The essence
Pluto takes its name from the Roman god of the underworld, the Greek Hades, whose name was often read as "the unseen one." He ruled the dead and also the riches under the earth, which is why the Greeks called him Plouton, "the wealthy one." His best-known story is Persephone's: taken below, she returns each spring, and the seasons turn on her leaving and coming back. Loss and renewal belong to the same myth.
Astronomically, Pluto is small, cold and far out, with a tilted, stretched orbit that sometimes brings it closer to the Sun than Neptune. Clyde Tombaugh found it at Lowell Observatory in 1930, and an eleven-year-old English girl, Venetia Burney, suggested the name. In 2006 astronomers reclassified it as a dwarf planet. Astrologers kept using it, because its meaning had proved itself across decades of charts. Modern astrology gives it rulership of Scorpio, alongside the traditional ruler, Mars.
In your chart, Pluto points to where you deal with control, fear and intensity. It rules what is hidden or shared: joint money, inheritance, debt, sex as deep merging, and the family patterns you repeat without knowing why, like the silence your parents kept about money. Pluto does not negotiate. It removes what is false, even when the false thing feels like your identity, and leaves you with power that comes from having faced it. Working with Pluto means naming what has gone unsaid.
