Dwarf Planet University
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led by Alan Clay
Ten interactive online classes exploring how the new dwarf planets extend traditional astrology into a richer and more spiritual perspective on your personal chart. We explore the Houses, Aspects and Transits of each of the dwarf planets in your chart.
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Sedna Consciousness
reviewed by Chris Lorenz in Dell Horoscope Magazine
On November 14, 2003, astronomers at Caltech discovered a new planet beyond the orbit of Pluto with an extraordinary lengthy orbit period of 11, 406 years. Astrologers looking back at the discoveries of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto know that these new planets represent emerging transpersonal archetypes reshaping our collective consciousness. What could Sedna symbolise in natal horoscopes or geopolitical events.
Alan Clay, who has been researching this new planet for several years, presents his findings in Sedna Consciousness, a dauntingly lengthy book of nearly 1200 pages. What makes the study of Sedna interesting is that it is approaching its closest pass to Earth in 2076. The last time Sedna was this close to Earth was eleven
thousand years ago when the last ice age was ending and the Neolithic Revolution being ushered in. Humanity as a whole was transforming from small, mobile hunter gatherers to non-nomadic societies based on agriculture.
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Could we soon be entering into a similar revolution of consciousness brought about by Sedna? This is Clay's contention, and he gives numerous case studies of individuals with Sedna prominently placed own their natal charts and who are leading the way towards this new consciousness. Before getting into these examples, he correlates Sedna's 2003 discovery with three concurrent breakthroughs that help to define Sedna's meaning. It's the same technique astrologers used to define Uranus, Neptune and Pluto - namely that transformative events that take place when a new planet is discovered resonate with the new planet's significance.
The paradigm-busting discoveries in 2003 were about how cells communicate with each other; the rise of Artificial Intelligence; and the discovery that dark energy make up some 68 percent of the Universe. From these events, Clay makes some assumptions about Sedna's nature and then demonstrates these in the horoscopes and mini biographies of Sedna individuals. One of his primary hypotheses is that Dark Energy that is all around us is spiritual energy. Another is that individual humans are like cells of planetary consciousness, and that illness has a higher purpose than to just make us miserable.
The first case study is James Lovelock and his Gaia Hypothesis. Lovelock proposed that organisms coevolved with their environment and that we collectively live in a planetary ecosystem with its own consciousness. This fits in nicely with mythological background as an Inuit Goddess who supports harmony between Humanity and Nature. With Sedna trine Lovelocks Midheaven, this new planet shaped his professional status and his landmark hypothesis.
The first two hundred pages of Sedna are filled with these kinds of case studies, plus some background info on her discovery, myth and physical characteristics. Then the rest of the book, some one thousand pages, is a reference section delineating Sedna in aspect to the other planets. For this reason those interested in Sedna should not feel intimidated by the unusual length of this book.
Sedna Consciousness
The Soul’s Path of Destiny
Book Review in The Mountain Astrologer Magazine, by Mary Plumb
Sedna, a trans-Neptunian object, was discovered in November 2003. Originally called planet 90377, Sedna exists in the outermost reaches of our solar system in the Oort Cloud. It has a highly elliptical orbit with a period of 11,406 years, and its extreme distance and slow movement relative to Earth mean that Sedna was in one sign, Aries, from 1867 to 1968, moving into Taurus in 1968. In 2076, Sedna will be at her closest point to Earth since the end of the last Ice Age (i.e. the Neolithic Revolution) around 12,500 years ago.
Alan Clay speculates on Sedna’s meaning by applying methods that astrologers have employed with other newly discovered bodies: He considers its previous (in this case, epochal) cycles, its orbital and physical characteristics, and the events surrounding its discovery in 2003. Only secondarily does he include Sedna in mythology.
Due to this object’s great distance from us, Clay associates Sedna with “a far bigger and more spiritual perspective” than any other known body. The events he relates surrounding the discovery date include the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “groundbreaking research on how cells communicate and co-operate to form a living eco-system”; the development of neural networks and the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI); and “the proof that roughly 68% of the universe is something called Dark Energy and 27% is something called Dark Matter.”
In making the case for Sedna’s meaning, the author delineates horoscopes with considerable biographical detail of individuals who display what he identifies as significant Sedna themes: James Lovelock (Gaia Hypothesis); Ray Kurzweil (Futurist); Rachel Carson and Sally Ride (Climate Change); Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs (AI Enablers); Edgar Cayce (Health); and Helen Keller, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and Osama bin Laden (Consciousness).
In the next nearly 1,000 pages of the text, the author delineates Sedna in the signs, houses, and (in particular detail) the aspects. He includes Sedna in major aspects (conjunction, opposition, sextile, trine) and minor aspects (semi-sextile, semi-square, sesquiquadrate, inconjunct, quintile, bi-quintile) to the Sun, Moon, planets (Mercury through Pluto), and the new dwarf planets (Ceres, Ixion, Orcus, Makemake, Haumea, Varuna, Quaoar, Eris). If readers are not familiar with these bodies, the author introduces their respective traits — e.g., “Ixion is utter lawlessness”; “Makemake is the Divine trickster”; “Varuna deals with questions of the gain and loss of reputation and the issue of immortality through fame.” There are hundreds of biographies and chart analyses in these pages, all with extensive life details culled from Wikipedia and other sources.
Alan Clay is in the early wave of astrological pioneers drawn to investigate the dwarf planet Sedna, named after the Inuit goddess of the sea. His comprehensive biographical and astrological research comes together in this unusual book — a collection of life stories and experiences from the “weird new outer limit of our consciousness which is stretching our concepts of reality and is pulling us to look at ourselves as part of the very big picture.”
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Sedna Consciousness - The Soul's Path of Destiny
Reviewed by Armand Diaz on the Astrology News Service.
Posted date: July 12, 2018
I’ll start write out with a caveat: Sedna Consciousnessis a serious astrology book, probably best suited to those who know at least a fair amount of astrology. Astrology News Service usually offers reviews of books that are accessible to the general public, but there are reasons for making an exception in the case of Alan Clay’s new book.
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Those looking for a Big Picture reference point in astrology have found it in the dwarf planet Sedna, whose orbit exceeds 11,000 years – more than 44 times Pluto’s orbit. Given the enormous scale of Sedna’s orbit, it far exceeds the boundaries of personal, social, or merely generational planets. It isn’t personal at all, and in fact all of human history to date fits neatly inside one half of a Sedna cycle, and all of human prehistory is summed up in about 30 orbits.
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The author correlates Sedna’s orbit with the Ice Age cycle here on Earth. To date, we have had an ice age about every nine Sedna orbits, ostensibly comforting news since we had our last ice age just recently – the last time Sedna came around this close to the Earth. We should thus be good for about another 88,000 years. Yet Clay suggests that we have synchronistically become aware of Sedna at this point in time because of the realities of climate change. Sedna is in part a warning and in part a teacher for us as we try to navigate an environment that is changing rapidly. While hopeful from a long-range viewpoint, the myths around Sedna offer little comfort for us in terms of things working out as we would like in the short run.
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The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is another area that Clay associates with Sedna’s discovery. He is a great believer in the inevitably of advanced AI, and goes so far as to question – like many a science fiction story – whether it may not be that AI takes over the planet from us, perhaps as a means of securing their (its?) own survival. At the very least, he sees that machines with the capabilities of learning and adaptation will become increasingly independent of humans, and if they do not dominate us, they will be indispensible to us.
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The title of the book, Sedna Consciousness, gives us the most important clue in understanding the importance of Sedna. While astrologers tend to think in terms of a planet’s symbolic meaning – the objects, experiences, areas of life with which it is associated – Clay suggests that Sedna heralds an entirely new type of consciousness, a novel perspective for seeing the world. From Sedna’s icy cold and distant perspective, even major calamities can be seen as having an ultimately positive role in the development of our consciousness, although better choices can also be made.
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Astrologers familiar with the evolution of consciousness have retrofitted the discoveries of Uranus, Neptune, and sometimes Pluto (as well as Saturn and the classical planets) to models of consciousness development, but none have applied the idea of a new level of consciousness to a planet (by any designation) that has recently been discovered. However, as the crises facing us become ever more pressing, the need to accelerate the process of consciousness expansion increases – a process that Clay sees as the key role of Sedna.
Interconnecting the themes of environmental change and the rise of artificial intelligence, a kind of global thinking emerges, an impersonal yet compassionate (or potentially so) view that extends identity beyond person, society, culture, or even species. Alan Clay describes Sedna Consciousness as a kind of social coordination, in which we see our connections to each other and the planet as primary. What he is describing resonates very much with Don Beck and Christopher Cowan’s Turquoise Consciousness in their landmark book, Spiral Dynamics.
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Getting to such a perspective involves letting go of a great deal. In order to transcend to a higher stage of evolution, we need to release, or die to, much of what we identify with at lower levels. That is a difficult and painful process, but at this point in our history it may be the only way forward.
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Sedna Consciousness is a big book, with many examples of the planet in the astrology charts of individuals and events. It is available in digital format as well as in paperback. Ultimately hopeful, it offers many occasions for deep concern and fear. While it is geared towards astrologers, any reader will find a lot to think about in its pages.
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