Pluto

What this is

Pluto is the smallest and furthest thing this Oracle still calls a planet. Clyde Tombaugh found him on photographic plates at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff on the eighteenth of February 1930, and an eleven-year-old in Oxford, Venetia Burney, gave him the name of the lord of the dead. Astronomers demoted him to a dwarf planet in 2006; astrologers did not, and the engine computes him because practice uses him. He takes two hundred and forty-eight years to go round.

What it governs

He has no day and no hour, and could not have: the seven had the week to themselves for two thousand years before anyone saw him. Modern astrologers gave him Scorpio to co-rule with Mars in the decades after 1930, and that rulership is theirs, not the tradition's. In a life he is given what will not be negotiated with — death and inheritance, obsession, buried power, what is hidden, and the slow compulsory change that leaves a person unrecognisable.

Its properties

His colour is black going to oxblood; his stones are obsidian, black tourmaline and smoky quartz, and the card modern practice hands him is Judgement, the dead getting up out of the ground. He has no metal, no number and no named spirit, for one reason three times over: the kameas, the Intelligences and the daemons were all drawn up for the seven, and nothing was added after. Upright he is regeneration, the nerve to look at what you buried, power made accountable. His shadow is coercion, obsession, the vengeance kept warm for years, the ruin that calls itself honesty.

Where else it appears

Hades holds the underworld for the Greeks and is not named aloud if it can be helped; Egypt sets the same court in Osiris and the weighing of the heart; the Norse give Hel her half-dark hall; India keeps Yama, the first man to die and so the one who receives everybody after. Sumer sends Inanna down through seven gates and takes something off her at each one, and Persephone is carried down and comes back a queen — which is the whole doctrine in two stories. These are one initiation described by people who never met: what is buried goes on working, and has to be gone down to rather than escaped.

Where you meet it on the Oracle

Pluto is drawn on your wheel and listed in the table on the Astrology page, and on the horoscope he appears as the birth planet a passing body is pressing — a Pluto contact surfaces under Health. He is never a daily card. Pluto square your Sun is true for two years, and a reading that announced it three hundred mornings running would be lying about what a day is. He belongs to the season panel, with its window and the two or three dates the contact perfects. When he is named there, stop bargaining with the thing and start taking it apart.

Why it matters

He is so because some changes are not offered to you, and pretending otherwise leaves you fighting the one thing that will not lose. Pluto matters because what is refused underground does not go away; it runs the house from the cellar. What he asks is that you go down and look — that you name what you buried, and let it be over rather than let it rule you.

Correspondences

planet

Pluto

element

Water

zodiac

Scorpio

colour

Black, oxblood

stone

Obsidian, Black Tourmaline, Smoky Quartz

tarot

XX — Judgement