Almagest

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Saturn opposite Pluto

Saturn opposite Pluto, within one nativity or between two charts in synastry

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Saturn opposite Pluto natal is read as a generational contact, present in charts roughly every thirty four years and read the same way across each generation it touches; sources describe it as exposing a person to the darker side of human nature from an early age, whether through extremism, bullying, a strict upbringing, a lack of emotional support or simply witnessing hardship nearby, at times giving rise to a disillusioned, oppositional cast of mind toward authority. The same sources read the placement's potential as a serious, sometimes intimidating character who, in recognising life as a continuum of change rather than a fixed battle of opposites, can turn that intensity toward real cooperation and achievement; a pull toward the occult or toward searching out deeper meaning and truth is also named, alongside the caution that any power drawn from this placement carries a cost if it is turned toward influencing others against their will. Between two charts, one person's Saturn opposite another's Pluto sets structure and transformation at the furthest possible remove, a hundred and eighty degrees apart. None of the sources consulted for this entry gives a separate reading for this specific contact in synastry, so none is offered here.

The story

An opposition is 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, since the signs it joins are not of the same kind, but of different natures and sexes. Saturn and Pluto are father and son. Cronus, the Titan the Saturn page says the Romans conflated with their own Saturn, fell from power, and the cosmos was divided in three among his sons: Zeus took the sky, Poseidon took the sea, and Pluto took the underworld, on the telling Pluto's own page gives. Set at the furthest angle apart, the father who once held the whole and the son who inherited one third of it stand across the sky from each other, each holding a share of the same original authority from an opposite end of the world's oldest division.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Saturn:Pluto:opposition.