Almagest

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Pluto opposition Pluto

the transiting Pluto's arrival, at roughly the halfway point of its cycle, in opposition to its own natal place, a station the tradition holds few reach within a human life, or one person's Pluto opposite another's in synastry

What the tradition reads

A natal chart cannot show Pluto in opposition to itself, since a single body cannot stand at an angle from its own degree, and here too the tradition notes 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 its own account of Pluto's returning aspects to its own place lists the sextile, square and trine but no opposition or conjunction at all, since the halfway point of so long a cycle falls beyond almost any human life. Between two charts, an opposition from one person's Pluto to another's sets the two placements at opposite ends of one axis; because Pluto moves so slowly, a synastry opposition of this kind would ask the partners to be roughly half the planet's own two hundred and forty eight year cycle apart in age, a gap the tradition treats as belonging to myth and to mundane, generational astrology rather than to an ordinary pairing of two lives.

The story

An opposition sets two points diametrically apart, a hundred and eighty degrees, half the circle; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs calls it, together with the square, discordant, and Wikipedia's own summary credits the medieval astrologer Ibn Ezra with calling the opposition the most powerful aspect, relational rather than blending as a conjunction does, its dichotomous quality often read as tense, though like any axis its two ends can be read as complementary as easily as oppositional. 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 true opposition of transiting Pluto to its own natal place would ask about a hundred and twenty four years, further than almost any life reaches, so this axis belongs chiefly to the god's own myth rather than to an observed life.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Pluto:Pluto:opposition.