Buy now on Amazon — Changing of the Guards: Pluto on the Precipice

Behind the scenes: thoughts on censorship

Buy now on Amazon — Changing of the Guards: Pluto on the Precipice

Changing of the Guards: Pluto on the Precipice is now available in both paperback and e-book formats. Today only, the e-book format is discounted from $9.99 to $8.99. The e-book version of my previous essay anthology, Impossible Dreams: Hopes, Fears, and Expectations for Saturn in Pisces, is also discounted from $9.99 to $6.99 today only.

Book summary

As Pluto, the planet of transformation, crosses the threshold from structure-focused Capricorn to visionary Aquarius, change is in the air! Past occurrences of this astrological transit, which repeats every 248 years, brought us the Protestant Reformation and the American Revolution. This time around, the outcome is still uncertain.

Joey Cannizzaro, Trisha Dempsey, Gael Johnson, Dorje Kirsten, Michael Pride, L.P. Streitfeld, Eva Sylwester, Sarah Randall Williams, and Bryan Winchell bring a variety of perspectives to the chaos of today’s world. Blending personal experiences with collective trends, they take on contentious issues including censorship, medically assisted death, COVID-19, and the summer 2020 protests. Escaping the turmoil may not be possible, but finding meaning in it is astrology’s contribution to our path forward.

Contents

“Introduction,” Eva Sylwester

“Convulsing along the Chthonic Stirrings of the Blob: On New and Ancient Plutos,” Joey Cannizzaro

“Beyond the Hierarchy: Media, Power, and Transformation from Pluto in Capricorn to Aquarius,”

Bryan Winchell

“Kennedy vs. Fauci: The Changing of the Guards Battle for Time,” L.P. Streitfeld, (

Shiva Lisa Paul

)

“Transforming Transitions: Pluto's Movement through the Houses of Your Natal Chart,”

Gael Johnson

“Scenes from a Realignment,” Eva Sylwester

“Moments,” Michael Pride

“Death, Taxes, and Love: Pluto at the End of the Zodiac Wheel,” Sarah Randall Williams (

The Cranky Astrologer

)

“Live Forever or Die Better? Humanity's Power Struggle with Life's Final Chapter,” Trisha Dempsey

“Pluto in Aquarius and the Humanitarian Impulse,” Dorje Kirsten (

Heart Astrology

)

“How Understanding Saturn as the Ruler of Aquarius Will Aid Your Pluto in Aquarius Revolutions,” Bryan Winchell

“Aquarian Gesamtkunstwerk: Co-Creating the Aquarian Icon into Being, 1997-2024,” L.P. Streitfeld

Behind the scenes

I first tolerated Changing of the Guards being separate from me on February 28, 2025, when I uploaded the paperback version to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing at 4:19 p.m. in Eugene, Oregon.

I then moved on to working on the e-book version, which required me to remove and reinsert the images. In doing so, I discovered that the paperback had outdated versions of some of the images. I had to let Amazon’s process of making the paperback live play out before I could do anything about it, though.

I then dragged out my own process for fixing the images and promoting the book because I had a lot of anxiety about the book’s content. Throughout all this, the book was live on Amazon, and people could have purchased the misprinted paperback, but I was the only one who did according to my Amazon sales reports. Hiding in plain sight makes a lot of sense for the liminal space of March 2025 with all the various astrological transits back and forth over the Pisces/Aries cusp.

The two essays that scare me the most are “Kennedy vs. Fauci” by L.P. Streitfeld and my own contribution, “Scenes from a Realignment.” You could not have an essay anthology about Pluto in Capricorn without addressing the COVID-19 vaccines, as Streitfeld did. You could not have an essay anthology about Pluto in Capricorn without addressing same-sex marriage and other issues related to LGBTQ identity, as I did. However, there is still a lot of unprocessed collective emotional pain surrounding both of those topics, and it hurts to be in the middle of it.

My efforts as a writer during Pluto’s transit through Capricorn were often hampered by concern that my writing would hurt the feelings of other people in some catastrophic, irreparable way. I finally got to a point with Changing of the Guards where I realized that this book hurts my feelings. It took me a while to figure out that that was what was going on because years of dealing with the menace of literary cancel culture had trained me to look for feelings only out there and never in here. I eventually had to come to accept that, if anyone else gets their feelings hurt by what’s in Changing of the Guards, then they’re in good company!

Impossible Dreams: Hopes, Fears, and Expectations for Saturn in Pisces, my first essay anthology, had less controversial content than Changing of the Guards: Pluto on the Precipice. However, learning how to format its paperback edition was still stressful for me. As described in a November 2023 blog post, I received help from a surprising source to get past that block:

I am not sure what is going on these days at X, formerly known as Twitter, but my feed there now gets clogged with posts from many people I never signed up to follow. The Sunday after I attended the wine tasting, I received a post from notorious conspiracy theorist David Icke. I never signed up to follow him, but I legitimately follow some X accounts related to cryptocurrencies, and Icke was going to be speaking with the promoters of an obscure altcoin concerning reptilians, so perhaps that was the common thread.

In general, I don’t see rhetoric involving lizard people as helpful or likely to be founded in reality. However, I was very stressed out and needed a good laugh, so I went ahead and listened to Icke’s live broadcast.

Icke wound up delivering exactly the message I needed to hear as he relayed a story from a reader of one of his books. This woman had Icke’s book on her bedroom shelf, and her boyfriend became agitated upon seeing the book there. He was offended by the idea of her reading books about reptilians. The woman and her boyfriend then became sexually intimate, and the boyfriend sprouted a tail during the encounter. Finally, he stood up from the bed in full reptilian form himself and departed, never to be seen again.

Well, here I am worrying because maybe I can’t guarantee my book will have every single hyphen and capitalization completely correct, but apparently there are much bigger things that can go wrong with books!

I think I can pretty well guarantee that your significant other will not turn into a lizard if you keep a copy of Impossible Dreams on your nightstand. If anything like that does happen, please contact the publisher, which is me, for a full refund. Include proof of purchase and, if possible, any lizard scales that were shed.

I don’t regularly keep up with Icke’s activities because I don’t think lizard people are real, but you will not believe where I just came across him again yesterday: prominently displayed in the Current Affairs section at the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Eugene, Oregon! That was a sign for me to finally start talking about Changing of the Guards. Whatever I am worried about in my book, it is definitely not as crazy as the stuff in his book.

Censorship, no matter how well intentioned, never succeeds in silencing the David Icke types, the true outliers. It mainly manages to intimidate ordinary people who are making an honest effort to figure things out. As a result, consumers wind up with limited options between the approved authority figures at one extreme and David Icke at the opposite extreme. The minute a crack appears in the armor of the approved authority figures, some consumers wind up in the arms of David Icke in a way that I don’t think would happen in a more tolerant environment.

Barnes & Noble also displayed multiple books by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. regarding various medical controversies. That conversation is already happening in the collective whether or not astrologers participate in it.

My books aren’t available anywhere other than Amazon yet. Whatever Amazon’s sins may be, Amazon has managed to create a self-publishing platform that is easier to use than IngramSpark, its main competitor. My understanding is that non-Amazon bookstores prefer to order books from IngramSpark rather than Amazon, so I will continue trying to learn how to use IngramSpark to get versions of my books available there.

Anyway, I believe all the contributors in Changing of the Guards are making an honest effort to figure things out. They are also all separate individuals who did not have jurisdiction over one another’s content, so a reader who has a problem with something one contributor said should not attempt to punish other contributors for that.

I would also remind anyone uncomfortable with the tough parts of the book that a core tenet of engagement with Pluto, the planet of the suppressed and forbidden, is that everyone has a shadow side. “Everyone” does not just mean the people you already thought were up to no good. “Everyone” also includes you and the people you like. You may not be able to control what your least favorite politician or least favorite writer or anyone else is doing, so sometimes the best you can do to improve the state of the collective is to work on your own shadow.

Contributors — I will start distributing contributor copies later today. Thank you again for your patience and all your hard work!