dadsnook2000 said:
To summarize the consensus of contemporary astrologers: Pluto is associated with the principle of elemental power, depth, and intensity; with that which compels, empowers, and intensifies whatever it touches, sometimes to overwhelming and catastrophic extremes; with the primordial instincts, libidinal and aggressive, destructive and regenerative, volcanic and cathartic, eliminative, transformative, ever-evolving; with the biological processes of birth, sex, and death, the cycle of death and rebirth; with upheaval, breakdown, decay, and fertilization; violent purgatorial discharge of pent-up energies, purifying fire; situations of life-and-death extremes, power struggles, all that is titanic, potent, and massive. Pluto represents the underworld and underground in all senses: elemental, geological, instinctual, political, social, sexual, urban, criminal, mythological, demonic. It is the dark, mysterious, taboo, and often terrifying reality that lurks beneath the surface of things, beneath the ego, societal conventions, and the veneer of civilization, beneath the surface of the Earth, that is periodically unleashed
with destructive and transformative force. Pluto impels, burns, consumes, transfigures, resurrects. In mythic and religious terms, it is associated with all myths of descent and transformation, and with all deities of destruction and regeneration, death and rebirth: Dionysus, Hades and Persephone, Pan, Medusa, Lilith, Innana, Isis and Osiris, the volcano goddess Pele, Quetzalcoatl, the Serpent power, Kundalini, Shiva, Kali, Shakti.
I'm a big fan of Richard Tarnas, so I thank you for that quote, Dave. As ever, Prof Tarnas makes me think further and deeper.
However, most of the attributes above were given to Mars/Ares in the Ancient World. Shiva the Destroyer is much closer, in his mythology, to Ares than to Hades. He's a warrior. I am very interested in the link between Hades and Dionysos - the twice-born (might not that newly discovered planet have been better attributed to him?) - but Dionysiac primordial chaos and renewal, creation and destruction, sexual intensity, depravity and purity are not generally seen in Hades: rather, Hades/Pluto provides the raw material for a part of the Dionysiac cycle - the death, putrefaction and preparation for rebirth (when there is rebirth: remember the Greeks weren't agreed on that one, and the Romans didn't think about it at all. Dionysos is the only being who was born twice.), while Ares provides another part of the cycle; and yet another part belongs to Dionysos's father Jupiter, and another is his alone. Dionysos is closer to Inanna in that sense - she who went imprudently to the underworld to meet its ruler; died; and rescucitated. The ruler of the underworld - her sister Ereshkigal - remains there, has none of the flexibility and liminal quality of Inanna - or Dionysos. She is a permanently unsatisfied, trapped goddess. Likewise, lonely Hades had to emerge briefly from his kingdom to kidnap his mate.
What I do find fascinating, in all these Underworld deities, is how much they need to burst above ground to capture life (Hades), or attract life underground (Ereshkigal). Unlike the psychocopomps, they don't walk easily between realms, they dwell permanently in the Underworld and if they emerge, it is only briefly. Rather, their prey is condemned to dwell below with them.
But they are not the destroyer gods. Hades doesn't cause death: he receives it. Ereshkigal likewise, doesn't cause death - except in the case of her sister Inanna, who came alive to the Underworld and thereby broke its laws. It's interesting that Ereshkigal, in Babylonian myths, married Nergal, the god of war and plagues: thus uniting in one realm the two functions of destruction and repose after death. It's also interesting that Inanna/Ishtar was goddess of heaven, of love - and of war and destruction: yet her incursion into the Underworld was viewed as intrusion. Underworld energies come into play after the destruction has taken place.
I think there is a very good case to be made for the inclusion among the outer planets of of a body that vibrates purely to cthonic energies (both Venus and Mars have cthonic associations, but these are not dominant). We need the Underworld, though we fear it. I am not at all convinced that it should be attached to any one sign - it is far too huge and universal - it touches the whole world. There is something inherently impersonal about the Underworld: it makes no distinctions, it captures everyone in the same way, it is our common destiny. Some people will die in war, some of disease, some of old age, some in accidents, some through excess, some through imprudence or crime. But once we have crossed the threshold - we all go to the Underworld, and the manner of our life and death makes no difference there - we are just another soul, deprived of personality and consciousness, an indistinct seed lying in a fallow field until it's time to grow again. In psychological terms, the Underworld is the place without ego. In spiritual terms, it is the place of the Dark Night of the Soul. In alchemical terms it is nigredo - the phase of putrefaction. In physical terms, it is the grave.
With respect to Pluto’s discovery, the synchronistic phenomena in the decades immediately surrounding 1930, and more generally in the twentieth century, include the splitting of the atom and the unleashing of nuclear power; the titanic technological empowerment of modern industrial civilization and military force; the rise of fascism and other mass movements; the widespread cultural influence of evolutionary theory and Archai:
psychoanalysis with their focus on the biological instincts; increased sexual and erotic expression in social mores and the arts; intensified activity and public awareness of the criminal underworld; and a tangible intensification of instinctually driven mass violence and catastrophic historical developments, evident in the world wars, the holocaust, and the threat of nuclear annihilation and ecological devastation. Here also can be mentioned the intensified politicization and power struggles characteristic of twentieth-century life, the development of powerful forms of depth-psychological transformation and catharsis, and the scientific recognition of the entire cosmos as a vast evolutionary phenomenon from the primordial fireball to the still-evolving present.
I have to disagree with Prof Tarnas on several points he makes in the above paragraph: the 1930s, and the 20th century in general, was a time of ferment, rage and huge militarisation around the world, which led to two of the most terrible wars in history and a third that was cold only in name. Mars was no doubt very proud of his work. The titanic creations of the 20th century - and especially splitting the atom - are more properly Uranian. The decolonisation and civil rights movements, with their intense optimism and evangelical zeal, are Jupiterian. The increase in communications and the information superhighway, the ever-available news beamed in our sitting-rooms, the leap forward of all sciences, the mass deceit and criminalisation of millions through propaganda, the increase in intelligent crime - these are the work of Mercury; the gang wars and drug wars, on the other hand, bring us back to Mars. The explosion or opening up of erotica, free love, prostitution, sex crimes, sexual liberation, gay sexuality, naturism - all this movement is pure Aphrodite/Venus: she is the mistress of all sex - the good, the bad and the ugly. Pluto never was and it's bizarre and perverse to make him so; his only Venusian act was a rape. So Scorpio the sexual sign might as well be ruled by Venus! And as Mars is her lover, and rules intensity, energy and sex drive...
On the other hand, the deep plumbling of the human underworld through psychology, the acknowledgement of the hidden depths of humans, of matter, of darkest space; the desire to conquer death and the inability to do so; the obsession with the underworld treasures of oil and minerals; the overwhelming quest for material wealth at the cost of all else; the acknowledgement of rape as an intrinsic tool of control and manipulation of entire populations - all these are plutonian energies.
Many of the characteristics above (not only the plutonian) seem at home in Scorpio, and able to thrive in that most intensifying of signs - the plutonian energies, the martian, the venusian, the jupiterian and the uranian. I just don't see, in that situation, why it was necessary to replace one ruler with another: on balance, the Ancients picked Mars as the ruler, because its character was at home in Scorpio, as a warrior would be during a desperate night, who both made war and made love with all his rage and intensity and carried within him a capacity to destroy and to revive. Ares/Mars, the bringer of death, who originated as a cthonic god and became god of destruction, war, plagues - the enraged death-giver - but also a god of courage and endurance and the intense lover of Aphrodite, just seems to me to be a much better fit for Scorpio.
---ETA: Dave, Srkt's association with the windpipe comes from her association with death and healing, since scorpion poison brings both - and because the cause of death by scorpion poisoning is suffocation or pulmonary oedema. She was associated with Isis in her use of sorcery that is both beneficial and destructive, and closely associated with death. She is not a cthonic goddess, rather, a goddess who brings death and despatches her victims to the underworld (or saves them from it!). But the link to Taurus is interesting, not only because Taurus is the opposite sign to Scorpio, and so intimately linked to it through polarity, but also because some have associated or synchretised her with Het-her (Hathor), the cow-horned goddess, among whose attributes were sexuality, sensuality, beauty, dance and drink, rage, energy and vitality, empowerment of the pharaoh, erotic charge, and a tender light in the underworld - a mix of venusian, dionysiac, martian and even hekatian characteristics that the Egyptians, far less compartmentalising than the Greeks, felt at home with.
Of course, by the time the Zodiac came to be used in Egypt, it was ruled by Greeks
