Your ancestors' Pluto in your birth chart: Clockwise mapping for lost power and “fatal attractions”
by Rosana Cueto Merayo
Source: The Courier-Mail – T. Mathewson photo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photo edited by Astrodienst
Tracking the sign of our parents' and (great)grandparents' natal Pluto can be such a life-changing experience. Going clockwise with our birth chart and mapping what Pluto was doing long before we were born feels like a homecoming release, since a light is cast on blind spots and conflicted areas where we tend to feel “fated” to lose power. There is power in clock-wise reading, for it reveals perceived missing links in the relationships across generations and “fatal attractions” among our ancestors, all of which many of us feel summoned to include now in our sense of identity.
There seems to be a twofold reason for the intensity of our tracking Pluto back to previous generations. The first and more obvious layer is that we don't go clockwise that often in chart analysis. We grab the chart and instinctively go counterclockwise in search of the transits, progressions and directions ahead, and only more occasionally do we check perinatal and prenatal positions. So, reaching back for data beyond the barrier of our conception tends to feel odd to our astrological mind, pretty much like being right-handed and eating soup by using our left hand!
Yet, most particularly when it comes to idiosyncratic Pluto, that odd, unusual feel is most welcome, since it throws us into cosmic, transpersonal, amplified time and space perceptual mode, which is what the outer planets are all about. Breaking the habit of counterclockwise chart analysis will forever open the door for us to include more of what we don't know in our radar and render our analysis more potent. In fact, it facilitates brain hemisphere communication, thus enhancing our skills to merge that which we can perceive through the physical senses (matter) and that which we can't (spirit).
The second layer of digging into ancestral Pluto is alchemical in nature, with the 8th house of ancestors and legacy being the primal realm of magic, transformation and a good deal of healing. Liz Greene once explained in one of her webinars that, even though Pluto was unknown to the alchemists, in their imagery the figure of Death, shown as a skeleton and mirrored in the traditional Tarot image of Death, often accompanied the figure of Saturn, kronos, ruler of the nigredo or ‘blackening’ stage of the alchemical work. However, they were always represented as separate figures.
Being “a process leading to another process, rather than a final event, Death in alchemy describes the state of suspension and suffering that is necessary as a prelude to transformation and release”, Greene says. And I see this process, which the alchemists intuitively equated to the inner experience of Pluto transits, as occurring within every individual as a highly intimate experience, inasmuch as on a transpersonal level in the frame of a greater trans-generational maturation process.
So, by going backward in the birth chart to find the placements in which our ancestors' Pluto falls, we are in fact letting the horoscope breathe with some essential input that must have been lost to our consciousness. And, as you know, the sojourn of Pluto in Aquarius is likely to challenge us to deal more fully and adequately with a potential surge of information and data much needed in our inner freedom and survival quest.
When it comes to our great-grandparents, it is unlikely that we know their birthday, let alone their exact time of birth. Yet searching in the ephemeris the sign Pluto was transiting in the month and/or the year they were born, and then placing the spans of those degrees in the corresponding house in our own birth chart, can cast such a valuable light.
How to interpret ancestral/prenatal Pluto when the portal of language is not that useful any more
Any planet or asteroid orbiting beyond Saturn tends to challenge us to leave aside the realm of the mind by appealing to our intuitive and emotional senses, which are usually not our default. Once more, we are summoned to reverse-engineer and get into some sort of “suspension”, so that we can tune into the mystical, transpersonal frequencies that seem to lie so far away from our well-known sense of conscious identity.
To my mind, what works best with Pluto is the experimental approach of letting ourselves drift guided by the images, symbols and archetypes, rather than limiting ourselves by trying to figure out what its workings might have been while it transited Taurus or Gemini. Moreover, we will all agree that portals are hardly possible without a curious, courageous, experimental attitude.
Let me, then, point out the myths for each of the signs, that I find more useful to get started with the alchemy. I use the Greek myth of Harmony, and the dynamics of its complementary opposite, Eris, to dig into Pluto in Taurus. For Pluto in Gemini, my favourites are the acclaimed Oedipus myth and “The Appointment in Samarra” story, while for Pluto in Cancer I find that Socrates' allegory of the soul being driven by two horses works beautifully. For Pluto in Leo you may want to deepen into the Mesopotamian myth of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, who held both a lion and a snake in his hands. And for Pluto in Virgo I suggest combining the power of Merlin, the magician, with the Greek myth of Tiresias, the blind prophet of Apollo.
Additionally, it is useful to bear in mind the fact that, on the one hand, the stream of light of Aquarius is meant to infuse us with a strong awareness, whether acknowledged or not, that we all stand on the shoulders of giants. But this doesn't just happen in an impersonal socio-cultural, collective sense. This is also true of our family unit in terms of our inherited psychological, intellectual and spiritual legacy, a truth we may not always feel safe and/or comfortable honouring and which, for this very reason, may be exerting an unwanted, sabotaging impact in our current reality. As Carl Jung poignantly stated, we do not become enlightened by “imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious”.
On the other hand, Pluto's lessons on empowerment and survival skills will set some triggers in place in keeping with the nature of each time cycle, so that we actually feel compelled to enrich and evolve our sense of identity. And while it is true that it may do so through less usual extreme experiences of light and awakening, it will oftentimes resort to gold-to-be-mined episodes whereby we undergo immense heat and pressure, so that our innermost, most authentic essence can be distilled.
To this combination, which may seem to be explosive all in itself, we have to throw in the variable of the cornerstone of Choice, which will become exacerbated with Uranus' ingress in Gemini. In each of their own nuanced way, all of the three Air signs confront us with the necessity of bringing ourselves to make more conscious, soul-based choices in alignment with that essence. In Aquarius, Pluto's agenda arguably revolves around our potential to become real thinkers and constructive imagining individuals... if we are to survive the sequels of the collective choices made during the Pluto in Leo era.
What were those? Do we set the pause button once in a while to reflect on the impact of those choices on our current reality?
This is where clock-wise experimentation becomes handy, if not life-saving altogether!
Three generations of ancestors (born from 1824 to 1916) placed on a Swedish kurbits tree
Source: Unknown 19th & early 20th century photographers, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The fact is that we can hardly really grasp the choices our parents, their own parents and grandparents, made back in the 19th and 20th centuries, if we do not take into account how each generation experienced the survival instinct and took action to survive accordingly. So, let me go into counterclockwise mode again and put a little thread together, that shows how unresolved issues may be manifesting in our current reality:
I regard the Pluto in Taurus generation, born in the second half of the 19th century, as a group who forged their sense of self-esteem around resources, the land and “owned” territory and the need to keep an image of cohesion around that feeling of bonding on the grounds of niceness and goodness to each other. The ingrained belief that survival would only be possible if the herd was kept together, and harmony was preserved against all odds, must have made it all the more traumatic for them to cope with the dismemberment caused by the numerous wars and the dramatic major conflicting interests, which sprouted over that period.
All that pain and unprocessed emotional charge are likely to have been passed down to their Pluto in Gemini and Pluto in Cancer children as a legacy of “dangerous goods” - if not literally as a biohazard in the making - that was tackled through the use/manipulation of ideas in the first case, and through the toll those ideas/manipulation exacted on the unsolved management of the aggressive impulse and challenges of an underrated human emotional system.
The collective (mis)management of the aggressive impulse and its impact on the notion of homeland and tribe seem to have gained maximum exposure during the Pluto in Leo sojourn, when boundaries were even more dramatically transgressed through the nuclear portal, when piling-up collective feelings of having been humiliated, eclipsed and deprived of self-expression took center stage.
Then the Pluto in Virgo generation would come in to try to fix and sort it all out. They were mostly either at pains with their Pluto in Leo parents' daring to become “free electrons” - Let's give the adequacy of your boldness a second thought, thank you very much! - or uncomfortable with their Pluto in Cancer parents' feeble resolution in dealing with the consequences of one's own individual actions.
I know this meagre interpretation of such a complex matter as Pluto is only one way of looking at it. Yet, I find it revealing because it exposes some of the ways in which each generation's Pluto seems to emerge as a counter reaction to the previous generation perceived shortcomings. Generational Pluto can be even regarded as an unconscious defense mechanism set in place to compensate the deficiencies and generate new certainties for our human, mind-based, survival instinct. But of course this is only an incomplete, darker, reading of Pluto's evolutionary drive.
Pluto is definitely not only about darkness. And in the light of this brief analysis we also want to notice how the organic trine - indicative of innate gifts and talents - happening across our Pluto in Taurus ancestors and those of us born with Pluto in Virgo can encourage us unearth gifts to be mined. The same is true for ancestral Pluto in Gemini regarding Pluto in Libra descendants, and so on.
When this trine has become a personal matter in our birth chart, it means that we are the heirs of such legacy and have taken on the responsibility to let that gift come to fruition in this lifetime. I have noticed that one is particularly likely to feel that one's ancestors' Pluto in Taurus is a personal matter, if one's natal luminaries and/or Saturn are placed in Taurus and/or in the 2nd house.
Similarly, if your great-grandparents' Pluto was in Gemini and your natal Pluto is in Libra, you may feel called to bring healing and resolution to the choices and decisions they made, if your natal luminaries and/or Saturn are placed in Gemini and/or in the 3rd house. And if your ancestors' Pluto was in Cancer and your natal luminaries and/or Saturn are placed in Cancer and/or in the 4th house, you may feel driven or urged during over this period to come to process, contain and infuse with new meaning any deeper motivations and impulses, which run unchecked in the family line and are the source of unwanted consequences.
If we expand our reading we find that, if it is true that generally speaking shame and shame triggers are all-determining factors that will place us on the verge of extinction, the legacy of Pluto seems to go way far beyond any determinism. Pluto not only brings in challenges into our hero quest, but it also provides us with innate gifts and unexpected heritage, which may need generations to become manifest. In order to identify in what area of our life experience that is more likely to occur, we need to go clock-wise again and track the houses our ancestors' Pluto moved through in our birth chart.
Saturn-Pluto contacts, fatal attractions and your ancestors' legacy in your birth chart
I have found that fatal, or “fated”, attractions can be tracked down to Saturn-Pluto contacts in synastry. Most notably, the conjunction and inconjunct (or quincunx) aspects seem to bring about a higher intensity and impact, depending on both the exactitude and the reciprocity of the cross contacts, into the nature of the relationship and how it is experienced by the following generations.
For example, take the birth charts of any two people who were brought close together for some reason - fatal attractions are, arguably, not always sexual or romantic in nature. If the Saturn of one of them is placed exactly on the Pluto of the other AND vice versa, that is, the Saturn of the latter sits exact on the Pluto of the former, then a turning point in the karmic thread (cause-and-effect dynamics) of the family unit or group is in place.
Being not so common, such reciprocal exact contacts may feel as a sort of “doom” to the more sensitive members of the family unit or group, which can in turn translate into quite extreme episodes of light and/or darkness. And the unfolding of it may present itself immediately in the following generation or further away into the future, since Pluto can take its time when it comes to making the impact of choices made in the past explicit.
In and by themselves, Saturn-Pluto contacts across charts are not indicative that the individuals consciously chose the relationship. Rather, they must have been brought together through the sacred pentagram by the Mother of the Fates, Anake's principles of Force, Constraint, Necessity, Compulsion or Inevitability. Indeed, to the comforts of our personality, these may seem as the unwanted, darker drivers to be avoided and resisted at any cost...
Yet by developing the courage to embrace and honour our fate, we find that experiences of the utmost challenging kind operate both as triggers and custodians of those latent gifts and talents, which need layers and degrees of heat and pressure to come into the light of our conscious power. They, like everything else destined in this universe, just needed the right time to come through.
About the author:
Rosana Cueto Merayo is a professional astrologer currently based in Spain, where she is an Intuitive Coach and Life Strategist. Holding a Bachelor´s degree in English Language and Literature by the Universitat de Barcelona, Spain, she studied in the Faculty of Astrological Studies, London. She has kept on enriching an ongoing learning through different alternative approaches to the spiritual realm, which include several oracular languages that she uses in a pretty unique interpretation of the cycles of time. She is also the translator of the Eclipse Report by Bernadette Brady into Spanish at Astro.com.
C.G.Jung, Caroline Myss and Liz Greene are the main pillars of her intuitive coaching and astrological practice. She is the creator of the multilayered “Tu MetaCarta Astral” method of astrological analysis, which features several original astrological reports. And she is also the author of the novel Las Intermitencias del Amor, and of three non fiction books: Relaciones Kármicas, Tus Citas con el Cosmos en 2023 (Una Agenda Mágica) and La Parte de la Fortuna en tu Horóscopo.
Her website is https://astroarquetipicaholografica.com/
© Rosana Cueto Merayo 2025
