Pluto in Aries

Their stations still stand at the heart of old cities, built like cathedrals, and you have waited under their roofs.

Before anyone knew

Pluto needs 248 years for a single circuit of the Sun, and when it last crossed Aries, nobody on Earth knew it existed. It would not be found for another eighty years. Power is Pluto’s subject, what is buried and what is forced into the open; Aries, ruled by Mars, is the spark that starts things. Under this Pluto, a generation grew up while the old order was being torn down and rebuilt by force.

Iron and steam

Those years saw the first public railways, the telegraph, the factory towns, and in 1848 revolutions breaking out across Europe in a single spring. The people born then inherited a world that moved faster than any before it and saw no reason to stop. Their ideal of power was the steam locomotive: raw force, harnessed, driving forward. They wrote in copperplate, travelled by coach and then by train within one lifetime, and saw the first photographs.

The ancestors’ ancestors

Count back four or five generations from any child today and you reach them. If your family tree reaches back that far, among them you find the one who emigrated with nothing, the one who built a business from a single workshop, the one who stood on a barricade. The will to start again from zero ran strong in them. Their handwriting leans forward on the page, as if in a hurry to get somewhere.

Force and its cost

The will that built the railways crushed whoever stood in its way. Child labour, empire, the belief that progress justified anything: this Pluto’s shadow is power without restraint, and the world spent a century paying for it.

In 2066

Pluto enters Aries again in 2066. That cohort inherits the same hunger to begin, in a world with very different machines, and the same question about what their power is for.

The bridges and tunnels and stations that generation built are still carrying people every morning, long after anyone remembers the names of the ones who dug them.