As September 2004 begins, the planet Pluto has just stationed in the sky. Pluto does not announce its intentions directly, so to understand it, we need to sharpen our sensitivities. It makes its presence known via a quiet intensification of everyday issues. Things prickle under the surface.

When Pluto is this strong, something within us is desperate to be eliminated. We start to feel the way a snake must feel when it's time to wriggle out of the old skin. This is a visceral transit, not a rational one: it often registers as a cell-deep malaise. Depending on the transit's placement in your chart, this sensation may run the gamut from mild to overwhelming.

It is a rule of thumb in astrology that the more powerful the planet, the more need there is to render it conscious. Or to put it another way, the more peril there is in letting it stay unconscious. In most astrology textbooks, the term "unconscious" is breezily applied to all three outer planets. But the reason we track planetary movements is to lift these mysterious urges into consciousness as far as we are able, despite their subliminal origin.

Then we can engage our wills accordingly. By aligning ourselves with the planet's symbolism, we can carry out the transit's intention in as creative a way as we know how. Twice a year, Pluto reverses its course along the zodiac from Earth's point of view. The tiny, distant planet appears to stop cold in the sky and then slowly begins to creep forth in the other direction.

The anomaly of apparent suspended motion makes it stand out from the rest of the planets for a couple of weeks. The degree at which it stopped becomes a powerful trigger for other transits, current, future and past.

Pluto is your best friend and worst enemy, daring you to plunge into something terrifying and utterly liberating. Its transits to the individual chart invite profound change, though your conscious mind may not have received the memo. The first hint that the transit is coming is a queasy discomfort, as when nausea signals vomiting. Right now Pluto has just turned its heel upon the twentieth degree of Sagittarius.

Our first act of September should be to pinpoint whatever we have been obsessing about, as designated by the part of our natal chart Pluto has been transiting. Our second act should be to identify the energy as our own, rather than trying to nail it on some outside agency or person. Thirdly, we need to ask ourselves why this thought (or behaviour or feeling or relationship) carries so intense a charge. We should keep asking until we have traced it back to some association – probably in the deep past – where it is rooted.

Finally, we need to identify what is crying out for release, and let it go. When interpreting transits to the natal chart, we begin not with the sign Pluto is in, but with its house placement and contacts to personal planets*.

Take a look at Pluto's current position against the background of your natal chart. Is it on or near your Ascendant? Something about the way you present yourself is slated for extinction. Is it across the chart on your Descendant, or near Venus? Key relationships need to be overhauled. You will know which ones. Is Pluto now in your the sixth house? Something in your job is crying out to be exposed and disposed of; something that may have been making you physically ill.

Has it been hovering near your Mars? Your old modus operandi is trying to die. You may be involved in a power struggle where either you or the other guy is behaving in ways that are becoming intolerable. Is Pluto making contact with your Moon? You are purging compulsive patterns that do not serve you any longer. Is it transiting your Midheaven? Attitudes towards your worldly role are being stripped down to the bare bones. We then consider the sign Pluto is now in. If you were born with one or more planets in Sagittarius, part of you already knows about the lust for knowledge, and has been cultivating an ever-more-authentic ethical consciousness throughout your life. Since Pluto's ingress into Sagittarius in 1994, you have been reminded how important these things are to you.

To interpret transits from the point of view of mundane astrology (events in society and the world), we refer to Pluto's sign placement first. On the world scene, recent stations of Pluto in Sagittarius have been accompanied by wrenching destruction (Pluto) involving clashing versions of higher truth (Sagittarius). The image that comes to mind for the whole twelve-year transit is a church set aflame and burning to the ground.

At this writing, an all-too-literal example of the transit is in the headlines. The latest chapter in Bush's plan to introduce Iraqis to Western civilization seems to be to bomb the most sacred temple in Shi'ite Islam with high-tech American weaponry. It is hard to imagine a more crazed and nihilistic act of religious terrorism than the desecration of this ancient site. If the soul of Sagittarius is religious faith, its shadow side is hypocrisy and sanctimony. As the blood runs through the streets, the American press continues to describe the occupation, ever more ludicrously, as a campaign to "win Iraqi hearts and minds".

In late August, U.S. Marines and collaborating Iraqi police warned journalists in the city of Najaf that if they stayed to witness the massacre, they would be killed. Enraged Iraqis rallied with increased intensity, pledging to take up the arms of any fighters martyred defending the shrine. Of particular interest to students of symbolism is the fact that the source of this violence is an American administration whose commander-in-chief claims he is acting on orders from his god.

President Bush's favorite preacher, Billy Graham's son, has declared Islam to be an "evil" religion. One of Bush's generals went on television declaring, in an unmistakably nyah-nyah-nyah tone, that Allah was less "real" than the Christian god. The raw idiocy of these pronouncements makes them an easy call. Unenlightened Pluto reduces complicated ideas to crude elementals, the better to see dangerous attitudes in an unvarnished state. With the planet stationary overhead, the staggering arrogance of American religious fundamentalism is being revealed in words and deeds. Herein lies the grand irony of the current Sagittarius transit.

In true Plutonian form, it is hidden in plain sight. Contrary to the portrait of Iraq painted by the corporate media, it is not a particularly religious society. It is a secular country that happens to be mostly Muslim. The US Government, by contrast, sounds and acts at the moment like a bunch of demented religious lunatics. With Pluto transiting the USA's first house and opposing its seventh, America's own Sagittarian crisis is being projected upon Iraq.

This makes it difficult for many to see that for the first time in history, America's foreign policy is in the hands of what is, for all intents and purposes, a cult. The network news would have us believe that humanism and reason reign supreme in the United States; that America has a modern, tolerant culture informed by a cool-headed plurality of views. And that all Arab states are peopled by Koran-thumping, emotionally unstable zealots. The truth is that any theological differences that might have existed in Iraq have been superceded by the overriding horror of occupation. Muqtada Al-Sadr, the current leader of Iraq's popular resistance, is a hero to large numbers of urban poor from a variety of faiths, a groundswell movement which becomes more unified after each civilian casualty.

Though violent Arab-Arab conflict exists in Iraq, it is not between one sect and another. It is between loyalists and collaborators. The rifts are political, pitting those Iraqis who see themselves as fighting to get their country back against those who are seen as selling out to the American invader.

As psychologists know, projection operates along relatively predictable lines. The more theologically divided our own society becomes, the more we hear about religious strife in Iraq. Even the language coined by the Pentagon -- and repeated unquestioningly by the press --presumes inter-Arab religious splits that do not exist.

The much-touted "Sunni Triangle", for example, is not based on real geographic or demographic distinctions. It is a label concocted by our policymakers to portray an Iraq beset by partisan infighting. The reality behind this projection is not difficult to see.

If American citizens were more informed by history and less misinformed by White House spin, it would be as obvious to them as it is to the rest of the world that what motivates the Iraqi people is good old do-or-die nationalism, as strong now as it was during the hard-won Iraqi revolution in 1958. It does not take a foreign policy analyst to understand that in an occupied country, national sentiment is strengthened, and hatred towards the occupiers increases, the longer the troops remain and the more destruction they wreak.

The Bush strategy has been to appeal to the American mainstream's xenophobia, by proposing that Islam must be the reason why Iraqis "hate America". What is remarkable is that the military experts, no less than the American public, continue to miss the point. Advocates of this war fatally underestimate the Iraqi people, who are far less politically ignorant than we are.

Iraqis are well aware of the significance of the black liquid that lies beneath their homeland; they have figured out why foreign powers won't leave them alone. And they will probably win this war for the same reason that the Vietnamese did: guerilla movements tend to hang on until the bitter end, becoming more unified as their occupiers' plans crumble into disarray. Iraqis are fighting for their home. They are far more motivated than the exhausted, betrayed GIs who kick down the doors and man the checkpoints. Our boys know on some level that they are fighting for Halliburton.

Back in Washington, Messrs. Cheney, Rove and Rumsfeld would have us forget how fundamentally similar people are all over the world, and how likely to follow familiar human impulses. Americans who support the invasion of Iraq might ask themselves how they would feel if the tables were turned.

If there were foreign troops attacking Indianapolis, strafing the roads and sewer systems. pummeling beloved civic monuments to dust, bombing people's living rooms and wedding parties, and killing or incarcerating anyone who resisted, would the Catholics of Indianapolis start quibbling with their Methodist and Jewish neighbors? Would they take up arms against the Baptists and pagans down the street? Or would they all band together and focus their anguish and antipathy upon their invaders?

As November 2004 approaches, the fiction of Iraq's "warring religious factions" is being used by different American politicians for different ends. The Bush contingent is using it to bolster their global campaign to stoke fear of would-be Islamic terrorists.

The Kerry contingent is using it as a rationale for proposing to send more troops to Iraq, for the sake of "preventing chaos". The fact that this monstrously toxic war is the cause of -- rather than the cure for -- Iraq's chaos seems to have escaped these policymakers' notice.

On the domestic front, ideological violence continues apace, as the US Constitution – whose principles underlie US democracy as surely as holy writ underlies a theocracy -- gets carved up by US President Bush and his top lawmaker, John Ashcroft. If there is such a thing as a secular sacrilege, this is it. Only under a Pluto-in-Sagittarius-transit-gone-wrong could morally infantile politicians presume to dismantle a sacred cow as fundamental to American thought as the separation of church and state.

Pluto governs not only religion and the ideological foundations of government, but also long-distance travel and education. Witness the mass bankruptcies of the airline industry, and the corruption and degeneration being identified in the public school system.

As Rob Hand has pointed out, though the word "radical" is usually associated with the planet Uranus, it is Pluto (radix, roots) that comes closer. Unlike Uranus, Pluto is not a mental planet; it does not trouble itself with flamboyant ideas or avant-garde philosophies. It just quietly goes to work, burrowing into the hidden underpinnings of a structure, taking advantage of any weakness that's already there. Sooner or later, without fanfare, the structure topples like a termite-infested house, from the bottom up and from the inside out. 

Footnote: *This is because Pluto occupies a given sign for more than a decade, presiding over the births of a whole generation. Thus the key lessons Pluto has to teach about that particular sign are being taught to masses of people over their lifetimes, rather than particularized to the individual.

jessica@MotherSky.com .  Her Web Site is www.MotherSky.com  .

Podcast Interview with US Astrologer Jessica Murray

A common misconception is that modern astrology makes predictions... centuries ago astrologers did, and some schools of astrology still do; most notably in those societies ..where the predominating world view follows a more fatalistic bent. It is psychology, however, rather than divination, that underlies most contemporary astrology in the West. In this interview I asked Jessica how does astrology today compare to traditional astrology of the past; and about the most common things that come up in an astrological reading. I hope you will enjoy our conversation.

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