Pluto

What Pluto Is Assigned

Pluto is transformation under pressure: what a generation destroys or remakes, and what it deals with at the level of power.

It is read as the slow, unavoidable kind of change — not the sudden break Uranus describes, but the sort that works through something completely and leaves it different.

Its associations are depth, concealment, power and what is not discussed, which in an individual chart apply only where it touches something personal.

The Most Generational Of All

Pluto takes between twelve and thirty-two years to cross a sign, because its orbit is markedly elliptical and its speed varies enormously.

Pluto in Scorpio ran from 1983 to 1995 — twelve years, and several hundred million people. Pluto in Taurus, by contrast, takes closer to thirty.

Anyone told that Pluto in Scorpio makes them intense and private has been handed a statement about a cohort as though it were a statement about them.

When It Becomes Personal

The familiar three conditions: a house placement, which is individual because houses rotate every two hours; a close aspect to a personal placement; or a position on an angle.

Pluto in Scorpio is generational. Pluto in your seventh house is yours, and the difference between those two sentences is a birth time.

This is the clearest case on the site for why the personal-versus-generational distinction is worth learning properly.

The Planet Question

Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006, and the question of whether astrology should continue using it comes up constantly.

The honest answer is that the reclassification was an astronomical decision about a definition, and astrology has never restricted itself to objects meeting that definition — Chiron and several asteroids are in common use and none is a planet.

So the reclassification does not settle anything either way. Astrologers who used Pluto before continue to, and the disagreement is about tradition rather than about astronomy.

The Sign It Was Given

Pluto was discovered in 1930 and assigned Scorpio, which Mars had ruled.

This is the most contested of the modern reassignments. Traditional practice keeps Mars on Scorpio, much modern practice uses Pluto, and a substantial number of astrologers use both.

None of these is authoritative, and a source presenting one as the answer has selected without saying so.

Questions About Pluto

Does Pluto being a dwarf planet matter? Not to astrological practice, which uses several bodies that are not planets. The reclassification was a definitional decision in astronomy.

Does my Pluto sign describe me? Only via house, close aspect or angle. The sign is shared with everybody born across a decade or more.

Who rules Scorpio? Traditionally Mars, in much modern practice Pluto, and many astrologers use both. The disagreement is genuine.