Pluto in Aquarius: Part 1
Transformation Through Pain
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When I started writing about Pluto, I found the article growing longer and longer. I realized there is so much to say about Pluto, that I didn’t want to just sum it up in a brief post. Pluto is far too profound a topic for that, so I have decided to break this up into two separate articles. Part 1 discusses the nature and function of Pluto. Part 2 goes into the implications of Pluto moving into Aquarius. Let’s get started!
This month delivers many special transits and on March 24th is another one. On this day, Pluto moves into Aquarius for the first time. This is an epic event that will definitely be felt individually and collectively.
Pluto is the very outermost planet in astrology. While modern science has demoted Pluto from a planet to a dwarf, astrology doesn’t consider this labeling to be meaningful as it doesn’t change the function and effect of Pluto. Astrologists tend to follow the classical definition of “planet” and classify any kind of heavenly body as such. (Note that we also call the Sun and Moon planets.) This is primarily for ease of reference.
While Pluto was originally considered one of nine planets of our solar system, it is now known as a member of the Kuiper Belt. The Kuiper Belt is a donut-shaped ring containing many, many icy objects that encircles the outer edge of our solar system. As technology advances, scientists are identifying more and more objects that lie within the Kuiper Belt – known as Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs).
Pluto has a very irregular orbit, sometimes it swings very wide and far into the Kuiper Belt – thus it is considered a KBO. It also sometimes comes very narrow in its ecliptic bringing it closer to the Sun than even Neptune. Due to its irregular path weaving in and out of the ring, in astrology Pluto is considered a kind of “gatekeeper” to the Kuiper Belt.
I plan to explore the Kuiper Belt Objects in more detail in later articles, but for now I’ll just mention that these objects are considered a very new area of astrology. It is quite exciting for astrology nerds to have the opportunity to observe these objects and the impacts they have on our world – pioneering new astrological definitions. Some examples of KBOs are Haumea, Ceres, Eris and Makemake. As I further my astrological study, again, I intend to explore each of these objects in depth. What I can say about them very generally is that they are considered bodies that bring “higher consciousness” energies to Earth. From a spiritual perspective, the reason they weren’t discovered earlier is because our collective consciousness was not ready to receive their “light” or information. As we learn more about the KBOs, they will deliver us ever-expanding insights into our own consciousness and the nature of reality.
Considering KBOs as “harbingers of higher consciousness,” Pluto’s role becomes much more interesting. Symbolically speaking, if Pluto is a gatekeeper to this higher knowledge, then it seems we must go through the tests and rigors of Pluto in order to access this new level of understanding. Analyzing Pluto’s myth, symbolism and actions in astrology, this makes a lot of sense – and you’ll soon see why.
First though, I’ll mention that with Pluto being so far away, it moves very slow. It takes Pluto approximately 248 years to make a full revolution around the astrological wheel (that is, move through all the signs and houses). Its highly irregular orbit means that Pluto spends anywhere from 14-31 years in a sign.
Because of its slow moving nature and retrograde cycles, it tends to feel like taking two steps forward and three steps back, undulating through a certain energy for painstaking amounts of time. This also makes Pluto a “generational planet” since there are whole generations of people born with Pluto in the same sign of their natal charts.
This means we can clearly observe Pluto’s effects in the outer world and society as it moves through the signs, retrogrades and makes different aspects. We have been experiencing Pluto in Capricorn since 2008. Capricorn is a sign associated with hierarchy, top-down organizations, government, authority, money, business, reputation, and control. If you recall, 2008 was the year of the housing crisis and was a part of the global financial crisis.
We tend to most heavily feel the effects of these slow transits at the start and end of their changing signs. Note that Pluto was at 0 degrees Capricorn in January of 2008. Also note that for the past few years, Pluto has been edging closer and closer to the end (or 29th degree) of Capricorn. What sort of events from the past few years can you recall that relate to the themes of Capricorn listed above? Additionally, the United States experienced its Pluto return (when Pluto comes back to its original placement) on February 22nd, 2022.
While Pluto is often considered as a generational planet, it also affects each of us individually. While it’s true that an entire generation of people will feel the energies of Pluto in a specific way (for example, I have Pluto in Scorpio, as does my husband, as does everyone I went to high school with), those energies will impact an individual person in unique ways depending on which house Pluto occupies in their natal chart. Specific aspects Pluto makes in the chart will also bring more individual flavoring to their experience of Pluto.
So what does Pluto mean? As a planet, Pluto symbolizes a specific action, intention, drive or purpose in astrology. Those actions get flavored by whatever sign it occupies, but the push toward the action remains. Pluto is the planet of death, transformation and rebirth. Its purpose is to transform the old and outdated through pain. I know that sounds very hellish at first glance, which is appropriate because in mythology Pluto is the ruler of the underworld.
Pluto’s role as underworld overseer is very psychological in nature. The underworld is symbolic of the “unseen realms” and whatever “lies below the surface.” This symbolizes our subconscious self. In Evolutionary Astrology, it is believed that we each have a soul and this soul is our inherent expression, our true being. The soul has its own personality and collective experience that is broader than our current, incarnated personality. This is due to past lives that we’ve lived and all the collective experiences we’ve gathered through those lives. The soul remembers them, even if we consciously do not, and these memories are stored in our subconscious. Thus, Pluto oversees these buried experiences and facilitates our souls’ extended growth.
Even though I am discussing the topic of reincarnation and looking at Pluto from the lens of a series of multiple lived experiences, this concept still applies even if you do not accept the concept of reincarnation. During our early childhood experiences (and some researchers extend this to our time in the womb), we accumulate unconscious memories. These are experiences we’ve had before we had the ability to mentally process them. They are stored in our subconscious as felt-perception experiences – things we experienced through our emotions. This means that even if you had a nice, loving, pleasant childhood, you still have unconscious traumatic memories.
Consider that as an infant, you could only experience the world through your emotions. So whenever you cried or experienced “loss” in some way (such as if your parents took something away from you that could hurt you), you wouldn’t have had the logical ability to discern why you were experiencing that loss. You simply would have felt the emotions of it. These emotions get stored in your psyche, whether they were objectively “harmful” to you or not. If you perceived them as upsetting, they caused trauma regardless.
The soul wants to grow. It wants to gather new experiences and transform as it moves through physical incarnation. Every detail about our current lives ties into specific themes and experiences that our soul “signed up for” prior to being birthed. Yet, we have all of these unconscious memories buried in our psyches. Even though we do not consciously recall these memories, they still play an active role in our existence. These memories influence our emotions and our emotions influence our actions. Thus, when we have experiences from the past that remain unintegrated – including early childhood memories from this life – we tend to repeat those experiences in different forms over and over again.
This is because our soul wants us to deal with the emotions of the experience. But we cannot deal with those emotions until we feel them again, so we attract to ourselves similar experiences that inspire the same emotional patterns. This way, we’re then confronted with those emotions on a conscious level so they can be acknowledged and integrated. Once they’re integrated, we get to move on to new lessons and experiences – the soul evolves.
The catch here is that those memories are repressed for a specific reason: they are painful and uncomfortable. Our personality, or ego, doesn’t want to relive those experiences. They may be frightening, they may make us feel insecure or weak, they may threaten our very definition of ourselves. And so when those emotions begin to rise into our awareness, we push them down and away; we avoid them. We do this again and again and again.
Each time we push down emotions, a new outer circumstance arises that reminds us of them. Our emotions are “energy in motion,” they are literally electromagnetic signals sent through our bodies and out into our environment. These signals are sent via the frequency fields of our hearts and brains – and those signals are received, processed and reciprocated by other people. This is a whole other topic in and of itself, but just be aware that your emotions are like little magnets which draw experiences into your reality. When you accumulate enough of the same emotion over time, again and again and again, you eventually attract a very BIG emotional experience.
In Evolutionary Astrology, this is the difference between gradual and sudden change. People who are willing to face themselves and take accountability for their emotional experience afford themselves a more gradual, somewhat gentler, evolutionary process. Change happens incrementally over time. For those who continuously avoid change over and over again, they are eventually met with “cataclysmic change.” That is, a huge, life-altering, traumatic event occurs in their outer world that forces their evolutionary experience. This is the will of the soul – it wants to evolve. We get the choice from the perspective of our ego-personality whether we work willingly with those lessons and changes, or whether they happen to us. Either way, the soul gets what it wants, and I should mention, this is ultimately for our own good.
This is the role of Pluto, it acts as facilitator of these changes. Pluto works on us on a subconscious level, stimulating our emotional experiences to resurface unconscious memories to be acknowledged and cleared. No matter what we do, these experiences are by nature uncomfortable. They’re not “fun and lighthearted,” but they do serve us in tremendous ways. They afford us the gift of evolution, growth, change, transformation and personal upgrade. As we upgrade ourselves, our experiences are upgraded; we expand and get to understand life in profound and deeply meaningful ways. We begin to see and feel the connection of our spiritual selves with our linear selves. This brings wisdom, and ultimately, greater peace and security.
But dang it if those emotions just aren’t so unpleasant. The average person is not consciously aware of these processes at work, and so they naturally repress the experiences. This is when Pluto steps in to deliver a super whammy of triggering, pain, upset and trauma to get our attention. It’s like at each experience our emotions are waving a little red flag at us, but we choose to ignore this – over and over again. Finally, they’re forced to hit us over the head with one of those giant cartoon mallets, and we’re left totally crushed, pummeled, and devastated.
To get through this experience, we’re forced to work with our emotions. We now have to explore them, make sense of them, and put them into perspective. Above all, we just have to feel them. If we don’t, they swallow us up; we drown in them. So maybe we go see a therapist; maybe we talk to a friend; maybe we decide to journal about our experiences or channel our emotions into art; maybe we go for a run and feel the emotions being expelled through our sweat and energy. However we choose to finally deal with the traumatic experience, we’re finally able to confront those emotions and therefore, integrate them into our being. Acknowledgment = integration.
Once integrated, they no longer are trying to get our attention. They’re not sending out signals anymore and therefore we aren’t attracting matching experiences to them. We’ve changed, we’ve evolved, we’ve transformed. This is Pluto: transforming the old through pain.
Anyone who has ever moved through grief understands this process. Particularly when grieving the death of a close loved one, this process can be excruciating. It wounds us so deeply and that wound can be triggered at very unexpected moments. Having gone through this experience multiple times, I can attest to the difference it makes when you are willing to feel your grief and release your emotions vs. pushing them down and avoiding them.
Every grief experience is different. Each individual grieves differently, but also each grief experience for certain loved is as unique as your relationship with that person. I have noticed though that when I allow myself the space to grieve and I honor those emotions, my grief process moves along faster and “easier” than if I avoid my feelings.
Pluto will make sure you feel those feelings eventually. If they are avoided, you may spare yourself some temporary pain, but you will ultimately be confronted with something much heavier and more challenging later on.
Continuing on our discussion of Pluto, I want to mention that Pluto is associated with karma. Many people assume karma is a bad thing, but in actuality karma is simply “accrued energy.” It is neutral in its essence. The point of karma is to help us achieve balance. All of these subconscious emotions withheld from past lives are simply the residue of karmic experiences we’ve had – which creates energetic patterning in us – and Pluto offers us new experiences to address that karma and clear the patterns that keep repeating. Recall that the soul yearns for new experiences – so we need to cease the old patterns in order to shift into something fresh and unfamiliar.
This is not a lighthearted article – and Pluto is not a lighthearted planet – but I feel it’s important to acknowledge that these actions of Pluto are here to serve us and our highest good. Despite its reputation, Pluto is not evil and it’s not sadistic. It is a very benevolent planet and it expresses itself through unconditional love. No matter what kind of person you are, even the most awful, nasty people are still given the service and love of Pluto who offers them the opportunity to change and evolve. And these opportunities are given again and again, no matter how many times they’re refused.
On a more general level, some keywords for Pluto are: change, transformation, the subconscious mind, power, control, manipulation, the occult, mystery, the unknown, transcendence, death, and rebirth. Keep in mind that all planets have higher and lower potentials of expression – this is the way these energies are expressed through us.
Under the influence of Pluto, some people will lean more toward its lower expressions – using manipulation to get what they want, controlling others, wielding power in irresponsible ways, using the ends to justify the means. Whereas there are some people who will tap into the highest expressions of Pluto and use its energies to confront their own shadows, look at themselves deeply and honestly, and find their own personal power, using it to shed the outdated versions of themselves and transcend into someone wiser and more evolved.
These themes have been particularly poignant while Pluto has been in Capricorn since Capricorn has much to do with power and public image. In its higher expressions, Capricorn holds very high integrity and feels a sense of personal responsibility, particularly in one’s public role. On the lower end of the spectrum Capricorn can be incredibly controlling and it can use money and status to wield power over others. Again, these themes can be witnessed on a larger scale out in the public arena, but they also play a role for us on a personal level. You can look to the house Pluto transits in your natal chart as well as any aspects it makes for more information on how this impacts you personally.
I can help you with that! If you’re interested in learning more about Pluto’s effects in your chart, you can book an astrology session with me by visiting www.zenithglowastrology.com.
This concludes Part 1 of Pluto in Aquarius. We’ll continue our discussion of Pluto in Part 2.
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