Lately my YouTube algorithm started feeding me videos of people throwing a powerful magnet into the murky waters of urban canals, forgotten rivers, or industrial ports, searching for treasure. They drag the rope until it suddenly goes taut: the magnet has latched onto something. They pull slowly, gently, as if waking a sleeper who has been dreaming for centuries. And from the black depths rises a bicycle devoured by time, a safe sealed for decades, a military helmet, a bunch of keys no one remembers losing, sometimes a pistol that no longer fires yet still carries all its rusted menace… or simply a toaster lying belly-up, its cord coiled like a dead snake.

At first I thought I was watching only for the thrill of unexpected treasure. But the more I watch, the clearer it becomes: these silent men and women standing on the bank beneath grey northern-European skies are, without knowing it, performing a perfect ritual of Pluto in Scorpio.

They are not looking for gold. They are looking for whatever was deliberately (or accidentally) thrown into the water so it would vanish from shame, fear, guilt… or simply because it was useless, ugly, in the way, because one day someone got sick of seeing it in the kitchen and flung it into the canal in rage or indifference.

And they do it in waters usually saturated with centuries of urban poison: heavy metals, oils, chemicals no one ever wanted to name. They dare to plunge their hands (and their soul) into the toxic without magical gloves, armed only with a magnet and a quiet decision.

The magnet does not judge. It attracts whatever is metallic, dense, whatever was once magnetised by the force of an extreme emotion. In doing so it reveals the deep law of Pluto in Scorpio: nothing lived with absolute intensity can ever truly be lost; it can only sink, wait, rust, until a greater polarity born from the same core returns to claim it.

That is why these modern seekers are Plutonian teachers showing us what must be done to unearth what we have forgotten yet still occupies space at the bottom of our inner abysses. With their rope and neodymium magnet they silently demonstrate what Plutonian transformation demands: the willingness to descend into murky, toxic waters to discover what is waiting there.

Sometimes what surfaces is terrifying: a hermetically sealed box of bullets. Sometimes it is joyful: a gold coin from a Spanish pirate galleon. Sometimes it is only a toaster.

But always, always, they clean up. Whatever has no further use goes into the rubbish and they call the council to collect it. And when the magnet unexpectedly brings up a crab, a river crayfish, or a fish still breathing in the mud, they look at it for a second, greet it almost with reverence, and gently release it back into the water.

That is the most beautiful face of the ritual: in the midst of the toxic and the rotten, they recognise life and let it continue on its way.

This is Pluto in Scorpio teaching what it means to be truly “Plutonian”. We all have Pluto. So we can learn from the magnet fishers to cast our own magnet into those muddy, turbid waters and see what comes up…

Do you feel like throwing your own magnet today? The water is still and it holds exactly the secrets you are ready to remember… if you feel like it.

Three Plutonian questions to ask while gazing into your own depths

1. What absurdly everyday object did you symbolically throw into the water so you would never have to see it again?
2. What rusted toaster are you still carrying because you’re ashamed to admit you once used it?
3. If you could return one single crab from your past to life… which one would you choose?