Eris and Envy

Like our easy access to the now ubiquitious wifi signal, the slender needle of envy now injects directly into the bloodstream through the same lit glass prism that once promised universal connection. A single thumb‑flick upon an online acquaintance’s promo selfie on “stories” and—thwack—another acid dart adds to the corrosion upon the steely framework of your flimsy self‑esteem.  But why do we feel envy? And is it now more prevalent in our society than in past eras?

We might define envy as that painful emotion we experience when we perceive another person possessing something—whether material, personal, or symbolic—that we lack but desire so badly for ourselves it makes us unbalanced or unhinged. It evokes an immediately comparative, self-referential evaluation that leaves us with feelings of lack, inferiority and resentment, often hidden or denied, yet capable of distorting all perspective and impairing our wellbeing. And so, astrology, ever the impresario of motive, identifies the hidden stage‑director behind the curtain as another crucial Kuiper-object—Eris, dwarf‑planet of discord—whose discovery in 2005 places her within a single news cycle of Apple’s iPhone’s prototype and the birth of Facebook.

Ironically, those inventions, gleaming like so many digital pommes de discorde (apple of discord), became her chosen munitions. Hurled into the banquet‑hall of humanity, they fractured conversation into competitive exhibition, igniting a global Aries‑style sprint for the most resplendent selfie, the most viral outrage, the most aggressively curated lifestyle. This was no metaphorical apple but one where the endless scroll of updates, accompanied by a ceaseless cascade of notifications—each ding a reminder that someone, somewhere, is winning at a game you did not realise you were playing.

The fever reached its paroxysm under the Uranus–Eris conjunctions of 2016 (there was three in that 12 month period), when the sky itself mimicked Silicon Valley’s launch calendar: innovation without reflection, shock without pause, and with nearly all of us signed onto a facebook/twitter account, we witness the earliest adopters scrambling for first‑mover glory even as the ground rules rewrote themselves nightly. If Uranus is the lightning strike of technology and thought provocation, Eris is the tinder‑dry underbrush that ensures the spark becomes a conflagrating wildfire; a cacophony of competing voices—and the world, firelit and sleepless, suddenly measured personal worth in likes, loops and luminous filters.

Thus begins our tale of how the silent and invisible but toxic seep of envy can make bothe mortal and gods crazy. Note that, in Greek mythology, it is Eris’ spurring of Hera’s envy for Aphrodite that set off the Trojan War. hence, this is Eris’s double‑edged gift: the corrosive comparison that blinds us into madness, and the catalytic friction that, if properly integrated, can hone the self into something sharper than any digital black mirror could ever reflect.

To understand how Eris animates the green‑eyed monster we must, first, refine our terminology. Envy, as is the inner pain that arises when another enjoys an advantage we lack. This is different to jealousy which is the pain of potentially losing an advantage we already possess. Both hurt—but they hurt in different keys. Astrology preserves the distinction by giving jealousy to Pluto, master of possession, power struggles and under‑the‑table manipulations, while awarding envy to Eris, agent provocateur whose métier is the zero‑sum carnival of comparisons. Where Pluto clamps down on what is “mine”, Eris lunges at what is “yours”, and the bruise she leaves is livid with humiliation.

Yet, as Hesiod hinted three millennia ago in his Works and Days, Strife comes in two guises: the ruinous and the regenerative. The poem belongs here in full (my translation), fascinatingly presents us with a dual face of Eris, setting the stage better than any modern editorial:

After all, there was not only one variety of Strife, but over earth
two Strifes exist. One, men would praise, seeing her at work,
but the other they revile, for they have wholly different natures.
The one, a cruel being, foments evil and war and battle;
no mortal loves her, but under compulsion by the will of the deathless gods
they pay harsh Strife her due of honour. But the other is the elder daughter
whom dark Night brought forth, and the son of Kronos on high,
dwelling in the upper air, embedded her in the earth’s roots;
she is much kinder to men. She stirs up even the idle to hard work,
for a man grows eager to labour when he sees his neighbour,
a rich man who hurries to plough and plant
and put his house in good order, and one neighbour contends with another
as they hurry after wealth; this Strife is good for men.
Potter too is piqued with potter, craftsman with craftsman;
beggar begrudges beggar, and bard resents bard.

Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all. ‘Envy’ derives from the Latin invidia, ‘non‑sight’. In Dante’s Inferno, the envious labour under cloaks of lead, their eyelids sewn tight with leaden wire—suggesting that envy arises from, or leads to, a form of blindness.

The passage exposes Eris’s double‑coded nature: a corrosive Strife that hollows, and a catalytic Strife that spurs. Translating this into chart language, the unintegrated Eris operates like a covert saboteur. She mutters secretly, “If I cannot have it, neither shall you.” The dispossessed may luxuriate in scorn, launch passive‑aggressive barbs disguised as “jokes”, or—at worst—wreck the shared toy simply to extinguish the neighbour’s delight. Sabotage, self‑destructiveness, flash‑mob smear campaigns on social media: all are signatures of an Eris who has been banished to the psychic basement, where she feeds on stale ressentiment and plots mutiny.

The pathology of it all is at once recognisable, but hard for the everyperson to define. They might sooner get dragged into the shitfight rather than learn to call it and step away. Unintegrated Eris keeps score with manic precision, inflating every social disparity into cosmic injustice and seeks vengeance. She is the office gossip who leaks a rival’s confidential misstep; the dinner‑party guest who congratulates a friend’s engagement while googling divorce statistics under the table; the keyboard warrior who relishes a glut ot Schadenfreude headlines because the high and mighty deserve to be dragged into the mud. She is the militant ideologue—the self‑anointed social avenger who uses righteous trans-generational outrage as a mask for her own unspoken envy, crusading not to liberate but to level and deprive, scorning any level of nuance as complicity. Her protest sign may read equality, but the clenched jaw beneath it snarls why not me? These behaviours, perhaps deemed necessary in the historical means of the evolutionary process, mirror the psychological account of envy’s “non‑sight”, the almost-blind, green-eyed monster, whose focus narrows to a pin‑hole through which only the envied object is visible, while the broader context—effort, sacrifice, risk—falls away. All that remains is the frantic sucking of the heart on air.

In contrast, Pluto’s jealous machinations differ in texture. Jealousy means guarding territory already claimed: the partner, the esteemed title, the lineage of privilege and wealth. Pluto’s fear is lsoing what you already have through displacement; Eris’s fear is never having in the first place and being cast into the shadows of insignificance. Their collusion is deliciously theatrical—imagine a technocratic CEO (Pluto) hoarding immense influence via supreme online surveilllance, scanning and spying on its clients or an insurgent start‑up competitor (Eris) whose mere existence mocks or threatens his relevance. When these two archetypes square off in a chart (as they has between 2020-2022—the COVID years), the axis usually runs straight through the vault of self‑worth: If I cannot own it, I must at least eclipse it. If I cannot eclipse it, I shall shut it down or ruin it to extinction.

But Hesiod’s second Strife—the elder daughter “embedded in the earth’s roots”—reminds us that envy, transmuted, can become emulation. Integrated Eris is a raging furnace of competitive fire that keeps civilisation humming. She is the inner drill sergeant urging you to rise an hour earlier to lace up for the 10‑kilometre run because your best friend just posted her personal‑best time. She is the entrepreneurial itch that hurls you into the market because another writer found a publisher and, damn it, your prose is every bit as sharp, if not sharper.

The crucial difference is that well‑integrated Eris competes on her own level, acknowledging hierarchy without surrendering agency. For her there is no insecurity in the comparison. She reads competence in others as living proof that the summit is climbable. Here, the psychological pain of disparity alchemises into aspiration; the fire in the belly becomes rocket fuel rather than arson. In such hands Eris is not a vandal but a superior life-coach, an influencer who, by example, pushes the psyche to close the gap not by bitching on one’s misfortune or by tearing down the other but by rising to meet them. The Buddhists call this mudita—sympathetic joy—but astrology accepts that joy may still carry heat, a sting that says move. Eris is, after all, the sister of Ares (Mars) the combatant god of battles. She hence becomes the competent goddess of the contest. Both wish to win, and understand the defeat is not a happy outcome, although the field of action and radius is much wider and less personal in Eris.

The Chiron Rendezvous: The Shame of Envy

All of this would be academic were it not for the celestial mise‑en‑scène looming in May 2025 and lasting until March 2026, when Eris hovering around 24°‑25° Aries conjoins Chiron, the wounded healer. Aries, the sign of raw initiative, already frames Eris as a street‑fighter, a lone frontline warrior; Chiron merely adds the smell of antiseptic and the rattle of surgical tools. This is a time when we are observing a sturation of headlines thick with rage against the “haves”: whistle‑blowers, online hacks, and torch‑bearing mobs exposing the gilded rot of elites. Yet the stage is also set for a cultural group‑therapy session on the shame of envy itself. Chiron probes the toxic abscess, Eris becomes the unsightly pus that threatens to ooze out everywhere, if released. The question is whether we lance the boil honestly—admitting the covetousness of all the we ache and thus, converting it into skil, or whether we project our bile, spraying the infection outward in riots of scapegoating.

On the personal plane, charts for whom Eris is a definitive feature (critical aspects to key points), or those with dominant planets from 22° to 27° of the cardinal signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn) are up for an uncompromising audit. If your default has been to mask envy behind hyper‑refined irony or designer nihilism, Chiron’s scalpel will slice through the facade. Or you may attract envy by the very naure of your elite standing in any particular area, field or personal trait. The wound revealed may throb with unresolved childhood scripts—perhaps an older sibling who always shone brighter, or a school culture that equated popularity or lovability with trophies. The medicine is, of course, bringing things out into the light with brutal candour: I want what you have because I fear I am less without it. Spoken aloud, the confession drains the poison and reroutes the energy toward mastery. Of course, as with Pluto, shedding sunlight on these sores is extremely difficult, especially if natives are filled with wounds of inadequacy and shame, as is most likely under a Chiron conjunction. Notice the difference between this and the shamelssness of the 2016 conjunction to Uranus. If refused, however, it metastasises into the kind of psychic mildew that blackens every relationship.

Keeping the Lid On

The psychologists advise reframing—remembering the unseen sacrifices behind someone’s success—and astrology offers an identical prescription: see the whole chart, not just the trophy planet. The influencer displaying flawless Marbella sunsets under a Libra Mars‑Venus conjunction may also host a Pisces Moon square Neptune, drowning nightly in imposter syndrome. Recognising those submerged currents restores perspective and, with it, compassion.

Remember, too, that nature compensates for its shortcomings. Astrologically, the compensation often lies by antiscion or contra‑antiscion—mirror degrees offering hidden boons—or in the house the envied planet rules. You might covet a friend’s Leo Sun in the 10th, oblivious that your own Cancer Sun in the 9th grants, by progression, a pilgrim’s passport to experiences she can scarcely imagine. Eris commands that you mine those quiet riches rather than paw salaciously at someone else’s crown. Avoid comparisons of sourgrapes too, as these kind of projections become your own nemesis.

The Alchemical Power of Emulation – Doing the Erisian Work

Integrated Eris knows that discipline is the key if she wants to cut it among the winners. As such, to some extent, it behoves us to collaborate with Saturn. Saturn surveys the distance between you and your aspiration, then drafts the regimen: 10,000 hours of disciplined practice, cutting back on the junk, fewer cocktails, more treadmill etc—an unglamorous apprenticeship that will not fit neatly into a 30-second Reels clip. Like everything in the Kuiper belt, regeneration requies extreme sacrifice, self-denial and intnese focus to improve. The heat of envy becomes the pilot light that keeps Saturn’s kiln burning through dull, pre‑dawn repetitions. (Saturn poses a prolonged semi-sextile to Eris throughout November 2025). Notice that emulation still hurts (Aristotle was right) but it’s a very productive hurt—a deeply painful athletic ache in the quads as you crest the hill instead of the seeping ulcer of spite.

One practical spell: when the pang strikes, name three actions—tiny, tangible, achievable ones—that move you toward the admired quality. Want their fluency in French? Download the tools, shadow‑read a novel, memorise a menu. Envy starves on forward motion; feed her that diet and she mutates into pure, authenticated drive. Should you catch yourself secretly hoping the fluent friend fumbles her subjunctive on stage, compassionately clock it as unintegrated Eris and redirect the fantasy toward improving your own grammar drills.

Closing the Circle

Eris, discovered only in 2005, is still a fresh‑ink scribble in astrological folkore, and yet she already proves indispensable tool for diagnosing the ancestrally inherited bruise, beaten and purpled by twenty‑first‑century hyper‑visibility and its ubiquitous technologies. We can’t escape it, for we live in a time when every neighbour’s harvest glitters beneath LED ring lights, when algorithms rank our desirability in real time, when the boundary between admiration and self‑loathing is no thicker than a swipe. we can create “no fair—those rotten elites” tribal/class/gender/etc. rhetoric and warfare. However, to navigate this hall of mirrors we must choose which Strife to invite aboard: the younger sister who keens to burn the palace down, or the elder who hands us a whetstone and says, Sharpen your ploughshare—let’s see what your field can yield.

The 2025-26 Eris‑Chiron conjunction is both fire alarm and forge. Nations may vent their envy through populist bonfires; families and personal relationships may fracture over dinner‑table wealth gaps. Although there is some merit to the inequity issues, we must keep in mind that nature is often cruel, and so are the Darwinian processes of natural selection. If “the fittest will survive” then we best stay ahead of the game and keep ourselves in tip-top shape. There are no shortcuts for the slouchers, the misguided and the bitchy. The transit offers individual redemption: a chance to transmute invidia into intuitio—clear‑sighted recognition of potential. Envy blinds; emulation illumines. In that illumination Eris ceases to be the harpy cackling at the wedding feast and becomes, instead, the midwife of untapped genius.

Let the plutocrats clutch their jewels in jealous terror; the rest of us have work to do. Strive loudly, strive lavishly, strive on your level—and watch as the leaden eyelids of envy split open to greet the dawn.

Many Blessings xx