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Obviously the myths of Hades in Greek literature came first, so Pluto has garnered its modern significations from them. The myths don't fit the planet, the planet fits the myths. There is a lot of assumption here on the part of modern astrologers that because the planet was named Pluto that it would follow the mythical Hades/Pluto in its behaviours. We have no idea of what came first astrologically, the myth or the planet in the case of the seven visibles, so it doesn't seem a good idea to me to do this for the outer planets.
Most astrologers, whether traditional or modern, are actually are not that knowledgeable about ancient mythology, in my experience. I highly recommend the site
www.theoi.com to you. But how do you think the traditional planets got their meanings? The astrological planet Mercury rules liars and thieves today because the young god Mercury/Hermes was quite a rascal. Astrological Venus rules feminine beauty and love today because these were the attributes of the ancient goddess Venus/Aphrodite. Mars rules soldiers and warfare because the god Mars/Ares was a warrior.
There are hardly any Greek myths about Uranus (or Saturn, for that matter,) yet these planets have well-developed bodies of astrological information about them. So you cannot over-generalize.
Konrad, how thoroughly have you studied the mythological god Pluto, and the role of Pluto in hundreds of charts? It seems as though you dismissed it out-of-hand through a prejudice against modern western astrology.
The main point I would make about Pluto in aspect to the sun in a natal chart, for example, is that inter-personal power relations are probably a big theme in the person's life. I can go into more detail by the individual aspects, but I don't think you will find this in the mythology of Pluto/Hades. By the same token, transiting Pluto square sun may be a time when the person withdraws from society, metaphorically going "underground" for a while.
I think in your answer here lies the issue of our divide. I never meant the Greek notion of atoms or the theories of the Sun, but that the ancient peoples (and I am not limiting myself to only the Hellenistic people with this comment) were aware that the world experienced through the senses was not the true, or even the only, world. It is this experience of the world that is important for our purposes, its appearance to our senses is said to show what will happen within the sensory world. This wasn't just limited to astrology, but there was all sorts of divination which sought signs from a being or collection of beings existing independently of the physical world within the physical world.
Well, this is great. But it doesn't support "naked eye" astrology.
With sight being the only sense with which to experience the sky, the practice of astrology hinges upon light and what we can see coupled with purely mathematical and rational concepts such as the method of dividing up the sky into sections and so on. A telescope doesn't change the fact that these bodies are not visible to our naked eyes. If we take that one step further, we can argue that they are then not relevant to our experience of the physical world.
Sight is not the only sense with which to experience the sky. Surely you are aware if it rains or snows through your sense of touch! The Greeks combined meteorology with astrology: see Ptolemy's
Tetrabiblos for example. The relationship between moon phases and tides was well known. You know the expression "lunacy."
Your mistrust of telescopes, however, really doesn't hold up. Ancient and medieval astrologers used quadrants, astrolabes, sundials, water clocks, the antikythera mechanism, perapegmata, and armillary spheres. They didn't restrict themselves to their eyeballs. In fact, as soon as reliable ephemerides became available in ancient times, they used them instead of star-gazing to note planetary positions.
They would have had to rely on ephemerides in northern Europe, frankly, because the sky is overcast so much of the tme.
I'll say here in a note I posted to
Dirius that wiped out, that the modern outers do cast visible light. Of course they do. They reflect the light of the sun just like the traditional planets do. In fact, on a good night with some homework under your belt, you can see Uranus with the naked eye. If you have a reasonably beefy telescope at home with a camera designed for night sky photos (advertised in amateur astronomy magazines) you can see Pluto.
This isn't about the Hubble telescope. Many of the asteroids were discovered in the 19th century, when telescopes were primitive by modern standards. Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter in the early 17th century.
Dirius: it isn't about traditional planets' orbs, either. Whatever "disk" of light is cast by Saturn in the night sky, it is far less than the degrees given to Saturn's orb in traditional astrology. (5 degrees is about 3 finger-widths from a fixed point in the sky.) The orb actually cast by the moon in the sky (vs. the one in your astrology book) varies significantly depending upon its phase, position, and atmospheric conditions. (Just now I see a first quarter crescent moon in the West, with a bright but narrow halo.)
Moreover, the midpoint and ascendant cast no orb. House cusps cast no light. We use them extensively, however. So naked eye visibility is hardly a criterion of the importance of a point in a horoscope.
In modern western astrology, moreover, orbs are not based on the visible light cast by planets (which is mighty small) but
on their observed effect in human lives. And then it's not so simple. Two planets out-of-orb for a conjunction, for example, might operate in synch if they are parallel or have a third planet at their midpoint.
Again, dear traditionalists, if you don't wanna use Pluto, don't use Pluto. But I will have to ask how thoroughly you have studied it. For that, unfortunately, you might have to drop the essential dignities and traditional house weightings, and focus on aspects, plus a few other techniques not widely used in traditional western astrology.
MC. Clearly there is more then the old system knew, why leaving it out?
