Pluto opposite Sun transit: meaning, duration and advice

The opposition places Pluto in the sign exactly opposite your natal Sun’s, a hundred and eighty degrees away. Your identity, your vitality and the direction you give your life find themselves facing the planet of power and transformation, and the face-off doesn’t play out inside you first: it runs through other people. What gets activated is your relationship to the strength of others, and to your own. Someone or something confronts you, challenges you, tries to influence you or to define you, and in that magnifying mirror your own ways of controlling, giving in, seducing or running away come into view when the stakes turn serious.

The everyday mood is intense, sometimes electric. A relationship takes on outsized importance, a disagreement festers well beyond what it deserves, a person seems to read you and to know exactly where to press. You swing between two reflexes: crushing so you won’t be crushed, or fading into the background so the storm will pass. Your vital energy fluctuates, very high in the confrontation, very low afterward. The questions that keep coming back concern the other person’s place: why does this person have so much hold over me? How much of my power have I handed over, and how do I take it back without breaking anything? Do I really want to win, or to finally be seen as I am?

This transit asks for a third way, neither domination nor submission: staying yourself in the presence of a force that matches yours, listening to what the adversary or the partner reveals about you without losing yourself in it. The risk of Pluto opposite the Sun is the permanent power struggle, the relationship that turns into a battlefield, the obsession with the other person; or else dispossession, the feeling that someone is deciding your life for you. The gift is a personal power that no longer needs an enemy: you discover that your strength isn’t threatened by other people’s, that there is room for two people to count, and your relationships come out of it more honest, more equal, rid of what was only a power game.

Pluto’s opposition to the Sun stretches over two to three years at a one-degree orb, depending on how fast the planet moves through the sign it is crossing. Because Pluto turns retrograde for about five months a year, the exact angle forms three times as a rule, five in some cases. The first pass sets up the counterpart and names what is at stake; the retrograde seems to ease the tension, then brings it back, and this is the time to change your stance rather than your arguments; the last pass sets a new balance. With a cycle of two hundred forty-eight years, this opposition happens once at most, and only if Pluto was already well ahead of your Sun in the order of the zodiac when you were born.

To find out whether this applies to you, calculate your free birth chart on the site and note the sign and degree of your Sun. If the sky-of-the-day page shows Pluto in the sign across from yours on the wheel, at the same degree give or take a degree or two, the opposition is active. Since Pluto stays in a sign for about twenty years, people close to you who share your Sun sign go through the same test of strength during the same stretch of years: compare notes.