Pluto Mythology

Hades is the son of Cronus and Rhea. When the brothers divide the world by lot, the underworld falls to him. He owns a cap that makes its wearer invisible. The Greeks avoided speaking his name and called him Pluto, 'the wealthy', or Clymenus, 'the renowned', instead. He is the one who abducts Persephone. He is lord of the dead, but he is not death itself. Death is Thanatos. Hades in the Greek family tree →

Dis Pater means 'wealthy father' and is the Latin rendering of Pluto. Caesar writes that the Gauls traced their descent from Dis Pater. Orcus is the underworld god of oaths and punishment. The English word 'ogre' is commonly derived from Orcus by way of Italian orco, but the etymology is disputed. Some linguists trace the word instead to Hongrois, an old name for the Hungarians (Oghur). The planet's name, Pluto, was chosen from this Roman tradition.

Ereshkigal is queen of the underworld and the elder sister of Inanna. She rules her realm from behind seven gates. Nergal descends, overpowers her and becomes king at her side as her husband. So the underworld belongs first to the queen alone and is later ruled by the pair. Ereshkigal in the Mesopotamian family tree →

Osiris is king of the dead and embodies resurrection in his own body. Seth dismembers him and Isis gathers the pieces. Anubis embalms the dead and weighs the heart at judgement. In Egypt the underworld, the Duat, is a place of renewal rather than punishment. Ra passes through it every night and is born again at dawn. Osiris in the Egyptian family tree →

Yama was the first human to die, and for that reason he became king of the dead. His two dogs meet the arriving souls. He rides a buffalo and carries a noose. He is regarded as the judge of dharma. In Buddhist Asia he passes into China and Japan as the judge of hell, where the Japanese call him Enma.

Hel is the daughter of Loki. Half of her body is living and half is dead. She rules Helheim, where those who die of sickness and old age go. When Baldr dies the gods ask for him back, and Hel refuses. Those who die in battle do not come to her. They go to Odin and Freyja. Hel in the Norse family tree →

Izanami is the mother goddess who died giving birth to the fire kami. Her husband Izanagi sets out to bring her back from Yomi, but he flees when he sees her rotting body. Izanami then becomes ruler of Yomi. She calls after Izanagi that she will kill a thousand people every day, and Izanagi answers that he will have fifteen hundred born every day. Izanami in the Japanese family tree →

The cap of Hades, called the kyneē, makes its wearer invisible. Perseus borrows it on his way to Medusa. The underworld is the place of what is not seen, not spoken and not named. For that reason everything repressed, buried or hidden is tied to this image.

The name Pluto means 'wealthy'. The mines lie underground, and the seed waits beneath the soil. Demeter's son Plutus, whose name means wealth, shares a root with Pluto. That is why the lord of the underworld is also regarded as the keeper of the treasure. Plutus in the family tree →

Persephone goes down to the underworld, spends part of the year there and comes back. This descent and return traces the cycle of the seed, of winter, of mourning and of spring. Inanna's descent to the underworld follows the same pattern. The mysteries of Eleusis let their initiates live through this descent and return. Persephone in the family tree →

In Egypt the heart of the dead is weighed against a feather. In Greece the dead are judged by Minos, Rhadamanthys and Aeacus. In India the souls are received by Yama, and in Scandinavia by Hel. In these stories the underworld is not only an end but also a place of reckoning.

Kore bends down to pick a narcissus in the meadow of Nysa. At that moment the earth splits open, and Hades comes up in his golden chariot and carries her off. Demeter searches for nine days with torches in her hands and leaves the earth barren. Zeus finally sends Hermes down to the underworld. Hades lets the girl go, but before she leaves he feeds her a pomegranate seed. Because of that seed Persephone will spend a third of every year below.

Orpheus softens Charon first, then Cerberus and Hades, with his lyre. He is allowed to take Eurydice back on one condition: he must not look behind him until they reach the light. Before he reaches the exit he turns and looks, and Eurydice dies a second time. Virgil tells the story in the Georgics and Ovid in the Metamorphoses. Orpheus in the family tree →

Percival Lowell searched for years for a body he called 'Planet X' and died without finding it. In 1930 twenty-four-year-old Clyde Tombaugh laid the plates he had photographed night after night side by side in a blink comparator. On 18 February he saw a dot in Gemini that had moved. In Oxford eleven-year-old Venetia Burney proposed the name, and Pluto was accepted. In 2006 the International Astronomical Union classed it as a dwarf planet.

Pluto's glyph ♇ is a monogram of Percival Lowell's initials and carries no mythological meaning. Some astrologers use the sign ⯓ instead, which is built on the circle, crescent and cross scheme. Both glyphs were invented in the 20th century.

Element 94, the one after neptunium, was named plutonium in 1941. This material was used in the first atomic bomb. The name of the underworld god was thus given to a destructive power. This is a naming tradition, not a classical metal correspondence.

Twentieth-century astrology gave Pluto the meanings of transformation, power, obsession and death and rebirth, and assigned it the sign Scorpio. In the classical tradition Scorpio is the night house of Mars. This school does not use the modern rulership and treats Pluto as an indicator outside the dignities.