I've spent the last two days hanging out with the very impressive students and tutors of the Faculty of Astrological Studies. It has been a great joy to visit Oxford, England, each August for the past several years to spend 5 or 6 days talking with astrologers and listening to eye-opening presentations by some of the biggest names in the business.

This year's event was canceled - and then transformed from the usual 8 days to just a weekend teleconference with a carefully crafted program of eight presentations and designated spots for students to contribute their reflections about the Summer School experience. All in all this was a brilliant pivot that gave students the opportunity to have a taste of the event they remember with such joy.

The topics, of course, focused one way or another on the times we are in and in particular on the transits of Pluto, Saturn, and Jupiter through Capricorn, all of which are associated with the global pandemic, the subsequent lockdowns, and the psychological challenges that such an enforced change of routine necessarily incites.

Let's go back three years, to August 2017.

For that event Alana and I decided to take our vacation time during the weekend workshop events and just attend the week-long Summer School. On Monday morning I entered the classroom and introduced myself to the instructor for that session, one Michael Lutin. He looked at me as if to say, "Ok. Is there something you want ?" I mentioned that Alana and I had liked the look of his weekend workshop but decided not to attend because, "we weren't sure we'd be able to muster the energy to do that and then make it through the week." He got a rueful look on his face and said, "Yeah, it was a lot of energy out."

What I did not know at that moment was that Michael Lutin had been asked to step in to cover the sessions originally planned for Rob Hand, who was not able to make the cross-Atlantic trip due to an eye operation. How he managed the energy to pull it off I have no idea. One of the lectures (each one 90 minutes) dealt with planetary nodes, a topic you don't hear a lot about these days. In that presentation he laid out the positions of the planetary nodes and talked about their role in getting context for the solar system environment within which our planetary transits occur.

Michael Lutin, unjustly cropped by a data obsessive, talking about planetary nodes at the FAS 2017 Summer School

Michael is a very entertaining lecturer, and he's an experienced hand, which means he doesn't just sit down and read a paper to you. He dropped an enticing statement into his presentation (and expanded it in a separate session later). He suggested that when Pluto transits its own South Node (20 deg. Capricorn) we should expect "something really big". When pressed to give details he simply said, "Just remember that in the worst case, say, a total nuclear war in which civilization is destroyed, a few days after it's all over, out from under a rock somewhere, will come . . . a Scorpio." This got a big laugh, but nobody could get him to be more specific.

In the follow-up lecture he spent all of his time talking to his astrologer peers, saying that when this transit happened there would be great need for the people in the room to provide guidance for a lot of people who would be in dire straights emotionally and psychologically. He wouldn't be more specific, and there were more than a few frustrated attendees.

At the time of the lecture, Pluto was at 17 deg. Capricorn. It first reached 20 deg. Capricorn in February 2018, then went retrograde and passed 20 deg. again in June 2018; then went direct and passed it again in December 2018; it came back for its final pass in September 2019 and stationed at 20 degrees Capricorn on October 4 for seven days until October 11, 2019. This was the last pass of the transit. Pluto went retrograde on April 25, but will only get to 22 deg Capricorn before going direct on October 4.

All of this tells us some interesting things :

Michael Lutin nailed this transit; he identified it as something an order of magnitude beyond what we're used to projecting for transits of any kind.
What we are experiencing in the pandemic coming out of the autumn of 2019 has roots in February, June, and December 2018. It's not just COVID-19 but a constellation of developments that have prepared the way for what we are experiencing now. In the U.S. this corresponds to a weakening of the powers of the central government, at least.
None of this diminishes in any way the excellent analyses that are being made about the effects of the conjunction of Pluto and Saturn in Capricorn.
Planetary node transits need more attention.