Pluto is the lord of death and the underworld and all things dark and mysterious as well as deep and intense. Pluto on its darkest days brings obsession and pulls us into darkness in order to bring us face to face with the deepest reality of life and death and face to face with our fears. It breaks down our existing reality and rebuilds a new one in the ashes of the old. Ultimately, Pluto releases us from bondage and empowers us in the truest sense.

In the film Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne falls down a hole into a cave (down into the Underworld of Pluto’s domain) where he is surrounded by a swarm of bats. The memory of this horrifying event haunts him throughout his youth, until finally he willingly enters the underworld again, going back into the cave to face his fears and overcome them. Having done so, he returns transformed and empowered as Batman – taking the shape of his own worst fears. His fear and obsession have given him the gifts of power and enabled him to follow his life’s true path.

Pluto is finishing up its twelve-year journey through Sagittarius in the next couple of years, where it has brought fear, destruction and rebuilding of all things Sagittarian: philosophy, religion, law, travel, cultural expansion. Since Pluto entered Sagittarius in 1995, we have seen the expansion of globalism at an unprecedented scale: the popularization of World Music, the establishment of the euro as European currency, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorist organizations. The expansion of large corporations across the world has destroyed a great deal of the American employment structure and rebuilt it in other countries.

Pluto in Sagittarius has brought fear (Pluto) of globalism (Sag), fear (Pluto) of other cultures (Sag) and fear (Pluto) of travel. The very cross-cultural expansion of ideas is terrifying to traditionalists. The attack by planes (Sagittarius rules long distance travel) on September 11 was a stunning archetype for Pluto in Sagittarius, and this week’s scare that terrorists are planning to blow up planes in flight has renewed the fear of flying. Tim Boucher’s post in his excellent blog on all things esoteric reads it this way:

[A]ttacking airlines (or threatening to do so) is a purely symbolic act. Attacking one airplane is bad and tragic, but it’s not – militarily speaking – as awful as it would be if they managed to take out an entire airport, power plant, factory, bridge, major highway, railroad hub, port area, etc. You know: real military targets, in other words. Things that are of clear strategic importance because they cripple infrastructure and inhibit your opponent’s ability to fight back. Putting a bomb on an airplane does not do this. It does one thing and one thing only.

It makes people afraid to travel.

The thing is though, that’s not where it ends. Getting somebody afraid of traveling is itself a much more loaded and interesting trick. Fear of travel decodes into increased provincialism and a reversion to local tribalism. [Pluto in Sag = fear of globalization.] Americans, increasingly so, are world travelers – at least the people who can afford to be. And the people who can afford to be are, by and large, also reasonably well educated. People who have money enough to be mobile and a decent education are thus able to be exposed to multiple viewpoints and perspectives by traveling. In short, they become more cosmopolitan.

An attack on an airplane then, is an attack on the rising cosmopolitanism and freedom of the middle class who can afford to travel by plane. It’s designed, even if you don’t fly, to make you subconsciously think that other nations and other nationalities are inherently dangerous. They are out to get you and it’s best not to “go there” mentally.

After all, in Western esotericism, the element of “air” tends to correspond with the intellect and with mental matters. A plane could be said to symbolize our ability to concretize our ideas and send them out as messengers all over the world. By association, if planes and air travel become dangerous, thoughts become dangerous, and letting your thoughts carry you to far off worlds becomes doubly dangerous.