Friday, December 18, 2020

Saturn-Pluto conjunction to end on January 8?

With reference to my recent post about January 8, my correspondent writes:

Also, in this post William Wildblood talked about a conjunction of Saturn and Pluto:

I will quote the relevant paragraph

On a totally different note, there was a conjunction of Saturn and Pluto in Capricorn in January. This lasts for about a year as Saturn moves forward then goes retrograde in May, going back to within a degree or so of Pluto in October, before moving forward again and going out of orb, as it is called, early next year. Saturn and Pluto are the two of the most difficult (in terms of the challenges they present to human consciousness) planets to deal with. Saturn represents restriction, limitation and what is hard and unyielding while Pluto symbolises forces of death, transformation and destruction. Put together and in Capricorn which is ruled by Saturn, meaning its effects are magnified because of a similarity of expression, they represent quite a package. What it means is that problems that have been suppressed or denied will be brought to a head. There will be no escaping them and they must be faced and dealt with. This will mean hard times but out of that may come, if one reacts with sense and really does face them, a new understanding. The potential for new life or death are both there.

From this paragraph it sounds like the conjunction is ending in January but I'm not sure because I haven't been able to find anything specific about when it ends, only that it's happening.  But wouldn't that be amazing if it was ending on January 8?

So I checked an online ephemeris, giving the positions of the planets at 05:00 Eastern Standard Time (i.e., Washington, D.C.) for each day in 2021.

When neither the Sun nor the Moon is involved, conjunction is generally defined as an angle of 8° or less. At 05:00 EST January 8, Saturn will be 2°27' Aquarius, and Pluto will be 24°26' Capricorn. That's an angle of 8°1' -- just barely out of conjunction. At 05:00 EST January 7, the two planets will still be in conjunction, at an angle of  7°26'. I don't have access to hourly data, but it appears that the conjunction will end either on Jan 7 or Jan 8. Given a change of 5 degrees in 24 hours, we can estimate that the conjunction will end about four-fifths of the way from 05:00 on the 7th to 0:500 on the 8th -- in other words, almost precisely at midnight!

I also note that one of the symbols of Pluto (incorporated into that planet's astrological symbol) is the bident (like a trident with only two prongs) -- a word which has also been brought to my attention recently by Scott Alexander's novel Unsong, where it is the devil's weapon of choice.

Update: I've checked with someone who knows more about astrology than I do, and he has confirmed that the Saturn-Pluto conjunction will indeed end on January 8.

5 comments:

A said...

I don't understand this astrology-related stuff, but January 6th coincides with the Last Quarter Moon of the last moon cycle of 2020, and January 13th is the first "New Moon" of 2021, so a period of transition perhaps overlapping?

David Earle said...

To add to the synchronicities, as you know Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon on January 10th 49 BC. This video on that event was upload January 9th, 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McersugUXYk

cae said...

January 8th would have been Elvis Presley's 86th birthday..

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

OK, I'm going to be seriously bummed now if nothing special ends up happening.

Unknown said...

I just want to add that January 8th is 2 weeks after Christmas Day, and they've been claiming all year that there is a 2 week "lag" for cause-effect related to the birdemic.

I think you're going to see a big Christmas-shame campaign and cases sky rocketing "because of all the Christmas gatherings", therefore the need for much stricter lockdowns. Also throw in thr mutant variety that circulated over the holidays.

Skeletor, hieroglyphic-bearing arthropods, and the Judgement

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