Pluto

What Will Not Stay Buried

Pluto governs power, compulsion, buried material and the kind of change that does not restore the previous state. Its orbit takes about two hundred and forty-eight years.

It spends between twelve and thirty years in a sign depending on where it is in a markedly eccentric orbit, which makes it the most generational placement of all.

Discovered in 1930, so its interpretive tradition is less than a century old — a fact usually left out of material describing it as ancient.

In the Chart

Pluto's house is where you experience power, your own and other people's, and where changes tend to be structural rather than cosmetic.

It is traditionally read as the area of life that gets rebuilt rather than adjusted, often more than once, and often not by choice.

As with the other outer planets, only the house and close aspects to personal planets make it individual. Pluto in Scorpio describes everyone born across eleven years.

The Reclassification

Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006, and the question of whether that affects its astrological use comes up constantly.

It does not, for a straightforward reason: the reclassification changed a naming convention, not an orbit. Pluto is exactly where it was, moving exactly as it did.

The more interesting question it raises is consistency. If Pluto counts, it is not obvious why Eris and Sedna should not, and most astrologers do not use them. The tradition has not resolved that.

Holding It Sensibly

Pluto attracts the most dramatic writing of any placement, and the language of transformation and destruction invites over-reading.

A generational placement with no aspect to a personal planet is background. It is not a fated theme running through a life, and treating it as one produces readings that would fit anybody born in the same decade.

Where it does aspect a personal planet closely, the traditional reading of intensity and structural change is at least specific enough to be worth considering.