Sedna Consciousness: The Soul's Path of Destiny
by Alan Clay
The author introduces us to his voluminous new book on the possible
dwarf planet Sedna (8 billion miles away) whose orbital period is so long
that the whole of recorded human history has taken place in the last Sedna
six months. Here he contends that Sedna's astrological themes include
transcendence and spiritual growth. And he looks ahead deeper into the
21st century to discover what comes next on our Earth journey.
When a new solar system body is discovered, clues to the astrological meaning can be found by looking at a range of factors. But primarily meaning comes from studying the planet in a large number of charts to find common themes. Here I'm going to present an overview of my research into the new outer-most planet in our solar system which I conducted for my new book Sedna Consciousness. Along the way we'll discover the evolutionary power of the "candidate dwarf planet" and learn of the profound implications for society as Sedna approaches her closest point to Earth later this century in the 2070s.
Orbital characteristics
Sedna has a huge egg-shaped orbit of 11,406 Earth years and is to be found far beyond all the other planets in our solar system, even at its closest point. Many astrologers believe that each new planet represents a new aspect, or level of consciousness, that humanity starts to embrace from the moment of discovery. And if this is true, Sedna represents the weird new outer limit of our consciousness, which is going to stretch our concepts of reality and pull us to look at ourselves as part of the very big picture.
With Sedna I draw the connection with the centaur Pholus because they both have a space weathering process that turns the surface of each red; so in my mind they both have to do with growth and illumination. And I draw the connection with Ceres, because they both likely have internal oceans, so they speak of a nurturing process. And with Saturn, because their daily rate of spin is the same, so they have the same day-to-day practical perspective and both speak of limits. Sedna is of course the esoteric new outer limit of the solar system.
The big picture: past cycles
Another way to deduce the meaning of a newly discovered planet is to look at previous cycles and the correlation with mundane events here on Earth. With Sedna approaching her closest point to Earth later this century, let's look back to the last close pass of the two planets.
Neolithic revolution
The last close pass of Sedna correlates with the end of the last Ice Age on Earth and the beginning of agriculture. Called the Neolithic revolution, it involved the wide-scale transition of many human cultures from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and settlement, making a growth in population possible.
During the following Sedna year it would transform the small mobile groups of hunter-gatherers, that had hitherto dominated human pre-history, into sedentary, non-nomadic societies based in built-up villages and towns. These societies radically modified their natural environment by means of specialised food-crop cultivation, with irrigation and deforestation, which allowed extensive surplus food production.
These developments provided the basis for densely populated settlements, specialisation and division of labour for trading economies: the development of non-portable art and architecture, centralised administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies and de-personalised systems of knowledge such as writing.
So the whole of our known human history came in the last Sedna year since the Neolithic revolution. In fact, all recorded human history has occurred just in the last six Sedna months. Think about that. It's about 433,000 Sedna years since the Earth was created, and roughly 20 Sedna years since people (who are recognisably human) first walked the earth.
Sedna in the signs
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| This is an extract taken from Sedna Consciousness by Alan Clay. Available in Kindle and paperback editions. |
By mid-Sedna year, when she was in Libra and approaching the full moon phase of her orbital cycle, almost as far from Earth as possible, the first fully developed manifestation of the Neolithic revolution could be seen in the Middle Eastern Sumerian cities where it first emerged, also heralding the beginning of the Bronze Age.
The movement of Sedna into Scorpio, the sign of sex and death, around 3000 BC, signalled the rise of the Ancient Egyptian civilisation, with the building of the pyramids and a religion which was in essence a cult of the dead. During the Sagittarius sojourn, in the sign of law and education, the Greek Miracle brought forth the early sciences, the arts and the concept of democracy.
Jump forward to modern times, and for a hundred years prior to 1965, the transit of Sedna through Aries (the sign of will, force and war) saw the World Wars of the first half of the 20th century and the growing threat and reality of atomic war. With the Sedna ingress into Taurus in 1965, the emphasis turned to money and property, to greed and questions of value. To the slogan "make love, not war", to environmentalism and global warming, which have become driving economic factors in modern times.
Sedna in Gemini: 2024 to 2068
We're currently in what we're calling a digital revolution, the Sedna in Taurus phase. And with Sedna's entry into Gemini in 2024, it is likely that this will morph more into a consciousness revolution. That's a bold and, dare I say it, hopeful claim, and anything I write about Sedna in Gemini at this stage is pure speculation. But because the sign is Gemini, we do know that it's going to have to do with the mind, with intellectual debate, opinions, and communication.
One of the discovery events of 2003, which I link to Sedna, is the development of neural networks, which is the basis of Artificial Intelligence. Ray Kurzweil is a scientist, inventor and futurist, who made a series of predictions in the 1990s. All his predictions to date have been realised. So here are some for this Gemini period:
"By the 2030s, virtual reality will begin to feel 100% real. We will be able to upload our mind/consciousness by the end of the decade. By the 2040s, non-biological intelligence will be a billion times more capable than biological intelligence. Nanotech foglets (micro-robots – known as 'smart material') will be able to make food out of thin air and create any object in the physical world at a whim. By 2045, we will multiply our intelligence a billion-fold by linking wirelessly from our neocortex to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud." (From a 26 January 2015 article on singularityhub.com by Peter Diamandis.)
We see that Sedna in Gemini is going to be all about the rise of Artificial Intelligence which will inevitably promote a consciousness revolution. And a consciousness revolution is a spiritual revolution.
Sedna myth interpretation
Another way we derive meaning for newly discovered planets is to look at the myth behind the name of the planet. Sedna was named after the Inuit goddess of the sea, and interestingly the Inuits did not believe in divinity: to them the gods were alive and part of this world, not dead and in heaven as we tend to think of them.
The varying legends each give different rationales for Sedna's transcendence, but in each version, her father, or 'the people', take her to sea in a boat and throw her overboard. In each she clings to her old life and her fingers are chopped off before she lets go. And in each version she sinks to the bottom of the sea, becoming the sea goddess, worshipped by hunters who depend on her goodwill to supply food.
Victimisation or transcendence?
Many of the traditional astrological interpretations of the Sedna myth focus on the unconscious actions which led her to her transcendence and her father's role in this process, emphasising the victimisation and sacrificial interpretations of the planet. However, interpretations which focus on Sedna's attempts to stay on the boat of reality, and calling her a victim, forget that she transcended to godhood through this process. Transcendence is not victimisation; and the two may only be confused if we desperately hang onto the old reality.
Astrological meaning
One of the case studies in my book Sedna Consciousness is Edgar Cayce, the father of modern wholistic medicine. We get a hint from him that Sedna combines heredity, evolutionary change and spiritual development into a unitary worldview.
That is why I call subtitle my book 'The
Soul's Path of Destiny', because, if we accept the idea of past lives, our
soul's path of destiny over those lifetimes would combine aspects of
heredity and evolutionary change with the spiritual growth of the
soul.
And from the myth we get the idea that it relates to various unconscious experiences which come from our heredity, that will push us to a painful crisis of transcendence, where we are forced to let go of our old spiritual framework and rise to a new consciousness.
Legendary humanistic astrologer Dane Rudhyar posited that there were three different levels on which each planet could operate depending on the evolution of our consciousness. The vast majority of us are at the beginners' level and we will manifest the energy of Sedna from a position of being buried in the dysfunctional swamp of density.
Largely unconscious of the all-encompassing spiritual energy of the planet, we are likely only to notice it when it jolts our reality, to correct some imbalance in our lives by bringing us illness or victimisation, like the judder strip (or 'sleeping policeman') on the road, to steer us back onto the true path of our soul's destiny.
At the intermediate level, we tire of density and the grief it creates, and we start a spiritual journey to get out of the swamp. This is the key to working with Sedna: she wants to get us on a spiritual path or recognise the spiritual path that we're on. Then she hits us with transcendent crises, experiences which force us to let go and rise above them, resulting in a huge growth to a new level of consciousness. There is no choice with these crises and the more we try and solve them the more we will get hurt.
At this juncture in human evolution, few people use their planets at the spiritual level, but such people are wonderful to be around. The well-known pattern with the other planets is that the spiritual level is vastly different from the two previous levels and this is also true for Sedna. Here the struggle of the beginners' level is gone, as are the transcendental crises of the intermediate level. At this level everything Saturnian is meaningless and yet everything Sednian has its place.
Sedna keywords
Here are some keywords for these three levels of spiritual development. At the unconscious level it's fairly dark, but this doesn't mean that all darkness comes from Sedna; she just uses every tool she has to get us onto the spiritual path.
At the unconscious level
- Victimisation
- Persistent illness
- Alienation
- Unrelenting trauma and suffering
- Nurturing resentment
- Unbearable pressure
- Caught in quicksand
- Personal blindspot
On the spiritual path
-
Radical acceptance - Acknowledging just how bad things really are and starting from there
- Keeping our heart open in hell
- Nurturing our sense of humour
- Beating our drum and singing to life
- Fated transcendence
At the spiritually evolved level
- Spiritual destiny
- Transcendent peace
- Nurturing abundance
- Allowing love and harmony
- Transpersonal consciousness
- Higher octave of Ceres
The newly re-classified dwarf planet Ceres can be thought of as the higher octave of the Moon, meaning that the emotional security of the Moon is transmuted to a sustenance and nurturing of our spiritual security and sense of place on planet Earth with Ceres.
This is very similar to Sedna, except that Sedna operates on a far vaster scale, so we may find that Sedna is the higher octave of Ceres – where the spiritual security and sense of place on Earth with Ceres is transmuted into transpersonal nurturing of our spirituality and sense of place in the evolutionary cycle with Sedna.
Note:
Sedna Consciousness: The Soul's Path of Destiny by Alan Clay is
published by Artmedia.
Image sources:
Sedna: NASA, Public Domain
Others: CC0 Creative Commons, via pixabay.com
First published by: The Astrological Journal, Nov/Dec 2018
Author:
Alan Clay
is a practising astrologer of 40 years' standing, with a basis in
humanistic astrology; and he has a long interest in Chiron and the
centaurs. Most recently exploring the dwarf planets, he spent the last two
or so years researching 700 charts for his book Sedna Consciousness.
Outside of astrology he is an award-winning filmmaker and clown teacher.
Website: www.sednaconsciousness.com. Email: alan@artmedia.net.nz
© Alan Clay 2018/19
