Eris, literally 'strife', goddess of discord, enjoys conflict in and of itself. Her archtype is tuned into the excitement of intense drama. She has intimate knowledge of chaos and seeks to disrupt the structures of order, especially when these structures serve to hide the truth of chaos, becoming exclusionary and self-involved. She revels in playing around with the vanities.
In her mythology she causes conflict through the strategic use of scarcity explosively coupled with her enemies' vanity. She causes the goddesses to fight over her 'offering' of one golden apple that should belong to “the fairest (of them all).”
If she is to be fairly considered astrologically, Eris might be an even more powerful force than Pluto. Her orbit is completely beyond Neptune and has a moon named after her daughter Dysnomia, goddess of lawlessness. Eris's scheming has far reaching consequences. She is slightly smaller than Pluto but much denser. This makes her both more focused as well as heavier. Her very eccentric orbit takes around 560 years, more than twice that of Pluto. She is the second of the so-called Seven Dwarves (yep, you made the connection!), right after Pluto.
The Plutonian explosions indicated by the T-Square to the nodes will have consequences beyond Pluto's purview. This is Eris's domain, especially as she moves ever closer to an exact conjunction to the North Node. To me this indicates that great discord and lawlessness is inevitable, as the lunar nodes are a matter of the Matrix's deep programming. The world has to go through it.
But Eris is a very complex archtype and not all is as it seems. Her energy is what it is, aggressive, uncompromising, and frequently cruel. To me she represents the human innocent wild-side that has turned into savagery and strategic cruelty during aeons of being chained in the dungeons of the collective unconscious. Humanity has failed to invite her to the party, and while this sounds way too close to Black Moon Lilith, it is also quite different. Eris is not focused on individual power and idiosyncracies. She deals with civilizations, brutally. Her tightening conjunction to the N.Node is something to behold, as it tells us of a future of great strife. But Eris, like every other astrological force has her lower as well a her higher vibrations. They are never comfortable, but we can envisage a way to channel her uncompromising energy. Eris is currently in retrograde, and as far as I can see this will continue into the beginning of 2024.
On a higher vibration Eris focuses her direct discordant power to bring Man to face and drop his arrogance and self-indulgence. She loves to dissolve the illusions of order that make humanity arrogant and prey to fantasies of harmony and altruism. She likes to play with the mirror of self-reflection. And she does this by facilitating the realization of vice, bringing man's weakness to the surface. She is the ego's agitator, and that's why she's so important to this full Moon. Eris is the archetype through which we see and experience the intimate links between the ego and chaos, arrogance and suffering, ignorance and ruin. She is acting as the temporal link (nodes) between the egoic 'me' and the consequences its actions bare upon a distant future.
So this retrograde season can be envisaged as a highly consequential shift for humanity. We do well to make sure it is directed by a conscious decision. Are we going to seek to change the world around us, or are we going to focus our energies inwardly, to become authentic human beings aligned with the spirit's will? Are we seeking to program the world around us according to our ideas, our anger at 'injustice', our fear of losing control, our ideologies? Or are we seeking the pocket of truth, the awakening of the silence that lives underneath the weight of our conflicts? Are we seeking revolution or evolution? Eris is fine with revolution, where everything remains the same, just upside down. But she can become a force for evolution, especially if put in the same room with softer energies and archetypes. Through this balance we learn to see, in the inevitable suffering that lies ahead, a great opportunity to refine the art of being human. Let us remember that Eris's capricious trouble-making only works because of our vanity and self-interest. If humanity can recognize how self-interest is not at all in our best interests, then Erisian energy can become an ally. During a full Moon in the axis Aries / Libra, the matter of how self-preservation (Aries) depends on collective well-being (Libra) becomes of paramount importance. We might discover that a conflict between 'my interest' and 'our interest' is impossible, an invention of a deranged collective mind.
If we follow the mythology further, and at the same time look at the astrological climate of this full Moon, we begin to understand that Venus's position in this chart is pretty important. Venus is moving into a conjunction with Lilith and an opposition to Saturn during and after this FM. She is currently conjunct Juno (who responds in a diametrically opposite way to betrayal than Eris), and forming a tight square to Uranus in Taurus, which she rules.
Putting all this in the context of Eris's mythology: The vain goddesses fought for the golden apple, in their quest for being considered i.e. self-importance. The god Paris was appointed as judge of their beauty, and they each tried to bribe him. In the end Venus/Aphrodite made him an offer he couldn't refuse; she promised him the sexual favours of Helen of Troy, the most desireable human woman in the world. The Trojan War ensued because of the interlocked dynamics of vanity, sexual avarice, bribery, scheming, control, betrayal and jealousy. And much suffering that could have been avoided was not avoided. Venus in Leo can very well become very vain, and the square to Uranus can coalesce into huge sexual desire and perversion, as well as revolutions built on the vanity of the mind. The great problem of the revolutionary is a mixture of vanity and anger: “I know what is wrong with the world, and I know how to fix it.” As Michael Bolton's book How to Resist advises: Ask yourself the question “what makes me angry?” Then go and gain power, make connections, use people's self-interest to bring about the change you want in your community.
You don't have to go very far to see that this is a blue-print for disaster.
But there is another way. Venus and her aspects are also a call for re-evaluating our values. Leo can fire up Venus's inner beauty, her love of peace, her generous gifts. Uranus becomes the implacable energy focused on finding a place of truth, even at the cost of the great personal loss of self-pride and personal ambitions (Taurus). Eris in this scenario, ahead of the eclipse season beginning with the next new Moon, becomes a terrible force tuned into the disidentification with the egoic mind, the one true necessary step to Enlightenment.
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