+The text below is excerpted and abridged from my essay Convulsing Along the Chthonic Stirrings of the Blob: On New and Ancient Plutos in the upcoming collection on Pluto's ingress into Aquarius called Changing of the Guards: Pluto on the Precipice. More info and official release date coming soon.
++Plain text of the poster of Pluto's significations above can be found at the end,
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Pluto's other names (and those of gods that merged with him):
Hades (Greek)
Plutus (Greek)
Rex Infernus (Roman)
Dis Pater (Roman)
the one who makes many sêmata [tombs] (Homeric Hymn to Demeter)
the one who receives many guests (Homeric Hymn to Demeter)
the one with many names (Homeric Hymn to Demeter)
Trying to really grasp and explain Pluto brings us up against one of its most fundamental characteristics: incomprehensibility. All of the other Greco-Roman deities whose names are given to the planets have a substantial body of myths and folklore to draw from to enrich our interpretation. Not the case with Hades/Pluto. Though he’s mentioned by the other gods and involved in a few stories, Hades only actually appears in archaic Greek literature one time. This isn’t because he wasn’t an important deity; it’s because absence is his nature. Even when he is spoken of, it’s with nicknames and epithets to avoid saying his real name. (like those from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter above).
Pluto is ineffable, inconceivable, unthinkable, because that’s what the land of the dead is like. Saturn is the material part of death—having a body that suffers and ages and will one day be left behind and decompose. He is the skeleton, the graveyard, and the headstones, everything physical that surrounds and marks death, but not the realm where the dead go afterwards. Pluto is the unspeakable void that stares back at us if we even try to conceive of experience after death.
Pluto is the power that operates in subliminal, subterranean ways; it exerts control without being seen or comprehended.
Some of the quintessential themes of Pluto:
1) the loss of personal agency to invisible forces beyond our control
2) the transformation of the world of the living into the world of the dead
3) the corrupting influence of wealth obtained from subterranean sources
4) cycles of trauma and violence that are both caused by the injustice of fate and exacerbated and continued by the reaction against that injustice
Pluto reveals the ways that extremes co-constitute one another, as we see in its rulership of both organized crime and secret government agencies. Organized crime is such a threat to the state because gangs are “organized” just like the state: ruthless hierarchies driven by insatiable profit whose authority is based on the threat (and execution) of violence. It’s precisely how mundane mafias really are, how similar their activities are to everyday capitalist business, that reveals the state to be nothing more than a particular group of gangsters who have secured a monopoly on “legitimate” violence.
Pluto in natal charts and transits can bring out extremes and absolutes, as well as the kind of obsession that locked Hades and Demeter together in mutually destructive co-dependence in the myth of the abduction of Persephone. On the personal level, Pluto speaks to the way that obsession—even an obsession with grasping for personal agency or control—can be the thing that possesses us and strips us of self-determination.
On the other hand, going through Plutonic, death-like experiences that rob us of our sense of agency, control, and markers of status, can also be liberating in that they break us out of the automatism of identity, freeing us from the old selves that possess us and convince us that we’re not born anew in each moment. Plato writes about this metaphysical nudity in the dialogue Cratylus, saying that those making the descent into the underworld, “are terrified because the soul goes to [Pluto] without the covering of the body.” The fact that death neutralizes social position and privilege is one of the things that drives the powerful to avoid that fate at all cost, to displace and avoid experiences of death (figurative and literal), and in doing so metastasize Pluto. Maybe welcoming, or at least accepting, experiences of identity obliteration is one way to improve our relationship with Pluto.
What would it mean for us as astrologers if Pluto is not the great transformer exactly, but the great annihilator? What if it emerged at the time it did to represent the leviathan of global systems of domination and to telegraph their final dissolution in social collapse? What do we do the day after the apocalypse? And what use is Pluto for astrologers if it is so apocalyptic, if it can’t be bent towards positivity? What if it doesn't show us the limit of our agency (like Saturn), but what is truly beyond our control, our awareness, even our ability to comprehend?
Rather than just gawk at the immensity of Pluto (which is mostly how I handle Pluto transits), one thing you can do is ask yourself what in your life leads you into a state of automatism and compulsion. Some Plutonic experiences can be internal, and we need to ask which of our beliefs, ideologies, and storylines are possessing us, making us act out someone else’s will—or the will of the ideology itself. Just noticing you've been under the spell of power doesn't always break you out of it, but it may be a necessary step in that direction.
Of course, many Plutonic experiences are external. Astrology is not all psychological, and Pluto is also an expression of the material ways that our agency is stolen by forces of domination. Rather than see this as something that makes us powerless, our study of Pluto can help us to recognize the presence of the invisible god and focus on disrupting whatever automatism has been driving us, rather than reifying and disseminating its power by pursuing control and domination in our attempts to break free.
PLUTO / PLUTÓN
the underworld the void possession extremism orchestrated violence
el inframundo el vacío posesión extremismo violencia orquestada
Qualities Calidades
invisible invisible
terrifying espantoso
paranoid paranoiaco
mesmerizing hipnotizante
controlling controlante
clandestine clandestino
dread-inducing que induce pavor
chthonic ctónico
putrid podrido
ruthless despiadado
Actions Acciones
to dominate dominar
to amplify amplificar
to annihilate anihilar
to intensify intensificar
to polarize polarizar
to abduct secuestrar
to hoard acaparrar
to conspire conspirar
to transgress transgredir
to infect infectar
Correspondences: abysses, annihilation, atrocities, decadence, dictators, epidemics, espionage, gallows, iniquities, inoculation, kidnappings, massacres, muck, nuclear energy, organized crime, plutonium, revulsion, terrorism, viruses
Correspondencias: abismos, aniquilación, atrocidades, decadencia, dictadores, epidemias, espionaje, horca, iniquidades, inoculación, secuestros, masacres, estiércol, energía nuclear, crimen organizado, plutonio, repulsión, terrorismo, virus