exploring the soul, the underworld & pluto in aquarius
As Pluto transitions into Aquarius on January 20th, we’ll be entering a new astrological era — a once-in-a-lifetime shift that will precipitate and coincide with generational and personal changes over the next twenty years (although I must note that this is not the “Age of Aquarius” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). Pluto moves the slowest of all celestial bodies in our solar system, and spends approximately 12-30 years in each zodiac sign. When Pluto moves signs, it’s a rare occurrence — depending on when we were born, most of us won’t see Pluto cover more than 4-6 signs. Since 2008, Pluto has occupied Capricorn. This has gone on for so long that it might be easy to conflate the meaning of the two! Capricorn, a Saturn-ruled sign, is often about sacrifice, labor, mastery, discipline, and the acquisition of power, all of which are in and of themselves neutral — but under many, heavy years of Pluto’s mythic pry bar and magnifying lens, the deteriorating underbelly of these aspects of life in economics, government, and culture have been repeatedly exposed: as exploitation, abuses of power and privilege, and structural inequalities. Before we give Pluto a bad reputation however, note that none of these things were new or created by Pluto’s ingress, rather they have simply been unearthed and brought to light with greater intensity over the past fifteen years. And, one has to hope, in service of spurring change over the long haul. One of Pluto’s roles in astrology is to expose us to what is invisible, or buried, and sometimes to what is dying — personally and collectively. This revelatory process can be painful, and on the scale of history, the decay that is exposed (literally or morally) seems to rarely be resolved within one lifetime (though we must try). On the personal level, engaging with Plutonian themes can be more manageable — helping us to advance insight, catharsis, renewal, and meaning-making through exposure to what is hidden, unconscious, or changing. As Pluto is about to shift signs, what will it mean to begin experiencing these themes in airy, fixed Aquarius, the sign of the Water Bearer? What kinds of transformations can we anticipate from 2024-2044, individually and socially? First, let’s explore Pluto’s meaning a bit more deeply, diving into the myths and archetypal qualities that underpin its astrological associations with death and rebirth.
For those who are curious for a more historical review of Pluto in Aquarius, see here.
Pluto, also known as Hades, from the Greek Ploutōn, meaning riches, was the ruler of the Underworld in Greco-Roman myth and spiritual practice, and was frequently interchanged and merged with Ploûtos, deity of wealth. The Plutonian realm in legend was a timeless subterranean place, where starless rivers plunge and sweep through quiet landscapes filled with innumerable souls. Consider for a moment the sacred feeling of a place made of soul, thick with spirit. The intangible richness of that realm. “Hades is not an absence, but a hidden presence — even an invisible fullness,” James Hillman wrote in The Dream and The Underworld. While the riches of the dead might seem ethereal, the mythic and the literal blend more corporeally in Pluto’s association with the wealth of the earth — as all precious metals and gemstones, and the crops that sustain life, come from rock, soil, and minerals. And soil is enriched by the unending, composted remains of plant and animal bodies; without that nourishment, land becomes barren. A great portion of fresh water, necessary for life, flows from underground rock, heated and churned by the earth’s hidden, “lifeless” core. There is so much power in the invisible, in the hidden, in the dead. And life becomes death becomes life, circulating infinitely ‘round. This is the sphere of Pluto.
When we apply this same circularity to our psychic and social worlds, we can see that regeneration and revival also often come on the heels of loss and destruction — whether by choice or by necessity. Countless popular stories and songs affirm this. Bob Dylan, born with his natal Sun in a tight sextile to Pluto, even wrote a song called “Death is Not the End” — a tune which plays as both a prosaic declaration and a reminder of the many endings and beginnings that punctuate our lives, over and over. Anecdotally, at least twenty percent of films seem to tell stories that are founded on the death/rebirth archetype. And as they should — it’s a timeless message, and one we need to keep taking, like a medicine. However, what we often gloss over in these popular retellings, and in the over-the-counter, allegorical version of death and rebirth, is that loss (whether physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual) is a messy process. Through loss we contend with decay, fear, grief, and above all a loss of control. When Pluto transits a key area of someone’s birth chart, transformation is a long process that can’t be rushed, and it is often a mess. Whatever Pluto touches — whether it relates to identity, family, relationships, career, trauma, or illness, etc. — the invisible is exposed. Whatever has been (like death) avoided, delayed, repressed, denied, distorted, projected, or compartmentalized, becomes real and palpable. These realities open up like a chasm where we thought was once solid earth (or at least a convincing camouflage tarp over the hole that we hoped to avoid forever). Scary. And yet, chasms are doorways. When we pass through them we slip into mystery. As we face fear and process loss, whether small or large in scale, publicly or privately, we begin to tap into Pluto’s rich realm of secrets, where we can become fertilized with meaning. Through mystery we are eventually reborn — we become something less defined, more open, more alive, more like soul. Of course it is important to note that this view of the process doesn’t mean perfect or complete or straightforward — it means messy. It means dirty and humble. It means bones among the flowers, heartache co-present with joy, uncertainty mingling with conviction, darkness with light. It means the strength to keep going, because endings imply beginnings. And this key implication gestures at Pluto’s primordial, creative power.
Thomas Merton wrote that, “there is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves. To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves." His claim is in a sense, a Plutonian one — because Pluto awakens us to the soulful depths in which our unique power, originality, can be found. Remember that Hades is the soul place, it is soul(full) by nature. When we think of the soul, we inherently invest the idea with our truest self — because it can survive anything, even death. It is our essence. Even as most us naturally concede uncertainty about the afterlife and its processes, the soul curiously remains something of an eternal and universal form, crossing all boundaries of religion, culture, and time. While the idea of soul is much bigger than one planet or point could ever suggest in astrology (and even the birth chart, it could be argued, is less of a portrait of soul than it is a map of where the soul might wander in this particular lifetime) — Pluto can show us where and how a soulful process is taking place in our lives. That process can be generative and powerful, tilling our soil (soul?) to create new life, beauty, and meaning that is uniquely ours. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a Scorpio rising with Pluto conjunct the Ascendant, once declared that “I am proud of my heart alone, it is the sole source of everything, all our strength, happiness, and misery. All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.”
So how will all of these functions — death, transformation, rebirth, soulful and creative power — express themselves in Aquarius?
As I’ve written elsewhere, Aquarius can be understood in part through its place in the solar year. Aquarius season marks the deepest part of winter in the Northern hemisphere. In the cold, still-dark days after the Winter Solstice has passed, nature is technically moving towards spring-time, but it is distant, merely an idea —like hope itself. Aquarius, as a fixed air sign, is all about the concepts and philosophies that give us a sense of meaning and order. We often forget that we see the world not as it is, but through the lenses of the overarching ideas we’ve been given. Framing is a powerful force. And along these lines, Aquarian energy is not entirely concerned with the tangible world around us as it is, but more so with the world as it could be, the world of ideas, the frame itself. Some of Aquarius’ association with what is unorthodox or revolutionary actually comes from this root of what could be — the desire to re-make the world, and to improve it, on the basis of better ideas. Aquarian energy likes to zoom out and to look at the patterns, systems, and boundaries that shape our lives in a big picture way. This often means looking at the overlap between ourselves and the society we shape and are shaped by. Like Capricorn, Aquarius is also ruled by mature Saturn — but while earthy, Capricornian maturity often looks like practicality, resource-management, discipline, and responsibility, by contrast airy, Aquarian maturity appears as intellectual gravitas, systems-level thinking and analysis, clarity of purpose, and a willingness to live by (and to bear the consequences of) ideals and dreams.
Previous periods of Pluto in Aquarius have corresponded with massive changes in science, religion, and human rights. Across time, the collective unconscious seems to ask, “what does it mean to be human?” when this generational transit appears. Aquarius is one of the few signs represented by a human being in the pictorial zodiac, holding a cup or urn of overflowing water. In Greco-Roman myth, this cupbearer was Ganymede, a youth who caught the attention (adoration? jealousy?) of the Gods, and who was swept up into their realm to become their Water Bearer. Ganymede had an exalted, lonely existence: he was more than human, yet not a God; more than earthly, yet not quite heavenly. While humanity extends itself towards transcendent technologies over the next twenty years (which we can already see coming in the news of AI, augmented and virtual reality, robotics, genomics, space travel, and other innovations), we will surely hit inflection points that create philosophical and ethical crises about the role and trajectory of the human. Likewise, our prevailing social norms will need to continue to adapt to this changing world. The myth of Ganymede lends itself to other Aquarian questions — What does it mean to be an individual? What does it mean to belong, or not to belong to a group? What does it mean to hold power? And we can anticipate a lot of Plutonian depth, endings, and new beginnings in response to these questions — with personal and political implications. For example, the internet was commercially launched and greatly developed under Saturn in Aquarius (1991-1994) and successive waves of Uranus (1996-2003) and Neptune in Aquarius (1998-2012) brought us social media, modern data analytics, reality tv, and an uptick in national and global protests. Aquarian energy is typically an egalitarian one, seeking to flatten and spread power, resources, and attention, rather to uphold hierarchies. Note that some of these examples in recent history do not show an absence of social control or corruption, but rather variations on how they are exerted. Pluto’s presence in Aquarius will likely bring new plot points and adaptations on similar themes within society, class consciousness, technology and information systems, culture, and governance. It will also test our connection to the earth — as our ideas and technologies attempt to outstrip the human (animal) mind and even this planet, we will likely discover dazzling new possibilities that go beyond our current reality and deeply humbling failures that drop us squarely back into our physical and environmental limits.
On a personal level, Pluto’s role in a new sign is unique to the house of the birth chart in which it falls, and varies greatly depending on which, if any, personal placements it makes aspects to once it moves. In a general sense, we can begin to raise awareness of the underlying web of ideas and the quality of attention that we have about the house topics that will be affected. The element of Air corresponds to the mind and the spirit. For example, Pluto’s entrance in Aquarius into the 7th house of relationships might provoke someone to start a journey of deep analysis, reconsideration, and release in regards to how they show up relationally — urged to do so by new thoughts and philosophies that creep in and subtly (or suddenly) begin to turn things upside down, or by new ideas that are formed in response to a change. We may also engage with the dynamic, archetypal tension of the individual versus the collective, of standing with and standing apart, and the attendant transformations that each perspective can bring to a given set of house topics. The house could also show where, during Pluto’s time in Aquarius, we might reach for something beyond our grasp, discovering our frailties and failures along the way — traveling a long arc that helps us to understand which parts of us are human, and which parts are eternal. However we start this process, it can be, at its best, a story of finding the soul. And it is not that we are condemned or forced to do this, rather, it is what we get to do if we are lucky. If we live long enough to make meaning from change, struggle, and pain, we are lucky. This is not a masochistic view, either, or some awful platitude excusing trauma (gross). There is no reason I could ever give for why difficult things happen — I certainly do not know, and have no excuses for cruelty or loss — instead, I mean to talk about how we can take a mythic viewpoint in response, given that they do happen. Recall that Pluto’s role is not to “cause,” but rather to reveal and expose; to show what is hidden, what is changing or dying; to draw us down into the Underworld (where we must let go); and, having freed up the creative energy that was once locked in an old form, to return us back up to the earth, like precious gemstones forged by heat and pressure, or like rich, black soil churned with compost, now ready to grow and enhance life. In an Aquarian version of that process, it is perhaps most of all our vision of what’s possible — for ourselves, and for the world — that will change.
Pluto will take one last tour of the last degree of Capricorn, from September 1st - November 19th, 2024, before it passes on completely, not to return for almost 250 years (for the vampires among us). And tomorrow, Pluto will slip into Aquarius, which happened once briefly in 2023 (March - June) and which will constitute the majority of 2024 (January - September). After November 2024, Pluto will permanently reside in Aquarius until 2043, when it will begin to seesaw in and out of Pisces until 2044.
If you’ve made it this far, I salute you. I will leave us with a final quote from passionate, Plutonian Goethe, “You should not resist fate, nor need you escape it; if you go to meet it, it will guide you pleasantly.”
Want more? Check out my Winter Workbook — an interactive guide that helps you personalize astrological transits, alongside journal prompts & tarot spreads.
Such a great read! I truly enjoyed reading your description of Pluto's archetypes and creating a scene for me to envision.