Pluto Down Under:
Hauntings of the Antipodes
©2000 by Erin SullivanNOTE: The following is an excerpt from Erin's book, Where in the World? Astro*Carto*Graphy and Relocation Charts. Throughout the book, Erin is working with the students at the Centre for Psychological Astrology in London. In this session, they are talking about a Pluto/Ascendant line.
Audience: Erin, when you were speaking about Pluto lines, I was
remembering something. When I was in Australia last year, which is where I have my Pluto/Ascendant line exactly running through Sydney, I was staying in an incredibly haunted house. The whole time I was in that house, I fought with a feeling that I was going to see "them" any minute. I felt if I relaxed and dropped my guard, I was going to start seeing the ghosts. A lot of people who have been in that house have seen them. It was quite known that it was very haunted, and it was absolutely terrifying. Actually, it was an overwhelming experience.
Erin: Knowing you, and your chart, I know that you are not inclined to Victorian vapours and visitations. Isn't that where that friend of yours saw somebody sitting on the bed who wasn't really there?
Audience: Recently, after I left Sydney, yes. It was an old woman sitting in the midst of a pile of books on the bed, reading out of a book. In he middle of the night my friend went to the loo, looked in this room on the way, and saw her. Then, when he came out of the loo on the way back to his room, he looked in again for some reason, and she looked up and growled at him like a dog. That's the kind of thing that happens in that house. When I was there I was overwhelmed by it, and very, very frightened.
Audience: Did you leave or did you stay there?
Audience: I was staying there for three nights, and on the first night I stayed awake all night, planning to leave. It was my friend's house and I was invited to stay, and when I told them in the morning how disturbed I had been, they were so upset about it. Of course, they are quite happy with these ghosts - they were used to them. But I couldn't bring myself to check into a hotel. My friends would have been mortified that I had left. So I actually stayed for another two nights.
Audience: And was that difficult?
Audience: The second night was a bit better because I did loads of visualization and prayer and mantras and things, and it staved them off a bit. But the third night it was back to being as bad as the first night. It was the whole time - it wasn't just at night. Any time of day in the house I could feel it and hear them walking past the room. Extraordinary.
That's the second time I've been to Sydney. The first time I went to Sydney, I went with a friend. His mother was dying, and that was the reason I was in Sydney - death again. So I'm very interested to see what happens when I go back again next year.
Erin: Me, too. You know, that's very interesting. Here's where I think fatedness comes in. Myself, I believe that, had you left, you would have felt really dreadful for leaving. You see, it's as though you are damned if you do and damned if you don't. As the Romans said, saxa inter unda -"between the rocks and the waves" - because you would have felt guilty, apprehensive, and frightened because you had been frightened. You would have been scared away from something. It is better to stand and face it. It is a metaphor for all fears.
Audience: Sometimes in the night I would think, "It is all right to think, 'I'm not going to deal with this.' I have come across this kind of thing before, so it is interesting that in this situation I wasn't all right with them. It was far more than I could cope with. Maybe they were disturbed.
Audience: When you came upon them before, was it on a Pluto line?
Audience: No.
Erin: Perhaps you have pretty and pleasant ghosts on a Venus line. Or Romeo-and-Juliet visions under Mars/Venus crossings. But under a Pluto line, I think it would be very frightening to the psychic integrity. Why bother, as you say? I am a great believer in, "Look, there are times to bang your head against a brick wall and times not to, and if it is going to work, great, do it." But you say you had three days when you just prayed a lot.
Audience: And it worked.
Audience: I'm looking at my Pluto now!
Audience: It was my Pluto/Ascendant line which runs up through Sydney, Shanghai, and Beijing. I have been to those two cities as well, but I didn't have those kinds of experiences there. I was only in Beijing for three days as well. There were no ghosts, but I felt as if I had been plugged into an electric current. You were talking about connecting with somebody else's dark tribal collective. That's what happened there. It was an extraordinarily powerful experience.
Erin: Well, when you are getting into places which have had layers of dynasties which have collapsed and then been reconstructed one upon the other, you are getting into a kind of Hades place. It is compartmentalized, and it is there for different levels of culture. None of them ever die. I had a similar experience when I was in Zululand, where I was horrified by the burying of the Zulu culture. I could not stay ten minutes in a particular village that had been reconstructed.
It was as if something really dreadful was saying, "I will not sleep here." Whitney Houston was playing in Durban, which meant that every hotel was booked. We had to drive up to Pietermaritzburg - which is 100 miles from the coast - to try to find a motel, because there was nowhere to stay.
But I refused to stay in this Zulu place, because you could feel the restlessness of the destruction of a culture that was perfectly fine until it was destroyed - only in its death has it become terrifying. And it is still there, haunting. I think Pluto will resurrect things like dead cultures, returned heroes, and people who have really been important in the growth of the world but have been killed off. Certainly it could be ghosts. You should find out who these folks were.
Audience: Well, actually, this particular house was in the Temple Gardens in Sydney, and was very old. The Temple Gardens are right next to the rocks where the convicts were brought. The person who lives in the house says, "We know that such and such a convict - we even know his name - died next to that tree over there, a hundred yards from the house." I felt that the house had become a repository for a lot of very disturbed souls. There must have been some horrible deaths in that small area two hundred years ago. Somehow that house was a magnet to them. That was my theory about it.
Erin: It is a very sound theory, because Pluto rules the disenfranchised, the disaffected, the submerged, the marginalized - people who are forced underground to live in areas of society that nobody wants to know about. We can't see these people. We don't know that they're sleeping in the road. England shipped off all of its "nasty" types, its living shadow, down to Australia. Well, they couldn't see them there, could they? They were down under, so to speak - the Antipodean shadow.
Audience: As well as that, I have shared my home for eighteen years with somebody who was born in Sydney. He's from my Pluto/Ascendant line. It's my Pluto/Ascendant, not his. You were getting around to speaking about knowing people from your lines. Now I'm wondering about how we experience our life through somebody else.
Audience: So you experience him as Pluto/Ascendant?
Audience: Yes. He can be an unconscious agent for unrealized contents in my own unconscious. He may, periodically, bring forth the "demons" for me to conquer and civilize.
Audience: Not everyone can move from one country to another for obvious reasons. But it is interesting that I have my PL/ASC in my house, in my life, and in part of my "non-relocated" self.
Erin: When considering relocation, we have to be practical in working with clients. People will ring up and say, "I want to emigrate to the States, or Europe, or Australia, and I want to look at my Astro*Carto*Graphy map." My first question is, "Is it viable? Is it actually possible for you to do that?" If it is not realistic, then it is simply not possible. However, there are times an individual can relocate in accord with A*C*G.
But unless all practical systems are in order, I wouldn't encourage people to uproot and move based purely on A*C*G lines. If the viability of a major move is good, then I encourage them to work with proper transits to the lines, because transits to lines work. That's where Cyclo*Carto*Graphy comes in. Transits to lines activate the line.
NOTE: This excerpt was taken from Sullivan, Erin: Where in the World?, Astro*Carto*Graphy and Relocation Charts, Volume 12. CPA Press, London, February 1999. See another excerpt here. The book is available on-line from midheavenbooks.com. Also visit Erin's site at www.erinsullivan.com or send her e-mail.
BIO: Erin Sullivan is Canadian born and has been a consultant astrologer and teacher since the late 1960s. She has lectured worldwide and led workshops and symposia on many aspects of human development using mythology, psychology and the rich language of astrology. She has been called 'the astrologer's astrologer' and is one of the world's most eminent consulting, writing and lecturing astrologers.
Her astrological background is broad. She was awarded three distinctions from the Fraternity for Canadian Astrologers. She was a founding member of the Association for Astrological Networking (AFAN), and founder of the Media Watch program at the height of the astrological boom in the 1980s.
Her work took her to London, England in 1989 where she has been a tutor for the Centre for Psychological Astrology since then, and the Series Editor for Penguin's Arkana Contemporary Astrology Series. She is an adjunct faculty member for the Central American Institute of Prehistoric and Traditional Cultures at Belize.
As of September '99 Erin has taken on the position of Professional Accreditation-Trainer for the Jim Lewis trust and Continuum. The A*C*G Continuum Jim Lewis Home-Study course is soon to be offered and mentored by Erin Sullivan.
CREDITS: The background tile came from ABC Giant. The haunted house cartoon is from Jeff Bucchino, The Wizard of Draws. Ethnic clip art can be found at Zena's Clip Art. The maps and globes are from a free geographic clipart collection at Graphmaps. One of the ghost animations comes from Artist for Hire, and the other came from Free Animations by Susan.
