Full disclosure: The author is my long-time astrology teacher and a good friend. Having said that, each year I read much of what’s published in the worlds of astrology, and in my view Daniel Fiverson’s book on Eris is one of the best astrology books published in 2025.
Eris is the name of the Greek Goddess of strife and discord, a “disruptor” and a “catalytic force,” a fierce feminine archetype for stirring up trouble and overturning the status quo. In her most infamous role, she crashed a wedding she wasn’t invited to, and furiously threw a golden apple inscribed with the words “to the fairest,” into the crowd. The resulting ruckus led to a beauty contest between Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite that sparked the onset of the Trojan war.
Astronomically, Eris is the name given to one of the trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) recently discovered by astronomers in this first quarter of the 21st century. Out in space, beyond Neptune, there are untold numbers of celestial bodies being discovered. They travel in “elongated, elliptical orbits that span hundreds of years,” Fiverson writes, making these “distant wanderers … elusive, mystical, and rich in symbolic meaning.” Eris was first noticed in a digital image in 2003. It was initially thought to be as large as Pluto (discovered in 1930) and labeled a “tenth planet,” but once Pluto was reclassified as a “dwarf planet” in 2006, Eris was similarly labeled. Just as astrologers have been studying Pluto for its symbolic correlations for nearly a century, the discovery of new celestial bodies is fueling a new wave of astrological research. The timing of recent discoveries is apt, as our lives on planet Earth face one crisis after the next.
Daniel Fiverson is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has a deep background in astrology and other intuitive arts. He teaches astrology through Kepler College, and he’s the kindest of counselors. About nine years ago, he began researching Eris astronomically and for its astrological symbolism, studying its placement in birth charts and mundane astrology, the astrology of world events. Over the years, in his counseling and writing, he’s been integrating Eris with his long-time study of astrological Pluto.
Fiverson practices evolutionary astrology, which has as its premise that astrology speaks to a mysterious continuity in the soul’s trajectory over multiple lifetimes. In particular, Fiverson works within the evolutionary astrology (EA) paradigm of Jeffrey Wolf Green, which centers the symbolism of Pluto, by house, sign and aspect with other planets in charts. Pluto moves so slowly that everyone born within about the span of a generation has Pluto in the same sign. Eris is like this, too, with a 557-year orbit around the Sun. Everyone born between 1928 and 2048 has or will have natal Eris in the fiery, initiatory sign of Aries.
What makes the astrology of Eris unique in natal charts is its placement by house and in aspect to all the other planets.
“Understanding Eris in an astrological chart requires recognizing where we are called to disrupt, challenge, and resist compliance with falsehoods,” Fiverson writes. “Her placement reveals the area of life where we must confront uncomfortable truths, face distortions, and ignite transformation—not only for ourselves but also for the collective.”
The bulk of the book, called Eris Through the Houses, consists of chart analyses of several dozen iconic cultural creatives: Allen Ginsberg, Joan Baez, Jim Morrison, Malcolm X, Bob Dylan, James Dean, Elvis, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the Beatles Lennon and McCartney, and more. These are chart examples often studied by astrologers, the difference being that Fiverson’s work on Eris adds whole new dimensions to understanding how an individual may make a mark in society and, based on house placement, the areas of life where “the soul grapples with the deeper meanings of identity, authenticity, disruption, and truth.”
Newcomers to astrology would do well to read Fiverson’s chart delineations; they are a master class in how to integrate key features of a natal chart and weave them in with a person’s known biography. There’s an emphasis on people from the 1960s counterculture--and let’s say that, especially for a reader “of a certain age,” they are a delight to read.
But there’s much more to this book, which is why I say it’s among a handful of the best astrology books of 2025.
The first part of the book features Eris as a revelatory symbol in world event astrology. Fiverson has been tracking the transits of Eris in aspect with other outer planets, especially Pluto and Uranus, correlating with socially disruptive events and the rise of authoritarianism since 2016. A couple of examples: the 2016 U.S. presidential election, “marked by foreign interference and the manipulation of disinformation,” occurred during a conjunction between Eris and Uranus, the planet of shock and awe. Then, the January 6, 2021 attempted overthrow of the U.S. government took place during a tense square involving Mars, Uranus, Saturn, and Eris, a combination which “indicated an explosive confrontation between personal will, entrenched power structures, and destabilized social contracts…the visible expression of a psychic civil war…”
For the near future, what’s on the horizon is no less ominous. Between 2026 and 2030, Eris will make an unprecedented nine squares (90-degree aspects of friction and conflict) with the United States’ Pluto (power and power structures). Fiverson forecasts “not only the collapse of political norms or democratic institutions, but the unmasking of a collective identity crisis, as evolutionary pressure forces confrontation with the soul-level consequences of exclusion, suppression and denial.”
The point here is not to say that Eris –or any planet – causes events. Astrology’s not like that. Rather, the movements of bodies in the sky form a language that “reveal[s] what is already in motion…The evolutionary demand is not obedience but awakening. These transits are not a detour; they are the curriculum.”
In this respect, the fairly recent discovery of Eris, along with Daniel Fiverson’s work to illuminate its astrological significance, come at just the right time, revealing what is already in motion.
~review by: Sara R. Diamond
Author: Daniel Fiverson
Wessex Astrologer, 2025
249 pages, $30.00
