 The
following article appeared in the March/April 2005 issue of Venture
Inward magazine (www.edgarcayce.org).
Unlocking the Mysteries of Sedna
A New
Planet Discovered;
An Ancient Myth Revived
By Mitch Horowitz
Twenty-first century
astronomy sits on the brink of a Renaissance of new discoveries in our
outer solar system. As new objects are found – such as the tiny,
unimaginably faraway planetoid Sedna early last year – the more
thoughtful among astrologers face new questions. Chief among them:
Should the astrological canon expand to accommodate new discoveries?
The ancients made no
division between astronomy and astrology. In their studies of the sky,
cultures encompassing the Egyptian, Persian, Vedic, Hellenic, Chinese,
and Mayan found correspondences between the positions of celestial
bodies and events on Earth, from the shifting of the tides to the cycles
of the human body. The great cultures went further, extending their
understanding to correspondences between outer phenomena and the make-up
of the human psyche: In their own fashion, each located the cosmic
traits of their gods – and the antecedents of human nature – amid the
Milky Way.
“Astrology – the vital
aspect of astronomy – is integrated in a synthesis that represents
myth,” wrote esoteric Egyptologist Isha Schwaller de Lubicz, “and should
not be considered as a separate philosophical speculation as our
rational mentality would lead us to believe.”
And yet, the separateness
that Schwaller speaks of prevails: The doors of mainstream science are
as closed to astrology as the Church itself once was to astronomy’s
insights. But when a planet is newly discovered in our time, it
heightens the question of whether these two approaches – the physical
science of astronomy, with its dedication to reason and
cause-and-effect; and the ethereal search of astrology, with its quest
for connection between human nature and physical world – must be so at
odds. It will take years before a consensus forms as to how or whether
Sedna will find a place in astrology; but we possess a few enticing
hints – from both astronomy and astrology – from which to begin our
inquiry.
A New Neighbor Amid the Stars
Astrology begins with
geology – with the physical realities of heavenly objects. These traits
impact how a planet, asteroid, or other kind of body is eventually
understood within an astrological framework. Hence, it is helpful to
first examine what we know about Sedna from a physical perspective.
Initially identified by
astronomers from the California Institute of Technology, Yale, and
Hawaii’s Gemini Observatory on November 14th 2003, Sedna’s
discovery was announced to the public on March 15th, 2004. Considered
the furthest – and coldest – known object in our solar system, Sedna is
about eight billion miles away from the Sun at its closest point. Its
surface temperature rarely rises above minus 400 Fahrenheit as it traces
an unimaginably slow orbit around the Sun every 10,500 years. The last
time Sedna would have been at its current point in the sky, humanity was
emerging from the last Ice Age.
Sedna now displaces Pluto
as the most faraway known planet-like object in our solar system – and
as one of the smallest. Indeed, there is controversy over whether
Sedna’s size – the highest estimates put it at 1,100 miles across, or
about three-quarters the size of Pluto – allows us to consider it a
planet at all. But astronomers quickly acknowledge that there exists no
firm consensus on what makes an object a planet. Some argue that for an
entity to be a planet, it must possess greater mass than the sum total
of all other objects in its orbit. Others maintain that the shape of an
object’s orbit is what distinguishes planets from comets or asteroids.
Still other astronomers say that a planet is defined by its roundedness,
i.e., it must have sufficient mass in order to be shaped spherically
(otherwise an object has the more potato-like shape of an asteroid).
The discovery of Sedna has revived a longstanding debate about whether Pluto itself ought
to be considered a planet. At the very least, most experts agree that
Sedna – if not our 10th planet – can be considered a
“planetoid,” or planet-like object. Sedna is spherical, possesses a
distinct – though incredibly slow – orbit around our sun, and early
evidence suggests that it may even have its own moon.
We can only speculate as
to what Sedna is made of. Its discoverers believe that it may be a
mixture of primordial rock and ice. In an intriguing note, observers
have found the planet inexplicably colored a bright, shiny red. One of
its chief discoverers, astronomer Michael E. Brown of the California
Institute of Technology, expressed puzzlement: “Sedna is one of the most
red objects in the solar system – almost as red as Mars. Why? We’re
currently baffled.”
If even its discoverers
understand relatively little, how then should Western astrology begin to
approach this odd new world? What can we make of a neighbor so faraway
that our Sun itself would be obscured by the head of pin if one were
looking out from Sedna’s surface?
Toward an Astrological Understanding
Astrologers
typically spend years looking for patterns in how a planet, planetoid,
or asteroid appears in the charts of a vast range of individuals. An
object’s date of discovery, and the astrological and earthly events that
coincide with that general time period, are also scrutinized. Consensus
forms over a course of many years: Even the meaning of the asteroid
Chiron – named nearly thirty years ago for the wounded centaur of Greek
mythology – remains a subject of dispute. Many astrologers interpret
Chiron as a symbol of deep-seated suffering and potential catharsis in a
birth chart, while others eschew its use altogether.
According to tradition,
astrology will also pursue its consideration of Sedna with an eye toward
the attributes that led her discoverers to propose the planetoid’s name.
Astrologers generally ascribe synchronicity
and meaning to the name a planet is given. More than any other single
factor, the founding myth behind how these planetary objects are named
tends to color their perception in astrology. Sedna – like other recent
finds such as Pluto and Chiron – was named by the consensus of her
discoverers. Says Cal Tech’s Brown: “Our newly discovered object
is the coldest, most distant place known in the solar system, so we feel
it is appropriate to name it in honor of Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the
sea, who is thought to live at the bottom of the frigid Arctic Ocean.”
In Fall 2004, the name of Sedna received formal confirmation by the
International Astronomical Union.
Sedna is the first
planetary name drawn from the Native American traditions, rather than
Greco-Roman antiquity. Sedna’s team of discoverers have, in fact,
proposed that future outer solar system discoveries be named for figures
from Inuit tradition. Yale astronomer David L. Rabinowitz, a member of
the discovery team, spoke of the intent behind the name:
The reason we chose the
name Sedna is because the astronomical community has agreed that all the
objects in the outer solar system should be named after characters from
creation myths (or underworld figures if their orbits are coupled like
Pluto’s to Neptune). We might have chosen Greek or Roman gods, but they
have all been used. So we looked at Inuit mythology. The Inuits are
naturally familiar with the cold appropriate for distant planets.
Sedna’s association with the icy seas and sea creatures is also
appropriate for the outer solar system since Uranus and Neptune are also
associated with the ocean.
The goddess of Arctic sea
life and a dweller in the icy ocean depths, Sedna is traditionally
depicted as a tragic and wrathful female god – a young woman who
suffered horrible betrayal by those around her and who was conscripted
to immortality at the bottom of the ocean after her own father abandoned
her during a deadly storm.
In the West today, we
often recast myths in search of an affirming moral: the Death card in
Tarot becomes routinely interpreted as a card of rebirth; Pluto – or
Hades – in the astrological canon becomes associated with insights of
the unconscious; the Greco-Roman gods are often stripped of their malice
and vanity in popular renderings. But myths like Sedna’s demand we look
at that which is bitter in life.
A Distant, Suffering Goddess
Sedna’s story is complex
and variegated. At least two primary versions exist: One involves a
young woman who weds a dog-god, to whom she bears many offspring: human
children, who become Inuit, and mongrel children, who become the white
man. (This is Sedna’s connection to the “creation myth” spoken of
earlier by one of her discoverers.) In another related version, perhaps
more widely known and accepted, a vain young woman is tricked into
marrying a malevolent bird-god. This tale emphasizes the stream of
events leading to Sedna’s tragic immortality, and it is this version
that we will explore in depth. Based on several sources, here is a
contemporary rendering:
Sedna was a lovely but vain young woman with beautiful, flowing hair.
She lived with her widowed father in an Inuit fishing village. While
many suitors vied for her affections, she found none to her liking –
leading her father to fear that his daughter would never wed.
One day a mysterious
hunter entered the village, his features hidden behind a robe. He vowed
to Sedna’s father that he would provide riches to Sedna and her family
in exchange for the young girl’s hand in marriage. Despite his
daughter’s reluctance, Sedna’s father sent her off with the hunter,
assuring her that she would be well cared-for, and that the hunter would
bring her lots of seal meat and other good things to eat.
The hunter brought her
to a strange and faraway island – where he shed his cloak and revealed
his true form: He was not a hunter at all, but instead was a fearsome
birdman. Sedna was less his bride than his prisoner.
Isolated and lonely,
Sedna waited daily on the island while the birdman set off to hunt. As a
great bird, he caught only fish – and Sedna grew weary of the same diet
day after day. It was around this same time that Sedna’s father began to
feel guilty about his decision, and set off in his kayak to visit his
daughter. He arrived while the birdman was away, and Sedna complained of
her plight – how they had been deceived, and how sad she was to be
struck on an island with nothing to eat but fish. Her father vowed to
take her back home.
He led Sedna to his
kayak and began to paddle away before the birdman returned. But the
birdman saw the daughter and father from the skies and angrily swooped
down on them. The father paddled furiously, but the birdman possessed
mighty powers of the air, and he conjured up a terrible storm. Sedna was
tossed into the icy waters. “Leave her to me,” the birdman commanded “or
die with her!”
Sedna swam furiously
back to the kayak. Terrified of his small boat capsizing, her
father beat her away with his oar, striking at her fingers as they
clutched the side of the kayak. So hard did her father strike that he
severed the fingers from her hands. Sedna’s fingers fell into the ocean
– and were magically transformed. Her thumbs became whales, her other
fingers seals, walruses, and other sea mammals. Sedna fell to the ocean
depths to join the creatures that her fingers had become.
Thus was the sea
populated with life. Sedna became the
mother and master of sea creatures at the ocean floor. Her
once-beautiful hair became matted with plants and detritus of the ocean
– having no fingers she could not comb it. From time to time, Sedna
weeps terribly – for her isolation, for her betrayal at the hands of her
father, and for her hair, now matted and thick. When she sinks into her
deepest sorrows, Sedna withholds the mammals of the sea from man, and
hunters return home without food, their families going hungry. At such
times, village shamans must enter ethereal states where they can visit
Sedna on the ocean floor and comfort her by combing her hair. When so
sated, Sedna softens and once again allows the Inuit to partake of the
animals of the deep – the children of her betrayal.
As Above, So Below
Astrologers tend to
calibrate the discovery of new bodies – such as Uranus in 1781 and Pluto
in 1930 – to changes on Earth. The discovery of Uranus, the planet of
revolution and innovation, is looked back upon as a herald of popular
revolutions – the French revolution in particular. Pluto – often
associated with the underworld and hidden passions – is seen by some to
have coincided with the rise of fascism in Europe. How might the myth of Sedna coincide with events in our time?
First, let’s look at where
Sedna falls in the current astrological schema. One of Sedna’s chief
facets is its slowness. As noted earlier, Sedna requires an astounding
10,500 years to work its way around the Sun – making it the slowest
known planet in our solar system. Because of its long, elliptical
orbit, virtually everyone alive today will find Sedna in their charts in
either one of two signs: Aries or Taurus. At the start of the last
century, Sedna was at 7 degrees in Aries and moved into Taurus in 1966.
It will enter Gemini in 2023. (Because the Earth is constantly moving
apropos of Sedna and the constellations, Sedna will appear in different
houses of a birth chart depending on birthplace and time.)
According to information
presently available to us – and at this early stage Sedna’s ephemeral
data may change – the planetoid will require approximately 50 years to
pass through one zodiac sign in the 21st century. But at the
furthest reaches of Sedna’s highly elliptical orbit – when the planet
travels as far as 84 billion miles away from Earth – the picture changes
dramatically. At Sedna’s furthest point from the sun, it can sit for
centuries in a single sign. Thousands of years from today when Sedna
reaches its orbital elongation in the sign of Scorpio, it is estimated
to remain there for roughly 1,500 years.
What is perhaps most
remarkable is Sedna’s relative closeness to the Earth at this present
moment. According to its discoverers, Sedna will actually make its
nearest sweep to Earth within about 72 years – a flash of time in its
10,500-year orbit. From an outward perspective, this closeness is part
of the reason that observers have succeeded in locating Sedna. From an
esoteric perspective, however, what can we glean about the heightened
influence of such rare proximity?
Let’s return now to the
mythological Sedna – a goddess who harbors terrible wounds from anger
and betrayal. Many traditions view the ocean depths as synonymous with
the unconscious or subconscious mind. In the Tarot deck, for example,
cards with water are considered hallmarks of the subconscious. One might
see those areas where Sedna appears in a birth chart as a place
harboring unconscious pain, perhaps from a source so dim and faraway –
like the tiny planet itself – that its cause may seem mysterious, or its
very existence may be easy to miss.
Throughout 2005, Sedna
sits at 18 and 19 degrees in the sign of Taurus – a sensual, earth sign.
Sedna may come to be seen as a painful and victimized aspect of the
fertile and earthy qualities that Taurus is thought to represent. Some
astrologers already suggest that Sedna connotes a need for feminine
healing. Viewing Sedna as a woman stripped of choice, the more
politically inclined might see Sedna as the harbinger of a worldwide
decline in reproductive rights, or something else associated with
feminine social concerns, just as Uranus and Pluto were thought to
coincide with outward events of their day. Continuing to look outwardly,
we may also consider whether Sedna harbors an environmental message for
our era. Here is an angry, suffering sentinel of the ocean depths in a
material sign of earth, birth, and the physical world. Is there some
correlation to what many today view as a global ecological crisis,
including the diminishment of ocean life?
Turning inwardly,
astrologer Maria Rodreguiz of the New York Open Center has suggested
that Sedna may come to be seen as the ruling planet of the sign Virgo.
Virgo is currently considered under the rulership of Mercury – which
jointly rules both Virgo and Gemini. Some have long detected an
unsatisfying contradiction in this. A feminine sign, Virgo is sometimes
considered to connote fussiness, methodicalness, yet also dependability.
Is this sign compatible with the expansive, communicative Mercury?
Consider: the vain young Sedna, who prized her beautiful hair, becomes a
suffering immortal unable to brush the detritus of the sea from her
matted locks. This is a predicament suggestive of what is experienced by
the overly meticulous Virgo. Is this distant planet perhaps a more
fitting ruler for the barren, feminine sign that Virgo is sometimes
considered?
Virgo is often associated
with the Greek myth of Demeter and her ill-fated daughter Persephone – a
story that bears striking resonance to that of Sedna’s. Consider:
Persephone is a beautiful and carefree young woman who is kidnapped by
Hades, who forces her to live with him in his subterranean world.
Stricken with grief at her daughter’s disappearance, Demeter – goddess
of the harvest – withholds the fruit of the earth until a bargain is
struck in which Persephone is free to roam the Earth part of the year,
but is condemned to live in the underworld the other part. During
Persephone’s absence, Demeter again withholds the harvest in her
despair.
To the Inuit, the life of
the sea is the Earth’s bounty: there is no other means of sustenance.
The goddess of the hunt suffers betrayal at the hands of a malevolent
suitor who separates her from her family and causes events that
conscript her to life at the depths. From her dark world, Sedna
routinely withholds the life of the sea in her sorrow. There is
correspondence to these myths, both of which resonate within the sign of
Virgo, the woman of the harvest.
The Future of Sedna
We live in an era in which
the discovery of new planets, or planetoids, may actually become more
routine. In 2004, Michael Brown of Cal Tech told The New York Times,
“Our prediction is that there will be many, many more of these objects
discovered in the next five years, and some of them will probably be
more massive.” Indeed, the joint paper of the team that spotted Sedna
reports that astronomers have detected a possible 831 “minor planets”
beyond the orbit of Neptune. Someday, the discovery of new planets may
no longer be considered newsworthy.
When such a day arrives,
it will represent a great step forward for observatory science; but, in
other respects, it could pose a diminishment of the awe we experience
when we look to the heavens. Recent history suggests an abundance of
information can lead to inertia rather than understanding. The sense of
the familiar can blunt our questions.
In this respect, real
astrology – the astrology of seekers rather than that of the funny
papers – endures in Western culture because it sustains mystery in a
world in which superficial answers appear so close. “The general
interest in astrology,” religious scholar Jacob Needleman wrote more
than thirty years ago, “represents, at the very least, a rebellion
against the idea of an unalive cosmos which modern science has given us,
a cosmos in which man is at best a lonely anomaly.”
Without a conception of
our relationship to a living universe, the sheer vastness of space can
indeed make us feel purposelessly alone. But perhaps not everything in
the telescope is so terribly distant or so separate from us. The
ancients – their powers of observation sharpened to a degree that
arouses wonder today – correlated the effects of the cosmos not only to
natural phenomena on Earth, but also to man’s inner state. To study that
sense of connection between our lives and the cosmos would compel us to
look to the stars in wonder – even in an era in which new discoveries
become common.
* * *
Sources Quoted in this Article
Michael E. Brown;
California Institute of Technology website;
www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/.
Michael E. Brown, Chad
Trujullio, David Rabinowitz; “Discovery of a candidate inner Oort cloud
planetoid;” submitted to ApJ Letters, 3/16/04;
www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/papers/ps/sedna.pdf
Stacey Dresner; “Yale
Researcher Helps to Discover New Planet;” Jewish Ledger: 4/16/04.
Jacob Needleman; The
New Religions; Doubleday: 1970.
Juan Antonio Revilla;
Sedna Ephemeris; Riyal Software:
www.karmicastrology.com.
Isha Schwaller de Lubicz;
Her-Bak: The Living Face of Ancient Egypt; Inner Traditions:
1980.
John Noble Wilford;
“Astronomers Discover Most Distant Object in Solar System;” The New
York Times: 3/15/04.
The author gratefully acknowledges filmmaker and
writer Kurt Teske for conversations that contributed to the ideas and
astronomical data in this article.
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