Eris, the tenth planet As a student of astrology, I of course had heard of the discovery of the newest member of our solar system, Eris, in 2005. I learned that it is farther out than Pluto, and a little bigger than Pluto, and it takes a full 560 years to make one orbit around the sun. Right away, folks first started calling it the “tenth planet” when it was first discovered. But soon, the people in charge of this sort of thing “demoted” Pluto and said it wasn’t going to be called a “planet” anymore, and instead made up a whole new “almost planet” category for Eris and Pluto to be in together. As an astrologer, this was very interesting to me, but also a bit amusing. I knew that Pluto acted very bit as much a “planet” in astrology as any of the others, and this attempt to “demote” its classification was meaningless in practice. But that left me unsure of what to do about Eris being discovered out there. Obviously, if Eris was just like Pluto, just farther out and a little bigger, than it’s magnitude of astrological impact must be at least in the same ballpark as Pluto’s, which is really pretty substantial. But what Eris’ meaning would be, what sort of manifestations it would engender, was really a completely wide-open question, and I assumed that it would take the astrological community some good bit of time to figure it out to anyone’s satisfaction. And that was about as far as I’d gotten thinking about Eris, until I recently started mulling over how extraordinary the history of the first half of the 20th century had been, and started looking for an equally extraordinary reflection in the stars. The 31 years between 1914-1945 contained a unprecedented number and variety of traumatic world crises, any one of which would have been sufficient to make the period extraordinary on its own. In those short 31 years, we suffered through the trench warfare and poison gas of World War I, the Spanish Flu, Prohibition, Palmer Raids, the Red Scare, the rise of organized crime, mail order tommy guns, the Great Depression, stockbroker suicides, hyperinflation, the black clouds of the Dust Bowl, fascism, dictatorships, concentration camps, the genocide of the Jews, Hitler’s ovens, Stalinism, Maoism, World War II, Normandy, Kamikazes, and the invention and deployment of the Atomic Bomb. We saw the dramatic and irrevokable fall of the old world and the rise of a shining new political order, we buried 300 million of our neighbors, families, and friends, and we woke up in a permanently unsafe world where nuclear war was not only a possibility but a constant theat. That minuscule stretch of time brought the worst bit of trouble that history had ever recorded. The stress started in 1914, quickly wound around the whole globe, and hardly let up for an instant for the next 31 years. Unfortunately, conventional astrology could point to no extraordinary planet (or extraordinary planetary aspect or extraordinary cluster of planetary aspects) to account for this exceptionally extraordinary period in history, and that failing has been a serious black eye for our community and our dharma. Glaring shortcomings like that encourage doubt in astrology. But it turns out that this new planet Eris does make a long, hypothetically powerful aspect that actually does cover the entire period from 1914-1945 : it exactly conjoined the Aries Point (0 degrees Aries) in 1926, but it was within five degrees orb of the Aries Point all the time from 1909-1945, almost exactly matching the beginning and ending of this ridiculously tragic period in human history. Thinking that seemed pretty interesting, I then looked back in history to see if anything similar had happened the other times in history when Eris had conjoined the Aries Point. This is astrology. This is how it works, comparing what happens up in the skies with what we find written in the historical record. And it’s very rare, and very exciting, to be living in a period when any of us can assist in the collective process of getting to know a new planet for the very first time, simply by asking such questions. So I looked online, and the only Eris ephemerids I found only go back to around 600AD. Between then and now, Eris only crossed over the Aries Point two other times, once in 866AD, and the other time in 1393 AD. Of course, just like in the 20th century, Eris was moving so slow at that point in its orbit that it was technically conjunct the Aries point for 30 years or so on each occasion. What did I find in those time periods? Around 866AD, the Vikings were in the process of attacking Europe, and they weakened the Carolingian Empire to the point that it collapsed and dissolved during this period, breaking up to form the modern nations of France, Germany, and Italy. The Carolingian Empire was Europe’s last gasp attempt to restore the Roman Empire. It lasted less than a century, but it controlled most of Europe for a bit, and its leader was known as the Holy Roman Emperor. When the Carolingian Empire broke up and collapsed, it was the end of an era, when the age of Empire finally died, and the era of Europe as a patchwork of independent nation states began. The next time Eris conjoined the Aries Point, around 1393, Europe was making a similarly huge transition, leaving the Dark Ages behind and taking its first steps into the Renaissance. And I thought, well that’s even more interesting, to find more two huge cultural transitions also occurring right when Eris was transiting over the Aries Point. And I wondered, if Eris conjunctions to the Aries Point make such an impact, what would oppositions do? So I looked. I didn’t find much in 1139, when Eris was opposing the Aries Point, but I noticed that that was when professional guilds first started organizing together and exerting control over economies, which is the economic model that most modern economies are based on. Then I looked at 1693, the next time Eris opposed the Aries Point, and learned that was when England’s first Central Bank was founded, the Bank of England, which came to be the model that most modern central banks (and the economies of most modern states) are based on today. Now, maybe those are coincidences and maybe they aren’t. The conjunctions seemed to coincide with the dissolutions of old political orders and the introduction of entirely new ones, while the oppositions seemed to do much the same to the economic order.
Posted on: Fri, 02 Aug 2013 12:03:41 +0000
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