Pluto in the 3rd House/Gemini (5)

Pluto in the 3rd House/Gemini

As we move to the third archetype in the Zodiac, we can explore the context from which it arises in the cycle. If we view the twelve archetypes of the Zodiac as a symbolic story of human life and evolution, then on a psychological level the 1st house/Aries can represent birth and the nascent identity instinctually striving to meet its needs within the early environment. The 2nd house/Taurus represents the phase of object constancy that follows the initial purely instinctual phase of life. In early infant-family relations the parental figure is internalized to a sufficient degree that the child is able to be left alone or play by themselves to a certain extent. The child has an inner knowingness that the parent is still there even when not actually physically present. Traumatic events or serious neglect at either of these key stages can be enormously detrimental to the development of a healthy personality. Both the Aries phase and the Taurus phase consist of a critical pre-verbal or partially verbal stage of the development of the self.


The Gemini/3rd house phase relates to the child’s verbal development and the experience of intense curiosity about its environment. Recent studies on healthy children show how the development of the language faculty depends upon contact, touch and holding by the parents to stimulate areas of the brain related to the acquisition of speech. Studies on so-called “feral children” (those brought up in captivity or by animals) reveal that the development of the verbal centers of the brain comes about through mimicry and specific human contact. Children raised by dogs often whine, howl and bark and are more comfortable communicating in the canine idiom.

In the alleged “forbidden experiment” of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick, eleven children were raised without any human interaction in order to discern whether Latin or Hebrew was the “innate” language. All died before any could prove anything other than that human contact is required for children to survive and thrive. It follows then that touch and holding are necessary healthy components of the Taurus phase, directly related to the proper development of the Gemini function in the next phase. Before we can begin to develop language (Mercury), we need to have survived (Aries), and we need to be have been held and touched, hence able to establish a link to our real inner needs (Venus). In fact, with this information we can now observe the theme with Pluto in any given archetype that the greatest potential problem we face is the failure to evolve through the pre-existing archetype.

Those with Pluto in Gemini/3rd house are learning how to expand into their environment in order to intellectually engage in life. Ideally the person has internalized the gifts of the prior 2nd house/Taurus phase including inner strength and a feeling of self-sufficiency such that the individual now wishes to engage with the world around them through collecting data, naming things, and passing on that information to others. This is the “Adamic” act of the 3rd house Pluto: the giving of names and classification. This act leads to an intellectual security that can be added to what was (hopefully) the emotional security of the 2nd house experience.

With Pluto in Gemini/3rd house the idea of who one is becomes as important as the biological or felt needs. The compelling need is to know – to structure the knowledge of their environment and to intellectually organize that environment so that it makes sense to them. Interestingly the Swiss thinker and education reformer Rudolf Steiner argues for a delay in learning language during childhood so that the child does not develop the capacity to label faster than their inner ordering of reality can manage (Taurus-Gemini in harmony). That philosophy underlies Waldorf School education, one of the fastest growing independent educational movements in the world.6

The attraction/repulsion aspect of the Pluto complex conflict is played out for this placement through their need to intellectually organize of the environment. The desire to know more is based on curiosity and need for expansion, yet emotionally the nature of security is generated through familiarity. So the temptation for this placement is for the person to create an intellectual structure of a known and familiar kind. This (safe) structure is then consistently threatened by the very curiosity and need for intellectual expansion that underlies the Gemini archetype. Words are used to construct concepts of identity – safe and “known” ideas – and yet the natural tendency towards curiosity leads to new words and new ideas that threaten their pre-existing safe constructs. Such a dilemma leaves the individual with a perpetual choice at the level of the will: to embrace the new or stick to a comfortable intellectual framework.

This issue forms the basis of the cyclic destruction of familiar intellectual worlds for the individual, with all the potential for emotional fallout that can accompany such loss. Pluto in any given archetype indicates the prominence of the issues of that archetype in establishing and maintaining the core security of the individual psyche, and here those issues include communication, information and the intellect.

If someone threatens our existing intellectual framework it can feel like an attack. If the process of internalization symbolized by the Taurus/2nd house archetype has been problematic (e.g. the parents were too forceful or chaotic, or prior-life traumas too destructive) then the threats to the intellectual framework can be capable of threatening breakdown. Threats to how we make sense of our environment can lead to a fear of overwhelm, even insanity. This kind of conscious or unconscious fear can lead people to rigidly adhere to one “safe” intellectual framework in order to resist potential change or breakdown of meaning.

We can also infer from Gemini’s relationship to the preceding archetype that a counter-reaction to the self-imposed limitation of Taurus can manifest as constant restlessness when Pluto is in Gemini or the 3rd house. The desire to learn new information is ever-present but is also accompanied by the fear that one will never have enough time to learn everything, or that one can never know enough. The evolutionary intention behind this placement is movement. The individual is meant to expand and grow but this process can be compulsive to the extent that they feel incapable of storing or making use of all the information that they are amassing. This can become its own problem: a disintegration process whereby the individual loses all sense of meaning, plunging blindly into more and more compulsive experiences that they have no real capacity to digest or integrate.

The polarity point of Sagittarius/9th house suggests a need to begin to develop an intuitive conception of meaning, a bigger picture in which this person can situate the diverse strands of their learning in order to weave together an integrative vision. If they achieve this, the constant pressure to learn can begin to relate back to a larger meaning whereby what is being learned gains new relevance. The container of the larger context of meaning is the antidote to the addiction to content that the Gemini/3rd house Pluto person has. For example, this person might align with a larger belief system (Humanism, Buddhism, Theosophy, or Jungian Therapy, etc.) and then relate all that is being learned to the meta-system, which serves as a protective canopy. This will allow the multiple forms of information taken in to be digested into some kind of context.

However, one person’s meta-system is another person’s poisonous restriction. For some, this approach will seem too restrictive and they will seek to create a larger framework of meaning via the interlocking of a number of different systems. However, a potential problem in doing so is that if the various systems are contradictory they can result in confusion and an inability to articulate and interact with the container of the greater context in a meaningful way. Many people with this problem reduce their interactions with larger systems to the magpie level, taking in only what catches their eye and leaving the rest. The problem then becomes lack of depth. People with this placement will need to seek out balance in their approach between adopting systems that are too restrictive, and trying to integrate too many systems. Once that balance is achieved, through developing a belief system they begin to have a subjective experience of knowing that goes beyond mere categories.

Whatever the path chosen, the soul intention is the development of the intuition to perceive reality in a more direct and inclusive fashion. This person is learning that the capacity of the mind to label reality is not the same as the capacity of the soul to fully experience reality. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued that we cannot know reality via the mind; we can only know the various categories of perception we place between us and it. This epistemological dilemma is at the heart of the modern problem of knowing the world. The 9th house polarity to the 3rd house Pluto holds the potential for transcending such Kantian categories of mind and perceiving reality in a more holistic fashion. This can occur via development of the personal intuition, which is akin to the Kabbalist path of probation, or the Middle Way of the Buddhists. The idea is to develop the capacity to perceive reality at the point of fusion of the self and world, instead of always keeping the world at arm’s length via the conceptual powers of the mind.

Rudolf Steiner sees this process as following the path of Imagination-Intuition-Revelation whereby the development of the imaginative faculties (for instance by contemplating the nature of the plant within the seed) lead eventually to a direct perception of the life force.7 In a beautiful illustration of Steiner’s point, Brother Lawrence in The Practice of the Presence of God writes how while contemplating a tree in winter he saw the coming spring arrive and had an understanding/experience of the resurrection that led him into a contemplative life.8

The Pluto in Gemini/3rd house person need not have this kind of profound integration to benefit from the attempt to integrate their ideas into a larger context of meaning. The process of integrating alone will allow them to overcome the confusing merry-go-round of ideas which can lead to a complete loss of direction in life. If, however, the innate security of the individual is predicated primarily on intellectual foundations, then the potential exists for rigid thinking, argument instead of discussion, reaction instead of response, to occur compulsively. The intensity of these difficult exchanges will be directly proportional to the degree of personal security invested in them.

The potential exists with this placement for the development of a powerful mind. However, this presents another problem. Because in this case the mind is fused with the Pluto complex, the person may have a natural intense attraction to fellow thinkers, which can lead to intense conflict if they do not see eye-to-eye. The Pluto in Gemini/3rd house person may react to this kind of challenge by using intellectual manipulation, relying on their powerful mind to attempt to control the other by exposing the inherent weakness of their argument, regardless of whether or not what their opponent is saying is true. This can be likened to the skilful lawyer’s dilemma: the successfully developed argument which may or may not be in service to the truth of the person who committed the crime.

With this placement the individual may have experienced profound psychological conflicts with regard to lies and deception of various kinds. This could take multiple forms: those around them not believing them, others experiencing them as profoundly incongruent, or others lying to them. One client of mine with Pluto conjunct Uranus in the 3rd house experienced her siblings as seeing her as incompetent in situations where she was helping out. In life outside of her family she was really successful, but in their eyes she remained the young helpless child to an extent where her siblings’ experience of her was distorted enough to consistently support that view. These kinds of situations often have roots in excessive prior-life dependency on others, or in a past struggle to maintain an inner authenticity that is being tested now.

Another possible deception is the inner lie – the story that we tell ourselves to rationalize our difficult experiences and to protect our core identity from the shocking realization of our own motivations and weaknesses. Such inner lies can form the basis for identity crisis and for living out “double lives.”

The potential exists for this person to have a powerful mind and be a charismatic speaker or writer. But people with this talent who also believe their own myth/lie can be powerful manipulators of the truth, and some even manage to fool lie detectors. This Gemini/Sagittarius issue shows up publicly within politics and the media, as we often see the gifted communicator who turns their inner fiction into a spectacle on the world stage. But the potential also exists for this individual to actually use their mental gift in service of the reality of their situation.

A frequent issue with this placement and related signatures is the ongoing need to know rationally what is going on at all times. This quality can drive some towards success and others to high anxiety, often both at the same time. There is a powerful need to know in order to satisfy an inner compulsion or concern. Sometimes these issues originate in prior-life traumatic memories of being persecuted for what they have written or said, or of being forced to speak out against themselves or others close to them, sometimes under torture or threat of loss and the terrible consequences of such events. Through coercion they may have been made to feel responsible for implicating someone in a crime and then felt responsible for the fate of that individual.

Whatever the roots of the issue, the constant pressure to rationalize ultimately stems from a kind of fear in the face of the unknown within life and surrendering it can bring greater peace of mind. The mind’s desire to know cannot be underestimated. The value of that knowing is too easily over-estimated. Releasing the desire to know can bring profound relief – that one simply does not need to know everything.

Pluto in astrology (1)
Pluto in astrology (2) Pluto complex
Pluto in the 1st House/Aries (3)
Pluto in the 2nd House/ Taurus (4)
Pluto in the 3rd House/Gemini (5)
Pluto in the 4th House/ Cancer (6)