Pluto through the Generations

In evolutionary Astrology we treat Pluto quite different to modern Astrology, we give it more power and potency - and make it more personal and relevant to us.

Yet still - it is a generational planet.

Pluto marks the underlying emotional themes of entire eras. In this blogpost I am looking into the core themes and patterns that we find through each generation - the unconscious content a generation is born into, shaped by, and asked to evolve through.

I am not the first one to do so - there are many astrologers out there who have done the same. Yet still I wanna give it more an evolutionary perspective, while also looking to the political aspects of each Pluto generation as well as what emerged through song, poetry, books and science.

But before we dive I wanted to briefly touch upon something else - isn't it an interesting thing how Pluto is the planet in Astrology, yet in the scientific community it isn't qualified as a planet anymore?

What does that decision symbolize collectively?

Don't you think it so beautifully demonstrated our modern relationship to death, depth, transformation, and the unseen forces that shape us?

Pluto is the underworld. The invisible. The shadow.

It governs everything we can’t quite classify: trauma, rebirth, the slow dismantling of false identities. And perhaps that’s exactly why it was removed from planetary status - not because it lost relevance, but because we struggle to name, let alone honor, what we can’t control.

But Pluto's influence and power isn't removed, after it lost the title of being a planet. It is just pushed a little deeper into our subconscious.

To me, this act of scientific distancing reflects a collective resistance to confronting the very forces Pluto rules: grief, destruction, renewal, surrender, truth.

But astrology never stopped listening. Here we still hold Pluto as sacred.

And maybe that, in itself, is an act of remembering what the world keeps trying to forget. Let's start with Pluto in Leo. Pluto was in Leo from 1937 to 1958. Through the lens of evolutionary Astrology, Pluto in Leo represents a soul that comes out of a past, in which they were some sort of upper class. There are endless scenarious how this could have played out, but lets think here for a moment about the medieval seperation between the rich and the poor. (Not that so much has changed today)

There's still a distant memory of being something special, sitting within their subconscious. And this of course comes out to play at certain times. We can find a strong need to be seen, for who they are, in Pluto in Leo people. Validation is to be found through status, money and fame. But simultaneously strong then the need for validation is the Pluto in Leo's dirve to express itself. The need to create. To need to move, sing, write - whatever form creativity can take place. But it is also the generation that was born after the second world war. And the war trauma still weights heavily on them, passed on by their parents. This is of course true for some countries more strongly than others, but let's not forget the collective fear that moves through each of us, when there is some event like a world war. Everything is in transition and certainty and stability seems to be something distant.

Isn't that a funny contradiction? Souls coming from a past in which they were leaders nobles, or recognized figures - people who knew how to command a room, how to express their light, how to shape culture through presence - and yet still, they were born into a world trembling with fear, rebuilding itself from the ashes of war.

So while the Pluto in Leo soul remembers power, significance, and self-expression… the body it incarnated into arrived in a world where survival, silence, and self-containment were often necessary.This creates an inner split:

A deep soul longing to be seen — and an inherited anxiety about standing out.

On a world scale we can see the tension between societal expectation, the weight and pressure to rebuilt society, yet also the desire to be free, wild and expressive.

It’s no surprise then, that this generation has struggled with both ego inflation and ego suppression. Some responded by trying to reclaim their “throne” - through wealth, visibility, leadership, or rebellion. Others collapsed under the weight of inherited fear and never fully accessed the creative fire that lives within them.

Being raised by parents that are used to supress their emotions and only focus on their essential needs, pushed the Pluto in Leo generations out of their inwarded self grandiour and made them focus on the needs of the collective. Just like the Pluto polarity point of Leo - in Aquarius - asks these soul to do. The opposite sign of your Pluto represents the Pluto Polarity point. It represents the evolutionary direction of a soul or in this example - a generation. It is in it's opposite

Where Pluto shows the karmic past - the soul’s unresolved desires, attachments, control issues, or trauma - the PPP reveals the medicine, the unfamiliar terrain your soul must now explore and grow into.

Think of Pluto as where you’ve been. The Polarity Point is where your soul is trying to go.

Yet this is also the generation where we saw the first big stars being born - Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Bob Dylan - just to name a few. And here we find the wound of the lion reflected through song lyrics. In song lyrics we found themes around the desire to be love - “Take my hand, take my whole life too / For I can’t help falling in love with you.”, identity crisis and a struggle with meaning “I can't get no satisfaction / 'Cause I try and I try and I try and I try...”, the cost of needing to put up a show and perform "Look at all the lonely people"... I could go on an on.

But it wasn’t only music that revealed this generation’s karmic tension.

We saw it reflected in the literature of the time - authors and poets wrestling with ego, alienation, meaning, and the pressure to live authentically in a rapidly shifting world. Writers like Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and James Baldwin used the written word to confront identity, personal power, and the fracture between performance and truth.

Take Plath’s The Bell Jar, a haunting portrait of inward collapse beneath outward expectation — the Leo wound, internalized. Also in science we see the polarity of Leo and Aquarius being activated - space race, nuclear advancement, and quantum discoveries show the deeper evolutionary understanding from ego-centric consciousness (Leo) toward a collective, interconnected understanding of reality (Aquarius). And in politics?

Culturally, the Pluto in Leo generation was the first in the modern era to reap the benefits of a booming economy and advancing technology, which freed up the labor force to do something other than work. As the planet of the underworld in the Sun’s sign would have it, this generation made their individual desires front and center. Woodstock and the 1969 Summer of Soul festival showed that Baby Boomers were keen on having fun and expressing their sense of style. Enter the era of the hair (read: shags and afros) and an obsession with royal “crowns.” What’s more, they were the first modern generation to have enough disposable income on a large scale and could therefore afford to delve into their own needs and wishes.

As the decades have progressed, we’ve seen how the Pluto in Leo generation’s self-realized agenda didn’t always translate into benefits for the community. The Plutonian urge in Leo settled into fixed-sign conservatism. Reaganism and trickle-down economics shaped much of the US financial policies, while Pluto in Leo representatives constituted the majority demographic in congress. We then witnessed the ramifications of the increasing atomization of family units and the dissolution of community safety nets and support. The shadow of Pluto in Leo is that it puts the individual first at the expense of the collective. 

Yet, Pluto in Leo shows us that it only takes one person to bring about a watershed moment in history. See also Muhammad Ali’s resistance to the Vietnam War draft, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ability to change a generation, and one solo informant called Deep Throat who brought about the eventual impeachment of a corrupt President Nixon.