Successful Experiment with Pluto Remediation
For the past several years Pluto has been transiting my natal Venus, which, as you can probably imagine, has been extremely difficult (understatements anyone?). Pluto finally made its last exact pass this year and started to move along, but its retrograde brought it back close enough that I started to feel it again. Remediation (methods of improving your relationship with a difficult planet) has been my go-to for resolving difficult transits ever since I learned it, but unlike the seven traditional planets, Pluto didn't have an established method for remediation so I was reluctant to try it. This time though, I decided desperate times called for desperate measures, because at the very least it wouldn't hurt.
I was taught (shout out to @adapembroke 's Planetary Remediation Astro Talk), that one of the most foolproof ways to do remediation for a planet was to read the Orphic Hymn to the planet on the associated planetary hour of the planetary day for a month (so, once a week for four weeks). Because I'm impatient, I ended up adjusting that to reading it once a day on the planetary hour (usually starting on the day of the planet) and then going for as long as felt right--sometimes a week, sometimes a month or longer. Reading it daily felt like it moved the process along more quickly and kept the energies of the planet more at the forefront of my mind.
In the case of Pluto, this brought up several questions. The first and most pressing was which Orphic Hymn to use. There is an Orphic Hymn to the deity Pluto, but quite a few astrologers have argued that Dionysus' mythology actually fits the way Pluto behaves more closely. I decided to go by feel--I would start with the hymn to Pluto, and figured I would get direction if I should be talking to someone else. And honestly, I wouldn't really argue if Pluto the planet started behaving more like Pluto the deity, instead of just trying to burn everything down to the ground. Second, Pluto doesn't have its own planetary days and hours. Since Pluto is often called the higher octave of Mars--a similar energy to Mars but on a transpersonal, collective level--I decided to use the day and hour of Mars with one exception: the planetary hour at dawn on the day of Mars felt like it belonged more specifically to Mars and that it wouldn't be right to address Pluto during that time instead. So, hour of Mars, except for dawn hour on Tuesday.
Because of everything going on at the time, I didn't wait to start on Tuesday, I started on Monday. I lit a candle like usual and then read the Orphic Hymn twice--once directed at Pluto the deity and once directed at Pluto the planet. It felt sort of like introducing myself and stating my intent, and I felt no push back about addressing the hymn to Pluto, so there was no need to change to Dionysus. The next day I started out trying to read it just to the planet, but it didn't feel finished until I read it to Pluto the deity and then again to Pluto the planet. I thought of it like how Kyle Pierce had described during his lecture on Essential Dignity--the ancient Greeks didn't see the planets as gods themselves, they saw them as platforms that the gods made their pronouncements from. So as I read the hymn, I was connecting the two, letting Pluto the deity know that I would be addressing Pluto the planet as his platform in the solar system. The energy that day was very intense and heavily Plutonian--it made it very obvious that Mars was the correct planetary time to choose. The following day I again read the hymn to both the deity and the planet, but this time I felt an almost annoyed vibe from Pluto the deity, as though to say "we've already established this." From then on I was able to read the hymn to just Pluto the planet with no issues, just like for the seven traditional planets.
When I had done remediation for other planets, I'd noticed that the first day often felt intensely like my preconceptions of the planet, and then the energy would shift as I went to something that was easier to understand and work with. Almost like the remediation brought my baggage to the surface to be cleared so that I was then able to gradually align better with what the planet was trying to teach me. I was hoping for something similar with Pluto or at least a better understanding of the energies that I could work with without hurting myself. Honestly the feel of it never got particularly comfortable, but it did shift. Parts of the Orphic Hymn stuck out to me as I read them, and a question popped into my head early in the week--"What needs to die?"--that I mulled over for a while before settling on an answer. On the last day, I wondered if I might need to do the remediation for longer than a week. But as I did the final reading, it felt done--solidly, reassuringly, you've finished.
I didn't get flashy results, but things that had been threatening to fly apart once again changed course and started to come together instead. I also noticed that even the faster planets transiting over Pluto were less jarring. Similar to how Mercury retrograde stopped bothering me as much once I'd done Mercury remediation. Overall the results were positive, and I decided to wait and see how things worked out longer term.
Two weeks later, @adapembroke (who has been going through a Pluto square natal Mercury transit, which honestly sounds like Mercury retrograde with added rocketfuel) described the latest round of related shenanigans: "My internet is down because somebody at my ISP botched a firmware update, and it is apparently going to take them 4 days to roll the update back and restore internet to my house 😭" I mentioned that I'd experimented with Pluto remediation and that it did in fact seem to be a thing if she wanted to give it a shot. After we chatted about the hows and whys of what I'd done and what my experience was like, she decided to try it. What I thought was really cool was that she had the idea that using the night time Mars planetary hours would be especially apropos for Pluto, given its underworld associations (and that gave me an additional clue to why I felt like dawn was not an appropriate time).
Late that night she relayed what had happened. She said usually she burns incense or herbs related to the planet, but there were none listed for Pluto in the book she uses, and additionally she was pregnant, so she skipped that part, but didn't get the feeling that it was a problem.
"[S]o, I prayed the Orphic Hymn to Pluto. I usually spend some time listening as part of the remediation, and I felt like Pluto was like, 'We know why you're here.'
I was like, 'Don't hurt me, bro.'
And he was like, 'Yeah, don't hurt me bro.'
So, I went about my evening. Shortly after that, the internet came back, and I got an e-mail from my car insurance that they're dropping my bill by 25%. Pluto-Mercury square. Travel and internet ruled by Mercury... 🤯"
We were both mindblown over how quickly and dramatically it had worked--Ada has also done plenty of remediation before and she said "I have never had a response like that before." Considering how difficult and life-altering Pluto transits can be, it seemed like having a tool to smooth the way a bit would be really valuable. If anyone does give it a try, I'd definitely be interested to hear your experience with it.
