President Joe Biden & the US Pluto Return

I n December 2006, Vanity Fair published a piece by Michael Lutin, its resident astrologer of 25 years, entitled “Special Alert: Horoscope U.S.A.” At that time, Pluto was at the end of Sagittarius, approaching its transition into Capricorn.

“Are we, in the end, ruthless imperialists doomed to be brought down by our degenerate culture? That is the question Pluto’s transit through the sign of Capricorn over the next 19 years will answer,” Lutin wrote. He predicted that “the mood will become much darker and much more conservative, and that the transit would “change America from the inside out, threaten our very existence, challenge our economy, and divide the country politically”.

One year later, as Pluto crossed the Sagittarius/Capricorn threshold between January and November of 2008, the subprime mortgage crisis cascaded through the global economy, the result of corrupt and racist American financial practices. And ten years after Lutin’s column, the spectacle of the Trump presidency birthed itself, a bit like a grotesque baby we were unknowingly carrying. Especially for folks on the white or otherwise privileged side of the cultural spectrum, Pluto’s transit through Capricorn has been a harsh reveal of this country’s corrupt, authoritarian and racist underbelly.

In recent years, we’ve been jostled further outside our comfort zones by events including the pandemic, the 2020 racial justice uprisings, January 6th and the rise of overt fascism, and a volatile international war. These occurrences have cracked the facade of American moral and political superiority. With publications like The 1619 Project and movements like BLM and Land Back, the shadow of our history has emerged into mainstream discourse, which is significant despite the fact that it hasn’t yet led to real reforms. And politically things are bad, but they could be worse: Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020, and in 2022 Republicans failed to sweep the midterms as many expected, with voters mostly rejecting the worst extremist candidates. So what next? Will the fascist impulse dip back beneath the surface? Will a political savior come down from the mountaintops? If the answer to both of those questions is “probably not” — how do we move forward?

To me, astrology offers a framework that helps us grasp what we’re living through, and lean into that ultimate inquiry. It’s a supportive psychic structure in this moment of political and cultural uncertainty. The current astrology describes the national reckoning: in 2022 the US went through its Pluto Return, completing a 246 year cycle that began in 1776. Pluto, Roman mythology’s lord of the underworld, is known for bringing shadows into consciousness; a planetary return means something is coming full circle. The entire transit is a really process that will ultimately span a decade or longer. In the US, we might trace it as far back as Trump’s election in 2016, or the economic crisis of 2008, or even September 11th, 2001. Its fallout will last far into the future as well.

This article is an interlude in my longer essay series on the US Pluto Return. I need to cover something timely: President Joe Biden and the seemingly fated role he’s playing in the peak of this transit. In my research, I’ve found that while historical Pluto Returns don’t always correspond to societal collapse or violence, they do consistently represent periods of national instability. They also often involve the redrawing of borders, transfers of power, and/or deaths of leaders. In at least two instances, which I’ll describe later on, countries undergoing Pluto Returns struggled with mentally unstable leadership.

For multiple reasons, I believe it’s worth considering that President Biden has some form of slowly-progressing degenerative brain disease. I have no medical qualifications to make that suggestion, but I believe that the astrological argument is strong. I was also a caregiver for my own mother, who died from early-onset dementia in September, 2020. Am I misreading Biden’s symptoms due to leftover paranoia from my personal experience? Or am I able to see what others can’t yet, because of that experience? I’m honestly not sure, but it all seems too important not to talk about.

However, you won’t find the mean-spiritedness in this article that dominates right-wing media discussions of Biden’s mental health. I’m not trying to stoke any conspiratorial fires or put the blame on any one person or group. Dementia is heartbreaking, a delicate, intensely personal journey for everyone involved. I have been considering writing about this for over a year. I am doing so now because my intuition’s clamor has grown too loud to ignore. I come to the conversation with compassion and empathy.

What I know from personal experience is that, even in the best of situations, the subject of someone having dementia is extremely hard to broach. In Biden’s case, it’s exponentially harder because of how high the stakes are, how many people are invested in him. His natural loquaciousness and lifelong penchant for saying weird things make it easier for those around him to stay in denial. But at a certain point, it will have to be talked about. Biden’s condition won’t be static: even if he decides not to run for reelection in 2024, the next two years may be too long a stretch for him to carry a facade of coherence. His administration is full of folks with decades of experience in Washington, who typically would be well-equipped to handle any crisis. But these are also the people who are most invested — not just financially or career-wise, but with their entire identities — in Biden’s future. And despite their respectable knowledge and experience, they all drink the kool-aid of the Democratic establishment, which is in denial about more than just Biden. It’s hard to foresee them handling something like this with any kind of grace.

It’s also possible that Biden could have dementia that goes undiagnosed for many years. Ronald Regan was diagnosed with Alzheimers in 1994, five years after his presidency ended, but there are several personal accounts claiming he had memory lapses while in office. There’s also a long-term astrological transit — Neptune in Pisces — which makes it likely that a lot of what’s happening now won’t be fully known until 2026 or later.

And of course, I could be straight-up wrong. I hope so. But even if I’m wrong about Biden, the Pluto Return is inevitably with us. The heightened mainstream awareness of America’s brutal history is real, and so is the political and cultural backlash. Pluto’s presence should remind us that the moral rot in this country’s foundations cannot be bypassed.

I’m going to take a little creative license in the rest of this piece, and weave together astrology, research and experience to tell one angle of the story of Joe Biden and America. It’s only one angle — not meant to be a comprehensive exploration of Biden’s life, degenerative brain disorders, or anything else. If what I sense is true, there’s not much we can do about it, so I am not trying to urge readers towards some kind of action. This is just a narrative you’re invited to layer with your own. If things do get shakier politically, I hope that these theories, and the framework of astrology in general, can offer a psychic anchor in the storm.

Joe Biden was born on November 20th, 1942, at 8:30am in Scranton, PA. That makes him a Scorpio Sun, a Sagittarius rising, and a Taurus Moon. His Mercury, Venus and Mars are all in Scorpio as well. His chart looks like, well, a politician’s chart. He’s strategic and cynical on one level (Scorpio), but also extroverted and passionate (Sagittarius rising). His Taurus moon makes for a resilient emotional body, key to survival in the high pressure political world. And his Virgo midheaven & north node indicate service as an important theme in his life.

But Biden’s path into public service wasn’t normal. He doesn’t have the Ivy League pedigree of most elite politicians: he studied at the University of Delaware and graduated from Syraucse Law School in 1969, with mediocre grades. He then served as a City Councilman in Newcastle County, Delaware for two years, and in 1972 was recruited to run for Senate essentially as a sacrifice, as a Democrat against a Republican incumbent whom no one thought could lose. But in an upset, Biden won, becoming the sixth-youngest Senator in US history at age 29. Less than a month later, on December 18th of the same year, Biden’s wife and infant daughter were killed in a car crash. His two sons were also badly injured, and he was sworn into office in January from their hospital room. He then served in the Senate for 36 years, until he became Vice President in 2009.

Biden did try to run for President twice, once in the 1988 primaries, and once in 2008 before joining Obama’s ticket. He didn’t run in 2016, expecting it to be Hillary Clinton’s year. But in 2020, as the pandemic interrupted the primaries, the Dems coalesced around him, seeking comfort in a moderate, white male insider.

Once elected, he hoped to be a history-making President by leading the country out of the sinkhole in the national psyche opened by Trump. And in measurable terms, Biden and his team have accomplished a lot: they passed three major bills through Congress in the first two years of his presidency, oversaw a historic vaccine rollout, and somehow did not lead the Democrats to slaughter in the midterms. However, unfortunately but inevitably, the sinkhole has only opened further.

In astrology, the lunar nodes say a lot about what we might call fate, karma, or destiny. Biden’s north node is at 00° Virgo, a sign associated with service and often found prominently in politician’s charts. Just two degrees away is Chiron, at 28° Leo. Chiron indicates a lifelong karmic wound, and Chiron in Leo means that wound probably relates to pride. I think Biden genuinely wants to be of service, and has throughout his career. I also think he is as blind as the rest of the Democratic elite to the corner we’re turning at this point in history, both in the US and worldwide. Chiron’s placement means that his quest to serve will go hand-in-hand with a narcissistic inability to see beyond himself.

Biden’s life story is already comprised of multiple twists of fate. If he has some kind of a degenerative brain disorder, it will be another one — especially if it becomes necessary to address during his term. And not only would a pattern of Biden’s life be coming back around. If he’s mentally/cognitively unwell, astrological history will also be repeating itself.

The dwarf-planet Pluto actually takes 248 years to fully orbit the Sun. But the wobble of our own planet causes a slow shift in Earth’s orientation towards the rest of the cosmos, affecting any measurements we make from here. This is called axial precession, and it explains why Pluto is back at 27°33" Capricorn now, in 2022, 246 years after the Declaration of Independence instead of 248, at least according to the tropical zodiac most mainstream astrologers use. The US Pluto Return is unusual in that it occurs only three times, all within a single year: in almost every other example I researched, Pluto Returns were spread over 2–3 years, and often aligned five different times (because of retrogrades, Pluto drags super-slowly through the zodiac in a three-steps-forward/two-steps-back kind of way).

Doing this research, I also noticed something I hadn’t seen before: although Pluto will not return to 27°33" Capricorn after Dec. 28, 2022, it will come pretty damn close. In Oct. 2023, it retrogrades back to 27°54" Capricorn, which is essentially a final hit of the US Pluto Return. Even though I’ve been researching this transit for years, I’d never bothered to check the specifics of what happened “after”. Now I think it’s fair to say that the US Pluto Return stretches at least through 2023.

Any outer-planet transit like this is a process, an energy that builds, peaks, and dissipates over many years. When I researched national Pluto Returns throughout history, I found that their milestones, including transitions of power and the redrawing of boundaries, usually occur within about three years on either side of the peak. In some situations, the aftermath is much more dramatic than the peak, which makes sense given that Pluto is known for a dissolutive effect, leaving a void in which anything can happen. In ancient nations, calendar discrepancies and lack of precise dating can also factor in, nudging the potential timeframe open wider. However… as you’ll see, a lot of these events hit the nail on the head as far as timing goes.

Here I’ll describe the historical Pluto Returns of the Roman Empire, England, Spain and France, and touch a little into Russia. Some of this info came from the few other articles out there about Pluto Returns, which I’ll link to below, but most of it is my original research.

ROME

The Roman Kingdom (which eventually became the Roman Republic, and then the Roman Empire) is the toughest of these examples to track because of its age, and because there are many exact dates on which experts don’t agree. I found two other articles (here and here, second one is a series) that do explore Rome’s Pluto Returns, although there are some discrepancies in their dates. The second article traces Pluto Returns all the way back to the Kingdom’s founding in 753 BCE, but the clearest examples lie with the Roman Empire, starting in 27 BCE.

That year, Pluto moved between 26° and 29° Cancer. The next time it hit those degrees, the peak stretched between 219–221 CE, which aligns with the short reign of a young emperor who went by the nickname Elagabalus. Elagabalus became king in 218 at age 14, and was assassinated by rivals, along with his mother, in 222. Elagabalus’ reign was full of sex scandals and disregard for tradition; he was a narcissistic teenager and an incompetent ruler.

The second Pluto Return peaked between 466–471 CE, only a few years before the Western Roman Empire’s official “fall” in 476. Multiple Roman leaders were assassinated during the 460s, in the brutal political style of the era, with the empire so disparate that no one was really in charge.

ENGLAND

I actually traced two different potential Pluto Return paths for England, one beginning with its original unification date in 927 CE, and one with William the Conquerors’ claiming of the throne for Normandy in 1066. Both dates match up to later Pluto Returns: the earlier date, which marked the consolidation of lands, has Pluto Returns during which significant shifts happened in territorial boundaries and alliances, while the later date maps mostly to changes in political leadership.

England was officially unified on July 7th, 927 CE, with Pluto at 21°55" Gemini. Using this date, its first Pluto Return peaked between 1171–1173, the first years of England’s invasion of Ireland and King Henry’s declaration of the English crown’s rule over Irish lands. The second PR took place 1416–1418, during the signing of the Treaty of Canterbury and while England built an alliance with the eastern Roman Empire against the French. The third time around, it was 1660–1662, when Charles II returned from exile after decades of civil wars, and restored the Stuart monarchy’s rule over Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

The fourth Pluto Return, 1905–1907, happened at the height of Britain’s colonial empire. During those years the nation signed treaties with both France (1904) and Russia (1907) that divided colonial territories and created alliances between the three countries, acts that are now understood to have been a central cause of Germany’s building resentment and of WWI. Also, in 1901, Queen Victoria died after 63 years in power. Her son Edward VII held the throne during the Pluto Return; in 1907 he was found to have cancer, and in 1910, he died after a nine-year reign.

In 1066, a people from northern France, the Normans, invaded England and overthrew the Anglo-Saxon monarchy that was established in 927. This event was led by a Norman duke who became known as William the Conqueror, and to whom today’s British monarchy is directly related. Pluto moved between 2° and 5° Pisces that year. When it came back around in 1310–1315, quality of life was deteriorating, culminating in the Great Famine that swept Europe between 1315–1317. The next time, 1555–1559, Queen Mary I, England’s first female monarch, took the throne. And in England’s most recent Pluto Return, peaking between 1800–1805, Great Britain (which had consisted of England, Wales and Scotland) merged with Ireland to became the United Kingdom. (Most of the specifics in this paragraph came from Ray Grasse’s article, also linked above. I always confirm any dates and planet placements I publish.)

Additionally, in the early 1800s, the UK was led by King George III, whose story is told in a 1994 movie called “The Madness of King George”. George III (whose madness also has a cameo in the play “Hamilton”) ruled from 1760–1810, and suffered from episodes of mental illness throughout his reign, possibly due to a rare, genetic blood disorder called porphyria. The events in the movie take place in 1786–1788, the timeframe of George III’s first big break with reality, which lasted over two years before he spontaneously recovered. By the early 1800s he was deteriorating physically as well as mentally, with bad cataracts that left him almost blind and pain from rheumatism. He had a short manic episode in 1804, at the height of the Pluto Return, and then one from which he never recovered in 1810. He didn’t fight the eventual decision to hand power over to his son.

SPAIN

Spain was unified in 1479, when King Ferdinand II of Aragorn ascended to the throne; his marriage to Queen Isabella of Castile ten years earlier meant that upon his ascendancy, the two largest kingdoms on the Iberian peninsula became one. That year Pluto moved between 28° Virgo and 3° Libra. When it came back around, 1724–1726, another mentally unwell leader was on the throne. King Phillip V, like George III, had a long reign spotted with manic episodes. He led Spain from 1700 to 1746 — except for a seven-month period in 1724, as the Pluto Return peaked, when he briefly abdicated the throne to his son Louis. Most historians agree that he abdicated because knew his condition made him unfit to rule. It’s also possible there were political reasons, but either way, Phillip V was known both for mania and for long depressive periods — for decades he made his entire court keep his schedule of doing business at night and sleeping all day. Ultimately the 1724 abdication didn't work, because Louis died of smallpox before a year was up, and Phillip V had no choice but to take back the throne.

Spain’s most recent Pluto Return was 1970–1973. In 1973, Francisco Franco, the dictator of nearly 40 years, resigned. Franco suffered from Parkinsons, a neurodegenerative disorder. Although his symptoms began in the 1960s, his diagnosis was hidden from the public until he took a sharp downward turn in 1972 and was forced to finally cede power the following year. In 1975, he died.

FRANCE

For France, we can start with the Treaty of Verdun on Aug. 10, 843, which lay the boundaries for current day France and Germany. That entire year, Pluto hovered at the very edgy 27°–29° Pisces, the last few degrees of the zodiac. It returned for the first time in 1087: that was the year that William the Conqueror — who, if you’ll recall, was originally from Normandy but had crossed the channel to declare himself King of England in 1066 — died. Normandy is a small region in what is now northern France, directly across the water from England. At the time of his death, William had returned there, in part to challenge his eldest son, Robert, who was allied with Phillip I, the King of France. (France, of course, wanted Normandy back for itself.) When William died, Robert inherited Normandy. Although it would take another hundred years before Normandy was fully joined with France, after William the Conqueror’s death it was never again fully controlled by the English crown.

Next up, France’s second Pluto Return, 1331–1334. More messiness between France and England — in 1328 King Charles IV of France dies, opening up a power struggle that escalates over the next decade and initiates the Hundred Years War in 1337. The third Pluto Return, 1575–1579, took place at the bloody height of the French Wars of Religion between Catholics and Protestants (then known as Huguenots). And finally, at the fourth return, the emperor Napoleon died. Because we know the exact date of the Treaty of Verdun, we also have exact dates for each of France’s Pluto Returns: the fourth one was exact for the first time on May 6th, 1821. Napoleon, who surrendered himself to the British in 1815 and spent the rest of his days in exile on an island, had died on May 5th.

RUSSIA

In 1462, Ivan the Great took the throne in Russia for a reign that would last until 1505. Ivan vastly expanded Russian territory, consolidated power in Moscow, and introduced a new legal codex; he’s credited with laying the foundations of the Russian State. Pluto was at 22 Leo in 1462, and it first returned 1706–1709. St. Petersberg had been founded by Peter the Great in 1703, a move which went on to hugely impact Russia’s relationship with Europe by establishing a capital with a coastline much closer to western centers on the continent. The third Pluto Return peaked 1952–1953. The death of Joseph Stalin, dictator since 1924, took place on March 5th, 1953.

If you’re thinking, did those m-fers do anything else but chase power and go to war? …I’m with you. Of course, this is Wikipedia-level history — there’s more to a country than its bloodthirsty ruling class, but I don’t have the broad, deep, full-scope understanding of history I’d need to speak to more than that. I also didn’t venture beyond my grade-school comfort zone knowledge of (mostly) western European history. So in that sense these observations are limited. It’s also true that leaders die and borders change all the time, not only when there’s a Pluto Return. But these examples, I feel, are transformative, a Pluto keyword. They are moments when each country was forced into evolution.

In the US, we’re only on Pluto Return #1. What big change are we going through? How are we being called to evolve? As I discussed in this series’ first essay, America’s relationship to Pluto is… different. No other nations have industrialized death to emerge as a global hegemon the way this country did. It feels like a theft that Pluto won’t stand for, a history that can no longer possibly be invisible.

But visibility isn’t just headlines and textbooks. It’s the rousing of the great white wound, the racism and hatred and fear that lives in so much of the American soma and that is showing itself so shamelessly today. True evolution would be an exorcism of these energies — but what would that look like? How could we get there? What sacrifices would it take?

It’s well-known that President Biden spoke with a stutter growing up, but that he mostly considers himself to have “overcome it” as an adult. He addressed it during his 2020 campaign more directly than ever before. These two articles, from The New Yorker and The Atlantic, written by journalists who stutter themselves, give nuanced and compassionate analyses of Biden’s stutter and how it might still be affecting him. And in an LA Times article, Biden’s sister remembers their mother encouraging him by saying things like, “You’re so smart, you can’t get the words out fast enough”.

All this makes so much sense in the context of Biden’s birth chart (see image below). The red arrow shape on the left-most point of the chart is 3° Sagittarius, Biden’s rising degree. Right above it, you can see Venus, the Sun, and Mercury, all in the 12th house in Scorpio. This is a fascinating combination of energies: Scorpio and the 12th house are both known for a withdrawn, hidden nature, while early Sagittarius is full of exuberance, passion and evangelism. And while planets in the 12th house are known to be “hard to access” or “behind the veil”, the rising degree is the most external layer of someone’s personality.

So Biden’s mother’s comment is probably accurate: psychological Scorpio keeps churning deep thoughts out of the 12th house, while Sagittarius rising takes them and runs, but predictably struggles to maintain full expression of everything that surfaces.

Biden’s Moon is in the bottom right quadrant, at 00° Taurus. This explains the rugged determination with which he worked “through” his stutter — apparently for years he practiced reciting Irish poetry with rocks in his mouth—and perhaps also the part of him that has been stubborn about admitting its lingering effects. The emotional resilience of the Taurus Moon also corresponds to the fact that despite being mocked for his stutter, Biden was popular, even serving as class president his senior year.

And, although his path to the political heights did unfold alongside some unusual twists of fate, Biden knew from a young age that he wanted power. Scorpio is known for its awareness of subconscious psychological dynamics: it has an instinct for what makes people tick, and can play the political game well, especially the behind-the-scenes parts. Scorpio is not so great at shaking hands and kissing babies, but with his Sagittarius rising, Biden has always had both bases covered. It’s my guess that the gaffe-prone, wide-smile vibe he’s been known for is both authentic and calculated. The Sag part of him is on stage just being itself, while the Scorpio part is strategizing and directing from the wings.

There are lots of interesting parts of Biden’s chart: for example, Saturn on the descendent, which, eerily, was the exact location of the Moon on both the day of the tragic car accident and the day of the 2020 election. But for better or worse, in this analysis, we have to focus on the lunar nodes. I want to keep this article grounded in provable reality as much as possible, but the story I see in the astrology — especially in terms of Biden’s current transits — means there’s no escaping some discussion of past lives and karma.

In the top right quadrant of the full chart, you can see the north node in Virgo (beige, horseshoe-shaped glyph) conjunct Chiron in Leo (blue glyph with k-shape). In the bottom left, you can see the south node in Pisces (upside-down horseshoe). Biden’s Sun, at 27° Scorpio, is only three degrees off from a square to the nodes, a placement that means his karmic story is central to his identity in this lifetime. His Sun and Venus are also in exact squares to Chiron, an uncomfortable aspect that indicates tension between his public role and his up-close persona.

Biden’s south node is at 00° Pisces in the 3rd house. The south node is a point in the chart that is a portal to past lives. We’ll stay out of that rabbit-hole, but because because of the 3rd house placement, we can infer that Biden’s karma has something to do with his inner circle, the advisors and fellow pols he sees on a regular basis, and the communication between them.

His north node is in the 9th house — an area of the chart that has a wide reach, in contrast to the localized nature of the 3rd. The 9th house can relate to teacher or guru figures, international travel/impact, and the moral stance someone takes in public. The north node gives information about the way a person needs to orient themselves to evolve out of their karma. Biden’s north node tells us he has work to do, maybe even a destiny to fulfill, as a leader — professionally but in a more human, almost spiritual sense as well. His framing of the fight against the MAGA movement as a “battle for the soul of the nation” comes to mind: it evokes the mysticism that is 9th house territory, and also embodies the north node’s sense of inherent duty.

Yet right next to the north node is Chiron in Leo. Chiron in the natal chart indicates a karmic weak point, a place in life where we feel predisposed to mistakes, failures or just plain bad luck. In my opinion, this is why Biden inspires as much revulsion as he does inspiration. Chiron and the north node together in the 9th house speak to someone who likely has a destiny as a teacher or public figure, but who will ultimately trip over their own feet, maybe many times, as they move in that direction.

When you throw in the sign combination of Leo and Virgo, you have a mixture of arrogance and humility that I think epitomizes Biden’s mystique. I experience it personally: I’m grossed out by his voting record, his whole-hearted embrace of neoliberalism, and his condescending tone towards progressives and the vaccine-hesitant — but I’m inspired by his resilience through hardships in his personal life, and I have a certain respect for his decades in Washington. Throw in the Sag/Scorpio combo of his rising/Sun signs, and you can see why I think his chart looks like a politician’s chart: he’s fake but real, full of himself but endearingly authentic. And, he has both the devotion and the hubris that it takes to climb to the top.

Yet the Virgo/NN alignment takes on a different meaning in the context of the current transits, and the potential scenario of Biden’s neurodegenerative disease. Biden is attempting to fulfill his legacy by ushering in the post-Trump era. Could pride keep him from acknowledging a painful reality? Chiron, after all, is Greek mythology’s “wounded healer”, and it’s not unusual for his placements to relate to health issues, or physical weak points that have their roots in karma. I think it’s possible that Chiron is sabotaging Biden’s genuine attempt to put his lifetime of service to use at this crucial moment in American history.

Most of my personal journey with dementia is still too raw to share publicly right now, but I want to open one window into my experience because it speaks to what puts me on edge about Biden. Although it’s impossible to compare or quantify the challenges of different phases of the disease, when I look back on the moments that were the absolute hardest, high on the list is breaking the seal of silence about a person’s cognitive decay, naming the impossible reality. This is where I am afraid that Biden’s inner circle could fall very short.

My mom started getting sick in her late 50s, and the disease took her body at age 66. She never had a formal diagnosis, but her symptoms, including her age and the speed at which the degeneration progressed, were mostly consistent with fronto-temporal dementia. Our family situation was incredibly fortunate, with my sisters, my dad and I all sharing the weight of her care over the last three years of her life.

In the few years before that, though, there was a collective familial limbo. My sisters and I each lived in different states and whole-family communication was sparse. I worried about my mom’s memory after some conversations, but after others could convince myself that she was just being her normal, silly self. On a family trip in 2017, her behavior was so unexplainable that we all had to acknowledge the problem together, but it took another year before we settled into the realization that things weren’t going to get better. A memory that still makes me wince is the conversation with my dad about how she probably shouldn’t drive anymore. Especially for him, the person whose future was most intimately wrapped with hers, the acceptance process was arduous.

What I want to emphasize is how mentally messy things can get — and how strong denial can be. In Elizabeth Kubler Ross’ framework, denial is the first stage of any grief, even when there’s no realistic question as to a loved one’s condition. But diseases like Alzheimers and dementia force victims and loved ones into a uniquely uncomfortable grey area before they are diagnosed. There are good days and bad days, good weeks and bad weeks, and when your mind is tangled with the mind of the person who is sick, it’s really, really hard to see a truth you don’t want to see. You overlook signs that seem obvious in hindsight because a subliminal mechanism is at work, diverting you away from the too-terrible-to-confront reality. Towards the end, before the dam of acceptance breaks, your whole being goes into overdrive trying to counter it all.

This might be slightly less true in situations with folks of Biden’s age than my mom’s, since neurodegenerative diseases are more common in that demographic. But in Biden’s specific case it applies, because he has not only a family but a massive immediate network of people whose central focus — and purpose — is him. Especially if they are used to him being a little weird, unpredictable and flamboyant already, it could be very easy for them to collectively look away, pretending to themselves that all is well, for much too long.

Of course, the shape of the acceptance process depends a lot on whether or not the person who is ill is conscious of their illness. My mom’s disease progressed so fast that my parents were still looking at therapeutic approaches to her symptoms when her driving became unsafe. One of the saddest parts of the whole situation was that by the time we accepted we were dealing with some kind of dementia, mom was too far gone to register her own diagnosis. But other types of dementia, including Alzheimer’s, progress more slowly, so an afflicted person is more likely to have agency in their post-diagnosis decisions.

When it comes to Biden… again, it’s Chiron that worries me. If the legacy he wants to leave as President becomes compromised by his health, will he have the humility to somehow step aside? Or will his pride get the best of him, leading him into dangerous territory in our polarized and potentially violent historical moment?

Astrologically, everything I’ve shared about Biden would be interesting, but a lot less meaningful, if the nodal alignment in his birth chart was not being activated right now. But it is: Biden’s south node will be crossed by both Jupiter and Saturn over the course of his presidency, and the transiting south node is in Scorpio 2022–2023, sweeping through all his 12th house personal planets and squaring Chiron and the nodes. So as we near the end of this winding road, here are my thoughts on what that’s all about.

The rabbit-hole I want to avoid with the south node is any attempt to “read” Biden’s past lives, or to speculate beyond what the astrological archetypes speak to. Without going there, what we know is that Biden’s south node is in Pisces in the 3rd house. The 3rd house is about one’s inner circle and local geography, as well as the traditional associations of siblings and neighbors. It’s also about how we communicate within these day-to-day relationships. Pisces is a water sign, and the last sign of the zodiac, associated with dreams, spirituality and creativity, but also with a shadow side of delusion, escapism, and states of mind like those caused by dementia, in which one’s grip on reality is not solid.

When a transiting planet crosses over the south node, it tends to activate familiar dynamics, maybe bringing back behavioral or relational patterns you thought you’d grown out of. And any transit to the south node activates the north node too, opening up an evolutionary avenue, an opportunity to make new choices and rewrite destiny. Jupiter crossed Biden’s south node three times in 2021. Saturn will cross the same point once on March 7th, 2023, and return to station direct there on Nov. 4th. Jupiter is known for expansion and faith, and is traditionally auspicious but can also morph into “too much”; Saturn is the opposite, representing contraction, boundaries, endings, and meetings with the cold, hard truth.

During Jupiter’s transit, what if Biden’s inner circle was in denial, failing to challenge him even if they did feel like something was wrong? What if Saturn’s transit, this coming year, is when everyone has to face facts?

Moreover, the transiting nodes were in an exact square to Biden’s nodes on Jan. 17, 2022, and the south node spent the rest of the year transiting his 12th house personal planets. The workings of the 12th house are mysterious: what happens there is not usually visible in the material world. Like Pisces, it’s associated with states of consciousness that aren’t fully grounded in reality. The south node by transit is like a cosmic vacuum cleaner, coming through once every 18 years and tugging at layers of self it’s time to shed. It’s also activating the square to Chiron, where the shifting reality in Biden’s personal planets conflicts with the public role his ego would like to play.

It’s significant too that Uranus is transiting Biden’s 6th house — the area of the chart associated with daily routine and health — and opposing all his Scorpio planets in the 12th. Uranus has a tendency to bring unexpected events and information that drops in from nowhere. It pushes us out of our comfort zones and asks us to accept new paradigms. Even if I’m wrong about the dementia — Biden is aging, and given this astrology, his health situation is unlikely to stay the same.

A m I cherry-picking associations here, to back up a conclusion I’ve already settled on? Yes, totally. Out of context, there are a zillion other circumstances this astrology could describe. However, the Pluto Return history adds a less-malleable angle: at least six of the Pluto Returns I researched coincided with the deaths of national leaders, in addition to three more (Edward VII, George III, Philip V) who were ill during during the Pluto Return period. And of course, Biden’s age makes his health a natural question regardless of any astrological arguments.

When it comes to an assessment of the President’s actual behavior, I’ll be the first to say that Biden seems coherent in many of the recent videos I’ve watched. And in older videos, like this 60 Minutes interview from 2009, it’s clear that his tendency to go off-script with long-winded answers is not a new development. In this touching 2015 appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, you can hear both Biden’s emotional sincerity, and his stutter.

As President, Biden has granted the press far less access than average. While Trump, Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton all gave around 20–25 press conferences per year, Biden’s average so far is 10. He gave just 23 sit-down interviews in a timeframe during which Trump gave 95, and Obama gave 187. He uses a teleprompter for most speeches, which is typical, although less so for him: Biden is quoted in this 2013 GQ article saying “ ‘the joke is that Barack is learning to speak without a teleprompter, and I’m learning to speak with one’ ”. There’s that Sag rising.

But when Biden speaks from a teleprompter now, like in this Jan. 12, 2023 address, he often lacks inflection and punctuation, as if he’s not quite keeping up with the structure of the sentences he’s saying. And when he speaks off the cuff, sometimes he’s impossible to follow. In an interview from Feb. 2022 with historian Heather Cox Richardson, the first question Richardson asks Biden is about his nomination of Ketanji Brown-Jackson to the Supreme Court. Biden’s response lasts over six minutes and jumps from his time as a professor at UPenn, to the speed of technological development, to the decline of democracy and the uniqueness of the American dream, to his son Beau’s death, to why he ran for President; he never ties it back to Brown-Jackson even for a moment. And that’s with editing. All his high-profile sit-down interviews — like with CNN’s Jake Tapper, or on “60 Minutes” with Scott Pelley— are obviously heavily edited.

Then there are the uber-cringes. In October, 2022, a month after Congresswoman Jackie Walorski died in a car accident, Biden attended an event she’d helped organize, and asked on camera if she was around. His press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, tried to spin it as a normal inquiry. In September, he had trouble finding his way off the stage at a UN event. In July, he appeared to accidentally read out loud instructions on his teleprompter; the White House released a transcript of his remarks attempting to clarify the matter, but… well, you watch it and then decide. He’s had some angry outbursts, like in January when he called a Fox News reporter a “stupid son of a bitch”. In 2021 he appeared to forget the name of the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, as well as his own defense secretary, Lloyd Austin.

Biden has never released the results of a cognitive test to the public, and the last time he released the results of any kind of medical evaluation was in 2021. The most recent info I could find on the subject is a Nov. 2022 article in the tabloid The Daily Mail. Unfortunately, the majority of the “reporting” on the President’s cognitive health comes from dubious sources known for nastiness and embellishment. The Daily Mail is no exception, but this piece is relatively grounded, describing Biden joking with reporters about his health over Thanksgiving weekend, and Jean-Pierre’s later assertion that he had completed “part” of his physical. In clips from the press briefing, Jean-Pierre just gives… exhaustion.

In 2020, when CBS news anchor Errol Barnett asked then-candidate Biden about his age and the possibility of a cognitive test, Biden shot back “no, I haven’t taken a test! Why the hell would I take a test?” The 2021 physical he released declared him “healthy” and “vigorous”, but there was no mention of the MoCA test for cognitive health that Trump bragged about “acing” in 2020. A few times during his presidency, Republican lawmakers have started petitions asking Biden to share cognitive test results, but their efforts haven’t gone anywhere and seem mostly for show. Now that they’re in charge of the House of Representatives, I am curious to see if this agenda moves forward.

In any case, to me, Biden’s avoidance of the subject just smells like Chiron.

“A Pluto-style transformation doesn’t happen overnight,” Michael Lutin wrote in 2006 in Vanity Fair. “Events that seem at first random and explosive don’t come out of nowhere. They have been brewing and simmering for years.”

This is Pluto’s nature. In Greek mythology, Pluto’s precursor Hades sometimes wore “the Helm of Hades”, a helmet that made its wearer invisible. And Pluto transits tend to manifest as events that sneak up on us, surfacing from the psychological underworld years after they first take root. In Biden’s chart, Pluto has been approaching a square to his Moon, which will complete between 2023–2024. Pluto/Moon aspects are notoriously challenging, and are almost guaranteed to have an element of reveal, since the Moon also relates to the unconscious, though on a much more personal level than Pluto.

Interestingly, Vanity Fair dropped Michael Lutin’s column the month after his Pluto in Capricorn piece was published. Lutin posted a note to readers on his website saying that he couldn’t “personally answer the thousands of people wondering what happened to the VF Planetarium,” and suggested “maybe you should ask them [Vanity Fair]”. Although I’m sure there’s a more legitimate explanation, I would not expect VF’s editor, Graydon Carter, basically a pillar of the American elite, to approve of Lutin’s anti-establishment predictions.

But there’s no stopping Pluto — there’s only avoidance of the omens, until the truth has to be faced. Whether or not Joe Biden is sick, the US Pluto Return is here, and something is surfacing hard and fast: the violent core of this country’s story, and the question of what it means to truly repair the atrocities committed in the name of America’s growth. Trump’s election in 2016 was one part of the reveal; the pandemic and January 6th were another. The historical record of Pluto Returns shows that whatever this is, it’s not over yet.

Since Pluto’s transition into Aquarius overlaps with the US Pluto Return, right now there are two destabilizing events happening at once. Pluto in Aquarius could bring revolutionary technology, disruptions like supply-chain breakdowns or widespread black-outs, and maybe even extraterrestrial “disclosure”. The transit lasts twenty years, so it’s not all likely to happen immediately, but I imagine that journalists will have plenty of other stories to focus on. So, unless there’s a severe, obvious drop in Biden’s coherency, we may not hear much about his health at all. If he decides not to run for president in 2024, I think it’s possible that he could make it through his term without disclosing a diagnosis, even if he has one, propped up and covered for by the Dems.

Neptune’s long transit through Pisces (2010–2026) is another influence that makes it hard to tell what’s really going on. Both Neptune and Pisces are associated with the dream-like state of dementia. Collectively, the transit speaks to our social media/video game/Netflix etc addiction, and the way so much of our consciousness is being absorbed by the virtual world. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of truths come out when Neptune enters Aries in 2026, but before then, it will be hard to see all sides of anything, including world affairs.

That’s a big reason why I’m closing this essay in a way that invites you to “do your own research”. I recognize this as an infuriating aspect of the conspiracy propaganda I’ve watched: films like “Plandemic” and “Out of Shadows” showcase a bunch of cherry-picked “evidence” that insinuates something outrageous, but finish without piecing together a comprehensive narrative to underlie it all. In this case, I’ve tried to tell the story as cleanly as possible, knowing I’m nowhere close to fully “objective.” But when it comes to specifics — for example, is there a diagnosis? How many people are aware? Are meds involved? etc etc — I don’t know, and I’m not going to pretend to. I think the situation is messy, fluid, human, almost “quantum” for lack of a better word, with simultaneous mutations happening in an opaque field and no single influence determining it all. We can’t know what’s going on, and from a divination perspective, maybe we shouldn’t even try, especially if it distracts us from the on-the-ground soul-work we’re really here to do.

But I wrote this article because these astrological narratives have helped me situate myself within this larger-than-life mess, and I hope they can do that for you, too. Astrology lets us peek behind the scenes, if not at the inner workings of the cosmos, then at least at its stage directions. And if we believe that the principles of the double-slit experiment apply to our material world (a totally pseudoscientific claim, of course) peeking at the cosmic blueprint could potentially have an effect on how it manifests.

Maybe even a positive, stabilizing effect.

I want to finish with a quote from one of my favorite Plutonian thinkers, Octavia E. Butler. In the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Butler rose to prominence as one of the first Black, female sci-fi writers to achieve mainstream success. Her novels from those years, especially the Parable novels, written in the 90s, have proved eerily prescient as the current era unfolds. In a 2000 Essence magazine article entitled “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future”, Butler discusses the challenge of putting the pieces of the present together in a way that realistically envisions the future, especially when the way things are going doesn’t look so great. I think this quote sums up my own philosophy behind this work.

Butler writes:

“So why try to predict the future at all if it’s so difficult, so nearly impossible? Because making predictions is one way to give warning when we see ourselves drifting in dangerous directions. Because prediction is a useful way of pointing out safer, wiser courses. Because, most of all, our tomorrow is the child of our today. Through thought and deed, we exert a great deal of influence over this child, even though we can’t control it absolutely. Best to think about it, though. Best to try to shape it into something good. Best to do that for any child.”

Thanks for reading! This and all my other astrological research is a labor of love. If you want to help fuel the downloads, buy me a coffee! If you’re interested in a one-on-one astrology reading, learn more here.

If you want more political astrology, you’ll probably like my ebook, Astrology for Apocalypse. You can also jump back to the beginning of this series here.