Pluto’s Swan Song

After all these years practicing astrology I am still not sure quite what to make of that little Beastie.

This post was triggered by a discussion on John Michael Greer’s ‘Magic Monday’ blog on ecosophia.net, where he fields questions in the area of occultism.

Here is the thread I’d like to quote:

Q: Why do so many astrologers still use Pluto as a planet when astronomers voted in 2006 to demote Pluto to dwarf planet status?

JMG: Partly because most astrologers don’t listen to astronomers — unsurprisingly, because most astronomers are aggressively ignorant about astrology. Partly, though, it’s because Pluto is so addictive. Pluto is among other things the dwarf planet of failed promises and overblown hype, of all those passionately held delusions that are just too appealing to let go of. He’s the dwarf planet of nuclear power, Freudian psychology, Communism, and a long list of other things that claim to split unities down the middle and bring about Utopia any day now, just you wait! Letting go of the dream is hard, and a lot of astrologers haven’t been willing to do it.

Greer wrote a book titled, The Twilight of Pluto: Astrology and the Rise and Fall of Planetary Influences.

Greer argues that the period of Pluto’s strongest influence coincided with the time it was considered a planet, and now that it has been demoted to dwarf planet as of 2006 – a decision that still evokes much weeping, wailing, complaining, and also denial – the effects of Pluto will be waning. He set a 30 year window for that waning effect, so that lasts until around 2036 when Pluto should dwindle to insignificance, except for that handful of rapidly aging, once-modern astrologers who are so entranced by Pluto’s hypnotic spell.

While I think Greer is definitely on to something, I learned from experience back in 2020 that it may be a bit too soon to count Pluto out of the game.

2020 – The Year of Covid Hysteria

My experience with the astrology of 2020 is that it is hard to make sense of the impact of that year on a global scale without taking the Saturn/Pluto conjunction into account.

At the time I was in a phase of my practice where I was working with only the traditional planets from Saturn on in.

My first gut reaction to the growing news about the pandemic was that this was being blown way out of proportion. Looking back, the impact of that year was off the scale in terms of importance – and there will never be a return to the world pre-covid. Never.

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To start, here are the things I got wrong. Let me be up front about these.

Number one, I was wrong to exclude the modern outer planets – it just leaves out too much. It has been proven to me over and over that discounting Uranus, Neptune (and possibly still Pluto) leaves out too many obviously relevant energies.

Number two, I was wrong to discount the importance of the effect of the covid year.

And number three, I think I was especially wrong to discount the importance of the Saturn/Pluto conjunction in the mix of what was going on that year.

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Now I want to talk just about Pluto.

We have to take into account that, officially and astronomically, Pluto is no longer considered a planet – it just happens to be one of the first of the chunks of rock we found out about, floating around in that area of the solar system called the Kuiper belt.

If you argue that you need to keep up with the science and include Uranus and Neptune – and I completely accept that, in theory and in experience – then Pluto should no longer be considered of major planetary importance. Astrologers are good at talking about keeping up with science until you try to take away one of their pet toys – especially one as hypnotically addicting as Pluto.

As Greer points out in his book, planets and other points and bodies in astrology do go in and out of style. For instance, there was a period in the mid-seventies to mid-eighties where Chiron was hot, the big new kid on the block, and there was a lot of talk about the importance of the Wounded Healer. In listening to people talk about astrology, if they quickly point to Chiron you can probably date their main training and imprint on astrology to those years when Chiron was the in thing. Most astrologers take their imprint from the period they were trained, and very few change much past that.

These days I rarely see references to Chiron.

When I started getting really serious about astrology something like twenty years ago, I was very struck by just how big a deal most astrologers seemed to make of Pluto. That little sucker ended up being brought up in pretty much every chart that was talked about, and was credited with everything from nuclear energy to diaper rash.

I still remember one moment in my local astrology group, where we had a new chart put up that had some blatantly obvious points – if memory serves me right there was Mars conjunct the Midheaven, and another planet sitting right on the Ascendant – important points that should jump out first in any analysis. And the first comment I heard was,

Ooooh, Pluto in the Twelfth… He knows where the bodies are buried…

Pluto was sitting there by itself, nowhere near the Ascendant, making no major aspects to anything else – and that is what popped out.

It was like all the other planets were in 10 point type and **PLUTO** was 33 point, bold and italic, bright red and blinking, highlighted in neon yellow. If I questioned that I’d get the response, That’s just like you Pluto in Leo types. This wasn’t Sun sign astrology, it was Pluto sign astrology.

It was reactions like that which were part of why I increasingly moved toward traditional astrology. If the rest of the astrology world was obsessing over Pluto I wanted as little as possible to do with him.

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So how do I make sense of the significance of Pluto in the astrology for early 2020 and start of the massive covid reaction phase?

As I said, I think I made a mistake to leave out Pluto. However, I think I was on to something when my gut reaction told me that the covid phenomenon was being blown way out of proportion, and people were getting fixated and obsessed with that to the exclusion of pretty much everything else.

I now think I was picking up on part of the significance and effect of Pluto that year.

Recall this quote from Greer, which puts it more elegantly than I could:

Pluto is among other things the dwarf planet of failed promises and overblown hype, of all those passionately held delusions that are just too appealing to let go of.

That is as good a summary of what went wrong in 2020 as you can get.

As I now understand it, there are two main aspects to Pluto’s significance in the astrology of early 2020:

First, Pluto is the tendency towards obsession to the exclusion of everything else, of blowing things way out of proportion and of hysterical over-reaction.

And second, Pluto is worth watching wherever you have sneaky manipulation going on behind the scene – below the surface, in Pluto’s domain – plays for power and for wealth, where surface events are being manipulated for ulterior motives. Manipulation behind the scenes for power and control would be a particularly apt interpretation of Pluto conjunct Saturn.

Those two factors go far to explaining a lot of what happened in 2020 and since then. We are still in the aftermath of the obsessive and out-of-proportion over-reaction to the covid phenomenon, and the worst of the bad effects from that year are not from the disease itself but from our collective reaction to it.

And, I still seriously wonder to what extent the scenarios of that year were crafted and manipulated by media for reasons of power and financial control – factors that are still evident today, and at least to my eye are becoming more evident as time passes.

I don’t want to go into any further detail on that, as I would be bumping into another likely significance of Pluto – conspiracies going on behind the scenes, and/or the tendency to find such conspiracies everywhere you turn. That is a very sticky rabbit-hole to fall into.

The Fat Lady Hasn’t Sung Yet

As Greer hypothesizes, it is likely that the significance of Pluto is going to fade out and die, as more astrologers learn their craft in an era where Pluto is no longer a full-scale planet but a planetoid. Eventually Pluto will end up fading into the background to join Chiron, Bacchus (anyone remember him?) and other astrology fads in the dusty, remaindered back shelves of astrology history.

While I definitely think Greer is on to something, I don’t think it is quite time to put the little Beastie out to pasture just yet.

If nothing else, Pluto is part of an exceptional pattern coming up in the next two years, where all four of the outermost planets all switch signs within a rather short period of time. That marks a major shift.

Will Pluto’s shift from Capricorn into Aquarius be part of his swan song, the part where he sings Goodnight, Mrs Calabash, and slithers off into the darkness? My hunch is that might be the case, but time will tell.

Meanwhile, I do not think we are done dealing with the consequences of that period of overblown hysteria and over-reaction that marks the covid years starting in 2020, and I suspect that the next few years, with that major shift in signs of the four outer planets, will mark a significant period of resolution, change and re-settling. We’ll see.

So for now –

We are still dealing with people being prone to get obsessed with things and way over-react, and blow things all out of proportion – or, to let themselves be manipulated by others to get obsessed and over-react. Along with nuclear energy and diaper rash Pluto is related to hypnosis, hysteria and mind-control.

We are still dealing with the consequences of nasty, under-the-table power games being played to manipulate people and events for money and power.

And, we are dealing with conspiracies, or the tendency to find conspiracies behind events – it is often hard to separate out which is the case.

I do not think we have yet reached a period of reckoning for the errors and over-reach of the covid years. Nowhere near. I suspect that the massive outer planet sign shift in the next few years has a lot to do with that reckoning, but time will tell.

I still include Pluto in the charts I draw up and read these days, though I mostly pay very little attention to the little guy. While I am still not quite sure what to make of Pluto in the charts I look at, I’m not quite ready to count that little Beastie out of the game. You never know what’s going on underground…

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Cat eyes Image by Anna</a> from Pixabay.