The Pluto symbol

From a photographic plate to a glyph

1. 1. 1930, the discovery

   Clyde Tombaugh found the planet on 18 February 1930 at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, by comparing two photographic plates taken a few days apart and noticing a dot that moved.

2. 2. The name

   An eleven-year-old schoolgirl from Oxford, Venetia Burney, suggested Pluto, after the Roman god of the underworld. The observatory staff chose it in part because its first two letters were the initials of Percival Lowell.

3. 3. The glyph

   The monogram PL was adopted as the symbol. It carries both readings: the first letters of the name, and the initials of the founder of the observatory.

The two Pluto glyphs

A planet that astrology kept

In August 2006 the International Astronomical Union ruled that Pluto is a dwarf planet, not a full planet, because it has not cleared its orbit of other bodies. The decision is about astronomical classification. Astrologers kept Pluto in their charts, and its glyphs are still printed in every ephemeris. Astrologers say the planet's meaning was built from watching its cycles, which does not depend on the label astronomers use. Whether that is persuasive is up to the reader, and this site presents astrology as tradition, not as science.

Pluto takes about 248 years to circle the zodiac, and because its orbit is a stretched oval it spends only about 12 years in some signs and more than 30 in others. In the astrology of the last century it became the modern ruler of Scorpio.

Reading the orb, the bident and the letters

• The orb stands for spirit, the same circle that appears in the Sun glyph.
• The bident is the two-pronged fork linked with the god of the underworld, and the stem under it stands for matter.
• Spirit held above the fork is the picture of renewal that the tradition associates with the planet.
• The PL monogram has no such parts, so it is read as a name and not as a diagram.

Typing the Pluto symbol

The monogram sits at U+2647 and is simply called PLUTO. The orb and bident form is ⯓︎, U+2BD3, called PLUTO FORM TWO; it is in the newer Unicode block of symbols and arrows, so older fonts may show a box. In HTML, ♇ produces the first. The Pluto in Aquarius transit page lists the dates of the planet's present sign.

Pluto and Neptune never meet

Pluto's orbit is tilted and stretched enough that for part of each lap it lies closer to the Sun than Neptune does. They never collide, because the two are locked in a 3 to 2 resonance: Pluto goes round twice for every three of Neptune's laps, and the timing keeps them far apart. Astrologers who track the pair note that their conjunctions are very rare. The last was in the 1890s, in Gemini, and a Neptune Pluto cycle takes about 490 years.