Monday, August 28, 2006 | Everyone please stay calm Dear Friend and Reader: It would be entertaining that planetariums around the world are trying to budget for how to reconfigure their displays and get rid of Pluto, were it not so sad. Like most of New York, the Hayden Planetarium was ahead of the curve and put Pluto down in the basement, away from impressionable school kids, a few years back; the men of science there could not handle that somebody was calling a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) a planet. Just because some guys with Ph.D.s take a vote and change the definition of a word, you have a lot of other people basically scrambling to respond. It would be nice, instead of budgeting to flush Pluto down to the underworld, if they invested some of that money into explaining about some other KBOs, which are a very interesting lot. There is so much to reflect on here. And it is all so interesting. But let's start with two pretty basic ideas. Just because the International Astronomical Union voted to take away Pluto's status as a planet (like the Boy Scouts revoking the Eagle rank of a scout who later in life comes out as gay, hmm) does not mean we can erase the history of science. As Mike Brown, the discoverer of Xena and many other "dwarf planets" was find of saying before last week, Pluto is a cultural planet -- it is accepted by society, school kids, and apparently NASA (which is spending billions on a space probe now en route to Pluto). The technical definition is something else. As for astrology, we have a situation that calls for greater perspective than the meaning of Pluto in individual or world horoscopes. We need to look at this as a comment on the Pluto archetype. As for Pluto in astrology, the cycles of this planet are documented going back long before the discovery in 1930. In other words, when you study the cycles of history, going back thousands of years (which could be made once Pluto was discovered), you see a most definite effect. Pluto shows up in the charts for many of what we think of as the greatest events of history. Just to give two modern examples, Pluto is powerfully configured when the Moon landing occurred in 1969 (the very peak of the scientific revolution practically the same chart as the Woodstock festival, a social event of equal importance). And Pluto was they key player in the events of Sept. 11, 2001. And events of this magnitude are visible as concurrent with the Pluto cycle going back as long as history is recorded. If you want proof of astrology, whether in the historical context or in an individual context, study Pluto. And because this began long before Pluto was discovered (despite my two relatively recent examples), we have an effect that will continue. And -- as anyone who has worked with Pluto as a personal factor knows, this planet gets results; it is the thing that compels change and growth when nothing else will. And whatever a bunch of stuffy old astronomers, politically driven and wishing to seize their particular definition of 'planet' want to say, we have an effect that will last, because it's always been there. Yet at the same time, this development adds something to astrology: it will hopefully guide many practitioners to look at the minor planets. By changing its definition to "dwarf planet," this puts it on equal footing with Ceres, Xena (2003 UB313) and a diversity of other bodies that some astrologers have been using for some years now. True, this is not a particularly popular field. As Vanity Fair astrologer Michael Lutin said in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, UB313 won't tell you whether you're going to get a date. But how does he know? Has he studied Xena that carefully? Maybe when Venus or Mars is conjunct Xena, you'll be come the irresistible sex magnet. Astrologers were slow -- excruciatingly, disappointingly slow -- to accept Pluto. Coherent writing in English was not available till the 1970s, nearly 40 years after the discovery. (The Germans were a bit quicker, but the one book out of Germany has not, to my knowledge, been translated.) Raphael's Ephemeris left Pluto out of its main longitude tables until the mid 1970s, sticking it in the back in a little table that gave the position once a month. So on the one hand, it's funny that we astrologers would be the ones coming to the defense of Pluto more than anyone; and that at the same time, new planets always meet resistance by astrologers. In any event, on the biggest level -- society itself -- we have a comment being made. As I explained in my article "The Foggy New Edge of Neptune," in pretending Pluto is not a planet, we have yet another an example of a big denial trip associated with the darkness of the world. We are saying that the bottom line of reality (whatever is represented by the official planet most distant) is not Pluto: all matters of survival, life and death; sex; shared resources; and social and personal transformation; but rather, that it is Neptune: whatever you want it to be. It is about what you believe. This is a great, humorous metaphor for an era in history when the truth is whatever you want it to be. This is the astronomical symbol of the Faith Based Initiative. We Western folks have always lived by, and with, more than a bit of this. The world was flat for a long time after there was proof that it was round, and went around the Sun. But never has it been more true than it is today. Everything is great, as long as there are a few burgers and a little potato salad left over from the barbecue, no matter what darkness we may be wreaking in other countries. Oh, in the name of saving them from that very darkness. So it is true, the bottom line of reality is not Pluto: that is, the humbly shared acceptance of our several common fates, as humans and humanity; rather, the bottom line is whatever image of ourselves that we choose to accept. Reality is what comes out in the movie, and what the PR department says it is. But as one who is in the business knows well, Pluto is a difficult publicity client to represent. It is a fitting irony that Prague, where some astronomers did the equivalent of voting to declare the Earth flat, is the same city where Kepler published his Sidereus Nuncius , his scientific proof that the heliocentric model was accurate, nearly 400 years ago. It was Kepler who proved in his paper that planets have elliptical orbits; it was astronomers meeting in the same city four centuries later who decided that something was "not a planet" largely because it has an elliptical orbit. Eric Francis Rotterdam