Mars Conjunct Pluto

Ordinary wanting is replaced by something closer to compulsion. When this native takes an interest, they take all of it: the subject is worked through to the bottom, the opponent is not merely beaten but removed, the love affair is conducted as though nothing else were happening. Stamina is enormous and largely unconscious, so they will work past the point where others have gone home and be surprised to hear that the hours were unusual. People find them impressive and slightly alarming, often before a word has been exchanged.

The two natures cohabit powerfully and not comfortably. Control is the recurring theme: over the work, the household, the diet, the other person. The native rarely experiences this as domination, only as a strong preference about how things should be, which is exactly why it goes unchecked until somebody leaves. Anger is not hot and passing but cold and structural; a decision is taken about a person and is not revisited. Where the will is thwarted for long periods it turns on the body, and this contact appears frequently in histories of both surgery and self-destruction.

There is no diluting this conjunction and no advantage in trying. What can be chosen is the object. Aimed at a subject rather than a person, it produces the surgeon, the investigator, the reformer and the researcher who finds what nobody else had the stomach to look for. Aimed at a household, it produces a small tyranny that everyone remembers for fifty years. The native should assume, as a working rule, that they are always applying more force than they think, and should ask periodically who is currently absorbing it.