In August 2006, astronomers demoted Pluto from planet to icy dwarf. Unlike real planets, said the scientists, Pluto wasn't powerful enough to shove anyone else around.* Yet this is the very reason astrologers will keep using him. Pluto's gravitational force may leave other celestial bodies undisturbed. But his appearance in the chart, by aspect or by transit, definitely shakes up people's lives on planet Earth.Pluto wants us to surrender something. But why does he make us suffer so? Can't a deity give us transformation without the grief? When I was ten, I asked a similar question of the Christian God: "If you're so Almighty and can do anything you want, why did you choose to kill your only son, letting people mock him while driving nails through his hands and feet? Couldn't you imagine a better way?" The motif of the suffering hero also appears in indigenous cultures, where shamanic journeys take initiates through literal or figurative dismemberment, going to the harrowing brink of death (and sometimes beyond) before their shamanic powers are won. In Buddhism too, some of the great masters are initially beaten and humiliated by their teachers, or made to suffer devastating trials and losses before their opening into enlightenment. Why do Pluto transits, along with so many mythic and spiritual traditions, offer the same pain-ridden story of death, transformation and rebirth?
Pluto operates like a good parent or a wise spiritual master. He doesn't engineer our suffering; our own confusion does that. It's not the transit, but our resistance to it that creates the pain. We're attached to something disempowering; it holds us back. The crucial part of Pluto's interrogation is to identify "that which we hold most dear," so we know what to relinquish. Initially we're frightened it's something external we must lose-a marriage, a child, our standing in the world. These may or may not disappear. But more often the real binkie we're sucking on is some stupid notion that has been holding our limited world in place. That dysfunctional mindset must be shattered if we're going to grow. To paraphrase Albert Einstein, "We can't solve our problems using the same mind that created them."....read more...