The Dark of the Soul by Liz Greene is a seminar on psychopathy, as described in a chilling checklist – charm without depth, grandeur without roots, lies as delusion. It’s the archetypal mask without a man behind it. And Greene, with her particular brew of Jungian insight and astrological acuity, holds up the natal chart as an X-ray. She shows how some souls arrive here ready to manipulate, to dominate, to mesmerize. What makes this subject so squirm-inducing is the shadowy figures Greene dissects — but also the quiet terror that we, too, might see reflections of the same traits flickering within our own psyches. Because let’s be honest: charm? We’ve all turned that dial up when it suits. Grandiosity? Who hasn’t imagined their own biopic starring someone prettier? Lack of empathy? Even the kindest of us have switched off the tap when it all felt a bit too much.
If you’re reading The Dark of the Soul, and you feel a chill — good. That means you’re alive, awake, and aware of the fragility of compassion in the face of cruelty. But take heart. Shadows aren’t the absence of light, but the evidence that it’s nearby, trying to break through. Even the monsters in mythology were once children.
This isn’t bedtime reading. It yanks your sleeve toward the shadow, demanding that you look at what most self-help books beg you to ignore: the grotesque, the perverse, the soul without empathy. At its heart, this work isn’t about psychopaths in the way tabloid headlines might want them. It’s about what happens when the inner soul that binds us to others, that makes us say “I’m sorry,” or “I love you,” or even “please,” is absent or severely compromised. The psyche, in these cases, becomes cold. And Greene doesn’t shrink from this void. She enters it. She draws the charts of the soul’s darkest possibilities. In her vision — and it’s an uncomfortable one for those of us who like our good and evil neatly boxed — even the most destructive among us are born with potential. The chart doesn’t create the monster; it reveals the potentiality. It’s a map, and like all maps, it doesn’t dictate the journey. But it can show the precipices.
What’s especially striking is Greene’s insistence on meaning. She won’t let us dismiss evil as random, nor will she let us be seduced by it. She doesn’t moralize, but she doesn’t excuse, either. She examines. She lays the psyche bare. And this, I think, is what makes her work both vital and deeply disturbing. Because she doesn’t place the dark entirely out there, in others, in the sociopath on the news or the historical tyrant. She shows how the same archetypes that manifest as cruelty or charisma in one life may appear as repression, obsession, or alienation in another. The soul’s energies aren’t good or bad — they are powerful. And power, when denied compassion, becomes dangerous. You realize that the monstrous is not simply in the Other, but in the choices, the circumstances, the unresolved traumas that can turn potential into pathology.
It’s uncomfortable. And so it should be. Greene isn’t asking us to become experts in psychopathy. She’s asking us to become more human — by understanding what happens when humanity is stripped away.
We have all felt remorse — it’s the haunting feeling of conscience that says, “What have I done?” When we realize our actions have caused another to suffer. It’s the soul’s capacity to feel on behalf of the other. It’s empathy wrapped in sorrow, tied to the awareness of consequence. And in Liz Greene’s analysis, the absence of this — the cold, yawning vacuum where remorse should reside — is the heartbeat of psychopathy. We have the flair for deception, the charm, the violent outbursts, but those are symptoms. The core, the true horror, is the utter void where feeling for another ought to be. It’s not just that the psychopath does harm, it’s that they don’t feel that it’s harm at all.
What Greene does so masterfully is link this void to the theme of vengeance — but this is a strange, abstracted, displaced vengeance. It isn’t he hot-blooded vendetta of someone who’s been wronged and is out for justice, but the ice-cold fury of someone punishing the world for a wound they can’t even name. These individuals often don’t know why they do harm. There’s no conscious grudge, no clear enemy. There is simply a relentless urge to exert control, to dominate, to watch something beautiful fall — and feel nothing as it breaks. It is the archetypal energy of Nemesis run amok, stripped of its moral compass and set loose upon a world that must pay for a sin it doesn’t remember committing.
And here’s where Greene’s insight becomes almost unbearably poignant — because the lack of remorse is an emotional absence. A hollowness where once there may have been the potential for connection. Often, these individuals have suffered their own brutal histories — betrayals, emotional neglect, early experiences of abandonment or violence that twisted their inner wiring into knots so tight they forgot there was ever another way to be. They aren’t robots — they are refugees from feeling.
And yet… astrology doesn’t t let us wash our hands. It tells us: here are the symbols. Here are the aspects. Here is Saturn square Moon, Pluto on the Ascendant, Chiron limping through the 4th house. Because when remorse is missing, empathy absent, and yet the chart sings of emotional woundings, what we see isn’t evil incarnate — but a soul that has sealed itself off from pain so utterly that it has also sealed off love. This is why remorse is so vital. It’s the soul saying, “I still care.” Even in shame, even in regret, even in grief, there is the presence of feeling. And thus, the potential for healing.
Greene doesn’t tell us to pity the psychopath. She doesn’t ask for sympathy. But she asks us to see — to recognize that beneath the monstrous acts is often a shattered soul in exile from itself. And this is a deeper tragedy than any punishment we could conceive. A lack of remorse is the red flag, the neon sign that something essential has been severed. But it also invites us to look with the compassion of those who still remember what it means to feel.
Now this is where Liz Greene really conjures the uncomfortable truths — the ones we’d much rather not believe, because they dismantle our tidy spiritual stereotypes. You see, most people, when dipping their toe into astrology’s vast ocean, get a little giddy with generalizations. “Oh, lots of Water — you must be so sensitive! Such a feeler! A natural empath, probably cries during pet adverts.” But Greene, with her deeply Jungian lens, says, “Hold your seahorses.” Because feeling is not always the same as empathy. And sensitivity, when twisted inward, can become a swamp of narcissism, manipulation, or emotional vampirism.
What’s terrifying, truly chilling, about the blankness Greene describes — that dreadful void in the heart of the psychopath — isn’t that there is no emotion, but this emotion exists only in service of the self. The music has no soul. A Water-heavy chart may be brimming with psychic impressions, intuitive insights, and emotional memory — but without integration, without moral development, without the bridge between feeling and relating, the water becomes stagnant, swampy, toxic.
And now we arrive at Venus — our beautiful goddess of pleasure, aesthetics, connection, and charm. You might expect that a strong Venus would indicate a love of beauty, a generous social grace, a capacity for intimate connection. And often, it does. But Greene forces us to confront a more complicated truth: Venus, too, can seduce without conscience. A strong Venus can desire to be liked, adored, pursued out of hunger. Venus in these charts often shows a need to relate, but there isn’t necessarily a capacity to.
Picture this: a chart heavy in Water, brimming with unresolved emotion, psychic rawness, potential abandonment wounds — and a strong Venus — yearning for connection, pleasure, attention. Add one cruel Saturn, one bruising Pluto, or a Moon that’s been exiled into the cold — and suddenly, you have a person whose emotional psyche is built around neediness masquerading as charm, or revenge disguised as romance. This is not love. This is transaction.
Greene speaks of rejection. But this isn’t just about being told “no” in a relationship. It’s an existential rejection, a replay of the original wounding, often from early childhood. And when that rejection is triggered, it’s rage rather than a sadness. Humiliation. A desire to annihilate the object of desire, because they once held the keys to salvation — and dropped them. So what we’re left with, in these charts, is a horrifying blend: the yearning for deep emotional connection without the infrastructure to sustain it. It’s like building a home on a sinkhole. Everything looks beautiful on the surface — Water and Venus in harmony — but below, there’s nothing solid. And when the illusion cracks, the descent is catastrophic.
Astrology doesn’t deal in absolutes. It deals in potentials. A strong Water chart, a strong Venus — these aren’t inherently dangerous. But when paired with certain aspects, unmetabolized trauma, or a lack of ego development, they become volatile. It’s how the soul responds to its wounds. And when we stare into that blankness — that emotional void behind the charismatic smile — we aren’t looking at something alien. We’re looking at what happens when feeling is turned away from love and toward control.
“We all need others and we all fear abandonment. It is absoluteness of the psychopathic fear that is so destructive, and there is no conscious awareness of it…The psychopath is not aware of feeling fear. Yet the fear is so deep and all-consuming that everything is dominated by it. All behavioural patterns, whether psychotic or not, serve some inner goal, conscious or unconscious. The psychopath’s characteristic promiscuity serves as a protection against abandonment. If one is always hopping from one bed to another, casually exploiting sexual partners but never feeling attached to any of them, one never runs the risk of being vulnerable. Power over others is a highly effective weapon against the threat of abandonment. Why should an individual disconnect from feelings? Because when we need we are vulnerable, and we might be humiliated or abandoned.”
Chart examples include the Oklahoma bomber, Charles Manson, Slobodan Milosevic, Myra Hindley, Dunblane Killer, Michael Jackson, and more. We are now well and truly in the thick of it —we are less tracing the outlines of pathology, but plumbing the soul’s most grotesque souls. In her dissection of infamous criminals, Greene’s approach is diagnostic. She observes unmet needs, unresolved trauma, and archetypal possession. Take Charles Manson: a man whose name alone sends a shiver down the spine of American memory. Greene doesn’t ask you to feel sorry for him. But she demands that you understand him as a tragic (and terrifying) archetype.
The Moon-Pluto opposition in Manson’s chart is a primal scream. The Moon, mother, nurturing, the inner child’s place of safety — pitted directly against Pluto, the underworld, the devourer, the transformer through destruction. In Manson, this opposition becomes unbearable. The mother, once a source of life, becomes the source of annihilation. The psyche, unable to process the trauma, externalizes it. In destroying others, particularly women, particularly mothers-to-be, Manson symbolically re-enacts the inner drama of his own annihilated childhood. Greene isn’t saying this excuses the crime — far from it. But she argues that understanding it through the chart can reveal why the psyche took this path. Why this soul, unable to heal, chose to inflict.
Then there’s Timothy McVeigh — the Oklahoma Bomber — whose Moon in Pisces in the 12th house suggests a haunting sensitivity. The 12th house is a karmic holding cell, a place where feelings get lost, dissolved, drowned. Combine this with a Uranus-Pluto opposition and you have a blueprint for violent eruptions, especially when empathy (Pisces Moon) is buried beneath generational rage (Pluto) and a compulsive need to break from control (Uranus). The child who was once emotionally suffocated grows into a man who must explode as an existential cry: See me. Feel what I couldn’t feel.
It’s here that Greene introduces this utterly fascinating idea — the signature of the psychopath. Just as investigators speak of criminals leaving behind a unique imprint, so too does the chart reflect this — not as a predictive tool (you can’t arrest someone based on their chart, after all), but as a symbolic map of the psyche’s terrain. When certain patterns appear — recurring Moon-Pluto aspects, hard Venus-Saturn contacts, the 12th house brimming with unintegrated emotion — astrologers may glimpse the shape of the wound, and perhaps even the flavor of how it might manifest.
But we must tread carefully here. The danger is in thinking the chart is destiny. It isn’t. It’s potential. Many people with Moon-Pluto aspects are not violent. Many with 12th house Moons are gentle, kind, spiritual. The difference lies in integration. In the work. What Greene gives us is the permission — and the language — to explore the inner world of the criminal with mythic empathy. To see the act as the end result of an archetypal drama gone horribly wrong. The villain is often a failed alchemist rather than just a monster, someone who couldn’t transmute pain into wisdom, so transmuted it into destruction instead.
To read a chart like Manson’s or McVeigh’s is not to condone, but to confront — to say, There but for the grace of integration go I. Because we all have Pluto somewhere. We all carry a bit of shadow. And the line between pain that turns inward and pain that lashes out is often drawn in the early years of life — when the Moon is still learning how to feel safe. The psychopath may leave a signature. But so do we all. The question is: what will yours say about you?
Liz Greene also covers the Dunblane case. Even uttering the name feels like stepping barefoot into ice. It’s one of those events that doesn’t just register as a headline in the mind — it etches itself into the soul, permanently, like a scar you didn’t ask for and can’t look away from. And Greene goes straight into the heart of that horror. In her examination of the Dunblane killer, Greene steps over the threshold of moral revulsion into uncomfortable territory where astrology meets psychology and tries, in earnest, to answer an impossible question: how could someone kill innocent children? In terms of the inner realm, the spiritual rupture, the machinery of the psyche gone tragically and monstrously awry.
And what she finds, what she lays bare, is deeply disturbing because it forces us to look at the places in ourselves, and in our culture, where compassion collapses. It’s the horror of the massacre, and that alone is almost too much to hold. It’s the way we respond to it: with rage, with despair, and often, with the swift manufacturing of a monster. A scapegoat. Now of course, the killer’s actions were vile. There’s no ambiguity there. But Greene suggests something far more complex and difficult: that even the most depraved among us aren’t aliens, but humans — and that is perhaps the most frightening truth of all. Because it means these horrors are no longer outside humanity. They are within its outer edges, its failings, its fractures.
The killer’s chart — which Greene examines — reveals a soul shaped by isolation, deep rejection, thwarted desires for recognition and affection, and perhaps above all, an inability to process emotional suffering in a humanizing way. Certain placements suggest immense emotional wounding combined with a distorted self-image and a volcanic inner world. But even as she examines the chart, Greene is careful not to say, “This chart made him do it.” Instead, she says: This chart shows a soul in profound pain who never found the tools to transform that pain into something other than destruction.
And this is where the most troubling — and necessary — part of the book lies. It is about how society often responds to horror with exorcism — social. We cast out the evil. We point and say, “There! That’s the monster!” And we feel, momentarily, safe. Because if it’s him, then it’s not us. If he’s other, then we’re OK. But Greene dares to challenge this illusion. In showing us the chart of the killer, she invites us to see the loneliness. The psychic abandonment. The unintegrated shadow. And it’s the part that hurts the most — because it asks us to consider how many times society looks away from the signs of deep psychological despair until it’s too late. How many times a cry for help is mistaken for noise. And how often our need for neat villains obscures the more complex truth: that violence, in its most grotesque forms, is often the final, twisted expression of a soul that never learned to relate.
It is challenging. It should be. If it were easy to read, it wouldn’t be real. Because the real stuff, the stuff that changes us — softens our judgments without dulling our clarity — is always difficult. Greene’s important insights, I think, lies not in her sympathy for the devil — but in her refusal to dehumanize even the most broken of human beings. Because the moment we turn pain into pathology, and pathology into otherness, we stop learning. And worse — we stop preventing.
Liz Greene observes that, in cases like this, it is often the Plutonian child who stands out as “different”—the so-called “black sheep” of the family. Greene’s observation about the Plutonian child is both heartbreaking and uncomfortably familiar to anyone who’s walked even part of the therapeutic path. These are the children who come into the world carrying the weight of shadows that aren’t necessarily their own — the family secrets, the generational curses, the repressed grief that hangs in the air like invisible smog. But not because they are inherently dark — because they see what others refuse to. They feel what others suppress. And when no one helps them make sense of this darkness, when no one says, “Yes, what you feel is real and you are not broken for feeling it,” the Plutonian intensity can curdle into isolation, resentment, and eventually — in the most tragic of cases — destruction.
The Dark of the Soul doesn’t provide easy answers. It doesn’t wrap things up in a neat philosophical bow. But it does what all great psychological and spiritual texts ought to do: it illuminates. It casts a harsh but necessary light on the intersection between wound and will, between chart and choice. It reveals how even the most disturbing behaviors are not birthed from a vacuum, but from a matrix of unmet needs, archetypal pressures, and psychic distortions. And despite all this insight, we may still be no closer to understanding the psychopath in the traditional sense. They remain elusive, enigmatic, terrifying. But what Greene gives us is something better, perhaps more useful: a framework. A way to witness the broken psyche without recoiling in fear or reducing it to caricature. A way to explore the map of a person’s soul and see where the roads split, where the bridges collapsed, where the light could not reach.
She reminds us that astrology, when used properly, isn’t fortune-telling — it’s soul-telling. It’s mythic cartography. And when paired with psychology, it becomes a tool for compassion. For holding the unholdable. For sitting with the unspeakable. And in the end, what she leaves us with is perhaps the most Plutonian insight of all: that if we are to heal as individuals and as a society, we must be willing to descend into the underworld. We have to understand what drives those who never made it back.
The Black Sheep
Pluto doesn’t want us to be good. Pluto wants us to be real. But society — polite society, conditioned society — wants pleasantries. It wants conformity. It wants ease. So the Plutonian gets labelled: difficult, problematic, unstable. And once labelled, they’re often left to fend for themselves. But here’s the alchemical secret: the black sheep is also the healer. In many families, they are the first to go to therapy. The first to question. The first to feel. And that makes them vulnerable. But it also makes them powerful. Because Pluto, in its highest form is transformation. It is the phoenix path. It burns, yes, but so that something purer may rise.
When society treats Plutonian individuals — the trauma-bearers, the question-askers, the wounded healers — as outcasts, it not only damages them, it robs itself of its potential wisdom. These are the souls who could lead us into deeper truths, if only we stopped fearing their intensity and started listening to what they carry. The psychic cost of being treated like the black sheep is real: trust issues, existential dread, emotional armoring. But with support, with reflection, with spiritual and psychological tools, these individuals can reclaim their power. They stop being the scapegoat and start being the seer. The healer. The catalyst. Liz Greene’s work, and Pluto’s domain more broadly, teaches us this: the exile often holds the key to the kingdom. We just have to be brave enough to open the door.
The Plutonian isn’t simply disliked, but demonized. And not because of anything they’ve done — but because of what they reveal. You see, Pluto people don’t just walk into a room — they bring a mirror. A big, bloody, mythic one, the kind that doesn’t flatter or forgive. And without saying a word, they reflect back to others the parts of themselves they’d rather keep hidden: their envy, their shame, their insecurity, their unloved bits. And most people? Well, they recoil. They look at the Plutonian and say, “You’re too intense. You’re making me uncomfortable.” But what they really mean is, “I see myself in you, and I don’t like what I see.” This is projection at its most primitive — and Pluto, being the underworld’s torchbearer, is the perfect screen upon which others cast their inner films. Suddenly, the Plutonian becomes the villain in someone else’s movie. The “weird one,” the “troublemaker,” the “bad energy.” All the while, they’re just standing there, holding space for a reality no one else wants to acknowledge. It’s not just family. Oh no. It spills into workplaces, friendships, classrooms, online spaces, the people in your neighborhood. The Pluto person — with their soul-deep eyes and their psychic intuition — unnerves people. They pick up on lies. They feel an energy that others deny. They notice the undercurrents and ask the questions that make the room go silent. And for this, they are punished. Mocked. Bullied. Scapegoated.
But here’s the twist, the bittersweet Plutonian revelation: this isn’t a curse. It’s a calling. A role. To be a mirror in a world full of masks is brutal, but it’s also blessed. Because the Plutonian doesn’t just reflect pain; they also reflect potential. They hold the frequency of what could be if we stopped pretending and started transforming. And they feel everything. They carry it in their bones, in their breath, in the way they can’t quite “small talk” their way through life. Their energy is real — it isn’t always comfortable, but true. Healing doesn’t always come with crystals and soft lighting. Sometimes, it comes from being cracked open in the presence of someone who sees you.
The tragedy, of course, is that many Pluto people grow up internalizing all this rejection. They start to believe they are the problem. That their intensity is a flaw, their insight a burden. And so they withdraw, or armor up, or become compulsively self-reliant. All because they were never told: You’re not too much. You’re just surrounded by people not ready to face themselves. But there is such beauty, such power, in the Plutonian path. Once the shame is peeled back — once the projections are seen for what they are — the Pluto person becomes a force of transformation in the world. They become the therapist, the shaman, the artist, the activist, the soul-midwife. The one who goes into the dark to bring back the light for others.
The world often treats Pluto people unfairly. But they are the ones who can hold the unholdable. Who can say, “I see your shadow, and I still choose to stand here with you.” And in that moment, healing begins — for everyone. If you’re a Plutonian — know this: your depth is your medicine. Your pain is your portal. And the ones who recoil from you? They’re not rejecting you. They’re rejecting the parts of themselves you remind them of.