Eris

Meaning

Eris is a dwarf planet a little smaller than Pluto but heavier, on a long, steeply tilted orbit that takes it, at its farthest, more than three times as far from the Sun as Neptune. It takes some 560 years to go round the Sun; it has been in Aries since the 1920s and will stay there until the 2040s, retrograde for more than five months each year.

It is named after the Greek goddess of strife. Left out of a wedding feast of the gods, she threw among the guests a golden apple marked “for the fairest”, and the quarrel it started led, through the judgement of Paris, to the Trojan War. Astrologers, still testing its meaning, read it as rivalry, exclusion and the fight to be counted: the refusal of a false peace, and the energy that rises when someone, or a whole group, is left out.

Because its sign is shared by everyone born over a century, its house and its close aspects to the personal planets and the angles say far more than its sign. Its gifts are courage, honesty about what is unfair and the will to claim a place; its difficulties, quarrels fed for their own sake and the habit of seeing slights everywhere.

In practice

• Close to the Ascendant or the Sun, Eris often describes someone who names the unfair rule others put up with, or who keeps asking for a place in a group that tried to leave them out.
• With Mars in close aspect, the urge to compete and to defend one’s ground is strong; it can serve a cause well.
• Its house shows where the fight to be counted is likely to be lived: in the 10th, at work; in the 11th, in groups and causes.

Origin and history

Michael Brown, Chadwick Trujillo and David Rabinowitz found it in January 2005 on images taken at Palomar in October 2003, and announced it that July. First listed as 2003 UB313 and nicknamed Xena, it seemed larger than Pluto, which pushed the International Astronomical Union to define the word planet in 2006; Pluto and the newcomer both became dwarf planets, and the newcomer was named Eris, after the discord it had caused, with a moon called Dysnomia, lawlessness. Henry Seltzer devoted a full astrological study to it in 2015.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune takes Eris from the Swiss Ephemeris file made for it, which covers only the years 1500 to 2100: for a birth outside that span, the chart leaves Eris out and says so. Within it, Eris is marked retrograde when its daily motion runs backwards and is aspected with the same orbs as the planets. Ulune gives it no dignity, leaves it out of aspect patterns, and the calendar does not date its transits.