posted June 21, 2005 11:17 PM            

Putting up these "Pluto in the..." threads has been a fascinating experience for me, so thanks for asking! Will be waiting with bated breath to see what you think of this chapter. I can see it -- you do have a shaman/healer vibe about you.....

From Steven Forrest's "The Book of Pluto":

quote:

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PLUTO IN THE EIGHTH HOUSE
THE EIGHTH HOUSE ARENA: Sexual bonding; Healing; Dealing with the Dark
THE EIGHTH HOUSE PITS: Brooding; Despair; Isolation

IN THE TRADITION...
...the eighth house had a rather ominous title: "The House of Death." Astrologers of long ago would use it along with a host of other factors to determine the timing and nature of a person's departure from this world. Both ethically and practically, this is a touchy area. Predicting someone's death can be upsetting business. On top of it, the techniques are not very reliable in my experience.
Still, thinking about death is a good trigger for eighth house insights. Death makes us nervous; so does everything else about this part of the birth chart. The emotions released around an intimate death are strong ones: both mystical ecstasy and wailing desolation may arise. It is the same with all the other eighth house terrains: sex, our woundedness, primal fears and phobias. Here, we deal with everything vigorous, passionate, and unsettling about human life.
Going to your edges emotionally is the heart of the matter: death and love may push you there. So may a long, hard talk with yourself. Or friendship so deep that it goes beyond politeness and an exaggerated "respect for boundaries" — the kind of relationship that must of necessity exist between long-time lovers. Anytime we are dealing in an honest and straightforward manner with the hurt or scared places inside us, we are in this domain.
As you might imagine from the foregoing language, Pluto has a special affinity with the eighth house. The Lord of the Underworld is attuned to these kinds of overwhelming energies. In the old hierarchical language of the astrological tradition, we say "Pluto rules the eighth house." What that means is that when Pluto is here, it is very strong. Simply having the planet in this house qualifies you as a Plutonian type: deep, intense, and inclined toward psychological thought.

YOUR HIGH DESTINY
A million years ago, we circled the campfire gazing into the comforting flames, our backs to the night. Stories were told, food shared. And behind us, in the vast dark, twigs cracked. A glance over the shoulder might reveal a pair of feral, yellow eyes. We took solace in community, and hoped for the best. Every now and then, something would lunge out of the dark, grab an unfortunate aunt or uncle, and rush back into the encircling night. And we would shiver, and sing more loudly.
The scenario is mythic, not to be taken literally. Like any myth, it invents facts to point at truths. And one truth is that being alive is a precarious, terrifying business. Things do lunge out of the dark and grab us. Terrible disease strikes without clear warning. Drive-by shooters strike without any warning at all. Lovers depart. Kids find the needle or the gun.
These are unpleasant subjects. Like our mythical forebears, we tend to gaze at the comforting fire with our backs to them. Let me hasten to say that love is real, joy is real, tenderness, beauty, and peace are real. But so are these darker elements.
You know that. You've always known it. To say that you are "comfortable" with life's terrifying side would be silly; who could be? But you are more at ease with it than most of us. You were born with a rare kind of emotional fortitude, an ability to sit with strong emotion in yourself or others, and override the common tendency to deny the dark. When life pushes us to the edge, as it does for everyone sooner or later, we need wisdom and a steadying hand. We need someone with whom to talk it out, someone who'll listen, someone who won't be too quick to box all our feelings up in a neat philosophical or "spiritual" package. We need someone who can sit with life's ambiguity, mystery, and enormity, and not take refuge in "answers" that simply drive the feelings back down into the dark. We need a "priest" or "priestess" in the true, archetypal sense. Your High Destiny lies in claiming the full expression of that power.
YOUR DISTORTING WOUND
A woman corners you at a party. Earnestly, dead seriously, and without stinting on any details, she outlines a surgical procedure she is contemplating. All the while, a spider is crawling slowly up her lapel.
You try to appear interested in her soliloquy. You do your best not to succumb to the spider's fascination. Perhaps after a bemused minute, you mention the bug. A year later, what do you remember? Her story? Her name? Probably not. You remember the spider.
The mind is like that. We notice the unexpected. We have a fascination with the macabre, the inappropriate, the taboo. When we see a truth clearly, especially one that others are ignoring or denying, we tend to centralize it in our awarenesses. It looms large, like the spider.
With your eighth house Pluto, you have always possessed a highly developed nose for the darker, more psychological under-currents in any situation. Since those undercurrents are often denied, you tended to focus on them all the more intently. This enchantment with the ragged edges of human emotion and the nightside of human experience is both your great strength and your distorting wound.
A plain reality in most human affairs is that these unspoken atmospheres of hunger, anger, or fear have a sexual component. For most people between the ages of twelve and ninety, sexuality is in practice the heart of the eighth house. We all have repressed desires, jealousies, guilty memories, "naughty" thoughts and fantasies: highly charged eighth house material that hangs like a hungry ghost just behind our party eyes.
Even when you were small and had no words or concepts for what you were feeling, you sensed these undercurrents in the world around you. Hungers and fears everywhere. This fact in itself is part of your distorting wound: because others generally did not acknowledge these problematic realities, you balanced that by focusing on them. This created an overemphasis in that area: an overemphasis on truths denied, on unspoken energies and drives. You see the dark clearly, but it may loom larger in your perceptions than is warranted. And the dark is scary.
Merely seeing the frightening side of life could be called a wounding experience, but the point here is more precise: it is that seeing the dark alone, without help and support, is the wound.….the more so if others actively denied the reality of what you were perceiving, or were simply incapable of enduring the sight of it.
To all this we must add a synchronistic principle. This inward focus on the more problematic and unsettling truths of life often coincides with a heightened density of painful biographical experiences: early experiences with intimate deaths or diseases, encounters with violence or outright evil, sexual secrets or chronic frustrations tainting the air of the family home. And these experiences themselves wounded you further.

YOUR NAVIGATIONAL ERROR
...can take a lot of different forms, depending in part upon the nature of the rest of your birth chart. We can unravel them all with a single meditation: what are the uses of Innocence? Because if there are any uses for it, you are potentially in some difficulty. Your innocence disappeared early, if you ever had it. You are simply not by nature an "innocent" type.
(This notion, by the way, should not be construed as a declaration of your guilt! Here we use the word innocence to signify something closer to the "innocence" of children — naivete, inexperience, a guilelessly trusting quality.)
Innocence allows us to rush headlong into life's experiences. It allows us to board the roller coaster without a second thought. A first marriage, for example, is typically undertaken in a spirit of considerable innocence: who can understand the enormity of that challenge without having tasted it? Children often come into our lives when we're not far out of childhood ourselves: again, we typically possess only the vaguest of notions of what we are getting ourselves into.
Is all that really so bad? Maybe not. Perhaps, from the evolutionary perspective, there is something positive to be said for leaping headlong into life, naively trusting that everything will work out. Maybe without that inborn innocence we would be paralyzed, afraid to move. Certainly anyone whose eyes are wide open and who still trusts life without misgivings enjoys a more than normal portion of sheer faith.
Your navigational error is, of course, optional. But if you succumb to it, you'll become guarded and hesitant, and gradually evolve into a moody, brooding person. Your attitudes may be governed by fear and worry, or crippled by extreme caution. You may find yourself emotionally isolated, with no one in your life with whom you can talk on a natural, open level. This syndrome can manifest in a variety of areas, but the single one that looms above the rest is the potential twisting of your capacity for sexual bonding.
In "innocent" sexual bonding, we reveal extraordinarily intimate details about our lives and thoughts without hesitation…..long before we have been faced with the darker dimensions of our lover's character. The Universe seemed to arrange our minds that way, and maybe for good purpose: we find ourselves deeply connected with a lover before we have much chance really to consider what we are doing. And then we are in it, and must deal with the relationship, and maybe grow a lot more than a person who saw the dangers more clearly at the early stages.....and wisely ran away.
You might fall into the trap of being that paradoxical creature: the natural relationship counselor who cannot make his or her own intimate life work. (And by "relationship counselor" I don't necessarily mean somebody getting paid for it. You have skills in that area, and they'll be recognized and employed even if you're the dispatcher for a trucking company.) You might accomplish that dubious aim by systematically choosing partners who are "safe" — which is to say, people whom you can easily outsmart or out-analyze, or who don't have enough intensity to match you, or who are weakened by their own woundedness. And then you may suffer the frustrations inherent in those kinds of limited relationships.
Why would you do such a thing to yourself? Out of fear. Out of a lack of innocence. And those two ideas are the same: it is the height of innocence not to fear human love.
As I write those words, I am aware of an urge to modify or delete them. But I won't. As negative as they sound, saying that human love is to be feared conveys a truth about life. Love uplifts us and gives meaning to our existences, but it also hurts us very badly sometimes. Everyone has a dark, dangerous side — a wounded side — and in deep intimacy, that edgy, caustic energy will certainly make itself felt. Saying we have no fear of that eventuality is as "innocent" as saying we don't fear the rabid dog or the wild-eyed terrorist.
In a nutshell, what you have instinctively perceived regarding life's scary side can potentially put a wall around your soul. Nothing can get in to hurt you — but nothing can get out either.

THE HEALING METHOD
The pain-driven, fear-driven, powers of destruction in this world can chill the stoutest hearts. If you doubt it even for an instant, think of the latest atrocities in whatever war is unfolding as you read these words. The human capacity for generating horror seems unlimited and insatiable.
But there are other forces. In every shadow, we see evidence of light. Human beings continue to love, to hope, to dream. We continue to care for each other. Simple-minded folk create an image of "good people" undoing the evil wrought by "bad people." The wise are quicker to see the two in one flesh. Most of us make our contributions to the sum of pain in the world — and to the sum of forgiveness, healing, and love. Both are formidable powers, and it is blindness to ignore either one.
A child is raised in an abusive, crack-ridden ghetto. Finally he is removed, and placed in a foster home. Getting through his shell won't be an easy task. It's going to take more than a good attitude. It's going to require something more akin to magic.....a quality of eye-contact, a shell-bashing intensity of love. There are not many effective words for these particular human potentials, there is a quality of insistence, of "000mph," that we can put into our love, a quality that magnifies the healing power of that love. Not everyone could understand what I am talking about here, but with your Pluto in the eighth house, I believe that you do understand.
Your Healing Method is twofold. First, you must open yourself up and receive that kind of searing, loving intensity from someone. Secondly, you must offer it back. It is in that unguarded, wide-open sharing of sheer life-force that your truth-seeing, penetrating nature is affirmed and validated. The heart of the matter is that you must experience not merely your ability to love, but your angel-powered, witch-powered, ability to see into another's soul. And the paradox is that you can't open that window without the other person looking right back into you.
This transaction might occur in a profound therapeutic context. It could happen in an extraordinary friendship. But it most easily and naturally occurs in an eighth house framework: in sacred sexuality, or in the face of death or terrible loss, or in any other human situation where the emotional energy runs so high you can't help but shake.

THE ENERGIZING VISION
Tibetans name their teachers "Rimpoche," which means "Precious One." The term has specific implications among Buddhists, and it definitely goes beyond suggesting that someone is simply kind and insightful. Still, you were born with the capacity to be one of the "Precious Ones" in your community, one of the people who is there with the right words, right touch, right silence, in times of dire need.
You have profound instincts in the face of crisis and loss. You may well have healing gifts, or divinatory powers that emerge when they are needed. You thrive when life becomes intensely real, and can help others thrive then too. You carry in you the archetype of the shaman, the healer, the magus, the good witch, the priest, priestess, minister.….pick your title. They are all different ways of referring to people who have the ability to be "there" when the chips are down, when life is extreme and we are pushed toward our limits — or beyond them.
Down that road lies a vast reservoir of sheer life-force. There lies your heat, your hunger for life, your eagerness for existence. In that intense realm, you find the energizing vision that ennobles you and gives meaning and direction to your worldly story.

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posted June 21, 2005 11:46 PM              

Thank you so much for taking the time to post this. I have to run out for a bit, but will be back to read the rest later tonight. I'll let you know how it relates to me. So far - WOW right on. Thank you.