Pluto in Sagittarius

Pluto crossed Sagittarius in about thirteen years, and everyone born in that window shares it. The era supplied the theme without subtlety: religious violence on an international scale, fundamentalism in several traditions at once, and the collapse of any assumption that the world's belief systems were quietly converging. This cohort learned early that a conviction is not a private ornament. People organise armies around them. Universities, publishers and broadcasters lost their monopoly on what counts as knowledge during the same span.

The compulsion is toward truth as something to be seized rather than received. These people interrogate doctrine, including the doctrine they were raised in, and they do it without much ceremony. What was destroyed was the authority of the institutional teacher. What is being rebuilt is more uncertain; a generation that has dismantled every inherited creed must eventually decide what it will actually stand on, and the temptation is to substitute a very confident scepticism for the answer.

In an individual chart the house does the real work. Ninth house, and education, travel or faith will each break and re-form the person; third, and it is the immediate world, the schooling and the siblings, that carries the upheaval. Jupiter and Mercury contacts sharpen the generational appetite into personal argument, producing the cohort's genuine teachers and, when badly aspected, its zealots, who tend to sound identical for the first ten minutes.