THE SAVAGE, TRUTHFUL LOVE OF PLUTO

Here we go. I'm talking personal, and it's about Pluto's abduction - indeed his rape - of Persephone, and then making her his wife. Love is not civilised, try as we might. Once it is 'civilised', what is left? Where are those claws that can hold you so fiercely in their passion, that will kill for you, and kill for their young? Those primordial eyes that stare so unreservedly and wantingly into yours?

Pluto is about to approach to within less than a degree of my retrograde Venus at 1.16 Aquarius. Venus isn't Persephone, but she may as well be. All my life I have felt I have lost something of myself when in relationship, which doesn't mean there hasn't been good stuff as well. But there is the abduction. I feel like I am hobbling around on a walking stick, aged 64, in the love department, at any rate.

In other respects, my life is flourishing.... I have my first 2 books coming out this year, more being written, about to buy a house..... and yet the love area is still in the wasteland after 5 joyous and maddening years on my own, which is maybe the proper place to be when Pluto is about to conjoin your Venus.

 

Retrograde tells you to look at the past. What was it that I was giving away in relationship, on and off - with one 18-year on - all that time? With natal Venus opposite Uranus too, what was I splitting off from, in what way was I not being true to the whole of myself? There is such an enveloping conventional expectation around relationship, because it is such a big part of life, that it can take a long time to find what is true for us. And maybe the biological imperative has to have its say first. How can we know who is suitable for us, in a deeper kind of way, at that more tender reproductive age?

 

Now this post could go on for a while. I expect we have all been here one way or another, so I hope this speaks to you. WHAT IS THE PRICE WE PAY FOR BEING IN RELATIONSHIP? What are those niggles we put aside in the hope they will go away, in the interest of all those other, maybe CONVENIENT, things that seem to work? For they will come back and bite you 20 years later. And it will be messy, but I'm not sure the universe is as bothered as we are about those messes, when it comes to the wider pattern in which it sees our lives.

This is the kind of question that Pluto-Venus aspects, natally or by transit, and Venus in Scorpio, raise. Pluto or Scorpio demands that we be instinctively true to ourselves, even when we don't have the reasons to support it.

------------------------------------------

Ad Break 

I offer astrology and tarot readings by zoom, on a donation basis. I am also offering a deal, that will continue indefinitely: if you purchase my book The Medicine Wheel by Barry Goddard on Amazon, and leave a genuine rating, I will do you a reading at no charge. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk

 ------------------------------------------

Is being with this person a compromise in any way? Are you allowing yourself quietly to go to sleep, rather than encountering the more abundant life that naturally comes with age? It is not a betrayal to admit these things to yourself. But that self-betrayal has to be acted upon, or it will eventually destroy you. You will die earlier than you might have, because the life will slowly leach out of you.

So I could go on about relationships. The need to learn to negotiate with your partner/spouse, and to be committed to that, existentially. Your whole life can be bound up with this person, and through that synergy and that commitment to being always honest, something very deep can be built. What more could one want? Love is something that needs to be built over decades, assuming the initial chemistry is there.

That is what marriage is about. The partnership is consecrated in the context of the Great Spirit, or whatever is your metaphysical context, and always the community. Such ceremony is a powerful thing. 

 

Even at my advanced age, that is what could be coming my way with my Pluto-Venus transit. Who knows? You can't second-guess transits. Personally, I have the capacity and the longing for that. Maybe, after a lifetime, this thing can work. Maybe I have been on my own for long enough to have earned the capacity to do this. I reckon :)

 

But what about relationships ending? I can often see it coming in the chart, and I always say don't take it personally, it needed to happen, even though it could hardly be more personal. And I won't shy away from it as a possibility in a reading, just as I won't shy away from death. If people call on us, it is not our job to be mealy-mouthed. It is to tell the truth. Requiring astrologers not to predict death is a betrayal of our calling.

Sometimes relationships are a lifelong commitment, and when they are that, it is a beatiful and maybe a rare thing, when it is about each becoming a more whole/balanced person, when negotiation about everything - and I mean everything - is possible. When - in astrological terms - each person is living according to the will of the gods/planets. But how often is it like that? That is what I feel Pluto-Venus is leading me into, but maybe not just yet.

More often, and here maybe I am on my soapbox, the relationship is more about each person carrying part of the other person's psyche. You be Mum and I'll be Dad. I think it is usually as simple as that, though in unique ways. Venus' House, the 7th, is the House of projection. And it can't be easily spoken about, because how sexy is it for the guy to say you are his Mum? You gotta have a good time in bed - and if that isn't Pluto-Venus, or Venus in Scorpio, I don't know what is. Raw, immediate, consuming on all levels. And maybe you can have that good time if you don't admit to the parental stuff.

 

But of course it's not usually either/or. A productive relationship will tend to be both the impulse towards honesty, and the carrying of bits of each other's psyche, which reveals itself over time, and needs to be navigated. (Falling in love, IMO, is the result of the initial and unconscious editing of ourselves to be what the other unconsciously needs us to be: suddenly we feel 'complete', we have found our 'soul partner'. Until they aren't.)

People grow apart. A relationship can have a beginning, a middle and an end. Our dogmatic religious background tells us that it must last for ever, and moreover be consecrated by God, or something has gone wrong, and who is the guilty party?

 

I watch a fair bit of Jordan Peterson, and I appreciate his free-thinking, pragmatic analysis of many areas of life. I also appreciate his standing-up for marriage. But he doesn't appreciate the benefits of a relationship ending. It is usually messy, it can be distraughting, but it can be deeply necessary. You can feel like you were meant to come together precisely because you would come apart in a messy way, and learn so much about yourself in the process. That can almost be the purpose of romantic love: to glamour us into exactly the place we need to be from which, 20 years later, we shall emerge bloody and bowed, vomitting up seawater on the beach, but with all that weird unconscious shit - which we like to attribute to early life, but really who knows - becoming conscious. It may make us a bunny-boiler for a while, but that isn't a permanent condition. It is maybe no more crazy than the initial condition of being 'in love', which feels divine, and maybe it is, but it it may also be a necessary trick to get us where we need to be. This is all Venus-Pluto stuff.

There is so much we can learn from our attractions and our visceral involvements. If we are prepared to be honest, at least with ourselves. And don't underestimate the unique joys of solitude. Venus in Virgo perhaps. But that is another post. Finding in yourself what you previously experienced, as a mere pale reflection, through the other.

 

I have 2 years of Pluto conjunct Venus to run. I get the Tower Card and the Death Card quite regularly. My Venus is Aquarian and Uranian. There is something outside the norm to be encountered and lived. There is a death of the old paradigm. But the outcome will be authentic, and the opposite of compromise, if I grasp the new life that is always Pluto's gift.