Pluto
The modern co-ruler of Scorpio and the slowest body a chart uses. Astronomy has called it a dwarf planet since 2006; astrology still reads it as power, compulsion, endings and renewal.
Where Pluto is now
What Pluto stands for
Pluto stands for what a person will not be moved on: power, compulsion, endings, and what grows back after them.
Pluto is named after the Roman god of the underworld, who ruled the dead and what lies hidden under the ground. Astrology reads it as depth, control, taboo, crisis and regeneration: the forces a person meets when something has to end for something else to begin. Where it is used, it is read as intensity rather than as fate.
How Pluto moves
It takes two hundred and forty-eight years to go round the zodiac, and its orbit is so stretched that it spends anything from about twelve to more than thirty years in a sign. It goes backwards for about five months of every year.
It was found in 1930 and reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006. Astrology kept it, and it is better to say so than to pretend the reclassification did not happen.
Clyde Tombaugh found it at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona on 18 February 1930, by comparing photographs of the same patch of sky taken days apart. In 2006 the International Astronomical Union decided that a planet must have cleared the neighbourhood of its orbit, which Pluto has not. Its largest moon, Charon, is about half its width.
Its orbit is tilted about seventeen degrees and so stretched that Pluto was closer to the Sun than Neptune from 1979 to 1999. It moved into Aquarius in November 2024, after more than a year of crossing back and forth, and stays there until 2043 and 2044. The retrograde page shows its yearly loop beside the planets’ own.
Rulership, dignity and sect
Pluto has no sign of its own in the traditional scheme, which was settled long before it was found. Modern astrology makes it co-ruler of Scorpio with Mars.
The Scorpio page reads the sign with both of its rulers. Pluto has no traditional dignities, and there is no settled modern agreement on where it is exalted, so none is given here. Some astrologers who work in the traditional way leave Pluto out of a chart altogether and read only the seven classical planets.
Where it is used, Pluto is read most personally through contact with the Sun, the Moon, the rising degree or the Midheaven. A close aspect from Pluto to one of those is read as intensity in that part of the character: a need to get to the bottom of things, or a sharp sense of who holds power.
Reading Pluto by sign and by house
Pluto’s sign is shared by everyone born over a decade or more, so it is read as the preoccupation of a generation. Its house is where the reading turns personal, as the part of life a person approaches with intensity and where they are thought to go through the most thorough changes.
A worked example: Pluto in the eighth house, its natural house by modern reckoning, is read as somebody drawn to what others avoid, steady in a crisis and interested in what lies under the surface. The same Pluto in the first house moves that intensity into manner and presence, and is often read as a guarded or magnetic first impression.
What gets confused about Pluto
Pluto did not stop meaning anything to astrology when astronomy reclassified it, because astrology never used it for its size. Nor does anyone have a Pluto return: at two hundred and forty-eight years, it never comes back to its birth position within a life. The Pluto cycles people talk about are its squares and oppositions to its own birth position and its contacts with the personal planets.
Questions people ask
Why does astrology still use Pluto if it is not a planet?
Astrology never chose its planets by size or by the astronomical definition, which in any case dates only from 2006. It counts the Sun and the Moon as planets in the older sense of wanderers, and astrologers had read Pluto for decades before the reclassification. When the International Astronomical Union made Pluto a dwarf planet, most astrologers kept it; some traditional astrologers never used it at all.
How long does Pluto stay in a sign?
Anything from about twelve to more than thirty years, because Pluto’s orbit is strongly stretched. It moves fastest near the Sun, which in recent history came while it crossed Scorpio in the 1980s and 1990s, and slowest far from it. It settled into Aquarius in November 2024 and stays there until 2043 and 2044, so the sign describes a whole generation.
What does Pluto represent in astrology?
Pluto is read as power, depth and transformation: what a person clings to or is driven by, what they will not be moved on, and the endings that make room for something new. It is the modern co-ruler of Scorpio. Since it spends a decade or more in each sign, its house and its aspects to the Sun, the Moon and the angles carry most of the personal reading.
Does anyone have a Pluto return?
No. Pluto takes about two hundred and forty-eight years to go round the zodiac, so it never comes back to its birth position within a lifetime. Astrologers look instead at the points along the way, such as Pluto squaring its own birth position, which because of its uneven speed falls at quite different ages for people born in different decades.