Ellen Longo's Astrology Blog

Hi, everyone.

All day long today we are approaching a Mercury/Pluto conjunction, which will be exact at about 11:00 PM MST.  At first I was going to write about how in ancient mythology, Mercury is the only soul allowed to visit the underworld and return to the land of the living at will.  In other words, our thinking, analyzing, and discriminating function can be infused with wisdom from our unconscious and put that wisdom to use in the world.  I still think there is a lot of truth to mine in this take on today’s conjunction, but I’m going to leave it to another time.  The Mercury/Pluto conjunction has its own message to convey.

Last night I was having a conversation with someone who is experiencing a fairly treacherous Pluto transit in her life:  transiting Pluto is aspecting her natal Moon, Ascendant, Mars, Sun, Pluto, and Jupiter.  That’s a lot of Pluto.  This transit has been slowly contacting all of these various points in her chart over the last couple of years and this year it continues.

Needless to say she has been experiencing the typical kinds of issues a strong Pluto transit tends to bring:  rehashing her childhood, questioning her beliefs, working like hell to protect herself against difficult authority figures, intense and unforeseen contact with family, even clashes with criminals.  She has had to look deeper and deeper into her own psyche in order to sort this out, and she has become committed to rooting out the last drop of these ancient patterns so she can be free forever.

Pluto is related to power; all the textbooks say so.  It is strong in charts of people who are “into power.”  I always thought of this in terms of external power:  the power of the mighty against the weak, the power of society to overwhelm the individual, the grabbing after fame or financial fortune, the lust for the corner office or for absolute authority over others.

But as we spoke last night, aided by the Mercury/Pluto transit today no doubt, I finally understood a much more potent type of power, the power (Pluto) of thoughts and words (Mercury) to either free us or bind us.  This is a power we either wield ourselves or let others wield it instead.

At some deep and fundamental level we decide whether we hold the authority and power in our lives, or whether other people do.  When my friend reacts to the scathing critical words of her boss, she allows his negative state to become hers.  If she continues to think about them and then speak about the situation with others, she further transmits his dark impulse out into the world.  Thoughts and words have a powerful transforming alchemy; they may be the most powerful energies operating in our day to day lives.

We hand over power to others to the extent we allow their words to impact us.  We are either open to their words or not.  We acquiesce, we grab them, we take them personally or we let them just linger in the ethers until they dissipate, unclaimed.  I think we are vulnerable to others’ words to the extent we think our survival depends on the good opinions of our boss or our parents or our spouse or our government.

I believe this all gets set up in childhood or even before, and those with strong Pluto influences in their chart usually had a power figure crashing through their household, insisting on absolute authority and creating the belief that everyone else was powerless and inconsequential.    If there was Mercury/Pluto influence in the early life, often the child was raised being told in no uncertain terms, “you’re useless; you’re as dumb as the day is long; I don’t care what you think, just do what I say.”  Having had this influence myself, I fully commiserate with you if you had it too.

It reminds me of the movie of King George VI that I’ve just seen twice, The King’s Speech.  Liz Greene states in her wonderful book, Saturn, that there is evidence that stammering is associated with Mercury/Saturn contacts in a chart, but in King George’s case it was Mercury/Pluto – issues of power.  If you see the movie you will recognize the constant battle he faced regarding power and whether he was entitled to wield it.  In his case it was an opposition between the two planets:  the power was undoubtedly in someone else’s hands and cut off from his own will or determination.

No matter how these things get set up, or how long we have been victims of other people, the day comes when we take back our power – and today can be such a day.  Today’s conjunction of Mercury and Pluto provides an environment, either external or internal, in which we can decide who will create our experience of life, whose words we will allow to influence us.  The conjunction gives us the insight as to where we have surrendered our power to others and it also gives us the will to reclaim our birthright.

Today is the day we can meld our thoughts and words with our inner authority, truth, and power.  Today is the day we can recognize the impact of others’ words on our happiness and the impact of our words on others.  Today we can choose to dip down into the source of inner authority and come back into the world with our minds infused with our own deep knowledge, the knowledge to create the life we desire through claiming the power in our own thoughts and words.

Today is the day!

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