Living with the Outer Planets Prominent
© 1996 - 2010 by Joyce Mason
Author’s Note: This is an update of a five-part series originally published in the 1990s in Mark Lerner’s astrology magazine, Welcome to Planet Earth
. The Outerplanetary (OPP) People series has been a timeless favorite that has been housed on the wonderful Australian archive, A Place in Space,
for most of the intervening years. I’m ever grateful to Candy Hillenbrand for making me such a vital part of her magical website. With the posting of the OPP articles, I will have completed the migration and update of all my articles to The Radical Virgo that still remain on A Place in Space
in their original forms.
Extraordinary Times
We live in extraordinary times. I call them Outerplanetary Times, marked by the discovery in 1977 of a new outer planet, Chiron. Chiron is trans-Saturnian. It acts like any other outer planet with a similar level of impact.
Chiron’s discovery heralded a helping hand for human consciousness. (Hand is what the “chir” in Chiron means. I love that someone whose birth name is Hand introduced me to this fact. As Barbara Hand Clow declared in her book title, Chiron is the
Rainbow Bridge Between the Inner and Outer Planets. [1] In its orbit between Saturn and Uranus, Chiron signifies transitions and the process of evolution, both as individuals and as a collective. The rainbow refers to the seven colors of our invisible energy centers or chakras. Evolution at the personal level takes place in the etheric or energy body. As the kundalini life force rises, it causes amplification of energy. As we grow, we literally get a "tune Up." We vibrate on a higher frequency. The goal, ultimately, is to be on the same frequency with All That Is—why people have chanted
Om for millennia. Chiron’s discovery, complemented by other major planetary alignments in the years since, kicked off a major evolutionary cycle in human consciousness.
Chiron’s transitional role is marked further by a common thread in its mythology and astronomy. For years, astronomers could not definitively classify Chiron as either a comet or a small planet (asteroid/planetoid). They kept changing their minds. Eventually, Chiron was determined to be both. Like the mythical centaur after which it was named, Chiron the planet was half-comet and half-asteroid. This dual nature parallels mythical Chiron’s makeup as half-man and half-horse. During the what-is-it period, some of us used the composite term cometoid. Ultimately, the American Astronomical Union came up with a new classification for Chiron and objects like it. The AAU called them centaurs in mythical Chiron’s honor. (I call Chiron a planet when speaking of it in generic terms, since planet means
wanderer.)
Astronomers subsequently discovered that Chiron is the first of perhaps thousands of similar centaurs beyond Neptune, previously unknown to us, thus the need for a completely new class of planetary objects. Clearly, Chiron became the precursor of what was beyond our grasp and astronomical knowledge at the time of its discovery. Chiron gave us a glimmer of deeper space, literally and metaphorically, in terms of our own capacity for inner growth and evolution.
Prophets like Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce foretold that the cusp of the Third Millennium would be a major turning point. Since the outer planets are traditionally linked with major cultural shifts, understanding the planets beyond Saturn has never been more important. As a huge hint of the important role Chiron would play in these turning-point times, there was an exact conjunction of Chiron and Pluto at the Turn of the Millennium. Symbols of pain, healing, death, and rebirth merged like conjoined twins at 11+ Sagittarius on January 1, 2000. The conjunction took place on the Sabian symbol for
12 Sag: A flag turns into an eagle, the eagle into a chanticleer saluting the dawn.
After much study of this Sabian, I feel the flag refers to our traditional allegiances to country and intimates, those people we’re willing to fight to defend. The eagle is known for its larger view, its ability to see the big picture from high up. The eagle expands the scope of our loyalty to all humanity. The chanticleer is a kind of medieval rooster whose loud cry heralds a new day. This Sabian and the powerful pair of Pluto and Chiron on it portended a new and larger perspective, the evolving
Oneness consciousness. (For more on this planetary pair and their similarities, read
Chiron and Pluto: The Comet Brothers)
Most recently in 2010 Pluto and Uranus have aligned in a T-square including Saturn. And outside the T-, Chiron and Neptune have been traveling as a pair, essentially making all the outer planets and their ambassador Chiron prominent in the sky shouting, Change!)
For the past several decades, there has been one agenda—rapid evolution. Chiron was discovered, and we became aware of it, when the time was ripe for us to see the personal influence of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, the outer planets for which Chiron is a go-between. Chiron came to our consciousness to give us the heads-up on how the outer planets will change us at a cellular level to become, quite literally, a new species. This is why I call Chiron the harbinger of
homo improvement. The improvement we’re called to make is to mirror Chiron’s composite nature—to merge our intellect and instincts, which Chiron’s human and horse halves respectively symbolize.
Saturn is a heavy energy, and, therefore, represents dense substances, like the Earth and the physical body. If Chiron is the Bridge to the Beyond and its discovery heralded our readiness for change, the Neptune/Uranus conjunctions of the early 1990s further signaled the time for a quantum leap in consciousness, as the Earthbound crossed the Bridge to new dimensions.
While Neptune and Uranus were in Capricorn (1988-95), we were preparing for this change of consciousness in our institutions and day-to-day reality. When the Saturn/Pluto square overlapped during this period, added to Chiron’s decade-long dance of opposition with Saturn, this brought all the trans-Saturnian planets into some form of dialogue with Saturn, Capricorn, or Scorpio. Symbolically, structural transfiguration was being set up on a grand scale. When everything familiar is yanked out from underneath us (the economy, the American dream, the family as we’ve known it, old encrusted forms of government, the patriarchal health care system), at long last new paradigms have room to move in.
Next the energy shifted (1995-2004) with Uranus is in its home sign of Aquarius and Pluto in Sagittarius (1994-2009). Changes from the Saturn/Capricorn groundbreaking and the Pluto square Saturn ground shaking prepared the reconstruction site. (The metaphors of excavation and demolition teams are only too real, remembering the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995, when Pluto stationed before its retrograde dip back into Scorpio.) [2]
As individuals, we may have tense aspects to any one of the outer planets that make their meanings very personal to us, but being an "outerplanetary person” means much more than that to me. It means that through our individual struggles and victories with these archetypes, we experience microcosmically, usually just one step ahead of everyone else, what's coming in the macrocosm of changes in awareness. I call this "channeling the outer planets."
Extraordinary People
I finally realized "why I am the way I am" and the source of my own complexity the day I got the implications of having a close square between each of the outer planets and my Big Three: Pluto square Ascendant, Neptune square Moon, and Uranus square Sun. Add to the configuration Chiron’s sextile to my Moon and square to Pluto. In astrological circles, I am hardly alone with this type of contact with “outer space.” More likely than not, if you are reading this article, you have intimate natal chart contacts with these planets. We are what I call outerplanetary people. We channel change.
Not long after my own epiphany about the outer planets, I heard a woman with Uranus conjunct Ascendant say that the outer planets were personal to her. She couldn't understand her Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars until she studied Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. This makes sense, for people with these planets prominent are the ambassadors for the collective to these exotic places. (They go where others dare not tread.) Outerplanetary people are the ones who directly experience and take Chiron, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto personally. They are not only in constant change, unlike their “normal” change-resistant counterparts; they are also messengers, running ahead to get information. People with strong outerplanetary emphasis bring news from the fringe, back to the rest of the community. They also hold out their hand to others as they cross from Old to New over the deep abyss of the Unknown.
Being outerplanetary is not an easy job (it's lonely out-front), but someone has to do it. The good news for OPP types: Our time has come and our life’s purpose is to act now on the knowledge we have gained by constantly interacting with tomorrow. If we do, we will literally change the world.
My sense of humor revolves around word play. For years, I’ve was unable to resist calling myself and others who share a powerful and close relationship with the outer planets PUN people (Plutonian, Uranian, and Neptunian). Once I got into Chiron, outerplanetary people became PUNCs with both a healing and healer dimension. Considering how Saturnian fogeys often criticize “young punks” with their far-out ideas, and the PUNC pun has always seemed perfect to me.
Of course, evolutionary consciousness can happen for anyone who is one outer planet prominent, but my observation is that the PUNCs—people with close aspects to them all—are hanging off the leading edge— out on a limb.
PUNCs have the strong accent on change and an assignment to catalyze it.
Any close aspect to Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto could mean a tendency to sense the tide of the times. I am sure that trines, sextiles, and minor aspects "count," but the tension of squares, the awareness (like it or not) of oppositions, and the sometimes overwhelming power of a conjunction between the inner planets and the outers tend to produce the most extreme cases.
What's it like to live on the edge when the whole world's on edge and on the brink of change? Just what are we precursor types to homo improvement supposed to be doing to ease these transitional times and offer that helping hand?
