LAST TIME (click here if you didn’t see it): I took a look at the “birth chart” (or rather, the chart of the first publication date) for everyone’s favorite example of how childhood trauma plus relentless dedication plus huge wealth can lead to masked vigilantism — Batman. I focused mostly on the character’s personality. This time, I want to show how upcoming transits may be affecting the actual trademarked character, in real-world terms.
You see, The Defender Of Gotham has faced some tough times lately. Sure, he’s changed over the years — from the gritty detective/crime-fighter he was in the 1930s and 40s to the largely goofy figure of the 1960s to the brooding goth superhero of the 1990s. However it was in the 2000s that we reached Peak Batman, with the trilogy of films featuring Christian Bale in the title role… and we can track all of these permutations in Batman’s image by the path Pluto has taken through the Zodiac during those decades. And now Pluto is moving into the most challenging of all places for Our Hero.
Batman grew in popularity during the 1940s and 1950s, when Pluto was in Leo, trine the Sun, Mercury, and Saturn of the character’s “birth chart.” After that, his popularity faded somewhat, until the mid-1960s, when the Uranus-Pluto conjunction in Virgo landed right on top of Batman’s Neptune and opposite his Jupiter. This was when the popular Batman TV series came out — the crime-fighter was no longer as serious as he once was, but he made some serious bucks off of showbiz.
After that, the hero’s public profile diminished, until director Tim Burton brought Batman back to his roots (in classic, kinda-weird Tim Burton style) in 1989: specifically, when transiting Pluto in Scorpio was closely opposite Batman’s natal Uranus, giving the character a quirky but much-needed reboot. The film franchise slowly degenerated after that, and it took Pluto’s entry into mid-Sagittarius (the Christian Bale years as noted above), making the trine to all those Aries placements in the birth chart to re-invigorate the character’s popularity.
And then, Batman v Superman happened. For a full and nerdy rant about that mess, please click here for the astrology involved (along with a little too much geek venom for many people’s tastes). In future, the same Batman under the same director is scheduled to appear in the upcoming Justice League movies (two of them, at least), and in a solo project that keeps getting rescheduled and still hasn’t found the right script yet — things which are often a bad sign in Hollywood. Many fans and showbiz observers alike are concerned about the outcome.
So: should we be worried that The Caped Crusader is going down for the count? Not at all, because it appears that this most Plutonian of superheroes is going to be saved by a Pluto transit. Specifically: the Pluto Opposition. During the current Batman v Superman era, Pluto is square Batman’s natal Saturn — which is never an easy time, whether you are a person or a fictional property.
But Batman is facing his Pluto Opposition in the next few years. This is a transit one doesn’t hear too much about, because frankly most of us haven’t lived that long. Because of Pluto’s highly elliptical orbit, expecting people to make it to their Pluto Opposition has often (historically) been pretty unrealistic. Pluto travels a lot more slowly when it’s at the Taurus end of its orbit. Pluto only spent about a decade in Scorpio, but takes about thirty years to move through Taurus. If you had been born in 1860, you would have had to live to the age of about 125 to experience your Pluto Opposition.
In theory, this should be a powerful time of transformation for a person (or a fictional property). In practice, we simply have seen enough cases of a Pluto Opposition to really comment intelligently on them. Yet Batman will start experiencing the effects of “his” Pluto Opposition in as early as 2021 — at the relatively young age of 82. So how should we interpret this transit? Perhaps it’s best to say that the Pluto Opposition is likely to have a phoenix-like effect: regeneration in the face of death; the willingness to live on and fight back against the darkness.
Sounds like Batman to me…
Seen your January 2017 horoscope yet? If not, CLICK HERE for it!
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