Pluto sesquiquadrate Orcus

I hope you have been enjoying yesterday's Mars sextile the North Node. In these days we can take action to do the dharmic work that we are here to do. Mars is travelling together with the Sun and Venus at the moment, so our willpower and our values will also enliven our destiny over the next 3 days as we welcome in the new year.

And let me take a moment to wish you all the best for the New Year and to thank you for being part of the DPU community, for reading these blog posts, and for doing the work to engage with these new aspects of consciousness. We are in a profound period of transition as a species, and the work we each do to grow our consciousness is facilitating this collective growth.

As we enter 2026, this is being assisted by a sesquiqaudrate between Pluto and Orcus, our new planet of karmic consciousness, at 18 degrees of Virgo. I talk about Orcus being Pluto's straight-talking brother, because when we're on the spiritual path he holds us accountable for our deeds and actions and gives us a ceed to live by.

Pluto and Orcus have very similar orbits and they are both in a gravitational lock with Neptune, doing 2 orbits of the Sun, to every 3 of Neptune's. Neptune is our spiritual consciousness, so both Pluto and Orcus are deeply spiritual, but Pluto approaches this from a psychological perspective and Orcus from a karmic perspective. The sesquiquadrate is a square and a half, so we are having a reality check between our psychological consciousness and our karmic consciousness over the new year.

The sextiles with the North Node from Mars, Venus, and the Sun, means that these planets are also trine the South Node, so we will be dealing with karma as we ring in the New Year and hopefully working through it and releasing it. The sesquiquadrate with Orcus is challenging you to do this consciously, to grow psychologically though the karmic experiences you are having.

In myth Orcus dragged oath-breakers into the underworld. Oaths are contracts with the gods, and we call down a conditional curse on ourselves when we break them. We make oaths both to ourselves and to others. And, while the oaths we make to others are policed and have real world consequences, it is the oaths we make to ourselves where we can more easily fudge the line.

New Year’s resolutions are the social manifestation of these personal oaths, so I encourage you to be mindful of the reality check that is currently occurring between your psychological growth and your karmic growth, as you formulate your New Year's resolutions. The key here is to resolve to turn a shadow aspect of your life into a light-filled solution.

Orcus gives us a capacity to deal with the shadow side of our lives, which is all of our repressed tendencies that have been labeled as bad and stored out of sight. But they do us no good stored there, and in fact often undermine, or poison our best efforts. As we engage and work with this shadow, we can learn to transmute it into light. Transmutation is an alchemical process where the constituent parts are transformed to produce a new whole. So this is an active process, with shadow as the raw material and light or energy as the result.

The sesquiquadrate came within a 1 degree orb just before Christmas, on the 20th December, it will be exact in mid January and go out of orb on the 7th February. So over this next month, you might find you are doing some shadow work, dealing with something that started over the Christmas period, and is likely to come to a head in mid-January.

The biggest challenge with shadow work is facing our fear but, frequently when we do, we find that what we were afraid of was just an illusion. Our fear was literally just a shadow without substance, and facing it, or shining a light on it caused it to disappear.

Sometimes when we face our fear we find a real problem. This is where Orcus is really valuable because he gives us a persistence and an integrity, which isn’t afraid to deal with the issue. When we embrace his energy we know that the pressure is best released, and that ‘the problem’ is actually a valuable resource for our growth.

Orcus gives us a self-sufficiency that nourishes us through the long and difficult work that we sometimes find necessary for personal evolution. This gives you the ability to marshal the energy, reserves and resources that you need to assist this process, you just have to identify and activate them. So as we start this new year, let the Pluto sesquiquadrate Orcus empower you to marshal the resources for your personal evolution, and transmute any shadow that you may find into light.

Orcus Early Scholarships

As always, a great way to do this is to join our Orcus course, which is running in the second course bracket, starting in March. I have some early scholarships for those who can move quickly on this opportunity. Celebrate the new year by giving yourself a structure, and by finding a supportive community, to help you understand and on-board this new karmic consciousness. 

Orcus 101 - Early Scholarship

NZ$270.00NZ$80.00

Buy Now

I hope you can join us on Orcus, and thanks for your work embracing these new aspects of consciousness. I wish you all the best for the new year. May all your dreams come true in 2026.

Love and laughter

Alan

Who would have thought that studying the dwarf planets would lead to such an expansive awareness of my soul’s journey? For this, I am very grateful. The style and structure of Alan's teaching provides the group with a very warm, safe and informative space in which to learn. I love being part of the group. Thank you, Alan.  - Marian Ryan, Energy Therapist, Author, Teacher, UK