Composite Pluto in the eleventh house brings a relationship ideals and hopes that both people feel very strongly about and will work very hard for. Robert Hand adds the feeling that goes with it. Both feel they have not come together casually, and that this association has great importance for their lives.
That conviction has practical consequences in his account. The two have a very strong emotional involvement with their ideals and will fight to maintain them against all comers, and by the same token they will work hard together to accomplish what they want.
What This Placement Describes
Pluto in a composite chart is death and regeneration, the energy that carries a relationship through periods of heavy change so that an order which has outlived its purpose can be replaced. Hand says its power comes from within, because the transformations it rules arise out of the nature of what is transformed. In a relationship the energy is frequently felt as power, and the house position shows which area of the relationship is most likely to be transformed by the two being together.
The composite eleventh house is friendship, and Hand thinks a strong eleventh is very appropriate in a composite chart. It does not confine a relationship to friendship. It helps two people be friendly in whatever they are doing together, which he says matters especially in a sexual relationship, since lovers with a strong eleventh will also be friends. He calls it an excellent house for a marriage composite. As the house of hopes and wishes it also gives a relationship a strong sense of shared ideals, with both people looking for the same things in life, and he notes that a couple with a strong eleventh must be able to share a great deal of their lives with each other.
How It Tends To Play Out
The intensity attracts. Hand says this kind of conviction draws others who are similarly inclined, which is how the delineation moves from ideals to company.
Because the eleventh is also the house of friends, Pluto here indicates friends who are either very emotionally intense people, or who possess some kind of power, or both. He is specific about the range that power can take. It runs from an intense aura that radiates from a person to actual power on the material plane, in business or in government. He adds a characterising detail. Pluto is by nature somewhat secretive, so the friends a couple with this placement attracts are not likely to be people known to the world at large, but rather those who hold power from behind the scenes.
The last reading widens the frame. An eleventh house Pluto may signify that the two are involved in large scale humanitarian movements that seek to transform and regenerate the world, which he illustrates with reform and revolutionary movements and movements of mass consciousness.
The Opposite House
The paired house rule comes out of the mechanics of the composite. Any pair of planets has two midpoints, the nearer is used, and the farther keeps some effect that grows as the two natal positions approach opposition. So an eleventh house Pluto should also be read through the fifth, and where the two natal Plutos are near opposition, reading both is essential.
The composite fifth house is self expression, creativity and love affairs, and Hand measures it by whether two people can be real in each other's presence without effort. His Pluto in the fifth gives a powerful drive toward self expression and intensifies whatever emotion is already dominant, for good or ill, and can make the relationship a vehicle for self regeneration. Read as an axis, the fifth is what the two are together now and the eleventh is what they are aiming at, and Pluto on that line makes both of them matter more than usual.
Hand gives no threshold for when the second reading takes over and no method for blending them. Both stand.
Where It Gets Difficult
Hand writes this delineation with less warning attached than most of his Pluto pages, and the honest reading is that he does not treat it as a hard placement. What difficulty there is follows from the intensity itself.
Ideals held this strongly and defended against all comers leave little room for revision. A couple who will fight for what they believe are also a couple for whom changing their minds is expensive, and the eleventh house is where a relationship decides what it is aiming at.
The friends are the second consideration. People who carry weight, and who are not publicly visible, are a real asset and a real exposure at the same time, and the secretiveness Hand attributes to Pluto makes the second half harder to assess than the first.
The house sets the issue. Whether the energy is experienced as difficult or easy is described by the aspects to Pluto, which Hand treats as a separate question.
Recommended Reading
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- Robert Hand, Planets in Composite: Analyzing Human Relationships (1975), chapter fourteen.
- Robert Hand, Planets in Composite: Analyzing Human Relationships (1975), chapter four, on the composite eleventh house and the paired house rule.
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Next: Composite Chart Placements and How to Read a Composite Chart.