As students become more advanced in their FCEA training, they often raise questions about the differences among Pluto, Chiron, and the Moon’s south node. Let me start by saying that this is  one of those places in astrology where feeling a bit confused is a sign of wisdom rather than of missing something. The simple fact is that these three symbols do indeed overlap considerably in practical meaning. They share the common ground – and the common keyword – woundedness. All three represent, among other things, a place where you hurt. Faced with a chart, if you entered the interpretive process by thinking of Chiron, Pluto and the south node as three separate wounds – and three separate pathways to wholeness – you would be off to a good start. Your words would resonate with your clients, and, more importantly, you could help them along on their own healing trajectories.

Still, Pluto, Chiron, and the south node are not interchangeable. As you become more aware of the distinctions among them, your work becomes more precise. There’s a balancing act here – you want to recognize their differences without losing sight of the blurry places where their meanings actually do run together. In this short essay, my aim is to help you feel the unique ways that these three energies interact with the human psyche and – more importantly – with each other. We’ll aim to keep perspective on them, explore their distinct energetic signatures, and, above all, see how they work in concert with each other as we reclaim our wholeness, our spiritual sanity, and our power.

THE HEART OF THE MATTER: THE MOON’S SOUTH NODE

Everything comes back to the Moon’s south node. It is the root of all our understandings regarding what might hold a soul back in its journey. Whenever you see anything going on that involves Pluto or Chiron, a good guideline is always to try to tie the messages of those two bodies back into the south node story. No aspect involvement is necessary for that to be an effective technique. Pluto and Chiron may bring old unresolved issues to the surface, but what are those issues? Pluto and Chiron themselves will give you important clues, but always the heart of the answer lies with the south node itself.

Here’s the key: most of us forget the mundane details of our prior lives – our names, where we lived, and so on. But we remember what those lives felt like. All the planets have south nodes and they all have to do with the past, but that emotional connection is why the south node of the Moon in particular is so important. The Moon represents the emotional body, and in a sense, that is the part of us that actually reincarnates. The essential idea here is to remember that our emotional bodies are robust enough to survive the trauma of death and rebirth mostly intact, unlike our specific “Mercury memories” – the labels we place on people, places, and things. Those factual memories tend to dissipate as we move into the space between lives – we typically even see that process starting here on Earth as people age. Think of how you wake up remembering a bit of a dream, but it soon fades away – it’s basically the same with the “facts” of your life once it’s over and done.

• Attitudes and moods are what survives death and rebirth. If we were loving in a prior life, we’ll likely be loving in this one. If we lived a life of fear or of some kind of terrible lack, those feelings survive too.

There are treasures in the south node, but its active ingredient is always a set of blinding emotional assumptions and limiting, distorting attitudes. If you had an easy, indolent prior lifetime – one whose karma has now ripened – laziness might interfere with your journey in this lifetime. If you were badly scared, or shamed, or otherwise traumatized, those emotional wounds will undercut your faith in yourself this time around.

• Whatever its specific nature, this south node distortion in our underlying attitudes and assumptions about life is our Rosetta Stone when it comes to fully understanding anyone’s woundedness in this present lifetime – and the full interpretive process includes understanding their relationships with Pluto and Chiron.

I would just add two more notes – as most of you know, the first one is that by “the south node,” we mean a complex analysis that includes the message of its planetary ruler or rulers, along with a network of aspects. The second note has to do with how the north node of the Moon works as a remedy for the south node’s blindness and stubborn stuckness. In contrast to the south node which contains no medicine, Pluto and Chiron carry the potential for their own resolution – that is simply the higher meaning of both of those points. Meanwhile, the remedy for the south node does not lie in the south node itself. For that remedy, we look to the north node.

The south node carries strengths of its own, but they are not particularly relevant to the healing process, at least other than the obvious notion that we achieve release from the south node karmic pattern by not doing it anymore, or at least by letting go of being so identified with it and attached to it. But once again, unlike Pluto and Chiron, it’s a separate point – the north node – that supplies the jolt of magic that lights the fuse of insight and transformation on our limiting attitudes, assumptions, and habits.

LET THE SOUTH NODE INFORM PLUTO AND CHIRON 

In a little while, we will sharpen our sense of the differences between Chironic wounds and Plutonian ones. They aren’t the same, but for now let’s just see them both simply as wounded places in the reincarnating psyche. The specific nature of the wounds they represent can be  focused by looking at their sign and house placements and the aspects they make – by the conventional procedures of normal astrological analysis, in other words. Do that, and you are off to a good start in understanding them.

To take your interpretation to the next level, integrate what you have learned about the south node into your understanding of Pluto and Chiron. Say, for example, we have either one of them in the 5th house. One possibility with Pluto or Chiron in that house is that there is a wound in connection with the human need for pleasure, play and release. Such a wound can naturally take many forms ranging from dissipation and excess to a fear of letting go at all. 

Now imagine two nodal scenarios, each one flavoring our interpretation of that 5th house Pluto or Chiron in a different way:

• The south node is in Virgo and the 9th house, conjunct Saturn. That could easily correlate with unresolved karma relative to the impact of harsh, repressive religion – a self-denying attitude that was brought forward from a prior life “in holy orders” and now negatively impacts our ability to celebrate and have some 5th house fun.

• The south node is in Sagittarius conjunct Neptune in the 11th house. In a prior life, you were swept along into enthusiastic, hedonistic escapism by a wild crowd. As a result, you might say yes today when you really ought to say no. There’s your 5th house wound. 

As you can see, the south node mood creates a totally different set of issues in each case. This integrative style of interpretation illustrates how we can let the message of the south node inform our understanding of a Plutonian or Chironic wound. 

The flow of insight goes in the other direction too – in these two hypothetical scenarios, the presence of Pluto or Chiron in the 5th house sharpens our understanding of the south node by underscoring prior-life impacts on our capacity for joy in our present life. If Pluto or Chiron had been in the 10th, the south node impact would be reflected in wounds to our career or status. If in the 7th house, it would point to intimacy problems, and so on. 

This is just one illustration. The 5th house has other meanings too. Any of them might also be relevant. The south node distortions might negatively impact our Plutonian or Chironic attitudes toward children or towards our own creativity, for two quick examples. 

My aim here is not so much an exhaustive analysis of all the possibilities as it is an attempt to illustrate how these three related symbols “talk to each other” in a chart.

PLUTONIAN WOUNDS VERSUS CHIRONIC WOUNDS

Start by remembering that these two kinds of hurt overlap a lot!  As we saw earlier, a bit of blur between them in your understanding is a positive sign, not a negative one. As an analogy, just think of all the different ways you might define a “good movie.” In summer 2023, like half of America, I enjoyed both Barbie and Oppenheimer. I’d happily call them both “good movies.” But, like Pluto and Chiron, I would never confuse them. Wounds, just like good movies, come in a lot of flavors. I wouldn’t push this analogy too far, but compared to the Oppenheimer vibes of a Plutonian wound, the Chironic wound is Barbie. 

And before anybody writes me a mean email about that last statement, let me clarify that my point there is not to minimize Chiron’s hurts – it is more to stand in total awe of Plutonian ones and to bow before those souls who are fierce enough to heal them. 

And remember – Barbie was a serious movie too.  

THE PLUTONIAN WOUND

Thinking about Pluto, imagine a sensitive young man is drafted into the military in the midst of a horrible war. He sees things no human being should ever have to see. Perhaps under the relentless pressures and exhaustion of battle, he does things of which he is ashamed. When he comes home, he is in a state of psychological, spiritual, and emotional wreckage. 

My next line hurts me even to write, but please bear with me. Imagine someone tells that poor, wounded young man “to just get over it.” 

You want to whack them for saying that, right? For starters, it’s grossly insensitive. Worse, it’s simply clueless. People don’t just “get over” things as horrific as that – things like war, or rape, or terrible abuse in their childhoods. Things like spousal abuse. Things like the truly vicious dimensions of racism, sexism, and all the variations on homophobia and the other  shadow-wars around gender identity. There is true darkness in this world. When it touches us, it leaves a deep mark.

Plutonian healing from trauma like that takes time. We may need help too. Let’s also recognize that such healing might require more than one lifetime. That’s how deep these Plutonian wounds can go – maybe one lifetime isn’t long enough to “get over it.”

Let’s add that Pluto also represents the skill-set that we need in order to succeed at that kind of monumental healing. It is the sovereign planet of psychotherapy – and when I say “psychotherapy,” I’m actually thinking of it in the original Greek, where “psyche” means soul and “therapy” means healing. In other words, maybe you have “professional help” or maybe you don’t, but it’s always about the emotionally raw process of dealing with the results of life’s darkness. That’s what our souls are healing from. 

• Wherever your Pluto lies, if you strive toward its positive expression in terms of its sign, house, and aspects, you are strengthening your greatest ally when it comes to healing all of your soul’s wounds – and that includes your Chironic wounds as well as the emotional wounds reflected in your south node. 

One more point about Pluto work – and this is one that underscores its powerful interdependency with the south node. There may be “Mercury memories” – names, dates, places, people – associated with Plutionian wounds, but the substance of those wounds is purely emotional. As a soul releases itself from the grips of a Plutonian wound, there is typically a powerful explosion of emotional energy. In fact, if we are afraid of strong emotions – especially dark ones – we will never succeed with a Pluto process. 

Hate is a spiritual poison, for example. No reflective person thinks hatred is good for anyone. But perhaps you came to your hatred honestly. Perhaps you were brutalized as a child. Perhaps in a prior life someone you love was murdered before your eyes. You didn’t ask for it, but that hatred is now inside of you. The world put it there. You can pretend it’s not there, but that’s just spiritual posturing. If you are going to truly liberate yourself from it, it must erupt out of the unconscious mind. When it comes out, it won’t look like little pink angels playing harps. 

This is why Plutonian healing processes are so raw – and so difficult, and ultimately so profoundly freeing.

Note how in exploring the Plutonian wound, we encounter two sides of a coin. Pluto is a place where you’ve stored up lifetimes’ worth of dark energy – but it also represents the very set of courageous, instinctive skills that you need in order to get beyond them. 

Pluto is both the problem and the solution.

WHAT ABOUT CHIRON?

Chiron is tiny by planetary standards. Astronomers today call Pluto a “dwarf planet,” but even little Pluto makes Chiron look like a pipsqueak. Pluto, with only one quarter of one percent of the mass of Earth, still has ten times the diameter of Chiron. Chiron would easily fit between New York and Boston – or Paris and Brussels. In China, it would just cover the Shanghai-Hangzhou metroplex. 

Size isn’t everything in astrology – again, look at Pluto, which is small but fierce. Still, it is important to remember that no astronomer and no experienced astrologer calls Chiron a planet. We take it seriously and its effects are not always subtle, but we do need to keep perspective on it. 

In a classic example of “as above, so below,” our most telling clue about the astrological nature of Chiron derives from one of its orbital characteristics. It revolves around the Sun between Saturn and Uranus, but it actually crosses the paths of both of those major planets. Its perihelion – when it’s closest to the Sun – lies just inside the orbit of Saturn and its aphelion is just outside the perihelion of Uranus. That last sentence is a mouthful. What it means is that Chiron never reaches the average distance of Uranus, but it does cross Uranus’s closest approach to the Sun. 

• The key here is that Chiron weaves together the materialistic, logical realities of Saturn and the electrical-magical realities of Uranus.  Half horse and half man in mythology, it builds a bridge between the instinctual, physical realm and the realm of mind-power and intellect.

With Pluto’s wounds, we emphasized the folly and insensitivity of telling someone to  “just get over it.” With Chiron, evolution and healing can potentially move much more quickly – again, more like a flash of electricity than Saturn’s heavy tectonic plates. Forces from the invisible Uranian realm interact suddenly and powerfully with the more plodding realm of Saturn. 

Sometimes all it takes to trigger Chironic healing is a single liberating insight – or a crisis. In medicine, there are many examples of spontaneous healing, even among people who have received medical death sentences. That’s Chiron in action too. People speak of episodes of hysterical strength, where for example a person can lift a car off a trapped child. I suspect that’s a Chironic feature as well – but instead of lifting cars, let’s think of a psychological expression of that same superpower. 

My favorite illustration is how you might forget about your painful toothache if a friend comes to you in tears over some tragedy. You were preoccupied with your pain, but then suddenly you were distracted from it by your friend’s crisis. The mind has more power over pain management than we like to admit when we are busy hurting. The point is that human consciousness has an extraordinary potential for engineering incomprehensible breakthroughs. These are Chironic manifestations. How much of our pain is in our heads? How quickly can we change? 

Bottom line, are there any limits to the power of consciousness to address suffering? My guess is that probably yes there are such limits – but where are they? How firm are they? And might we underestimate our own healing powers?

Miracles do happen and Chiron is often connected with them.

There’s more. Certainly the most common description of Chiron in the world of modern astrology is the Wounded Healer. The basic idea is very simple:

• Once you have found a way to liberate yourself from a wound sufficiently that it no longer controls your life, you’ve got a map that you can potentially share with other people who are suffering from the same wound. 

In 12-Step programs, there is a tradition of a member having a personal sponsor. That might be someone who, for example, has suffered from the psychic wound of alcoholism – but who hasn’t had a drink for fifteen years. That is a person who can understand your thirst if you’re an alcoholic yourself. Maybe they can help you deal with it “one day at a time.” This idea of mentoring – of guiding and being guided – is fundamental to Chiron. Often, during times of Chironic stimulation, all we need is meaningful contact with someone who has already been where we are hurting today – and not only survived it, but thrived. Such a meeting alone can be enough to trigger a breakthrough.

Pluto processes are slow, Chiron’s are fast – that simple idea is even reflected in their orbits. Pluto takes 248 years to get around the Sun. Chiron’s orbit varies. In the past, it has occasionally been as short as 46 years or as long as 52 years. At the present time, the orbit is close to 51 years. 

By the way, Chiron’s orbital variability reflects the fact that it’s such a cosmic lightweight – the gravity of the “real” planets, especially Jupiter and Saturn, kick it around a lot. 

The point there is that once again with Pluto we need patience, while with Chiron perhaps all we need is faith.

SOME PLUTONIAN AND CHIRONIC SPECIFICS 

When it comes to understanding the details of a wound represented by Pluto or Chiron, always reflect on the signs and houses they occupy and the aspects they make. Those bedrock astrological techniques are always the heart of the interpretive procedure. Beyond that, each of these bodies has a natural resonance with certain particular areas of life. In other words, it’s exactly like how, when we think of Mercury, we naturally think of communication or when we think of Venus, we think of relationships. 

With Pluto, think of healing the long-term effects of:

Lies. Shame. Violence. Sexual transgressions. Dramatic or tragic deaths. Contact with evil. The abuse of power, given or received. Poverty – or too much money. Toxic psychotherapy. Betrayal.  Corrosive guilt. Tragedy. Collective nightmares such as plague, famine, and war.

With Chiron, think of healing the long-term effects of:

Bad mentoring and misguided guidance. Physical problems, disorders, and diseases. Rejection. Abandonment. A “family curse” – that is to say a dysfunctional pattern passed down from one generation to the next. Chronic, exhausting caregiving. 

So there you have it – the three faces of our woundedness: Pluto, Chiron, and the Moon’s south node. Each has its own story to tell, but the clearest telling is when we listen to all three of them together.