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The Twilight of Pluto: Astrology and the Rise and Fall of Planetary Influences - Softcover

Greer, John Michael

 
9781644113110: The Twilight of Pluto: Astrology and the Rise and Fall of Planetary Influences
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1644113112 ISBN 13: 9781644113110
Verlag: Inner Traditions, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

An examination of the waxing and waning influence of demoted planets

• Explains in detail how the demotion or proved nonexistence of a planet marks the beginning of a roughly 30-year period in which that planet’s influence wanes

• Explores Pluto’s arc of influence on individual and collective life in depth, from its discovery in 1930 to the end of its influence in 2036

• Offers examples from other demoted planets, such as Ceres, whose fifty-year reign as a planet corresponds very closely to the Romantic Era of history

Recent research in astrology has shown that the discovery of a new planet correlates with the emergence of a new set of influences in individual and collective life. As John Michael Greer reveals, the opposite is also true: the demotion of a planet correlates with the decline of a set of influences into the background.

Exploring the waxing and waning of planetary influences in astrology, Greer explains in detail how the demotion or proved nonexistence of a planet marks the beginning of a roughly 30-year period in which that planet’s influence fades out. He examines several examples of planet demotion, including Ceres, whose influence began to take shape some 30 years before its discovery in 1801 and gradually faded over the three decades following its demotion in the 1850s.

Examining Pluto’s astrological influence in depth, from the beginning of the search for “Planet X” in 1900 to the end of its influence in 2036, the author shows how during the Plutonian era the concept of cosmos--from the ancient Greek meaning “that which is beautifully ordered”--was in eclipse. Pluto’s influence led to the rejection of unity, beauty, and order, exemplified through the splitting of the atom by physicists, the splitting of the individual into conscious and subconscious halves by psychoanalysts, and the splitting of the world into warring camps by politicians.

Offering an essential guide not only to the astrology of the future but also to the twilight of the Plutonian era, Greer shows how as Pluto’s influence fades out in the years ahead, a great many disruptive phenomena of the recent past will fade with it.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Michael Greer is a highly respected writer, blogger, and independent scholar who has written more than 70 books, including The Long Descent, Circles of Power, and the award-winning New Encyclopedia of the Occult. An initiate in a variety of Hermetic, Masonic, and Druidic lineages, he served for twelve years as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America. He lives in Rhode Island.

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Introduction: After Pluto

On August 26, 2006, members of the International Astronomical Union filed into a hall in Prague for the last session of the organization’s triennial meeting. Normally there’s nothing duller in the world of astronomy. After two weeks of papers, panels, informal discussions, and social events, the final afternoon session of the IAU meeting typically attracts only a handful of attendees, most of them elected officers of the organization, who take care of necessary business voting in new members, passing resolutions, rubberstamping decisions already made by consensus within the field and then head for the hotel bar or the next flight home.

That day was different. There were still nine hundred new members to be voted in, and four uncontroversial resolutions to pass, covering such edge of the seat issues as how to define the ecliptic and whether or not the IAU would officially endorse the Washington Charter for Communicating Astronomy with the Public. The last two resolutions on the agenda, though, addressed what had suddenly become one of the hottest topics in astronomy: what counted as a planet, and above all, whether Pluto made the cut.

Behind the controversy lay one of the most dramatic bursts of astronomical discovery since the invention of the telescope. Starting in 2002, using revolutionary new data processing technologies, astronomers had located a series of planet like objects orbiting the Sun in the distant, frozen outer reaches of the solar system, far beyond the orbit of Pluto: Eris, Quaoar, Sedna, Haumea, and Makemake. One of them, Eris, was bigger than Pluto, and all of the new planetoids had a lot in common with Pluto----much more, arguably, than Pluto had in common with the other eight planets of the solar system.

That last was the detail that mattered to the astronomers gathered in Prague. As a planet, Pluto had always been the odd duck. The other planets have orbits around the Sun that are nearly circular, and nearly in the same plane, while Pluto’s is much more elliptical, and canted at an angle of almost twenty degrees from the others. The other planets have gravitational fields that dominate the nearby regions of space, clearing away smaller bodies or locking them into orbital relationships dominated by their gravity, while Pluto’s weak gravitational field has no such effect. At only 1/400th the mass of Earth, Pluto is much smaller than any of the other planets; in fact, it’s smaller than some moons, including ours. In terms of its structure and composition, it has very little in common with the four rocky planets close in to the Sun, and even less with the four big gas giants further out. Until the new discoveries, it had been lumped together with the planets simply because there was nothing else quite like it. The recent burst of discoveries in the outer solar system had changed that decisively.

In 1943, when astronomer Kenneth Edgeworth first predicted the existence of a belt of small icy planetoids out at the distant rim of the solar system, the technology to detect anything at that distance didn’t yet exist. Advances in astronomy took a long time to catch up to Edgeworth’s prediction, but catch up they did. In 1992, the first object in what had by then been named (after another astronomer) the Kuiper Belt was spotted, and hundreds more followed it into the textbooks as astronomers turned their attention to the frozen suburbs of the solar system. Until 2002, the largest known was about a third the size of Pluto.

The new discoveries from 2002 on made it clear that Pluto was just one more Kuiper Belt object, and its apparent uniqueness was the result of the bit of randomness that made it both large enough and close enough to the Sun to be detected much sooner than the others. That’s the way the astronomers voted, too. By a substantial majority, they adopted a new definition of the word “planet” that put Pluto where it belonged, in a new class of “dwarf planets” with the former asteroid Ceres and certain other bodies, and left the solar system with eight planets, an as yet uncounted collection of dwarf planets, and two belts of smaller objects, the asteroid belt and the Kuiper Belt.

The public reaction to this change was dramatic and almost entirely negative. Schoolchildren in particular rallied to the former planet’s cause, and deluged astronomers with indignant letters demanding that poor little Pluto be restored to his former place on the roster of planets. The media proceeded to have a field day, and more often than not presented the situation as though the IAU had ganged up on Pluto in a back alley and robbed it of planetary status at gunpoint. By the time the controversy finally died down, scientists, pundits, and media personalities had talked over the fate of Pluto from every imaginable angle but one.

The omission, of course, was the astrological angle. This lapse was hardly an accident. As Richard Tarnas slyly pointed out in his pathbreaking book Cosmos and Psyche, astrology has exactly the same status in contemporary industrial society that Copernican astronomy had in European societies around 1600: even though it makes sense of plenty of things that the conventional wisdom can’t explain, it is so unpopular as a way of understanding the universe, and so sharply at odds with the unquestioned beliefs of the age, that most educated people reject it out of hand without giving it the serious consideration it deserves.

Just as a significant number of people in Europe in 1600 ignored the conventional wisdom of their time and made the leap to the Copernican vision of a sun--centered cosmology, however, a significant number of people in the industrial world today have made a comparable leap to the astrological vision of a meaningful universe: a vision in which the placements, motions, and relationships of the solar system’s major bodies have subtle linkages that connect them to everything in this corner of the cosmos, including the lives of human beings. The modern astrological community is much larger, better educated, and better funded than most people outside it realize. Like the Copernican underground in late Renaissance Europe, it pursues and develops its distinctive vision of the cosmos in the face of the disapproval of the conventionally minded.

The vision of astrology is holistic: that is, it recognizes the mutual connections that bind everything in the cosmos together in a common unity. It’s also noetic: that is, it recognizes the presence of consciousness and meaning in all things, not just in those anomalous lumps of meat we’re pleased to call human brains. It has close connections to the great spiritual, mystical, and occult traditions of the world: not surprisingly, as astrology has long had an important role in many of these traditions and a central role in some. To the astrologer, furthermore, the holistic and noetic vision of the cosmos communicated by astrology isn’t merely a set of abstract notions. Those who study and practice astrology know from personal experience that the movements of the planets relative to one another and the surface of the Earth do in fact correlate closely with the subtle tides that shape individual and collective consciousness----tides that can reveal glimpses of future events before they happen, and can also bring happiness and success to those who know how to move in harmony with them.

In modern astrology, Pluto has earned an important place. It is the planet of deep transformations, of secret and subterranean influences, of sex, death, destruction, and renewal. The sign and house it occupies in the birth chart shows where secrets are kept and where drastic changes can be expected. Its aspects by transit and progression are challenging, gruelling experiences...

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Verlag
Inner Traditions
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1644113112
ISBN 13 
9781644113110
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
176
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union
info@simonandschuster.nl

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