Pluto in Aquarius: AI and the Future of Human Originality

What can the planets tell us about our awakening age of artificial intelligence? Quite a bit, as it happens. In 2023, Pluto, the planet of the underworld, death and fate, entered Aquarius, the sign of technology and new ideas. Only two years into a two-decade Aquarius residency, Pluto has unleashed the dark god of AI, and revealed the cynicism and one-size-fits-all dehumanization at the heart of big tech. Must it end here? What are our choices, beyond strapping into patent leather and doing high kicks, like Carrie-Anne Moss in The Matrix?

To make sense of the future, I pull an opening card: Judgment, which gives us insight into fate, calling, and awakening. What is our individual assignment in this harrowing new chapter? I talk about Pluto’s previous editions, namely in Scorpio (think: the AIDS Crisis in the 1980s and early 1990s) and in Capricorn (flash to the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath). Devastating periods, which did, at great cost, inspire new modes of activism and consciousness. If the heroes of the ACT UP generation can teach us anything, it’s how to face an impossible enemy. 

As for the present? I talk about the final season of The Comeback, and invoke Lisa Kudrow’s Valerie Cherish as a messiah of optimism and originality in an age of pre-arranged playlists and human isolation. We dig into Pluto’s possibilities for reinvention, and for Aquarius’ high aspects of idealism, inventiveness and originality. It ain’t over ‘til it’s over. 

Write to me at Ask@Heavenlybodiespodcast.com 

To book a reading with, go to DavidOdyssey.com and Davidodyssey.substack.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello, Star Child. You've tuned into Heavenly Buddies, a trip through the Cosmos with David Odyssey. I'm David Odyssey, your personal astrologer and guide, cruising through the stars and down to Earth. Each week, we'll seek life's meaning in archetypes, old and new. And now, let's drop in. Welcome, children of the future, to the world of tomorrow. It is a very special jacked-on espresso episode of Heavenly Bodies, A Trip Through the Cosmos with David Odyssey. And here I am, David Odyssey, uh, here to do uh an episode I think I've kind of, and this is going to be very thematically appropriate once you understand why, I've kind of feared doing because it's a big one and it's very much uh it's very current and very apocalyptic and fatalistic, uh, which is to say we are going to be talking about Pluto in Aquarius and what that means for the future of technology, individuality, uh, movement, and human consciousness. So I am going to break down what all of that means uh step by step, but as always, we are going to introduce this week's theme with a card pull. So I wanted to introduce you to Judgment. Uh, this is this is the 20th card in the major arcana. The one I'm using is from the Aquarian deck. We see someone blowing uh a giant horn. We are when you know, judgment has a lot of different valences, but the one that we're kind of getting the suggestion for in this card is Judgment Day. Obviously, Terminator 2, Linda Hamilton, one armed pull-up. Uh, that judgment day is going to be quite relevant to what we're about to talk about. Judgment Day deals with the horn sounding from heaven and the dead rising. Uh, judgment, we're really thinking of this sort of I don't want to say come to Jesus moment, but this sort of big revelatory awakening. Judgment deals a lot with this sense of the big fate issue is coming to a head, and it's impossible to ignore and impossible to hide from. It has a very karmic, fatalistic aspect to it, in which it deals with something which is bigger than us, uh, which is kind of calling us forward to face either our destiny or our death or uh our death and rebirth. Which leads us to Pluto. Pluto is the final planet in our solar system. Pluto, for that reason, takes about 20 years, dot dot dot, 16 to 20 years, to make an uh to move through each sign. It takes a lot longer than that, um to to make a revolution. So the United States only had its first Pluto return in 2022. Um some countries have had a few Pluto returns, but not a lot, because we're talking about multiple centuries at a time. For that reason, as the last of the planets, as the last judge, as the last of the dark masters, um, Pluto rules over really big chapters and really big epochs on the personal and the collective level. Pluto is named after the god of the underworld. The god of death, uh, and in the underworld we see um just rewards, um, we see the end of kind of human hubris, and we see great treasures and possibilities which may come into the next cycle uh as one is reborn. We see Pluto, um, who is Hades but who may also be Dionysus, uh, and his bride, Persephone, the dark queen, who carries within her the duality of six months out of the year being in the world of the living, and six months out of the year reckoning with the realm of darkness and um truth and violation. Um, to get a really good sense of what these forces mean, I really recommend this book, The Astrology of Fate, by the genius astrologer and psychotherapist Liz Green. Um, she deals a lot with what does it mean for a person to be reckoning with these underworld forces? So wherever Pluto goes, it's going to be commanding a sort of judgment day. Like I said, Pluto spends many years and multiple signs in a sign. So, you know, we've talked about this before, but if Venus is in a sign, Venus she'll be in a sign for about a month. Okay, that month will have certain themes, but when a planet, when Pluto's in a sign for, you know, 16 years, and in the case of what we're about to talk about, 20 years, it's not like a day-to-day thing. It's way more of a thematic reckoning. Pluto deals with these things that have to be faced, and in the facing of them, in the like deep, profound challenge, we gain a lot of wisdom because so much is revealed, the truth is revealed. You know, that's the thing with Persephone. She she knows the truth of everything. You can't hide anything from her. She's already in the world of the dead. Like, what are you going to shock her with? And it inspires, hopefully, some sort of a new way of uh a new either courage or originality or creativity to deal with um this mass uh death of something or destruction or of something. So starting in 2023, but really 2024, uh Pluto entered the sign Aquarius. So Pluto had been in Capricorn from 2008 to 2023, then from May to June of 2023, it peaked into Aquarius, went back into Capricorn, then in 2024, it pretty much outright entered Aquarius. So when Pluto was in Capricorn, Capricorn deals a lot with governance, finance, authority, power. If I say the year 2008 to you, or the year 2011 to you, or the year 2020, I think you'll kind of know what Pluto was doing during those years. We see Britney Spears being locked up and put on lithium, we see the financial crash, we see uh Carrie Bradshaw and the girls going to Abu Dhabi as a reaction to the financial crash. Um, and we re- and then of course we see COVID, we see uh Me Too, Trump. So we see basically the total demolition of the existing capitalistic order, and then we see a lot of these bizarre um blowbacks where those in power uh double down or get more desperate. Um so we see these sort of splits in reality where, okay, we see everything's falling apart. How are we responding? Wait a minute, why are we responding this way? And that's Pluto really helping us to face like this is happening, and let's see how the I mean, it's really too easy in this case, how the Pluto crats who are in power um have fucked us up and are continuing to fuck us up. Those were the Capricornian themes. Pluto is now in Aquarius. What is Aquarius? Aquarius is the second to last sign of the zodiac. Aquarius is ruled by Saturn and Uranus, and Aquarius deals with thinking about what's next. It deals a lot with the future, new technologies, new movements, ways of thinking, ways of organizing, and these sort of governing and ideals and beliefs which bring people together and inspire either, you know, stagnation or change, and change for the better or change for the worse, we can discuss that. So when Pluto enters Aquarius, I mean, look, I think you'll know where this is about to go, but essentially the moment that Pluto entered Aquarius, we started the AI conversation. Because the entire world of technology now entered the realm of what if technology had its own consciousness? And I was just reading an article about these sort of stadium arenas that are being made. Um to they're basically data centers, but they're kind of like cities. I mean, it really is like what we saw in The Matrix, which came out when Uranus was in Aquarius, by the way. But I was just reading a piece in The Atlantic where they said, quote, Elon Musk intends to build a god. Um and when I read that, I thought, oh, that's it. That's that's Pluto in Aquarius. Pluto is literally a god, but Pluto is this god who made who rules the underworld. So we're seeing literal these kind of data center underworlds that no humans can actually occupy and don't actually have to do with human beings. So there's already that kind of dark imagery, but more than that, Pluto deals a lot with human hubris, which leads us to the underworld. If you think about the Greek underworld, there's a lot of these characters like Sisyphus who get punished for what they did, and their punishment matches their hubris, and there's something about the construction of a consciousness which may replace or displace or certainly depower uh humans that rings very true to all of this. So we have that aspect. The other thing about what's going on is this, you know, this whole conversation about AI and evolving technology, because I really want to avoid a lot of catastrophic cliches with this, but there is a fatalistic aspect to this. Because once again, the plutocrats who are now we now have tech plutocrats who have fully revealed themselves over the past few years. I mean, I think the lead up to the Pluto and Aquarius thing was that these guys who I think used to be a little bit kind of dorky or cute or weird are now like, no, we're the plutocrats, and we actually control all of information and pretty much all of the power on Earth, and we have all of the money on Earth. So we're seeing that Pluto and Aquarius are now many Aquarius technology, Pluto, Pluto, which means riches, are now we're that's being revealed in a big way, and we're gonna have to deal with that. But this whole thing with AI had a very fatalistic aspect to it because it just has kind of happened and it couldn't be stopped or helped. Obviously, it was helped um by gross government uh deregulation uh and the fact that, you know, a lot of dark deals were made. But the idea is that we are all having to face this thing that is kind of befallen us um and that will affect all of us. And let me just describe more of uh of what Aquarius is so that you can kind of see what's going on here. Aquarius is thought of as the Promethean sign. Um Its ruling god is Uranus, who who is goes with Prometheus. Prometheus is the the titan who wants to give fire um to the mortals and wants to give mortals um their own future. Aquarianism is often really about like such a forward vision, but it it can be a little bit sterile, which is to say it isn't actually super connected to like lived in reality, which is why a lot of Aquarians get this sort of reputation for being maybe a little dissociated or a little too far ahead of their time, but not able to like be with us right now. Um, that's kind of a gross generalization, if you know what I mean. But this whole thing is about a future that isn't fully here yet and problems that it that might be solved in this future, while the actual problems that we are dealing with right now are being not only ignored, but if we look at these data centers, which are using uh, according to what I've been reading, quote, as much electricity as 200,000 American homes to power one of these. Some of these are bigger than uh like several football fields put together and will use more power in a year than in actual cities that we have. And you know, you just think about how many people who have who really have nothing. Um and we're seeing, okay, there actually is power. Pluto deals so much with power. Where is the power? Where is it going? So it's going into this alleged future that we don't fully know what it's going to be doing. We know that it's all, of course, being used to surveil on us and collect data on us, but we don't fully know what's gonna happen here, which is very Aquarian. There's this idea of the ideal um being more important than the real. And sometimes we need that. You know, you need vision. I think a world without vision is very sad, and for queer people, it's like very boring. You know, we need either the vision or the fantasy or the possibility to of something to look forward to. But the dark side of Pluto and Aquarius is that the vision becomes one size fits all, and we're going into a world where, you know, touch and sensuality and need and feeling are kind of irrelevant. Um, I was going into an Airbnb yesterday that had kind of like an automatic check-in and the gate wasn't working, and we texted um the people who ran the Airbnb, and it was a bot, and we had to keep texting them, and then the bot sent a message saying, We are getting you in touch with a human to help you. And it was kind of like I just watched um the Grand Budapest Hotel with my dad, and it's like, wow, remember this world of service? Like the idea of like this very loving world of service that kind of doesn't exist anymore. The other issue to think about with Aquarius is that Aquarius deals with like I said, ideals and beliefs, it deals with those organizing um kind of ideas or um things we pledge ourselves to which are bigger than us and which help us find our community, uh, help us find the movement which which we belong to, um, and help us kind of um take our place in something bigger in the world. So the first thing to think about as Pluto hits Aquarius is that right now we really are understanding how ideas, identity, messaging, propaganda, belief are really informed and swayed and controlled right now. Um we're understanding how the the platforms and the mediums themselves are controlled and who controls them and how they're based on, you know, numbers and money, etc. We see what are the credentials or responsibilities of an influencer or a thought leader right now? Um what is their bottom line? And we're also asking a lot of questions about like where does identity come from and what is the point of identity? Um how was it developed and what do we want to do with it? Which is obviously leading to like a really big generational clash. But what all of this is doing, I don't believe that the answer is some sort of a deep cynicism and don't believe in anything, don't trust any movement, because right now, frankly, compared to the current world leadership, any sort of anyone I think is better than what we have, and we really do need those new organizations or crews or movements or leaders to come. But right now we're doing, and this will be happening, Uranus, which we did an episode on this, Uranus, which deals a lot with chaos, which is in Gemini, which is the sign of communication currently. We're going to be learning a lot about where we where we get these ideas and beliefs, how they're vetted, how we form them. Um, a lot of the old bastions that created these things, which would maybe be the academy or the church, have kind of fallen, and now we're in this sort of Joe Rogan freak show. But hopefully, what is going to be happening uh over this 20-year period, which is 2024 through 2044, while Pluto's in Aquarius, is we're going to have to do kind of an autopsy on human identity and belief. And, you know, at we're at a point where technology, TikTok, etc., is fully being used to sway elections, and where world events are kind of being chosen uh as these sort of propaganda hotspots, uh, which is very sad because once again, like the actual individual, local, human need or suffering is then getting swept up as part of a um I don't know, political platform, etc. etc. etc. And I think right now we're all kind of untangling all of that. So where does this leave us? Like what do we do with this? Um, I wanted to bring up a few Pluto isms and then kind of talk about where we go with this. First of all, Pluto has uh taught us some things in recent years, which is to say Pluto was in Scorpio from 1983 to 1995. That time is pretty much defined by the AIDS crisis. Scorpio is the sign of sexual sex, lies, uh, control, power, death. Uh it's Pluto's ruling sign. Scorpio rules the underworld, Pluto rules the underworld. And when Pluto was in Scorpio from 1983 to 1995, we had the AIDS crisis, which was this insane convergence of um uh a sexually transmitted disease being used as uh moral ammunition by an oppressive government and an oppressive religious authority to punish um or ostracize or create some sort of an effigy of um what it means to be uh an angel. Moral person who deserves what they get. And we saw a very dark um backlash. And of course, during this period, Susan Filudi wrote backlash, which is about something else, but you get what I'm saying. So during this period, and I'm bringing this up because we saw that the authority in power was capable of betrayal and capable of leaving human beings behind to kind of die uh alone. We also see during this period the rise and the birth of Act Up. Um, and I highly recommend everyone read Sarah Shulman's Gentrification of the Mind because she talks about basically like, how is it that this is the greatest story ever told and we're not really telling it? Which is basically a group of people who were dying and their friends, uh, people who were considered um to be out of the world order, out of the power structure, queer people said, okay, we're gonna form our own organization and we're going to get results. Act Up was a coalition of a bunch of different um categories of people, uh, cross-racial, you know, cross-sexual, socioeconomically, etc. And its goal was to save lives and uh affirm dignity, but also get real answers from the government and from the pharmaceutical establishment, which at that point basically had supreme power and could do whatever they wanted. And because of ACTUP, the pharmaceutical corporations really did have to inform the public about what they were doing and answer for what they were doing, and you know, fucking help people who were dying. This created a new a new idea of what government and corporate transparency could or should look like, and it also really defined a new possibility for local, um, communal, state, and even international activism. I bring this up because this is kind of a definitive example of like both sides of the Pluto reality. I don't want this podcast about Pluto and Aquarius to be so bleak and hopeless because I do feel like an aspect of the fatalism that we're dealing with with AI is this thing of like, well, it's happened, it's happening, and it's too late. And I think I don't think the answer is just to like run. We're going to have to really reckon with it. So I wanted to talk about a few of the ways that we reckon with it. First of all, I think like the most beautiful conversation that's being had about AI is, of course, on the comeback, which is airing its alleged final season. Uh, by the way, please read my piece for W magazine about Valerie Cherish. Um, but the comeback is dealing with in its third season, which is airing right now, Valerie Cherish, the tragic uh sitcom slash reality star, is now on a TV show sitcom, which is being written by AI. And Valerie, who is this old school kind of like like 1990s uh old world actress, is reckoning with it. But what they're doing on the comeback is showing that AI isn't really the problem. It's human cynicism that's the problem. Um, all of the people who are working with Valerie have really mostly given up and have a very dark view about their industry, why they work, why they do what they do, and what's the point of it. The comeback is deeply apocalyptic, but I think it's it's been showing something interesting. Valerie, in the course of the previous season of the comeback, went through her own plutonic rebirth. What does that mean? Valerie went to, if you watch season two of the comeback, which is there's nothing like it, and there's nothing like that finale, Valerie Cherish, played brilliantly by the Leo Lisa Coudreau, basically lost her mind and lost her sense of reality and was basically falling into her own reality show and her own fame addiction. And the nearly losing her loved ones in that process caused her to have an awakening and basically shut the cameras down and step into real life for the first time. And now that Valerie has done that inner personal healing, she might actually be the only sane one while the rest of the world is slipping into fame addiction. So I found that like very beautiful and instructive because Aquarius is supposed to be the sign of the future thinker and the original. It's the person who's a real idealist, who's a real creative, who's seeing something that no one else can see, who has a real vision, who wants to change the world, and who's really optimistic. The dark side of Aquarius is, like I said, this sort of a uniform, Maoist, one size fits all. You know, everything can be this way for everyone. The cars can drive us, we don't need to talk or feel or complain or have inner issues, the bots will deal with us. Pluto wants us to confront a world devoid of originality because that is what we are entering. We are entering the world of Instagram cafes and Spotify playlists. The world of curation, of um insight, of authenticity, and of originality may be slipping away, but this kind of final battle that we are entering will force the originals to emerge. They will likely have emerged after undergoing their own, like I said with Valerie, after having undergone their own inner plutonic crisis, their own reckoning with their own sense of madness or inadequacy or fear or terror or darkness or self-sabotage, which leads them to trust their own voice, to be able to call bullshit, to face their own fears of authority of power, to claim authority and power and use it for something new or beautiful or special or tender. What does that mean for you? Wherever Pluto was in your chart when you were born, whatever sign it was in when you were born, and whatever house it was in, okay, I should obviously have this be my next book, Hilaire, whatever sign or house it was in in your chart will be giving a huge amount of instruction about what your kind of core fundamental karmic battles are. Those might be biological karma, those might be societal karma, those might be about individual relationships, it might be about your own ambition, uh, your addictions, those really big, lifelong battle royales that you have to face with, those sort of inner underworld journeys that you are destined to undergo and complete. It's very, I think it would be worth it if you see where Pluto's been these last few years. When Pluto was in Capricorn, where did it hit for you? What did it affect? What did you learn from 2008 to 2023? And now that Pluto's in Aquarius, where is Aquarius in your chart? Are there any planets in Aquarius that you were born with? Are there any planets across the way in Leo or in Taurus or in Scorpio that it's going to be squaring? What part of your chart is that hitting? I asked that because I think that that might be an invitation for you to see where you're going to have to do your next inventory underworld process where you're going to have to really reckon and grip and battle and kind of do a huge cleansing of all this shit that you arrived here with, so that you'll be able to start to tap into what's your voice and your soul and your originality and your gifts and your treasures. I don't want to only push for individualism because I think like the way forward against Pluto has to be through um, especially when we're in Aquarius, great collective uh inspiration and uh organization. Uh but the and again, this is why Liz Green's uh book on Pluto is so critical, you know, the the the inner reckoning and the descent into the personal underworld and the return from the personal underworld, the death and rebirth that is necessary to give a person consciousness or discernment or a voice will be critical in this sort of uh uh battle to come because right now they're really counting on us just being so exhausted that we're basically zombified.

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Okay.

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To wrap this up, I have to talk about this week's High Priestess. Uh, every week on this show, we are celebrating uh a grand dame uh or great queer master who was born this week. Uh, and today we are celebrating my sister Taurus, my all-time number one actress movie star in the galaxy, who is currently having a huge comeback with two TV shows airing concurrently. The one and only born on April 29th, Michelle Pfeiffer. Uh Michelle Pfeiffer, look, first of all, it's not only that she's as beautiful as Helen of Troy, it's that she is that bitch. Like, Taurus has this aspect of um I know that I'm sexual, I know that I'm dangerous, and I don't even find it that interesting. It's just kind of second nature for me, and I don't care if it fucks you up. And we get that when Michelle Pfeiffer, you know, sings in Fabulous Baker Boys, puts the gun back in her mouth and goes, so, or when she's in the red dress on top of the piano. Her catwoman deals a lot with the Taurus Scorpio axis of death, rebirth, death, rebirth, power, madness, control, domination, fear. Um obviously, it's the greatest, most totemic, animalistic performance of all time. The list I mean, I honestly I literally just watched White Oleander, which isn't even that good of a movie, but like there's a scene when it's her it's her last shot in the movie where she's in prison and they're about to like take her back behind bars, and she just looks at her daughter, and you're just like, wow, she can destroy anyone. She has it. Um, Michelle Pfeiffer really has the Taurus thing of like, I'll work when it's interesting, and I don't need to like go after it or prove or make people want me or like me. Like I have it already, like I am that bitch, period. Uh Countess Olenska, Age of Innocence. Um, so she's currently on The Madison and Margot's Got Money Troubles, and like a like a good Taurus, she'll live forever. Uh so I just want to salute you. And yeah, like there isn't really a there aren't a lot of bad Michelle Pfeiffer movies. There are some, but you're gonna like strike out. She's done so many good ones. So if you have questions, responses, or feelings about Michelle Pfeiffer, and if you have questions or thoughts about your own personal reckoning about Pluto and everything it's brought forward for you, about what this age means, about the astrology of AI, please let us know. We are at ask at heavenly bodiespodcast.com, uh, and we want to hear from you. And we will be here next week. Uh, Taurus season is only just getting cracking, and we got a lot more divas to cover. So we will be here next week. You know where to find me. Please uh leave glowing reviews wherever you get your podcasts. Share. We are on Instagram uh at Heavenly Bodies Podcast. Uh, and we will see you soon. Thank you so much for being with me. Thank you for listening. This podcast is part of Pride House Media, hosted by David Odyssey and produced by Matthew Breen and Josh Rosenswag. With original music composed by Nell Balaban. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And while you're there, leave us a rating and review. It really helps others discover the show. I'd love to get to know you. So email questions and visions to ask at heavenlybuddiespodcast.com and book a reading with me at Davidmodice.com. Until our next trip, keep looking up.