This isn't strictly speaking a review, but I wanted to respond to Steven Forrest's interesting talk on Eris. I think there's another way to view this material. My sense is that "Eris" represents the excluded and un-integrated soul under the patriarchal social system. In the two most well-known Eris stories - the Judgement of Paris and the Wicked Fairy in Sleeping Beauty - a woman is excluded from an important social event and in revenge, brings DISCORD that stirs up all kinds of unrecognized, anti-social reactions. In the case of the Judgement of Paris, a degrading competition among women for the attention of a man, one-upsmanship, vanity, ****** obsession, war and ultimately, destruction. In the case of Sleeping Beauty, a bitter woman's cure leads to... depression. It's the patriarchy of the Greeks that gets goddesses to strip down and parade themselves before an inconsequential young man, as if he were running one of Donald Trump's pageants. Eris disrupts the patriarchal order. The primal forces of the soul that are excluded become inverted, negative and counter-relational - something like a ferrel cat. Tonya Harding and Coco Chanel are/were outsiders fighting their way in. Harding was sexually and emotionally abused. Chanel was the illegitimate daughter of the most extreme French poverty. She found a way to storm the barricades and become, as you point out, powerfully connected socially. But she brought with her a fierce anti-sociability, which she applied to all her calculations and manipulations. I don't think that it's true that her success in fashion was about turning women into alluring objects for men. What made her clothes so irresistible to young women at the beginning of the 20th century were their simplicity and practicality. They freed women from the conventions of femininity of the time. In her way, she disrupted the social order. The discovery of Eris seems to have opened a door to forces that have been distorted by exclusion from the modern social order. Whether Muslim extremists, populist nationalists and white-supremecists, terrorists and other kinds of bomb-throwers or the environmental protests of Mother Earth herself, these are factors that the mechanistic forward drive of modern society has disregarded. The greatest factor is the soul itself, that has become buried in a world that has lost sight of it. My fear is that we have arrived at a tipping point where dissociation and emotional obsession over-rules the soul's capacity to unify and integrate. That is, to experience oneself as part of the greater whole. In any case, this seems to be where the battle is being fought. I have Eris in the 10th house, in a grand cross, oppose Saturn in the 4th and square Uranus rising and Mercury descending. I would say that my mother was an Eris figure, whose competitive nature arose not so much from a desire to assert her femininity as from a profound sense of the dark, primal and creative dimension of her soul that was unrecognized in her world. As for myself, coming to terms with Eris has had something to do with taking possession of the "dark feminine" that had, from my childhood, been basically throttling me, and show it that it has a relevance to existence. As you point out, our challenge - as it was with Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, the astroids and the Centaurs - is to integrate energies to which we have not, heretofore, had conscious access.
