Last time I shared my notes on Pluto in Virgo which are also relevant for Pluto in the 6th house or in hard aspect to Mercury. Now that we’ve covered the sign placement, we need to explore how that works through a particular house or area in your life. So this post covers Pluto in the 8th house which also works for Pluto in Scorpio. These notes are from Healing the Soul by Mark Jones, as well as Jeff Green’s Pluto: The Evolutionary Journey of the Soul Vol.1.

In Evolutionary Astrology, Pluto represents the soul and its deep unconscious security patterns, as well as gifts and talents that may be hidden. With Pluto in the 8th house or Scorpio the evolutionary intent of the soul is to challenge its pre-existing identity and limitations in order to grow beyond them. The 7th house brings you to the edge of your limitations through interacting with others and then the 8th house reveals the potential of what you might become.

With this placement you can’t just accept your limitations – you feel compelled to test them, like a velociraptor looking for weaknesses in its cage. This is usually done by identifying with symbolic forms of power so you can absorb that power into yourself by forming a relationship with it. Some examples include sex, death, money, status, powerful people, systems of knowledge, religious imagery and practices, taboos, and ultimately God.

There may be intense experiences of attraction and repulsion towards these areas. The attraction reveals your pre-existing limitations which then creates repulsion due to fear of change. The process of learning something new can also make you feel disempowered because you realise how much you don’t know. You want to change but another part of you is still attached to remaining secure in your current identity.

When your current situation or identity starts to feel too limiting or stagnant it pushes you to change. If you try to hang on to the past and resist making changes this will trigger a crisis, what Jones calls “a dilemma of metamorphosis.” You resist because you perceive a threat to your security patterns. You don’t know what or who you’re going to become if you change. But you can’t stay as you are either.

This dilemma is rooted in the conflict between the desires of the ego and the soul. The ego wants security and to stay in its comfort zone, while the soul wants to transform and evolve. This process happens with all Pluto placements but it tends to be more intense for Pluto in Scorpio and the 8th house where everything can become a life-or-death struggle.

As you transform yourself, you’ll experience cycles of crisis on every level: physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual. But you’re not in control of this process. It’s driven by the soul and its desire to return to the Ultimate Source of Power, i.e. God. So resistance is futile!

This happened to me when I was 20 and my progressed Sun moved to conjunct my natal Pluto and I had a breakdown. My old security patterns at that time were based on a false self with very shaky foundations and they simply collapsed. A big crisis ensued but I was able to transform myself and stabilise in a new identity on a spiritual path that included Buddhism and meditation.

After many years of practice the first satori tipped me into another crisis of transformation when I realised how many layers of identity I still had to work through. I had rebuilt a strong sense of self following the breakdown only to be confronted by the necessity to let it go again. I was also confronted by the fact of God and my old atheist identity went into a meltdown that continued for years.

You can either cooperate with this process of change or not. If you cooperate, it’ll be a lot less traumatic (and more dignified 😂). And with this placement you won’t be able to avoid it – at least, not for long. Jeff Green says that you’re a natural psychologist and were born asking why. You need to understand yourself and others and this pushes you to dig deep into your subconscious, spelunking for inner treasures.

Doing this allows you to develop profound knowledge in the areas that you explore and this gives you greater personal power. You can then use this knowledge and power to help others to understand and empower themselves. Or you can use it to control and manipulate people and gain power over them. You’re more likely to become power-hungry if you fear being powerless and this will trigger crises in your relationships with emotional manipulation and issues of co-dependency.

With Pluto in the 7th house there’s a need to form relationships with a wide variety of people so you can learn how to relate because you don’t know what you need. With Pluto in the 8th, you know what you need so have to choose who to get involved with based on what’s right for you and your soul growth.

This can create crises because you’re using your relationships (other people) in order to grow. Your relationships may be intense and full of obsession and compulsion that pushes you to change. There can be a lot of shadow projection and complicated karmic entanglements, especially when sex is involved. You may struggle to let go of a partner and resist the change that’s demanded, or resist relationships completely due to fear and defensiveness.

The permutations are endless but it all comes down to how you use your power in relationships and whether you’re willing to work with others as equals. Ideally, you can learn to grow within a relationship by finding a partner who is willing and able to grow with you. This may only happen after years of trial and error and multiple broken hearts. You have to evolve to the point where you can stop projecting your issues onto others and process them within yourself. Jeff Green says that you:

“should be willing to experience life as an open-ended proposition, and to be willing to risk that which constitutes security.”

When you can do this, your relationships can transform with you as you grow because you remain open to whatever may come up between you. This kind of relationship may be with a soulmate, someone you can journey with on your spiritual path, supporting and challenging each other as necessary and as equals.

The 2nd house polarity point shows the evolutionary intent is for total self-reliance and learning how to identify your own inner values and resources regardless of others. You need to minimise compulsive dependency on anything outside of yourself and look within to find the meaning of your life. As Mark Jones says:

“The sooner the illusion of personal happiness existing outside of the self is punctured the greater the chance of leading a fulfilling life.”

You can work out who you are without reference to others and discover the core of yourself and how to draw on your own inner resources. That doesn’t necessarily mean being alone. When you can meet your own needs, your relationships will become less compulsive and fraught with emotional drama. You can then naturally attract others who are also self-sustaining.

This also prevents the misuse and abuse of power and sexuality because you’re centred in yourself and grounded in your own being. You can be self-motivated and encourage the growth of others without manipulation and control. And you won’t allow others to become dependent on you.

You can use your capacity to penetrate deeply into the essence of whatever issues or areas of life that you focus your energy on and, as Jeff Green says:

“discover and solve the ‘mysteries’ of life for the betterment of [yourself] and for others in general.”

How do we combine this with the sign placement of Pluto in Virgo? In general, the planet shows what’s happening and the sign shows how it happens, while the house shows where it happens.

So the desire for soul growth (Pluto) happens through learning self-improvement and humility in order to be of service to others without getting stuck in negative thinking, inferiority and guilt (Virgo). This manifests through challenging limitations and transforming yourself and how you use power in relationships (8th house).

With Mercury conjunct Pluto in Virgo in the 8th house there’s going to be a lot of compulsive thinking about relationships, as well as relationships being distorted by negative thinking. It reinforces the psychological nature of the 8th house and the need to explore motives and desires, with a mental fixation on the need to grow beyond limitations. Psychological insights and knowledge can also be put into the service of others – this website being one manifestation of that (Saturn in 3rd house trine Mercury Pluto conjunction).

There may be hidden gifts in this area too which can be retrieved or brought forward from the past to help with the current life transformations. During the breakdown I had in my 20s, it often felt as if I was being guided by a source wiser than myself or drawing on knowledge that I already had. A part of me knew what I needed to do in order to get through the crisis and become the person I was supposed to be.

That process triggered my evolutionary intent which is to overcome resistance to surrender and develop a relationship to the divine (Pisces polarity point). This manifests through the development of self-sufficiency in my own inner values and resources (2nd house polarity point). The ultimate inner resource is the divine and realising this will bring peace and free me from dependency on others.

There’s another step to interpret the Evolutionary Axis and that involves the Moon Nodes, and we’ll look at them next time…

Read whole series here

Images: Walking; Dock; Rock

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