(This piece is not—and should not be used—as a substitute for professional mental health support. Please exercise your discernment.)
Writing is a prayer. Art is a prayer. Yet, I am afraid we have been taught to pray to the wrong god. A god that has built homes, dungeons and caves so deep and wide into the interior of our psyche, that its roots stretch out into the dawn of time. Before hunger was exiled from the garden of Eden. Before we knew that our teeth existed, so that we can take a bite out of life. It’s difficult to know how far into the pie of your life this force had already helped itself to the moment you vomited yourself into this world. The false god that you meet at the threshold of change, the one that says your desires, thirst and creativity are dangerous. It needs to be regulated and needs permission from an outside source to exist. That you must not be inside yourself, otherwise you risk stumbling into death.
But what is it you will die towards? What is it that this god, who is merely a collection of thought forms that crystallised into a brutal dictator inside you, is afraid you will sacrifice at the altar? What is more dangerous than the rotting life that has squeezed you out like the final drop of a week-old lime that makes it into your warm water? What is this god afraid you will become when you no longer tremble at its presence? What you were born to be: Alive.
Plutonian activations demand your whole presence. You are forced to petition the goddesses and gods of the underworld with everything you’ve got. The snake is wrapped tightly around your throat, and your breathing is unstable. There is a rapid fire coiling from the base of your spine, and the heat and pressure of the lie is slowly killing you. You beg, please, whatever it is, take it. You see, you don’t make it out of purgatory without giving something up. What lies about yourself and the world are you going to throw into hellfire? What scandalous truth that was slithering around your back is now ready to show its face? What has been lurking beneath the psychodramas and projections that this false god used to keep you asleep, appearing during key stages of transformation, to drag you back into hell, in the name of shadow work?
This god uses the language of transformation but knows nothing of it. Because real transformation opens a third way. You queer into a mode of being that diverges from the old, even if the old sometimes knocks on your door. When it comes to Pluto in astrology, cookbook words we hear thrown about are destruction and extreme. There is a polarised way this archetype is spoken of, which in a sense is true to its nature, but also not helpful because humans are complex creatures. Our waters often run somewhere between hot and cold. Life is inherently a mystery and unknowable, but I am beginning to believe that this false god, in the midst of a Plutonian activation that wants to bring some powerful life force from the unconscious, cockblocks this activation from completing itself, because it fears the mystery. You do not know what this life force will turn you into. What kind of hungry, uncontrollable being with a large appetite you will become. The Midas touch that the forces of the true goddesses and gods possess may begin dripping from your pores.
I’ve always been surprised at how Pluto is called a mystery, but never alive. The process to reach this aliveness is messy and pretty dark, but all matter and all living beings go through this non-linear seasonal shift of decay and growth. We, humans, are not that special. The aliveness we have been taught to fear, that this fake god gate keeps, is where the answers to your biggest questions lie underneath. I am beginning to believe that uniting with this aliveness is a process worth suffering for, because Plutonian activations force you to get low into the ground so you can excavate trapped life force. So you can exit the artificial reincarnation cycle of constantly dying meaningless deaths and waking up to the same rotting life. The same power struggles, projections and leaving the driver’s seat empty for random shit to get in.
Pluto understands that not all deaths are equal, but they are all painful. The difference is that one is worth suffering for because you get to meet life. You get to be the author of your book and not a side character. Plutonian activations, though triggering, want to get the blood running again in your veins.
The fake god ushers you into a different kind of death. To illustrate, if you lock up a human body in a freezer while the blood is still running hot and the breath is moving, it will eventually freeze. Humans and neighbouring mammals are different from food. You can’t microwave them and bring them back to life. I know this image is macabre; we are in Plutonian domains after all. My point is Plutonian activations, as grim and gnarly as they are in the moment, visit us from the trenches of our psyche, the part of us that refuses to die a meaningless death.
In mytho-poetic-esoteric discourse, we often hear this reductive, toxically positive and polished narrative of how, after every death, there is new life. Yes, death is an alchemical process that ultimately begets new life. However, there is a lot happening during this transition. Sometimes the gap between death and new life is many years, and sometimes lifetimes. The length of time the transition takes is unique to each individual and is completely valid. Another Plutonian word is shame. How can we take off the veneers of an incredibly vulnerable, confronting and difficult process that many don’t survive both literally and figuratively and stop pretending that death and rebirth is another Tuesday at Taco Bell. This discursive nonchalance is a collective shadow that stems from spiritual and moral bankruptcy. We don’t have the language and the due process in place to help people die well from an old life or self. We don’t know how to be there for someone in the thick of complex grief because no one attended our funeral.
All that to say, there is a death that is generative, that yes, begets new life, but the truth is often we don’t know what the new life will look like; that’s why we ignore the pomegranate. We cling to the old life because the deathly screams of our psyche are unbearable. We want change, but we are afraid of the fake god we will meet at the liminal point. It is at this point that the fake god attempts to induce you into an anti-life death. One that locks you up in a freezer and convinces you that this is it. That was your shot at life. Just stay small, cold and lifeless, and you will be safe and free from danger. I will be on the lookout, so no one with the slightest bit of heat or blood comes near you lest you wake up to this lie.
This is a god of fear, apathy and resentment. A man-made construct that has now grown legs, a loud, abusive voice and a figure that towers over you. It gives you two choices, always. Never more. If you manage to outsmart it, it wears the mask of a person you trust with your life and spews the things you fear the most through their mouth. It distracts you by bringing “justice” to the other person in real life and “levelling the playing field”. In the eyes of the fake god, you can’t trust yourself. There is always danger and deceit lurking somewhere. Better to be malnourished and hungry than to risk being hurt. While you are distracted with this projective episode, it takes the mask off and wraps itself around you from behind like an old fan who turned into a creepy stalker whispering in one ear, “Yes, accuse them, tell them how terrible they are. Set yourself free from their tyranny and control. They don’t understand you, your demons and the messy parts of you. Only I do. Destroy the connection and run away to this freezer, where yes, it’s cold, but at least you are safe. No one can disturb you from this sleep.”
As you get lulled into this illusion, the dissonance grows wider, and the words of the living and fake god are not in congruence. I have noticed the fake god never reveals its true colours. They masquerade as your wounded inner child, ancestors, guides, higher self or a being in line with whatever cosmology resonates. Fill in the blank. They are constantly beckoning you into a death that keeps you forever stuck in purgatory and pain. They are summoning you to a grave that is your final destination. They are hypnotising you into a deathbed of regret where you will be taking your last breath thinking, “ what if I rode the wave of that anxiety spell and didn’t neatly fold the charge into the back room of my psyche? What if I didn’t believe that the creative power to direct my life was in someone else’s hands?”
This fake god will catch you where it hurts the most. If your identity is built around either being defined by this pain or being exiled from it, this can feel like you are being buried alive. This fake god will attempt to distort and fill the spaces in your psyche that have been left vacant because it wasn’t safe to exist in them. It will convince you in one way or another that safety is to remain exiled from yourself even when you have the tools and support to move through the threshold. I know this because I have been at a confusing threshold since 2024. There is always some random interruption or trigger that hijacks the momentum I build to begin something that I deeply desire. I am in the thick of four once-in-a-lifetime Pluto transits. As I have been digging the ground for clues, I have found hidden roots and networks of this threshold I am only now discovering, and it is extremely confronting.
I shaved my head a few weeks back when transiting black moon Lilith was exactly conjunct my natal Pluto and south node conjunct my ascendant. I may not be able to throw everything out now, but something had to go.
My question is: What kind of death is pursuing you? What voice appears at the threshold of your adjacent chapter ( because life is circular, not a straight line)? Who interrupts the ceremonial rites of passage that your ancestors and higher self are holding for you as you respond to the cosmic initiation of the present moment?
Often, during the heat of transition, when you are on the verge of throwing something old into the fire, the fake god will appear and use what you value against you. If you are someone who is dedicated to your healing journey and radical self-acceptance and honesty, it will mistranslate your attempt at changing an old internal scaffolding, as you are abandoning your shadows or not processing your pain thoroughly. It will accuse you of abandoning yourself because you are aligning yourself to a different timeline. It says you cannot be in multiple timelines at once. It locates peace and contentment as an empty ghost belonging to an undefined future. You must stay faithful to the weapon that wounded you. You must stay loyal to the strategies that once saved your life. It translates desire for growth and individuation as self-betrayal. The fake god wants you to become a more sophisticated version of your past self, armed with therapy lingo and journaling prompts, but without risking getting burnt by your own heat. By the living uncontrollable creature inside that is a reincarnation of the true goddesses and gods. It wants you far away from the empty rooms you were taught to fear. That way, you pull in dramas and distractions as a way to get a taste of the fire and heat that’s locked inside of you. As long as you’re pointing the finger outside of you, this suffering will loop and steal your life. The fake god wants you to prepare your funeral when, in the eyes of the universe, you are still a newborn.
Plutonian activations, which are unusually visceral during Pluto transits, bring forth dissonance you have danced around before, in full scorching heat. The “small” things you brushed under the carpet begin to feel like a tornado. The magnification of previously ignored patterns and spillages is not to punish you, but to initiate you into this central question: Do you want to Live (capital L)? Are you ready to walk on all fours on the muddy waters of the earth and listen to the heartbeat of your deepest desires? Plutonian activations ask: Which god are you praying to? If you’re going to pray, then pray to the creative energy that brought you into this world. Pray to the sensation that makes you froth quicker at the mouth than milk simmering above 100 C. Pray to the words that are crossing oceans to meet you. Pray to the art that is waiting to be made by you. Pray to the art that will help you get around the fake god. Pray to the art that will sing to the aches and the scared children inside of you.
Plutonian activations want you to meet the extreme moments of fear, trepidation and sorrow with tools that can help you transport life back to where it belongs. To muster the courage to open the doors of those hidden rooms that the fake god convinced you were too dangerous to enter. Tell the fake god, “ I am the captain now”, and I’ll take liberty in re-arranging the furniture in my house; hell, I’m throwing them all out.
Pluto is slow and goes retrograde half the year, so a single Pluto transit lasts almost three years. During a Pluto transit, different faces and angles of the same activation will likely show themselves. Trying to make it appear less intense ( or keeping up appearances, period) will only prolong the suffering and keep you exiled longer from the life that’s trying to emerge. Pluto also governs defence mechanisms that emerge from a deeply unconscious level. Sadly, and I know this intimately, sometimes we are defending ourselves from, through projection, the very freedom and space we wish to occupy in our lives. You must see it, dance it, talk it, write it and create through it. Do not be swallowed by the fake god.
I am an astrologer who is not a fan of answers, partially because I don’t have them, but also, I don’t believe they contain the life we think they do. I believe reassurance, sacred witnessing, and co-regulation from a trusted and safe person are valuable, but not answers. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke said in letters to a young poet, you must live your questions, and maybe someday, far in the future, you will find yourself living the answers. I am interested in questions that create a before and after. I am salivating for questions that split timelines open with a sharp, hungry knife, while my knees buckle from the pressure and my stomach makes backflips. In my previous essay for the Taurus New Moon, I wrote about a taboo question I asked a friend at 16 that I am living the answer to today.
Yes, these bloody oppressive systems live inside us too, but that’s only one part of the story. You have more than two choices. Don’t listen to the fake god who’s tempting you with the fast life of freezing to death. The difficult work of reuniting with the part of you that knows it has more than two choices is fruitful and generative. The most valuable riches in the world can’t be seen. I read somewhere that diamonds are so rare that all the real diamonds in the whole world can fit into one London double-decker bus. Be a diamond. Be the rare thing that crawls out of the soil after the house is burnt to a crisp from the fire of your transformation. The most valuable things live underground, bursting and pulsating in the molten lava core of the earth. Find your riches. Find yourself.