us on planet earth, this will be an era of rebuilding actual community. Of learning to recognize the innate humanness of one another, of how powerful we can be when we are united, rather than divided by niche consumption categories. This is also the message of Chiron’s time in Aries: it’s time to relinquish our attachment to hyper-individualism, and admit that it has wounded us all. Would you believe it if I told you that the United States is also experiencing its Chiron return, right now? As above, so below.
***
Aquarius carries a jug of water on his back, and that water flows out from his shoulders to his feet. Water is something that, no matter who you are, or for that matter, what you are, you need to survive, on this planet. Every human, plant, animal, and mineral needs water in order to be.
Aquarius’s job is to move through the collective, doling out his watery abundance, reminding us that at bottom, we all require the same basic resources to live and thrive. Water, the most essential nutrient, is symbolic of emotional connectivity, which is found in community where we share space happily, for the sake of the good of the whole. I don’t think that Pluto in Aquarius will be easy, charming, or fluffy, but if we can get ourselves to focus on the unification for the good of us all, and for the planet, we will be able to grow new life from the charred earth that Pluto in Capricorn left for us.
I’m calling this our “Tower Moment,” but if I’m being honest, we’ve been witness to many Tower Moments of late. Every day feels like that meme that says something like “I wish for once I could live in precedented times.” Regardless, the themes of The Tower card are here.
In the card, we see two people. They were building a tower to the sky, and are struck down by lighting, flung to the earth below, as the structure of their realm collapses around them. The Tower represents a totalizing destruction of the norms, especially norms that were maintained in bad faith, symbolized by the crown that is set ablaze in this card. The Tower tells us to examine our souls, to call our own bullshit, and to surrender as that which is unsustainable falls apart.
But the story of the tarot doesn’t just end here. After The Tower comes The Star.
This card is famously a card of healing and peace, of reintegration of body and soul after the chaos of The Tower. The Star card shows us a maiden crouching before a pond, pouring two jugs of water out, seemingly in perpetuity, one onto the earth, and the other into water. She is naked, and over her is a giant eight-pointed star, with a total of eight stars in the sky, above. The eight pointed star is a symbol of Inanna, the Mesopotamian goddess of love and war. The seven smaller stars here are symbolic of the seven gates of heaven Inanna had to descend through, on her trip to hell.
In her story, Inanna is forced to descend to the underworld, to undergo a horrible betrayal and ultimately, find rebirth in rising back to the day-world. The story of the destruction from The Tower to the serene realm of The Star mirrors that mythic form. The Star card reminds us that even after things fall apart, there is hope for healing, and to be bathed in the waters of life.
Each tarot card has an astrological correspondence, and The Star is associated with Aquarius, Pluto’s next destination. This seems vital to me, important to keep in my heart and mind, as we keep moving together as a collective. After The Tower comes The Star. I hope we meet each other there.
For more insight on the Pluto Return transit, check out my friend Catherine Urban’s article(s) on the topic, here.
Please note! This is not a Capricorn slander comment!!! I am a Capricorn rising and love this sign with my whole heart. I do want to try to parse the differences between Cap and Aqua as Pluto moves signs, and believe that Capricorn is *so* good at the singleminded focus of pursuing its goals. Pluto amplifies that individualistic quality, in some ways.
Everything continues, even when one's mind is telling you, 'this is the end'.
Thank you<3