Pluto

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.

The name was suggested by Venetia Burney, an eleven-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford, and astrologers again read the planet through the years it was found in: the Depression, the rise of the dictatorships and the work on the atom that led to the bomb. Plutonium, first made in 1940 and 1941, was named after it. From those years came the readings of power concentrated and hidden, and of things broken down to be remade.

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.

Pluto is far too faint for the eye or for binoculars; it takes a sizeable telescope and a good chart to find it at all. It goes round the Sun twice for every three circuits of Neptune, a lock that keeps the two apart even where their paths seem to cross. It was nearest the Sun in 1989, and in July 2015 the New Horizons probe flew past and sent back the first close pictures of it.

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.

Its stays show how uneven the pace is: Leo from the late 1930s to the late 1950s, Virgo to 1971 and 1972, Libra to 1983 and 1984, Scorpio to 1995, Sagittarius to 2008 and Capricorn to 2023 and 2024. Scorpio took about twelve years; Taurus, on the slow side of the orbit, takes more than thirty. Astrologers read each as a theme a generation has to come to terms with, which describes an era and says little about any one person.

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.

The Pluto square, Pluto a quarter of the way round from its birth position, shows that unevenness most plainly. People born around 1970 reached it in their mid-thirties, those born around 1940 in their mid-forties, and those born in 2000 will be in their early fifties.