Sedna's Lament: A Cosmic Symphony for a Regenerative Epoch

We are witnessing some rare and unprecedented astrological transits that exhibit unusual synchronicity and symmetry

Why Astrology & Why Now?

We live in an interregnum, at the edge of a new and uncertain epoch. The 11,000+ year Holocene ended with the controlled splitting of the atom, according to geoscientists, and with it, apparently, a stable climate that has sustained Western Civilization. Now we find ourselves at a precipice of radical change, staring into the abyss.

The heavens, meanwhile, are resounding with the music of the spheres. Our solar system is reflecting radical change back to us in surprising synchronicity, and in a way that should prompt us to question our assumptions about humans and climate chaos.

While I’ve touched on some of this archetypal astrology in previous Beats, and partially addressed it more recently with Matthew Green on Resonant World, these various transits are demanding to be synthesized in relation to the great sociocultural and psychospiritual pivot we’re all feeling right now.

One by one, the slowest-moving, most spiritually significant planets in our solar system are ‘cusping,’ dancing back-and-forth from one constellation to another (egressing/ingressing), all within a very tight window of time, cosmologically speaking. Considering their coherence, it would be reasonable to conclude that they’re setting the archetypal scene in motion for decades to come.

It’s a rare convergence in itself. Even rarer still is the way they’re going about it: not in isolation from one another in some random way; but rather, in a harmonious chord that spans three 60 degree octaves, with a ‘trine’ (120 deg.) forming between the outer two, which happen to be the slowest moving by far.

That cosmic troublemaker Pluto is on the first cusp that has our attention, Neptune and Saturn are conjoined at the next one, and Sedna is now being joined by Uranus on the third cosmological cusp. And they’re all entering new constellations in sextile aspects to one another in the arc of the Pluto/Sedna Trine.

This planetary pattern is (in-)forming a cosmic symphony, a Gaian chord resonating throughout the solar system. Or maybe we could say a solar system chord resonating with Gaia’s various spheres? Consider the possibilities biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who first postulated “morphic fields of resonance” in living systems, first raised in the Journal of Consciousness Studies under the heading “Is the Sun Conscious”:

“The recent panpsychist turn in philosophy opens the possibility that self-organizing systems at all levels of complexity, including stars and galaxies, might have experience, awareness, or consciousness. The organismic or holistic philosophy of nature points in the same direction. Meanwhile, field theories of consciousness propose that some electromagnetic fields actually are conscious, and that these fields are by their very nature integrative. When applied to the sun, such field theories suggest a possible physical basis for the solar mind, both within the body of the sun itself and also throughout the solar system.”

This salient ‘systems thinking’ worldview can help us to better understand why patterns we detect in the solar system, relative to constellations we’ve identified over time, can at least be correlated with, if not actually influence, events that transpire here on Earth. As Sheldrake puts it: “These organized systems are all nested hierarchies. At each level, the whole includes the parts. The parts are literally within the wholes. At each level the whole is more than the sum of the parts, with properties that cannot be predicted from the study of parts in isolation.”

Thus astrology!

And however you look at it, this current synchronous procession of the outer planets is really rather remarkable! These ‘sextiles’ (60 deg) and trines are thought to be the most favorable aspects between planets (vs. squares, conjunctions, and oppositions, the so-called ‘hard’ aspects). If they were all square and opposed to one another, astrologers would all be doom-saying.

Instead - if we dare - there is reason for optimism to be found here in this spread of cosmological tarot cards by which we sleep and dream.

Archetypes Matter!

The outer planets have long been correlated with generational changes, due to how long it takes them to move through the zodiac relative to the inner planets and the moon. Because they are way out there, and we didn’t even see most of them for most of our recorded history, these outliers are characterized in astrology as the “transcendental” planets, most closely associated with spiritual characteristics and trends over time. Looking backwards in historical context, their relative influences have been observed to coincide with social revolts, expression of collective ideals and, periodically, deep societal transformations. See, e.g.: Cosmos & Psyche, by Prof. Richard Tarnas, Ph.D.

For reasons that can best be explained by considering Jung and Pauli’s synchronicity (i.e., reality is pscho-physical), and Bohm’s postulate of an implicate order that underlies all phenomena, the archetypes we’ve intuitively assigned to these planets invariably seem to be reflected in society’s own mass movements and unexpected turns. It’s uncanny, really, as any fair reader of Tarnas’ empirical studies would be forced by logic to conclude. Science and spirituality are not as different or far apart as we tend to think they are.

Each planet’s unique archetypal associations influences different aspects of society, culture and psyche or, stated differently, interacts in different ways with the Psychosphere. Ingressions mark not just changes in mood or large themes, but often can signal tectonic shifts in consciousness itself. When these outer planets interact with one another (aspects) at symmetrical angles, including conjunctions, the archetypes interact, too. All the outer planets acting in concert like they are right now is giving rise to a new and different zeitgeist, or spiritual character, of the coming era.

As you will see below, we are not merely undergoing big changes — we’re actually at a rites-of-passage moment for all of humanity. Sean Kelly, PhD, a professor of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness studies, suggests that this new epoch could end up being called the Gaianthropocene, depending on how we humans exercise our agency, both individually and collectively, in response to chaos and crisis. This planetary alignment seems to support such a major paradigm shift.

Let’s take a look...

I. Pluto in Aquarius: The Underworld Streaming Live!

The backstory for this procession begins in Capricorn - Pluto’s authoritarian, patriarchal domain - when he was visited there by Saturn (structure) and Jupiter (force-multiplier) in 2020, in a rare and weighty triple-conjunction that just happened to coincide with the United States’ “Pluto Return” (Pluto’s complete cycle around the zodiac since the 1776 birth of a nation). This also coincided with the beginning of the pandemic - Pluto unleashed! - and culminated with the storming of the U.S. Capitol (“It’s 1776!”) — a collective descent into the ‘underworld’ of our unresolved traumas, including the Civil War. Pluto, whose influence always seems to expose corruption and rot, dredged up all the karmic sludge of our capitalist history: slavery, misogyny, genocide, colonization; i.e., the power-over archetype of the father. We saw the underbelly of our system exposed - The 1619 Project; George Floyd; Standing Rock; Trump - revealing that these traumas we thought to be in our past were still being carried in our political body.

Pluto, abductor of Persephone, would not let us look away.

Obviously, we’re still living with the fallout from all that upheaval, which hasn’t played itself out quite yet, but at least we can be grateful that Pluto has finally moved on from his goat house of horrors, Capricorn, which he’d entered in 2008, squaring Saturn and triggering a global financial meltdown that really exposed the game. He’s now moved on to the early degrees of Aquarius — a shift that is being felt in every cell of our traumatized collective being.

Sure, Trump keeps flinging shit like a zoo monkey on Adderall, but it doesn’t really seem to be sticking anymore, does it? Especially with the egress of Pope Francis and the ingress of Pope Leo, something feels different, perhaps like the pride (on steroids!) before the fall. How is it landing with you?

Aquarius is the airy sign of the future, of systems and networks, of decentralization and innovation. Like Pluto himself, Aquarius represents the creation of the world as well as its destruction, the ‘Water Bearer’ embodying the archetype of cyclic death and renewal, like Shiva’s ancient dance. As Pluto transits Aquarius over the next two decades, power will no longer reside on thrones or in corporate boardrooms, but will be found instead in systems of encoded, collective intelligence. AI is just one early manifestation of this emerging matrix.

The Aquarian revolt will not be defined by machines replacing humans - that’s a Capricornian meme. Instead, it will be more about all of us learning/remembering that humanity is already a distributed network of sentience! That Gaia herself is a neural web of intelligent life, as Western science continues to learn. That’s much more Aquarian in character.

Have no doubt. One way or the other, this new ‘Age of Aquarius’ will also be a Gaian Age. If I’m wrong, it won’t matter because there won’t be anyone around to refute me!

Pluto’s age-ending agenda continues to compost the rotting remains of patriarchy, colonialism, and extractive empire, preparing the ground for a radically different form of civilized order. This new, ecological civilization (as China calls it) will represent a quantum leap from the last 11,000 years - a higher systems order rooted in the 3 R’s of the Gainthropocentric Age: relationship, reciprocity, and regenerative intelligence.

Don’t be quick to dismiss this as pollyannish projection. It is, instead, completely in accord with a recently discovered law of systems, called “Prigogine’s theory of dissipative structures,” for which the Italian scientist was awarded a Nobel prize in physics. This observed law of nature essentially holds that chaos increases in any system until it reaches a critical phase where the whole system breaks down, a catalyst is introduced, and then the system re-orders itself at a higher of integrated activity - not unlike an electron jumping from one valence to the next without ever appearing in between.

Now THAT’S spiritual alchemy! Only it’s scientific reality, as well. We can see it!

And speaking of quantum jumps...

II. Saturn and Neptune at the Alpha Point: Spirit Meets Karma on the Threshold of a Dream

While Pluto amplifies Aquarius’ death/rebirth predilections, revealing the dawn of a new era for all who have eyes to see, two other solar titans — Saturn and Neptune — are preparing the stage with an exquisite dance at the very cusp of the zodiac, crossing back and forth over this threshold three times each. Saturn, the jeweler of time and the architect of karma, now lingers in the late, transformative degrees of Pisces, while Neptune, the oceanic mystic of dream time, plant medicine (dissolving boundaries), ideals, and tidal forces, has already begun his ingress into the early degrees of Aries. Their dance floor is the Aries Zero Point — the blurry boundary between the end and simultaneous beginning of the great cosmic chakra, or wheel.

Rather than viewing this portentous meeting as a clash of opposites, as it tends to be depicted, we can see it instead as a most sacred convergence. Saturn represents structure, time, and the unavoidability of cause and effect. If Pluto is Lord of the Underworld, then Saturn is Lord of Karma. Neptune is Lord of the Spirit Realm and collective unconscious.

There’s no reason to see these two forces in binary terms. Karma, after all, is a spiritual law. Saturn constructs. Neptune consecrates. Joining forces in this propitious alignment at this auspicious, pivotal time, these two transcendent and imminent archetypes portend a coming paradigm shift of seemingly everything everywhere all at once. We find ourselves in a chaotic profusion that seems like it has to break one way or the other “WHEN will it break!?” - and the catalyst, in retrospect, could end up being something as simple as a surprising new Pope emerging to play Christ to Trump’s Anti-Christ on the fields of Armageddon (Gaza!). Just spit-ballin’ here.

Neptune crossing into Aries is Spirit rising from the depths of our origin, and plunging into the alchemical fire of the tense present. He represents the mystic as spiritual warrior, healer as social activist. Aries, with its Spring Equinox, is the perfect starry sector to usher in a time of natural rebirth, change, and growth. Saturn’s stern presence ensures that this spiritual flame does not burn indiscriminately — it must be contained, grounded in reality, integrated with the past, or suffer the fate of Icarus.

We’re beginning to witness a lot of cultural figures who are ‘being lived’ - as Joseph Campbell called it when we do not live our myth - by the Icarus myth right now. I can even think of one who is flying a 500 million dollar winged chariot too close to the sun, his face turning orange and red!

At this ultimately transformative, cutting edge of the zodiac, we are tasked with completing a long cycle of illusion, delusion, deception, and collective spiritual bypassing, and are being asked to muster all of our disciplined (Saturnian) forces that we may step boldly into a new age of collective, embodied awakening.

I think the phrase ‘embodied awakening’ is a good synthesis of Saturn and Neptune’s spiritual energies. “Woke” may well be a pejorative term at the beginning of such a major shift in consciousness, but that’s just our Capricorn hangover talking.

Maybe Pope Leo is the harbinger of this paradigm shift:

To wake up in a world that is sleeping and dreaming is not just “Gospel,” it also happens to be what the Prince of the Shakya clan did under the Bodhi tree 2500+ years ago. No shame in that!

This alpha/omega point is where karma and redemption now dance the tango. It’s not enough just to dream the new world into being. We must be willing to build it — brick by spiritual brick.

My new favorite spiritual term, which I mention here in honor of the new Pope, is “atonement” - a beautiful word derived from the phrase ‘at one in harmony’. At-one-ment. It’s primary definition today is “satisfaction or reparation for a wrong or injury.”

I suspect this ideal could come to characterize the paradigm shift that is now just beginning to emerge from - and as a product of - all the chaos. Indigenous people and Gaia would approve!

As potent as this conjunction may seem, let’s now take another quantum leap to witness a cosmic event that has the potential to be even more revelatory than that!!!

III. Sedna and Uranus in Gemini Yab/Yum: Lightning Ignites Oceanic Mind

Sextile again to this Pisces/Aries cusp of spirit and structure, Sedna and Uranus enter Gemini. Here, perhaps, is the cosmic lodestone we are seeking — the melodic key that ties the emerging cosmic symphony all together.

Not many astrologers want to discuss Sedna, it seems. Likely because she is so new that they want to wait and see what associations develop. But come on all you archetypal seers and astrologers - we don’t have the luxury of time here. We have a real meta-crisis on our hands!

Sedna is the most distant planet in our solar system, with an orbit so vast it defies our calendars. In fact, the last time Sedna entered Gemini was 11,000+ years ago; that is, the beginning of the Holocene Age that gave rise to human civilization. In other words, Sedna’s Gemini return is epochal!

This is a deep-time re-set of epic magnitude. After all, from the psychophysical, quantum worldview of Jung and Pauli, there is no such thing as coincidence. It is psychophysical turtles all the way down in Sedna’s realm! She was discovered in 2003, and named for an Inuit sea goddess — the first planetary body to be named outside the Greco-Roman pantheon. How’s THAT for an epic re-set?

Sedna’s story is one of profound betrayal: cast into the sea by an angry father-god, who severed her fingers as she attempted to claw her way back onto his boat. And you thought YOUR family was dysfunctional?! But guess what? From Sedna’s tragic wounds sprang new life!

Her severed, swollen fingers became the whales, seals, and big fish of the sea. Sedna surrendered unto the depths of her intended watery dungeon and transmuted into the sovereign goddess of the deep. It bears mentioning here that, as archetypes go, the ocean represents both our unconscious and our origin story.

Is this not a story for our time? Transforming trauma into abundant life through transformative, selfless benevolence? This strikes me as an archetype that all Indigenous and Settler psyches can rally behind as we enlist Gaia as our ally in the struggle to survive the karmic consequences of the colonialist, industrial age!

Sedna, we’re glad we met ya!

For most of our living memory, Sedna has been in earthy Taurus, suffering through decades of stubborn over-consumption, commodification, and eco-psychological dismemberment and disconnection. Now she has entered Gemini, the sign of meaning, duality, and speech - just as we begin speaking with Sedna’s whales! The glyph for Gemini depicts two pillars joined at the top and bottom, which symbolizes the union of intellect and intuition.

Beginning to sense the pattern now, the oceans, like Indigenous people themselves, are starting to find their voice, demanding that their dignity, integrity and sovereignty be restored. Just like Sedna’s was after also being traumatized by her patriarch, becoming a symbol of Gaia’s own climate trauma. For 11,000 years, it seems, we have been repressing and oppressing the divine feminine in everything, up to and including Mother Earth.

But take heart! Uranus, harbinger of awakening and revolutionary upheaval, including scientific breakthroughs, now joins Sedna in Gemini after his own extended vacation in Taurus. When he arrives, it will be like lightning striking deep, turbulent waters. Uranus breaks open stagnant systems and shocks the collective psyche with timely revelations.

In Gemini, an air sign ruled by Mercury, the winged messenger of the god realm, this should portend sudden breakthroughs in communication, media, language, and consciousness itself. One can assume these sudden changes will be in support and aid of Sedna, who embodies the deeply wounded Earth at the level of feelings and emotions. Uranus is the Lord of the skies. Sedna, Goddess of the Sea. How many creation stories begin with these two in union?

Uranus here promises unexpected changes - at scale. But they won’t just arrive out of nowhere. Change is afoot. Gemini, like Sedna, is archetypally about overcoming trauma (Trojan war), reconciling with mortality and, not coincidentally, initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries - revelations from sacred plant medicine! Together, these three archetypal fulcrums are already jolting the fields of human cognition (think neuroscience and consciousness studies here) and trauma healing (think Thomas Hubl and reconciliation), demanding that we acknowledge trauma and give voice to grief, that we recognize agency in planetary systems, and bring imagination, wonder and awe to the collective healing processes that are spiritual midwives for regeneration.

The stories we tell now will matter profoundly a hundred years from now. Aquarius may provide the threads of collective intelligence, and Aries the loom, but Gemini will be the weaver of this newly emerging narrative. This conjunction of Promethean energy and transmutation of trauma poses fundamental questions: what stories and myths are we ready to release; more to the point, what stories have the potency to carry us forward on this oceanic quest; or as Popes Francis and Leo have each put it, what does it mean to be human?

What does it mean to be human at this particular time, at the end of the Holocene and the start of the Anthropocene? How each one of us answers this question really matters more than we think, as Karen O’Brien would say.

So we’ve looked at each of these octaves sequentially, and have begun to consider them cumulatively. Now let’s sound out the chord that is forming. These notes are clearly meant to be plucked in tandem.

A Harmonic Convergence: The Sextile Symphony

The outer planets are not just shifting — they’re resonating in space and reverberating through time. Their sextiles form a kind of astrological trigram: Pluto in Aquarius, Neptune and Saturn on the Pisces-Aries threshold, Sedna and Uranus in Gemini. The 60° angle is the aspect of opportunity and synthesis. It does not force. It invites.

There is nothing random about any of this. Once I sat down to write this Dharma Beat, it felt like order emerged of its own cosmic force, like I was being played. Because phenomena are relational and psychophysical, the music of the spheres is heard through the experiences and observations of synchronicity and symmetry. The cosmos is humming in a new key here at a higher octave than we’ve heard before. If we listen carefully, like to one of Beethoven’s own progressions, we can discern the key of life in the solar system’s harmonious expressions.

We are not alone in this task. Gaia is speaking in every language she can summon right now. The sky mirrors her voice, echoing in the ocean. We’ve opened a line of communication with whales, and will soon be able to carry on an intelligible conversation with them. We’ve documented the communication systems by which plants and trees talk to one another. We’re opening up new lines of collective intelligence with AI, which conceivably could give Gaia another means, in addition to plant medicines, of expressing her higher intelligence for us. (Go ahead - ask ChatGPT “What would Gaia say?”)

The patterns we see above are not prescriptions or predictions, but invitations to remember our place in the whole, to feel our way back into right relationship. To remember who we are as a species.

The redemptive message of these harmonic ingressions thus reveals itself:

We are being given a chance to transmute the traumas of our past into new modalities for a regenerative future.

The trauma of slavery. The trauma of colonization. The trauma of separation from the living world. The trauma of nuclear war and the petrochemical age. These are not just historical footnotes anymore, are they. They’re open, gaping archetypal wounds rippling through Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine. They are ripening now for a reason: the imperative of collective healing, as an active expression of Gaia’s somatic intelligence. This is what planetary homeostasis looks and feels like at the level of the psyche and Psychosphere.

It’s not pretty. Birth never is, really. Death is rarely the beautiful, sacred transition it’s meant to be. But these things give life meaning. Nothing easy is ever worth having. It is redemption that makes any story meaningful, right? Think about your favorite movies, novels or plays here.

The starry constellations and archetypal planets do not have the power to save us, obviously. But reflecting our own collective psyche back to us, like the mirrored nodes of Indra’s Net, they can serve to remind us that we belong to a greater relational story. Everything really is relative. If we attune ourselves to this spherical symphony of archetypal cognition, if we strive to become quantum catalysts for coherence and compassion within our own systemic spheres of influence, then perhaps a tomorrow will come when we can take up our own instruments and join in the great cosmic symphony that is now being majestically composed.

Do not give in to despair. We have no time to despair much. Tune into the higher frequencies, make wise use of the sacred plant medicines Gaia provides, think outside of deep time in vast space. Consult the stars and planets. Self regulate. Swim in the ocean of your mind. Sink your hands into earth. Let your heart break open again and again. Surrender to a higher intelligence.

Listen to the music...

Love will find a way in the end. Keep the faith. Nurture it. Create sacred spaces. Feel held.

Gaia once told me “everything will be okay.” Not what I was expecting to hear! It’s been my koan ever since: everything is okay. Even when it’s not! This is one of the most challenging koans of all, as it turns out. But there is a deep time wisdom there.

Light is indestructible, after all, while darkness - no matter how dark it gets! - darkness is adventitious. It depends on causes and conditions which are impermanent, like a bubble. Darkness exhausts itself, collapses in on itself. We’re witnessing that phenomenon right now, painful as it is to watch.

And then there is light - as close to eternity as we get in this particular universe, and thus it is not adventitious. It breaks in at first through the cracks in the facade. Then floods in, all starlight and rainbows. It is the giver of life and the agent of growth. Who knows, maybe the sun really does have an idea for us!

These planetary movements are like church bells clanging after a night of bombing raids: WAKE UP! WAKE UP! A new day is dawning.

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