Two astrobloggers whom I hold in high esteem have quoted my ponderings on the “tripartite nature of Pluto” including Eris and Ceres. Their comments are really wonderful and help to expand this concept.

From Jeffrey comes this beautifully written story of the Pluto drama:

At the beginning of a Pluto transit, there is a sense of “discord and strife” as our ego fights against its own destruction. It is then dragged down into the underworld, where we encounter the Shadow elements of our psyche. Ceres mourns the loss of our virgin self (Persephone, untarnished until she is abducted by Hades). We then re-emerge, newly aware of that which we had hidden from ourselves, having undergone a shamanic initiation into our own deepest parts. The final product is then a sense of empowerment and authenticity, as we have integrated previously dis-owned parts of ourselves, aspects of our being that we had to hide (because society or our parents did not approve of them) or aspects that were just so biological or instinctual that we just did not feel safe acknowledging them in the light of day.

Dharma Ruci, my new blogfriend in the UK, expands the Ceres/Proserpine myth:

Through Proserpina’s abduction, both mother and daughter are forced to move on to the next stage of their lives: Proserpina loses her childish innocence and becomes a wife, while Ceres has to let go of her child and re-encounter her as an adult. And this is part of Pluto’s function. Often we don’t want to move on to the next stage, we’re quite happy as we are, we’re often not even aware that it’s time to move on. But it is in the nature of life to move on to the next stage – animals do this naturally, they don’t have a problem about how to live, unlike ourselves. Pluto is the agent of that Necessity to move on and to transform.

Through her daughter, Ceres becomes a bridge between this world and the underworld. She has earned the right, as Lynn Hayes puts it, to ‘preside over our emergence from the underworld and the regeneration of our lives.’ As a goddess who also presides over the growth of nature and crops, she embodies that new life, and that fullness of life, which takes place at the other end of the transformational process. But it is a life that has lost its innocence, a life that is aware that winter, which has a beauty of its own, is necessary so that life can be renewed. Death and a letting go of the old are needed for re-birth.

Dharma has more to say about Ceres which I’ll post later once she starts really talking to me. If you have some time, read through his previous article about Eris in the charts of famous people, it’s really fascinating.