Pluto

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Magic

Power of death and resurrection. It destroys what doesn’t serve to create something new. Pluto is the Higher Will, the Divine Will. Not the will of your personality, but the will of the gods, the will of your soul. Call upon Pluto to add sheer power to transform your spell, but be mindful of the consequences.

Archetypes[edit]

  • Horned God
  • Underworld King


Astrology

[1]Pluto (Pluto symbol (fixed width).svg) is the modern ruling planet of Scorpio and is exalted in Aquarius. In classical Roman mythology, Pluto is the god of the underworld who is extremely wealthy. The alchemical symbol was given to Pluto on its discovery, three centuries after alchemical practices had all but disappeared. The alchemical symbol can therefore be read as spirit over mind, transcending matter.

Pluto takes 248 years to make a full circuit of the zodiac, but its progress is highly variable: it spends between 15 and 26 years in each sign.

In astrology, Pluto is called "the great renewer" and is considered to represent the part of a person that destroys in order to renew by bringing up buried intense needs and drives to the surface, and expressing them, even at the expense of the existing order. It is associated with absolutes, power, extremities, transformations, incredible feats, mass movements, and the need to cooperate or share with another if each is not to be destroyed. Pluto governs major business and enormous wealth, mining, surgery and detective work, and any enterprise that involves digging under the surface to bring the truth to light. Pluto is also associated with Tuesday, alongside Mars since Pluto is the higher octave of that planet in astrology.

Its entry in Cancer in 1914, the sign in which it was later discovered, coincided with World War I. It is also associated with nuclear armament due to such weapons using plutonium, which was named after the dwarf planet. Nuclear research had its genesis in the 1930s and 40s and later gave rise to the polarized nuclear standoff of the Cold War, with the mass consumer societies of the United States and other democracies facing the totalitarian state of the USSR. The discovery of Pluto also occurred just after the birth of modern psychoanalysis, when Freud and Jung began to explore the depths of the unconscious.

Pluto is considered by modern astrologers to be the primary native ruler of the eighth house and a higher octave of Mars that functions on a collective level.


Science

[2]Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object to directly orbit the Sun. It is the largest known trans-Neptunian object by volume, by a small margin, but is slightly less massive than Eris. Like other Kuiper belt objects, Pluto is made primarily of ice and rock and is much smaller than the inner planets. Pluto has only one sixth the mass of Earth's moon, and one third its volume.

Pluto has a moderately eccentric and inclined orbit, ranging from 30 to 49 astronomical units (4.5 to 7.3 billion kilometers; 2.8 to 4.6 billion miles) from the Sun. Light from the Sun takes 5.5 hours to reach Pluto at its orbital distance of 39.5 AU (5.91 billion km; 3.67 billion mi). Pluto's eccentric orbit periodically brings it closer to the Sun than Neptune, but a stable orbital resonance prevents them from colliding.

Nomenclature[edit]

The name Pluto is for the Roman god of the underworld, from a Greek epithet for Hades. The name 'Pluto' was mythologically appropriate: the god Pluto was one of six surviving children of Saturn, and the others had already all been chosen as names of planets (his brothers Jupiter and Neptune, and his sisters Ceres, Juno and Vesta). Both the god and the planet inhabited "gloomy" regions, and the god was able to make himself invisible, as the planet had been for so long. The choice was further helped by the fact that the first two letters of Pluto were the initials of Percival Lowell; indeed, 'Percival' had been one of the more popular suggestions for a name for the new planet. Pluto's planetary symbol ⟨♇⟩ was then created as a monogram of the letters "PL". This symbol is rarely used in astronomy today, though it is still common in astrology. However, the most-common astrological symbol for Pluto, now occasionally used in astronomy as well, is an orb (possibly representing Pluto's invisibility cap) over Pluto's bident, which dates to the early 1930s.

Most languages use the name "Pluto" in various transliterations. In Japanese, Houei Nojiri suggested the calque Meiōsei (冥王星, "Star of the King (God) of the Underworld"), and this was borrowed into Chinese and Korean. Some languages of India use the name Pluto, but others, such as Hindi, use the name of Yama, the God of Death in Hinduism. Polynesian languages also tend to use the indigenous god of the underworld, as in Māori Whiro. Vietnamese might be expected to follow Chinese, but does not because the Sino-Vietnamese word 冥 minh "dark" is homophonous with 明 minh "bright". Vietnamese instead uses Yama, which is also a Buddhist deity, in the form of Sao Diêm Vương 星閻王 "Yama's Star", derived from Chinese 閻王 Yán Wáng / Yìhm Wòhng "King Yama".


Moons[edit]

Pluto has five known moons:

  • Charon, the largest, whose diameter is just over half that of Pluto;
  • Styx;
  • Nix;
  • Kerberos; and
  • Hydra.

Pluto and Charon are sometimes considered a binary system because the barycenter of their orbits does not lie within either body, and they are tidally locked.

  1. From Wikipedia article "Planets in Astrology" 16 Mar 2023
  2. From Wikipedia article "Pluto" 16 Mar 2023