posted June 23, 2005 08:33 PM            

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Heh, I hate to be an obtrusive newbie, but do you have one of those for Pluto in the 2nd house? :-P

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Yes I do, and I would like to see you being even more obtrusive around here, I like what you have to say!!

Would like to hear any feedback you have on how this description touches you and resonates with you.....

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

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PLUTO IN THE SECOND HOUSE
THE SECOND HOUSE ARENA: Building a Basis for Self-Confidence
THE SECOND HOUSE PITS: Underextension due to Self-Doubt

IN THE TRADITION...
...the second house is often called the "House of Money." In practice, that's a valid association, provided we keep the idea in perspective. Here, as in many other areas of astrological interest, I find it helpful to recall that astrology is far older than human culture. I'm not speaking of the knowledge of astrology, but rather of the astrological mechanism itself. Primitive hominids nuzzling around the Olduvai Gorge a couple of million years ago had birth charts and responded to astrological stimuli. They didn't know it, of course, anymore than does a modern Senator or physics professor.
What did "money" mean to that hominid, ages before the first VISA card? The best answer is probably food, rocks to throw, perhaps a warm animal hide to wear on a cold night.
And how did that hominid feel if he had those resources in abundance? Probably pretty good. Confident. And if he lacked them? Insecure.
That's the core logic of the second house. To feel self-assured we must feel that we are prepared and equipped to face the requirements of life. We need resources, both materially and in terms of skills, connections, and knowledge. Money is certainly one such resource, but far from the only one.
With any planet in the second house, the skills, connections, and knowledge most naturally associated with that planet are at the heart of the matter for us when it comes to maintaining a pleasant feeling of legitimacy, self-respect and capability.
Pluto in the second house? Let's have a look...
YOUR HIGH DESTINY
Every Age has its folk wisdom. Some of it is truly eternal and precious; some is hooked uniquely to the transitory blind spots of time and culture. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" — that, I think, is in the former category: eternal and precious. "A woman's place is in the home." "Boys don't cry." Those nostrums seem less compelling today than they did a couple of generations ago.
Here's another nostrum: "You're good enough just the way you are." We hear a lot of sentiments along those lines nowadays. How eternal are they? That's hard to say. Certainly exhortations toward loving self-acceptance can serve useful, healing purposes. But they don't help us understand the logic of the second house. Here, we face the human need not so much to accept oneself as to prove oneself. How? Each planet has its own story, but with Pluto in the second house, you must prove yourself to yourself in distinctly Plutonian ways. And Pluto, as we have seen, thrives on extremity and intensity. With Pluto in this position, the realization of your high destiny involves going to your emotional limits. It might literally mean facing the risk of physical death — as for example when a person attains self-respect and self-realization through climbing a mountain or fighting back against a violent attack or virulent disease. Very often, there is a Plutonian Rite of Passage in which some powerful taboo must be broken — a man or woman, for example, marries across a race line or "comes out" as a gay person in conservative society. And thereby attains dignity.
Earlier in the book, quoting Robert Bly, we spoke of a "witch" who guards the gate to higher states of energy, keeping out "wimps" with all her treachery and ferocity. If you have Pluto in the second house, in realizing your own high destiny that metaphor has particular relevance to you. Often, for people such as yourself, there is one critical fear-facing, taboo-breaking test that arises, often unexpectedly, like a crossroads in your biography. A friend says, "Let's quit our stinking jobs and move to Europe." If you do, you've crossed the Rubicon. A month later you're making ends meet by serving pizza in Zurich. Everyone you know back at the Insurance Agency thinks you're crazy. Some days you do too. But in that dramatic, taboo-breaking action you've proven something to yourself: that you have inside you the basic resources of survival, that your life did not depend on your job, and that you are far more autonomous than you ever imagined.

YOUR DISTORTING WOUND
Zen Buddhists say that being born is like setting to sea in a leaky boat. Unless you're either very young or your Pluto is very weakly placed, you probably don't need me to explain that proverb to you.
Life is full of perils, and sooner or later we die. None of that makes anybody very comfortable, and so there is an unspoken collective agreement not to emphasize such Plutonian perspectives in normal conversation. We designate a priestly class to handle those realities for us. We dress them in black, encourage them to wear long faces, and generally don't invite them to our parties.
Ever since you were small, you've had an instinctual sense of the fragility of our circumstances. Second house energy is concerned with arming ourselves against threats, and Pluto is particularly skilled at recognizing even the most dreadful of those threats. The linkage of planet and house is very natural here; they reinforce each other. Thus, Pluto in the second house often represents a cautious quality. Caution is a virtue in many ways, but taken to extremes it can cripple a person. And if it is taken to extremes unconsciously, its effects can be devastating.
How much fear was in the air in your family home? What was the nature of that fear? These are critical questions. Because your natural awareness of life's fragility was like a vacuum into which your mother's fear and your father's fear rushed. Unprocessed and left unconscious, that fear can profoundly affect your view of life, leaving you hesitant to extend yourself toward your most interesting potentials.
In the state of grace, a child with Pluto in the second house wants experiences of the "edge." He or she wants to climb high in a tree, wants to see the scary movie — wants to forge a basis for self-confidence, in other words. But all children are busily forming a view of world based in large part upon parental and communal descriptions of "what's out there." The more the child perceives parents motivated by fear, the more he or she internalizes a sense of being inadequate and powerless. "If they are scared, I guess I should be too."
Complicating this dynamic, we also observe a tendency for any form of abuse, deception or betrayal to immediately lodge as a kind of poison in your second house circuitry — that is, in your self-confidence. Earlier in the book, we raised the question of "where we carry the Wound," observing that not everyone who suffers the same hurt will bleed from the same place. For you, your self-esteem is the Plutonian lightning rod. The psychological wiring diagram looks something like this: "There must have been something bad about me or I wouldn't have been hit, lied to, dismissed, ignored, abandoned, and so forth."

YOUR NAVIGATIONAL ERROR
The "beer can" near your existential compass can manifest as a systematic underestimation of your ability to deal with whatever life hurls at you, leading you toward an unnecessary emphasis upon safety, guarantees, and certainty as you navigate through life.
In our culture, money is generally heralded as the ultimate guarantee. Certainly having money does solve a lot of problems — it would be naive to pretend otherwise. But one point is sure: people who make weak responses to their second house Plutos tend to give money too much power in their thinking. They pay too much for money. They squander their lives in safe work that bores them. They fear trading the money they've earned for joy, experience, and adventure. They imagine that a lack of money prevents them from doing what, in their hearts, they hunger to do. Money becomes a substitute for the inner security that this Plutonian configuration ideally signifies.
Often a person going down that money-road will acquire a lot of financial clout. But will they ever feel secure? Probably not. Furthermore, tawdry circumstances often surround money bought at that price and for that reason: the hint of crime, or shame, or of something that couldn't stand the light of day.
Money is only part of the picture. Think of the vast array of factors that help you feel safer in the world. There's a good chance that none of them are inherently "bad" things, and blindly dumping all life's safety nets is certainly not the ideal path for many people.
Maybe you come from a traditional extended family, and living near all your relatives gives you a sense of well-being and security. If so, those people are part of your second house net. Since you have Pluto there, you need to consider whether you are leaning too heavily on that family solidarity. How can you tell? Ask yourself what your dependency on those people is costing you in terms of intensity and fulfillment. Have you avoided looking for work in other states? Are you thinking too much about what the relatives will think when you choose friends, hobbies, belief-systems, clothing? These questions are not always easy to sort out, but there's one sure test: if your Pluto is unhealthy, no matter what house it's in, you'll feel a kind of dull, passionless emptiness in your daily life. If you do, and you have Pluto in the second, you're paying too much for safety somewhere in your life. And it may have nothing to do with money.

THE HEALING METHOD
Pluto in the second house must prove itself to itself in extreme, intense circumstances. It demands a Rite of Passage. Earlier, we used the colorful example of a person quitting a boring job and moving to Europe: a scary experience, but she comes back home with a sense of being able to do anything, anywhere.
Pluto laughs at nickel and dime bets. It wants to see big bills on the table. It wants winning to be life-transforming... and the price is that losses are potentially catastrophic. To realize the best that's in your second house Pluto, you need to hurl yourself into frightening tests. Many times those tests involve facing your greatest fears. A young man might tell his domineering, shaming father to go to hell …..and risk a beating or disinheritance. A woman might confront her boss about his sexual innuendoes, and risk losing her job. These two examples involve the classic Plutonian strategy of speaking the hard truth, eyeball to eyeball, with a person who might not want to hear it.
A man with severely limited eyesight might swallow his fear and travel abroad for an experimental corrective operation. He faces grave risks, but the potential reward is the inestimable resource of sight.
A fifty-year-old woman might take her life savings and use the money to finance going back to school to become a computer programmer. She's scared, and "voices of reason" are telling her to hang onto that money as a hedge against Whatever in her old age. Instead, she invests in herself now.….and her old age promises to be vastly happier and more interesting, and probably more prosperous as well. She trades the resource of money for the greater resources of marketable skills and the kind of self-confidence that comes from challenges accepted, met, and conquered.

THE ENERGIZING VISION
Security is an inner state, not an outward one. That's one of those genuinely ultimate truths, so easily lost in a web of lesser truths. Certainly having money in the bank, a good job, credit, and so forth contribute materially toward feelings of security. Such supports are not to be despised, and you'll not read anything here about holy poverty. Poverty is merely an outward state, and as such is not inherently holier than any other visible condition. But true security is a confident attitude one has toward one's capacity for survival in this universe: an attitude that, come what may, there's an excellent chance I'll be able to land on my feet.
Some of that security derives from practical sources: knowing that we possess an array of skills that make us valuable to others or knowing that we are linked to supportive human networks. Some of it comes from our own history: remembering that we have often managed to improvise methods of survival in dicey circumstances. Some of it comes from possessing the right tools and the knowledge of how to use them. Some small part of this confidence derives from money.
But the lion's share is an internal sense that we are wise enough, cunning enough, worthy enough, fierce enough, creative enough, to deal with whatever comes along. And that confidence can only be forged in a spirit of Plutonian venture and risk.

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posted June 23, 2005 09:57 PM            

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or "comes out" as a gay person in conservative society.

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Me = bisexual and I live in Tennessee.

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A friend says, "Let's quit our stinking jobs and move to Europe." If you do, you've crossed the Rubicon. A month later you're making ends meet by serving pizza in Zurich.

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I would love to do that. But hopefully, I'll be in a job flexible enough to be able to do that, and not have to serve pizza. :-P

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Zen Buddhists say that being born is like setting to sea in a leaky boat. Unless you're either very young or your Pluto is very weakly placed, you probably don't need me to explain that proverb to you.

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I'm fairly young, yeah. But not a little kid. I guess my Pluto must be "very weakly placed", then, cuz I don't get that at all (Pluto Op. Merc., Trine Venus, Square Mars, Sextile Uranus, Neptune, Saturn).

Money is like a security thing for me. Heh. My family goes through drastic changes in finances. We go from being very well off, to being drastically poor in a short span of time.

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How much fear was in the air in your family home? What was the nature of that fear? These are critical questions. Because your natural awareness of life's fragility was like a vacuum into which your mother's fear and your father's fear rushed. Unprocessed and left unconscious, that fear can profoundly affect your view of life, leaving you hesitant to extend yourself toward your most interesting potentials.

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Money has always been the biggest fear in my home. Or rather, the lack there of.