Pluto Transits Webinar Transcript

This is a transcript of a live webinar event that was broadcast September

11, 2016.

Steven Forrest: “Welcome everybody and thank you so much for joining us today.

So, Pluto . . . the underworld, also known as the god of hell. Now, a proper
Mediterranean kind of mythologist just might jump on me for “Lord of the
Underworld,” and Roman and Greek mythology with the “God of Hell,” but Lord of
the Underworld—it’s a pretty fair street translation I would say.

Now, think about Hell for a moment. Hell is a concept that has arisen in just about
every culture across the Earth and across time. Any culture that had anything like a
religion, it would describe Hell differently. But let’s, for anthropological purposes,
let’s make a little journey to the heart of Mississippi. And we’re going to go to a little
church in the country side and we’re going to ask the pastor there to speak to us of
Hell. Now, it’s probably his favourite subject, for obvious enough reasons, and maybe
he says of Hell, “There’re three things that you need to know. The first is it’s hot. The
second is it’s buried under the ground. The third is you really don’t want to go there.”

Now, I don’t mean to be making fun of anybody’s religion, but those basic parameters
are fairly common in mythic, cross-culture definitions of Hell. Now, the fact that Hell
has existed so universally in the human imagination, at least, is rather compelling
evidence for the idea that Hell must be part of the human mind and that we then
willy-nilly project it out upon the unsuspecting universe. So, is there a place in the
mind that fits the description we got from that pastor? A place that is so hot, we burry
it and don’t want to go there?

Welcome to the Underworld. Welcome to Pluto’s realm. As soon as I put it that way,
you recognize that you’re talking about the unconscious mind—that’s a more
sophisticated way of saying Hell—the place we keep all the uncomfortable stuff, all
the hot stuff, so to speak. I’ve used, sort of, folk-protestant metaphors so far, but we
could go to Tibet in the Buddhist realm, in the Buddhist culture, and they’re
wonderful at generating hellish images; the realm of the hungry ghosts and so on.
Some of their hells are cold, and I’d like to put that on the list too. Is there a place so
cold inside of you that you burry it under the ground and you don’t want to go there,
you don’t want to look at it?

As soon as we wrestle with this idea of Pluto being the Lord of the Underworld, we’ve
begun to think in this kind of deeper, deeper way. Now, let’s stick with Christian
imagery for just a little bit longer. I know that’s not everybody’s religion, and I’m
certainly not trying to sell Christianity or any other faith, but just entering it as an
mythic system. So, some of you probably grew up in churches, I did. And if you did, a
line you heard a lot: “He descended into Hell. On the third day, He rose again and
ascended into Heaven.” These words are of course from the Apostles’ Creed, which,
outside of the Bible, is probably the most fundamental and universal document
within the Christian religion. And again, we see both sides of a Pluto transit in these
lines. And sometimes a decent into Hell sets the stage for an accent into a higher
energy state. This is absolutely fundamental to our ability to understand our Pluto
transit.

Now, just bringing it right down to Earth for a moment, you’re walking down the
street one day and you happen to run into a friend, a good friend, a soul friend. And
this friend, say it’s a woman, let’s say she’s obviously looking kind of distraught, you
know, she’s in a heavy place. You sense maybe she has been crying recently. And
since you’re close, you immediately see this and you say, “Are you okay?” And she
shakes her head sort of sadly and says, “Well, I had a really tough session with my
psychotherapist today.”

Now, imagine you’re about a thousand times dumber than you actually are. A happy
thought, a thousand times dumber. Then you say to her, ‘That doesn’t sound like
much fun. Why do you go to psychotherapy then?” Obviously, kind of a dumb
question. Now, she is miserable because she is in a critical moment of the
psychotherapeutic process of healing. She is miserable, nobody enjoys that. Nobody
enjoys facing these things, but why is she in therapy? Well, she anticipates that she’s
going to be happier as a result of it; that there are mistakes and patterns in her life
that haven’t done her any good and she’s going to break them and so she’ll be
happier. This is a very human translation of this idea of the decent into Hell—setting
the stage for an ascent into heaven, into a higher energy state. And this brighter, more
optimistic part of an understanding of Pluto is essential to the work we’re doing in
this webinar.

We will not pull punches about the dark sides, so to speak, and the journey into Hell,
which can be so utterly common in Plutonian periods. But we also, if that’s what we
do, we’re only sowing the seeds of fear. And of course, many astrologers fill people
with fear when they see Pluto coming to a sensitive point in a chart. And I’d never say
that they are entirely wrong.

Plutonian times can indeed be very difficult, but there is higher ground. There can be
an ecstatic dimension to Pluto. That’s not something you’re going to read very much
in astrology books now days. And the results of a successful passage through
Plutonian times can fill us with creativity, energy, sexiness, mojo, directness,
spunkiness, vitality, passion and the courage to be honest. Now, underlying these
happy words is an absolutely fundamental insight. And that is: it takes a lot of energy
to be crazy.

Think of the time we waste and the loops we get ourselves into being crazy. It just
wastes time. And what if we are able to stop doing that? Just simply that — break out
of these destructive, squandering, wasteful patterns. What is the fruit of that process?

Sanity. Of course, we could use words like that, fair enough. Or energy, juice, eros, life
force, vitality. And as that energy becomes more available to you, then we begin to see
these extraordinary possibilities of just intensifying and accelerating good qualities in
you. Engaged, life affirming qualities in you that can become even stronger. Thus you
get more creative, more energetic, sexier, your libido goes up, and so on.

So there’s a kind of theoretical understanding between this. And again that one line —
it takes a lot of energy to be crazy. As soon as we think about that, we realize the
enormous benefit that comes from doing Pluto work and just not being so crazy
anymore.

Let me press a little more deeply down this road.

So, you’re lying in your bed and it’s three o’clock in the morning and you can’t sleep
because there’s some trivial drama in your life. Somebody has insulted you or treated
you disrespectfully. And you know, in the scheme of the universe it’s not really that
big a deal but it’s bothering you and you can’t get it out of your head. And here it is,
three a.m., and you’ve not had a wink of sleep. A common enough reality.

And then we say to ourselves, “I’m just not going to think about it anymore.” Famous
last words, right? Because in thirty seconds your thought enters your mind: “Now
there’s something I’m not trying to think about anymore…” And, of course, it’s back
again. After a while, God is good, and maybe you fall asleep. But the idea is that we
take all of the energy of mental discipline, of concentration, the power of the will over
the mind, and we set it against some trivial insult, which your ego has born, and the
trivial insult usually wins. It is very difficult to simply put something out of our mind.
We can do it sometimes, but the pattern I’m talking about is very human and we’ve all
lived it.

Now, compare that with a second image. We’ll use a terrible image: a child who is
sexually abused. There’s a terrible, Plutonian one. And in one scenario, when that
child reaches teenage years, the sexual abuse has been “forgotten.” I put that in
quotes. “Repressed” is the more precise word. But there is no conscious recollection
of the violation. And that’s not universal, but it happens a lot. And so, this
enormously greater offence against the integrity of the soul that we call sexual abuse
is held out of the mind, without even the slightest conscious effort. And we compare
that observation with the one we have on the back burner: you in your bed at three
o’clock in the morning trying not to think about something. And what we’re getting
here is a very direct gauge of the amount of energy that gets locked up in repression –
an enormous amount.

I’m using repression as an extreme example. But we can think about denial, we think
about rationalization, we think about compartmentalization – all the ways we take
things we don’t want to look at and push them away. They all take up a lot of energy.
That’s really the bottom line. A tremendous amount of energy is tied up.

And then the happy question: what happens if we get to a place in our life where we
don’t have to do that anymore? Because we have faced the wound, we have healed the
wound. And all that energy is released. And again, what are you going to do with it?

I’ve already kind of answered that question, some of the answers are up on the screen
(in the slideshow). Here is one of my favourite answers to that question, “What are
you going to do with that energy?”: Whatever you damn well please! It’s your energy!
It’s yours and you can use it to make your life better.

I love talking about this. I don’t want to ignore the fact that Plutonian times can be
very difficult. And a lot of good psychological astrologers will go down that road
helpfully. But I feel like we’re missing something. We get too far from the Apostles’
Creed, so to speak (paraphrased): “He descended into hell, but on the third day he
ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of God, the father almighty.”
There’s an image or a metaphor of energy and of juice.

Well, I’ve already tooted the wonderous things that can happen for us in a Plutonian
time if we do the work, and we have one more.

So, you can see in the slideshow, I just love the image of the wise woman that Tony
has used here to create this slide. Pluto can offer us a magical power, to boot. We
become the kind of person to whom it is very difficult to tell a lie. Just look at that
woman’s face. Good work here, Tony. I mean, imagine looking into that face and
trying to say something that wasn’t true. There are people it’s easy to lie to and people
it’s kind of hard to lie to.

Now, you might say that the hardest people to lie to are the ones who don’t lie to
themselves. It’s a one liner but it’s something important. Now, somebody lying to
himself or herself – of course that sounds terrible. But faced with the wounding
realities of life and considering them with some compassion, we have to realize we all
do some lying to ourselves. But the less of that we do, the harder it is to lie to us.

A line I love to use with Plutonian people is, “As you are looking deeply into
yourself, similarly, you are looking deeply into everybody else.”

Let me carry this one inch further. We might ask, when does a Pluto transit begin?
And we can argue a bit about orbs. But look in your ephemeris and as Pluto gets close
to a sensitive point, okay, that’s when it begins.
Now, there’s another question – one very similar – when does it end? And I think
that it’s easy to fall into the trap of applying the same thinking about the ending as we
did about the beginning. That at some point Pluto has moved far away and it’s not in
the sensitive zone anymore. And that’s of course important and good to know. But try
this. One time when you were a little kid, you went through some kind of Mercury
stimulation, and during that time you learned how to read. When the Mercury
stimulation moved on, did you forget how to read? Of course not. You remember. It
became part of you forever. Pluto transits are like that. Nearly everything in the
category of transits and progressions in astrology is like that. It becomes part of us
forever.

So, this sense that you become a person to whom it is harder to lie . . . it really seeps
into the very essence of what you are and you are changed forever by this. And of
course, potentially, in a very good way, very powerful and beautiful way.

Now, so far I’ve been speaking of Pluto transits. “Plutonian times” is really a better
way to say this. I’m using the short hand of “Pluto transit,” but what we’re learning
here, what we’re investigating here, really could be pertinent to any kind of Plutonian
event. So, a transit or a progression or a Solar Arc that involves Pluto.

We don’t pay much attention to progressed Pluto because it’ll never make that much
progress in a life (progressed Pluto moves so slowly it won’t cover many degrees in
one lifetime). But by Solar Arc it moves about a degree every year. By transit it’s
slower – 248 years to get around the chart.

Or we could imagine some significant stimulus of the natal Pluto, like the progressed
Sun making an opposition to your natal Pluto. The very language we’re using here in
this webinar applies powerfully and accurately to times like that. Without getting too
far of field here, I do want to say that the basic language that I’m presenting in this
webinar would also have relevance to Scorpionic events, 8th house events. I want to
keep our focus here and there are some differences with those. But there are parallel
structures. If you sense some echoes and resonances with an 8th house experience
you’ve had, you’re probably right on target.

Now, Sigmund Freud was once asked to give a brief definition of psychoanalysis – not
the easiest thing in the world to do. He called it “the process of making the
unconscious mind conscious.” And in saying those words, I think Freud probably
defined the Plutonian process more precisely than any astrologer ever has since, or
more succinctly. This is it – the process of making unconscious material welcome in
the conscious mind, or at least in the conscious mind. Sometimes it’s not so welcome.

So, during a Plutonian event, something hard to digest psychologically or

attitudinally is surfacing in your awareness, or trying to surface. Things do not
become unconscious because they’re hard to understand, for example, or because we
simply don’t have the knowledge of them. We may be unconscious of the
temperature today in Kathmandu, but that’s not repressed material. There’s always
something kind of intense relative to this sort of Plutonian material, always
something charged.

Now immediately, again humanly, and compassionately, you need to understand

something about this – that nobody is likely to enjoy this process while it’s
happening. There are good things about it. But we’re dealing with something that is
inherently, by definition, challenging. But here is the critical insight: there are many
positive states of consciousness available to us humans which would not be
characterized as happiness.

So if, for example, someone you love very much has just died, you’re not happy, of
course. You’re in a state of grief. But if you think about it, grief is a positive process. I
mean, we don’t enjoy it, but it has to do with honouring your love for the person who
has departed. It has to do with processes of digestion, adjustment. The popular word
nowadays would be closure. Not my favourite one, but you know.

So grief, which no one welcomes, we recognize to be a positive state. Your friend, who
I alluded to earlier, who you ran into on the street and she’s had a pretty ragged
session with a shrink . . . Well, you know, she’s not happy but she’s in a positive state
of consciousness. She respects herself for doing that work and you honour her for
doing that work – the courage it takes and the simple and well-grounded faith that
she’s going to be better off for it. She knows that and you know that. Might not always
be clear in every moment, but again, I just want to honour these conditions that
might not make us want to jump for joy.

It’s kind of a crazy attitude that’s rather common in Western culture – that if you’re
not having a good time, something is wrong. But there are many wonderful healing
human conditions that don’t make us jump up and down. I just want to take that very
seriously.

Now, I want to take another big step here, and this puts us squarely in the realm of
astrology. A lot of my language so far has been psychological. But here it is, you see it
in the slideshow. This process, this Plutonian process, is not limited to “your
“awareness,” in quotes. It’s certainly about your awareness, but it isn’t all in your
head. Because of the laws of synchronicity, the difficult Plutonian material will also
be visible in your circumstances. There it takes the form, or sometimes takes the
form that we might call misfortune, trouble, calamity or tragedy. That’s not universal
of a Pluto event. But it’s important in the name of honesty to put it on the page, so to
speak, on the stage of life.

So, just reflecting on this a little bit more . . . Astrology in the past tended to be very
material in its orientation. As in, “Here’s what’s going to happen to you, this will be a
good day, this will be a bad day.” “You will be rich and famous but unlucky in love.”
You know, statements of that nature. In my view of astrology, the river of astrological
wisdom, which some of the older astrologers say is much diminished, but I think
there’s still some pretty good water in that river, it collided with that masterpiece of
19th and 20th century thinking we call psychology. And what arose was modern
astrology.

So, when I was younger, we all sort of aspired to be psychological astrologers, and
that’s a good aspiration. I certainly don’t want to make fun of it. But I also want to
recognize astrology is not purely psychological. There is a material dimension to it
that works really well. If we’re only looking at the material side of it I think we’re
missing the heart of the matter. But there’s no reason to ignore the material side of it.

And you know, Carl Jung came up with this idea of synchronicity, that there is
nothing really in this universe that we could honestly call coincidence or chance. That
instead, the stuff that seems to happen “by chance” in life is meaningfully connected
to our inner life, and that the outer world is a mirror of the inner one. That elegant
idea, the law of synchronicity, is absolutely fundamental to the way astrology really
works. So while Pluto is surfacing in your head, in your heart, and into the conscious
mind, you’re going to see plenty of echoes of that in the big world. It’s out there, and
it’s visible.

So, whatever the difficult material is, you are ready to integrate it. Or, I like to say,
“barely ready” to integrate it. Now I don’t put the word barely in there to insult people
or to discourage them, but rather to honour the fact that when you come to a
Plutonian time, you’re right on the edge of having enough spiritual maturity, so to
speak, to be able to wrestle with it. But it’s difficult.

I think, at the risk of a silly example, maybe it’s not so silly. We rate a movie as PG13
– it’s different in different countries, but most nations have a system of recognizing
that there are movies that just aren’t suitable for kids. The material is going to be too
hard on a child’s psyche. But by the time we’re 13 or 15 or whatever, then the idea is,
we can handle it and maybe even benefit from it.

We can’t talk about Pluto without using kind of edgy imagery, so let me go a little
further with that. If we imagine a movie that has a graphic scene of a rape in it . . . I
mean, there are many people that would say, “nobody should have to look at that.”
And I have some sympathy, as I suspect most of you do, for that statement. A little
kid doesn’t understand what’s going on and it’s only frightening. But if I had a
thirteen-year-old daughter, I would not want to see her in the streets of this world
without the knowledge that rape exists. She needs to know about that. It ain’t pretty,
as they say. But I would view it as a form of failure on my part as a parent if I did not
give her that information so she could exercise caution.

And if I had a thirteen-year-old son, I know he’s going to be feeling surges – I was
thirteen once myself – surges that might lead him to be tempted to dehumanize a girl.
I want him to see what a pig that guy looks like if he’s raping some woman. I want my
son to see that too. Because at thirteen, it’s still awful, but there may be some benefit.

Now, I love to use that kind of metaphor when I’m sitting with a client who’s going
through a Plutonian time, with basically the words I just said. And then I hit them
with a line that makes them smile but they nod their heads with understanding. I say,
“And now you’re thirteen.” Now, this person might be fifty-seven, but they know what
I’m talking about. There’s a sense of being ready, or barely ready, to deal with this.

I need to add another layer to that. My intent in really all my teaching, webinars,
books and of course this class, is to speak to people who are wrestling with their own
journeys or attempting to use astrology to help other people with their journeys.
Some of you are professional, some of you here for reasons of personal interest, and
that’s all fine. But you know, you out there, a couple hundred of you out there today,
you are not a random sample of humanity. Nor are our astrological clients a random
sample of humanity. People who get interested in this work are obviously doing inner
work. They are interested in their own lives and that makes them a little different
from folks who you might chose at random.

The reason I’m saying all this is not to pat us all on the back or anything. But this idea
that when Pluto comes along, that whatever the difficult material is, you are ready to
integrate it. That is a statement I have found to be reliably, accurately, helpfully true
in the counselling room. I’m not so sure it would apply to a random sample of
humanity.

We will carry that idea further. It’s possible to make weak responses to Pluto, and if
we haven’t done our work leading up to it, we’re more vulnerable to give a weak
response. I’ll be a lot more specific about that before we are done.

Either way, Lord Pluto always says, “ready or not, I’m coming.” And again, this sense
of Pluto coming is an internal arising of the material that is difficult, the rudiments or
beginnings of awareness, the trail of bread crumbs leading ominously into the deep,
dark forest. But also, because of synchronicity, circumstances that occur and arise in
the life.

There’s a giant subject that is not the subject of this webinar, and I’m not going to
spend much time on it today. But of course, I’m doing this reading on September
eleventh, the fifteenth anniversary of the attacks on the trade towers in New York.
And that is, of course, a vast subject and not really the purpose of this webinar. There
have been various possible charts for the United States of America and people making
strong arguments for various interpretations. One of them showed about middle of
Sagittarius rising, and Pluto transited over that Ascendant on 9/11/2001. And I, for
one, became very convinced that’s the correct chart for America because that was an
utterly Plutonian day. And it illustrates the principal we’re talking about it, which
applies to nations as well as to the inner lives of individuals. So, was America ready to
face something? There’s a messy question. But, “ready or not, I’m coming,” said Lord
Pluto.

Now I want to move to a couple of principles that are kind of the bottom line here. We
are all sometimes touched by tragedy, or even true evil. Such experiences leave
Plutonian wounds in the psyche. They can lie there buried and unhealed for a long,
long time. That is fundamental to our understanding of Pluto. Tragedy is one of those
words that nobody really needs to have defined for them.

I write the words “true evil” here and sometimes people have challenged me with,
“Well, what is evil?” And I quickly acknowledge that philosophers have been trying to
get an understanding of that reality since the beginning of time. I have a working
definition of it myself. It’s pretty precise. I’m not sure it would always work, but here
it is: that the evil, and I might say in us all, has the following quality — it’s the part of
us that enjoys creating pain for another being. I cannot think of a more precise
definition of evil than that – to enjoy creating pain for another being.

So, terrible things happen in this world, headlines that make us feel ill when we read
them, and there it is. And of course, in our own little private worlds sometimes there
are great darknesses too. And we’re touched, and these wounds can lie there unburied
and unhealed for a long time. During a Plutonian event it’s time to face those wounds,
ultimately time to heal them. And circumstances, both inward and outward, arise to
help us with that healing process. I’m aware I’ve essentially made that point already,
but it’s kind of a summary of everything we’ve learned so far.

Note in this, that there are two faces of Pluto that become visible, if we think about it
carefully. The first face is the existence of some initial wound, something hurts us.
And then the second face, which you also see arising in a Plutonian time, the echo of
that wound. And the echo of the wound, some repetition of events or circumstances
that are reminiscent of the initial wound – they contain the seeds of the possibility of
great healing. And so we go from the heavy side of Pluto back to the ecstatic side of
Pluto.

An example, I’ve already kind of referenced this. A four-year-old girl is abused

sexually by her uncle. The violation is so horrendous that her psyche represses the
memory. By age twelve she does not remember what happed. Now, I’m using an
example of sexual abuse. Sexual abuse, as anyone on the front lines of the counselling
rooms of the world knows, is epidemic. It’s so destructive in its impact and often not
talked about. In many cases, I think calling it evil seems appropriate. I want to be
loud and clear that Pluto is not only about sexual issues or sexual damage. It’s just
that in thinking of sexual damage, we are looking at an area that is, again, sadly
common in the world and illustrates all the principals of Pluto.

So I’m going to use that kind of example here, but I want to make sure I’m not giving
you the idea that that’s the only thing Pluto is about. A kid is hit for example, it has
nothing to do with sex, but violence and tyranny – that can be it, somebody is
shamed. So there are many different faces of Pluto.

But here, by age 12, she doesn’t really remember what has happened. But the wound
affects her. I use a metaphor here, like an unseen piece of iron near a magnetic
compass, and it swings the needle. You’re sailing across the sea and you’re following
your magnetic compass, before the age of global positioning systems, and maybe you
see a dolphin. You’ve got your binoculars, and after a while you set them down by
mistake near the compass and that needle swings five degrees, deflected by the iron
in the binoculars. And you merrily sail along thinking you’re still on course. But
something in the unseen realm has changed your direction through life. It’s a good
metaphor for what we’re talking about here – the girl who was sexually abused and
represses it. Not any conscious contact with the memory, but it is distorting her
direction through life. Now, how and in what direction?

A deep analysis of the individual birth chart can often help us understand that. We’re
going to go a little further in that direction in a while. But here at this stage, just very
simply, we only know that she will be hurt by this thing that she is not aware of. Does
she become inordinately afraid of sex? Does she become repressed in a prudish or
prim or fearful kind of way? Does she become promiscuous? Does she develop an
attraction for the kinds of people who are like the uncle who abused her? There are so
many different things that we can talk about here, so many different possibilities. But
the point is, they all warp her basic nature and her direction through life. And that’s,
needless to say, a terrible thing.

But let’s go further with the story. So, this woman, when she’s 27 (I’m saying that
quite arbitrarily), she becomes involved with a man. He pushes her into watching
pornography. Perhaps he pushes her into darker directions. Now you know,
pornography – I don’t mean to sound judgemental or prim myself about it. But the
point here is that this woman is not comfortable with the idea of using pornography
as a way of stimulating sexual energy in an allegedly loving relationship. But this man
shames her about that with, “Oh, don’t be such a prude.” And he leans on her. And we
could even tell darker versions of the story. She is being pressed in this
uncomfortable direction.

Now we take the typical astrological step. The man is the psychic clone of her twisted
uncle, the one who hurt her in the first place. He’s a different person, but the psychic
clone, he bears that energy. So the wound has resurfaced in her life.

And then you look at her chart, and transiting Pluto is conjuncting her Venus. I mean,
we could imagine other illustrations astrologically, but the point is, something that
would connect intimacy, trust and sexuality into her life is being triggered by the
transiting Pluto, or some other pattern of Plutonian event. So, we would realize here
that we have an echo of an initial event.

Now, the girl was abused sexually when she was tiny. If we looked at her chart then
we also would have seen something else Plutonian going on. When the dark side
touches us, Pluto is pressing. Can we heal from it? Well, yes – when Pluto is pressing.

So, possibilities arise here, just possibilities. Some of them are good, some of them
not so good. So, what actually happens to this woman? Happy story: maybe she
leaves the relationship. Maybe she enters some reflective process, such as
psychotherapy, and recovers the memories and heals. There’s the high Pluto – a
descent into hell that leads to an ascent into heaven. We used those lines earlier.

Now, I’ve referenced psychotherapy quite a lot here and I’m doing that purposefully. I
can’t think of a better metaphor for a positive response to Pluto. But I want to get
right back into the roots of psychotherapy, the roots of the word. “Psyche” is the
Greek word for soul, and therapy, based on the Greek “therapos,” healing. So
psychotherapy is soul-healing.

And I make one of my favourite little speeches, you might call it a rant here, that you
go to a modern university, go to the department of psychology, and say, “Where’s
your course about the human soul?” And they look at you like you’re crazy. Soul is not
really part of the modern academic definition of psychology. And it makes you laugh
or cry. I kind of prefer laughter myself. But soul-healing, that’s the meaning of the
word. And we’re talking about podiatrists who don’t believe in feet, veterinarians who
don’t believe in horses . . .

The process of psychotherapy – I want to honour it. There are good psychotherapists
out there who will help people in Plutonian times. But it is soul healing and we’re
going to see just how precisely that term fits as we go a little further into this.

So, when it comes to modern psychology, I often think of myself as the loyal
opposition, you know, as an alternative to it. Not to oppose it – I want to be loyal to it,
loyal to the best of it, but I also want to keep questioning it and I want to not get on
my knees before it. On the slideshow before you, you see “maybe the woman leaves
the relationship and enters some reflective process, such as psychotherapy, recovers
the memories and heals.”

Another example of a reflective process could be getting a good, deep, effective

astrological reading. That’ll trigger this. Or just the deep conversation with a friend or
the healthy relationship. The long hard talk with ourselves needs to be on the list,
although often the Pluto work would benefit from somebody to talk to, somebody to
share it with, because it is difficult.

So, that’s if we get it right and how to get it right. But what if she gets it wrong? What
if it’s a sad story? Well, maybe she marries the crazy man who’s the psychic clone of
her uncle and lives miserably ever after. I mean, that’s such a simple thing to say, but
how often does that come true? I use the extreme image here too – maybe she
becomes a prostitute. Well I mean, it’s sort of a grand-standing image, but there are
prostitutes in the world and there’s never a happy story behind what got them there. I
think that’s a pretty good rule of thumb, generally a Plutonian story. The point is if we
don’t get Pluto right, we are surely going to get it wrong, and we can count on that.

Now, at this stage I’ve been kind of talking around Pluto, trying to give you a human
feeling of it, some concrete ideas about it. But I want to begin to try to pull these
threads into a kind of model, a synthesis of principles.
So, in this story that I’ve told, which is an allegory for all Plutonian events, we discern
three elemental principals which underline everything Pluto can throw at you. And
again, the sexual abuse story is just a concrete illustration; there could be many,
many others. I want to look at these three principles with some care.

The first principle: the trouble that often arises in Plutonian times is in
no way random. It’s not bad luck. It’s always the echo of some wound in
the deep memory of the soul or the psyche.

This is a critical insight in terms of taking what seems to be the random misfortune
dimension of Plutonian experience and actually turning into something that can fit,
not comfortably, but meaningfully into the universe. And so, there is our first
principal: nothing is random in this.

Our second principal, which is also of course tremendously important, we have

perhaps matured enough spiritually and psychologically to look honestly
at the wound and to heal it. Therefore, we have said to the universe, “Set it up
again, I want another look at it.” And so again, this idea of an echo of something that
hurt us in the past. It doesn’t mean that we’re going to go down the same road again
in the present. Maybe there are other possibilities. So we say to the universe, “Set it
up again, give me another shot, give me another look at it.”

The universe is, of course, infinitely patient with this kind of thing. You know, if you
flunk the seventh grade, spiritually – you do it again. You get left back, the seventh
grade again, you flunk that. You can do it again, and again, and again. No shortage of
time in the universe. There’s probably some attrition after you flunk the seventh
grade a few times, bad patterns get established, but there it is. So, we can get it right.
That’s what’s at the heart of this second principal. It’s an affirmation that we can get
this right.

And remember, if we do get it right, if you eat your spinach so to speak, there’s
dessert. You get the ascent into heaven. You get the mojo, the sexiness, the creativity.
Those are important points. You’ve redeemed something out of the underworld and it
becomes part of our juice. So you cannot forget about that.

Now our third principal: If we have not done that maturational work, then
the Plutonian event is experienced as “random bad luck.” We learn
nothing. We merely re-enact the wound. We do it again. So, the girl in the
earlier story, sexually violated by her uncle when she’s just a child, and then in the
sad version of this story, she marries this guy who is the psychic clone of her uncle,
who is sexually twisted in such a way that he needs a little weirdness, that just love
and the natural bond between two people isn’t going to be enough for him. And so the
hell that unfolded, in let’s say an hour with her awful uncle when she was a kid,
becomes graven in stone, crystalized in her life in the form of a marriage that lasts for
years, a lifetime maybe. This is “random bad luck”? I always put that in quotes.
There’s nothing random about it. But we learn nothing and we merely re-enact the
wound.

Now, these three Plutonian principals are really very much the heart of the matter.
We’re going to answer the footnotes, but if we understand those principals we’ve just
described, the three of them, we really have the essence of what I’m trying to get
across here. Some of these footnotes are actually very important too. So as we look at
them we’re going to have something like a complete theory of Pluto, so to speak, or be
close to it. I don’t want to sound too cocksure about that. Perhaps a more precise way
of saying it is you’ll have Steven Forrest’s complete theory of Pluto, what I’ve learned
in many, many years in the counselling room at the front lines of people’s journeys.
And still, even now in my life, even though I spent a lot of time teaching and writing
and all of that, most of my work, I mean two thirds of my work, is still face to face or
at least recorded, one-on-one intimate work. And there is no greater teacher than
that. You say something wrong and you see it in the client’s face. It’s like an electric
convulsive shock. We’ve got to be careful of that astrological ivory tower, where
everything is in theory, and theories that make a whole lot of sense are not necessarily
right.

Again, I don’t want to appear to be the word of God on these principals I’m teaching.
But I can honestly say they have worked very reliably for me, for my students. And I
think they will reliably for all of you too, obviously, that’s why I’m teaching them. But
we have our three principals. Let’s add some footnotes to these principals, which as
we’ll discover are really very important too.

This is a big one, and this is what puts you squarely in the territory of evolutionary
astrology.

Footnote number one: as metaphysicians we recognize that the psyche is

older by far than the physical body. Rather than being rooted in drama
from our present life, the Plutonian wound may very well be karmic in
origin. In other words, related to some trauma or hurt or distortion originating in a
prior lifetime. This seems like it gives us a lot of wiggle room. It’s not exactly wiggle
room. It’s really a fundamental principal of the universe – that we would recognize
that the mind stream, that would a Buddhist way of saying it, “soul” would be the
Western way of saying it, is indestructible, ancient, and has a long complicated
history. And that history is not always completely pretty or comfortable, needless to
say.

There’s a very important footnote to the footnote though, that you see here on the
base of this slide: But even if it is karmic, the echoes of it are still likely to
have appeared in the present life childhood or adult experience.

So, almost cartoon illustrations so you know exactly what I’m talking about here. If
we imagine a person who is in the dark ages, who is tortured in the Spanish
inquisition, tortured on the rack in order to “purify them doctrinally” in order to
“turn him into a better Christian.” Torquemada, the famous inquisitor, has him on
the rack, tightening the thumb screws. Now, it’s a dramatic image, it’s a historical
image, it actually happened. We hear an image like that and it’s funny, you almost
can’t resist laughing a little bit, but of course, not if you’re on the rack. If you’re on the
rack it would impress you that you’re being tortured in the name of Jesus. That’s
going to mess with you, that’s going to confuse you, isn’t it? Sweet Jesus, Buddha,
Muhammed, pick your prophet, because every religion has blood in it.

So, you’re being tortured in the name of Jesus. This is confusing and contradictory. It
leaves something unresolved. It is of course a deep wound in the psyche. Okay, pause
at that. Simply pause at the existence of that wound. Now, here is a possible scenario:
you are reborn. You come back into this world and you are born into a family of kind
of morbidly, judgmentally fundamentalist Christians. And your father, at the head of
the table, is damning you for you sexuality and damning you for your error and
predicting that you will go to hell. To say that he is the reincarnation of Torquemada
is tempting. But of course that’s really cartoon astrology, cartoon metaphysics. But he
carries the energy of him. He’s like an emanation of Torquemada. He has that
signature. And you have unresolved business with Torquemada, so to speak. So you
are reborn into a family that has the same dynamic.

Now, as I put this idea out here, it’s essentially footnote number one, that we would
have to realize that this is not something that always happens, but it’s good to be
sensitive to it. That the dramas of childhood, which would be accessed through
conventional and effective psychological work, where we imagine a psychologist, for
example, with no metaphysics and no belief in reincarnation or anything like that . . .
And this good, effective, loving psychotherapist, who is an atheist, dives into the
realities of a person’s early family experience and helps the person enormously. And
it’s a Plutonian wound that had probably echoed through some in the adult life too.
But what the psychologist isn’t seeing is that the actual origin of the wound existed
prior to this incarnation. And it’s an important point for theoretical understanding.
But what really puts the smile on my face is that the psychologist can do fine work not
even knowing this.

I’ve annoyed some of my friends in the world of psychology by saying I believe this
insight accounts for the relative success in psychology, in helping people. And I say
this without diminishing it, but just to say that psychology could become so much
more accurate and so much more powerful if we recognize that the winds of karma
are what blow us into our family of origin – that it is not random. I also have to say I
get a bit of a laugh out of some of the more blissful, shall we say, new age people who
talk so glibly about “choosing your mother” and “choosing your father.” You know, as
if you’re choosing chocolates out of a box of Whitman samplers. And I don’t think it’s
like that. As many of us in our human lives have demonstrated. We have troubled
relationships with our families of origin, and those are usually connected to
unresolved karma. And those issues come up in life in Plutonian times. So, there’s
footnote number one. In essence, it’s this idea that more is going on than meets the
eye as we look at the present body.

But now we go to footnote number two. Even when a person gets Pluto right, so
to speak, he or she will typically succeed in that through some kind of
shadow work. In other words, in difficult work, dealing with things that are
uncomfortable. Therefore, to do well in Plutonian times we must not be
afraid of strong emotions or be unduly afraid of negativity.

I think, for example here, of just one illustration of this principal, to humanize it for
you. I think of a genuinely glorious, spiritual, uplifting word. The word is
“forgiveness.” Forgiveness, absolutely sacred. We forgive those who have trespassed
against us, so to speak. But I’d add a Plutonian perspective that probably ninety
percent of what I have seen flying under the banner of forgiveness, so called, is in fact
denial and rationalization. The point here is that forgiveness comes at the end. True
forgiveness comes at the end of a long, funky, complicated process, where we might
have to get really angry, we might have to get really depressed, we might have to get
miserable, we might have to get murderous in our hearts before we’ve dealt with the
feelings that need to be forgiven. And it’s almost like forgiveness is not even the goal.
It’s more like the flower that opens at the end of a Plutonian process.

Now, this is an example of shadow work, of dealing with strong emotions. And again,
I’ll sound like the loyal opposition here to modern psychological practice. There’s
such a reliance on this arsenal of psychoactive chemicals now. And sometimes I’m
thinking a person needs to go through some real darkness. And that there’s richness
in the shadow work. There’s power and strength in it. And the ability to simply turn
off the process – messy.

I have a friend, a good friend, I won’t name her, but she’s one of my go-to
psychotherapists. She talked about a seminar that she went to. She was required to
attend this seminar in keeping up to date in the field. And the presenter was really
pushing a drug-oriented model of psychotherapy. And this person said something
that just appalled my friend, the therapist. This individual said lightly, “Nobody has
to have a bad day anymore.”

Your best friend just died and you’re in grief. You’re not going to call that a good day.
But remember, grief, as we referred earlier, is part of a healthy process. It’s not
happy, but it’s part of a healthy process. Without grief, if we could somehow numb
the grief chemically, we’re robbing the soul of a Plutonian process.

Psychopharmacology is a complex subject. But I feel that this voice, this questioning
perspective needs to be heard. And I think it is heard in many circles, but it’s not the
dominant one. So, footnote number two: you can’t do Pluto work if you’re afraid to go
down into the dark and descend into hell. Which as we saw, is the necessary
prerequisite for the much happier ascent into heaven.
Now, there is a third footnote, and this one has to do with being honest about failure
in a Plutonian time. Critical footnote to the principal: the wounding tableau
reappears. And I put that word in here for the first time because in every situation
of at least an interpersonal mess of evil, misunderstanding, or damage, there are
many roles, there’s some drama. We might think about the victim and the victimizer,
so to speak. The words are complicated, but we just say them simply. Now, this
critical footnote: in the Plutonian time the wounding tableau reappears. Maybe we
are again the victim, assuming we’ve been the victim in the previous initial wounding,
which was maybe in a past life, or echoed in the childhood. So maybe again we’re the
victim. That’s not rare. But just as easily we can become the victimizer.

And those last italicized lines in the slide bring us right to the essence of this: The best
predictor that you will beat your children is that you yourself were beaten as a
child.

I mean, beating kids – it’s a terrible thing to think about. It’s Plutonian. We could
imagine a person who was beaten as a child . . . This is actually a true story from my
practice. And the person was beaten as a child and swore, passionately, “If I ever have
children, I will never lay a hand on that child in anger. I will not do to my son or
daughter what my father did to me.” A passionate, righteous speech, and we’re all
clapping our hands, needless to say.

Then the person has a kid, he gets married and has a kid, true story. And one day he
comes to me in tears, “I lost it and I hit Johnny.” Now, Johnny was being a little
rascal, so to speak. And kids can drive you nuts. It’s so easy to sit in our ivory tower
and say you should never hit your children. But show me a parent who hasn’t had it
cross their mind, needless to say, because kids can drive you crazy. But this person,
who had been beaten as a child and swore he would never do that to his child, lost it
and hit his kid in anger, and had grace enough to be absolutely ashamed.

Needless to say, if you’re following along with this webinar, as I hope you still are, he
was in a Plutonian time when he hit his kid because the wound was surfacing. Now
the story has, I don’t want to dwell on it, but it had a happy ending. He went through
healing. And everybody screws up with their kids. Not everyone will hit a kid. But the
relationship survived and they all prospered, but it wasn’t pretty. So again, footnote
number three: in a Plutonian time the wounding tableau appears.

And we always need to be sensitive to the fact that we’re not sure which role we will
play. Often it’s a repeat performance of the initial one; if you were a victim, you’re a
victim again. But it doesn’t always work that way, and we need to have some active
awareness of that principal.

Now, what is the nature of the wound? I’ve been emphasizing that it’s not always
sexual. I’ve used sexual examples, I just used a beating example, there are many.
What is the nature of the wound we’re invited to face during these Plutonian times?
And there are a variety of sign posts in the chart. So what planet or point, like
Ascendant or node, is Pluto contacting?

There’s no function in the psyche that is immune to humiliation, disempowerment,

lies and betrayals. So we might ask the question, what hurt your Venus, what hurt
your Mars? Just what planet is Pluto actively in the process of contacting?

We think of the basic psychoanalytic model, where we have the conscious mind and
then the unconscious mind. Generally, the metaphor that’s used here is of the
iceberg, with ten percent above the water and ninety percent below the water. That’s
a pretty good metaphor. So, every structure in astrology, every planet in astrology,
has that same imprint, that same blueprint. Every planet represents a function in
your psyche, of which you are fully conscious in every case. You know you have a
Mercury, you know have a Venus, you know you have a Saturn. But every planet also
has an unconscious mind where it keeps the material that it is denial about,
compartmentalizing, explaining away, or flat out repressing.

When Pluto comes along it contacts that planet, it triggers this process we’re talking
about according to the nature of the planet. Thus, if it’s hitting your Mercury, it’s
something to do with your voice, what happened to your voice? If it’s hitting a planet
in your ninth house – how has, for example, religion hurt you, or beliefs in
philosophy hurt you? This can take, obviously, a lot of different forms, and we can do
healthy, psychologically based astrology just thinking like that.

There’s a metaphor I just can’t seem to shake. I’m a little embarrassed I like it so
much, I use it all the time. But I just haven’t ever improved on it. It’s a way of
introducing Pluto to an astrologically naïve client. Most of my clients are there for
end-user purposes and I need to speak English. And I have to get complicated ideas
across to them pretty quickly. So here’s what I use for Pluto. I say, “Imagine that
Darth Vader were a psychotherapist.” And immediately everybody giggles, you don’t
think of Darth Vader as the epitome of bedside manner. But what’s a famous Darth
Vader line? “Release your anger, Luke.” For the corker – spoiler alert if you’re not
into Star Wars – “I am your father, Luke.”

Now, Luke was going to need a little therapy after that. So, Darth Vader, as a
psychotherapist. It’s a silly image. But go ahead and use it if you like. It works like
crazy because what it emphasizes is that sense of dealing with dark, heavy material.
Darth Vader is the lord of the underworld, and doing it without gentleness, without
kindness, because those are qualities that don’t exist in Pluto, there’s the key.

Now, the Plutonian process is tough. We can find gentleness and kindness in
ourselves and in other people, and we’re going to need them. But Pluto is fierce. And
fiercely honest. Now, this is the psychological way of understanding a Pluto transit.
And again, note the take away is that it focuses your attention on a very specific area
of life that is being triggered into your awareness. And of course, in most cases it will
not be about sexuality. I just used that as an example.
Now, there’s a kind of deeper way of looking at all of this. The same basic structure.
But every planet represents a contract you sign with God. Pluto comes along and says,
“So, how are you doing with that contract?” See, each planet represents evolutionary
possibilities. Each planet reflects a soul intention, and also reflects unresolved karmic
issues. But here I’m emphasizing the positive side of it. This is the heart of
evolutionary astrology: that you’re on this earth with this chart for a reason, for a
purpose; unresolved stuff from the past led you take this birth in this way.

Everybody has a perfect chart. Every chart represents a way forward. There’s a way to
get them right. It takes effort to do that. It doesn’t happen automatically, but it can
happen. A chart, and every planet in it, represents everything wrong with you and
how to fix it.

“Everything wrong with you” sounds unfashionably negative. And “how to fix it” is a
triumphant affirmation of human potential. And so there, in just a few words, is the
essence of this kind of astrology. You can’t really do truly evolutionary astrology
outside of an ultimately metaphysical context. And not the existentialist context of
modern psychology, but the metaphysical one where you’re on this earth for a
purpose, and each planet represents a contract you sign with God, so to speak, in
order to fulfill that purpose.

And along comes Pluto. Along comes Darth Vader – looks you right in the eye. And
you can’t lie to this planet. And it says, “You haven’t been watching television or
anything, have you? You haven’t been wasting time have you? Reading glamour
magazines? Noodling on Facebook?” And of course, we all have to chew our
fingernails before that fierce truth. It’s like, of course we have wasted time! So Pluto
comes along and it is time to renew our commitment to the inner work connected
with that planet. And specifically, to do the hard work, the work we don’t really want
to do connected with that planet. And this brings us right back into the territory that
we’ve already been looking at, that places it in this kind of larger framework, or larger
context.

Let’s go further. So where in your chart is that transiting Pluto? In what house and
sign and making what aspects? Of course it’s in Capricorn for all of us now (in 2017).
But individually it’ll be in your certain house, it’ll make certain aspects uniquely to
you. In the transiting position of Pluto, there you see clues about events and
conditions and circumstances – note synchronicity in that – the events and
conditions and circumstances that are triggering the emergence of the deeper issues.

Go back to where we were a moment ago. Those deeper issues are going to be
connected to the natal structure that is being hit by Pluto. So, note we have two sides
of this. We have the present position of Pluto, emerging events that are connected
with the inner work that needs to be done. Let me concretize this with an illustration.

So here we imagine Pluto is transiting your 10th house, and it does, it squares your
natal Virgo Moon. So transiting Pluto in the 10th squaring a Virgo Moon. We’ll leave
out any more astrological information, we’ll just look at that. Setbacks and
frustrations in your career (10th house in other words) ultimately rooted in your own
self-doubt, shame and self-sabotage (Virgo Moon). There is a lot in that sentence, a
lot of theory in it.

So, let me start with the Virgo Moon. And let me loudly and clearly say that having a
Virgo Moon does not mean that the definition of your inner life is self-doubt, shame
and self-sabotage. But those are the shadow dimensions of Virgo. So, Virgo, the virgin
of course. This is just real boiler plate astrology. You can read about it in The Inner
Sky if you wanted to. So, there was a time, long past now basically, when sexual
inexperience was viewed as an inherently virtuous condition. And when a person had
their first sexual experience, especially a female person, the idea was they have lost
value, lost their virtue. It’s a poisonous idea, and I certainly don’t mean to endorse it.
But the notion that we compare an ideal state with an actual state, and the statement
that “we all fall short of the glory of God” is a Virgo statement. The idea that
perfection is a rare condition, that perfection is an ideal, and ideals are never fully
realized because the world is complicated and we are imperfect, and so on.

Now there is no inherent shame in those statements, just honesty and humility and
accuracy. But when Virgo goes sour, we can see the idea of, “Well, here’s what I
should be and here’s what I am.” Uh oh, falling into a dark trap. Allow this field of
archetype to condition the Moon, which is to say the emotional body, which is to say
the attitude. Now, the Moon doesn’t think. That’s not a criticism of the Moon, it’s just
not one of the jobs of the Moon. Moon is internal and inward. So Moon is heart
energy, deep down inside us, energy. And attitude can shape us unconsciously
without even knowing it. Ok, that’s a deeper analysis.

Now, Pluto is squaring that Moon. So Pluto is saying to that Moon, “Is there anything
you’re not dealing with? Is there any way your self-doubt, self-criticism, beating
yourself up, self-sabotage, might have had any impact on your life?” That’s Pluto
squaring a Virgo Moon.

But Pluto is in the 10th house, so we might see setbacks and frustrations in the career,
10th house. It could be other possibilities, but that’s one of them.

So, you have a boss who has some prejudice against you. A racial prejudice, an ethnic
prejudice, a gender prejudice, doesn’t like your hairdo, doesn’t like your politics.
You’ve got a boss who’s behaving inappropriately. And so there are setbacks and
frustrations in your career and you’re suffering from it. You should be further along
in your career, and you know that, you deserve to be. Well, here’s the question. Why
the heck don’t you quit your job? Why the heck don’t you quit your job and what are
you doing there? What leads you to believe you need to be there? And you can take
those setbacks and frustrations that come from working for that terrible boss and
turn them into wisdom. You’re in hell. You’ve descended into hell – it’s called your
job. Time to ascend into heaven.
So there’s a possibility – crisis in the career and the turning point is reached.

Another possibility? Remember our story where she marries the guy who’s the clone
of her twisted uncle? Apply that here and seventeen years later you’re retiring from
that job, psychically damaged from not having stood up for yourself and having
bought into the shame. There’s the nature of the trap.

So, a piece of the puzzle that’s really important . . . Earlier I referenced the need to
have sensitivity relative to karma, relative to unresolved issues from the prior
lifetime. And the South Node of the Moon, by its nature, always represents the
deepest core of that material. It’s a complex subject and I can’t really summarize it
here in any quick way. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, have a look at my
book, Yesterday’s Sky. It’s a big fat book that is basically about how to understand the
unresolved karmic material through an analysis of the South Node of the Moon, it’s
ruler, the aspects that are made to it, and so on. But basically, the South Node of the
Moon always represents a kind of attitudinal hang up, something that is holding you
back in your evolutionary journey. As a result of that, we will always look at a
Plutonian event in the light of the nature of the South Node of the Moon.

As I write here on the slide, this is true regardless of whether or not there is an aspect,
a current aspect or a natal one, between Pluto and the node. It doesn’t matter if
anything is going on between them. Pluto deals with the surfacing of charged
material, as we have seen. The South Node of the Moon will often give you the royal
road into understanding the nature of that core of charged unresolved material. Thus,
the nature of Pluto is eternally tied to the nature of the South Node of the Moon. This
is a fundamental technique in evolutionary astrology and working with Pluto. And so
it’s important never to miss that or we fall into the limited perspective of the
psychological astrologer, of the purely psychological astrologer. I say “limited
perspective.” They can do good work, they can help people. But the deepest
understanding always arises when we take the metaphysical perspective and
recognize that the prior life echoes in the birth circumstances, very probably, and very
surely echoes in the general circumstances of the adult life. And so, the full
understanding really arises from the synthesis of all these.

So, Oprah Winfrey – a person who needs no introduction, needless to say. Born
January 29th of 1954 in Kosciusko, Mississippi. The birth time of 4:30am was given
verbally by Oprah, as you can see on the slide. She said, “Nobody knows for sure.”
You know she was born in terrible poverty, but this is the time I was always told.

That’s kind of shaky information, and astrology is very dependent on accurate birth
times and kind of vulnerable. You know, a client comes in and says, “Oh, I was born
an hour later than I told you.” And it’s a serious problem.

There are other charts floating around for Oprah. I like this one for a lot of reasons,
some of which we’ll be looking at in just a few minutes as we contemplate certain
rather Plutonian events in her life and in relation to the chart. First thing I want to do
though is just look at her chart. So, here’s Oprah. I do want to pursue one of our
purposes here in this webinar, to concentrate on moving events that have happened
in early Pluto transits, so to speak. But let’s look at it.

She speaks here of being sexually molested – in fact, let me just jump to another
screen for one moment, then I want to go back to her chart. Here Oprah speaks of
being sexually molested by a cousin, an uncle and a family friend starting at age nine.
That’s all I was able to read, I didn’t have dates. And with that she probably didn’t
know the dates exactly, but she was about nine. That works out to be 1963. She went
through a very promiscuous period, by her own report. She became pregnant at the
age of 14, obviously a rather early start. That works out to 1968.

Okay, so a history of sexual abuse. Now, note in the chart here, Pluto lies in the 8th
house of the cart, and I really do want to emphasize that for starters. Now, Pluto is
always kind of a lightning rod for material that wounds us, places where we might get
hurt. Pluto can operate in many different places. If Pluto is in your 10th house, for
example (not Oprah, but natal Pluto in your 10th house) there is a certain
vulnerability to collective or social projections onto you. People of your race or gender
or ethnicity “can’t do that” or “are not welcome here” would be an illustration, where
the wound comes in operating at a social level.

Pluto in the 3rd house – voice and the mind behind it. Maybe your intelligence is
insulted in a way that hurts you. So Pluto, always a bit of a lightning rod for the
wounding experience.

Now Oprah’s Pluto here is in the 8thhouse. So right away we develop a certain
sensitivity to issues connected with sexuality. I might also point out that Pluto is in a
nearly exact square with a Scorpio Mars. And Mars and Scorpio, once again, make
that reference. So the Mars in Scorpio linking to sexuality. The 8th house has a sexual
feeling. Scorpio, the 8th sign, has a sexual feeling.

The classical astrologers say that Mars is the ruler of Scorpio and the 8th house.
Modern astrologers will often say Pluto rules the two of them. I like to say they both
rule it. The point is, we’re looking at a very powerful, but rather monochromatic
signature of Pluto. In particular, of vulnerability to wounding in the sexual territory,
which of course manifested biographically in her life.

I want to go a little bit further with her natal chart. I regret that I might not have time
here to do the full analysis, and I want to put an hour into looking into everything in
her chart. I’m not going to be able to do that. But a few points are going to be relative
to our purposes. You’ll note she’s an Aquarian with a very tight Sun-Venus
conjunction. Venus standing there, just a fraction of a degree away from the Sun. So,
right away, the Venus signature – the idea that questions of intimacy are central to
the evolutionary work of this life. At a simple kind of descriptive astrological level, if I
say, “everybody loves Oprah Winfrey,” there’s not going to be too much argument.
She was famously effective in connecting as an interviewer. I’m not a television guy,
but I think, “Oh, that Oprah, she’s alright.” And I suspect a lot of people do. Feel that
Venus signature?

Now, that’s conventional astrology. And it’s accurate, but it’s a smoke screen that
hides the deeper astrology. So, Venus is big in somebody’s chart? From the soul
perspective they’re learning about Venus in this lifetime. And I like to reduce that to
two questions that need to be answered in this lifetime. If Oprah were sitting with me,
I would tell her this, and she would probably get a tear in her eye: “You’ve come here
to face two questions. One is who to trust, and the second is how to trust.” Who to
trust and how to trust. Those two. If you already knew the answers to those questions
the night before, it wouldn’t be your questions. So, we’re going to see you making
some mistakes here. No need to beat yourself up about that, but to recognize we’re
learning. Now in a full analysis on the chart, we could go a lot further into the
signatures of who she should trust and how she should trust and so on. We don’t
really have time for that. But I do want to underscore that with that Pluto-Mars
signature, and the vulnerability to damaging impacts of a sexual nature, and then we
marry that observation to this Venus-Sun conjunction, and the vulnerability relative
to issues of trust, it’s obviously a rather electric and explosive combination.

Now once more, I regret not being able to go further into the chart. But one more step
that I will take – the South Node of the Moon. There it is in Cancer in the seventh
house, in a conjunction with the planet Uranus, a rather tight conjunction. Cancer is
ruled by a Sagittarian Moon. That Sagittarian Moon, by the way, is out of bounds. It is
at an extreme of declination. And so, 24° 54’ south of the celestial equator, that gives
her that outside feeling, which is of course echoed in the strong Aquarian energy.
Aquarius the outsider, powerfully echoed in Uranus on the South Node. So, the
unresolved karma is connected with this sense of outsider, of exile.

There’s a strong relational theme built into the 7th house position of the South Node.
It’s in Cancer, ruled by the Moon, so we have this idea of home and family. The Moon
is in the 11th house, which extends out to “house of friends.” Kind of the classic name,
but it’s really kind of the sea of faces around us, in a family context. And we’re talking
Moon in Cancer, that’s a good word to have in your head. And then we think of the
11th house, I might use the word “clan,” the words “kinship group,” kind of extending
it out in the direction of community.

Okay, those are all positive words, family, community and so on. But Uranus on the
South Node, trauma, shock. A strong possibility here, given the Uranian element of
shock in the context of family and relationship, is that Oprah was abandoned when
she was a child or otherwise dependent on family in a prior lifetime. Now there are of
course echoes of that in her present biography, no surprise, because karma
reproduces. But here we are looking at the actual karmic story.

I do want to emphasize that the fundamental message here to me, if I were sitting
with Oprah and attempting to counsel her here, I would have referenced that
vulnerability, that kind of Plutonian lightning rod relevant to sexual damage or
intrusion in this lifetime. But I would not frame the fundamental karma as sexual
damage. I would not rule it out, but I wouldn’t frame that as the fundamental karma.
I would frame the fundamental karma as the karma of abandonment. Because I
always like to hit a strong emotional note with a client when I’m talking about the
South Node. I like to use strong images. This is not just a grandstand. It is because
I’m trying to bring a kind of resonance with the unresolved karma into the client’s
mind. So, the image that comes to mind here, that I might very well use with Oprah if
I were doing a reading for her, would be the image of a little Eskimo baby. Kind of the
extra baby that the family knows they’re not going to be able to feed, and the baby is
born, so they put the baby out on the ice to die, and the death will not take long. What
does that baby feel like? No words, no understanding, no capacity to take care of
himself or herself, but out on the ice of the arctic dark of winter. I wouldn’t be
surprised if I’m sitting with Oprah and say that, I’d see a glisten in her eye. Not just
because it’s a powerful image, but because it’s a powerful image related to her.

So I’ve made three points here. We have that Pluto-Mars square. We have the strong
Venus placement. And then we have this unresolved issue around trust; who to trust
and how to trust in the light of a karma of abandonment or betrayal perhaps, another
word for abandonment.

Now, once again, she is sexually molested by a cousin, uncle and family friend. Now,
nobody reading this is happy. But a cousin and an uncle, there is family, but in that
kinship framework. Family friend kind of moves out to that 11th house framework of
the larger community. She’s nine years old when this betrayal happens. She is
promiscuous after that, not an unusual result of sexual violation, and pregnant by the
time she’s fourteen, which works out to 1968. What was going on for her? Here we’re
looking at the wounding period.

Remember, I’m looking at a period from ‘63 through ‘68 here, when she’s abused
initially, and then a few years later when she was actually pregnant. And we have
quite a list here. April 21st of 1964, solar arc Pluto squared that Moon. That’s
significant, but remember the Moon is the ruler of the South Node, very directly
bringing in the karma. Might bring it in anyway, because of Pluto, but here you’re hit
over the head with it. April 7th, two years later of ‘66, progressed Venus opposed her
Pluto. Christmas of ‘68, solar arc Saturn squared her Pluto. January 12th of 1969, the
Progressed Sun opposed her Pluto. So, during this period in which her life was
hanging in the balance, in this awful way, in the vulnerability of youth, we see this
frightening array of astrological events.

Now, implicit in them, if we follow the theoretical material that I’ve been putting out
so far, implicit in these events was the possibility that she would heal during this
time. Of course, it’s a little harder to think of that with a kid. Especially a kid who’s
abandoned, where a mother pawns her off to a man who might have been her father,
kind of a better figure in some ways, the mother a bit of a disaster. Some of you know
of her story. She’s been very public about it. But you know, a child sent from here to
there, this city, that city, you get that feeling of abandonment. You get that feeling of
being the outsider. I have to say, she probably had once when she felt like a little
Eskimo child out on the ice. How does a nine-year-old feel when a mother says, “I’m
sending you away.”

I want to go back to her chart for a minute, and again, thank Tony for showing Eris
there in the 3rd house of her chart, in Aries, you may notice it right then at the
bottom. There’s not universal law agreement on the glyph to use for Eris yet, so “Eri,”
there’s the Eris. And some of you have maybe read my current newsletter on the
ForrestAstrology.com website. If you’re interested in Eris, I would recommend it. It’s
kind of a longer newsletter than usual, and I feel like it’s kind of time for us to really
wrestle with this planet. I need to start using it more in my practice, I’m absolutely
convinced of that. I haven’t quite caught up with myself yet as far as that goes.

Out of curiosity, I had a look at the position of Eris during this critical time with
Oprah. I’m going to get to that in a moment. For those of you who have maybe never
even heard of Eris before, it’s more Plutonian than Pluto in some ways. It’s edgy, it’s
competitive. There is a beautiful side to it, I talk about that in the article, the
newsletter, but it is a very sexualized planet. It has a viciously, insensitively
competitive quality to it. She is described as “delighting in the groans of men dying in
battle,” a quote from the classics. And when we think about that, it gets pretty darn
close to that definition in people that I offered earlier. Everyone has Eris somewhere
in the chart. It’s in Aries for all of us too. It entered Aries in the 1920s and it’s going
to be there quite a lot longer, I think until the 2030s, or something close. It moves
very slowly.

Okay, well the reason I even bring this up – in this critical period, November 6th of
1963, solar arc Eris conjuncted the astrological Nadir of this chart – left the third,
entered the fourth, entered the house of family. Earlier, when I first put Oprah’s chart
up here, I made the comment that the 4:30 birth time sounds a little shaky. There are
other astrologers who have different times. I like it. The natal things, like I said, fit
her life well. And there are others. But this Eris, it kind of made me smile. I mean, not
because the subject is so pleasant, but this scary edgy planet enters the house of
family in 1963. When Oprah turned nine in 1963, she was abused sexually by the
cousin, the uncle and the family friend. So there is a coordination between this 4:30
birth time and the solar arc of Eris. That alone would not be a strong enough
argument to say, “okay, that nails the 4:30 birth time.” But it is an argument in that
direction.

As we go further, we’re going to see more of it, but what we have looked at here, we
recognize a natal potential symbolized by the Pluto for sexual intrusion or violation.
We also recognize a powerful natal potential for being abandoned by family, being
“left out on the ice.” And that’s through the South Node of the Moon, which we have
seen cannot be understood separate from Pluto, nor Pluto understood separately
from it. These two are interactive. They’re both about the Moon. And those two
structures were there, and then we recognized in theory, along comes Pluto in any of
its forms, and we’re going to see the surfacing of the pre-existing karmic wound.
What we see here in these four events up on your screen, and then throwing in solar
arc Eris hitting the Nadir of the chart, we have theory vindicated. I mean nobody is
going to jump for joy at the thought of a child being abused this way, but we do
recognize the wound surfacing. It’s important to acknowledge that there were higher
potentials of response, but given the circumstances, the vulnerability of youth, I’m
not going to castigate Oprah for not picking a stronger response to that trigger, but
say, “God bless you, you poor thing.” Sometimes that’s the kindest thing we can say.

Now, she of course went on to a rather interesting career after that, to put it mildly. I
want to skip forward to the middle 1980s. In 1986 Oprah went public about her
history of sexual abuse. She also really, for the first time in her life, entered into what
proved to be a long-term relationship. They’re not married. But essentially, marriage
with this fellow, Stedman Graham. Let me add a couple biographical details while
we’re at it. Her first TV show, this was not syndicated nationally, but it aired the first
program January 2nd of 1984. “The Oprah Show” itself, the national broadcast that
made her famous, 1986, that was the year I’m kind of bringing up here. This period of
‘84 through ‘86, we see, certainly just existentially, much in the way of career
development.

This is just a bit of a footnote to our program, but more evidence of my faith in this
chart. Remember, her first TV program, she’s given a show. It’s local, but it’s her own
show, January 2nd of ‘84. I said that already, but I want to repeat it. That 4:30 chart
shows transiting Neptune, with its 165-year orbit, conjunct her Ascendant January
10th of 1984. That same chart shows on January 17th of 1984, Jupiter conjunct her
Ascendant. In other words, when her first TV show appeared, there’s a Neptune-
Jupiter conjunction on her late Sagittarian Ascendant. I kind of have a lot more faith
in the chart looking at that. And then, right, remembering about solar arc Eris
entering the 4th house, and those dark, dark times. I just want to put that on the table.
It’s not exactly Plutonian, but it sure is astrology in action, so to speak.

Now, February 8th of 1986, Pluto made a station, at 7° 22’ of Scorpio. And thus it
began a series of conjunctions with Saturn and squares to her natal Sun-Venus
conjunction. To quickly bounce back here to the chart, we’ll learn more looking at
that. So, transiting Pluto, up there in that 11th house context of the chart, in Scorpio,
made that station, at seven and a half degrees of Scorpio. ‘86, the year in which she
comes out publicly, talking about what had actually happened to her, and she also
forms this bond that has lasted her lifetime, in her own Aquarian Venus sort of way.
They’ve never married, but certainly have been a committed couple during this time.

So again, very simply, we see a major Pluto transit occurring at a time in which the
circumstances were set up again for her to repeat the old wounding experience. In
other words, she could have. She didn’t, she did better than this. But those
circumstances, ‘84 through ‘86, we are recognizing a period of which she could have
entered into a relationship with the psychic clone of her twisted uncle, to essentially
use a metaphor we’ve already established. And to have ended up feeling like the little
Eskimo baby out on the ice, setting it up again became available.
And she was in some pretty strange relationships leading up to this period. It’s all on
her Wikipedia biography, if you want to look at it. I’m going to leave out the salacious
details, experimenting with drugs and the various dark roads that that can go down
with men who needed her to take drugs with them. The Pluto stuff was all there. You
can’t do Pluto without doing shadow work, and I have a feeling Oprah was definitely
doing it during that period. But then, then she comes out of it.

As Pluto moves into the exact square there are some other Plutonian things
happening. I’m going to list them in a moment. But this major thing, one of the major
Pluto events in her life, Pluto coming to the square of her Sun-Venus conjunction.
Given Pluto’s 248-year orbit, its arrival at any strong aspect with the Sun, let alone a
Sun-Venus conjunction, is huge. And what happens? You know the biographical
piece: she went public about her sexual abuse. She found her voice and her voice was
heard.

In the 70s, she had gone to her family and told them what had happened and they
didn’t believe her. Once again, little Eskimo child out on the ice, that’s what it would
have felt like. Tell your family what your uncle did and they call you a liar. I mean, it’s
sad to think about, needless to say.

I mentioned some more Plutonian stuff – the solar arc South Node. And if you’re an
evolutionary astrologer, pay a lot of attention to that solar arc South Node, because
when it hits a sensitive point, the karmic wave is breaking. It works a lot like a Pluto
event. So, solar arc South Node, going one degree per year, so it just drifts through a
sensitive aspect, made a conjunction, the ace in the poker hand of aspects. Solar arc
South Node, a conjunction with Pluto there in the 8th house. And, of course
correspondingly, a square to Mars around the same time frame. This occurred
September 3rd of 1984, with Oprah’s soul hanging in the balance in that period.

And what happened? She finds a righteous relationship and she finds her voice. But
not before doing a descent into the dark. Solar arc Mars, which is of course a player in
this, solar arc Mars trined Pluto there May 4th of ‘84. It’s so interesting that just a few
months apart, two solar arcs – and solar arcs tend to bring events into manifestation
– two solar arcs triggering the natal Pluto.

By the way, just in terms of the conventional language of astrology, I’ve spoken of the
solar arc South Node forming a conjunction with Pluto. Of course, what that’s likely
to look like on your computer screen is solar arc North Node opposing Pluto. They are
the same thing, of course. And I put so much emphasis on the South Node, I’ll often
just go ahead and write it that way. And so, the karmic wave broke. And God bless our
Oprah, she got it right. She got it right, she found her voice, she found support. I
smile at what I’m about to say. She found support in her larger family, and of course
that larger family is some significant proportion of the population of the planet Earth.
And she created something like healthy honest family dynamics in living rooms all
across America. If there is one line I would write on Oprah’s grave, were she to have
assigned me the authorial task of writing it, it would be, “Let’s talk about it.” Doesn’t
that epitomize Oprah? “Let’s talk about it.” The soul who, in prior life times, was
sorely used, abandoned, treated as worthless, told that she should not talk about it,
and if you do talk about it, we’re not going to listen anyway. And so, what does she
do? She finds herself in this powerful position of finding her voice. And that voice
comes out into the world, and everyone who cares to listen hears it.

So, I’ll just close here, with three quotes, I guess most of them familiar or famous.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.” What could be
a more Plutonian idea than that? Those who’ve been through hell, those who have
been through the dark, come back powerful. I could have put the famous Obi-Wan
Kenobi up here, to Darth Vader, “Strike me down and I will become more powerful
than you can imagine.” That which does not destroy me, makes me stronger. Those of
us who have dealt in a healthy, positive, courageous way with Pluto transits become
powerful, as well as sexy, creative and full of mojo for reasons we saw earlier.

A quote often seen on Facebook lately from Carl Jung, “One does not become
enlightened by imaging figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” See,
Pluto work, shadow work, down into the dark to willingly descend into hell. Doesn’t
sound like a great idea, but it is the salad course for an ascent into heaven, a higher
energy state. We make the darkness conscious.

And then from Viktor E. Frankl, “What is to give light must endure burning.” You
may burn in a Pluto time and then you will give light to everyone who gets near you.

So, this is the sacred work of Pluto.

God bless you, and good luck in your journeys through the dark and enjoy the bright
light at the end of the tunnel. It’s really, really there. Thank you.

Copyright 2016 Raven Dreams Productions. Please do not

share, copy or distribute in any form without written
permission.