15 October: Pluto stations direct in Aquarius
Pluto’s domain is often misunderstood. Many people think he is a God of Death and a psychopomp, and that’s not exactly true. As the King of the Underworld he is not the person who makes Death happen – he’s not there when someone passes away, and it isn’t him who accompanies spirits on their journeys to the Underworld. It’s actually Persephone who rules the cycles of Death and Rebirth that we often mistakenly attribute to her husband. The Greek God of Death who is present on the final threshold is actually Thanatos.
As King of the Underworld, it’s Pluto’s job to make sure that intangible folks have everything they need to be comfortable where they are. This is because he needs intangibles to stay in their rightful places instead of wandering around where they don’t belong. It’s on him to make sure that when spirits are finished with their time on Earth and come to live in his domain before moving on to reincarnation or whatever else is next for them, those people have everything they need to be happy and well-adjusted in the afterlife. It’s also on him to make sure others of the Old Gods aren’t overstepping their boundaries or causing undue mischief, chaos, or destruction. That is his primary job: to guard the boundaries that keep reality whole.
In mythology, we most often see Pluto in his role as grief counselor. Mortals are always taking the hard journey to Hades to ask him to bring their loved ones back to life. He is a kind and empathetic person, and this comes through in every last story. Even when he isn’t able to bring the dead back to life, he always goes out of his way to help, finding loopholes that grant him the ability to support the living who have experienced loss and talking each person through their woes with endless patience. When other Gods send mortals to him for a boon, he always grants it. I haven’t read a single story about a human traveling all the way to see Pluto and coming away with their needs unmet, even if they don’t actually get what they have asked for.
Through astrology we often understand Pluto in relationship with power, but the word power can be misleading. Pluto isn’t interested in gaining or accruing power; he isn’t power-hungry, and he isn’t interested in doling out power to mortals, seeing that as irrelevant to his role. Power-obsessed humans who set out to hoard wealth and political influence and other malevolent gain-based activities have to take ownership for those motives themselves. It’s false to attribute those desires to Pluto.
On the contrary, Pluto is a rather serious person who is just very committed to doing his job well. This grants him a different kind of power than we often think of. Steady, reliable commitment is one of the most powerful forces in reality, and many humans are extremely averse to acting with commitment for that exact reason. We’ve all heard the famous line from the Spider-Man origin story: “With great power comes great responsibility.” But Pluto’s lesson for us is that the opposite is also true: with great responsibility comes great power. All we have to do is step into the role of doing the right thing regardless of whether anyone appreciates us for it. External validation is a crutch; we need to be able to do our holy work without the petty rewards of other people’s gratitude or affirmation.
According to the stories, Pluto wasn’t that happy to pull the straw that granted him dominion over the dead – that’s a much more important, difficult, and thankless responsibility than his brothers Zeus and Poseidon have to fulfill as Kings of their respective domains. But Pluto does his job well, maybe better and more thoroughly than any of the other Gods, and because he does, the world goes ‘round. His lesson for us is that the main thing we have power over in life is whether we choose to step up to our given role. His power is the quiet kind that comes from keeping his nose to the grindstone.
Pluto reveals our relationship with power: whether we can handle it when it’s given to us; whether we would rather give up our power and claim to be helpless so we don’t have to make our own decisions; whether we step up to our responsibilities, own our choices and their consequences, and proactively address our self-created problems. He also reveals where we don’t have power; in those areas stronger personalities surrender to the inevitable and weaker personalities whine at length and live in denial.
This does, of course, impose an experience of hardship on people who are not similar to Pluto in their temperament. But as with all astrology, choosing to complain about hardship instead of working on the skills we need to overcome it only shows our own lack of moral fiber. People who blame the Old Gods, the Signs, or the Houses for their personal weaknesses give authentically devoted practitioners extreme secondhand embarrassment.
When a planet is moving direct, its work is expository. When it’s moving retrograde, its work is editorial. That’s pretty much all there really is to the direct and retrograde cycle, no matter what misinformed superstitious people say.
Pluto is the most distant of the planets in our solar system, and he moves very slowly. So he doesn’t make a lot of progress through the Zodiac with each direct season. Every year he retrogrades over a fair amount of the space he’s just traveled through. This means that he gets a lot of opportunity to rework the areas of his domain where he finds weakness. Usually where there is weakness, it comes from our own resistance to the inevitable. His real holy work is to get us to accept what cannot be changed.
Today marks the end of his retrograde period. He has been retrograde since May. During that time we have probably felt a bit like we were treading water, chewing cud, and reviewing parts of life that we needed to understand better so that we could move forward and make progress. In Pluto’s domain specifically, people in good alignment have probably been ruminating on what our actual role in the Collective is meant to be, and how to move in the direction of alignment in our service to the world. People in poor alignment have probably been searching for ways to avoid their obligations instead – loopholes and easy exits.
From today onward, Pluto returns to the slow work of writing the story of our collective fate. His direct season in Aquarius will bring us face to face with our individual power in the social responsibility sense. Aquarius is the sign of the Collective, so it’s a suitable place for a planet who relates to us through the way we impact transpersonal society.
During this season it’s important to remember that our choices and their consequences don’t limit themselves to the way they affect us as individuals. Those consequences trickle down to our impact on everyone around us, and that trickles down to their impacts on everyone around them. Given the small world we live in and the six degrees of separation, a little self-ownership goes a long way towards making sure our impact is net positive rather than net negative.
