The Book of Pluto Quotes

“Whenever it occurs, the Plutonian trine is an invitation to wisdom. To claim the wisdom, three tests must be passed. The first test lies in choosing to face a demon that guards a gate. Beyond the gate lies a treasure, but at first all we see is the demon itself: a fear, based on an old Plutonian wound. A critical observation is that there is absolutely no pressure on us to face that demon; it is a purely voluntary act undertaken utterly for the sake of the principle of personal growth. If we do not subscribe to that principle, the process goes no further. The second test, with the demon integrated and understood, is to claim the treasure. What might stop us? Old enemies: inertia, habit, the still-memorized patterns of thought and self-imagery which the “demon” engendered in us. And what is the treasure? Heat, passionate intensity, the energizing experience of high Plutonian consciousness. And how do we claim it? By recognizing a desire so deep that its roots lie in the soul itself, and then going forth unabashedly to claim it. The third test is only available to us if we have passed the second one. Claiming that desire will make a visible difference in our lives. We are, for example, now living in another state. Maybe we’ve started our own business or written a book or left a marriage or entered one. Whatever the changes, they have allowed our true wisdom and maturity to flower. That flowering makes available to us a set of perceptions characteristic of a true elder. To pass the third test, we must now make an effort to realize where we are in the life cycle, to claim the wisdom and authority of our years, and to integrate into our “philosophy” the perceptions such a perspective makes available to us. What about the low path? In truth, it means very little. An opportunity passes, unused and unheeded. We get older, and duller, by degrees.”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto

“Those larger Sun-Pluto issues revolve around the sheer pagan desire for heat in one’s life. What fear stands between you and a fuller, more vital existence? Are you scared to admit hard truths about your marriage, your job, your religion, your family, your children, your sexuality, your health? How much are you paying for your attachment to your social standing? Your money? Your illusions?”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto

“The trick lies in realizing that your life as you’re living it is inadequate to meet your spiritual and emotional needs, and that half the reason that’s true is that you’ve believed far too many lies all your life. The other half of the reason is that you’ve grown and changed, and what used to be satisfying and believable is now barren and false. Keeping one’s fire, enthusiasm, and faith alive is the challenge these squares and oppositions bring. Typically, to do so, one must pay a price. Comforting but phony elements of life must be released, and new possibilities seized under less-than-auspicious circumstances.”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto

“The point is that squares and oppositions are compelling. One must respond to them. Something in one’s sexual or intimate life has reached a point of criticality. It can no longer be denied. Identifying it consciously takes courage and openness. Integrating it, accommodating it into one’s life, is no simple matter. The costs may be great. But the result is worth the price: sanity, integrity, and authenticity in one’s life.”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto

“These transiting or progressing aspects are particularly hard on people who have striven to be “good” all their lives. “Goodness” in this context implies not so much true warmhearted compassion as formality, rigid “normalcy,” and that common phenomenon, “good child” approval-seeking. Such individuals are often shocked at the intensity of the “taboo” needs and desires that arise under passing Venus-Pluto configurations, and they may break down under the pressure. The behaviors which then arise have little to do with individuality, reflecting more familiar, more tawdry archetypes: the straying mate, the minister caught with the prostitute, the psychologist having sexual contact with his or her client.”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto

“Much that is truly frightening in life we must face alone. But not all of it. Sometimes help is available. It may not ultimately bail us out, but it can provide comfort, a steadying hand, wisdom. Trines and sextiles between the natal Moon and natal Pluto suggest the existence of that kind of nurturing assistance when we need it. Teachers and comforters are at hand; guides appear when we are lost — provided we are brave enough to admit that we are lost! I emphasize the existence of earthy, human support during our Plutonian ordeals. But I must add that other, more etheric kinds of support are also suggested by this class of aspect: inner guides, angels, ancestral spirits, the Holy Spirit...serve yourself here from the basic cafeteria of words we monkeys use to speak authoritatively about what we understand so little. Always, with trines and sextiles, there is a question: will we maintain sufficient self-awareness to use the opportunities these “good” aspects represent?”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto

“When Venus progresses into contact with the natal Pluto, you are invited to allow another human being to intervene profoundly in your life. These people, at their best, can be recognized by their Plutonian intensity and honest self-revelation. They bring the sorts of insights which can only be realized in the context of intimacy. Are you capable of trusting at that level — or are you still in the grips of wounds that damaged your capacity to trust? Those are the questions. Venus is also connected to the aesthetic side of human character. If we are inclined in creative directions, its progressions to Pluto can signal an emergent ability to create symbols of the wound — and then to unravel them. The dark side of Venus-Pluto contacts, always optional, has two faces. In one, we simply distance the person who might help us so deeply. In the other, we draw to ourselves people who have a seductive, and ultimately destructive impact upon us, reproducing old, forgotten dramas of promises made and broken.”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto

“The same can be said for the knotty problem of sorting out our rights from our responsibilities. So far, we’ve emphasized adult responsibility — the ability to put off the gratification of one’s immediate personal needs and appetites for the sake of moral or ethical considerations, or one’s long-term purposes. In the same breath we must also recognize that no one who gives up all his or her own needs will remain healthy for long. There is a balance between the two extremes, and it’s not always easy to find. Ask any tired mother or father. That balance, too, must be learned from someone. Something went wrong with that mentoring process in your life. That is your Distorting Wound. What was it? Who failed you? No astrologer can know. But here are some possibilities. At the most obvious level, we can speculate about gross irresponsibility on the part of one or both of your parents. Abandonment. Neglect. Active abuse. Or we can raise questions about the competence of the parents. Here we may be looking at innocent intentions: the seventeen-year-old mother doing her level best, for example. Going further, we can imagine parents who were quite competent and responsible, but who so resented the burden that the gift was poisoned. Or parents who were overprotective, or overly directive, or “encouraged” a child through shaming, guilt-inducing behavior.”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto

“How can we relate the old sixth house to modern reality as it is actually experienced? The twin notions of subordination and humility are the key. To what do you subordinate yourself? And try to answer without bringing in any overtly religious or spiritual perspectives. What do you make greater than yourself, so that you freely sacrifice independence, impulse, and personal pleasure? Before what do you humble yourself? Here’s a hint: what are your plans for Monday morning? Ah yes: work. Most of us go meekly to work, maybe without burning enthusiasm, but voluntarily. And of course “going to work” may not involve employment in the simple sense; it may mean getting the kids off to school, the shopping done, and the meals prepared. Responsibility is the key idea — and the heart of the sixth house.”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto

“Pluto in the first house. You’ll read that this configuration suggests an impactful and intense character. That is generally a sound observation — more so if the rest of the person’s birth chart is full of fiery self-confidence.”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto

“Thus, were Pluto in Cancer as well as in the house of career, we would get a further hint about the nature of that source of fire and beer cans — they would have to do with the Cancerian need to protect and nurture something.”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto

“If Pluto lies there, we recognize that a source of intensity, fire and life-giving meaning potentially exists in that professional or vocational area of your experience.”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto

“Pluto is the part of human awareness that connects with the darkest, most tragic, most desolate perceptions a person can endure. But sitting on that rock I suddenly felt something else: that Pluto also represents what gives meaning to our lives. It holds for us that transcendent urge to do something beyond eating, earning, lusting and aging. I also learned that Pluto’s fierce message is that our lives are not inherently meaningful; that meaning must be actively, consciously created.”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto

“That warm feeling is utterly Plutonian. It is the emotional response to any action that imbues our lives with meaning.”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto

“All true Plutonian desires have as one of their dimensions a feeling of moral or philosophical meaningfulness. Regarding that idea, I have great certainty. But regarding my choice of words, I suffer grave doubts. “Moral” and “philosophical” are churchy terms that don’t readily connect with our bodies, our hungers, or our guts. In the last chapter, we spoke of the Shadow and defined it in part as everything that might get a person “hot” — which is to say on fire with hunger and desire, for good or ill. Once again, morals and philosophies don’t exactly leap to the top of the list. In fact, the training most of us receive typically pits our morals and philosophical principles against our hot desires. Morals don’t embrace desires; they contain them.”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto

“Regarding that idea, I have great certainty. But regarding my choice of words, I suffer grave doubts. “Moral” and “philosophical” are churchy terms that don’t readily connect with our bodies, our hungers, or our guts.”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto

“All true Plutonian desires have as one of their dimensions a feeling of moral or philosophical meaningfulness”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto

“The secret is so simple to say: the key to unleashing all the high, life-shaping potential of Pluto lies in knowing exactly what you want. And what stands between you and that knowledge is the distorting impact of lies, shame, cruelty, and so forth: the “beer cans” of our previous chapters.”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto

“That we cannot know what a graduate of conscious Plutonian experience will choose to do is a basic truth. The behaviors of individuated people are vastly more difficult to foresee than those of the walking wounded, who tend toward a handful of self-numbing patterns and a few deadeningly familiar acts of self-destructiveness or other-destructiveness”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto

“Personally, I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that conscious Plutonian work turns people into vastly more interesting creatures. They are certainly more energized. There is a quality of aliveness and presence in them often missing in the militantly well-adjusted, the militantly cool, the militantly spiritual. What will these Plutonian heroes do with their recovered vitality and recovered vision? Whatever they please...that’s the bottom line. They are free. And whatever they do, they’ll do it more happily than those who are still bleeding internally, unwittingly. As William Blake put it a century and a half ago, “Energy is Eternal Delight.”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto

“A man or woman who has consciously navigated Plutonian waters emerges from the process with a certain wildness...a barbarian, animal vitality. He or she does the unexpected, and is hard to categorize. The personality seems less a set of opinions, concepts and postures, and more an expression of spontaneous instinct. It typically develops more forthrightness and jagged edges, more intensity and markedly less patience with poseurs.”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto

“Pluto rips that kind of posing to shreds. If we handle the experience wisely and bravely, we break out of those soulless, dissociated states of fakery, however “politically correct” they may be. We absorb our own heat. We begin to burn with humanness and with vision, and with the kind of hunger that drives a person into true creative individuality.”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto

“Peace and tranquility are spiritual necessities; without them, we humans become very nervous—and with that nervousness comes restless, runaway worry and a frightened, obsessive concern with outward situations.”
― Steven Forrest, The Book of Pluto