On the Late, Great Planet Pluto

by Charlie Obert

I don’t think well on my feet. I do my best thinking sitting relaxed, with a cup of hot tea and some classical music on in the background – at the moment it is Beethoven string quartets. This gives me time to really think through subjects before I say or write anything.

I have some things to think out in this post.

Yesterday I made a post to my Facebook page about how I thought it was time to stop treating Pluto as a full fledged planet, and that position could no longer be easily justified in either traditional or modern terms.

I reproduce my post here.

At the risk of being the party pooper in the astrology community – I really don’t think continuing to make a big deal out of Pluto works today with either traditional or modern astrology.

In traditional terms it is not one of the classical planets, and traditional astrology works very well without it. I have quit including it in the charts I do. (For that matter, most of the time I now leave out Uranus and Neptune.) Most of the meanings assigned to Pluto were originally part of the more complex traditional signification of Saturn – I talk about that in my recent book on Saturn.

In modern terms it is no longer considered a planet – it is in 2006 that Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet. Any astrologer that speaks at all about being “scientific” is on shaky ground in science terms by hanging on to Pluto’s significance as a full planet. Still treating Pluto as a planet is being way behind the times scientifically.

The concepts normally attached to Pluto are pretty ominous, and very vague, and you can attach them to pretty much anything because of that vagueness. At any given point in time you can find SOMETHING going on you could assign to Pluto.

I find that leaving Pluto out eliminates a kind of ominous background noise, like clearing away a cloud of smoke.

I am just starting to see occasional posts referring to the eight (rather than nine) planets, so maybe we’re starting to get caught up.

– Charlie Obert
Facebook, February 6, 2020

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The post drew quite a flurry of responses, most of them negative, mostly trying to “prove” to me that Pluto is a planet.

My reaction to pretty much all of the pro-Pluto posts was something like this:

What you are saying is all well and good – but you are ignoring the main point I raised, which is that Pluto is no longer considered a planet.

That minor detail appears to have gotten lost in the shuffle, so I want to repeat and emphasize it here.

Since 2006 Pluto is no longer considered to be a planet.

It seems to me that if you practice modern astrology you really need to come to terms with that rather inconvenient scientific fact. Pretty much the only response I have seen so far is to ignore it, and to go on reading charts as if Pluto was the Biggest and most Badass of all.

Here is a pretty good article among many on the web on this issue of Pluto not being a planet.

Why Pluto is No Longer a Planet

In that area of space, known as the Kuiper belt, there are numerous large bodies in the vicinity of Pluto that qualify as dwarf planets, and at least one of them, 2003 UB313 aka Eris, is definitely larger than Pluto, and a third one, Makemake, is likely larger than Pluto. At the most conservative estimate there are likely at least 10 bodies in the Kuiper belt meeting the qualifications of dwarf planet.

So if we make a “big” deal (so to speak) out of Pluto, shouldn’t we make a “bigger”deal out of Eris and Makemake? How about the other dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt? And what about the asteroid Ceres, the one body in the asteroid belt large enough to qualify as a dwarf planet? In terms of astrology the whole subject gets very messy very quickly, and the justification for giving Pluto so much “weight” is very shaky.

That is one of the main points I was raising by my post, and as far as I can tell very few of the responses addressed that point, or even mentioned it. They pretty much all said that Pluto is a planet and here are examples that prove it, with no reference to the current scientific status of Pluto.

So that is my main question here for modern astrologers who take science into account – if you continue to use Pluto as a full-fledged planet how do you deal with this scientific data about numerous dwarf planets? If you ignore this, then any claim for scientific validity for your astrology is on very shaky ground.

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Here is where it starts getting really messy. I want to start this section with a long quote from Scott Adams in his recent book, LoserThink.

“There are three important things to know about human beings in order to understand why we do the things we do.

1. Humans use pattern recognition to understand their world.
2. Humans are very bad at pattern recognition.
3. And they don’t know it.

We can’t tell the difference between valid patterns that might predict something useful and something that simply reminds us of something else but means nothing.”

– Scott Adams, LoserThink

There is another way of putting this – give the human mind a pattern to make sense of the world, and it will proceed to go out and find evidence that this pattern explains things. It is a self-reinforcing process. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to tell if we have a useful explanatory pattern, or if we are arranging the data to fit the pattern.

Give the mind a pattern and it will find evidence for that pattern. This goes to the very heart of what we do as astrologers, and like I said, it gets very messy very quickly.

Look at astrology data through a lens that says Pluto is very important, and you will find tons of data showing how important Pluto is.

The other thing about human minds is that they get into habits, they get used to their patterns. Introduce some data that does not fit the established pattern and the natural reaction is to resist it, or dispute it, or plain old not see it.

A lot of modern astrologers (myself included) spent very many years working the Pluto-As-Planet filter. It became an important and habitual part of their astrology toolkit, and in some forms of modern astrology Pluto-as-Planet is absolutely central and crucial. In 2006 the scientific community decided that Pluto is no longer a planet, so the Pluto-as-Planet filter no longer corresponds with current science. As far as I can tell the great majority of astrologers have reacted to that change by acting as if it never happened.

When I did my earlier blog post on Pluto and Overhype where I talked about the Dreaded Saturn Pluto Conjunction, I tried an experiment, where I took a couple of years at random and tried looking at them to find events I could “prove” were due to Saturn and Pluto. And lo and behold, I could find Saturn-Pluto events in every year I chose, even the years where there was no significant Saturn-Pluto aspect. I would not even say I could be sure there were more Saturn-Pluto sorts of events in the years where there was an aspect compared to years that there were not.

I could make the Saturn-Pluto planet filter work even when Saturn and Pluto weren’t around.

So, all of the responses to my posts that gave examples to “prove” Pluto was a planet showed only that they could take the Pluto-as-planet pattern and use it to explain data. I already knew that.

And they still didn’t answer my point about Pluto no longer being a planet.

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I want to talk about my own astrology experience.

I’ve been working with astrology at various levels of intensity for a long time now, and for a long time I practiced modern astrology since that was all that I knew. I regularly used Pluto along with the other modern planets Uranus and Neptune.

I then went through a period of several years, when I was intensely studying traditional astrology, that I went cold-turkey and stopped using the 3 modern planets altogether. I worked only with the traditional seven planets and used only traditional techniques.

A couple of years ago I again started including the modern outer planets, and that was a period where I wanted to integrate my traditional astrology skills in with the best of my modern astrology experience. What I have been finding is that I sometimes find meaning in including Uranus and Neptune, although I do not emphasize them anywhere near as heavily as many modern astrologers seem to.

And Pluto? My experience in the past few years is that Pluto really doesn’t add much in terms of specific information to my chart reading. The meanings attached to Pluto are mostly pretty vague, and I had a hard time pinning down what it meant.

Summing up – I have astrology experience with Pluto as planet and without Pluto, and I find my astrology works better without Pluto.

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One last point.

I would imagine that some of those people who posted examples of how important Pluto transits were in their own lives, could rightly say by experience that they “know” Pluto is important. I must have not been through that so I don’t know it firsthand.

Good point – except that isn’t my situation.

My natal Ascendant is at 18 Capricorn, so I very recently experienced a period of around 3 years where Pluto was tap-dancing right on my Ascendant – or whatever kind of dance dwarf planets do. It seems to me that if Pluto really were as important as was claimed, that should have been a period of particularly severe stress, transformation and change.

Did I change a lot during those three years? Yes. I also changed a lot in the three years prior to that, and I changed even more in the years following that when it was Saturn tap-dancing on my Ascendant, or whatever kind of ponderous dance Saturn does.

Did those three years of Pluto on my Ascendant stand out to me? Frankly, no – and I’m an astrologer, I was watching. During that period, I found that using only the traditional seven planets provided the most satisfactory astrology explanation for what was going on. That is my experience with my own chart and with the charts of clients I have worked with.

So, in terms of both my own personal experience, and my own chart reading experience, I find that my astrology works better without Pluto than with Pluto. In my personal and astrological experience Big Badass Pluto really is a Dwarf with an ominous shadow and a big special effects budget.

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Lest my main point about Pluto get lost in the shuffle I will repeat it one last time here at the end of my post.

Since 2006 Pluto is no longer considered to be a planet.

I think we would do well to come to terms with that in our astrology.

Those of you who claim Pluto’s importance – how do you deal with that fact?