If you really want to know what it means to have a planet somewhere, you have to grow an understanding of what the archetype associated with that planet ‘means’, what the somewhere implies, and then… use your imagination!
Below is a little starter kit for planetary associations. Can’t bear the suspense? Just click to teleport to your favourite planet at superluminal velocity:
Sun – Moon – Mercury – Venus – Earth – Mars – Jupiter – Saturn – Uranus – Neptune – Pluto
Archetypes being what they are, no description can be complete. A google search will quickly reveal different specific manifestations of eg. Venus, like women’s razors and songs by Bananarama, that would not be mentioned in a textbook definition but are concrete expressions that we can cling to. Widen the search to include aliases like Aphrodite and Ishtar for more depth perception.
As you build up an idea of an archetype, things will confound it and then somehow be absorbed, until everything contains its opposite and you end up full of notions that can’t be put into normal language, yet might be accurately (if not precisely) summed up with ‘Mars quincunx Venus’ or ‘Sun conjunct Moon’.
Sol 
The solar system we all know and love is thought to have formed from the gravitational collapse of a giant cloud of molecules about 4.6 billion years ago. The Sun is the star in the middle that remains the gravitational centre around which planets continue to orbit in a disc-like plane. It radiates energy in the form of heat and light because of the thermo-nuclear reactions that accompany such a big ego. Without this energy and gravity, there would be no life on earth.
If one were looking out from the Sun (obviously one would have to be some kind of pure energy/concept being who could withstand the radiation etc.), everything else in the solar system would be equally well lit, and one might not even recognise that there was a light source.
From our earthbound perspective, however, it is not difficult to see how and why this fiery centrifuge became associated with gods, kings, heroes, gold, will, consciousness, reason, power and (in patriarchal times) the male-parent. From the spectacular celestial fanfare of dawn, through the relentless heat and brightness of midday to the beautiful, bittersweet farewells of sunset and the sometimes chilly, scary darkness of night (when we can see that in fact there are other stars in the sky), this is without doubt the brightest and hottest object in the vicinity. Which is what leads astrologers to assert that the sun placement represents not only the energy source but also a kind of blind spot – the thing which is too obvious to see. Planets in conjunction with the Sun are said to be ‘in combustion’ and without autonomy from the centre of self.
Luna 
Luna is 400 times smaller than Sol but also happens to be 400 times closer to Earth, so she appears to be the same size in the sky and is just as impressive as the other luminary, but in an elegantly understated kind of way (except when, occasionally, she eclipses him outright).
Our Moon is the largest (relative to the size of its planet) in the solar system and scientists reckon that without its stabilising influences on our otherwise wobbly sphere, there would have been much less, if any, life on Earth. Its gravity is literally responsible for tides, which provides a direct link with the sea and, by metaphorical extension, elemental Water.
Enigmatically coming and going in a month long cycle of Dark/New-, First Quarter-, Full- and Last Quarter-moon phases, the Moon shows us the same face whether it is lit or not. This cycle peaks energetically at Full Moon when eerily bright night light facilitates hunting, linking the Moon with the divine huntress Artemis/Diana (who is Sun god Apollo’s twin sister).
Selene or Luna, the goddess who was properly considered to be the Moon herself, was the daughter of Theia, which is also the name given by astroscientists to the hypothetical planet that might have collided with a young Earth, producing the Moon from pieces that got knocked off.
Reflecting the light of the Sun, in an equal but opposite way, the Moon archetype is the divine feminine yin counterpoint to all that sacred masculine solar yang, and thus associates with: goddesses, queens, heroines, silver, the subconscious, the psychosomatic, feeling, intuition, reception, reflection, home, fertility, gestation, birth, nurture and the female-parent.
Mercury 
While all the other traditional planets come in pairs – Sun/Moon, Venus/Mars, Jupiter/Saturn – Mercury is a duality unto himself. Ruling everything to do with pairs and doubling, from mirrors and symmetry to hermaphrodites and twins, the namesake of this fast-moving planet is known primarily as the tricky, quick witted, fleet-footed messenger of the gods. Mercury’s apparent motion in the sky goes retrograde much more often than any other planet – three times a year. This frequent repetition is a physical correspondent for the pattern of processes associated with this archetype: thought, learning, communication, analysis, articulation, exchange and memory. In all this is implicit Mercury/Hermes’ ability to go to the other side and come back without hindrance. He is the god of merchants, thieves and silver-tongued lawyers.
Another slant is given by the Hermetic tradition of alchemy which held ‘Thrice-Great Hermes’ to be the be all and end all of the Work (of transmutation) and the Universe. Alchemy was about much more than literally turning lead into gold. The transmutation of the prima materia was partly an elaborate metaphor for the transformation of consciousness, in much the same way that planetary positions can be used to describe archetypal factors in the human psyche. Modern physics has shown that the consciousness of the observer affects the experiment, and this by extension points to the literal possibility that consciousness can change matter, as well as changing matter being ‘only a metaphor’ for changing consciousness. Mercury never does anything in only one direction.
Venus 
Everything you want, everything you want for… Venus is the most luminous planet in the night sky and (because she never strays too far from the Sun) she appears, twinkling like a jewel, just before dawn or after sunset (except when in combustion) and thus is also known as the evening star or morning star, depending on which part of her orbit she’s in. Like the Moon, all planets have phases which means that at some times she is much more luminous than others.
The Maya civilisation was so taken with this planet that they built their famous calendar around the Venus cycle. The myth attached to the phenomenon of Venus going retrograde (backwards, through solar combustion and out the other side) was of a hunter god coming down to earth, then going to the underworld, being sacrificed upon losing a sacred ball game and coming back as a woman.
Geometrically, the zodiacal locations of Venus’ 5 regular back-and-forth changes of direction every 8 years look like those of a near-perfect five pointed star nestled in the circle of the zodiac (drawn in the order you would do them on paper without lifting your pencil). The relative lengths of different sections of this voluptuous figure demonstrate the golden ratio (approx 5:8), and this is the observable root, and mathematical proof, of Venus’ connection with all things lovely which was so celebrated by the cultures of Mediterranean antiquity.
Today, most people are unaware of the heavenly patterning, but this powerful and ancient goddess of desire still rules everything to do with beauty, values and value (money, wealth and debt), attraction, relationship, femininity, sensuality, love, sex, pleasure and style. Even that ubiquitous object of our time, the credit-or-debit card, incorporates the golden ratio in its universally respected dimensions (width:length). Venus is probably the best known archetype in terms of modern popular culture, and she with Mars as a pair are inextricably associated with binary notions of love, gender and relationships.
The Venus placement in a chart is an astrological index of what and how one desires and attracts. A native with a strong Venus is supposed to be easily enthused, sometimes too easily. A native with a blocked Venus will have trouble liking things that are obviously great to everyone else. The acquisitive impulse can turn Venus into a land-grabbing goddess of war, and the Mayans set armies marching on her heliacal rising.
Earth 
In a standard geocentric astrological chart, the Sun is represented, as are the planets, against the backdrop of the zodiac from the point of view of the relevant spot on the Earth’s surface. However, it is also possible to draw heliocentric charts, with the Sun at the centre and the Earth on the zodiac, and whichever part of the zodiac the Sun is in in the former, in the latter type of chart the Earth will be diametrically opposed. So it is worth remembering that having your Sun in a particular sign means that you have your Earth in its opposite.
Gaia/Terra is the primal mother goddess in the Graeco-Roman lineage. She created Sky (Uranus) and Sea (Pontus) and then had many offspring with them. She is the mother of Chronos/Saturn, the grandmother of Aphrodite/Venus (technically) and Zeus/Jupiter and so the great-grandmother of Ares/Mars, Hermes/Mercury, Apollo/Helios/Sol (Sun) and Artemis/Diana/Selene/Luna (Moon). Thus, in the names of the planets we have four generations of a totally dysfunctional family… and Earth is its matriarch.
Mars 
The planet Mars and blood are conspicuously red for precisely the same reason (the interaction of iron and oxygen), which suggests an obvious basis for all the most primordial Mars associations, and an archetypal driver for the intimate connection between iron, tools, warfare and masculinity in the history of our culture.
Mars in astrology is the principle of action in general (as opposed to thought, which is Mercury, or desire, which is Venus). He is more like a verb than a noun (‘to mar’ is, in fact, a verb in English), representing the means to Venus’ ends. He governs the impulse of the shoot pushing upwards in spring, or the proverbial sperm breaking into the egg, as much as the ill-considered rage that thrusts the stabbing dagger in a crime of passion.
A strong Mars is supposed to make you effective, whereas a weakly situated Mars indicates problems with getting things done. Personified, he is best-known as a warrior but, in a different context, Mars can also be a healer as the scalpel-wielding surgeon. Sometimes injury is necessary to renewal but, as it is seldom pleasant, Mars earned the villainous title of ‘Lesser Malefic’ in traditional astrology.
Mars’ most celebrated positive manifestation is in competitive sports. Some famously controversial statistical research has shown that a prominent Mars placement in a natal chart can bestow sporting prowess on the native. A huge, decades-long conflict over the validity of the results involved opposing factions of researchers angrily contesting each others’ methodology, ie. the manner in which various studies were done. Perhaps the salient point for present purposes is observing that the fight has focused almost entirely around the ‘Mars effect’ even though the original study showed intriguing results to do with the placements of other planets too, and Mars is, of course, the competitive planet par excellence.
Jupiter 
The principle of expansion and space. King of the Olympian generation of gods, Zeus/Jupiter/Jove was the god of sky and thunderbolts, equivalent to Thor in Norse mythology. For the Greeks he was the bringer of civilisation because of his establishment of the laws of guest-friendship, which encouraged alliances rather than wars between strangers.
Jupiter is the third-brightest object in the night sky (after the Moon and Venus) but the ancients who equated him with the god of plenty (and excess) had no way of knowing how aptly they were naming this gas giant which is actually the biggest planet in the solar system. Apart from being the supreme heavyweight, Jupiter also boasts a huge magnetosphere which is so big that, if it were visible to the naked eye, it would appear bigger than the Sun and Moon.
In traditional astrology Jupiter is considered to be the ‘Greater Benefic’. Psychological astrologers recognise more readily that you can have too much of a good thing, so Jupiter brings us obesity and hangovers as well as expansiveness and seven-course dinners. He is not only king, but king-maker, amplifying any other archetype he contacts. Optimistic, joyful (jovial), exuberant, progressive and proud (and potentially arrogant), he rules the impulse to broaden horizons and is therefore associated with long distance travel and communication, further education, religion and science.
Saturn 
The principle of limitation and time. From Saturn’s Greek name Chronos we derive words like chronology, which are to do with sequential, ordered time. Saturn has a bad reputation as the ‘Greater Malefic’, for bringing old age and setting limits. But as with all these archetypes, he is neither good nor bad; Time does not only degrade youth, it heals injury by the very same virtue. Without defined structure and limits there can be no room for play. Gravity can be boring and serious, but without it everything would disperse. Control is sometimes suffocating but also prevents terrible accidents.
Saturn was the outermost planet known to the ancients, and is the most distant planet visible with the naked eye. He is the guardian of the darkness in a way, delimiting the influence of solar radiation in terms perceivable to the senses. In some cosmologies he is the evil, shadowy counterpart to the radiant goodness of the Sun, and in Christian mythology has become associated with Satan and death (note grim-reaper scythe prop). Often portrayed as an old man, Saturn is also paradoxically the bringer of youth (which would not exist outside of the context of time).
Uranus 
Uranus has been the butt of many jokes…
And is prominent in the charts of many comedians, apparently…
Well, what do you expect from a planet whose axis is perpendicular to that of the Sun and every other planet in the solar system?
The unexpected! Welcome to the ambit of superlative quirk – where eccentricity is the norm. As are: surprises, discovery, disruption, invention, perversion, revolution, breakthrough, electric shocks, explosions and, on a good day, genius.
Think: ‘improbability drive’, baby, and you’re in the right multiverse.
The astronomical discovery of Uranus in 1781 was itself a shock and revolution: this planet is dimly visible to the naked eye, but was not recognised as a planet by any historical cultures until it became the first to be discovered by telescope (after being inferred from aberrations in the expected orbits of the classic outer planets), a symptom of the exponential spread of technological mores which turned the world upside down at that time in typical Uranus fashion.
It also posed a huge challenge to traditional astrology, as there was no established archetypal association for the new addition. The astrological attributes of Uranus were thus the first to be established by systematic observation and consensus, which paved the way for modern astrology to widen and deepen its horizons. Of course, Uranus’ tendencies resist straightforward pigeon-holing, and there is an argument that the attributes of this planet’s namesake are the least accurate fit for its observed archetypal associations. This is why Prometheus, the other mythological candidate for that honour, is also pictured above having his liver pecked.
Ouranos was the primal Greek sky-deity, and father of Chronos (Saturn) and the other Titans, who, upon being overthrown by his offspring, cursed them to be overthrown by theirs – a connection to the themes of futurism, evolution and revolution that have been seen to consistently synchronise with this planet’s rhythms. Prometheus, on the other hand, a nephew of Chronos, is best-known for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humankind, which resonates with the spirit-of-invention, incendiary and rule-breaking motifs. So the archetypal complex could actually be appreciated as a duet of themes apparent in both of these bodies of myth.
Astrologers consider that Uranus/Prometheus is the ‘upper octave’ of Mercury (who is more than tricky enough for many people’s tastes). He has a similar flavour, but operates at a slower, stronger, ‘generational’ pace (because everyone born within a few years of each other will have a broadly similar Uranus, or other slow/outer planet, placement), rather than a day-to-day one (unless, as regularly happens, the faster moving planets come into contact with it…).
All phenomena connected with and emerging from the invention/discovery of electricity, right up to the internet as a game-changing conscious collective forum, belong to Uranus. Mercury is the messenger and rules the nervous system. He forms words by association of minuscule electrical impulses in the brain, he gestures with his hands even when talking on the phone: Uranus types those words with nimble fingers into a digital machine, and sends them half way round the global nervous system faster than you can say ‘steal fire from the gods’.
Neptune 
Liquid flows, yet it is hard to talk precisely about Neptune because he rules vagueness itself. Try painting a picture on the surface of a body of water and this is what you get. Serenity while drowning.
In astrology, Neptune represents the archetypal pole of transcendence, spirituality, mysticism, altered states; from the sea floor to the mountain top, to the dream, to the womb, to the pub, to the sick bed, to the church, to the drug den, to the lunatic asylum and far, far beyond the concrete, physical, material realm. He rules the relation of microcosm to macrocosm, the primordial soup where life evolves in the universe, and the tiny ocean inside every living cell.
The phenomenon we conceptualise as ‘matter’ is inextricably bound up with the phenomenon we conceptualise as ‘gravity’. Neptune rules the phenomenon of ‘concept’ itself: the mysterious, intangible realm of ideas and the illusion that matter is really there.
It is well documented, that one of the main effects of weightlessness, or ‘levity’, on human consciousness is a state of euphoria so intense that people can ‘forget themselves’ completely, and that a feeling of weightlessness is, in turn, a symptom of euphoria and ‘enlightenment’. Astronauts frequently report experiences of what sounds suspiciously like cosmic union, but the average human being feels weightless infrequently in ‘normal and civilised’ circumstances. However, all the situations which do bring it about belong to Neptune, and they are suggestively entangled with our experience of Liquids.
The phenomenon of ‘pressure’, which can, by altering, compress gas and melt solid into liquid, is another clue. ‘Rapture of the Deep’ experienced by scuba divers, is thought to be caused when gases like nitrogen, which we normally breathe all the time, narcotise the diver simply by being breathed at a higher pressure. Nitrogen can do, with increasing intensity the deeper one dives, what nitrous oxide does at sea level: intoxicate. It is a potentially dangerous state: deep sea divers have been known to experience such irrational delight that they forget about what matters, take off their breathing masks to offer them to their fishy friends and die happy from breathing water themselves.
That these states lend themselves to melting visionary ecstasy and paranoid hallucinations is linked with what psychologists call ego dissolution, obviously because the hydraulic metaphors are really apt. Freud even named the ego-less state oceanic.
Neptune was identified as a planet in 1846 and named after Jupiter’s sea-ruling brother. But Galileo had actually observed Neptune in 1612 when it was in conjunction with Jupiter and mistook it for a fixed star because, by sheer synchronicity, Neptune had just stationed retrograde and therefore appeared not to be moving at all. It was mistaken for a weird blue star by many other astronomers also. So Neptune’s trajectory towards emerging into human consciousness was itself exemplary of the themes of deception, confusion and illusion that are the pitfalls of his watery realm and also neatly resonates with the fact that Jupiter was the original ruler of Pisces, the fishy sign that astrologers signed over to Neptune once it was properly recognised as a planet. Neptune stands for archetypal integrity, cosmic oneness and non-differentiation, so being thought to be ‘a star’, one of many, in the starry sky is fitting.
Neptune is said to be the ‘upper octave’ of Venus. Favourable aspects between theses two are supposed to be a boon to creative, artistic, visionary endeavours, and colour the moment with dreamy, good-willed social lubrication but also imply potential for dangerously exaggerated idealism. In other ways, Neptune resonates strongly with the Moon, which itself has some considerable overlap with the Venus archetype: further evidence, as if any were needed, of a distinct lack of clear boundaries. It all boils down to scale: in theory, what is personal with the Moon is inter-personal with Venus and trans-personal with Neptune.
Pluto 
Just as the shock discovery of Uranus resonated with the spirit of the Enlightenment and that of Neptune accompanied the celebration of all things gooey by the Romantics, so the discovery of Pluto in 1930 coincided with the reworking of cultural attitudes to the very underbelly of nature, as well as manifestations of the dark side of humanity on a mass scale. This is the period when the paradigm-shifting investigations of quantum physics and depth psychology were at peak momentum. The new planet’s naming, after the ancient god of the Underworld (another of Jupiter’s siblings), was a strangely effective antidote to the demonic over-simplification of the subterranean realm in Christian mythology.
Much like the first tentative discoveries at the quantum scale, Pluto heralded the coming into view of whole new worlds of scientific investigation into deep space and the human unconscious. Ultimately, his recent demotion to dwarf planet status has meant the elevation of a multitude of other celestial bodies to any kind of planet status (a surprising number of which are named, by ‘hard science’ types, after demons, devils, lords of chaos etc. as if to deliberately drag as many minions of hell onto the stage as possible).
The astrologers’ consensus is that Pluto is a difficult planet, and he has been dubbed the ‘upper octave’ of Mars. Transits by this celestial body to a sensitive point on a natal chart, or heavy, long, hard mundane aspects with other outer planets are really heavy, long and hard. But sometimes in a good way. Pluto represents raw power, or that force in nature and the unconscious which is a precondition to life and the conscious (cf. Freud’s nasty id and libido, the harsh cruelty of ‘survival of the fittest’, the terror of Not Knowing). That void is so intense that it can be very difficult to deal with.
So everyone was surprised and delighted to find out in 2015, when N.A.S.A.’s New Horizons sent back the first ever detailed images of Pluto, that the terrible Lord of the Underworld has a bleeding heart. Perhaps we let our imaginations run away with us, or it could be what makes him so awful.
astrospection 