This week we embark on what I’m calling the ‘Solstice Cluster’ of events. We’ve just been through a group of events associated with the long-anticipated transit of Venus, which was a bit less than two weeks ago.
Astrology events tend to cluster up, and the events get going with a kind of momentum that can carry things forward in unexpected ways. I’m guessing you’ve had enough of that by now.
Before I describe the events in the Solstice Cluster, though, there’s an aspect brewing quietly in the background that is calling for some attention — the opposition of Saturn and Eris, which is part of the group. Because so few astrologers are following Eris, you’re unlikely to read about it on most mainstream websites (nor will you see it on most of the alternative sites; I actually don’t know who is writing about Eris regularly).
Eris is a slow-moving body discovered in 2005 that was named in 2006 — and which resulted in the ‘demotion’ of Pluto and astronomers defining the word ‘planet’ for the first time. If you’re curious, you can dive in via this Google search.
Eris, a long-term visitor to Aries (it’s spending more than a century out of its 557-year orbit there), is an outer planet, larger than Pluto. Like all outer planets, it works outside the reach of normal consciousness. Think of it as a deep, driving force within the psyche, stirring up almost impossible to answer questions about who we are.
I think that Eris is responsible for quite a lot of false identity making — that is, answering the question in ways that are not really relevant, or not honest. Currently, Saturn in Libra is in a close opposition to Eris, which peaks on June 27, in the midst of the solstice cluster of events. My summary of this aspect is that if you haven’t formed your identity on your own, you won’t be able to use a relationship to cover for that fact. That may not actually stop anyone, but if you get confused, you now have a fallback position.