It is not in fleeing the monster, but in honoring our hybrid desires — body, soul, and ego — that we find our way through endings and into the uncanny rebirth to come.

*The Chasseur in the Forest (1814) - Caspar David Friedrich*

The Threshold Encounter

Surrounded by the golden leaves blanketing the wet forest, you take a hike up a quiet trail. Lost in reverie, you fail to notice the thickening fog surrounding your path. The velvety fog blinds you to the fast‑darkening sky, as the day rushes to a close. A loud rustle of broken branches and crunched leaves pulls you back to the present.

That’s when you notice up ahead on your trail a figure of both horror and fantasy.

As the days get shorter, and the night of Samhain is upon us, we feel the thinning of the veil between this and the Other world — a place where endings and beginnings blur.

And there he waits: half human, half wolf — the werewolf.

Not in the ballroom, not in the open square, but at the threshold where the forest and its blinding fog presses close.

His presence is lupine: commanding, primal, and charged with inevitability. You may think you are stumbling upon him; but the truth is that you are drawn, compelled, as if some part of you already knew this meeting was fated. This was no mere walk in the woods. Not even Red Riding Hood was as innocent. One always knows the fated wolf that awaits them.

His presence isn’t a light flirty invitation, but initiation. Despite the horror chilling your blood, you feel compelled to step toward him and feel the growl beneath the silence, the scent of earth and blood in the air. This monstrous, and yet alluring suitor does not promise cozy comfort, but lacerated transformation.

To accept his embrace is to shed skin and to discover what survives when all else is stripped away.

When I write of Pluto in this way — as the fated lupine suitor at the threshold — I’m also writing about how I’ve felt him in my life. The beast to beauty. The myths are never only “out there”; they echo in the private chambers of our birth charts and daily life. And so, before I speak of Pluto as an archetype, I must admit how he has shaped me: not as a distant deity, but as a companion whose lessons I’ve wrestled with in the dark.

Pluto has been both a mystery and paradox for me. Right on brand for Pluto. In my chart, he sits at a threshold cusp, bridging two areas of my life — ancestry and creativity. In this position the tension I feel between wanting my work to be seen and the instinct to keep much of myself hidden itches like an unhealed wound scab. At times, I feel compelled to share, and yet worry that I scatter myself by sharing too much, or that my words slip into the shadows, unseen. Yet, only more recently, things we learn with age, I’ve come to recognize that this rhythm is part of Pluto’s way. He doesn’t ask me to be visible all the time, only that when I do step forward, it demands that what I do share carries the weight of something authentically lived and real.

The challenge is humbling because visibility doesn’t come easily, and I often wrestle with the discomfort of both wanting to be seen and keeping a part privately hidden. But as with any paradox, there’s also a gift. Pluto roots my creativity in depth, from the marrow of things. He reminds me that what I bring forth is not meant to be superficially everywhere, but to carry resonance when it does appear. Creativity isn’t the 24/7 news cycle with its pundits rehashing vapid content as we’ve been made to believe. Pluto wants me to understand that my work, like his lessons, is cyclical — hidden for a time, then emerging with something forged in the darkness of my womb.

The Monster‑Lover Archetype

In my Healing Power of Fluff publication, I’ve been writing about monsters as more than terrors in the dark. They are invitations, thresholds, companions who ask us to face what we’d rather avoid. Monsters arrive not to destroy us, but to undo the illusions we cling to. They strip away the polite masks and ask:

What are you really afraid of?
What do you secretly long for?

This is the thread I carry with me here. The way I’ve come to see monsters — not as enemies, but as seductive and unsettling companions — is the same way I’ve come to understand Pluto.

Pluto is the ultimate monster‑lover.

He does not woo us with charm or lightness; he unsettles, compels, and demands intimacy with what we fear most. Yet it is not only fear he awakens. Pluto also draws out the desires we bury in shame, the longings we keep secret even from ourselves. To romance Pluto is to be confronted with the paradox of wanting what terrifies us, of being drawn toward the very thing we were taught to avoid, to deny, to consider as sin, to swear we would never touch.

And yet, this confrontation is not only undoing — it is also creation. Pluto gives us the raw material to create. That is the mystery of creation itself: it comes from the dark — the darkness of the womb, the underworld, the night.

Pluto is a creative matrix, not the only one, but one we must meet if we want to create something that has teeth, claw, and root — something with the stamina to weather the storms of life. His gifts are not soft or ornamental; they are forged in fire.

My own monster is not the wolf or vampire, but the tall, brooding, tentacled one — the one who pulls me into its embrace even as I play hide‑and‑seek through distraction and busyness. It is both terrifying and magnetic, and I know that when I stop running, it will hand me the raw material of my next creation.

This is the monster’s gift: to reveal that fear and desire are often twinned, and that what terrifies us may also be the very source of our vitality.

The werewolf, the vampire, the shadowed suitor — they all embody this paradox. They frighten us because they expose the hunger we pretend not to feel. Pluto, like the monster‑lover, does not let us look away. He insists that we acknowledge the growl in our own chest, the longing in our own body, the truth that intimacy with shadow is the vitality that our soul craves.

The Lupine Mask

If Pluto were to wear a mask, it would be lupine. The werewolf is a creature of thresholds — human and beast, civilized and wild, life and death. Folklore tells us the Moon calls the change, but it is Pluto who makes it irrevocable. Once the shift begins, there is no turning back. In this guise, Pluto is the alpha wolf: commanding, primal, inevitable. His presence is felt in the growl beneath silence, in the scent of earth and blood, in the hunger that cannot be reasoned away. To romance Pluto is to recognize the feral within ourselves, the animal body that is our soul’s loyal companion.

The Moon’s role here matters. She is rhythm, ebb and flow, the reminder that transformation comes in phases — waxing, waning, fullness, darkness. The werewolf myth tells us the Full Moon triggers the change, but Pluto ensures it cannot be undone. Together they reveal a paradox: transformation is both cyclical and absolute. The Moon opens the door; Pluto seals it.

The werewolf unsettles because it forces us to face what we’ve long run from: the monster within. These are the shadow aspects of ourselves that would burn down the cocktail‑party small talk if spoken aloud, the guilty pleasures we hide from polite company. Yet if approached through a mythic lens, these so‑called sins reveal themselves as less destructive than we fear. They are reminders of our paradoxical humanity.

Others have circled this truth as well. Jung spoke of the shadow as containing not only what is dark, but also what is vital and life‑giving. James Hillman reminded us that soul is never abstract, but rooted in images, instincts, and the body. Clarissa Pinkola Estés has written of the wild, instinctual self as essential to creativity and wholeness. Pluto, in his werewolf mask, echoes all of this: he refuses to let us forget that our animal bodies are not obstacles to spirit, but companions to it.

Stories often imagine humans paired with daemons in animal form, but perhaps the truth is simpler and stranger: we are already paired — stitched together in one hybrid being. Perhaps this is why the werewolf has haunted our imagination for centuries. It shows us what happens when the animal self is dismissed, shamed, or treated as sinful: it grows angry, distorted, monstrous. But in truth, without the body our souls would have no place to inhabit, no way to delight in the beauty of this garden of earth.

The werewolf reminds us that our animality is not a curse but a companion — and Pluto, in his lupine mask, insists we remember it.

Death’s Double Face

I saw this paradox most vividly in death — first in my father’s, then in my mother’s. When my father died, I was struck by the strange beauty of it, though “beauty” is not quite the word. There was horror, yes, but also a raw intimacy, a surrender that left only essence. It imprinted me at a molecular level, as if Pluto himself had brushed past and left me forever changed.

Years later, when my mother died, Pluto’s presence revealed another face. Her body carried the pain of unlived desires, of joys deferred, of a life that had not always honored what it longed for. In her suffering, I saw how the body itself bears witness to what has been denied. The body remembers and grieves what the ego would not allow, even as the soul aspired — caught in an impossible double‑bind.

Pluto, in this sense, is not only the lord of endings but the fierce advocate for embodiment. He will not let us forget that to live fully is to honor the body’s hungers as much as the soul’s aspirations and even the ego’s demands. He shows us that death can be both rawly beautiful and unbearably painful — beautiful when essence is revealed, painful when desire has been silenced. Both are true, and both are his.

The body is not “just a means to an end.” It is the channel through which the soul flows, experiences, and makes manifest. It is also the stage where the ego wrestles, stumbles, and learns its limits. Together — body, soul, and ego — they form a paradoxical hybrid, quickened by hunger, that makes us human. And Pluto, relentless as ever, demands that we honor the whole of it: the beast, the dreamer, and the fragile self that tries to hold them together.

*The End of the World (commonly known as The Great Day of His Wrath) (1851-1852) - John Martin*

A Civilizational Threshold

Pluto is not only personal; he is civilizational. We are living through a Plutonian threshold, and the signs are everywhere: images of ending saturate our collective imagination — climate annihilation, economic collapse, governments faltering, structures failing. These are all Plutonian signatures: the stripping away of what cannot endure. Yet what strikes me is how little attention we give to the other side of Pluto’s gift.

We fixate on endings, but seldom speak of how imagination’s vitality might midwife what now labors through its birthing pains.

At the heart of this labor lies a deeper question: perhaps our civilization’s challenge is to learn what desire really is. For centuries we have been taught to fear, repress, or dismiss desire — to treat it as sin, distraction, or weakness. And so, when Pluto arrives, we are poorly prepared. His starkness terrifies us because it exposes the naked truth of our hunger. His gift is pornographic in its brazen honesty — not erotic display, but the unflinching exposure of what we long for beneath the masks of civility.

And like art, Pluto unsettles us. Art often draws us in without explanation, leaving us in awe, bothered, and at times speechless, because it grabs us beneath our socialized, rational minds.

Pluto’s gift is similar: he bypasses the polite surface and drags us into the raw marrow of our longing.

Desire is often given to Venus, and rightly so — she shows us the flowering of attraction, the beauty of connection, the pleasures of harmony. But Pluto is the root system beneath Venus’s garden. He is the subterranean desire that undoes us, strips away pretense and demands transformation.

To flourish in a Plutonian age, perhaps we must imagine a union of Venus and Pluto — not as Persephone and Hades, where the maiden is silenced in her descent, but as two archetypes meeting in their full power.

Venus does not go underground unwillingly; she knows what she wants and how to claim it. She brings the body’s delight, the soul’s eros, the ego’s longing for beauty. Pluto brings depth, irrevocability, and the fierce demand for truth.

Together they show us that desire, when both embodied (Venus) and deepened (Pluto), can become a force of renewal rather than destruction.

Others have spoken to this necessity. James Hollis has written of desire as the engine of individuation, the summons to live a larger life than the one fear allows. Liz Greene has written of Pluto as compulsion, power, and the underworld of desire — the place where we confront what we cannot control. I find myself standing in their lineage, but also extending it: Pluto is not only the god of endings, but the civilizational challenge of our time. He asks us to learn the truth and gift of desire — to see it not as sin, but as the tangled hunger of body, soul, and even our neurotic little ego, that hybrid mix the gods seem to delight in watching as we stumble, burn and create.

If we fail, we risk being consumed by the very monsters we have created through repression. But if we succeed, if we can marry Venus’s delight with Pluto’s depth, then even in this age of endings we may discover a way to flourish.

*Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1819-1820) - Caspar David Friedrich*

Marked Forever

For me, romancing Pluto has meant learning to live with paradox: the struggle of wanting visibility and the gift of depth that comes through the stripping and gestation of the underworld — and then the harder task of birthing myself anew as I cross the return threshold. It has meant accepting that my work may not always be widely seen, but when it emerges, it carries the stamp of transformation. Pluto teaches me that visibility is not about constant exposure, but about timing, authenticity that comes from the tooth and claw of the lived experience.

And so, as this series closes, I see Pluto not only as the suitor at the threshold, but as the companion who has shaped my own path. Saturn taught me discipline — the weight of structure. Uranus disruption — the responsibility of freedom. Neptune enchantment — the surrender to imagination. But Pluto is the one who leaves the mark that cannot be erased. He has taught me that the liminal is not a pause but the forge, and that to romance him is to accept both the challenge and the gift: that what is born from the depths may not be loud, but will be unforgettable.

Perhaps this is the invitation of our time as well. We live in an age of endings, of thresholds we cannot outrun. To romance Pluto now is to learn that desire is not sin but the hybrid hunger of body, soul, and even ego together — the unruly mix that makes us human, creative, and worth the gods’ attention. To romance Pluto is to risk being undone, but also to discover the uncanny beauty of what endures.

And so, as I step back from this dance with the planets, I leave you at the doorway. The suitors have all made their case. The choice, as ever, is yours: to linger, to turn away, or to step across the threshold into the in‑between — where terror and treasure, loss and intimacy, body and soul, are waiting to be romanced.

Ease & Grace
Vanessa Couto

Romancing Pluto: The Werewolf at the Threshold