The Pythagoreans called it the voice of the cosmos: three to two, two frequencies in delectable consonance, yielding such sublime resonance that you cannot but wonder at the pure beauty that has whispered sweetness in the early morning dawn light. Confidently draped in satin, so elegant and radiantly inspiring, countless musicians have supped from her ambrosia for millennia, lovingly composing their musing to her enchanting harmony.
Out in the frozen velvet of the deep cosmos, locked in an eternal waltz, three times the blue giant pivots, as the dwarfed chthonic dynamo twice rotates around our star in timeless cadence, weaving the perimeters of our solar system together in perfect harmony. The exact shape of a classic memory, the simplest, most luminous ratios gives the horizon room to stretch its arms, yet leaves enough weight at the center to hold a lovers face. It is the natural boundary of sight, catching the world exactly as you perceive it, wide, beautiful and fleeting. Three to two: the simplest, most luminous of ratios, and it is this ratio that governs the orbital relationship between Neptune and Pluto around the Sun.
Together their cadence defines the boundary of culture’s epochal growth, aligning at the same ecliptical degree every 572 years, the last being at the door of Aldebaran at 8 Gemini in August 1891. Between 1950 and 2032, these two bodies will have danced in exact sextile to each other no fewer than forty-nine times, a sustained harmonic of quite extraordinary duration, easily opening up and accelerating the evolutionary possibilities latent in the collective soul. This particular resonance feels like a door held open rather than a threshold across which we are being forced.
Many astrologers have written about July’s astrology, adding Uranus to the mix and I’ve made a video about the truplet, a revolutionary time and a time of rapid, nah, quantum acceleration within the collective consciousness, but what I’d like to do is to muse a little on the background rhythm that many reading this missive know all too well, as so, so many people born in the twentieth century have the two further planets from our Star in sextile to each other in their natal charts.
One way to better understand what is being offered requires that we listen to what this pairing’s music has created across three generations, the art that emerged, the grief that cracked open entire communities and the nameless hunger that has driven everything, because the world that we live within is a very different place to that which we resided within back in 1950, some 76 years ago.
1950 to 1956
Innocence burned away in a single blinding moment over the skies of Japan some four years earlier, the hubric consequence of a people hell bent on using the power held in breaking open an atom, the world had demonstrated what ingenuity in the service of destruction was capable of producing. Questions regarding the meaning of what power serves, about what it means to remain genuinely alive in a world that has looked into the abyss of its own annihilation, were already forming in them in the very years the sextile was first finding its voice.
During these years Pluto patrolled the very perimeter of our solar system, her chthonic body holding the outer boundary containing all within reach of our known psyche. This was a time when our world was coming to terms with a reality undergoing seismic changes, as the institutions of power adapted quicker than a people shell shocked from back to back global conflicts and the sheer scale of a raw power unleashed with such profound consequences. The infrastructure of the current westernised world was being laid, the great institutions and global bodies that still order our lives today taking their first shape, much of it set in motion by the prior Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1947. Women who had been called into factories and fields by the absence of men at war were called back out of them and into the home, encouraged by technology’s most wiley invention – the television, a quintessentially Yang creation, discouraging the imagination, the faculty of true listening and start of the glorification of the eye, as a new way of telling the world captivating stories as the eye took over from the ear as the most salient of our senses stepped aside for the first time in human history.
All that Elvis represents – global fame, visual lust, glamour, illusionary success, marketing, fantasy, entertainment, excessive wealth, mental health, drugs, sex and rock and roll – arose at the end of this six year sextile, an icon that spawned numerous offspring that fuelled many a teen’s imagination and sexual awakening. Misunderstood and misguided by those seeking to distract attention from what was truly being constructed, Elvis personified so much of what we now know entertainment to be, as music moved away from the orchestrated towards the single charged body of one performer, the scandal of his hips becoming, in its own way, an epitome of one aspect of the libidinous Pluto hold. And in publishing, J. R. R. Tolkien masterminded a new mythology, an entire invented world built complete with its own languages and its own deep time, answering, perhaps, a hunger for meaning that the official institutions being built in these same years could not supply.
Yet beneath the building and the binding back, a new class of drugs emerged, possibly encouraged by the series mental health issues that a generation of self-medicating shell shocked men returning from war carried – PTSD, depression, anxiety, TBI, and panic – a facet of life now deeply embedded within our cultural milieu.
This beautiful tone, soothing and inspiring the Akasha, filling our dreams with seductive futurisms of a better world, whilst secretly channelling such raw creative energy in ways that fed instable hungry ghosts, as liberty died with a thunderous applause.
Is this a real life, is this just fantasy? 1976 to 1986
Though remaining within ‘orb’ of each other for many of the intervening years, Pluto and Neptune once again drew within one degree of each other for a decade starting in 1976. The difference to this Scaramouche rock-opera cadence was that Neptune now held the outer perimeter of the solar system, as Pluto moved inside her orbit in February 1979 and stayed there for twenty years. Reality was no longer initiated by a Creatrix energy but by the sweet allure of sirens voices, alluring and enticing, creating much magic and deception, awakening and slumber, and escapism and a drive to move beyond the philosophy of separation and isolation.
Television’s seed, planted in the fifties, blossomed. An image no longer told the story; image was the story, video effectively killing off the radio star as music increasingly moved towards a Yang-dominated reality as artists actively sought to create short visual stories that showcased fashion, glamour, sex, wealth and what we now see as an ‘elitist’ lifestyle. By channelling the world’s collective social conscience into a single broadcast, Live Aid fused the raw emotional power of stadium rock with empathy and compassion, to mobilse action to elevate global humanitarian crises.
However with less emphasis on musicality, epitomised by the rise of Stock Aitkin and Waterman in 1984, the visual fully displaced the audible as the primary way a culture received its music. The story of individual fame, begun with one singular hip-swivelling body in the fifties, had become an entire industry built on watching, the camera’s gaze now doing what the gramophone needle once did alone.
Just as music creates reality, the rise of greed framed openly as virtue, the ‘American Dream’ visibly inflating past the size its 1950s origins, recreational drug use moved from the margins to almost everyday practice, just as secularism grew, with meaning thinning sending people reaching for all forms of escapism – particularly the youth onto computer screens and into film, inspired by the cultural phenomena of Star Wars, a simple story of a hero’s call to adventure and self-actualisation process set in a galaxy far, far away, a long time ago. This movie’s impact should not be underestimated in terms of entertainment, story-telling, cinematography, and a search for meaning. Yes, it is a sci-fi movie, but it is something so much more, appealing to a generation of soul’s seeking meaning away from the reach of Rome’s institutional vice grip, as a genuine and widespread reach toward Eastern philosophy and spiritual practice, born as a direct response to Vietnam and to the counterculture’s disillusionment with the institutions built in the fifties arose. A hunger for oneness and harmony that ran alongside, rather than instead of, the greed and the hollowing, and alongside that hunger, an actual movement toward political peace, took shape in these same years rather than remaining only an aspiration.
This is the shape of the boundary changing hands: depth’s pressure from the fifties returning now as the oceanic’s own pressure, wide enough to hold both the emptiest excess and the most genuine reaching for transcendence the culture had produced since the sextile first toned.
And the wheel that began turning with television in the fifties had, by these years, turned far enough that the image was no longer simply sharing authority with sound. Image was beginning to author reality just as MTV decided who would be heard at all. The narrowing of our senses, whilst at the same time speeding up of time, as society tried to ‘get a grip’ on what reality truly means, paved the way for a new term – projection. We cannot ‘see’ without projecting, and in psychological terms nothing prevented the world from projecting their own anxieties, fears, problems and aggressions onto ‘another’, be it an individual or a country. Yes, projection has been around as long as we have. But it was during the latter stage of the Cold War that we chose to ‘look’ more and ‘hear’ less, furthering blinding us from using our other senses, as the process of dumbing down silently chained us further to the reality that the cartel stated back at the end of WWII.
Pluto back at the edge- 2026 to 2032
Once again Pluto stands again at the perimeter of our solar system, though some would argue that Eris and a whole range of unintegrated trans-Neptunian Kuiper Belt objects beyond Pluto are defining our expanded psyche. But mirroring the years 1950-56, even if the sign of the zodiac that the sextile is occurring differs, what was asked of the chthonic then is being asked of it again now.
In the fifties depth’s violation moved through living rooms and hospital wards, women who had tasted their own independence and their own creative power called back into the home and made to pay for that calling-back in the coin of their own mental and physical health. Now depths violation moves through servers and the emergence of a parallel online world, under the illusory seductive pretext of AI’s creative engineering that has auto-tuned voices, generated ‘unique’ songs and artwork, sped up productivity and offered the glamorous illusion of new world. The manipulation of the advertising and marketing industry still exists, encouraging a further enslavement under the guise of ‘freedom’ and ‘convenience’, yet the reality of this new world is merely a facsimile of the one that truly creative folk have imagined. Replication is the ultimate flattery, is it not? Remember that as you are being ‘forced’ back into the house, just as the artist’s voice is fed without permission into the machine, they are the same gesture wearing different centuries, depth claiming for itself what was never freely given.
The same chthonic libidinal energy that eventually pushed back against the fifties’ forcing of women into domestic confinement, fuelling the very movements of the sixties and seventies that this long sextile has already carried, is once again gathering itself, but I believe within a reality that is seeing the end arc of the ‘American Dream’. Many see and feel the exhaustion of long hours that drain you of vital energy to be with those you love, to nourish creativity, and to build depth, intimacy and joy. I believe that this time is a fundamental creative renaissance, one in which there will be a push back against the ubiquity of artificial replication and its assault on human freedom, spirit, and creativity, even if I know there will be those seduced by drugs, meds, glamour, the illusion of freedom and wealth. I believe that Pluto at the perimeter of our cosmic psyche eventually answers from the body, the libido and from the place that refuses finally to be replicated.
This gathering force runs alongside something larger still moving through the sky in these same years: the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction of the 20th/ 21st of December 2020, marking the opening of the seventh wave of the element of Air, last experienced across the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when Sufism flowered and Rumi and Master Eckhart gave the world a spiritual and creative renaissance built from music, art, and a mysticism that needed no single hierarchy to mediate it. If that wave is opening again now, then Pluto’s coming creative pushback against AI’s replications may be its very first expression, the chthonic insistence on the genuinely made finding itself perfectly timed to a wider cosmic permission for exactly this kind of flowering.
What Neptune brings into this is not only the lower register that I written about throughout this reflection – the lies, the drugs, the propaganda, the mesmerism that softened and dissolved boundaries that needed, perhaps, to hold. Neptune carries equally its higher register, enchantment rather than illusion, awakening rather than escape, the world made more alive rather than merely more blurred. This is the register that let Star Wars and, a generation later, Harry Potter, fill a void that Christianity’s own deconstruction in the West had left standing open, myth answering a hunger that institutional faith no longer could.
And this same void, left unanswered or answered only partially by entertainment, may be exactly what now feeds the opposite movement taking shape on both sides of a very old religious divide, a fundamentalism rising in Islam and in Christianity alike that offers, in place of the harder work of self-individuation and self-created meaning, the simpler comfort of fealty to a hierarchy that asks for obedience rather than creation.
The generation born between 1950 and 1986 carries this harmonic as a living quality of their own natal inheritance, pressed into the ground of their being at the moment of their arrival into consciousness, and these souls are now the elders of the culture, the holders of a depth of experience whose value the current moment is only beginning to recognise.
The question this sextile poses between 2026 and 2032, then, is not only whether an American Dream born under Pluto’s first watch and inflated under Neptune’s softer one will survive a second turn at the perimeter. It is whether the creative renaissance the chthonic is readying, fed by the Seventh Wave, can answer AI’s theft and replication with something genuinely made.
Moreover, another question that arises is what has been genuinely distilled, through the grief and the creativity and the dissolution and the depth of the previous activations, and how does it find its way forward into the awareness of those who are coming into their own evolutionary power in these years, those born into the final decades of the twentieth century who carry their own relationship to this long harmonic and are only now beginning to understand what it has been working in them?
What is already audible, for those willing to listen with the inner ear that the sextile has been patiently cultivating across these decades, is a returning hunger in the collective life for the genuinely interior, a weariness with the performed and the algorithmically generated.
In the interior lives of those who have done the genuine work that the previous activations were asking for – the willingness to descend into what has been preserved in the interior dark and to allow it, at last, to be truly received – these next six years carry the quality of a long note resolving. This is perhaps what the celestial fifth has been working towards across the full span of its long sounding: the restoration, in our collective sOul, of the understanding that depth and openness are aspects of the same single movement! The most courageous descent into the interior life leads always into the vast and luminous field of compassion and interconnection. The orbital orchestration of the solar system encoded this understanding in the relationship between these two bodies. The invitation of 2026 to 2032 is simply to hear it at last, with the full depth and the full luminous openness that all of these extraordinary years have been so patiently preparing us to bring.
This is NOT the time to stand in fear’s shadow, or to ignore the voluminous creativity that exists within you. Nor is this a time to return to the chains of fealty that prevents you individuate. Yes, there is a distinct possibility of the next four years paralleling the fifties, as a new world order emerges, with inspiration taken from creative authors like George Orwell and Philip K. Dick. But remember that being enslaved has a cost, one paid with your body and mind.
The karios is ripe to once again hear the beauty of this major fifth, a tone that adds life, strength and wonder to our world, enabling you to recharge and rejuvenate your creative life force with a profound feminine Creatrix energy that can birth a new reality. Will you, however, surrender, trust and let flow, this visionary libidinous tone or will you take the red pill and plug back into the matrix, blissfully unaware that your life force is being drained of all that you are. The choice is yours.
First draft completed on the 27th of June 2026 at 17:16 CEDT
Second draft completed on the 27th of June 2026 at 19:53 CEDT
