Almagest

The library · The aspects

Pluto conjunct Pluto

the transiting Pluto's return to conjunct its own natal place, a return the tradition holds does not complete within a human life, or one person's Pluto conjunct another's in synastry

What the tradition reads

A natal chart cannot show Pluto conjunct itself, since a single body cannot stand at an angle from its own degree, and in Pluto's own case the tradition adds a further limit: Cafe Astrology's transit page for Pluto states that the planet takes approximately two hundred and forty eight years to come full circle, and the source's own account of Pluto's returning aspects to its own place has no entry for either the conjunction or the opposition, giving only the sextile, square and trine as achievable within an ordinary lifespan. Between two charts, a conjunction from one person's Pluto to another's is read through the same transformative, intensifying character the tradition gives Pluto generally, an instinctive alignment on questions of power and depth; because Pluto moves so slowly, partners of a similar age already carry very close natal Pluto placements, so a synastry conjunction of this kind is, for most pairings, simply the ordinary case rather than a distinctive one.

The story

A conjunction fuses two natures at the same degree, sitting outside the four mutual configurations Ptolemy's chapter on the signs measures by fixed distance; Wikipedia's own summary calls conjunctions the most powerful aspects, since they mutually intensify the effects of the bodies involved, their character as easy or hard depending on which planets meet there. Hades meeting Hades has no myth of doubling to draw on. The tradition instead reads the pairing through the god's two names and natures: Hades, portrayed in the older stories as the dark and violent abductor of Persephone, with few temples of his own, and Plouton, the name that came into wide use at Eleusis, where the same god was venerated as both a stern ruler and a loving husband to Persephone, and, since the Greeks connected mineral wealth found underground with the same chthonic power, as a god of the earth's buried riches too. A return of transiting Pluto to its own natal place would ask about two hundred and forty eight years, far outside any human life, so Pluto meeting itself this way belongs only to the god's own myth, never to a life the tradition can actually observe.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Pluto:Pluto:conjunction.