Hall - The Hades moon: Pluto in aspect to the moon

The dark moon leads to the underworld, but it also makes transformation possible.

Demetra George

E VERY THREE DAYS or so, as it wends its way around the zodiac, the cyclical, receptive Moon makes a major contact with the planet Pluto, Lord of the Underworld: known in Greek myth as Hades, The Invisible One. The celestial bodies make contact for only a few hours each time, but the effect is extremely powerful. This dark chthonic contact between Pluto and the Moon is the Hades Moon. The resulting subterranean convulsions, mirrored in our inner psyche, have been captured in myth and imagination since time began. It is a particularly graphic illustration of the hermetic principle as above, so below: as within, so without. Our psyches resonate with the movements of the planets, our consciousness vibrates to the archetypal energies of the ancient gods with whom they are linked. Our inner and outer realities are tied to the tides that flow in deepest space, in the collective unconscious, and in the innermost particles of our being. We are the planets.

The Hades Moon story is an eternal saga of birth, death, and rebirth; abandonment and rejection; catharsis and crisis; hubris and nemesis; karma, transformation and new life. It is the eternal saga of suffocating, symbiotic and incestuous matriarchal patterns interwining down the generations to suck life from the blood-kin. This dark Moon underlies eternal mysteries and taboos. It drives the great dramas of life. No other planetary contact has such a depth of trauma, compulsion, and alienation. No other aspect has quite the same metamorphic and healing potential. Understanding Moon-Pluto contacts means opening to the possibility of renewal and regeneration, not just on a personal levelbut for the planet and humankind as a whole.

Seven generations, half a century of personal initiation, and twenty years experience as a karmic astrologer lie behind this book. I have a tight square from Pluto to the Moon, intensified by the Scorpio placement of the Moon and accentuated by Pluto on the Ascendant. With a family history of Moon-Pluto aspects going back five generations and forward into the next two, and seemingly endless karma carried over from other lives, I was compelled into the Plutonian underworld of emotional trauma and covert power struggles. I had to connect the instinctual fears of a paranoid Moon with the alienated, deeply enigmatic Pluto energy, and somehow find the power to transform the archaic patterns held within its depths. To encompass the destructive patterns of other lives, with their toxic emotional residue, within the healing potential of this cathartic aspect. Healing in this context does not mean curing or getting rid of, nor making better. The healing lay in acceptance of this dark side of myself. I needed to recognize loss and endings as part of the cyclical experience of life. I had to plug into the positive, regenerative aspect of Pluto to activate my own creative lunar energies. It was a life or death struggle, and I made the journey to the purifying flames of Pluto's realm many times. But each time I emerged stronger, with new insights. Each time a small piece of my inner self was transmuted, and gradually I began to recognize the purpose behind the aspect. Pluto is, after all, the Bringer into Consciousness as well as Lord of the Dead.

Although I had been working with astrology for some time, my first real insight into the effect of the Hades Moon came almost twenty years ago when I had a consultation with Howard Sasportas. Looking back, and after having had the privilege of knowing Howard well for many years, it still amuses me to remember Howard pussy-footing around for twenty minutes while trying to hone in on this particular part of the chart. Anyone who knew Howard will know that, direct and to the point Aries that he was, he rarely ever skirted issues. But, as he said after the consultation: For all knew, here was some little housewife from Essex coming with no knowledge of all this power, and all this karma she had to take hold of. When he finally did point to that Pluto on the Ascendant with its square to the Moon and tentatively said: This often indicates mothering karma and maybe death around childbirth, and I responded quite casually with: Oh yes, I know I died in childbirth last time round, his face was comical to behold.

I told him that, at the birth of my daughter in this present life, I had had a near death experience in which I was somewhere on the ceiling watching myself as I struggled in the cold and clinical environment of a teaching hospital to give birth. I was also watching myself in a very different scene: a straw-filled pallet on a cold earth floor with an old crone trying to deliver the baby. Around me were several children. We were desperately poor and I just could not stand it, and opted out. Many years later, just before I met Howard in fact, someone said to me accusingly: You were my mother but you died and left me. And he went on to relate exactly that same scene. In the near death experience, the guide who was with me said: You opted out before, you are opting out now. You will have to come back yet again. So, you have a choice, to go or to stay and see it through. I stayed, reluctantly, not really knowing what I was taking on. Within six months my husband was dead and I had to bring up my daughter alone. In our consultation, Howard had touched on the issues of loss, rejection, and abandonment that so often accompany the Hades Moon.

When Howard spoke about the Pluto-Moon connection with the Devouring Mother, and the mothering karma that passed down the generations, a great deal clicked into place. Suddenly my childhood made sense. At the time I was not consciously aware that all my female relatives as far back as I could trace had strong, stressful Pluto-Moon contacts. But I knew it made sense of the family history. For some time after the consultation I consoled myself with the thought: Well, what do you expect with a pattern like that. I went into therapy to deal with my mother problem and my poor mother was blamed for a great deal until one day I suddenly had the dreadful insight: I, too, was a Pluto-Moon mother, as my daughter would no doubt testify. It was one of those life-changing moments, a true albeit painful revelation. This was the point where I had to stop blaming my parents and take responsibility for my own life: a decision that brought tremendous changes. My Hades Moon did not go away, but the eruptions of my unconscious were channelled into constructive pathways rather than being left to blast the unfortunate person who happened to inadvertently trigger them. In time, I learned to know my dark places very well indeed.