Pluto sextile Pluto
the transiting Pluto's passage in sextile to its own natal place, or one person's Pluto sextile another's in synastry
What the tradition reads
A natal chart cannot show Pluto sextile itself, since a single body cannot stand at an angle from its own degree; the tradition instead reads this key through transit, a station reached well before the halfway point of Pluto's own approximately two hundred and forty eight year circuit. Cafe Astrology's transit reading describes this passage as a subtle but meaningful growth, shedding attitudes or situations that have been limiting a person, becoming more strategic in a way that benefits a person directly, and connecting with instinct and ambition in a way that wastes less time and naturally strengthens many areas of a person's outer life. Between two charts, a sextile from one person's Pluto to another's is read through the same transformative, intensifying character the tradition gives Pluto generally, an easy, cooperative note on questions of power and depth; because Pluto moves so slowly, partners of noticeably different ages are needed to produce this angle at all between two separate natal charts, rather than the near conjunction that similarly aged partners already share.
The story
A sextile is sixty degrees, a sixth of the circle, one of the four configurations Ptolemy names, formed between signs of the same gender; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs calls the sextile, together with the trine, harmonious, and Wikipedia's own summary describes it as similar in influence to the trine but less intense, indicating compatibility and harmony that eases communication and opens opportunity. 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. Pluto meeting its own natal place at this cooperative angle is read through the same transformative character the myth gives Hades and Plouton together, old attachments loosening gradually enough to be worked with rather than simply lost.
Written from
- Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, Book I, Chapter XVI (Ashmand translation, Project Gutenberg ebook 70850, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/70850/70850-h/70850-h.htm)
- Wikipedia, Aspect (astrology)
- Wikipedia, Transit (astrology)
- Wikipedia, Pluto (mythology)
- Cafe Astrology, Pluto Transits
- Wikipedia, Astrological compatibility
Corpus key aspect:Pluto:Pluto:sextile.