The Underworld

Pluto/Hades is the god of the underworld, yes. He is the long sleep after life. But that is Pluto’s human-facing aspect.

In the life of the stars, he is an everyday being.

He is the portal from planetary time to stellar time.

As a kid I remember being captivated by the fact that Neptune and Pluto crossed paths from time to time, swapping which one was farthest out.

Neptune, the imperturbable sea of consciousness, can venture into the void.

And transcendent Pluto can venture in from it.

I was also obsessed with the underworld as a kid, the Egyptian version. This probably isn’t unusual, except my connection to it was inextricable from the Passover story, in which my ancestral beliefs were supposed to be superior to theirs, but I knew it was missing something.

It was something subtle about death and souls. I was being taught that embalming etc. was a primitive belief, but I felt there was an exact opposite misunderstanding of its meaning.

Preserving the body “forever” aligns that person with the frozen, cold eternity of Pluto.

“Eternity” is an abstraction of pure time. I don’t know if those are real or not, but it doesn’t seem like they’re “in” the “universe” if so.

But cosmically long, cosmically far, cosmically cold — that’s functional eternity at Earth scale.

It’s life at star scale.

What bothers me about “eternity” is that, from our point of view, there’s no time. It stops.

But nothing stops.

And sure, Nothing stops.

But though we may be very small,

we are not Nothing.

There is no “becoming One” with Something you are already One with.

That’s how One works.

One is always already One with the One.

That’s not what becoming one with the dirt of the solar system means.

That’s not stopping.

That’s slowing down to star speed.