Eris - Discord and Mayhem
This judged and maligned goddess is represented by the dwarf planet named Eris, which is the most massive and second-largest known dwarf planet in the Solar System.
Part 1: The Astronomy
The dwarf planet Eris is a trans-Neptunian object (TNO) and is a member of the scattered disk with a highly eccentric orbit. Eris was discovered in January 2005. It was named after the Greco-Roman goddess of strife and discord in September 2006. Eris is the sixteenth-most massive object overall in the Solar System, and is the ninth-most massive known object orbiting the Sun. Eris has an orbital period of 559 years. Its closest possible distance from the Sun (perihelion) is 38 AU (astronomical units) and the maximum possible distance from the Sun (aphelion) is 97.5 AU. Pluto's perihelion is 29.7 AU, and its aphelion is 49.3 AU. Pluto's average distance, or semi-major axis, is 39.5 AU. So we can see that Eris goes way out past Pluto at its furthest and is just inside Pluto’s average distance from the Sun at its closest. Eris came to perihelion around 1699, to aphelion around 1977, and will return to perihelion around December 2257. Eris's orbit is highly inclined and is tilted at an angle of about 44 degrees to the ecliptic, showing a wildly different orbit than the planets, and even much more eccentric than Pluto’s orbit. In about 800 years, Eris will be closer to the Sun than Pluto. Because of the high inclination of its orbit, Eris passes through only a few constellations of the traditional Zodiac; it is now in the constellation Cetus. It was in Sculptor from 1876 until 1929 and Phoenix from roughly 1840 until 1875. In 2036 it will enter Pisces and stay there until 2065, when it will enter Aries. It will then move into the northern sky, entering Perseus in 2128 and Camelopardalis, where it will reach its northernmost declination in 2173.
The multiple eccentricities of the dwarf planet give us lots of information to work with. First, it goes further out into the far edges of the Solar System than any of the other major bodies, much further than Pluto, and at its closest is inside the orbit of Pluto. This suggests to me that Eris is carrying the messages of the deep, the Void beyond our Solar System, into Pluto where they are then released on into the inner planets and our physical reality. The wildly eccentric orbit sees Eris move through constellations not on our ecliptic as viewed from Earth. This is also the case for Pluto, but not to the same extreme as Eris. This suggests to me that Eris and Pluto both, but especially Eris, are traveling in areas that are far out from the physical, far-and-away, above-and-beyond the domain of the usual, earthly concerns and experiences. Naturally, for astrology, the wild transits of both Pluto and Eris are condensed into the “signs” to make using them convenient. This is done by just placing the “sign” they are in as the constellation on the ecliptic that is above or below the actual placements of Pluto or Eris. Further, in Tropical astrology, that is further modified, placing either in the solar-dictated signs of the Tropical zodiac with no reference to the actual constellation on the ecliptic. And as we read above, Eris is actually transiting the region of the Solar System that is backed by the constellation called Cetus. In true constellation sidereal astrology, Eris would be seen to be in Pisces, and in the Tropical zodiac, Eris is said to be in the sign of Aries. Interestingly, because of the very unusual orbit, Eris will drop on down into the constellation of Pisces in 2036 and then move on into the constellation of Aries in 2065. In Tropical Astrology Eris entered Aries in 1926 and will exit Aries for Taurus in 2048. Interestingly, in the tropical zodiac, Eris spends more time in Aries than in any other sign. This ties in with her myths, as we will see.
With an orbital period (year) of 559 Earth years, Eris is an energy dealing with historical epochs. The passage through each “sign” defines long period of chaos and discord within the energies and rulerships of that sign.This applies to both the Tropical and Sidereal systems. While for convenience we place both Eris and Pluto into our “signs”, I first became aware of this for Pluto over thirty years ago and have mapped and studied the actual movements of Pluto through the actual constellations it transits and I can say that they are informative, even though the placements in our “signs” also has meaning and is instructive. In time I will write about both Pluto and Eris in the actual constellations they transit, but I will leave that off for later and focus on a simpler article this time. It is very interesting that Eris spends part of its cycle far above our ecliptic, and then spends part of its cycle below our ecliptic. This means that Eris can move from the “Upper World” into the “Underworld”, as the ancients understood the regions above and below the ecliptic, with the ecliptic representing the “Middle World” (or our Earthly plane and experiences). Pluto also goes far above and below the ecliptic, though not nearly as far as Eris. Interestingly, when Eris was first discovered, it was suggested that is should be named “Persephone”, wife and partner of Pluto and Queen of the Underworld who spends half of the year in the Underworld and half of the year on Earth. In our time, Eris is in the process of moving from her height above the ecliptic, which she reached in 1977, and will cross into the “Underworld” below the ecliptic in this century.
Part 2: The Mythology
The most well-known myth of Eris deals with her being the only god excluded from the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. She crashes the party, throwing down a golden apple - the Apple of Discord - engraved with “For the Fairest”. The goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite all claimed it. Being unable to settle on who should have it, they appeal to the shepherd Paris and force him to choose which goddess is the fairest and receives the apple. Offered bribes by the goddesses, Paris picks Aphrodite, who has promised him the love of the most beautiful woman in the world. This, of course, turns out to be Helen, wife of Menelaus, and leads to the Trojan War and the many sorrows it brings.
Eris is said in some myths to be the sister of Mars, suggesting that Zeus (Jupiter) is her father with Hera her mother, but other myths tell that she is an older deity who’s parents are Nyx (night) and Erebus (darkness). Even the myths sometimes suggest that she is actually two goddesses - one chaos and discord, the other strife and striving, which can be seen as drive to achieve. She is also equated with the Greek war goddess Enyo and her Roman equivalent, Bellona. All of her associations to the Greco-Romans relate to strife, conflict, war, effort, chaos and discord, disharmony. Eris had no temples in either Greece or Rome, and it is clear the order-obsessed Greeks and Romans feared her.
I would suggest her confused parentage and apparent ancient origin as one of the primal deities may indicate that she derives from much older religious motifs predating the patriarchal Greeks (and perhaps the patriarchal Ind-European cultures). I would suggest that she has much in common with the Sumerian Ereshkigal, who is the Queen of the Underworld and was associated with chaos and disorder, and who is the template for the Greek Persephone.
Part 3: The Astrology
I feel that Eris is most closely associated with Mars, for the inner planets, and Pluto, for the outer planets. The energy of Eris feels to me much like the lovechild of Mars and Pluto - bellicose, delighting in conflict and chaos, but transformative and regenerative too, implying power, strategy and the ability to set actions into motion. The Greco-Roman myths would have us believe that Eris is merely negative chaos, but I would point out that we are explicitly told in the writings of the patriarchal Greeks and Romans that women are chaos, so I don’t feel we can look to their version of the story to get a balanced view of the subject. I think we have to look further back to Persephone, and then back to her roots, with Ereshkigal, to get a more balanced view of the dwarf planet named Eris. Certainly, she encompasses many of the attributes assigned to the goddess Eris by the Greeks and Romans, but she also carries deeper meaning, pushing toward breakdown and thus breakthrough, just as Pluto does. To me, Eris represents the rage of the oppressed, the unloved, the uninvited, the excluded of all kinds, all that which is marginalized and all that which is judge to be “bad” by patriarchal structures and polite society. Much like Pluto, Eris bears the projections of unhealed imbalances within the psyches of humans. The big difference is that while Pluto might just put on his helm of invisibility and go back to the Underworld where he is lord and ignore the projections of humans, Eris takes slight and shows up in a confrontational way to get in the faces of humans and make them face their unhealed judgements, unloved aspects and denied darkness. If Pluto brings change through transforming and transitioning, Eris is the force that rips the legs out from under the tottering table, spilling everything to the floor to be broken apart, eventually to be rescued, reduced, salvaged and reformed.
I find it interesting that Eris was discovered so close to the end of the ascending yuga iron age (as applied to the precessional cycle). This suggests to me that she represents an unveiling of the wounded feminine, and the wounds of all minorities and marginalized people. She is the ultimate marginalized symbol, being uninvited to the wedding in the most well-known myth she features in. She actually becomes the crux character of the story, setting off the events that unfold. She is the dynamic push that causes all the actions that come later and which break apart multiple kingdoms and lives. The entire story is her revenge on both the gods and men for the slight of being excluded. She sets the game in motion through what appears to be a very desirable gift, and thus the three goddesses - Hera, Athena and Aphrodite - all begin to vie for the reward. Eris allows hubris to actually create the conflict and chaos. All she does is toss down a golden apple with an ambiguous message. The other players do all the work in making the bad outcome. It isn’t really Eris who causes the problems. All she does is provide the framework through which the other characters reveal their egos, greed, avarice and smallness. Time and again, this is the transforming quality of Eris, much like Pluto, as both revealer and judge. There is a lesson to be learned in this. It isn’t that Eris causes problems, but that she provides the situations by which our own shortcomings are revealed through actions and outcomes.
As Eris has been in Tropical Aries since the 1920s, almost all living people at this time have Eris in their charts in this Tropical sign. In Sidereal astrology this would then be the sign of Pisces. So it is through these two signs that Eris works most strongly in modern times. Pisces, of course, is ruled by Jupiter, while Aries is ruled by Mars. This suggests to me that issues of Jupiter and Mars (ideology and conflict) have been major arenas where Eris - the driving force of chaos - has been exceptionally active throughout the last century. One only needs to looks at the struggles of minorities and marginalized communities to see the drive toward breaking up solidified structures of oppression, while the many and extreme wars of the twentieth-century (including the first use of atomic weapons) certainly demonstrate the action of Eris in Tropical Aries.
We all have Aries somewhere in our natal charts, regardless of whether we have any of the natal planets in the sign. We all have this influence within whichever house Tropical Aries falls. For those of us with planets in Tropical Aries, those placements are colored by the presence of Eris in the sign, and further, all the cardinal signs are receiving stress from Eris (made more intense during times of activation such as when Mars is the Year Lord, or when a planet transits one of the cardinal signs - and 2020 showed us something about that…while Pluto is still actively setting the cardinal signs into active stress with its square to Eris.) Tropical Aries Sun Signs, and especially Tropical Aries Sun Sign women, have been heavily colored by the presence of Eris in the sign of the ram.
Currently, Pluto is in the process of squaring Eris, and while it has moved back and forth as it does, Pluto has basically been in square with Eris throughout most of 2020 and 2021. By early 2022 Pluto will have finally moved on past the square to Eris. This square, also activated by multiple other planets and events, has had a massive effect on the years of its passage, and will likely go on to have repercussions for many years to come. The period when Jupiter and Saturn joined Capricorn in Tropical Capricorn, and then was joined by many of the inner planets, including Mars, all triggered this square and the passage of the nodes through the Tropical Cap/Cancer axis further gave it a push. The Great Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in December of 2020 fell within 7 degrees of the square to Eris. Now, all the planets have moved on and only Capricorn is activating the square to Eris. However, we are approaching the part of 2021 when some of the inner planets will again transit Tropical Capricorn. Most notably, Venus will enter Tropical Capricorn on November 6th, where she will have her retrograde and descend into the Underworld. Venus makes her first square to Eris on December 8th, 2021 and then goes retrograde on December 29th, conjunct Pluto within one degree, and still square to Eris within two degrees. All aspects of Venus will have to do with women, though they certainly effect men as well, but women belong to the sphere of Venus. The aspects of Pluto and Eris have to do with power and strife. Add the goddess Venus, and we can encounter female anger and rage, much warranted, and you can look at the shift in the quest for equal rights for women and other marginalized groups since Eris was discovered and named in 2005/2006. The ‘Me Too’ movement is an aspect of this energy. One might expect women’s issues, such as access to health care and reproductive rights, to be making headlines during the period of the Pluto/Eris square. We may also see individual women stepping up to deliver Eris’ destabilizing influence to existing structures and entrenched systems.
Part 4: Who Would Play Her?
Because Eris has been in Tropical Aries so long, it has had an outsized effect on this sign. As I noted above, we all have Aries in one of our houses in our natal charts, but those with planets there have a much greater influence, and none more so than Aries Sun Sign individuals.
When we ask “Who would play her?” (Ii.e., what person would we cast as Eris in the movie) in reference to Eris, we have to first and foremost look to Aries sun signs, as well as people with prominent and important placements in Aries in their natal charts. When we do we find quite an interesting group of people. Even when we look to Sun Sign Aries people born in the decades leading up to Eris entering Aries, we can still see that the movement of Eris into Aries seems to have activated these people.
Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were Aries sun signs and famous Hollywood actresses who were both born in the early 1900s. Their rise to fame kicked in as Eris entered Tropical Aries. Their lives and careers offer manifold examples of the Eris archetype. Perennially difficult, and eventually uninvited, they were both sharp, hard, and talented women who fought to remain relevant in youth-obsessed Hollywood. I would cast either as Eris…They would have don’er proud!
I believe that one of the most Eris of all current media figures is Lady Gaga. A Sun Sign Aries with Venus in Aries who loves to shock and dismay, she is loved or hated, but rarely ignored. Eris sits between her natal Sun and Venus, closer to Venus but sharing the sign with them both. Her immense talent is almost eclipsed at times by the stunning parade of weirdness and artsy darkness she loves to play with in her visual presentation. Her work embodies multiple astrological archetypes, especially Venus (her natal Venus is also in Aries), but her embrace of the outsider, the uninvited, the unloved - as exemplified by her epithet, Mother Monster - is pure Eris. She has portrayed herself as “mother monster”, the mother of all her “little monsters” - outsiders of all kinds. Eris in Greco-Roman myth had many children…
“And hateful Eris bore painful Ponos ("Hardship"),
Lethe ("Forgetfulness") and Limos ("Starvation") and the tearful Algea ("Pains"),
Hysminai ("Battles"), Makhai ("Wars"), Phonoi ("Murders"), and Androktasiai ("Manslaughters");
Neikea ("Quarrels"), Pseudea ("Lies"), Logoi ("Stories"), Amphillogiai ("Disputes")
Dysnomia ("Anarchy") and Ate ("Ruin"), near one another,
and Horkos ("Oath"), who most afflicts men on earth,
Then willing swears a false oath.
Hesiod - Theogony
Quite a brood of little monsters, indeed. I would absolutely cast Lady Gaga as Eris in the movie! She would be my first pick, in fact.
Nancy Pelosi is a Sun Sign Aries who also has Jupiter in Aries. She became Speaker of the House in the US Congress in 2006, the year after Eris was discovered and the year it was named. In the third highest position in the US government, she is an effective and intelligent leader who seems to have extremely good instincts for the weaknesses of others. This fits perfectly with the most famous of the Eris myths, as Eris knew that all she had to do was drop that golden apple with the words “for the fairest” on it, and that the egotistical and greedy goddesses would create all kinds of chaos through their actions. This is also an important thing to understand about Eris. It is suggested she is just a negative energy, but it seems to me that this is a patriarchal interpretation of the goddess, with Eris symbolizing untamed female power (which apparently scares people shitless). One very positive aspect of Eris, in my opinion, is the ability to strategize. Eris, in the myth, didn’t actually do anything. She set events in motion by knowing the weaknesses of others, even the gods themselves. Nancy Pelosi has played this role masterfully, knowing just how to provoke adversaries into unwise action.
Alternately loved and hated, she is the boogieman of the right, but is also not really recognized or fully appreciated by much of the left, seen as “too old” by the young and “too moderate” by many progressive. She was an early advocate for AIDS victims and went to congress with Liz Taylor to fight for funding for AIDS research when no one would touch the subject. She may go down in history as one of the most skillful House Speakers. A true queen of shade, she could play Eris in the movie too.
Kamala Harris is a Sun Sign Libra who has her natal Moon in exact opposition to her Sun from the sign of Aries. Occupying the second most powerful position in the US government, she is known as an intense interrogator, as we saw in various hearings when she was a US Senator from California. She was not liked by progressives in California when she served as the district attorney for San Francisco and the states Attorney General. Yet, she is painted as an extreme “socialist liberal” by the right. This is a good example of how we project onto Eris what we want to see. Our reactions to Eris may just be something within ourselves. After all, it was the other three goddesses who created all the chaos that led to the Trojan War. Eris didn’t actually do anything. Yet the story suggests that she “caused the Trojan war”. That is not quite true. Greed and ego caused the Trojan War.
These are just a few examples of Aries Sun Signs. I could mention many more, and each will have some aspect of the Eris myth in their life. I want to keep this short(ish), so I will stick with these examples that I know well.
There is much more I could say about Eris, and in time I will write more about this subject, but for now I want to point out that Eris seems to me to represent places where we have the opportunity to acknowledge our own inner ugliness and to own it, finding power in it. If we don’t these areas (based upon where Aries falls in your chart, and whether you have any planets there) can become chaotic and give us a host of problems. Eris is strongly related to women, and I believe it relates to female power, empowerment and accomplishment, as well as feminine rage. I note that many prominent women have prominent Aries placements, and so this area of their charts is colored by the energy of Eris. When used positively, it can add intense power that seems to derive from sources outside themselves. It is accessible to all, male, female or otherwise, and it is a place to explore. If your first reaction to that suggestion is something negative, you might need to look there more than others.
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