Dear Friend and Reader,
Jupiter squares Eris today and Mars conjoins Hylonome. These aspects combine a sense of the outcast with the courage and desire to work through private grief for the purpose of healing.
Dwarf planet Eris was first spotted in 2003 by Mike Brown. When she was first introduced to the public she went under the name Xena, as in the bisexual warrior princess from television Xena. Her arrival on the seen of our consciousness shook up our whole perception of the Universe. Because of her, Pluto got demoted from planetary status, and Ceres got promoted from asteroid to dwarf planet.
One of the most well known myths starring Eris recounts the wedding she crashed when she was left uninvited. Feeding upon the egos of the three most powerful Goddesses in attendance, Eris rolled a golden apple into the crowd upon which was inscribed: To The Fairest. A pageant was held between Hera, Aphrodite and Athena (even the goddess of wisdom was not exempt from such folly). To make a long story short, because of this, the Trojan War ravaged the city of Troy and killed a countless number of souls.
However, myths are metaphors about the human psyche, and the delineations of planets don’t always follow them closely; the more important a planet is, the more it will tend to depart from the mythology of the name. Pluto is a good example. We understand that the ‘death’ aspect of the underworld god is almost entirely a metaphor for transformation, progress, sexuality and growth.
With Eris, the notion of discord is a factor imposed on the human psyche and its condition now. True, the world appears to be in strife, but this is not true most places on an overt level. What we do have is psychic and psychological strife; deep inner divisions within nearly all people (over our roles versus our reality, competition between the many aspects of who we are, and so on. We have problems in our homes that can result from the desire for freedom, and the fact of our own jealousy preventing us from allowing others to be free.
It is, however, worth checking in with classical mythology when an archetype appears on the radar. A description of Eris written by Hesiod tells of two different kinds of Strife (the word ‘Eris’ translated): “So, after all, there was not one kind of Strife alone, but all over the earth there are two. As for the one, a man would praise her when he came to understand her; but the other is blameworthy: and they are wholly different in nature.