Outer Planets as Transpersonal

The three planets discovered in the modern era — Uranus (1781), Neptune (1846), Pluto (1930) — mark in archetypal astrology the threshold where the personal chart opens onto the collective-unconscious. The seven classical planets describe the individuated personality (Sun–Moon–Mercury–Venus–Mars–Jupiter–Saturn); Saturn is the outermost of the personal boundaries. What lies beyond Saturn is suprapersonal.

liz-greene makes this the structuring insight of her Saturn. When Saturn in one chart is contacted by an outer planet in another’s horoscope, he “swings about to confront what he feels to be an abyss opening behind him by using as his defense all that he knows of the realm of personal, concrete experience. There is usually some numinous quality about the other person which is mysterious, frightening, and a threat because there is the feeling of the dissolution of the structure which Saturn has worked so hard to build. Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto evoke a different response from Saturn than the inner planets do because they are past the personal boundary and partake of the power of” the suprapersonal (Greene 1976).

The outer planets function, in this register, as astrological names for the archetypes of transformation: Uranus for awakening and rupture, Neptune for dissolution and merging, Pluto for death and renewal. They are the planets of individuation’s third act, the powers that break the saturnine structure open so that the self may be reconstituted around a suprapersonal center.

Relationships

• senex-saturn
• planetary-gods-as-archetypal-complexes
• collective-unconscious
• individuation

Primary sources

• greene-saturn-new-look (Greene 1976)