Rihanna, Pluto, Projection and Breaking the Bank:

formulated with thoughts from @yungdesperad0 and myself.

A deep look at Rihanna’s Plutonian signature.

Pluto has called benchmarks in Rihanna’s life through transit, with SOS going to number one as transiting Pluto was culminating in her chart - the beginning of her massive influence being expressed as part of her praxis in the world (10th). Jupiter was also in conjunction to her natal Pluto initiating her into her first expansion into the world where she met a huge worldly audience that was to feed into her transformative process over the next decade. Her natal Pluto is in Scorpio in the 7th house and encodes her journey into her own empowerment and fortification. Dane Rudhyar calls Pluto the solar seed, which in my opinion, suggests that the core of the unravelling of the externalised solar journey is found in the darkness of how we are able to manage and allow Pluto’s demands of us to evolve. In a sense, Pluto is seen as the finisher of the Uranian process of deeper individuation where the potential gathered from Uranus’ drive is ushered into being tested in the real world of power. Thus, Pluto kickstarts and finalises the process of transformation by asking us to utilise and make choices authentically according to how we are seeking to express the individuating genius represented by Uranus in a process of sometimes difficult self-realisation where separations from the past need to be made. Pluto opens the door to the evolution of consciousness as it tries to discover its power (Pluto) through the glimpse of its sacred uniqueness (Uranus).

Pluto in Scorpio suggests a generation that is born in the midst of global power struggles whereby they come to face the discrepancies in power and authority between themselves and the baby boomer Pluto in Leo generation. The background of such a generation is one that comes face to face with a dark social underbelly and becomes the turning point in their remediation. Dealing with power and its redistribution, economic devastation and corruption all of which were forces with which Rihanna had to contend with in her reclamation of her Plutonian power and in her decision around the type of  influence she would have on the world - think FENTY exposing the corruption in the lack of foundation products for POC. In the 7th, Pluto's contribution and therefore her influence, lies in dealing with forces beyond her control in the context of relationship, committed partnership to people or business. Her Scorpionic journey in this context has led her to the opening of the gates of wealth from the underworld as she became America’s youngest self-made female billionaire in 2022l.

Now, let’s look at the planets that Pluto is bringing into this process. Tightest aspect is Pluto in quincunx to her Venus in Aries which I see play out in a huge way when it comes to her ‘image’, ‘beauty’ and ‘wealth’. The fact that she’s made most of her money out of her art and cosmetic products is just too obvious…. Another interesting manifestation of this is that with every dramatic physical makeover and adjustment to her image, particularly at the advent of her career, Rihanna stepped into a new calibre of her power. Think the shift from Pon De Replay and SOS into Good Girl Gone Bad with the sharp short black bob and the development of that into the So Hard era and Russian Roulette where her image was seeing dramatic breaks from her younger, more conventional image. These changes were not merely physical as they pinpointed developments in RIhanna’s emerging influence on music, fashion and people at the time. The Aries Venus and the militarised clothes, short hair and pioneering looks gave us life in the 2000s and her fanbase from her music (Venus) naming itself the NAVY. The songs themselves are populated with Venus-Pluto themes and she began to experience the heights of fame and power as she grappled with the residue of the harrowing image of her face being online after her domestic violence case with Chris Brown. Power struggles, consuming love, a controlled image, passing through personal thresholds.You can’t make this shit up. 

This is the external story, however. To think of a young Rihanna navigating the music industry is where we can begin piecing the less obvious story together. At the beginning of her career, I would go as far as to say she was undermined by labels and the public, as her journey into stardom although rapid and hugely influential seemed to always be tested by others. I still remember the discourse around whether she could sing or not, youtube compilations of her not hitting notes as an attempt to disparage her dominance over the music scene. It seems people were not sure whether Rihanna was a one-hit wonder and her abilities were tested in time before she was seen as a consolidated presence. This is part of the Aries archetype of becoming and overcoming. Rihanna must have been aware of this dynamic and the extent to which her image was controlled and so reached a fork in the road in terms of her decision-making. I feel like Rihanna became aware of this and realised that it was necessary to reclaim her agency and self-determine. Pluto quincunx Venus speaks of an internal need for adjustment in order to reconcile the demands of the two planets in order for the energy not to become stuck. It is possible that had Rihanna not scrambled within herself to reclaim her power from the structures that canonised her, there would have been a cap on her creative potential and she would have been relegated as another pop-star that we knew for a while. The working of this quincunx deep within herself, usually also happening in bouts of public isolation (Venus in Aries in the 12th), seems to have been a deep part of the fabric of her evolution into womanhood and consolidated power in the public realm. I think there was a crisis period of self-determination where Rihanna had to take a long hard look at her journey and decide how she was going to rebirth herself as her authentic self, with all the fears, doubts and difficult doing that Aries ruled Venus in the 12th suggests. This coincided with her 2009 ‘bankruptcy’ that saw her drop from 11 million dollars in net worth, and from 35 million the year before to just 2 million dollars due to mismanagement of funds from her accountants despite the fact that she had been solidly working. This type of drop must have definitely catalysed an inner crisis around her journey and speaks of a process of self-undoing or hidden accountant enemies that spiral her into the first real moments of her transcendence as an artist. I think, in retrospect, this must have been a very rich time for her as Pluto’s power of deconstructing, picking apart and leaving the bones for a powerful transformation was taking place. It must have felt bare and stripping but it formed the ground by which Rihanna was going to recover her largest asset, herself and her power. With Jay Z leaving Def Jam, the label also stopped funding her work and so she began to fund her own studio time, music videos etc through endorsements and tours. This allowed her to self-determine again and present herself without the filters of the labels as she came to grips with who she was going to become. Adjustments, difficulties, overcoming challenges with power structures and inner uncertainties about who we are  speak about the first part process of the quincunx which when confronted and dealt with open the door to a different type of ease within oneself, a real resolution of a deep-seated issue that liberates a whole lot of power.