Which tarot card is Pluto?
Pluto is attributed to Judgement, the twentieth Major Arcanum.
Judgement
Upright: Judgement, rebirth, inner calling, absolution
Reversed: Self-doubt, inner critic, ignoring the call
Full Judgement meaning →Why Judgement carries Pluto
The most recent of the planetary attributions — Pluto was identified in 1930 and reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006, which astrologers have almost universally ignored. Pluto governs irreversible transformation, what is buried, and what comes back.
Judgement shows figures rising from open coffins as an angel sounds a trumpet. Whatever was under the ground is now standing up, and the summons is not optional. That combination — the buried returning, and no way to decline it — is Pluto exactly.
Pluto rules Scorpio in modern practice, whose card is Death. Read together they distinguish two kinds of ending: Death is the threshold crossed, Judgement is the reckoning that follows and cannot be deferred. Traditional astrology gives Scorpio to Mars and The Tower instead, which is a third version of the same territory.
The difficult register
The shadow is the reckoning postponed, or a past dug up compulsively rather than answered once.
A modern attribution, and why that matters
Pluto is the most recent attribution in the whole system — identified in 1930, reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006, and retained by astrologers regardless. Whatever one thinks of that, it means the Pluto–Judgement pairing is roughly a century old against a trump sequence that is closer to six.
The pairing arrives through Pluto's modern rulership of Scorpio. Traditional astrology gives Scorpio to Mars, which carries The Tower, and Scorpio's own trump is Death. So the Scorpionic territory is covered three times over depending on which system you use: Death for the sign, The Tower for the traditional ruler, Judgement for the modern one. Rather than a contradiction this is arguably the most useful cluster in the deck — three distinct kinds of ending, and a spread will usually make clear which is meant.
As with the other outer planets, Pluto rules none of the thirty-six decans. The decan cycle uses the seven classical planets only, so Pluto's reach stops at the Major Arcana.