Pluto Crossing Ascendant
Art by Svein Nordrum
The year that Pluto crossed my Capricorn Ascendant was a MASSIVE initiatory gate for me.
It showed me how far I’d go to betray myself in pursuit of the archetype of the “Good Wife/Good Mother” that I’d been conditioned to play my whole life. I just about died to play that role. To stay bound up in chains of white.
Fifteen years prior, reeling from my parents divorce, I almost broke free. But I stuffed myself so tightly back into the good girl box and threw away the key. I arrested the process of spiritual death.
It was only Pluto, in his compassionate cruelty that helped me escape. Everyone else in my world conspired to keep me bound and gagged.
Sound familiar? It’s a little like the patricized version of the myth of Persephone. I would not willingly go to the underworld to gain my own soul. I needed Pluto to drag me there.
And maybe that’s why this new version exists. Because we are so accustomed to reaching for the light. We are constantly striving to be good. To be someone else’s version of worthy, that we don’t willingly choose the descent.
In 2012, after finding my birth family, and learning that one of my biological sisters had been named the same name, and after hearing the words, “do not ever contact us again”...Everything I believed about myself, my purpose, and the journey I was on was immediately stripped away. I fucking shattered. Broke completely open. It was as if I didn’t exist. I wasn’t real. Pain seared into my skin. The experience branded me.
I had seriously believed that if I was good enough, there was no possibility that my mother could reject me. I brought what I thought was my best, but it wasn’t even close to enough. My whole existence prior to that had been centered around finding my way back to them. But honestly, I had been miserable. This model of striving for goodness was killing the me inside of this persona.
After the vessel that held me together shattered, though I tried, there was no possibility of putting the pieces back in their original configuration. Every time I did, the pain of moving through each day was unbearable. Nothing could ever be the same. And until I surrendered to the new reality that had emerged, I was stuck. The only sane choice was to give birth to a new iteration of self. The authentic one.
Every nerve ending was electrified as I journeyed through the shadowlands. But I discovered that the land was fertile here. And if I could only submit all the way, flowers would grow out of the manure of my pain.
It’s not as if I arrived in the Underworld and immediately knew what to do. I clawed my fingernails bloody trying to escape.
The Underworld is a Place that holds an inherent immanence. Timelessness. There is no escape from the intensity of raw aliveness here. A giant rip in the matrix appears, and the wound opens. We fall through, into groundless, realness. It cuts away all illusions of control. And forces us to submit. There is nowhere to run, no safe harbor when the underworld rises up to swallow us whole.
Underworld experiences aren’t the same as the mini pangs of intense emotionality that we fend off day to day. Underworld experiences hold a Sacred Wound, the unhealable, unknowable, mystery that has come to initiate us. It is the landscape of birth. That’s why in Erishkagel’s throne room, we find her there on the floor, writhing with pangs of labor.
Understanding that I was pierced by the Goddess, I now have been much more willing to surrender to the forces of the deep darkness when they come to feast on the decay of my illusions.
When I sense the vultures circling overhead, I don’t numb out, or search for cover. I don’t get stuck in stagnant inaction, rather I start moving towards unclenching my fists, and unwinding my patterns of control. I remind myself that the real Persephone willingly took herself to the Underworld, where she eventually reigned as Sovereign Queen.
The current models we have of descent and rebirth are incomplete, and have left us without a template for metaphorical death.
Descent and resurrection was never intended to only happen after death. And without this template, we get stuck. I believe this partially responsible for the immaturity plaguing the planet. We don’t know how to die.
In Eleusis, followers of Demeter gathered at the temple once a year to practice the rites of resurrection. Freddi Sylva recently discovered temples dedicated to these rites all over ancient Europe that were positioned towards the winter or summer solstice. Indicating more frequent rites were held there.
The year Pluto crossed my ascendant, the work of several astrologers brought forward deep work on the Venus Cycle. Which unlocked secrets about how the ancients worked with her. For the last several years I’ve been journeying with Venus as she enacts the myth of Inanna every 19 months, just as the Babylonians did. Being initiated into the cult of Demeter. Learning how to die again, and again, and again.
*On this timeline, we are at the 3rd Gate of Ascent. Venus is approaching the midpoint of her Evening Star Phase. Initiating us into healthy emPOWERment.
