Pluto

What it asks you to notice

If you use Pluto at all, let it ask what is buried and still running the house: a compulsion, a debt, a family secret, an institution's unsaid rule, a power you pretend not to have. The symbol, in modern psychological astrology, points at elimination and at the kind of change that is not a rebrand. Traditional astrology did not use it, because it had not been found, and many traditional practitioners still decline it. Both choices can be intellectually honest.

The notice should be humbling, not theatrical. Not every argument is an underworld initiation. Sometimes a buried thing is a box you can label, a role you can resign, or an apology you can make without a mythic soundtrack.

Power is often banal. That does not make it small.

Name and history

Clyde Tombaugh found the body in 1930 at Lowell Observatory. Venetia Burney, an eleven-year-old in Oxford, suggested the name Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld, Greek Hades. The suggestion traveled through her grandfather to the astronomers and stuck, helped by the fact that the first two letters echo Percival Lowell's initials.

The underworld did not nominate itself. A child who knew her myths made a good pun, and the culture agreed.

In 2006 the International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet. Astrologers who continue to use it are making a symbolic choice, not an astronomical protest The Wilde Altar needs to referee. This guide lists it with the planets as a teaching convention and states the dwarf-planet status in the same breath.

Hades' myths are grim and specific. They are not a mood of 'intense people.'

In the sky

Pluto is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, smaller than Earth's Moon, with a tipped, oval orbit that takes about two hundred forty-eight years. The orbit is eccentric enough that its distance from the Sun varies widely, which is an astronomical fact and not a personal schedule. You cannot see it without serious optics. Any degree you quote must come from a proper ephemeris elsewhere.

Because the period is so long, Pluto's sign is a poor way to describe an individual and a tempting way to caricature an era. Resist the caricature. Eras contain arguments. A distant dwarf planet does not settle them, and this site will not say where Pluto is this year.

Over-identification

Over-identification narrates ordinary conflict as descent into the underworld, which inflates the speaker and frightens everyone else. Jealousy, grief, and institutional power are real enough without being cast as fate. The other error is to fear every ending, as if to finish a thing were to summon annihilation. Endings are part of competent life.

If the symbol helps you face a buried imbalance, use it and then do the unmythic task. If it only gives you a more dramatic self-image, set it down. You are allowed to practice astrology without Pluto. You are not allowed to use Pluto as a threat.

At a glance

Set one buried thing down

1. 1Name one thing you are done carrying: a role, a secret that is yours to tell, a grudge, or a box of objects.
2. 2Write the practical form of setting it down, with no mythic verbs.
3. 3Do the smallest version today: label the box, send the resignation from the role, or tell the truth to the person owed it.
4. 4Refuse one dramatic gesture that would make the act about your image rather than about the weight.

Questions

• What power am I pretending not to have?
• Which ending am I delaying because I want it to feel legendary?
• If I did not use the word Pluto, what would the task still be?

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