Here I discuss the astrology of right-wing extremism and the role of the astrology of the Uranus square Pluto cycle in recent history.

Such astrological transits have been associated with the rise of radical right-wing extremism, populism, fascism and authoritarianism.

This is a transcript of an episode of Aquarian Diary I published at 9:11am on June 15, 2023


Episode transcript:

Greetings all, welcome to Aquarian Diary.

I’m your host, John Irving.

It is June 15th, 2023.

This topic has been on my to-do list for a very long time.

I’ll be displaying many dates on the screen, so if you’re interested in those kinds of things, you may want to watch this on YouTube.

It took me many hours to calculate and verify all these states. You can’t just go copy them off the internet somewhere, because often there will be mistakes. That’s not to say that I haven’t made any, but I tried not to. With so many numbers, it’s quite possible to make a typo or something like that, or to omit something.

There’s a few reasons why what I want to talk about today is very important.

One, it helps explain recent trends, namely the rise of fascism and far-right extremism, which threatens liberal democracies around the world currently, including the United States, the most powerful country on the planet. Who’d have thought that would ever happen?

And it also of course explains the rise of populist demagogues, people who are typically extremely unqualified to be in the positions they’re in, and not just because of their blatant lack of expertise, but their abhorrently poor moral and ethical character as well.

At the very least, recent history has been shocking and disturbing.

Let’s not forget that a few generations ago, millions of people around the world rallied to defend democracy against the threat of tyranny and fascist dictators. Our ancestors made tremendous sacrifices to protect our cherished way of life and our freedoms. Anyone with even a superficial understanding of history knows that nobody benefits ultimately from those sorts of tyrannies except a very small handful of people. Anyone who thinks that that form of governance will provide them with some form of safe harbor is profoundly mistaken.

The other main reason that prompted me to talk about this now is that it’s just been stuck in my mind for a few weeks. And I have, very gradually, learned that when things stick in my mind, I need to talk about them, that they’re important. And I have a feeling that if I explain what is going on astrologically, it might help some people wrap their heads around this and give them another perspective that might be helpful.

Have you ever had the experience where a song is stuck in your head, an earworm, sometimes for days, until suddenly you stop and you think about the lyrics and it makes perfect sense. It’s that kind of thing.

What I want to demonstrate here today is the role of the Pluto-Uranus cycle in recent history.

As I worked on this, I realized that you could easily do a full documentary on this one topic. I’m going to keep it fairly simple because I would like people who are not highly skilled at astrology to understand the important role that these two outer planets play and how the timing might be affecting us.

The Uranus-Pluto cycle varies a lot because Pluto’s orbit is very elliptical, so it will appear to spend a lot more time in some signs than others.

When Pluto and Uranus conjunct, or when these two planets meet at the same degree, it tends to mark very important points in world history. To give you a sense of scale, Pluto and Uranus conjuncted around 1850, 1966, and the next one will occur in 2104.

Pluto represents deep and powerful transformation, metaphorical death and rebirth, the energy of raw power, which can be used for both good and bad, bringing to the conscious what is subconscious. Pluto rules the underworld.

And Uranus represents sudden insights, dramatic events, changes in perspective or circumstances, and it has a very revolutionary energy about it.

So when these two planets meet, depending on the sign, it can mark very potent and significant periods of change and transformation that can be very dramatic.

Just after the conjunction in Aries in 1850 and 1851, within a few years, the first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania in the United States. Now when we look back to the effects of the industrial revolution on atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, 1850 is often used as a starting point, and prior to then is effectively a baseline for the effects of human activity.

The internal combustion engine changed every aspect of life on Earth for humanity. Imagine if we still lived in a world where it took weeks or months to traverse the globe.

The era of industrialization officially began in the year 1850 through 1938. Charles Darwin would soon publish The Origin of Species, and The Science of Epidemiology would soon be born.

All of these completely reshaped history, as well as the entire biosphere of Earth.

No aspect of human experience was left untouched.

To illustrate the potency of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction in more contemporary terms, let’s consider the 1960s.

Like I said, Pluto and Uranus conjuncted in Virgo around 1965-66. Now those are the dates when the conjunction was exact, but these two planets would have been within a few degrees of each other for some time before then and for some time after then.

So that period of the 1960s is considered to be an extremely important point in modern history. And if we look at the kinds of events that occurred in the United States as a case in point, it represented a very radical shift in many, many ways.

There was the entire counter-cultural movement, feminism, many people rejected the dogmatic cultural approach from the preceding years in the 1950s. There was a very active student movement, protests against the war in Vietnam, clashes over civil rights, the moon landing, widespread concerns about nuclear annihilation – Pluto was discovered in 1930 and the first atomic bomb was used in the second world war. There were powerful movements on the part of minorities and to address segregation. The Voting Rights Act was implemented, the assassination of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. There were revolutionary changes in areas like fashion, music, art, popular culture, relationships, and sexuality. People explored different kinds of lifestyles and Eastern spirituality.

Virgo is an earth sign ruled by Mercury. Many people even explored doing things like going back to the land, rejecting modern society. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring was published, which many attribute to the birth of the environmental movement. And of course there was a whole movement of people who were, like I said, exploring things like eating and living naturally, exploring alternative forms of medicine. They rejected many aspects of modern society.

I mean, it goes on and on and on. It was enormously powerful and transformative.

And society was quite polarized, much like today in some ways. The effects of that period lasted for decades if they’re not still playing out. Huge changes which also sparked a lot of resistance from the status quo. The powers that be went to great lengths to try and discredit all of this because, of course, it threatened them and their privilege and they’ve been trying to put that genie back in the bottle ever since.

In fact, I have argued here before that that explains why education is so astronomically expensive now because young people are much less likely to rebel if they are in inescapable debt up to their eyeballs.

The next significant milestone in this story is the period around 2012 to 2015 when Uranus in Aries squared Pluto in Capricorn.

So think of the conjunction that occurred in the mid-1960s as the beginning and the first square, some 40 or 50 years later, is a test of the energies or consciousness that were being born in the conjunction back in the mid-1960s.

Even today there are still reactionary and conservative forces who are very much opposed to all of that progress.

The period between 2012 and 2015, give or take a few years on either side, was extremely dynamic.

Again, this was the period when Uranus and Aries was squaring Pluto and Capricorn, during which time we had the Arab Spring, ISIS, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and the LGBTQ rights movement. Barack Obama was president during this time. Social media, mobile phones and the internet were in their heyday. There was Hurricane Sandy, the Paris Climate Accord was signed, the BRIC nations including China and India began a rapid ascent, the negative impact of dark money really started to become clear, Edward Snowden revealed details of a vast and unprecedented surveillance network, WikiLeaks was active, the news and publishing industries were radically changing. Everything was going online, including entertainment platforms, the anti-austerity movements, there was a lot of tumult and rebellious activity that occurred during this time.

The square is like a testy, challenging aspect where the two forces are kind of at odds with each other and there’s no real clear or easy resolution. And the energies, like I said, that are unleashed from these events can take quite some time to play out.

Donald Trump began to rise to prominence around this time and was first elected in 2016. That was an extremely radical outcome.

We have also seen the rise of a lot of far-right extremism, populists and demagogues, the rising threat of fascism, liberal democracy under attack, in ways that are entirely unprecedented in modern history, concerns about civil unrest, and even the possibility of civil war. We saw Brexit, the post-truth era, rampant conspiracy theories and conspiracy-theorism, extreme forms of fundamentalism, Christian nationalism, and all of these kinds of things.

To put that in a bit of historical context, as I mentioned earlier, Uranus and Pluto conjuncted in 1850-1851, they squared each other in 1932-1934, again with some give and take on either side.

At that time, in the 1930s, Pluto was in Cancer and Uranus was in Aries. Again, that very fiery Mars ruled energy. Cancer can be very protective of home and family, or on a mundane level, the nation.

During that time, of course, we saw the rise of Hitler, which led to World War II, in following years. But it wasn’t just Germany, there were fascistic movements in other countries as well, such as Spain and Italy. Very intense and dark stuff.

Of course, the world was in the midst of a great depression, and programs such as the New Deal under Roosevelt were initiated to try and address that.

The failure of the investment, banking and finance industries created the conditions which led to the rise of far-right extremism and ultimately the Second World War.

The period of the early 2010s, of course, followed closely on the heels of the great housing market and bank failures of 2007 and 2008. The parallels between the early 1930s and the 2010s are eerie.

So we went through another square between Pluto and Uranus, like I said, around the period of 2012 to 2015, and at that time as well, I recall things like Golden Dawn in Greece, which was very fascistic, and these kinds of trends started to show up around that time. And polarization really started to take off then as well. And we saw the spread of propaganda and disinformation.

Many have said that if the US government hadn’t bailed out the banks, there would have certainly been another global depression. There’s many parallels to what happened in the 1930s.

Astrology never repeats exactly twice, because all of the other planets are moving at different speeds. So, for example, in the 1930s Neptune was in Virgo, up until the early to mid-1940s, and in the 2010s Neptune was in Pisces. And of course, Pluto has been in Capricorn more recently, whereas in the 1930s it was in Cancer.

So these are different energies and things played out differently, but there’s a lot of parallels and similarities between these periods and these events and the timing of them,

And that is what I want to make people understand. Because I have heard people make reference to, “Oh, astrology explains this, what’s going on.” And a lot of it can be explained by this cycle.

So to some degree, and again I’ll be putting dates on the screen – I’m not going to state them all here because there’s just too many of them and it’ll bore people – but the whole time that Pluto and Uranus are in squaring signs, they are kind of at each other in a somewhat antagonistic relationship.

So, for example, when Pluto was in Capricorn and Uranus was in Aries, there was that tension there.

As of now, at the time of this recording, Uranus is in Taurus, Pluto just retrograded back into Capricorn until early 2024, then it will resume its journey through Aquarius through the mid-2040s.

So Uranus and Pluto aren’t actually squaring each other anymore, in effect, is what I’m getting at.

So there was a period when Pluto was in Capricorn and Uranus was in Aries. These are both cardinal signs. And Aries is very fiery and can be assertive and aggressive and even violent in its lower expression.

And Capricorn represents the institutions and power structures of our society, everything from corporate to the law and government and so forth.

So we’ve seen tremendous amount of activity in those areas where there’s been people fighting for their freedom and independence against what they perceive as tyranny, or trying to, conversely, impose tyranny on others.

The energy can go either way. It’s kind of up to us how we express it.

But the bigger point of all of this is that we’re out of that square energy. Uranus left Aries on March 6th of 2019.

So there will be some spillover of these energies into subsequent years. But the really intense phase of that, or the triggering phase, is over. It may not look like it because things are still playing out.

Like for example, in the United States, a lot of people who abused their power or broke the law are starting to be held accountable for actions that they committed years ago. Hopefully as they are prosecuted and held accountable and brought to justice, that will put a damper on things.

Another example is it looks like Putin’s days are numbered because of his failures in Ukraine. Reality is coming to bear on all of these people and all of their actions.

Saturn is currently transiting Pisces through 2026. Pisces rules the 12th house.

One of the things the 12th house was traditionally associated with was imprisonment. Both Saturn and the 12th house are karmic. It is where we are held accountable for our karma.

During part of this cycle there was a conjunction of Pluto and Saturn on January 12th of 2020, which was significant as well because Pluto was conjuncting Saturn in its own domain. And the Saturn-Pluto cycle is a whole other subject, but that is considered to be an important development that is also often linked to the rise of the far right. Authoritarianism, fascism, and those kinds of things.

So it’ll take some time for these things to play out, but overall my point is that we are through the worst of it.

The next major aspect between these two planets will occur between 2046 and 2048, which will be the opposition, with Pluto in Pisces and Uranus in Virgo. That is a very polarizing energy as well, and that should be a very dynamic and important milestone. That’s over 20 years from now. But those of you who are younger, take note. There will be a lot of major developments at that time.

I know there’s a lot of dates and terminology. Just to summarize, the main point I wanted to make was that we can look at the conjunction of Uranus and Pluto as the beginning of major new cycles or developments, and often they move us forward to a new level.

Then there’s the squares, which challenge whatever occurred during the conjunction. It tests it. In the case of 2010s, it was questioning how far have we come with respect to what was brought forward in the 1960s, those new ways of being, there was kind of a battle between the two opposing forces.


That gets settled out, the next one will be the opposition in the 2040s when Pluto has essentially begun its transit of Pisces, which that in and of itself should be huge, because Pisces can on a higher level represent spirituality, the non-material realms, and things like psychic phenomenon, but it can also represent major endings and letting go, to create space for the new.

Pisces rules the 12th house. It’s not about ego or materialism.

So we went through a lot of tumultuous times in the 2010s and we’re still dealing with that now. But like I said, those energies aren’t really directly square to each other anymore. We have other issues going on.

Pluto in Aquarius I have talked a lot about here on my channel. I’ll put links to some of those episodes here as well, which I would encourage you to listen to. A lot of the things I predicted actually came to pass within fairly short order of Pluto moving into Aquarius. It’s just at the very beginning though, so it will take some time for that to really fully manifest.

And now we are also starting to become aware – and I think this occurred just after Pluto went into Aquarius – he masses are starting to realize the implications of the climate and environmental crisis. It’s now in everyone’s faces. And people are having direct experience with it.

Aquarius is very global in scope. It’s about all of us. And the only way to solve those problems is for countries to cooperate. Otherwise, we’re in deep trouble, if we’re not already.

So, humanity is becoming aware of global consciousness, just as I predicted.

Pluto moving into Aquarius, when it settles in there, is really about the people. It’s not about the people at the top of the pyramid. So that’s the really important thing to know.

And Aquarius is very egalitarian, and also very rational and intellectual. Whereas a lot of the far-right stuff seems to be driven based on emotion and grievance and things. That is not an Aquarian energy, typically. I don’t see that stuff persisting.

I think we’ll experience that kind of stuff probably from now until early 2024. It’ll make a bit of a comeback. But after that, and Pluto really starts moving into Aquarius, it’s like, forget it, people aren’t going to do that crap.

Aquarius is very progressive, rational, intelligent, and independent. It doesn’t bode well for dogmatic belief systems, trust me on that.

So I hope this is helpful. It’s a huge topic to try and cover in a short period of time, but I wanted to just paint a broad brush, big picture view of this for people so that they could understand what’s going on, why, and what the timing is essentially.

I’ll put links in the episode description to any related content, and if you’re interested in a reading with me, I’ll put a link to that as well.

Many sincere thanks to everyone who supports me, especially my YouTube members.

Thank you very much.

Take care, all the best, and I’ll talk to you again soon.

Bye for now.