Whose Imagination Are We Living In? – New Moon in Sagittarius as a beacon of light and Sag Pluto dreams for global liberation
ideation as time travel + re-exploring faith, lessons, and calls to action from Pluto's transit in Sagittarius.
dear friends,
I’m writing to extend a warm hug from the depths of my heart which I’ve been dedicated to protecting and maintaining optimistic and resilient. I wish that everyone has been taking care of themselves and finding practices that make you feel held as we navigate the horrors of the current state of the world.
I’d like to offer this moment together to pause, take a few breaths, and check in with your body to see what you need. Are you hydrated enough? Have you eaten? If you need to stretch or haven’t gotten the chance to check in with how you feel in your body, I invite you to do so with me at this time. I’ll still be here when you get back should you need to venture off to the kitchen for a bit.
✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧
I dedicate this newsletter in memory of the late Palestinian poet and professor Dr. Refaat Alareer, who was murdered by an airstrike on December 7th by the Israeli Occupation Force in Gaza. Read his poem If I Must Die, Let It Be A Tale here and honor his legacy as the man who would’ve thrown his pen in soldiers’ faces as a last resort. May his life and wisdom always bring us hope and be a testament to the magnanimous role of artists in resistance movements. See his TEDx talk on storytelling here.
“Of course, you can always put a poet in jail. But you cannot arrest the poetry.” - Elia Suleiman
This newsletter is a culmination of a few different drafts I’ve kept in the cobwebs for months, but through all this time there has been a question that has resonated with me buzzing in my head like honeybees excavating for nectar:
Whose Imagination Are We Living In?
originally having encountered this question on an Instagram reel I have been ardently trying to trace back, it has returned to me through
on a TikTok video calling for everyone to reflect on how white colonial imaginations influence every inch of our norms and world views. Imagination in tandem with communal dreaming are two vehicles of world-building that I’ve felt most called to in my life and work, as I hope is reflected in my writing, music, and art overall. In addition to radical joy and pleasure activism, I believe that ideation is one of the key frameworks through which we will organize our futures. It is why critical race theory has been targeted within the education system of America and why queerness as an antithesis to white colonial structures has been struck down and silenced time and time again.In one of my first fully virtual semesters as a junior in college at the beginning of the pandemic, I remember an assignment in my Introduction to Culture, Race, and Ethnicity Studies class (one of the core classes in the curriculum for my Latinx Diaspora Studies minor coursework) with Wendsor Yamashita where she asked us to draw maps of our ideal communities and how we’d dream of it addressing all our needs. This was a building block for the course, as the few assignments we received incited us to question the way things were in our lives/social spheres and construct or demand new norms. I’ve come to realize now how they were an invitation for us to hop in a time machine, one where reality would bend to our liking, to detach from the structures we’ve grown accustomed to to exercise our abilities to garner the faith in our imagination. Since the genesis of my healing journey as a young adult in my early twenties, inner child healing and joy have been muscles I have kept fortified by centering pleasure and returning to the truths I grew up knowing, which I treat as a divine resource (which we all have, some of us just harden with age and find it difficult to caress beyond the walls we build to protect ourselves). I am lucky to have been actively journaling and archiving my thoughts my whole life because I can remember who I was and what I valued before I confronted the grief and heartbreak of the realities of greed and power present in the world from the ruling class, sexists, racists, xenophobes, etc.
At the BALLE 2015 conference closing plenary speech, Adrienne Maree Brown said:
We are in an imagination battle…imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race…We have to imagine beyond those fears. We have to ideate together. The poverty that results from our current system allows all of this Imagining to be fed by the results of scarcity economics. We must imagine new worlds that transition us from seeing black people as murderers, or brown people as terrorists and aliens, to ones that can see black and brown people as cultural and economic innovators…This is a time travel exercise for the heart. This is ideation – what are the ideas that will liberate all of us?
Imagination and faith are the muscle memory we must strengthen to carry us through this fight for liberation in solidarity with global freedom movements in Palestine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, and Haiti. It is a core belief of mine that daydreaming is sacred technology and revolutionary. The most powerful thing we can do as people in the West living in the belly of the beast is to stand for something and have a moral compass that guides us toward justice to speak up for those who are systematically silenced and censored. We can not love and light and individualize ourselves out of our issues. Using ideation as a time travel practice, one in which we write ourselves into the future and sow the seeds to create a sustainable world in which we all can find liberation, we must make the revolution irresistible as Toni Cade Bambara has taught us.
Deep Dive into Pluto as a revolutionary teacher
I would like to extend the offering of deep diving into the lessons Pluto has to impart to us as a call to action in solidarity with the global struggle against colonialism. If it’s true that Pluto represents power, the subconscious, and inner resources, then everyone born within a Plutonian generation is inclined to share the desires and impulses that are common to everyone else born with Pluto in that sign. Most within a generation (to not say all of course because of social disparities and varying privileges) have the same well of resources to drink from with new aquifers from lessons of the previous generation. It is up to everyone within a generation to excavate through rock and soil to reach the wisdom available to us. Understanding the sign Pluto was in when we were born and how it can guide us toward change is our mission. First, I’ll provide a few fundamental astrology notes for clarity:
The planet Pluto was discovered in 1930, a time when the world was in a geopolitical crisis. The cultural landscape was navigating between two world wars, where the battle of imagination was being fought through the expansive spread of propaganda.
Pluto takes 12 to 24 years to transit a particular sign, or, the span of a generation.
Pluto takes approximately 248 years to travel through all signs for a complete orbit.
Demoted in 2006 from its planetary status into a “minor planet”, I am thinking of Pluto not as an astrological titan, but rather as a teacher we’ve come to learn about through modern astrology studies who holds one promise: everything that cannot stand the test of time WILL be dealt with!
Nicknamed the ruler of the underworld to some, Pluto symbolizes the power that lies beneath the surface in the subterranean and can point us to our inner strength if we do not fear the darkness. This is the planet of the depths. The Mariana’s Trench. As a slow dancer, Pluto studies the landscape it emerges in and permeates through every fabric of existence to unveil the knowledge of the sign it is transiting for us. Pluto invites introspection and demands we face who we really are and what we stand for — especially when the lights are off.
To study how Pluto has reflected a generation’s desires and values, we can look to one of the most notorious generations we love to hate: Baby Boomers, or the Pluto in Leo generation who brought us trailblazers such as Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali. This post-war generation who were among the first born into disposable income and grew into bold activists in the 60’s and 70’s as adults, also unfortunately mirrored the more self-centered qualities of Leo as a fixed sign of becoming conservative with old age. Pluto can’t guarantee change for the better, as celestial bodies are intricate mirrors reflecting human desires and trajectory, but we can personally promise -and stay committed- to learning HOW to collectively work towards change by organizing through our desires.
We can look to the Pluto in Scorpio generation as the composters, dedicated to thinning the veil on taboos to protect their communities (in their youth they witnessed 9/11, the revelation of abuse in the Catholic Church, and the 2008 housing crisis/recession.)
We can consider that if the Pluto in Scorpio generation grew up to carry the torch to expose secrets and lies and dig to the depths to find the root of a taboo, then Gen Z, or the Pluto in Sagittarius generation (1995-2008), is defined by the collective desire to find meaning, harnessing the mutable fire energy to fight for shifts towards liberation against conventions. We who were born in the Pluto in Sagittarius generation have come to age in a digital landscape, where we are dedicated to fighting against succumbing to a mob mentality and resisting by spreading awareness. Ruled by Jupiter, we can see how the Pluto in Sag generation is communally oriented and aligned with the masses, as reflected by collective efforts to raise mutual aid, spread messages far and wide, and find unity in global struggles for liberation.
The Pluto in Capricorn generation, or late Gen Z/Gen alpha (born 2008-January 2024), in their coming of age, have witnessed the crumbling of institutions and unjust power structures long past their expiration date. Over the past few years, we have seen statues of historical figures once revered as heroes to some now recognized as war criminals (rightfully) finally toppled and taken down across the world, interest in a return to offline life through outdated technology, the vintage revolution, and the attacks on educational curriculum, as well as revised history, thanks to initiatives such as the 1619 Project (which was released in 2021). While we will still be feeling the effects of Pluto in Capricorn in the next few years, we can observe how the collective call to action for the Pluto in Capricorn generation is to be the judges of time (as Capricorn is ruled by Saturn), destroy outdated structures and bring forth new norms.
Invoking Pluto as a revolutionary teacher, I will share with you a poem I can’t recommend enough (which as an astrologer gagged me a little I won’t hold you) by Fatimah Asghar titled Pluto Shits on the Universe.
Arrasa Con Todo: Calls to Action for the Pluto in Sagittarius and Capricorn generations as Freedom Fighters
Every day I am thinking about Bisan Owda, one of the leading archivists of Palestinian resistance and a storyteller of resilience in the eyes of thousands. She is also only two years my senior, being 25, and wears braces. I think of her post in which she described being bedridden and ill, which many people speculated as covid, with no medication or food or accessible bathroom without waiting for an hour. I think of her mouth -full of metal bound to her teeth that can never be adjusted. I think about the constriction of the metal, the many nights I slept off the pain of feeling my displaced teeth fight against this foreign body in my mouth, and how Bisan likely feels the same now and then. Only Bisan does not get access to orthodontry. There is no orthodontic practice in Gaza. They are all tending to their injured and burying their dead.
Bisan, like Motaz Azaiza (24) and Plestia Alaqad (22), is a beacon of light we all come to social media to routinely check on for their safety and updates. Bisan, Motaz, and Plestia, who should’ve never had to been put in the position of danger they are in, are all examples of the Sagittarian Pluto generation’s altruistic mission and desire to proliferate perception and abolish all systems of oppression and injustice. The widespread nature of Jupiter as the planet of expansion calls to Gen Z’s insatiable fervor to see every institution of oppression fall, every empire crumble. That is the promise of Pluto in Sagittarius at its highest operation of altruism: all that does not serve the higher good, the collective rising, will fall.
Jupiter and Saturn always move close to each other in orbit, Jupiter spending about one year in a sign while Saturn spends two, making them the social planets of a natal chart. Jupiter, as the largest planet in our solar system, symbolizes growth –especially on a philosophical level. It represents the process of expanding your worldview through travel to distant lands, friendships with the people you meet on those travels, and higher education. It is no wonder then that Jupiter’s gift of wisdom as ruler of the Pluto in Sagittarius generation is attuned to fight for the collective good and to be in solidarity with the global struggle for liberation across continents. The Pluto in Sagittarius generation coming to age manifests like tides of arrasa con todo baños, destroying every enemy in its path and dispelling all evil. After all, Jupiter is known for its intense storms. Jupiter coworking with Pluto is a manifestation of the culmination (mutable) of this anger (fire) for the collective good.
I am thinking of that final battle scene at the end of Sailor Moon season 3 where Sailor Saturn arrives with her scythe to save the world from impending doom as the only sailor scout who can defeat Pharaoh 90 (the villain here). She speaks about how as the guardian of destruction she will perish in this process, but as the villain possesses the powers of the Holy Grail (a source of power in the Sailor Moon universe) she is the only one who can reach its core to save the world. This is certainly one of the most gruesome episodes of Sailor Moon, as all of the inner scouts (Mars, Jupiter, Mercury, and Venus) have died in battle, but [spoiler alert] it is followed by a beautiful scene where, within their souls, their collective love and faith in sailor moon give her the strength to transform into super sailor moon, saving both sailor Saturn and cleansing the world of evil once again. Everyone comes back alive and all is good in the world again. I think of this scene in relation to how the Pluto in Sag/Capricorn generations will be working together to build the worlds we dream of. Early and late Gen Z people carry on the torch from Pluto in Scorpio to finish their work in lifting the veil we’ve grown to call “normality” here in the West by expanding global consciousness and organizing towards liberation from these facades.
Jupiter in Roman mythology is also, an imperialist. Roman Jupiter as an imperialist, as the construction of the United States, manipulates power to define higher education according to the propaganda and norms it wishes to feed and sustain. There are many speculations of what the best symbolic/historical chart for the creation of the United States is, two of the most advocated charts being set to July 4th, 1774 from Luke Broughton’s 1861 delineation of the chart indicating the states as a Gemini Rising to Ebenezer Sibly’s version, delineated in 1787, indicating the U.S as a Sagittarius rising. However, what both charts have in common with the same date at different hours is that regardless of what time the Declaration of Independence was agreed upon, The United States has Pluto at 27º Capricorn. Meaning the United States saw its Pluto return when Pluto moved into 27º Capricorn last year on February 22nd, 2022, which testifies to the desires, actions, and abolitionist themes of the Pluto in Capricorn Generation/Late Gen Z-Gen Alpha era.
The United States, as a malignant manifestation of Jupiter, deems itself a leading nation in the world because it believes itself, like the war machine it is, enlightened through philosophy and power above others. It is only fitting that those born within Pluto transiting Sagittarius are all called to collectively shift to abolish systems of oppression.
Thesis: if the concept of humanity is defined by political institutions, then it is our mission to abolish those institutions to sow the seeds of the world we wish to live in.
Pluto in Sagittarius: re-defining faith
At the time of my writing this on Saturday evening December 10th, I have received notification of a new offering from
which is the thread (ba dum tss) (see, their newsletter is called threadings hehe) binding this next section I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts for.Simply put, I have been thinking about faith since October 7th. Since Libra season. I am thinking about the faith we owe to Palestinians by believing in their liberation as they stand with unshakable faith in Allah and love for their land and their lives. I am thinking about the way imperialist regimes rely on despair to feed into their propaganda. I am thinking about how nihilism is a tool of oppression and optimism is a driving force to fight against the fascist reality of the West, which has no backbone to uphold or moral compass. I’m thinking about how the United States is a death country and the only way to fight the war machine is to be political. I have been examining what faith is in my life and faith as revolutionary praxis (as someone centered in imagining revolution through radical joy for all.) Faith, to many of us who grew up with religious trauma, is a word embedded with complicated feelings of distrust – and reasonably so, as faith was taught to us to be intertwined with submission to patriarchal, colonial harm. However, I am interested in revisiting faith as a discipline in solidarity with global resistance movements against colonialism. I am thinking about these tweets by Elamin Abdelmahmoud:
Those of us who have the (false) security net of living in the United States, in the belly of the imperial beast, do not have this privilege without the expense of others. We do not have to worry about war because the United States has control over the United Nations. We do not have to worry about war because the United States will never fight another war on its soil, only internationally as arms dealers to keep this mirage of a security blanket intact. That is the agenda of the West: to feed into the fire but evade the burn. To reap the benefits and destroy the earth and people whose minerals and oil it steals. The United States operates on a scarcity mindset making sure only it is ever fed so everyone else will depend on it. In the United States, the battle on imagination is a false promise for all its inhabitants to make a home in and never be able to detach itself from, thus restricting our power to dream different realities. At the time this was written on December 8th, Robert A. Wood, deputy representative of the United States to the United Nations vetoed the UN vote for a ceasefire saying “We do not support calls for an immediate ceasefire, this would only plant the seeds for the next war.” Know that he is affirming the law will never hold the settler supremacist state accountable because it would have to destroy itself.
Having grown up in Miami, when it came to social organizing, I never had trouble believing in change but rather believing in other’s dedication to bringing change forth. It was hard not to lose faith in others when I felt they were stubbornly loyal to the hyper-capitalist, modernist society we grew up in. But one of the most important exercises towards revolution as a faith-based practice is real community building -which includes all that we do not wish to confront. It is simply not our place to be anything but faithful in the international fight for freedom. If we see faith as a discipline, one in which we express true solidarity by doing everything and anything at our disposal to fight and believe in the liberation of others living in the violence the United States has imparted, then we operate out of love, which is real community building towards communal dreaming for alternative economies and futures which are not parasitic to others. This in my life looks like having faith that my city is not a lost cause due to the presence of bigotry and vapid modernity in it. It looks like believing that there are strangers in my city who are also committed to faith as revolutionary praxis in global liberation and holding those in our community against it accountable.
In their latest publication, Ismatu Gwendolyn writes that “Revolution, then, is a faith-based practice. We ruminate on, pray for, call forth a world past what we can see. It is with the utmost faith that a kinder world (1) exists and (2) actively roots and blooms…liberation in and of itself is divine. And the pursuit of the divine is religion.” Jupiter, which inherits its meaning from the mythology of Zeus, is a planet that represents faith and divination. In mythology, one of Zeus’s Achilles heels was the envy of other gods’ abilities to divine -so he just straight up forbade it. Mirrored in our present, we can look to the extractivist nature of the United States, from the embargos and coups in Latin American history and beyond, as a testament to how -politically- judicial power is manipulated as divination because it allows them to define the civilized from the uncivilized. Revolution as the antithesis to fascist judicial power, is divination because it allows us to rip the power back from the ruling class to divine and imagine our OWN futures.
Within these webs of connectivity, I believe it is the mission of the Capricorn & Sagittarian Pluto generation to not only dedicate ourselves to fight for liberation as it is our innate desire but to also faithfully believe in the fruits of our hope for liberation for all, whether we will see it in our lifetimes or not. Imagination is a divinatory force because it gives us the strength, when we transmute our grief and anger into action, to build upon the kinder worlds we pray for. Imagination as divinatory and revolutionary praxis is our promise to everyone united by the global struggle for freedom to do everything in our power, to dismantle the structures that have inflicted wounds upon the rest of the world.
Jupiter’s beneficial qualities are related to power through divinity. To divine means to wield the power needed to predict and craft the future. - Alice Sparkly Kat, Postcolonial Astrology, 238.
Further calls to action: what is being asked of us now
Along with cultivating the seeds to inspire us into action what more do we do? This is the additional tool kit for solidarity I have been collecting to attach to this newsletter:
Here is another substack post compiling all types of ways in which we can continue to show up for Palestinians including an overview of organized boycott instructions from the BDS (boycott divestment sanctions).
Visit gazaesims.com to extend the ability of communication in the Gaza Strip by buying internet access for those in the Gaza Strip. I have included the option to monetize this newsletter to send all profits for the rest of the year towards collecting e-sims for those in Gaza using Holafly, should you feel called to subscribe and have your pledge go to this action.
Find out who your representatives are and call them weekly, even daily, using either the 5 calls app or this tool to demand a ceasefire on the Israeli attacks on Palestinian land as well as advocate for an end to apartheid Israeli occupation of Palestine. You may use this tool as well which provides a script.
Go through this compilation of actions on the ceasefiretoday website to find protests near you, phone banks, along with more calls to action based in the U.S. or internationally.
As it’s been said that calls and faxes are often forwarded into spam, kick it up a notch and plague your representatives with incessant snail mail that they have to physically sort out.
Read up on the Boycott Divestments Sanctions movement (BDS) and educate yourself on what to boycott to revoke your financial support for Israel's oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law. Do not contribute any more money than you must. The United States only speaks in dollars.
Register for the Artists for Palestine virtual Teach-in on December 13th.
Use this link to automatically send an email to the United Nations members and staff to invoke Article 377 immediately to circumvent the U.S. veto for a ceasefire in Gaza. See this thread for more.
Palestine is just a fraction of all the horror the United States and Israel is complicit in internationally (from the Rwandan Genocide in 1994 to the current genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo and plans for cop city.) It’s our duty to not let the traction die here but to keep the same energy by refraining from buying new electronics in solidarity with the abuse inflicted on the Congolese and continuing to educate ourselves on Sudan, Haiti, Tigray, and beyond. We must keep this fervor for freedom alive by resisting normality, which is rooted in complicity with the harm the United States inflicts internationally, by making education and action towards global resistance movements part of our routines.
Palestine is a stepping stone towards our collective dedication to global liberation, it is only right we do everything we can to liberate them, as they have us, in return.
May this new moon in Sagittarius empower your dreams with love and magic.
Love,
your astro hottie Gaby, NeptuneMuse 💌✨