Eris Blog Post 6: AN INTRODUCTION TO USING ERIS IN NATAL CHARTS

 USING ERIS IN NATAL CHARTS

AN INTRODUCTION

"Cosmic Love [e.g., the Spiritual Self] is absolutely Ruthless and Highly Indifferent: it teaches its lessons whether you like/dislike them or not."

~ John Lilly

The astrologer Isabel Hickey was, from what I’ve gathered, the first astrologer credited with designating Eris the “higher octave” of Libra, soon after its discovery. It makes perfect sense: even Libra (“the primordial desire to recognise, tolerate and complement mutually arising polarities”) has its “opposite pole”, and that pole is (sacred) tension, (glorious) discord and (divine) chaos. Drama, in other words. Imagine your natal Eris as a quantum particle which simultaneously exists in three states of potentiality at once; the three states, or “roles”, as illustrated in Karpman’s Triangle of Drama:

In order for any human cycle of drama to exist these three roles need to be fulfilled. Of course, the thinking mind flits between them constantly (with some people’s cognitive behaviour patterns erring to specific roles with fluctuating levels of vehemence and violence).  Maybe some people get through their whole lives without their “Eris particle” ever actually materialising?! I doubt it. Whatever one’s thoughts are on freewill & self-determinism, at some point Eris is going to throw a golden apple into the mix, and fuck our shit up.

Once triggered, the “potentiality” of our natal Eris creates a “butterfly effect,” it’s an astrological suicide bomber; a source of catastrophic chaos and potential evolutionary leaps forward.

I think there’s been 7 books published on Eris, including the astronomer Michael E. Brown’s “How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming” (the consequences of Brown’s discovering Eris lead to hilariously synchronistic discord and chaos in his own life). Two of them are by the same astrologer; a lovely man called Thomas Canfield. Eris ruined his publishing career; he made a vow never to publish another book after 2018’s “Brother Pluto, Sister Eris”. While they all have some merit, (Canfield’s especially - he is similarly “possessed” by Eris as I am) none of them really look into burgeoning cultural origins of the Eris archetype from before the planet was discovered at all; ie chaos theory (which was developed in the early 1970s), chaos magic and Discordianism (a satirical “anti-religious religion”, started by two friends Kerry Thornley & Greg Hill in 1958, which “worshipped Eris by not worshipping anything”).

All seven books do tell the mythical story of the “apple of discord” and the Trojan War; that one small act which had such catastrophic consequences. Why did Eris throw the apple into the crowd of goddesses at the wedding? Because she wasn’t invited. That sense of “lashing out for feeling excluded” is another vital component of the Eris archetype. In one of her Tarot Tuesday videos, Jessa Crispin describes an example of an Eris-style event as “you’re arguing with your lover, so you throw a knife at them, which doesn’t hit them, but does fly out of the window and blind a small child who’s walking by.” which is a grotesquely beautiful example of the Eris ‘butterfly effect’. That’s an “Eris event” in a nutshell.

Now, everything I’ve described so far could be attributed to the other planets: Mars for anger, Pluto for dark unconscious reflexes and impulses, Uranus for sudden catastrophes… so, let’s clarify what it is that marks Eris out from the significations of the other planetary archetypes. In his 2011 book “Discovering Eris” archetypal astrologer Keiron Le Grice makes a valid attempt at defining the Eris archetype:

• Pairs of opposites that underlie all change in the world, and between which life energy moves and is held in dynamic tension. 
• Compensatory responses; the reaction of the unconscious; reactions arising from polarity; the regulatory, counterbalancing forces of nature. 
• Strife and discord relating to the principle of deeply-rooted evolutionary change that underlies the separation between civilization and nature, between ego-consciousness and its instinctual foundations. 
• The conflict and discord inherent in the nature of things that stimulates the evolutionary movement towards the realisation of the global unity of the Earth as a living planet.
• The experience of violation and perceived injustice as a result of evolutionary change.
• The backlash of nature and of human nature against violation and injustice, sometimes resulting in indiscriminate destruction and the large-scale loss of life. 
• The experience of resentment arising as a response to the discord wrought by evolutionary change. 
• The expression of indiscriminate rage and violent lashing‑out fuelled by the resentment of groups that feel violated or excluded.
• The closing of the division between civilization and nature, sometimes in the form of a collapse of civilization or catastrophes that bring human collective consciousness back into alignment with nature, back in touch with reality, putting to an end more superficial modes of living. 
• Evolutionary turning points and great reversals.
• The movement through strife and discord towards harmony, through bringing individual human lives into alignment with the will of the One – the cosmic or divine will. 
• Fragmentation that precedes the formation of higher-level unities. 
• The ‘dark spirit’ in matter and nature, often conceived in myth as a ‘feminine’ spiritual principle, as a compensatory force to the transcendent divine; the polarity between these expressions of the divine.
• Dark matter and/or dark energy in the cosmos, existing in complementary relationship, counterbalancing each other; dark energy opposing the force of gravity. 
• The principle of cosmic justice, and the strife between the human order and this justice; the personal will versus the cosmic or divine will; the challenge of overcoming the sense of personal injustice and fairness to embrace the will of the whole. 
• The experience of an irreconcilable tension of opposites during individuation that stimulates psychological transformation; the juxtaposition or coming together of conflicting opposites; passing through the opposites.
• Discord and disputes requiring evolutionary advances, greater global unity, or psycho-spiritual growth to resolve; ‘conflicts of duties’ that force a regression of libido in the psyche – that is, irreconcilable conflicts between forces of equal power in the psyche that demand the shift to a higher level of consciousness to resolve such that the problem is transferred to a higher level.
• The need for a differentiation of the emotional sphere to come to terms with the deep-rooted discord, rather than falling victim to it through its external forms of expression.
• Competition as a spur to excellence and wholeness. 
• The path and transition to a new level of consciousness; the principle that impels one to overcome all discord, to subsume all antagonistic reactions within a higher unity.

All these elements are wrapped up in the wavicle of our natal Eris; how and where they will manifest is dependant upon a number of key factors:

The natal House Eris occupies

The relationship between Eris & Pluto

Any other significant aspects between Eris & natal planets (we’ll explore the “Eris frenemy principle”, as Canfield calls it, in more significant depth later)

“The path and transition to a new level of consciousness.” 

Hidden beneath the myriad discordian dichotomies of Eris, there is ultimately an “evolutionary purpose”. The “new level of consciousness” le Grice is alluding to is manifested in the capacity for polarising leaps of consciousness that those with a prominent/strong Eris placement tend to exude, in one form or another. It’s the kind of quality that could be lumped in with Uranian “genius”, but there are clear distinctions. The Erisian “drive for progress” is ruthless; it has no basis in “the good of the people” or “the betterment of Man(capital “M”)kind”; it gives no fucks whatsoever for the liberty and fraterniy of social change, even though social change can be one of its more positive outcomes. Eventually. Additionally, there’s the butterfly effect of chaos theory within the astrological Eris archetype too, especially when exploring natal significations. Sometimes we have no idea of the bombs we drop on the lives of others.

The “new level of consciousness” is, I posit, the same “level of consciousness” that Alice Bailey called “the etheric realm” that Dion Fortune termed “the astral light” and that pre-Copernican astrologers called simply “the heavens”. It’s no coincidence that the developments (and subsequent schisms) in astrological practice, since Eris’ discovery, have included the reemergence of Zodiacal Releasing and a renaissance in astrological magic which hasn’t been so popular since before the Reformation. It’s hard to talk about the microcosmic implications of Eris in the individual’s natal chart without talking about the macrocosmic cultural manifestations of Eris energy. We live in an era when we’ve never been more connected, yet never felt more lonely. There has never been so much information so freely available, and yet there is a significant proportion of the population which now “believes” the Earth is flat. The exponential proliferation of conspiracy theories during the Pluto-Eris square of 2020, most famously seen in the phenomenon of QAnon and culminating in the Jan 6th storming of the Capitol, is Eris in action.

Before we start to look at Eris in the Houses, let’s consider quickly the incredibly slow (155 year) transit of Eris in Aries. Eris ingressed from Pisces into Aries in 1924. Because of its insanely erratic orbital path, the planet spends a wildly varying length of time in each sign. It had been in Pisces since 1852. In 1886 Nietzsche published Beyond Good & Evil, containing his most famous epithet “God is dead”. That kind of sums up the particular nature of Eris in Pisces. There were plenty of wars fought during this time period, but they were fucking child’s play in comparison to what we’ve seen with Eris in Aries. The core “discord and polarisation” of the Eris in Pisces era was the gradual acceptance (and distortion) of Nietzsche’s pronouncement into the collective consciousness.

In 1922 there were two landmark texts published: Ulysses by James Joyce and T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. Both started by their authors long before WW1, they synchronistically summed up the annihilated collective Western psyche after the end of the War in 1918. There’s a line in the Wasteland: “These fragments have I shored against my ruin,” and, later on, “you know only a handful of broken images”. Both texts went on to shatter conventional poetry and novel writing; they were (and still are) watersheds of literature. They symbolise the ushering in of Eris in Aries: the Era of total destruction, and inhuman human cruelty of a like the human race couldn’t have imagined back then. In April 1924 a young Adolf Hitler was arrested for starting the Munich Beer Hall Putsch. Although he was sentenced to 5 years, Hitler only served 9 months, which was enough time for him to write Mein Kampf. If the Wasteland and Ulysses were the books of the end of Eris in Pisces; Mein Kampf is the book of Eris in Aries.

Because Eris has been in Aries since 1924 and will be until 2045, every human being under the age of 98 has their natal Eris in Aries. So, while it’s interesting to “go back” and look at historical examples, with using Eris in natal charts that kind of isn’t the point.

“The expression of indiscriminate rage and violent lashing‑out fuelled by the resentment of groups that feel violated or excluded.”

Part of the reason that astrology is ignoring Eris is because Eris is that part of existence which we not only want to ignore, but actively exclude. This sense of “lashing out from feeling excluded” is another component of understanding the aspect of the psyche which our natal Eris represents; most specifically in terms of the experiential fields as designated by the houses.