Keiron Le Grice - Discovering Eris: The Symbolism and Significance of a New Planetary Archetype

Figure 2. Dwarf Planets, Plutoids and Trans-Neptunian Objects.

All this, of course, is widely known. What is less well known, though, is the possible deeper, symbolic relevance of these events. What most onlookers would have been unaware of is the fact that the discovery of Eris might also have an archetypal meaning, which emerges not from the science of astronomy, but from the ancient mythic perspective of astrology. As we will see, this archetypal meaning appears to be suggested, in part, by the symbolism, actions, and character of the classical Greek goddess of strife, Eris (pronounced ee-ris), after which the dwarf planet was named.

While many people would be quick to reject outright the truth claims of astrology, for those who care to delve into the deep mysteries of the human psyche the astrological perspective can provide a

Archetypal astrology, as this new approach has been called, is based on the supposition of a correspondence between the planetary order of the solar system and the dimension of the human psyche that C.G. Jung called the archetypes of the collective unconscious creative ordering factors in the depths of the unconscious that give a dynamic thematic structure to human experience. In archetypal astrology, the Sun, the Moon, and each of the planetary bodies, are thought to represent distinct archetypal principles. Thus the planet Mars, for example, is considered to be related to the archetype of the warrior and more generally to the principle of self-assertion and aggression, whereas Venus, understood in its simplest terms, is related to one aspect of what Jung called the anima, and to the universal principles of love, beauty, and pleasure. Rather like the ancient mythic conception of the gods, and as in the Platonic conception of archetypal Forms, the archetypal factors studied in astrology are recognized to be not only psychological, but also cosmological in essence, exerting a dynamic formative ordering influence on both the interior and exterior dimensions of reality.

As I have explained elsewhere, the archetypal approach to astrology must be distinguished from the fatalistic predestination long associated with astrologys traditional and popular forms. According to Richard Tarnas helpful definition, astrology is not literally predictive of actual future events and therefore indicative of the inescapable workings of a preordained fate; rather, it is archetypally predictive in that its methods of analysis and interpretation of the planetary positions and movements give insight into the archetypal determinants, the general themes and motifs, evident in our experiences, rather than the specific form of manifestation of these archetypes. To understand how an archetypal factor might manifest in the particular details of human life, one would need to take into consideration many other factors not apparent from astrology alone, such as cultural background, gender,

I should explain also that while astrology is incompatible with the basic tenets of mechanistic science and the materialistic conception of the nature of reality that have prevailed throughout the modern era, it is far more congruent with many of the new paradigm perspectives that have recently emerged in physics, biology, psychology, and elsewhere. The ideas of holism, interconnectedness, interdependence, organicism, self-organization, and non-local causality that have emerged from relativity theory and quantum theory in physics or from the systems approach in biology have presented us with a view of reality sharply divergent from that based on classical physics and the still-dominant Cartesian-Newtonian mechanistic paradigm. As I have attempted to show in The Archetypal Cosmos (2010), these new models, together with the insights of the psychology of the unconscious, provide an increasingly coherent and supportive theoretical context within which we can better comprehend the likely basis of astrological correspondences. It is in this context that I offer the following reflections on the possible archetypal and evolutionary meaning of the discovery of Eris.