Pluto in Astrology

Think of the change in your life you did not choose and could not stop, the ending that turned out to be a beginning. Think of where you are most intense, most afraid of losing control, most capable of rebuilding from nothing. That is Pluto in your chart: the part of life that goes through death and rebirth, again and again.

Pluto is the slowest and deepest of the planets astrology uses. It does not tinker. It transforms, from the root.

What Pluto stands for

Pluto represents:

• Transformation: deep, lasting change, often through crisis.
• Power: personal power, control, and the power others hold over us.
• Depth: what is hidden, buried or taboo, and the urge to uncover it.
• Endings and rebirth: letting go completely so that something new can grow.
• Intensity: obsession, passion, all-or-nothing feeling.

Pluto takes about 248 years to circle the zodiac. Its orbit is so stretched that it spends as little as about 12 years in some signs and more than 30 in others. Its sign describes the deep concerns of a generation.

The planet that is not a planet

Here is something most horoscope pages never mention. Pluto was discovered in 1930, and in 2006 astronomers reclassified it as a dwarf planet. Astrologers kept using it, for a simple reason: in a chart it works. Its themes of power, crisis and renewal show up clearly in the lives of the people it touches.

Pluto is unusual in another way too. Its orbit is so stretched that for part of its journey it comes closer to the Sun than Neptune does. For twenty years in the late twentieth century, from 1979 to 1999, Pluto was not the outermost planet at all. Even its place in the solar system transforms.

Where is this planet in your chart?

Its sign says how it works, its house says where. See both, with the aspects that shape it.

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