CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan and
you're listening to the Astrology Podcast. This is Episode 336, where I talk with astrologer Richard
Tarnas about the significations and the meaning of the planet Pluto in astrology. Richard is the
author of one of my favorite books on astrology titled Cosmos and Psyche which was published in
2006. This ended up being a pretty wide-ranging discussion where we covered a lot of different
things related to Pluto and occasionally went on some digressions about other interesting topics
in astrology. Early on at the beginning of the episode, we did have a bit of a digression about
the recent Saturn-Pluto conjunction that occurred at the beginning of 2020 and how that
coincided with the onset of the pandemic. I wanted to talk with him about this a little bit
at the top of the episode because he was one of the few astrologers who had done the historical
research in order to demonstrate how Saturn Pluto alignments had coincided with some pretty major
turning points in world history in the past, including pandemics and other major events. So I
thought it was worth it to go on this digression at the beginning of the episode to check in with
him to see how he felt about some of his work in retrospect on that topic and how things had
actually played out over the past couple of years. The last time he was on the podcast was in
Episode 84 in 2016 in order to mark the 10 year anniversary of Cosmos and Psyche. So, that did
give us some insight into Pluto going through that digression and then eventually we get straight
into our topic and start talking in more detail about the broader significations of the planet
Pluto, including not just the super negative ones related to pandemics but also some of the more
positive ones in order to balance things out. I did want to let people know that if they want
to jump straight to that point, I did create timestamps for this episode which are available
both in the video version in the description below this video on YouTube or in the audio version you
can find the timestamps on the description page on the podcast website at theastrologypodcast.com.
I'll also put links to my previous interview with Richard harness and other relevant website links
in the description below this episode. All right, with that introduction out of the way,
let's get started with the interview. Hi, my name is Chris Brennan and you're listening
to the Astrology Podcast. In this episode, I'm going to be talking with Richard Tarnas
about the meaning of Pluto in astrology and what it signifies, and how astrologers
developed an understanding of this planet or dwarf planet historically. Today is Tuesday,
December 28th 2021 starting at 1:59 pm in Denver, Colorado, and this is the 333rd episode of
the show. So hey Richard, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for joining me today.
RICHARD TARNAS: It's my pleasure, Chris. Good to see you again.
CB: So this is your second appearance on the show. You previously appeared in Episode 84
in 2016 to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of your book, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New
World View, and I can't believe it's been almost five/six years since that time at this point.
RT: Yeah, time is really flying these days at least at least for some of
us. I know also depending on the lockdown experience, it can be both
moving almost at a glacial pace and also moving so fast as if the day starts and ends
in about a quarter the time when it needs. CB: Yeah, especially last year going through
the Saturn-Pluto conjunction and then the Saturn-Uranus square sort of alternating
between those two. It seemed like at different points. So you recently took part
in a new documentary series that's coming out in January called Changing of The Gods, which
is a 10-part series directed by Kenny Ausubel. RT: -Ausubel.
CB: Ausubel. Yeah, whenever I read his name I always want
to ask if he's related to the seventh century Assyrian king Ashurbanipal but it's probably not
related in any way. So, this is coming out. This has been a long time coming. I think they've been
working on it since 2013 or 2014 or so, right? RT: That's right. Yeah. Certainly a full seven
years in production. It started just at the kind of central period of the Uranus-Pluto square
and was focusing on the Uranus-Pluto cycle that I had basically focused one part of Cosmos
and Psyche on that cycle historically, the big world transit cycles; the conjunctions, the
oppositions, and the squares in particular. And Ausubel who is the Co-founder of Bioneers,
they wanted to do a film that basically focused particularly on this big Uranus-Pluto
square that was more beginning when they first conceived the film. And then it became such a big
project moving from a feature film to a 10-part documentary series that it went the
entire period of the Uranus-Pluto square in making it. But the advantage of doing it that
way is that you really got a big overview of that alignment and the cultural correlations
that took place, the archetypal phenomenon that is so evocative of the
Uranus-Pluto energies and have been played out so dramatically over the last decade or so.
CB: Yeah, I watched the first half of the series already and I felt felt especially that episodes
four and five were really compelling, where they were tying it on the one hand, the women's rights
movements and some of the developments that happened in the 1960s and how those tied in with
previous cycles and then how we saw continuation of some of those themes in the past decade at
the Uranus Pluto square. But then also the Civil Rights Movement, which was also a key defining
moment in the 1960s with the conjunction, and then how that was tied into broader cycles as well.
RT: Exactly. Right. Going back earlier to the beginnings of the abolitionist movement and going
right up through the most recent square with Black Lives Matter, for example, just huge. There always
seems to be a kind of intensified constellating of the archetypal energies around both Uranus
and Pluto, those kind of complexes of meanings and impulses that we've experienced in human
life. And they seem to track very precisely, as you look through the centuries, every time
Uranus and Pluto for example come into conjunction or opposition or square, there's a bit more
in a decade where you see whether it's the women's suffrage, women's feminism,
women's liberation, those movements just really get activated in new ways that
build on what's happened before but clearly come into cultural focus and intensified
activism and so forth, and awareness. And then the same thing with the civil rights movement. I
should say civil rights movements because there's many forms. Same thing with gay liberation,
and also as a socio-political revolutionary phenomenon more generally. Also, technological
revolutions, scientific revolutions, etc, seems to have something. Obviously, the planet
Uranus astrologically has so much to do with change and revolution and the impulse
to rebel and to overthrow the present status quo on behalf of greater freedom,
greater advance of knowledge, technological and scientific breakthroughs and so forth,
artistic innovations... And then the Plutonic energy which I know is what our focus is going to
be today. The Plutonic seems to intensify whatever other archetype it's coming into contact with. And
it often does this on a kind of mass level, almost to overwhelming proportions. When that happens and
you combine it with the Uranian Promethean impulse towards change and rebellion and originality
and innovation and freedom, there is a massive intensification both in frequency and in kind of
mass phenomena that reflect Promethean Uranian qualities. The other way it works, of course, is
that whatever Uranus touches, it activates in a kind of sudden unexpected way with unpredictable
consequences. And it tends to be rather creative in its implications or consequences, and there can
be a kind of genius level to it or an originality to how it expresses itself. When that's combined
with, say Venus, it would more come through, you know, the arts or through romantic or social
awakenings of some kind or changes, disruptions, or artistic creativity is stimulated. But when
Uranus is sitting Pluto, it liberates the Plutonic archetype in so many ways. That's one of the
things I think we'll probably focus on today. CB: Yeah, for sure. And watching that series
gave me some new insights into Pluto and the meaning of Pluto in the way they were
taking your work from Cosmos and Psyche and just focusing on certain pieces of it in an
easy-to-digest and more presentable form of what was otherwise a really dense book that you spent
a long time working on. Speaking of that, despite all of the terrible things that have happened over
the past two years since the pandemic, has it been interesting for you to see how the
Saturn-Pluto conjunction ended up working out, and how literally how much some of your previous
research tied into and made sense of what happened over the past couple of years? I mean, a lot
of people-- a lot of astrologers at least-- looked to your work when the
pandemic happened in order to help contextualise what was happening and felt
like the pandemic to some extent was a little bit of a fulfilment of some of the things you had
have written back in 2006 in terms of how you had articulated some of those energies. What was your
feeling about that over the past couple of years? RT: On the one hand, the flow of life is always
unpredictable in a concrete way. You don't know how the specifics are going to unfold. So much
depends on human agency and the unpredictable interactions of multiple factors. But astrologers
have this remarkable gift from the cosmos that allows us to get a glimpse into what are the
Archetypal energies that are going to be activated at a given time because it's been so consistent
with/and so visible once you know how to read the cosmic symbolism and have a decent
sense of symbol and archetype and so forth. It's what Stan Grof calls a Rosetta
Stone, it really kind of gives us a remarkable translation device like
a telescope to see into the deeper energies and meanings that are activated
at a given point. So I certainly wasn't being clairvoyant in thinking that when the
Saturn-Pluto conjunction comes there would be major phenomena of a certain character, I
was just being kind of empirical. If you look every time Saturn and Pluto come into hard
aspect like the conjunctions and the opposition's as well as the squares, you see very decisive
turning points in history where there tend to be quite challenging. And if we just
looked at the conjunctions and oppositions of our lifetime-- my lifetime now, seven decades--
it's quite striking how- Or let's just look at the 20th century. The Saturn-Pluto cycle, its
first conjunction of the 20th century is 1914 and basically, particularly from 14 to 16,
very tight conjunction. And that's World War One. And then the Great Depression comes
in under the the next opposition. And then World War Two begins right as Saturn and
Pluto come into the square in 1939. Then the Cold War begins under the conjunction of 46-48 where
you've got the world kind of held in this great conflict that has nuclear intensity. And then most
recently, I mean, 911 is what happened of course under the most recent Saturn-Pluto opposition.
CB: Did you mention the AIDS epidemic of 81 conjunction?
RT: That's right, AIDS epidemic under the preceding one. And of course in Cosmos and Psyche,
I go back to earlier centuries and talk about the correlations with the Black Death
or the enormous plague that swept through Europe and much of the world under the
Saturn-Pluto cycle of the mid 14th century. So because Saturn has to do with
that which contracts and limits, Pluto intensifies that so it's often a
kind of contraction moment in history. And there can be, you know, the Saturn-Pluto
combination is often one of confinement. I mean, there's many good things that are also
characteristic of Saturn-Pluto; the discipline, the capacity for courage under great pressure,
of facing evil or facing extremely dangerous circumstances, tremendous powers of organization
and ordering and extremely hard labour being focused on a particular purpose that is sustained
day after day with great intensity... All those are classic Saturn-Pluto virtues and people often
are able to kind of restructure their life in a certain way because they're accessing these
deeper capacities for Plutonic transformation but with a Saturnian discipline and foundation
that will endure. And often the things that happen under the Saturn-Pluto alignments tend to
endure in their consequences. It's also a period, Saturn and Pluto, of much greater
awareness of environmental issues, ecology, you know, with more of an apocalyptic
potential in the atmosphere. Somebody like Greta Thunberg who is born under the preceding
Saturn-Pluto opposition right during the 2001 to 2004 period, then she comes into prominence as
a great spokeswoman on behalf of the awareness of the tremendous gravity of our global ecological
situation. Because Saturn relates to gravity and Pluto intensifies whatever it touches,
Saturn-Pluto periods tend to have a quality of great gravity. Gravitas like, "This is morally
serious, we really have to focus. This is life and death. Issues are at stake, etc," but
also gravity even in the literal Newtonian sense. Saturn relates to the Saturn Pluto heaviness
of like a great iron safe or a Titanic ship that weighs countless tonnes
of steel and concrete, those are very Saturn-Pluto. The whole 911 Twin Towers
started under Saturn-Pluto in the mid 60s and fell under the next opposition in 2001.
One last thing about the Saturn-Pluto, you've got that tendency towards confinement
and suddenly with the Saturn-Pluto, everyone's confined to their homes
and we're separated from each other, and there's a tremendous sense of isolation. And
those who aren't able to seclude and separate have to be out on the front lines as healthcare
workers or as people who are carrying the needed infrastructure of the deliveries. All the
things that have to happen just to keep people fed and warm and so forth during this
crisis. All these people were being exposed to COVID of the way the social inequalities are
hierarchically established in our society, and on they're facing the Saturn-Pluto more at
that level of facing death, facing mortality, risking themselves with very hard labor. While
others are experiencing it through solitude and loneliness and feeling cut off; grandparents
and grandchildren not able to hug each other and couples separated and so forth. We are also all
very familiar with the hyper intensification of the Saturn archetype these last two
to three years. Two years in particular. CB: I have this really distinct memory during the
early part of the pandemic, because so many such a generation of astrologers have come in
over the past 10 years and everyone has read your book at this point, and the emphasis on
the Saturn-Pluto cycle was very clear because you wrote your book partially in the aftermath of
911 so you actually spent quite a bit of time talking about the Saturn Pluto opposition that
happened that was very close at the time. So, did you see that meme of where somebody had
changed the title of your book at some point during the pandemic? I think an astrologer
named Ursula posted this in like March of 2020 or something like that. I don't know if you ever-
RT: Yeah. My daughter, Becca Tarnas who's an astrologer, she sent it over to me. [laughs]
She said, "You know your book's a success when it's been turned into a meme." [laughs]
CB: Yeah, when you've been memed. So for the audio listeners, instead of the title, it says,
"I Fucking Warned You. I Fucking Told You, Bro. Intimations of a New World View, Richard Tarnas."
RT: And because the cover which I had designed had basically a god and a goddess both pointing at the
surface of the Earth and there was a sense of the gods both being at odds with each other and also
letting the Earthlings know that they'd really screwed up and that actually the warnings had been
out there as in Cosmos and Psyche. [laughs] Yeah, that was a very clever meme.
CB: Yeah. Despite the hardships, and obviously, nobody revels in that. It
seemed like, you know, to the extent that you had covered that so much and archetypal way
that you described those alignments worked out pretty well when the next major one came about. It
seemed like a successful prediction or should have been somewhat fulfilling in terms of to whatever
extent you might have been striving to anticipate what certain upcoming cycles might bring.
RT: Well, I think I experienced that more when I was younger because, you know, at this point I've
been studying astrology and kind of had a handle on the larger both the archetypal meanings but
the big cycles starting pretty clearly by the late 70s. So, the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of the
early 80s was the first one where I was seeing things that I kind of would have anticipated
archetypically and astrologically seeing come to bear with, again, I spend a bit of time in Cosmos
and Psyche discussing that particular conjunction. You brought up the AIDS epidemic as being one
kind of mass encounter with mortality. Those who are older will remember that that was the period
when the Cold War had reached such an intensity of where the nuclear that was called the Sword
of Damocles was hovering over humanity with such dangerous precariousness. And Ronald Reagan was
calling the Soviet Union the evil empire, and this was before Gorbachev. And so the last premiers
and the Kremlin leaders were in there. There were so many nuclear missiles placed in Europe
to obliterate most of the world within seconds and any little mistake could have triggered it,
that this catalyzed such an awareness of our nuclear danger that mass demonstrations-- the
biggest there had ever been seen-- happened all around the world at that time particularly
under the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction there. But it was the Saturn-Pluto gravity of the danger
that was really pushing that awareness. You know, the apocalyptic intensity comes in more from
the Pluto. In fact, there were conferences on "what is the meaning of Apocalypse?" Depth
psychologists like James Hillman were speaking at conferences where they were examining
the symbol of the Apocalypse, there was an extremely popular television film called
The Day After that just was all about what would happen the day after a
nuclear holocaust, you know, and it was very vivid bringing home to many people
what was at stake. The Fate of the Earth was a big book at that point by Jonathan
Schell who interestingly, first made his- Where he's bringing the attention to this nuclear
danger with vivid prose, and he is the person who, let's see... Jonathan Schell wrote that. Then
John Hersey under the preceding Saturn-Pluto conjunction wrote the book on Hiroshima that had
such an impact. Anyway, I didn't take too much pleasure in seeing the cycle fulfilled
particularly when some of the things that were happening were just so- Some things are avoidable.
The pandemic didn't have to be this bad. You know, China could have acted in a different way. The
United States, Trump's government could have acted in a different way. There were all sorts
of ways that didn't have to get to this level. Or under the last Saturn-Pluto opposition, the
war against terror was started and the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq against
tremendous opposition, popular opposition here in the US and around the world to that invasion.
And all during this Saturn-Pluto conjunction, a lot of the consequences of those decisions
have come home to roost; in the Middle East and Iraq and Afghanistan because this was such
a duplication of what had happened under the Vietnam Saturn-Pluto opposition in the mid
60s, which also was an unnecessary war. So it's hard to take pleasure in how
planetary alignments are manifested in perfect conformity to their meanings, but it's
in conformity to a certain range of those meanings up in their shadow side that didn't have to be
constellated if there had been a more conscious relationship to those archetypes. And this
is something I hope we go into today, is how we can take-- in this case we're talking
about the Saturn-Pluto energies, but we could also talk about it in terms of Pluto just generally, or
just the degree to which we enter into the deeper realms of the plutonic archetype and become
conscious of them inside ourselves and in the world, and come into a more reflective and skillful way of enacting them.
Because they're going to come through, the gods express themselves. But to an extraordinary
extent, human beings have the capacity to inflect the direction or the quality to a higher
or lower or a more, you know, problematic or more life-enhancing range of the spectrum of
archetypal possibilities that each planet and planetary complex represents. And the Plutonic
is in some ways the one that requires the most consciousness to come into relationship
to because when we don't, we're driven by it like puppets. It's such raw,
instinctual energy. It's coming from the depths of nature. It's coming from what Freud called the
ID or the Darwinian struggle for life or nature's will to power. All of which are both healthy
and have problematic potentials when they are acted out unconsciously. And part of our
human challenge is to bring a kind of psychological reflectiveness, a thoughtfulness,
being able to kind of come into a collaborative relationship with these powerful
archetypes rather than just being possessed by them or trying to suppress them. Either
one of which is a bad bet, you know, in terms of how that archetype will manifest.
CB: Yeah, maybe due to that tendency for Pluto to go to extremes. Maybe that's part of the
reason why the need for conscious reflection of and being careful is most important in
some ways when dealing with that planet. All right, so let's let's segue into our
main topic. I couldn't help but take the opportunity to just check in and ask you how
that had been going over the past few years. Let's start talking about Pluto. This is the
final quote unquote "planet" in my series on the planets that I've been doing this year where
I went through each of the planets and did a deep dive into their significations and meaning. We've
covered Uranus already and covered Neptune. Pluto was discovered on February 18th 1930 by the
astronomer Clyde Tombaugh working at the Lowell Observatory, who was an astronomer who
had previously initiated the search for Pluto a decade or two earlier. And so
it was the third large new body found in our solar system after Uranus and Neptune. One of
the issues that all of the discoveries of the new planets has raised for me is how do astrologers
establish the meaning of newly discovered planets? Pluto is one that I struggled with
the most because I get the sense that the mythology of Pluto, after it was named
by astronomers, became the primary access point that astrologers started using to develop
its significations and meanings and astrology because it was named after the the Roman god
of the underworld. But with some of the earlier planets like Uranus, there are these stories
about, for example, John Varley and Uranus. They have almost a more empirical tone in terms of how
the astrologers of the time perhaps were actually first putting them in charts or looking at them
in transits and trying to find out their meaning. I wasn't sure then if there's been a shift when
it comes to Pluto, and how much of the meanings of Pluto are empirically derived versus derived from
the mythology or the archetype. That's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you today because I
know you blend both of those approaches, but your work definitely takes that archetypal, oh sorry,
the historical approach or the empirical approach into account so that it's not all just sort
of abstract but you have concrete reasons for developing certain meanings of Pluto.
RT: Yes. Well, this is a very rich and complex topic. I'm glad you're
wanting to address it. I've tried to emphasise how we- Well, the the mythic names
that are given to the planets or the asteroids or other celestial bodies are, I think, should
be considered as potential clues to take into account. We also need to look empirically and
of course, one of the things that has been most reliable with certainly the outer three planets
discovered in the modern period; Uranus 1781, first one by telescope as well. And then
Neptune 1846, and then Pluto in 1930 as you just mentioned. One of the things about those three is
that, as Dane Roger pointed out quite eloquently, he pointed out the synchronistic phenomena that
happened around the time of the discoveries of those particular planets. So, you know, Uranus is
discovered 1781 which is right at the very heart of the periods of great revolutionary
phenomenon; the American Revolution, the French Revolution both happened within a decade
of the discovery. But also it's the height of the emancipatory enlightenment period. It's also
when the birth of romanticism happens. It's when kings are being toppled and forces of
democratic emancipation are really being being activated. The first rebellion by
enslaved people happens. It seems as if for about 15 years or so on each side of that year
of discovery, that's the kind of orb within which phenomena happen that give us a clue
to the nature of that planet's meaning astrologically. Because of course in the modern
period, the outer planets and all the other planets and all the other solar system bodies
are being named by astronomers who necessarily don't have an archetypal astrological
orientation and instead, they are more- Let's just take Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. Uranus
was named Ouranos the sky god. One, because it was the father of Kronos Saturn who was the father
of Jupiter, Zeus, and who was the father of Mercury, Venus, and Mars or Hermes Aphrodite and
Eris, going in that sequence, it's a patrilineal sequence. It's a patriarchal mythology
that the Greek or Greco Romannes provide us with those figures.
Astronomers don't have as the uppermost motive in their mind for choice of the planet's
name, they don't have an archetypal meaning and astrological meaning in mind. Mercury,
Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, these were all known to the ancients, they're visible to
all of us with our naked eye. And it's pretty early in the records of where there is, you know,
astronomy and astrology going back into those earlier millennia are so undifferentiated. They're
one science. The great passion to understand the movements of the stars and
the planets, the Sun and the Moon, had a lot to do with the fact that they were
seen as gods and goddesses, as great powers whether it was they were the gods and goddesses
or whether that was the celestial realm, the abode of the gods and as Plato's eponym is
the last dialogue that many Platonic scholars Platanus scholars attribute to Plato written
after the laws, that dialogue, Plato calls each of those planets Kronos, Zeus, Aphrodite...
This is the planet that is sacred to Zeus, this is the planet that is sacred to Kronos. So, right up
through that period, they are always all seen as being somehow related to or expressive of the gods
and goddesses. This is not part of the rationalist astronomical mentality in the late 18th century
when Uranus is discovered or Neptune. Instead, they just are seeing while Uranus is the next
planet out from Saturn, it's twice as far from Saturn, twice as far from the Earth as Saturn is,
it tremendously expands our sense of the Solar system, let's call it Ouranos who is the father
of Saturn or Kronos. And Ouranos is the god of the starry sky, which really fits the fact that
it was so deep into the starry sky where it was developed. But as astrologers, we're focusing
on Uranus and then Neptune and then Pluto. They were also just looking empirically.
And it's pretty clear that a lot of the- Let me just say in general terms. I think the
astronomers who named Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, they had some kind of intuitive, you know,
there's a synchronistic- You don't have to believe in astrology to maybe come up with
a name that has a relationship to the actual archetype that may prove out astrologically.
And I think it's pretty clear that Uranus as an astrological planet, has a lot to do with
the heavens, with the sky, you know, with space travel, with air travel, with the interest in
astronomy and astrology and the cosmic view, and so forth. So there's something to be
said for Uranus's relationship to the sky, Neptune certainly to the water. Every astrologer
has a sense of fluidity and dissolving energies of Neptune and its connection to rivers and
oceans and the stream of consciousness, and the oceanic feeling of the mystical and so forth,
or metaphors that are connected to the Neptune astrological archetype tend to be quite
appropriately, you know, oceanic or watery. So it makes sense that they were onto something
even though they weren't thinking astrologically. And Pluto, when it was named, a
couple of different factors came in. A number of names were being considered. You may
know the story, the quite young daughter of one of the people in England who was on the committee
to name the planet strongly suggested Pluto. And P L, the first two letters of Pluto, also
fit Percival Lowell, who was the man who first set in motion the discovery of Pluto. So there
was a kind of honouring of the astronomer that way. You can see it in the astronomical cliff
there that has been used so often for Pluto. In addition, even the Disney cartoon figure of
Pluto seems to have played a role in the girl's thoughts about it, but I think she
had more in mind than just that. CB: Yeah, what I was reading is that she did have
some background in Greek mythology or interest in mythology and that was part of what motivated her?
RT: That's right. Basically, you know, like Zeus and Poseidon and Hades were each
given a different realm, you know? So Poseidon Neptune was given the realm
of the oceans and of the sea, and Pluto was given the realm of the underworld,
Zeus, of the overworld; Mount Olympus, the sky, et cetera. And so there was that as well.
CB: Yeah, I think Pluto in mythology had the ability to become invisible or to cloak
himself and I think part of her rationale she said was that because Pluto is so distant and you
could barely see it and it was very difficult to even get a glimpse of with telescopes,
that was part of the reason why she thought that Pluto would be a good name for it.
RT: Yes. So on the one hand I want to honor the way in which even a non-astrologically aware
astronomer or astronomical committee could come up with a name. They went through several names
for Uranus before they came up with Ouranos. Herschel, who discovered it, named it Georgium
Sidus, Georgia star after the patron King George. His friends didn't like that idea. [crosstalk]
CB: I still think we missed out on not having it called George, because like where the planet
George would be by your horoscope or transits would be much more entertaining in some level.
RT: I think we discussed this in our other interview, but so many of the qualities
that we recognize as being distinctly Uranian have to do with, you know, rebelliousness
and unpredictability and change and originality and genius and creative
innovation and the trickster and so forth. All of these are not particularly characteristic
of Ouranos, the myth of Ouranos, but are very characteristic of the myth of Prometheus.
CB: Right. So part of it is that you, on the one hand, recognize and acknowledge that
there's some-- as most astrologers now this has become their main line of thought-- that
there's some synchronistic connection between the name that is given to a new celestial body
and its astrological meaning just through some sort of coincidence, just through that that in
some ways the correct name will be picked and that will have some meaning. But then on the one
hand, before you wrote Cosmos and Psyche in 1998, some newer astrologers may not know that you wrote
a separate book called Prometheus the Awakener, where you kind of argued that the mythology
of Prometheus actually matched many of the significations that astrologers give to Uranus
empirically, the planet Uranus more empirically, than the myth of Ouranos does on its own?
RT: Right. This was a point that Stephen Arroyo made very briefly just a single sentence
in Astrology, Karma & Transformation back in 78. I think one or two other astrologers
in earlier decades also, just briefly co mentioned that there's a Promethean
quality there. I think there was a Frenchman-- I think it was Barbault. But it's been hard to
nail down a particular text where this was done. I think what it allowed me to do was to start
differentiating, like not every single thing about a myth is going to tell us about that
astrological archetype, there's going to be lots of details in a myth of a particular figure
like Zeus that is not particularly Jupiterian. For example, Zeus can act in a very Saturnian
way, when he's being punitive or he's being the principle of order where he's restrictive,
etc. But Zeus was also a rebel at one point overthrowing his father Kronos. And who did
he get the help of? Prometheus. To overthrow Kronos in that battle. And of course,
Zeus can be very Plutonic. He's constantly engaging in sexual conquests and so forth. So,
Jupiter- and this is true of each of the planets or each of the mythic figures associated with the
planets-- is that there are details that are more relevant to an unfolding of a particular
inflection, a particular mythic and cultural manifestation that goes beyond what the pure
archetype is. One of the reasons it's pretty obvious that this would be the case is, there's
nothing about, I mean, the Greeks were an incredible culture. The Romans were an incredible
culture in many ways. Both of them had huge shadow qualities as well. But what the Greeks and
Romans tuned into in their mythologies doesn't necessarily become the way of understanding all of
human experience and all other cultures who have nothing to do with Greek and Roman mythology,
yet they share the same planets out there. And presumably, the astrological meanings of
the planets are not radically different for that culture just because they have a different
mythology. In addition, certainly in the Greco Roman tradition, they're very patriarchal
mythologies. And the names of the planets are so overwhelmingly male and yet I think every
good astrologer recognises that every single planet including Venus and Mars, has
both feminine and masculine expressions, ways of expressing themselves. Same thing with
the Sun and Moon. It's only in a patriarchally constructed mode of understanding
that one reduces Saturn or Mars or Venus or the Moon just to a masculine
or feminine expression. And I think there's so many signs right now in our society
that we're kind of breaking out of that confining binary of male/female being
radically separate from each other and also the patriarchal hierarchy. And instead, I think
if we can recognise the archetypes as being these kind of primordial transcending
principles, they're forces, they're gods, they're gods' goddesses, they're
psychological impulses, they're complexes, they're platonic archetypes, they're Jungian
archetypes, they're [plumeric] figures in myths, but they go across all the different cultures.
And each of these kind of pure transcendent, archetypal principles that we can glimpse through
our studies of the Sun, the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, etc, each of those can be expressed
differently in different mythologies. Like Pele, the volcano goddess in Hawaii is pretty clearly
a Plutonic being, a Plutonic manifestation. In order to understand Neptune, you pretty much
have to-- while you can get some understanding of it through Greek mythology, you really have to go
to India to get a lot of its meanings. You know, in terms of Maya, in terms of Leela, in terms of
Vishnu's dream, in terms of the oceanic mystical unity of all things that is so emphasized
in the Hindu and Buddhist context. And there's trickster figures, that Uranian
trickster that's kind of a creative principle is in so many different cultures. Same thing with the
god or goddess of love, of beauty, etc, of war. These are transcultural archetypes,
they're both masculine and feminine, they can be understood as cosmic principles in
a more platonic Pythagorean way, but also as interior psychological drives and realities
in a more Jungian and even psychoanalytic or Hillmanian way, archetypal psychology.
So I think it's helpful for us to not just take the name of a planet
that's been given and automatically assume that that exhausts the meaning of
that planet, but instead we have to draw from an interaction between the name of the
planet that it’s synchronistically been given, the qualities and features of that mythic being
as it's played out in myth, and then look at the period that it's been discovered in and get
a feeling for what is the cultural zeitgeist that is dominant at that period, which we can
talk about now with Pluto. And then finally, look very very carefully at well, "What
do we see when people are born with Pluto on their Sun, or Pluto on their Moon, or Pluto on
their Venus? How does that shape their particular Sun or Moon or Venus or Mercury or whatever it
is' expression? What's particularly distinctive about the expression of love?" Let's say, with
Pluto-Venus which we have right now in the sky, the Pluto Venus conjunction as we're
speaking here. Mercury's there too and the Moon square Pluto as well so we've
got a nice full activation of the Plutonic archetype there. All right up at the Midheaven.
CB: Yeah, here's the chart for right about when we started with late Taurus rising
and that triple conjunction of Mercury, Venus and Pluto in Capricorn. Today is actually
the day Jupiter's ingressing into Pisces as well. But yeah, that was a pretty good chart we picked. RT: Yeah, and just after Saturn has just
moved out of the conjunction to Pluto, it's been closer like 5/10 now and just past
the 15 degree. Or of the conjunction to Pluto. Even Mars and Pluto are in a tight semi-square
for those who pay attention as I do to the so-called minor aspects. As Rob Han
likes to say, "When is a minor aspect not a minor aspect? When it's really
tight." [laughs] And then it's quite major indeed. So, should we talk a
little bit about the discovery of Pluto's zeitgeist and what's going on at that period?
CB: Yeah. Briefly, I wanted to mention the mythology thing as a new interpretive principle
complicates things. The meaning of Pluto is also complicated by the debates about astrologers
immediately wanted to start figuring out what sign to assign it to because by then there'd started to
be some agreement of assigning Uranus to Aquarius as a new ruler of Aquarius instead of Saturn,
or as a co-ruler in some instances of Aquarius, and then Neptune to the zodiacal sign of
Pisces as a co-ruler in addition to Jupiter. So there started to be debates about assigning it
to a sign of the zodiac and different rationales for that, and eventually those who assigned
it to Scorpio ended up winning out or becoming the majority. And the tendency to conflate
or interchange the meaning of the planets' signs and houses that increased and became more
normalized in 20th century astrology also resulted in drawing some significations from Scorpio in
the eighth house and assigning those to Pluto. That's an additional complicating factor. But one
of the things I've done in this series is to try to give it some historical context about how the
current meaning of the planet has developed is I've looked at some historical sources, and one
of the ones that really seems to have influenced the Western and especially the English
tradition is Reinhold Ebertin and his 1940 book, A Combination of Stellar Influences. Was that a
direct or indirect source for you in some ways? RT: It was definitely one of them. You mean
in terms of how I came to understand Pluto in charts and transits and world transits and
so forth? Is that what you're referring to? CB: Yeah. I mean, it seems like Ebertin wrote
in 1940 and then his text influenced Rob Hand who wrote Planets in Transit in 1976. And some
of Hand’s treatment of Pluto ended up seeming kind of seminal in terms of influencing
the generation of astrologers that came in in the 60s and 70s. So I thought about maybe
reading excerpts from those two really quickly, and then going to your book.
RT: Sure. I would say, I think Dane Rudhyar was extremely influential
as well in that early period. Ebertin was quite remarkable, you know, the German
astrologer. I think he had a good intuition of certain dimensions of Pluto, for sure, and
particularly reflecting the period that he lived in. I mean, living through Nazi Germany, World War
Two, etc. He lived through World War One too, as well, but in his mature years, World War Two. And
then Charles Harvey in the astrology world, helped bring Ebertin into, you know, he translated part
of Combinations of Stellar Influence that we use. And Rob Hand certainly was an admirer of Ebertin.
But Dane Rudhyar, I think he had quite an intuitive grasp of many things, and one
of them was of Pluto and recognising this quality of death and rebirth, destruction
and regeneration, and seeing it at a very collective level. He wasn't in tune with it in
terms of reading birth charts, individual charts. I'd love to see more-- if there's any
Rudhyar scholars out there-- I would be very interested in knowing if there's literature or
personal things he left behind that give us an indication for where he started getting his first
intimations of the meaning of Pluto, but I suspect a lot had to do with his grasp of the periods
immediately surrounding Pluto's discovery in 1930, which I can talk about in a couple minutes, but
let's go along with what you had set out there. CB: Sure. So here's the excerpt from just
the Pluto delineation from Ebertin in 1940s. So he's writing in 1940's Germany, so that
sets a pretty distinct historical context. He says, "The principle of Pluto is force
majeure or providence, invisible forces or powers. Psychological correspondences, positive
ones are the will or the wish to exercise power, the manifestation of unconscious powers,
ruthless frankness or candidness, the urge to influence the masses, propagandist aspirations and
objectives, understanding the masses. The negative psychological correspondences are ruthless use
of force or coercion, inclination to incite, a fanatical zeal to state one's own doctrinal
principles, to agitate, convulsions and spasms. Biological correspondence he gives is the
collective unconscious and regeneration, sociological correspondences, persons
who can be said to exercise a magical influence over the masses such as propagandist
actors, public speakers, and politicians." So it's like we can recognize some of the
later common themes of Pluto in there. And there's also some in there that are
different or ones that I don't think you hear repeated as much in contemporary sources.
RT: Yeah, but he's got the will to power there, he's got the force majeure, which has to do
with-- like when a hurricane comes through, an earthquake, that's force majeure. It's large
impersonal forces. He's also got the sense of the urge to have power, including through influence,
through changing people's minds towards leading them in a particular direction through
the exercise of power, propaganda, etc. And he's got a sense of the mass quality too.
I think of the collective, the mass quality, that's why during the periods when Pluto's
activated by one of the outer planets like Uranus, things tend to happen on a more mass
level, you have mobs acting, we have large demonstrations and riots and so forth.
So he's got a number of those things quite... Ebertin generally has a tendency towards... He
lived through a very dark period of history, and he has a tendency to at times to single out the
more problematic sides of the archetypes. And this is where I think some of the great
depth psychological work that's been done over the last half century, particularly
by somebody like Stan Grof, where there is a willingness to enter into that plutonic
domain and become basically through going through kind of whether it's
shamanic rituals, sacred medicine ceremony, LSD therapy, holotropic
breathwork, anything, Kundalini yoga, these where there's a capacity to become a
vessel of these very powerful energies and come into a more conscious relationship to
them and also release them so they're not driving us from the depths without any agency on
our part, without any kind of moral consciousness informing our expression of it. I think
depth psychology has gone a long ways towards becoming friends with Pluto, so to speak.
And that's why it's so important to do our inner work as astrologers, because if we
don't, we tend to either just be afraid of like, "Pluto, oh no, too bad you got a Pluto transit or
you've got this Saturn transit." If you haven't come to terms with that archetype in yourself
and in your own life, there's a tendency to pass on a negative view to your client
and a fearful one, etc. And that can be wounding unnecessarily. So I think it's
important for us to do our own inner work in relationship to Pluto perhaps in particular.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I want to circle back around to the emergence of psychology
and depth psychology as well as a possible thing that happened and became more prominent,
especially after Pluto's discovery. But let's jump forward historically a few decades to 1976
to Robert Hand's seminal book, Planets in Transit, where he went through and provided delineations
for all major planetary transits, which was kind of a major and novel thing at the time. And since
this book came out, what 40, almost 50 years ago, it's become one of those books that I think
every astrologer reads at some point and is on every astrologer's short list. So as a
result of that, I think his formulation of Pluto was really important or the way he
formulated it. So he says, "The significance of transiting Pluto, the nature of Pluto is similar
to that of the Hindu god Shiva, the creator and destroyer. Pluto usually begins by breaking down a
structure, then it creates a new one in its place. This entire cycle of death, destruction, and
renovation is accompanied by tremendous powers for Pluto is not a mild or even very subtle planetary
influence. You can always see its effects very clearly ranging from machines breaking down and
needing repair to full scale destruction or death. Decay at one level or another followed by new life
from the old is the typical Plutonian process. Characteristically, Plutonian people are those
who seek to change, transform and take control of everything around them. Often a Pluto transit will
signify the arrival of a person who transforms your life either for good or for evil or it can
symbolize an event or circumstance that has the same effect. Pluto also rules those energies
inside of you that lead inexorably to change. It rules the death and regeneration of the
self as old aspects of your life pass away and are replaced by new ones that could
not otherwise have come into being. Pluto does not signify death in the literal
sense, instead it refers to a metaphorical death, something that ceases to be." And it actually
goes on. Sorry, this is kind of long, but worth reading the full passage. So he goes on
and he says, "The energies of the planet that Pluto is transiting become a source of change and
transformation in your life. You may get involved in serious power struggles with other people and
changes in the areas of your life associated with that planet. As Pluto transits your houses,
it signifies the areas of your life that are due for radical transformation in the area ruled
by the transiting house structures in your life that have built up to the point that it is no
longer possible to patch up whatever is wrong. It is time for a full scale reconstruction
proceeded if necessary by destruction of the old change-resistant patterns. It's extremely
important that you recognize the inevitability of Plutonian change, which is built into the very
structure of things and cannot be prevented. And you should not try to prevent it because
it is a necessary stage in your evolution. All that you will do is force the energies
to build up until they're explosive, then the inevitable changes will come about
disastrously. Not only should you go along with the Plutonian energy of destruction
by letting go of whatever must depart, you should also assist in the rebuilding process
that follows for this is the equally inevitable consequence of the Plutonian breakdown." And
then finally says, "For reasons that are not entirely understood, Pluto also has to do with
secretive and subversive elements of society, revolutionary groups, organized crime, and
the like. A Pluto transit may bring such elements into your life, although it's often quite
dangerous to allow this during a Pluto transit." So that's kind of his introduction to this
whole transit section, and then he goes through and delineates specific transits of Pluto to
different planets and different combinations. But there, I think we can see sort of the
full establishment pretty close of most of the modern take of Pluto for the most part, right?
RT: Yeah, quite a bit there. I mean he mentioned Shiva, for example, the destroyer and creator, he
could also have brought in Kali, again, there's a masculine and feminine. Kali is the great goddess
of death and rebirth and is another very potent mythic or goddess figure that expresses Pluto.
I should just say by way of historical accuracy, when Rob came out in 1976 with Planets in
Transit with those kind of detailed delineations, he did have before him Frances
Sakoian and Louis Acker had written full delineations of all the planets and their
both natal aspects and transits in a couple of books. Actually, they used to be in booklets,
individual, the planets transits of the Sun, transits of Neptune, transits of Pluto,
etc, each one had its own little booklet. And then later those were combined into a
single volume called Predictive Astrology. And then of course they had the Astrologer's
Handbook. And Rob knew Frances Sakoian, they were both in New England, but she was
older and was a teacher there in that area. And then he's got Ebertin behind him. He's
also got... There's a lot of Dane Rudhyar's characterization in what he's setting out
there. Also, Charles Carter, Marc Edmund Jones, the early Marc Edmund Jones from the 1930s and
'40s, they wrote a bit about it. But Rudhyar, I think, was the one who most was tuning
into its depths. And so he's recognizing how in the same way that the 18th
century and the discovery of Uranus brought this great period of revolution
and breakthroughs and liberation and the technological advances and so forth, industrial
revolution, the 19th century and the discovery of Neptune coincided with many romanticism,
transcendentalism, the incoming of the Asian mystical traditions into the west, also
the birth of chemistry particularly in the industrial, like pharmaceuticals and
anesthetics coming into being at that point. But overall, the great focus in the mid 19th century
on compassion, the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, the Geneva war conventions,
the red cross, the nursing profession, many forms of the child labor
laws, Charles Dickens bringing in such a more empathic, socially compassionate
view through his novels, those are all deep Neptunian phenomena that were coming in at
that point. And when Pluto comes in 1930, I mean, if you look at the... That's the midpoint of the
30-year period of the 30 years war, basically, that encompass World War I and World War II. So
if you look at 15 years before to 15 years after, you've basically got both world wars, you've got
the coming of the atomic bomb, you've got... I think I wrote up in Cosmos and Psyche a little...
CB: Yeah, here's the passage if you want to go ahead and do the honors of reading it.
RT: Oh yeah, sure. So this is right during that period that we're talking about. Pluto's
discovered, you've got the splitting of the atom, the unleashing of nuclear power, the
Titanic, technological empowerment of modern industrial civilization and military force,
the rise of fascism and other mass movements. Remember I talked about that kind of mob energy
or mass movements, thinking about the Nuremberg rallies that the Nazis held, just massive. That's
so plutonic. Yes, there's other things going on there too, Mars, Saturn, etc. But the plutonic
was so visible. The widespread cultural influence of evolutionary theory and psychoanalysis
with their focus on the biological instincts at depth quality, what's below the surface of
the veneer of civilization. What's below is the Plutonic, which is also the underworld,
which getting back to Rob Hand's point, he says it's not quite understood why this has
to do with the criminal underworld and things like that, but Pluto's the underworld. So it's the
criminal underworld, it's the sexual underworld, the urban underworld, the psychological
underworld, and the mythic underworld. But getting back to my description from Cosmos and
Psyche, increased sexual and erotic expression in social mores in the arts. So the plutonic
is all the instincts. It's aggression, it's survival instincts, it's reproductive instincts,
sexual energies, destructive energies, intensified activity and public awareness of the criminal
underworld. Think about the thirties with all the criminal, the gangster movies that became very
prominent at that point, tangible intensification of instinctually-driven mass violence
and catastrophic historical developments evident in the world wars, the Holocaust,
the threat of nuclear annihilation, and ecological devastation. And here if
you take the broad view as Rudhyar did, that it's a 20th century phenomenon surrounding
the discovery of Pluto, here also can be mentioned the intensified politicization and power
struggles characteristic of 20th-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. So in many
ways, even our view of the cosmos it's right then in just a couple years before Pluto's discovered
that astronomers particularly through the work of Harlow Shapley and Hubble, and they're recognizing
that the cosmos is expanding and is huge as many galaxies and is evolving. It's a whole different
view that comes in compared to the more static Newtonian universe that scientific revolution
had established, much more plutonic. So I think I may have also... So those are the
correlations with that I think Rudhyar's picking up on, and then they get played out.
But Rob Hand and Sakoian and Acker and Ebertin, they're starting to differentiate Pluto
with the Sun, Pluto with Moon, Pluto with the different planets, Pluto with different
signs and houses, and those are very important advances in our understanding of Pluto.
CB: Right. So that brings us eventually, and we'll circle back to some of the things
that occurred around the time of the discovery, but I just wanted to provide some context
before we go into discussing those in detail. Your next passage, which is when you summarized basically the significations of Pluto very
broadly about what the archetype of Pluto is, do you feel like reading this passage?
RT: So 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. It's associated 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. Let me just take a bracket here. We think of
Saturn as related to death and the endings of things, while Pluto is death and rebirth. It's got
the whole cycle in it. And in fact, it goes birth, sex, and death and rebirth, it's the whole big
[unintelligible] cycle of life and death. Getting back to the description here from Cosmos and
Psyche, it's associated with upheaval, breakdown, decay and fertilization, violent purgatorial
discharge of pent up energies, purifying fire. This is what Stan Grof calls pyrocatharsis, that
part of a very powerful experiential therapy where you go through pyrocatharsis, where there's a
great release kind of fiery burst from the depths that releases the repressed energies from one
in a way that is not destructive but actually puts you in touch with the life force and is
healing. 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 like an earthquake, 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 dissent and transformation and
with all deities of destruction and regeneration, death and rebirth. Dionysus,
Hades, and Persephone, Pan, Medusa, Lilith, Inanna, Isis and
Osiris, the volcano goddess, Pele, [unintelligible], the serpent power,
Kundalini, Shiva, Kali, Shakti. So these, I think, it was quite helpful when Rob Hand
made the connection to Shiva with Pluto, and in doing so, it helps us recognize that these
goes to many different cultural mythologies and also feminine, not just masculine that
we should include. And in certain ways, certain elements of the Pluto archetype
have a particularly feminine quality, that is the goddess. If you have birth, you have a
goddess present. You have a mother energy is what makes birth possible. And that also involves
the kind of elemental energies of the birth process as any mother who has given birth could
say. It's just, these are titanic energies that take over the body to bring forth the infant
from the womb into the world. Let me just tell you one thing about Rob. I invited Rob to come to
Esalen Institute back in the seventies right after Planets in Transit came out, cuz I was director of
programs there. And both Stan Grof and I when we saw Rob's book come out, up until that point, we'd
been using more Ebertin and Sakoian and Acker's work. And so Rob along with Liz Greene and
Stephen Arroyo about the same time were coming out with their works, but Rob's systematic work was
quite something. And he had Neptune... The whole time he wrote that book, he told me he was
in a kind of almost like hypnotic state of almost like channeling. He could hardly remember
in retrospect consciously writing it. Neptune was transiting his Sun, Venus, Mercury conjunction.
So Neptune was conjoined Sun, Venus, and Mercury, which in his case opposes both his Uranus and
Saturn. He's got a Uranus-Saturn conjunction born 1942, opposite Sun and Mercury and
Venus. Yeah, you see it there with the... CB: Yeah, here's his chart. So he has
Sun at 13 Sagittarius, Mercury at 15, and Venus at 17 Sagittarius, and in the mid
to late seventies, Neptune was transiting right through all of those points in Sagittarius.
RT: Yeah. So he was basically in this kind of... When he came to Esalen, had him come in a number
of times, it was great to have him. And he'd sit there in the living room in a kind of Buddha pose.
He'd put his legs into a lotus position cuz we all were on cushions in those days. There were
no chairs in the meeting rooms at Esalen. And it was in the big house living room, and
he would almost in a kind of trance state be talking about what each of the planets meant,
what each of the houses, each of the signs, etc. But I remember he was particularly... Because
Stan Grof and I were doing all this work with the death, rebirth process, LSD therapy, and
powerful forms of experiential therapy there at Esalen, he called us the Jupiter-Pluto
club because both Stan and I had that. But he quite memorably described the process kind
of ego, death and transformation in terms of moving in his discussion of when he would
describe each of the planets starting from the Sun and Moon moving out through Mercury's
role and Venus' role, Mars' role in the psychological development of the
individual, which is what he was particularly focused on. And then when he got
to Saturn's reality principle, it's also the ego structure that we kind
of define our identity according to, and he said, "But then when you get to the
transpersonal planets, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, that challenges the ego structure and the reality
structure of your life." And the way he put it was Uranus breaks that, it comes in and kind of
disrupts it, breaks it like breaking the ice, so to speak. And then Neptune dissolves it, and
then Pluto comes in for the kill. That's how he memorably put it describing people who've gone
through powerful death rebirth experiences. Stan Grof has a great description of it in
one of his books, where there's this just when the plutonic energy fully comes in
and first you're working through all the pyrocatharsis and the fiery energies, the
titanic destructive powers coming through and the sexual, the orgiastic, the aggressive,
then demonic energies can come through, scatological, etc. It's a real journey through
the underworld. But then there's this, he said the last stages involve a kind of annihilation.
And he said many people experience... He said, "First Kali comes in and requires
total surrender to the feminine principle in all her power and terrifying quality."
And then with that surrender, he then said, "And then Shiva comes in and just completely
does the final destruction, destroying the ego what's left." And he said, "Then at that
moment, there's this kind of opening up to the incredible grandeur of the cosmic pantheon
of gods and goddesses as far as you can see and kind of the golden light of spiritual healing
that just can kind of pour in at that moment and go on and on from there." When I had an experience
along that line, that was actually when astrology deeply came in through that kind of golden
white light, like coming in through the top of my head and many other insights, biographical,
psychological and so forth. But the recognition of how suddenly how the planetary archetypes,
how they worked, how they were expressing themselves in our lives, the power of transits,
the significance of the birth chart and one's own birth and as well as facing death, all those
things were kind of coming in at that time. So this deep inner journeying that so many
people are engaging now is so helpful in breaking out of the constricted worldview in
which you think that you live in a kind of random materialistic universe with astrology as the gold
standard of superstition as I like to call it. And instead, suddenly realizing that you live in
an unsold cosmos of incredible depth and moral and aesthetic majesty, and that we're participating
in a great mystery that's unfolding through us. And Pluto plays a big role in that.
So that's why Pluto can go from being solely seen as this terrifying will to power or
some something that's just purely destructive and to really grasp it's transformational and
redemptive quality. But it is a dangerous principle. It's almost like the principle of
danger. So this is where guidance, mentors, teachers, wise elders, therapists,
healers, shamans are so important to help navigate that guide, navigate in a guiding way
that deep descent into the underworld. So people like Jung, for example, has a lot of wisdom on
this. Stan Grof has a lot of wisdom on it. Tolkein had Gandalf playing that role for
Frodo and engaging a life that he, Frodo, wished that he hadn't been born to deal
with such a fraught time as he was born into. And my daughter, Becca, who's a Tolkein scholar
kind of particularly called to my attention that beautiful passage where when Frodo says,
"I wish I wasn't born at such a time." And Gandalf says, I'm paraphrasing, Gandalf says,
"None of us wish to be born at such a time, but it's what we do with when we find ourselves in
such a time, then it's how we respond to it, it's what we do to in this circumstance that
is where it's all at. That's where we become a soul, that's where we become an identity. This
is where you kind of have to be true to the hero in your own soul, even at the very moment that
you're going into the depths and feeling your identity being devastated. That's part of the
heroism of that transformational journey." So anyway, we have guides, we have elders that
are very important for dealing with these extremely powerful energies which probably
are as activated now on a global level as ever, because we both have the rise of
authoritarianism and violent populism, massive power struggles in the world in quite
destructive ways, very similar to the period when Pluto was discovered in the thirties.
CB: Yeah, let's actually dwell on that point because that's something I've been
thinking about a lot recently with the United States experiencing its first exact
Pluto return this year with three exact hits. But certainly, it's been pretty close to that for
several years now as Pluto's been moving through the later stages of Capricorn. But one
of the things that really always sticks out to me when we think of that principle the
astrologers have been using for a while now, that when a new planetary body is discovered, that
some of the events happening in the world at that time that are defining world events will give
you some insight into the nature of that planet. And discovering Pluto in 1930 and just what
was happening in the world in the 1930s, one of the things that always jumps out is the
rise of fascism, not just in Europe, which had been building up for a little while up to that
point, the sort of explosion of it in Europe, but also how that kind of got exported to
different parts of the world where fascism started being imitated in different countries.
And maybe if you could, I don't know, explain that point or what that means to people a little bit,
because I think this is often mentioned as a note in passing like an obvious thing, but it's really
only to historians or people that study the period that that becomes really a striking point.
RT: And the striking point-- CB: Just in the sense of how do you define
fascism and what was unique about the emergence of fascism in the 1930s in its relationship
to Pluto or what can that tell us about Pluto? RT: Right. Yeah, that activation
of mass will to power, people identifying with a collective suppressing
their individuality and even the so-called leader, fuhrer, the strong man, the dictator,
whether it was Musolini or Hitler or Stalin, the psycho historian Lloyd deMause and Stan
Grof often used the phrase that the strong man, dictator, tyrant, who's leading
fascist movement, they're not really- Underneath they're a small person in certain
ways with kind of a titanic compensatory persona. And he said really what makes them so powerful is
the fact that they're channels of the collective [ed], and the term that both Lloyd deMause and
Stan Grof use is that they're garbage collectors of the collective psyche, of the shadow that
is erupting. I mean, America, the United States has just went through a four-year period really
kind of more like five years where it's almost as if the soul of America like Persephone
got swallowed by Hades, by the underworld, and we suddenly found ourselves in a kind of a
world in which a kind of violent, massive, titanic and often criminal will to power was at work. And
the people representing it or forwarding it, they almost represented the shadow version of the
UnAmerican or the shadow version of what it would be to be male or shadow version of wealth or the
shadow version of whiteness and so forth. And the United States birth chart at that point was being
transited 2016 you got Pluto was opposite the Sun, and then now Pluto's returning now and has been,
I mean, the Pluto return like a Saturn return is a big, long transit. It doesn't just activate
the year that it's exact, this is the end of an enormous 248-year cycle. And even as it gets to
within 10, 15 degrees before exact, it's cooking much as a Saturn return does in a personal chart. Saturn return doesn't just
happen when you're 29 and a half, from 28 to 30, you can pretty much depend from
your 28th birthday to your 31st birthday, those three years are going to be pretty characteristic
of a Saturn return. And the Pluto return has been approached here. You can see how tight it is
right now, just one degree from exact. And prior to that, back five years ago, Pluto was
opposite Sun. And you often get the Pluto opposite Sun energy when you are a very powerful
solar individual with plutonic qualities will kind of massively influence the, in
this case, the United States, whose birth chart we're looking at that, where Pluto's
transiting it. And of course that's when Trump came down the escalator and started his ascent
to power. And now we're deep in the Pluto return, which suggests... I mean, this isn't just
a Trumpian phenomenon, it's an American phenomenon. Just think about the degree to which
the United States has during these last few years really been entering into the underworld of its
own shadow-like facing... This is how racist we've been and not owning it, not recognizing
it. This is how we've treated Native Americans since the beginning, the great expansion of the
west, the manifest destiny and so forth. Look at it from the other side of the people that were
here. How does that look? How emancipatory is the American experiment for African Americans, blacks
who fought in the world war and then come back to lynchings and disenfranchisement and not
being able to make a living and not being allowed to live in many neighborhoods and
so forth. It's just the shadow side, Pluto is having to be faced at many different levels.
Facing the shadow is an extremely important part of a spiritual growth and of a psychological
transformation, and we're having to do it right now. But part of a Pluto return of
any powerful Pluto transit is a kind of going through a destruction, going through a
loss, a transformation, a kind of purgation of the [unintelligible], of the refuse, the suppressed
shadowy parts of ourselves that we don't want to look at. It has to be brought to the surface and
then released, but it has to come to consciousness before it can be released. That's why this time as
painful as it is is so important for the potential of a rebirth the United States, which has a
noble side. Somebody like Martin Luther King deeply, deeply believed in an American ideal that
hadn't been fulfilled that he's drawing on Lincoln before him and on Frederick Douglass and so
forth and Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. These are potentials within the American brave
experiment that can only be realized through going through this plutonic crucible
of death and rebirth, this plutonic underworld of transformation.
And that's how rebirth can take place. You have to go through the
deep night sea journey, you have to risk everything, you have to experience
yourself burning to ashes before you can be revivified through the mysterious grace of the
life process. This is why the Greeks recognize, I think, quite accurately that Pluto, Hades,
were also united with Dionysus, that Dionysus, Pluto, and Hades were three
names for the same god. Heraclides said this, the great Greek
philosopher, but also Euripides, the playwright. And this points out how life and death,
dying and rebirth are curiously interlinked, because Dionysus is so much the god of life, even
as he is the one who goes through dismemberment. And Pluto, Hades, the god of the underworld and
the being of the underworld itself, they are also deeply tied to the giving of life, even
as they are what swallow us in death. And these are in turn conveyed so powerfully
in the Indian renderings of the plutonic principle in Kali, in Shiva, in the Kundalini
serpent energy, and in the Shakti energy. So I think we have resources, the question is
whether, and we have wisdom traditions and we have ritual means that are available to
us to go through these, wilderness, vision quests and so forth. So many people
are carrying keys to our transformation, but we need to have the collective, wake up to
these enough, and it's quite possible that the Pluto return that the US is going through and
the very powerful Pluto transits that we've been going through, generally world transits,
Uranus square Pluto, the Saturn conjunct Pluto, now we're just starting to move into the trine
of Uranus to Pluto for later into the twenties, quite promising. There's a real possibility,
I think, with this great intensification of plutonic energy, that we will be obliged as
a civilization, as a species, to undergo the dying in order to realize ourselves. Goethe
said, "Until you know this deep secret, die and become, you'll be a stranger on this dark
earth." And in some ways modern civilization has been a stranger on this dark earth. It has
been separated from, alienated from nature as if that was something to conquer and control,
exploit, understand in order to use its resources. And in doing so, it's like it's suppressed
the plutonic nature which was not invited to the birthday party as it were, and
it becomes the being who comes back with a vengeance which we're experiencing
with global climate change and many other expressions of it, the return of the repressed.
And the only way we will wake up to the full beauty and power of the earth community
that we belong to and its richness and realizing that our species and our civilization
are a part of something much bigger that we're participating in, the only way we'll wake up
out of our strangerhood to the dark earth is through dying and then becoming then actualizing
our deeper roots in the earth and in the cosmos and not a random mechanistic, materialistic,
meaningless cosmos, but an unsouled one of great intelligence and great spiritual
mystery. So that's kind of how I see the mystery of Pluto, whether it's in birth charts
or in personal transits or in world transits or what we're talking about as well, the Pluto
return for the United States which plays such a crucial role in world history. At this point,
the American experiment is still looked to as an important one by people around the world,
even as we have gone through such failures morally and so forth. I think this is
the essence of what I think Pluto is asking us to be aware of to be able to live a more
skillful, compassionate, participatory life in the life of the earth and the cosmos.
CB: Right. So perhaps one of the main core significations of Pluto that
seems to come with Pluto transits is the dredging up of the darker parts of one's
history and then the subsequent struggle to confront and recognize them and deal with
them in some way. And that can happen either collectively in the instance that you're talking
about or personally in some instances. And that's one of the interesting things about the emergence
of depth psychology in the 20th century, that might be very much relevant to Pluto as well.
RT: Yeah. I think whenever you have a depth dimension, deep is a
Pluto word. And Jupiter, Uranus, they're high, they move towards the heights, even Neptune with
its emphasis towards the celestial, the heavenly, has that impulse towards the above, up and out
each of those in their own way. But Pluto is into depth, and depth psychology was born in the
late 19th century. I think Nietzsche was probably in many ways the key figure. He's born with
Pluto opposite the Sun. If one wants to get a sense for Pluto in eloquent, philosophical
expression, read Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and one really can get the sense
of it. He even signed his last letters Dionysus, and some of his key phrases were... Yeah, see that
Sun opposite Pluto, could hardly be more vivid. CB: For the audio listeners, his Sun is
at 22, 7 Libra, and his Pluto is at 22, 57 Aries. It's a very close opposition.
RT: Yeah. I have a whole section on Nietzsche later in Cosmos and Psyche, where I kind of go
over a number of his major alignments in including that Sun-Pluto. And so much of his key ideas like
to the discerning person, all instincts are holy, that's one. Or he has another one, "What
is the secret of living a fruitful life lived dangerously? Build your homes on the side of
Vesuvius. Send your ships out unto uncharted seas. Live at war with yourselves and with your equals,
no, with your equals and with yourselves. That is the secret of living a fruit life." You can
just hear as Pluto, even the Pluto opposite Sun at war with yourself too, he was into transcending
the self in order to come into the greater power, redemptive power. He has another passage, "Behold,
I am that which must overcome itself again and again," he was saying, "Nature told me
this deep secret. Behold, I am that which must overcome itself again and again." Or he
has another beautiful passage where he says, "One must have chaos inside oneself
in order to give birth to a star." Well, the star is the Sun, that's our star,
the Sun. And the Sun is the symbol of our own central principle of self-hood. And it's the hero
archetype, the solar hero, who can get caught in an immature form of just being the John Wayne
hero or something like that. But there's a deep hero that goes through the descent, that becomes a
servant of the whole in a great sacrifice. That's true heroism. And so when he says one must
have chaos inside oneself, that's Pluto, inside oneself, the Sun, in order to give birth
to a star that's the solar, then you become... Another one of his phrases, become what thou
art, become what thou art. So there's many ways in which he was carrying that Pluto-Sun, that
plutonic energy. And then he serves as a kind of guide or precursor of the whole depth psychology
project that is carried forward by Freud, by Jung, by Melanie Klein, by Marie-Louise von
Franz, by so many important depth psychologists, James Hillman. I think Stan Grof's work becomes an
especially potent synthesis of the Freudian, the Jungian, the spiritual, the instinctual, and it
partly is because he was working with the power of LSD and the sacred vision plants, psilocybin,
mushrooms, peyote, mescaline and so forth. So depth psychology, Jung once said, "We have not
yet recognized the extent to which the discovery of the unconscious is a critical spiritual
discovery which we must integrate in order to preserve our civilization." I would say in order
to transform us and preserve our civilization, which I'm sure he meant too. The discovery of
the unconscious, yeah, there's Jung, look at that Moon-Pluto conjunction near the base of his chart.
CB: Yeah, that's really close right there next to the IC at 29 Taurus and Pluto is at 23 Taurus
and the Moon is at 15, and then both are squaring Saturn which is at 24 Aquarius.
RT: That's right. And the Moon is tight square Uranus as well. So he has
such a powerful anima, Jung does. The Moon is so potent all three outer planets are
in some relationship, one degree square to Uranus, the tight conjunction to Pluto
about eight degrees, and then the Moon is right in between Neptune and Pluto in
the sky when he's born. So his whole childhood is carrying those intensified Neptunian energies of
visions, dreams, etc, from the underworld and then his understanding of the anima and why our
civilization and particularly men need to kind of come into re-engagement with what he called the
feminine, but it's the lunar principle, which has both masculine and feminine qualities. But his
anima had all three of the transpersonal planets aspecting his Moon. And so he has a great
sentence in one of his letters where he said, "The apprentice piece of psychological development
is the encounter with the shadow. The masterpiece is the encounter with the anima." Now he's
talking about male psychology at that point, but because our civilization has been so
patriarchal in many ways, you can apply this to the collective psychology and the great gift
that depth psychology provides for the collective, for our civilization, if it's willing to do this
deep work. And that is if first we have to face the shadow, the things that we don't want to see,
the whole shadow side of Western civilization, of modern civilization, of all the things we've
been talking about, the ecological devastation, the effect on other species, the patriarchal,
Eurocentric, it's all the ways in which tremendous suffering has been caused by what is also a
dynamic and noble civilization and species. We contain both. And if we can first face the
shadow, as he called it, the apprentice piece, and integrate that, he said, then we
can enter into the bigger task, which is to come into relationship to
the anima, which is the whole of life, which is the soul of life, which is the anima
mundi, the soul of the world, anima mundi the soul of the world. This is what's been repressed.
This is James Hillman's great point in his powerful paper called Anima Mundi:
The Return of the Soul to the World. It's in a book called The Thought of
the Heart and the Soul of the World. And the suppression of idea that the whole
world isn't souled, not just human beings, that suppression has allowed a kind of destructive
alienation on the part of the modern mind, whereby it tried to basically objectify the
entire universe and all the earth and all the other species and even other human beings, very,
very, morally horrific side of our civilization. Because of that view of an objectified
universe in which we are the only subjects, and particularly a certain type of subject namely
the Western modern civilization, we have to lose, in a sense have that identity overcome, destroyed
in order to wake up to the fact that we live in a living universe that is imbued with profound,
spiritual mystery, intelligence, and soul. And we're going through a kind of plutonic
transformational crucible right now that's giving us both the opportunity but also the necessity
of doing that transformation cuz everything's at stake now in a way that wasn't as visible
in the 1970s when Rob Hand was writing about Pluto as Shiva in Planets in Transit. It wasn't
as visible in the sixties. It's very visible now and it's probably going to get more visible. And I
think, fortunately, there are more and more people in the world who are waking up to the nature
of our situation and are tuning into the great gifts that depth psychology, indigenous
wisdom traditions, sacred medicine journeys, social and ecological justice movements
and so forth, what all these provide for us in terms of a potential radical
transformation. There's more and more people on board for this great kind of heroic
quest of our time, but it could hardly be a more dramatic period than we are in.
CB: Right. I was just looking at the charts and I pulled up... You were talking about Jung's chart
and his Moon-Pluto conjunction in mid-Taurus, and it made me want to pull up Freud's
chart, who interestingly has a Sun... It's a little wide but a Sun-Pluto conjunction
in mid-Taurus and also Venus-Pluto conjunction. RT: Yeah, Venus-Pluto with his focus on the...
See, the Venus-Pluto right at his Descendant, and his whole focus is on the pleasure
principle, Venus-Pluto, and on the importance of sexual energy as he became a kind of... He had
made it into a mono explanation. The advantage of Jung's work and Grof's work is that they expanded
our understanding of the plutonic. So it is the sexual but it's more than the sexual. It's the
elemental, the instinctual, it's regenerative, there's a sacred dimension to it. But yeah,
look at that. He's got a Pluto-dominated chart in many ways. He's basically born with
the Sun in between Uranus and Pluto, and Jung's born with the Sun tight square to Neptune
and the Moon in between Neptune and Pluto. CB: It's interesting seeing their Sun, Moon
synastry. And it's funny, Jung of course would've remarked on that. And I can't help
but thinking of his synchronicity experiment, where he was comparing Sun, Moon, people in
relationships as a synastry. [crosstalk] That must have been in the back of his mind somewhere.
RT: I wouldn't be surprised because even though he didn't work with Pluto at all for example, but
he definitely was working with Sun and Moon and the planets out through Saturn and
in later years with Uranus as well. But in many ways, Freud looked at Jung as being
his sun. And the crown prince of psychoanalysis is how Freud described Jung with his Sun. So Freud’s
got Sun conjunct Jung's Moon and Freud has a Sun-Uranus conjunction. Let's see. Freud's got the
Sun-Uranus conjunction and it's conjoining Jung's Moon which is square Uranus. So they each have
a Jung’s Promethean principle of the solar, Freud focused on the heroic conquistador
while Jung having his Moon right there on the Sun Uranus of Freud's in the outer chart,
and Jung's Moon is tight square to Uranus so he's got that… His followers tended to be
women and he was focused on the importance of the liberation of the anima and the integration of
the anima and the feminine side of life in order to become whole and not suppressing it the way
patriarchy does. And Jung was also more focused on the Mother Goddess and Sophia and the Virgin Mary,
and the Great Mother archetypes, Magna Mater, etc, while Freud was focused much more on solar
deities, Oedipus, and dealing with Yahweh and God the Father and his Moses and monotheism, etc.
He was more interested on liberating the egoic hero from the clutches the power of the Plutonic
while Jung was more on integrating the lunar side of life as the way to get in contact with
our soul again for redemptive transformational purposes. And what's interesting is it's right
when transiting Saturn transited across Jung's and Freud's Sun-Moon conjunction, it's during that
transit that they went through their big break. CB: That they had a falling out. Coz with that
synastry, they have a Plutonic synastry there. One of the things with Pluto is its tendency to go
to extremes. So earlier you’re talking about Freud treating Jung like the golden child that would
take psychology forward or what have you, but one of the typical things of Plutonic synastry
is sometimes it can be extremely positive, but when it goes negative, it can go the opposite
extreme and be extremely negative and have a very painful falling out.
RT: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. CB: So it was 1910-1911 when
they had their falling out? RT: Yes. It went through a series of stages. Even
1909 it was starting to occur, but 10-11 was very quite decisive. I write about it in Prometheus
the Awakener, that little monograph I wrote back in the late 70s. Yeah, in fact, then there's a
whole… If you look in the years after that with the Jung’s transits, just unbelievable transits he
went through as he went through the whole period, the descent into his unconscious that brought
forth The Red Book and really his entire life's work is that basically Neptune as you can see and
Uranus were basically moving right across his- Yeah, you can see Neptune right on his Sun there
in 1916. But prior to that, if you go back to 1914 you can see Uranus. Go back to 1913 actually
when it started. Uranus is opposing his Sun. And then as the years go by, Uranus squares
Moon. And so that period from 1913 to 1917 or 18 is a period when he just went through
such a, as he put it, all the images that flooded into his visions and his dreams
at that time and even destabilized his sense of centered sanity and identity, it was so
powerful that that became the prima materia, the prime matter of his whole life's work.
CB: All right. We're going to jump through because there's a bunch of points we wanted to get through in the rest of this so we'll
do this a little bit more rapidly. Something an astrologer friend of mine said that
always stuck with me that I thought was a good interpretive principle for Pluto and I think is
consistent with one of the things that you're saying the astrologer Alan White who passed away
about a decade ago. He was involved in Product Hindsight. But something he always said was that
Pluto makes small things big and big things small. And I think this is connected with this thing
of signification of magnifying things or taking things too extreme or pushing them beyond their
normal limits. That is sometimes associated with Pluto. What do you think about that?
RT: Very true. Yeah, it magnifies things. It intensifies them. It gives
titanic energy to it. For example, sometimes back after the first three outer planets were
discovered, there was a typical comparison that Uranus was the upper octave of Mercury
and Neptune was the higher octave of Venus, like universal divine love compared
with human love or Mercury is the mind and Uranus is the cosmic mind, just Mercury's
everyday mathematics and Uranus is Einsteinian relativity theory or something like
that. And then with Pluto, it would be Pluto is the higher octave of Mars, or one might
say deeper active. But in this case, if Mars is like a fistfight, Pluto's like an earthquake.
It's just like it's a world war. It's much bigger or even just a war that's Plutonic. So, it
greatly intent intensifies whatever phenomenon that it is coming into relationship to.
Now, what's interesting is Alan White's two sides to that because you can see how that would make a
small thing big, the mouse into the elephant with, but are the technological empowerment
that can happen in the titanic empowerment super muscled. But the making the larger
smaller, I was thinking about that and I have a feeling what he's getting at is the ego death part of it, the death. Anything that's
inflated is ultimately going to get destroyed. And so, it serves as a compensatory principle. It
makes larger and it can make smaller depending on where you are in the journey.
CB: Yeah, one of the tangible examples of the first part that he always used
was the atom bomb and the development of the atom bomb where you're taking something extremely
small an atom and then breaking it open and then causing this huge explosion. There had been
explosions up to that point, which might have been like Mars principle of dynamite or TNT or
something like that, but this was magnified far beyond anything anybody had previously
imagined and taken to the utmost extreme. RT: And did he say anything about what he meant
the other way around about making the large small? CB: I'm trying to remember about one of his
things, I think was technology and just how technology kept miniaturizing things like
huge computer the size of a house in one decade suddenly becomes fitting in your mobile
phone the following decade or what have you. Yeah, I think that was part of it. In terms of
that, I thought it was interesting apparently in doing research for this episode, the element
Plutonium was actually named after the planet Pluto in 1941 following a convention where
Uranian and Neptunian were also previously named after planets when they were
discovered previously. But interestingly, in terms of the significations of Pluto, even
though Plutonium was discovered in 1941 and named, the wartime secrecy prevented them from
announcing it, or publishing about the discovery until 1948 several years later.
RT: Yeah, I don't know what they had in mind with the connection between those
three elements and three planets. CB: Yeah, but just, I don't know, in practical
terms, I think both of the bombs that ended up being dropped in World War II ended up
having Plutonium cores so there's some interesting things there. And just going back
to other significations and other core things, we mentioned the intensification of anything that
it touches and being taken to the utmost extreme, so sometimes that when combined with other
planets is where it really where that comes out. So for example, combined with Venus and taking
elements of having to do with like relationships to their utmost extreme, which on the one hand,
could be a positive manifestation of going to the utmost extreme for love or what have you
and then on the other hand, it could be a negative side of that of going too far or being
too obsessed or not letting go of somebody even when it becomes inappropriate or what have you.
RT: Yeah, yeah, that's a very good point. One of the ways in my courses at CIIS, California
Institute of Integral Studies where I've taught for this last better part of three decades, I've
taught a lot of courses that called Archetypes, Art and Culture, where I will use works of
art, music, film, poetry, etc. to demonstrate the nature of a particular archetype or
archetypal combination between let’s say two planets by having the students we all listen to a
particular song or we see a film. So for example, with the Venus-Pluto that we're just talking
about, I would typically among other things, I would play something like Janis Joplin who's
born with Venus opposite Pluto, Venus and Sun and Mercury in her case all opposite Pluto but that
Venus opposite Pluto and her signature song take another little piece of my heart even though it's
causing me agony when you put me in your arms I just say take another little piece of my heart.
CB: Yeah, so her Venus is at 14 Aquarius and Mercury at 9 Aquarius opposite Pluto at 6 Leo?
RT: Right, right. And of course, Mercury being there brings in the communication of it with
and even the screaming of it. Mercury-Pluto it can intensify the voice as well as the mind
and the communication. And think of both say John Lennon with his scream, he could scream
even when in the early Beatles like with the Twist and Shout or something like that and he would
have to do that song last because it would just make his voice so ragged at the end of
the night of singing. And when he did the song Mother in his first solo
album, he had a Moon-Mercury-Pluto T-square. You see the Moon opposite
Pluto quite tight and then the Mercury is at 8 Scorpio in a T-square with Pluto and the
Moon. So he's got all the emotional tendency of talking about whether it's betrayal or the
relationship to the mother or he’s losing his mother, you had me but I never had you. And
then he goes into the primal screaming and that's the Mercury coming in to express the intensity
of the emotion. And Janis Joplin did that with her singing. Before Janis Joplin's singing
in like Piece of My Heart or her version of Ball and Chain, she was bringing
such visceral intensity into her voice that it could sound just like an animal
screaming in a trap or something like that in Ball and Chain and that's the Mercury coming in.
But the Venus opposite Pluto is the part of her where she, sometimes it can be as you put it
like even after you’re being obsessed with the relationship like even though you aren't good for
me, I love you anyway and I don't want to leave you or I don't want you to leave me even though
you're betraying me, even though you're causing me agony. Even though you're out on the street
doing what you're not supposed to do, I still want to be… It's passionate love but it can
also be obsessive love with the Venus-Pluto. I often use the arts if I was going to
contrast her with the Venus-Neptune aspect then I would bring in someone like Joni Mitchell
who has that much more almost ethereal voice, angelic, the more lyrical quality of her singing
and melodies and so forth that are much more Venus-Neptune compared with Venus-Pluto. It's
helpful to make archetypal distinctions that way. And the beauty of using the arts, whether it's
film or comedy or sculpture or music is that you can feel the archetype because these archetypes
aren't just keywords that you read about in a book and then apply in a mentalistic way. Words are
helpful for getting us to the meaning. They're really crucial for getting us to the meaning. But
the full feeling is much more readily conveyed by artistic experience because music taps in very
deep into the human psyche even before complex language, music is part of the evolutionary
inheritance or legacy of Homo sapiens. CB: Right. Some of my other examples I was looking
at for Venus-Pluto are Frida Kahlo who had a famously, both in terms of artistic style as
well as in her personal life and relationships- RT: A perfect example. I often use Frida Kahlo
as well. You look at her art, it's just so vivid. The colors are just coming right out with great
intensity. But she's also showing scenes of crucifixion, bloodiness, real personal agony
at times. Just an amazing chart she has, doesn't she? I love that chart.
CB: It's a great chart example. And she has a very close conjunction of
Venus at 24 Gemini and Pluto at 23 Gemini. RT: Square to Saturn so it was… Yeah,
she really was experiencing it. And then she had all that Sun, Jupiter, Neptune,
Uranus energy too. Her relationship to the different men in her life like Diego Rivera
and great artists and also on Trotsky. I often assign the film Frida that was quite well done, it
conveys it very well, her Venus-Pluto in action. CB: Yeah. And then another example is Alan Turing
who had a Venus-Pluto conjunction and although playing a major role in the war effort and helping
to break German codes through cryptographic, he was a codebreaker basically. Despite that, he
ended up being persecuted after the war due to his sexual orientation and ended up either dying or
committing suicide as a result of literally having to receive chemical castration for that.
RT: Yeah. The Plutonic is often what is hidden or needs to be hidden or is taboo in
a particular society in that world’s conventions and Venus-Pluto often can indicate that
hidden or secret or taboo form of love that cannot be revealed lest one
be persecuted as he was. Also, although Saturn has a lot to do with shame,
but Pluto can involve things because Pluto does have a relationship to the shadow side of our
psyche that we don't admit to ourselves or that we don't want to admit to polite society or that
we don't want to or that isn't allowed before the puritanical conventions of one's particular
community, that you can be shamed about you. And there's often wounding around
a Pluto aspect because of that element CB: Yeah, that makes sense in the cultural
relativity of taboos or what is taboo at any given time in a certain point in time in society
or what have you but the need to have things that are hidden or suppressed or underground
about either one's own life or one’s psyche or in this case, relationships or what have you.
RT: That's right. CB: Let's see one other example. Maurizio Gucci
who was the grandson of the founder of the Gucci fashion empire had a Venus-Pluto conjunction
and he inherited the Gucci fashion empire in the 1980s, but he ended up leaving his wife
and his wife actually or his ex-wife ended up having him murdered afterwards as a result
of that. And there's actually a movie I think that just came out or is about to come
out where it's dramatized. I think Lady Gaga is playing his ex-wife who had him murdered.
RT: Yeah, I look forward to seeing it. You often see Venus-Pluto sometimes Venus-Jupiter-Pluto
in the charts of people involved in high fashion and where there's a lot of wealth,
a lot of power, a lot of intensity focused on high fashion, on cosmetics,
on expensive clothes, design shoes, etc. But those other qualities of the Venus-Pluto,
the betrayal, the murdering by the betrayed, those can be themes as well. Yeah. I've seen
Venus-Pluto in a number of other charts often mixed with Jupiter where there are people who
are involved in the very high echelon level of fashion where there's often a lot of manipulation, a lot of power struggle within families,
within the company and often, obsessive erotic involvements and things like that.
CB: Yeah, power struggles and power plays seem to be major Pluto themes.
RT: Yeah. And there can be, although Jupiter particularly has to do with wealth and success
and money, etc., but there's an interesting relationship that the Greeks recognized. There are
two different gods of Pluto, Pluton in Greek where the O was long O omega and then that was the
Pluto the lord of the underworld. But there was a Plutus where the O is short O. That's the omicron.
Notice that we now have the omicron variant, that's the short O in Greek while the long O is
omega. Omega, right? Well, omicron is omicron. Like, a micro O is omicron and omega is the mega O
and it's a long O. And the long O Pluto Pluton was the one who was the lord of the underworld
while Plutus was actually a separate deity originally involving the God of wealth, but wealth
and riches were often seen as being underground where the minerals were and so forth or
the fertility of the land. And eventually, there became a conflation of the two that
also was present right in the Greco-Roman mythic lineage. So our word plutocracy ruled by
the wealthy also has, it's like the powerful, wealthy plutocracy. You combine them there.
CB: Yeah, I was going to put this off till later, but two of my favorite charts for time some of
the richest men in the world are, for example, Bill Gates who has a Jupiter-Pluto conjunction in
the 2nd house in Leo. Here's Bill Gates’s chart and his extreme wealth, because there's a normal
wealth of let's say generational wealth or what have you, but then sometimes there's the wealth
taken to the utmost extreme of being literally the richest person in the world at one point in time.
RT: Yeah, that's right. You see Jupiter-Pluto a lot in very wealthy charts. So J.P Morgan J.
Pierpont Morgan is another Jupiter-Pluto figure. CB: I have one more. My other
famous one is Warren Buffett has a Jupiter-Pluto conjunction in the 8th house.
RT: Yeah, yeah, that's a perfect example as well. Now, all people who have
Jupiter-Pluto are not necessarily going to be super wealthy figures as
I can speak from direct experience. Stan Grof and I used to laugh at both of us
having the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction in his case and in my case, the opposition.
CB: Do you mind me if I show you the chart? RT: Oh no, not at all.
CB: Okay, here we go. RT: And while we both have the Jupiter-Pluto
pretty strong in our being, it comes through in totally different ways, which I won't spell
out particularly, but enormous wealth is not particularly our leading characteristic.
CB: Yeah, wealth of information or wealth of knowledge. I don't know what your stance
is on houses, but it's interesting that it's falling in the 2nd house 8th house axis
in both Gates and Buffett whereas for you it's falling in the 3rd house 9th house axis.
RT: 9th house, yeah. Jupiter up there in the 9th and Pluto in the 3rd for me. Yeah. When I write
books, they tend to be big books like the whole history of Western thought, Cosmos and Psyche and
there's a tendency… Jupiter-Pluto has a drive to… Again, Pluto intensifies whatever it touches.
Jupiter wants to get the big overview or it wants to take in all the cultures of the world
or it wants to have a global perspective, or you see it with people who are involved in
geopolitics. For example, Gorbachev for example, or Kissinger shadow version of it. So yeah,
it can take many different forms. Also, Pluto has a passionate drive towards whatever
it's touching. We're talking about Pluto-Venus in terms of that drive towards passionate love
or expression of artistic beauty or whatever. With a Pluto-Jupiter, it can be not just a
drive to wealth, but it also can be a drive towards excellence, for example, striving
for excellence or striving for success. But there's different ways of defining success.
Abraham Lincoln, he underwent such deep depression even suicidal depression at certain points in his
life and he had some really difficult things in his birth chart. He lost his mother when he
was quite young, great sense of loss there. So there's Lincoln with that Saturn-Neptune
conjunction square to the Mercury and Pluto. But look at that Jupiter-Pluto conjunction
with Mercury, what powerful language he had, the Gettysburg Address. If you're just to
single out say two or three of the greatest speeches that have ever been given
with great power to the moral power, that's his Mercury-Pluto-Jupiter, you
would think of the Gettysburg Address, you would think of the Second Inaugural Address,
that kind of quality. During one of his periods of most suicidal space, he said, “I'm going to try
to live a life in which I do something significant and that will make my life worthwhile and
so I won't leave it. I'll stay if I can just do something significant.” And that's what
drove him into the realm of politics. Sometimes Jupiter-Pluto likes to succeed in politics and
can be very political. Lincoln was very political. And you see it with people who have leadership
qualities too. Jupiter has a leader quality, Zeus there at the top. But Pluto drives that
because it empowers whatever it touches. And so, the fact that George Washington,
Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, perhaps the three presidents that just had the
most influence in the first 150 years of our nation's history, they all had Jupiter-Pluto
conjunctions. You see it where there is real leadership potential as well. A lot
of the actors, the lead actors that had Jupiter-Pluto, Richard Burton or Paul Newman or
those- Yeah, see that Jupiter-Pluto. With FDR, in his case, he's got the Sun squaring Saturn and
Neptune and Jupiter so quite tightly Sun and Venus very tight square Saturn that was the
distant relationship with Eleanor and at the same time having to hide his love and/or
separate himself from who he was in love with. But with that Sun square Saturn-Neptune, he had to
go through the great debilitating illness of polio and dealing with fear and anxiety and so that's
why he could say the only thing we have to fear is fear itself in his inaugural address that became
such a model for his long administration. That's the fact that he stared it in the face, that
Saturn-Neptune potential for a nonspecific fear or anxiety that was overcoming the entire Zeitgeist
of the 1930s during the Great Depression. But with that Jupiter in there, the Sun square the
Jupiter-Neptune great faith in the possibility of a better world, more empathic, compassionate,
taking care of the poor and the working class, but then there's that Jupiter-Pluto which it's 11°
away but those of you who know my work know that it's quite clear to me that we need to
expand our orbs if we are going to understand how the planetary archetypes interact with each
other because they're not like on-again off-again light switches. They’re aspects that just
turn on when they're 1° away or even 3°or 4° away. They're archetypal waveforms as it's coming
into a big conjunction or a big opposition. If you look at the full Moon when the Sun
is opposite the Moon, the Moon looks full for right up to about 15° on each
side basically for two nights that you're in a full Moon part of the cycle and the
same thing with the new Moon when it's invisible. Empirically, I didn't start off with the
larger wave or with these larger orbs, but it was empirically just looking, you look at that
Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the ‘60s for example, Rob Hand and I have talked about it, and it's
just so clear empirically that you have to expand it all the way from about 1960 to about 1972.
That particular Uranus-Pluto energy that's so familiar to us was in evidence in the civil
rights movement, in the women's movement, in the ecology movement, in the youth
movement, in the revolutions around the world, African Independence Movements and so
forth. And even the late ‘60s after its exact and going into the early ‘70s, those
of us who lived through the ‘60s and ‘70s recognize that when we talk about the ‘60s, we're
also talking a bit about the early ‘70s. That energy had flushed into the system so potently
that archetypal energy that it just doesn't stop when the aspect is moved past
5°. It's really cooking at that point. So anyway, that's also true with natal charts.
CB: It's one of the reasons I like Archetypal Explorer for the way that they visualize some
of these things as more of a graph as a wave form like this illustration of the Saturn-Pluto
conjunction that went exact and peaked in early 2020, but still stayed in effect and came back
a little bit in orb when they retrograded back into a range but it's like a range of influence
that lasts for, as you said, in the conjunction up to 15° or 10° in the other hard aspects.
RT: Yeah, exactly. That’s Kyle Leimetter’s work. He was a student of mine in the Philosophy
Cosmology and Consciousness Program at CIIS and I would sometimes draw those waveforms in
that way so that people even for their personal transits so that they could see the way it is
intensifying and then there's a bell curve there. The first person who started implying that
in an app was called the Archetypal Calendar. Anyway, he was the first one. He
was focused on personal transits. The Cosmic View was his original thing and then
he started using it. I gave him the basic program and he worked out the program that started
using it and then Kyle for Archetypal Explorer has employed it in a more comprehensive way.
CB: Yeah. Well, it's been nice over the past year in order to visualize some of these outer
planet transits and understanding the wider range in which they’re in effect and also going back
and looking at some historical examples like the pandemic in the earlier part of the 20th
century around 1918 and 1919 and how the Jupiter Pluto conjunction which went exact
in 1918, but retrograded back and got very close in 1919 that second that ended up coinciding
with what they call the deadly second wave of the pandemic when the most deaths took place
after there was a mutation. And then similarly, there were some interesting things in 2020 when
we comparing some of the different COVID graphs to some of the Jupiter-Pluto alignments that
took place during the course of 2020 and when the number of COVID cases would skyrocket
or when hospitalizations would go up, and other things like that. It's been interesting
coming up with some of these new tools in order to visualize some of these things.
RT: Exactly. In that case, of course, the Jupiter-Pluto was in a triple conjunction
with Saturn so it was quite complexified by that, so you're getting Jupiter, Saturn and
Pluto all in that triple conjunction. Early in the pandemic, I did a talk
called What's Happening in the Stars Right Now because that was the question a
lot of people were asking. It was for CIIS public programs. It was just called What's
Happening in the Stars Right Now. And I use those graphs to show how and unpack more
the complex interaction between the Jupiter, the Saturn, and the Pluto. In fact, there was a period
there where Mars was in there too right when the pandemic was just really launching
there in February and March of 2020. CB: Yeah, that pile-up of a lot of planets in
Capricorn and then a little bit in Aquarius. That was really the lineup. And that was the
one that André Barbault… Because you were given a lot of credit last year for the work you
did in Cosmos and Psyche which very clearly in archetypal terms broadly pointed to that as
being an important alignment for a number of those different reasons. But then Barbault had actually
done a study on pandemics and had identified that time range as a potential for a major
pandemic specifically because he narrowly focused on that question of when have pandemics
occurred historically in the past and what alignments might indicate that in the future.
RT: Yes. He particularly was looking at when you get a clustering of several planets within
a very narrow range of degrees being a factor. That wasn't the only thing he paid attention
to. He was really one of the really key figures in the development of mundane astrology. And he
was an influence on Charles Harvey in England who became the leading mundane astrologer in the
UK, and published with Nick Campion, and maybe possibly one other person coauthored a book on
mundane astrology. It's been enough years that I’m not remembering the third author,
which I should. But Charles was the leading figure in that. André Barbault,
he goes back to the ‘40s and ‘50s, and there's very interesting letters exchanged between
Carl Gustav Jung and Barbault about how astrology how Jung was finding astrology’s value.
CB: Right. Yeah. We talked a little bit about this last year. I did an episode that
people can go back to if they want to study more about that in both your statements as
well as Barbault’s statements in episode 254, titled Misconceptions About Mundane Astrology in
the Media where it's like there was this article by The New York Times in May of will Coronavirus
kill astrology and whether the pandemic was completely missed by the astrologers. And our
whole discussion was actually about how Barbault and you had done a pretty good job through
looking at historical cycles at identifying this upcoming one as a difficult one. So going back to-
RT: The Times is so valuable for a lot of things, but I don't go to it for astrological
accuracy, sympathetic knowledge of the astrological discipline. It's not its cup of tea.
CB: Well, I meant to ask you about that as a digression because it's been actually coming
up recently, and I'm a little bit nervous about seeing some of the younger generation of
astrologers has just come into the field in the past few years or the past decade. It's
been a period of astrology flourishing again in a way that I don't think we've
seen since the 1960s or ‘70s. But there's been weirdly also a drop off it seems
in the skeptical movement over the past decade. And I remember in even the 2000s, the skeptic
movements were much stronger and had better leadership and was much more antagonistic against
things like astrology, but it seems like that's fallen by the wayside a little bit over the past
decade. But I was curious about you always make that statement about how astrology is regarded
as the gold standard of pseudoscience and- RT: Or superstition generally.
Yes, it's what you want to compare. If you want to say something is really not worth
our intellectual serious engagement, you would compare it to astrology if you're well educated.
CB: So my question is what I wrote down is, how do you deal with practicing a subject that is viewed
with such disdain by most of academia as well as scientists? How does one deal with the place that
astrology holds relative to science presently? How do you deal with skeptics in particular?
And is it possible to change somebody's mind who is skeptical? And what does it actually really
take to do that in tangible terms? Can it be done with an intellectual argument or demonstration?
Or does it only happen by having some personal experience of astrology that is impressive?
RT: Well, you packed a lot into that. CB: Yeah, sorry. This is like
a full episode in itself. RT: Yeah, it would be. Well, just
a couple headlines. First of all, I've argued and I believe this is the case
that it's actually somewhat valuable for those of us who are in touch with
the extraordinary value of astrology what a gift it is. It gives insight whether
you're looking at the arts, whether you're looking at history, whether you're looking at
this at psychology, whether you're looking at virtually any field, astrology provides
insights that nothing else– even philosophy, the nature of the importance of the nature of
archetypes for making sense of all sorts of philosophical mysteries like nominalism
versus realism and so forth. So, astrology is such a gift, it's such a privilege, such a
spiritual honor that those of us who have been initiated into it have been bestowed. It would
be very easy to get inflated with that knowledge. The person who knows astrology well has an insight vision, a vision into the interior dynamics
of the Anima Mundi, that the non-astrologer, the average person, even the brilliant scientist
or man or woman of letters does not have available to them. And that can lend itself to a hubris,
an inflated sense of superiority of spiritual elite, and having the social reality
that astrology has been so widely despised, not just relegated to second
class status, but really scorned or actively opposed and in quite intensely shaming ways. In
some ways that acts as a humbling compensation for the potential inflation that can come with this
special privilege that astrologers have. I think that's helpful to keep in mind. It keeps us
humble, which is something we generally can use. And then the second thing, I think
you're right that there has been… I don't think there's been a dwindling among the
skeptics of a certain generation. The Richard Dawkins of the world are still around, but they're
getting older. But there's new ones that are quite ready to take their place. But I think there
has been, particularly with the millennials, the generation born under the big long
Uranus-Neptune conjunction between the late ’80 and the ‘90s. They don't have the same what
I would call epistemological armoring. There isn't such a rigid boundary between what's
truth and what's imagination. There's more of a sense that this is… There's a
more mysterious relationship between the imagination and reality and that we are
always seeing through our imagination, but there's a requirement for a rigorous imagination.
You have to have rigor and imagination, not just an undisciplined one. But even the most skeptical
scientist or philosophical reductive skeptic is seeing things through his or her imagination
as just a reductive imagination. It's a filter. It's only letting certain things through.
And so, I think this is where there is tremendous value in going through experiences
that will dissolve that armored epistemological barrier and open oneself up to the possibility
that for example, consciousness pervades the universe and is not just a function of
Homo sapiens or of the higher mammals as they're called, but rather is say that we are
embedded in a conscious intelligent universe and that our conscious intelligence is the cosmos
conscious intelligence universe in human form, that we are cosmic expressions of the whole. It's
just that it looks like astrology suggests that the universe has left quite valuable clues to
that part of itself that is Homo sapiens to be able to read symbolically the movements of the
planets so as to live a better more aware life. I think you're getting at the importance of
having some balance between skeptical rigor and just a kind of undisciplined credulity where
you just think anything, anything goes. That's why I am always encouraging serious
astrological students and researchers to… There's ethics of being a good astrologer like
don't make generalizations on the basis of one or two seemingly big correlations that you've noticed
and then just say, that's what Pluto in the 5th house means or that's what a Chiron midpoint
signifies because I’ve seen this in my chart. One should be able to give a dozen
compelling examples that other people can assess from the public record, famous
individuals, important historical events, significant cultural milestones and then you
look at where the planets were. And you don't just ascribe something to your new favorite
astrological factor without first taking into account the factors that have been most supported
by empirical evidence that many people have come to a consensus about.
For example, there's pretty much a universal consensus
today among practicing astrologers who use the outer three planets Uranus, Neptune,
and Pluto, as well as the classical planets all through Saturn, there's pretty
much universal consensus about their meanings. And you can see these meanings played out
whether you are looking at natal charts or you're looking at personal transits or personal
progressions or whether you're looking at synastry and relationships between individual chart or
if you're looking at world transits, the whole mundane astrology and the collective cycles. If
we're going to be identifying the meaning of a new planetary body or celestial body or if we're
going to be making a claim about what this factor means in that chart, we need to be able to back
it up with compelling and substantial evidence. This is where the mainstream modern educational
system in higher education particularly as you go through college and graduate school and
so forth, it's built-up certain standards of critical thinking and of bringing in evidence
and cogent argument that will support a position. And so, when one is writing a Ph.D.
dissertation, you have to meet those standards in order to pass and enter into the
community of fellow PhDs. Those are valuable virtues and disciplines to cultivate as
a scholar and astrologers have often been rather a little looser in doing so. I mean, a lot
of understandable reasons in earlier centuries and earlier generations. But if we're going to make
that bridge to the mainstream educated world of deep thinking morally and intellectually
sophisticated members of our society, we have to use critical thinking and solid empirical evidence
and cogent argumentation in order to communicate the principles and the convictions that we are
implementing in our practice. So that's basically the way in which we can incorporate the skeptical
or the rigorous or the let's look at what's the simplest, most compelling explanation for
this phenomenon without getting into some arcane possible explanation. Well, we have
to incorporate that thinking in balance with a disciplined imagination and a capacity for
symbolic insight and knowledge of the esoteric traditions that are in the astrological world,
which you've done so much to help vivify for many people. So I think it's that balance that we need.
CB: As somebody whose life's work seems to have been very much directed towards making
the single best case for astrology to non-astrologers in Cosmos and Psyche, to what
extent though is it each astrologer’s job to attempt to do that and make the case for astrology
or prove it to those who might be skeptical versus sometimes there's been a tendency, it
seems like over the past few decades, to instead pull back and become more insular and say, if
people don't believe astrology is legitimate, that's fine, that's up to them but to the extent
that even no matter how rigorous Cosmos and Psyche was that it doesn't meet up to, let's say, the
scientific definition of demonstrating something statistically and therefore fall short of what
many scientists might consider to be scientific. Will we ever be able to truly prove
astrology in a way that meets that? And do we need to continue trying to? Should
we still be striving for that? Or is it something that should just stay more insular?
RT: Yeah, very good question. First of all, I don't think everybody has the dharma
or the life calling to take on that particular role. Some people-
CB: Was that the goal? Was that ultimately the goal though? I think it was, but-
RT: Everybody would be trying to prove astrology. CB: No, I was curious for you
personally, was that the goal with Cosmos and Psyche all along, the primary one?
RT: Well, it was basically to give some hint of the power of the astrological
perspective and the empirical data. Cosmos and Psyche has barely scratched the surface
of my research and of the data I've gotten. But I just thought, “Okay, I'm just going to
do these four cycles and do it in a way that will help and give a philosophical and
historical context so that people could enter into the astrological perspective.” And
a lot of people who did not know astrology and had only read my earlier book, The Passion of
the Western Mind, which was not an astrological book but which is a history of Western thought.
And it was being used in a lot of universities, it still is as a history of Western philosophy
or Western thought, that kind of thing. But then they read Cosmos and Psyche, and
a good number of people who didn't know astrology or had any reason to think astrology was
worth paying any attention to got opened up to it by reading that in that sequence. And in some
sense, I wrote Passion of the Western Mind as an entree to an astrological world view. I used The
Passion of the Western Mind as a way of giving people an understanding of the evolution of our
cosmology and of archetypes from Plato to Jung and so forth that would help people make, the
Copernican Revolution and so forth, that would help people be prepared for when Cosmos and Psyche
came out, which was originally going to be one big book and it turned into two rather large books.
So yeah, that was to a certain extent the intention, but I think it's very valuable for
whether it's a field or a person to go into an insular mode for a while to protect something
that's growing that's not ready to be invaded by skeptics. And I think that's what astrology did
for some years. There was a time there in the 70s when some of the because of the Gauquelin research
coming out the 50s and 60s, and by the 70s certain astrologers including John Addy in
particular in England, and Charles Harvey were getting the sense that the statistical support for
astrology was going to make a big difference. And some scientists who had no appreciation
of astrology at all, like Hans Eysenck were very compelled by the statistics and felt
that we had to pay attention to it even if it went against our basic beliefs, which it did
for [03:00:53]. But scientists are human beings and sceptics are human beings, and human beings
have a genius for walling out certain data that they would find challenging to their
most cherished belief system. Often, that belief system is deeply intertwined
with their own sense of identity and what their careers what their whole way of defining
themselves. So to let in this data as being determinative would be so threatening to so
many things that it's easier to just say, "Oh, this is faulty evidence or it's faulty
data." The problem with the statistical research is that much of the research wasn't
sophisticated enough to either recognize the patterns, although they did recognize the
patterns with the huge Gauquelin research data basis. They recognized some patterns. But it
wasn't something that every astrologer would just say, "Okay, what's Gauquelin saying about
this? Now I can use this in my next reading." The readings were coming from the esoteric tradition
and from the astrologers’ own practice, it wasn't coming from the statistical correlations which
were too approximate, too rough-edged. It was too brute a tool, an instrument to get us to something
as nuanced as the astrological correlations. CB: -was reductive?
RT: Yeah, quite reductive. Now, let me just say that there seems to have
been in the last few years, quite an increase in interest in a more sophisticated approach
to astrological research. I should mention, when Cosmos and Psyche came out, the Institute
of Noetic Sciences, its lead scientist, Dean Radin called me up and asked if I would
do an interview with him. And he and he said, "Well, I'm convinced," and when I talked to him
about it, I didn't think that statistics were a nuanced, sophisticated enough, subtle
enough tool to be able to, you know- You have to be able to take in multiple variables
at once. You also have to have a sense of archetypal multivalence, that is any given
planetary principle can manifest in physical ways, psychological ways, relational ways, but it also
can manifest in destructive or creative ways, in trivial forms but also in
very profound or noble forms. You can't tell just by looking at the
birth chart whether somebody is going to become Hitler or Chaplin, you know, to give one
famous example. So Dean Radin said, you know, there are forms of statistical analysis using what
technically are called fuzzy categories that could encompass something like archetypal multivalence.
He was already thinking in 2006 that we could increase the sophistication of the statistical
analysis. But my friend [Will Kippen] who is a physicist and he deeply studied with Stan
Grof and with me as well, and has written about astrology at times and given presentations to
science conferences about it, he is in touch with a number of statistical researchers that are doing
quite remarkable work right now. He's writing a paper that will summarise a lot of this that will
come out soon, I hope I can remember to send you a copy when he's got one ready. Because even though
I myself find quantitative forms of analysis to be too insufficient for registering the extraordinary
correlations that the symbolically attuned kind of poetic in a disciplined way, but that kind
of poetic archetypal imagination that is also able to be astronomically mathematically rigorous,
etc. Where you're not just fitting in anything into the categories, but you have a good sense for
what is a true discernment. You really have to use discernment and you have to use self-critical
rigor, I talked about this towards the end of Cosmos and Psyche. So, I think statistics
may make may come in but will probably never equal the human mind and the full
human faculties that in the same way, statistics are never going to register why
Beethoven's Emperor Concerto is the amazing work it is, it takes the whole human
being with all his or her faculties including the emotions and the imagination and the
somatic experience in order to take in the meaning of Beethoven's music. Beethoven's music is
visible archetypically in the birth chart, you can see his birth chart and go,
"Wow, that's so much fits his music." But statistically, you're not any more than you're
going to be able to register quantitatively the physical manifestation of the music and what
the mathematical form of it is not going to duplicate what the human being can experience with
their whole soul and body when they're listening to the music. But that's how the archetypes speak,
it's to the whole soul and body and spirit and mind, and not just to this quantitative form
of analysis which is very valuable in certain respects but very limited and others.
CB: Yeah, this was something I've been thinking about lately about how much anyone
can ever be convinced of astrology being something legitimate or worth looking into
through an intellectual argument versus how much somebody who's truly skeptical about it
would have to have an experience of it in seeing their own transits line up
and experiencing an event, and just how notable that correlation can be in living
through it in order to truly have any sort of, quote-unquote "belief" in astrology or
belief that it's somehow legitimate. But that's a whole whole thing. So, bring it.
RT: I might just quickly say on that point that I think you do have to go
through some transformation of your epistemology-- that is how you know things and what you
regard as being true, a valid way of knowing-- you have to go through a transformation at the
epistemological level, and that means not just- Most people open up to astrology or/and to
other more expanded forms of knowing through going through some kind of a transformation
that's existential. Just as people go to an astrologer or a therapist when they're in
crisis then they feel, "Okay, the current tools that I have to live my life are not
adequate. I'm going to try to expand the range of my tools in order to get some insight to live
a better life or look more skillfully and holy." That often requires some kind of a crisis,
which our world is going through right now and is therefore probably more likely to open up
to a wider range of perspectives, unfortunately, also a wider range of fake news and
disinformation too and weird beliefs. But the opening of what we and others have
called the epistemologies of the heart that involve the empathic imagination, the
the somatic, the symbolic, and not just a narrow version of rationalist empiricism
that views quantitative measurement as the only measurement of what is real, I think most
sophisticated intellectuals today have gotten past that. Yes, there's a good number of people
who are still stuck in the reductionist camp. But most sophisticated intellectuals, I
mean, read something like Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern
Identity. It's just written 30 years ago and he's got such an embrace of the modern intellectual
and philosophical scene, and so recognizes the need to transcend such a narrow reductionist
perspective as being determinative of our worldview. It's a severely limited
worldview and to live within it is to live in a kind of prison, a kind of iron cage. Also,
there's destructive consequences that come from living in such an objectifying worldview
and we're seeing the results in our social and ecological crisis of our time.
CB: Yeah, part of the epistemological issue you just mentioned, but maybe part of it is the
issue of the scientific world view that the human senses are fundamentally flawed and untrustworthy
in terms of their ability to accurately perceive the world around them. Whereas for astrologers
and in looking at astrology, they're actually crucial or paramount in terms of accurately
being able to understand the correlations and the symbolic importance of what's happening
in human life on a individual basis. RT: Yeah, that's exactly right. And
the principle that the senses can't be trusted, that our direct subjective human
experience can't be trusted, that we need to transcend that with a mathematization of our
experience that can be registered on a machine, you know, it comes out of John
Locke, Galileo, Descartes, Bacon were all kind of moving in that
direction. The distinction between what's called primary qualities and secondary
qualities was a big thing at that point. Only primary qualities like mass, weight, things that could be measured, those were
real. But everything else that people experience are just subjective realities
that can't be seen as scientific. I think what's happened is that there
was for quite a while a kind of colonization by the reductive natural sciences,
a colonization of the human sciences and of the humanities in higher education. And there's a
turn that's going on that's recognizing that the natural sciences, and particularly
reductive natural sciences, are not a sufficient methodological universe to encompass what the
humanities, philosophy, religion, psychology, literature... They can't be subjected to what was
very useful in developing a mechanistic science. There is a movement right now within higher
education to recognize the need to elevate the importance of the humanities, of a
liberal education that includes the sciences with the humanities, that includes philosophy,
literature, the arts and depth psychology not just looking at psychology in terms of behaviorism,
genetics and pharmacology. So, yeah. Well, I'm imagining we've probably carried our audience
long past their- Hopefully, they're listening to this in segments rather than all in one sitting.
CB: Yeah, I think it will be broken up into chapters. Just to bring things back full circle.
Your book was published in 2006. Interestingly, after the discovery of the dwarf planet Eris
in 2005, Pluto was actually demoted by the International Astronomical Union in 2006
from planet status down to a new category that they created of dwarf planet. This
created some arguments or questions among astrologers of whether that had any significance
symbolically or had any relevance for astrologers, or if astrologers should just keep on doing what
they had always done up to that point with Pluto. Do you have any feelings or thoughts about that?
RT: Well, the first thing to point out is that the decision to demote Pluto was made by
a group of astronomers. There's a lot of planetary scientists who were in general quite
opposed to this decision and were very vocal about it and still quite feel that it was not the right
decision. Even in the astronomical, the IEU that made the decision, the particular committee
that came to the decision, the head of that committee was Owen Gingerich. He was my professor
of astronomy back at Harvard in the late 1960s. He's the world's expert on Copernicus
and Kepler, a great, great man. He was the head of that committee and he
disagreed with the decision. He issued a dissent on the decision. And a lot of
people feel that the addition of this what had never been used before as a criterion
for deciding if something were a dwarf planet is whether the planet can clear the neighbourhood
of other bodies that it has sufficient gravitational power and mass to do that, and as
many planetary scientists said, "Well, if you put the Earth out in the Kuiper belt where Pluto
is, it wouldn't clear the neighborhood either. So one has to recognize that this decision is
probably temporary-- I just read an article within the last couple of weeks in a science journal
about how this is seen as being a provisional temporary and very possibly erroneous
categorization that will be rethought. But the main thing to recognize, and this
is so characteristic of our postmodern era, is to recognize that these are
human categories; planet, dwarf planet. These are names that we come up with. I
mean, planets used to include the Sun and Moon because with the Greeks, the word planet
meant that it wandered. Planetes meant it was a wanderer. Which means that if you looked
out, all the stars each night stayed in the same relationship to each other as they
moved across the sky. But the planets like Mars and Mercury and Venus, but also the
Sun and the Moon, they gradually moved across the ecliptic. They had different zodiacal signs
behind them at different times of the year and over the years, and so they were seen as
wanderers, and therefore planets. Now, planets mean something different than it did before. So
these are categories, and it certainly didn't make a difference in terms of anything
that I or my fellow researchers in the astrological community that I'm familiar with in
the archetypal research collective that's kind of emerged out of CIS. Pluto is an extremely powerful
planetary influence and in fact it is the very archetype of power and it didn't get diminished
by its categorization as a dwarf planet. It probably carries very little
as to what human beings call it as a dwarf planet It is smaller than the other
planets. But interestingly Eris, which was the new body that helped trigger the recategorization,
they originally thought Eris was larger than Pluto as well as more massive, but it turns out
that Pluto is slightly larger than Eris. Eris has slightly more mass than Pluto, Pluto
has slightly more volume and size than Eris. Because Eris and these other bodies that are
further out have such huge cycles and acentric cycles, you can't get the same data. So far we
haven't been able to get the same quality of data relative to the inner planets, relative
to world transits, that we have for all the planets out through Pluto. But I think the
fact that we are discovering all these other celestial bodies and these other circumstellar
discs like the Kuiper belt and the scattered discs and the Oort cloud, we're basically recognizing
that our solar system is a permeable body or system. We're recognising that it's got
a kind of permeable boundary with the rest of the galaxy, we're opening up to the larger galaxy just
as we've recognized that our galaxy is one of many many galaxies that it's in larger clusters and
superclusters. Part of our postmodern moment is recognising how we subjectively categorize things
and there's nothing absolute about a term like planet or dwarf planet, etc, or male and female,
that the masculine/feminine binary is not the only way of understanding the richness of human
gender and sexuality, etc. We're recognising that certain assumptions that seemed to be absolute
certitudes and built into the nature of the cosmic reality are, in fact, human constructs and
are permeable and are culturally inflected, etc. We're also recognizing that just as we
are not skin encapsulated Cartesian egos, but we are in a permeable porous relationship
with all of life around us and in us, and in relationship to each other, and in relationship
to the earth community animals, the air, the water, the microbes, and so forth, and
the stars and planets. So, also, is our solar system in a kind of permeable relationship
to the larger galactic hall and so forth. I see these new discoveries and changes in naming
and so forth as all being part of a kind of postmodern crucible of underworld descent where
the old identities and the old structures and certainties are being dissolved
so that we can enter into a richer engagement with the whole of life, and
not constrained by our assumptions and the egoic bubble that has cut us off from
a greater immersion in the flow of life. CB: Yeah. In terms of the downgrading, it's been
interesting in terms of the idea of making big things small and small things big that when Pluto
was first discovered, they estimated that it must be about the size of Earth. But then throughout
the 20th century, it was continually downgraded in size and they realized it was smaller and smaller
and smaller. Then eventually we did have the actual demotion of Pluto in 2006 by astronomers,
and Mike Brown the astronomer who discovered Eris wrote a book later, ironically titled,
How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming. But then eventually, the New Horizons space probe
was also launched in 2006, that very same year, and that ended up doing a flyby of Pluto
in 2015, and catching some of the first actual close-up photographs of it and scientific
readings of Pluto that ended up over the course of the past several years, giving us much more
information about Pluto than we had before. Interestingly, it turned out that Pluto
is much more interesting to scientists than thought previously, because now they're
starting to think that it has a rock core as well as a large deal of water underneath
the surface, which could then end up making it one of the more interesting planets in the
solar system because it could be some of the elements that could support life on Mars, some
sort of biological life or something like that. So there may yet still be, you know, a re-examining
of Pluto or maybe its importance might be magnified again at some point in the future with
some of these recent discoveries after it was actually witnessed close by for the first time.
RT: Yeah. It's very interesting you bring up that correlation between 2005 and 2006 because
the planetary scientists who were doing that mission were outraged when Pluto got
demoted by that group of astronomers and there was quite a conflict between Mike Brown
and the head of the mission for the Horizon. I have a nephew who is a planetary scientist
who works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories and he told me, "You know, among the actual
scientists who are doing this research, they paid no attention to whether Pluto
is called a planet or dwarf planet." He said Mike Brown is kind of like an aggressive
trickster who likes to push buttons and he likes to upset that applecart. But he said, "Among
the people who are actually doing the research, they're just doing the research and they kind
of stay outside of the conflict between the ones in the scientific community who really
opposed the change and the ones who were in favor of the change. I just don't actually give it a
lot of focus myself. I refer to Pluto as a planet, which whether you call it a dwarf planet or not,
I mean, a dwarf human being is a human being with just as much nobility and potential for high achievement and value a big human
being. That's not a particular feature that I think determines significance. I
don't pay that much attention to it so that's the shorthand response to that. It looks like it'll
probably go through some changes in the future, there could be many more planets fully called
planets, or they may be fewer depending on, you know, what a particular community
of scientific interpreters decide at a given moment. That's always in flux.
CB: Yeah. Some of those distinctions that astronomers make are not always
necessarily relevant for astrologers, but it's just interesting symbolically some of
the things that are happening on Earth and some of the things that are happening in terms of
our investigation of this planet as humanity, as well as just, you know, now Mike Brown is
searching for and they think there is another large planetary body somewhere out there
that may or may not be discovered in the not too distant future, and then we'll see
what sort of things happen in humanity that coincide with that discovery if it happens.
RT: Yeah, which I'm very interested in. I think Mike Brown's team is doing great work.
The discovery of Sedna, for example, it's quite important. We don't know
exactly what all this is opening up to but clearly our understanding, I mean, what's
happened in the last 100 years from the time Hubble and Shapley and Clyde Tombaugh
and so forth were doing their research. From that, the recognition of the many galaxies,
the expanding universe, expanding Cosmos, cosmic background radiation, then recognizing exoplanets
and trans-Neptunian bodies, the Kuiper belt, the likelihood of the Oort cloud, and
so forth... We have such a different understanding of the universe than we
did before. Maybe what I'd like to end on right now getting back to Pluto and the
discovery of the outer three planets which Dane Rudhyar beautifully described that
they were the ambassadors of the galaxy. And for 18th century, 19th century, and 20th
century, those three bodies were the ones that basically pushed us past the Saturnian boundaries
of our reality principle and opened us to a much bigger universe, a deeper one, and they were
the transpersonal planets as they've been called and so forth. The discovery of those three
planets astronomically through the telescope, the fact that as those are being discovered and
as the inner world was opening up through the interior self explorations of whether it was
the romantics and then the depth psychologist and William James and Jung and Anthony Wolfe
and Groff and so forth, by the time you get to Groff and you get to recognize that these powerful
archetypal complexes that are associated with the death-rebirth experience and the reliving
of our own birth, that these perinatal stages are all so closely connected to the four
outer planets of Pluto, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus. That the understanding of the inner meaning of
these planets and the discovery of the outer meaning of the planet or the discovery
of the outer existence of the planets, and that this is happening right at the time that
our civilization and our species and our planet is going through a death-rebirth crucible of
transformation, seems to me of great significance. It's as if the Cosmos is giving us, you know,
like the breadcrumbs to make our way out of the dark forest to home. It's like it's giving us
the clues of insight that we require to help mediate and navigate this tremendous
transformational moment that we are in as a culture and as an Earth community. I think it's a
great gift and it shows the Cosmos in some senses cares about the Earth and is paying attention
to it, and every time an astrologer sees correlations between the movements
of the planets and a person's life or their birth chart in their and
their biography and so forth, every time they look at where the planets are
now and see something happening at the same time and see the correlation, that's a sign of the
Earth being bathed by the cosmos with meaning. Like, we are a moving centre of cosmic
meaning and therefore have significance in the larger scheme of things even though
we're just this tiny, meaning-seeking planet. So to me, astrology provides for those who have
the great grace to open up to it or to be opened up to it by life, by circumstances, by opening
of their heart and mind, and some initiatory experience. Anybody who has that gift, that grace,
is in a position to be able to feel that we are embedded in a larger cosmos of love and of deep
meaning, and astrology is a kind of gift from the goddess of the cosmos as beauty and love.
That's basically how I look at it. Cosmos seeks a discerning partner who will love and glory
in the beauty that it's displaying in this way. CB: That's a brilliant point to end on, and just
your point of humanity being such an important turning point and shortly after the discovery of
Pluto having the development of the atomic bomb and for the first time, the ability to wipe itself
out and completely destroy itself, but not yet. And also being on the verge of such an important
turning point where it's also reaching outside of the Earth and outside of its own solar system
and the potential for other really great more positive things, but it clearly being an important
turning point. That's a great point to end on. RT: Yes. Yeah. And Chris, you're a great
interviewer. I really appreciate the care that you take in preparing for an interview and
then organizing it and bringing high quality both to the technical and to the substantive parts of
the interview. I know you're giving great gifts yourself to the astrological community month
after month, and it's been a pleasure to have this very long afternoon conversation with you.
CB: Thank you, I appreciate that. And I have to apologize-- forgive me for my own Sun-Pluto
and Scorpio tendency to take things to the utmost extreme, and having what was supposed
to be a very short two-hour conversation and blowing it up into a four-hour one. But thank
you for bearing with me and thanks for joining me for this today. Let's mention one more
time really briefly Changing of The Gods, because that's really something that we'll go into
much more detail about some of your work on Uranus and Pluto when it comes out in January. Right?
RT: Right. Actually, it's February. I think the full launch date is
February 22nd. Like, 2/22/22. CB: Okay.
RT: Yeah, there's a- CB: There's a whole trailer on their
website, which is changingofthegods.com. RT: Yeah, and we can thank Kenny Ausubel
for conceiving the film. The film was very much made in kind of collaboration between
him and Max DeArmon and Theo Badashi, and also Louie Schwartzberg. It was quite a
collaborative effort and one thing to keep in mind is that it's based on Cosmos and Psyche
that was finished and published before this Uranus-Pluto square began. So everything that's
in the film is basically kind of examining, "Well, given the patterns and the meanings that
Richard Tarnas set out in Cosmos and Psyche, let's look at see when Uranus and Pluto next came
into alignment-- which is after the book after he published it-- how does it bear out in terms of
the patterns? You know, in terms of civil rights, in terms of the women's movement, in terms of
ecology, in terms of scientific and technological breakthroughs and so forth. They've done a
really good job over the last seven years and I appreciate they would come to me
for, you know, I'm interviewed a lot and fortunately, two of my students; Max DeArmon and
Theo that I mentioned, played a major role in the making of the film and they were very dedicated
to keeping the astrology accurate as well. Stan Grof plays a role. Well, you'll see there's a lot
of major thinkers and visionaries and activists of our time play a role in those 10 episodes. So I
think there's going to be like a pre-launch period in February where each day one episode will be
shown for free, anybody can watch it. And then I think February 22nd is when it gets launched
for everybody to be able to see the whole thing. CB: Great, awesome. Well, people can check that
out at changingofthegods.com. I'll be interviewing the director, Kenny, very soon for an upcoming
episode of the astrology podcast. I think it just does a great job of giving much more insight into
the meaning of Pluto by studying some of those historical cycles. So people should check it out.
And yeah, I guess that's it. So thanks a lot for joining me for this today, I really appreciate it.
RT: Thank you Chris, and thank you all of you who will listen to us. I hope we conversed
about things that you might find valuable. CB: Definitely. All right. Thanks, everyone,
for watching or listening to this episode of theastrologypodcast.com and
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I’m gonna pass out
great episode chris, thank you. i really appreciate how you guys went into detail about the sort of relationship pluto can have with each planet in aspect in the natal chart. this has been an awesome deep dive i’ll probably listen to several more times. this and the jupiter episode have been my favorites from this series. you and all your hard work and the generosity of inviting us to learn for free is so valued. thanks.
yaaaaaaaassssss!!
Exciting! I’m watching it now :)
i've really enjoyed making my way through this series
Yesssss! I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS! 🎉
I've been waiting for this one, seeing it show up in my podcast feed feels a little like Christmas.
What a treat this episode will be! Happy to know it’s out.
Finally!!! I’ve been waiting so patiently for them to get to Pluto.