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Neptune trine Pluto

Neptune trine Pluto, within one nativity or between two charts in synastry

What the tradition reads

Neptune and Pluto are, in Wikipedia's own phrase, among the "slower moving planets," whose transits it calls more powerful and noticeable than those of the inner planets, so that a trine between them can persist for some time. Within one chart, Cafe Astrology's transit reading reads the trine as softening and refining a person's life, working through deeper ambitions, fears and defense mechanisms without the disruption the pair's harder contacts bring, awakening or boosting an interest in metaphysical topics, understanding one's own psychology becoming something of a quest, belief in oneself and a stronger sense of meaning among the source's stated benefits. Between two charts, a trine from one person's Neptune to another's Pluto sets the two planets a third of the circle apart, a hundred and twenty degrees; the sources consulted for this entry give no separate reading for this specific synastry contact.

The story

A trine is a hundred and twenty degrees, a third of the circle; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs calls it, together with the sextile, harmonious, since the signs it joins are of the same kind, all masculine or all feminine, and Wikipedia's own summary calls the trine extremely beneficial, indicating harmony, ease and what is natural, more intense in its effect than the sextile though gentler than either hard aspect. Poseidon and Hades are brothers, two of the six children Cronus and Rhea bore according to the Hesiod genealogy the Pluto myth page relates; when the world was divided three ways, the sea fell to Poseidon and the underworld to Hades, so the brothers rule adjoining domains beneath the sky their brother Zeus rules from above. The same page notes that the underworld god was also worshipped as Plouton, a name tied to the Greeks' own sense that mineral wealth found underground belonged to the same chthonic power that governed the earth's dead. Set at this easier angle, the two brothers' adjoining domains are read as cooperating, the sea's currents carrying what the underworld has transformed back toward the light.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Neptune:Pluto:trine.