The ultimate test of fitness, the Pluto function strips away all but the essential core of being, and modulates values and consciousness to a larger, more inclusive, trans-Saturnian context.

The higher octave of Mars. Regeneration, death and rebirth. Purging, elimination and essentialization. Compulsion and extreme means. Dictators and their absolute power. Sheer egomania. Nuclear energy and its waste. Mass control and manipulation. Unrestrained catabolic forces and their results. Eruptions of the unconscious. Pluto carries the name, and much of the significance, of the Roman god of the underworld.

Pluto is the great reducer, stripping away all that is unessential, leaving nothing but what simply is. Ruthlessly destroying all glamour, Pluto symbolizes the power enabling one to cast away all but one’s essential dharma, one’s fundamental truth of being. In so doing, it presents the possibility of psychological and spiritual rebirth, and it provides the conditions leading to reintegration around a new center of being. In your birth chart, Pluto symbolizes how you can best refocus and restructure your life and your personal energies, how to modulate your center of being to a higher level. Pluto shows where the urge toward radical transformation is most active in your life, and how it can be exercised most constructively.

Retrograde indications and gender shading for the planets Mars outward can provide an astrologer with a powerful set of keys to psychological dynamics, instruments which can be used with destructive and oppressive results. In a sense, it is fortunate that gender shadings and deeper retrograde interpretations of the astrological planets beyond the earth's orbit are almost entirely unknown to virtually every practicing astrologer today. Although a number of professional and amateur astrologers have attempted to coax me into revealing "the secrets" of gender shading and, especially, retrograde interpretation and how to use astrology to reveal deeper levels of psychological dynamics, none have succeed.
      Their attempts have been unsuccessful because almost everything I have witnessed in recent years indicates that the "astrological community" is simply unable and unready to use such knowledge in a wise and responsible manner. Such knowledge is my both "intellectual property" — accumulated over more than thirty-five years of psychological and astrological study, practice and experience — and the legacy of the continuum of the great pioneers of modern astrology who proceeded me. It is also my duty to use and dispense such knowledge wisely and responsibly.
      The recent resurgence of intense interest in the "legitimatization" and official acceptance of astrology merely reinforces my conviction that the "astrological community" is unfit to handle the real power of astrology. Recent attempts to aid such a program through the establishment of an academic foundation for astrology and the testing and certification of practicing astrologers will ultimately give rise to a power-hungry, controlling, self-perpetuating organization, perhaps not dissimilar to the American Medical Association. Additionally, a legitimatized and officially acceptable form of astrology will necessarily be put to use by exploitive forces in business and politics, and no group or association of astrologers, or college of astrology, will be powerful enough to regulate how the real forces of our society use and misuse the power of astrology. The implications of an officially accepted astrology and the Pandora's Box it will inevitably open has long been a concern of the proponents and exponents of humanistic astrology, a topic explored in-depth in Part Two of my Humanistic Astrology Revisited and in Rudhyar's From Humanistic to Transpersonal Astrology, as well as in his An Attempt at Formulating Minimal Requirements for the Practice of Astrology.