Becoming a Companion of the God of the Underworld
Down in the guts and spew of the underworld, the feelings press close. I restrict my inhalation, wishing to avoid the putrid air. My neck and shoulders constrict; getting a full look around is impossible. The only thing to do is curl tighter inward.
Beside me is Pluto, Hades, the god of the underworld, a demanding and brutal guide. And an unwavering one. They will not let me up until the job is done. The process is painful, but there is a promise: keep compressing, squeezing, concentrating the self until it seems to be nothing. It will not disappear but rather turn inside out and unfurl in slow motion into something new.
My extended stay in the underworld, land of death and transformation, began around six years ago when transiting Pluto started its square of my natal Mars-Saturn-Pluto stellium. In non-astro speak, that means that starting in 2017 the life experiences coming to me began to break down first external and then internal structures that determined how I relate to others and, most pointedly, to myself.
Because Pluto is an incredibly slow moving planet, its transit over these key points in my chart has taken years, matching the function of Pluto the archetype, which is to creep along like lava on a flat plain, forever changing everything it flows over with scalding heat and constant pressure.
Image description: Raven from Teen Titans Go! With her slight frown and the flat drape of her purple hooded cape, Raven is like Pluto: she doesn’t seek approval by trying to be something she’s not.
Source: https://dcsuperherogirls.fandom.com/wiki/Raven_(Teen_Titans_Go!)
As the ruler of profound transformations, Pluto ushers in death in order to create the conditions for rebirth. With no judgement, Pluto accompanies things that are dying. Pluto has no wish for things to be tidy, no expectation for things to return to normal when what is called for is to dry up and wither, break down into smaller and smaller pieces until worms and microorganisms can consume the fragments and excrete a new form, something with a different function now, a shifted animus, an altered identity.
Pluto knows that this is not an easy process for us humans. We resist change with all our might, especially when what’s on the other side is a total unknown. The intense, extended pressure of a Pluto transit feels excruciating and unjust. How could the universe be beating up on us so much? But there is no other way to dissolve the protective yet corrosive casing of the self-attacking beliefs we hold about ourselves.
At the beginning of my own Pluto transit period—my long visit to the underworld that I initially had no idea would last for at least the next six years—the first trips and falls shook me, but I picked myself up, adjusted course, and continued on. When I found myself on the edge of a crumbling cliff, I strove to adapt. I took alternate routes, went the long way around. I resisted the changes at first, then acquiesced to the smaller ones. I fought against the bigger ones and, exhausted, eventually gave in to those too. Time after I time I struggled to maintain my grip on old ways of being and in the end felt them disintegrate into dust in my hands.
Part of me could sense my own growth and evolution. I began my work with tarot and astrology and came to understand the true nature of the journey my soul was on. I devoured books on codependency, emotional neglect, living with a highly sensitive nervous system. Still, as time went on and there seemed to be no resolution to my struggles, I felt utterly worn out. Each time I crested a summit I thought that I had made it to the top, but there was more to climb. As I trudged on, Pluto pulled me down deeper.
The fifth year, 2022, I spent in the deepest, loneliest caverns of the underworld. In the preceding years I had ended a potent romantic relationship, closed my small business, started a new one and closed it too, moved away from a country where I had worked hard to establish permanent residency, cared for my mother who had suddenly become disabled and then lost her within six months, and come out as trans and nonbinary. After all that, I thought I should be done with change. What more did I have to release? What more did I still have that needed to die?
But 2022 turned out to be perhaps the most intense part of the saga. Transiting Pluto came to square its own place in my natal chart, an extremely brutal and transformative configuration that astrologer Howard Sasportas called “one of the most testing transits that we will experience in the span of our lives.” For me this held true: all external trappings had already been stripped away; I would now have to sift through the putrifying muck at the bottom of my most remote inner swampland.
I spent more time with the lord of the underworld this year than with anyone else. Pluto’s company made me short-tempered, irritable, exhausted, enraged, hopeless, numb, hypersensitive, obsessive, inarticulate, and deeply, deeply sad. It made being around other people often intolerable and it seemed to make other people not want to be around me. I was on my own, which is the exact and only way that Pluto will have it.
I relied heavily on the tools I’d learned to use along the way, going to my tarot deck again and again, staring at my chart for hours trying to find the key to unlock my suffering, returning to daily readings in Melody Beattie’s The Language of Letting Go. I was still resisting, still wanting to hold on to my last protective/corrosive shield. Without it, I would be totally exposed; how could I possibly let it go?
Image description: yellow and purple violas (flowers) amongst green and brown foliage.
In true Pluto fashion, it was a microscopic process of decomposition. There is no single moment when an apple core ceases being that which it was and starts being something new—those magic granules of humus.
In my case I was terrified to thaw the shriveled apple core I’d kept hidden and frozen under my heart. I was terrified to release it and let it pass through a natural process of decomposition and transformation. Even though it no longer gave me any nourishment, I was convinced that it was all I had. And that what would come out the other side would be wrong, horrific, rejected.
A deeply-rooted belief told me that the only way to survive was hustling to make sure others approved of me in any and all situations, even at the expense of my own sense of self. Now I had finally gone deep enough that I was facing the unsustainability of this belief. The level of discomfort was unreal as I simultaneously let go and clung on with my claws. In fits and starts, different behaviors started to roll out of me: tending to my own needs, then feeling wretchedly bad; saying no, then feeling guilty; refusing to plaster on a socially-acceptable appearance when I was really experiencing rage, bereftness, exhaustion, dissatisfaction, disappointment, and isolation, and then experiencing terror as I imagined being outcast and condemned for daring to let these show.
Pluto didn’t give up on me. They kept me down there with them, right by their side as I fought and let go, fought and let go, again and again but in changing proportions, until I was mostly letting go and somehow I was different.
After spending a lifetime shaving off parts of me and twisting myself and detesting who I am, the prospect of coming face to face with the reality of myself was truly the most terrifying thing I could imagine.
But my imagination was unequivocally wrong. What was left was not a horror. It was just me. It was fully me.
Transiting Pluto made its final exact square to my natal Pluto on December 4, 2022, which astrologically signals that my time in the underworld is coming to an end. I like to think that the cosmos are a reflection of the work our souls are engaged in, rather than the other way around, and so in a way it could be said that my letting go, my release of those final protective barriers, has allowed Pluto to advance in its orbit. I may be coming up to aboveground now, but I will always know that I am capable of inhabiting the space below and that I learned the secret of becoming a companion to its formidable ruler.
