Pluto: New Horizons for a Lost Horizon: Astronomy, Astrology, and Mythology

327 Pages·2015·4 MB·English

by  Richard Grossinger

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Cover design by Susan Quasha “Hades” (pp. 27-32) from The Dream and the Underworld by James
Hillman. Copyright © 1979 by James Hillman.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pluto : New Horizons for a lost horizon :
astronomy, astrology, mythology / edited by Richard Grossinger.
pages cm
Summary: “An anthology about Pluto, encompassing astronomy, mythology, psychology, and
astrology with original essays and excerpts of classic required reading about our most famous
dwarf planet”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-58394-897-2 (pbk.)—ISBN 978-1-58394898-9 (ebk.) 1. Pluto (Dwarf planet) 2.
Planets—Exploration. 3. New Horizons (Spacecraft) I. Grossinger, Richard, 1944– editor.
QB701.P63 2014
523.49′22—dc23
2014039181
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
INTRODUCTION Richard Grossinger
1 Pluto on the Borderlands Dana Wilde
2 Pluto and the Kuiper Belt Richard Grossinger
3 New Horizon … for a Lost Horizon Richard C. Hoagland
4 Pluto and the Death of God J. F. Martel
5 Hades James Hillman
6 Excerpts from Pluto Fritz Brunhübner
7 The Pluto/Persephone Myth: Evoking the Archetypes Gary
Rosenthal
8 Old Horizons Thomas Frick
9 The Inquisition of Pluto: A Planetary Meta-Drama in One Act
John D. Shershin
10 Pluto and the Restoration of Soul Stephan David Hewitt
11 Our Lady of Pluto, the Planet of Purification Jim Tibbetts
12 Love Song for Pluto Shelli Jankowski-Smith
13 I Feel Bad about Pluto Lisa Rappoport
14 Pluto Robert Kelly
15 Pluto Maggie Dietz
16 Falling in Love with a Plutonian Dinesh Raghavendra
17 Dostoevsky’s Pluto Steve Luttrell
18 Ten Things I’d Like to Find on Pluto Philip Wohlstetter
19 Plutonic Horizons, or My Sixty-Nine-Year Search for Planet X
Philip Wohlstetter
20 Ten Things I’d Like to Find on Pluto Jonathan Lethem
21 Ten Things I’d Like to Find on Pluto Robert Sardello
22 Ten Things I’d Like to Find on Pluto Ross Hamilton
23 What the Probe Will Find, What I’d Like It to Find Jeffrey A.
Hoffman
24 Ten Things I’d Like to Find on Pluto College of the Atlantic
Students
25 Ten Things I’d Like to Find on Pluto Nathan Schwartz-Salant
26 The Ten Worlds of Pluto Charley B. Murphy
27 Ten Things I’d Like to Find on Pluto Timothy Morton
28 The End of the World Timothy Morton
29 My Father Pluto Robert Phoenix
30 Pluto is the Reason We Have a Chance Ellias Lonsdale
31 Pluto: Planet of Wealth Rob Brezsny
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Introduction
R G
ICHARD ROSSINGER
This anthology puts Pluto into scientific, cultural, and psychospiritual
context in conjunction with NASA’s New Horizons mission, the
centerpiece of which is the transit of an Earth-originating satellite with
the dwarf planet and its moons on July 14–15, 2015. The dedicated
capsule of instruments was launched atop an Atlas V rocket at 14:00 EST
on January 19, 2006, from Pad 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Center in
Florida after an eight-day delay, initially to allow last-minute testing of
the rocket’s kerosene tank, then to avoid high winds and low cloud
ceilings downrange.
It is compelling to picture local weather on Earth affecting the
delivery of a package at cloud-less, wind-less Pluto more than nine years
later.
A half hour after lift-off, the rocket’s Centaur second stage reignited
the probe and sent it into a solar-escape speed and trajectory. New
Horizons crashed lunar orbit in a mere nine hours and was out of the
Moon’s gravitational field before midnight.
As the scientific package zips 6,200 miles above a bleak Plutonian
landscape—the Sun a bright star in perpetual night—Pluto becomes the
last and farthest-flung member of the original nine-body Solar System to
be imaged close-up through a transiting Homo-sapiens lens.
But the book (or digital display) that you hold in your hand is not just
a program guide for an engineering feat; it is the pursuit of a mytheme,
an irreducible kernel with at least three manifestations: a god, an
astrological organizing principle, and a planet. Pluto’s mythology,
astronomy, astrology, science fiction, and politics form a series of
semiotic networks that have to do less with imaging a far-off frigid rock
and more with staring into a mirror of our own cosmology in crisis.
Unmanned human assignation with a planet, though a mere mite
floats above an orb hundreds of thousands of times its mass and size, is
never innocent and without metaphysical consequences. Hours after
Voyager’s close encounter with Uranus’s moon Miranda (January 28,
1986), the space shuttle Challenger exploded, driving NASA temporarily
out of the heavens. Likewise when NASA put Galileo, a plutonium-238-
driven satellite, on a 108,000-miles-per-hour suicidal plunge into
Jupiter’s atmosphere (September 21, 2003), the collision sent a black
nuclear cloud hurtling down through the planet’s cloud layers and
changed everything about astrological Jupiter on Earth.
Borderline planet, gadfly, and changeling object, Pluto is Earth’s
Planet X, a vortex of seeds from beyond space and time, a quixotic 1930s
dark body bundling inconclusive physical and paraphysical equations, a
mischievous intruder in the zodiac who redefines every chart by the fact
that his passage along its threshold evokes the imperceptible shock wave
of the system itself.
Pluto also crosses the destiny of the human enterprise at the moment
that its own crisis transits with Pluto—a synchronicity inside the zodiac,
which is Synchronicity Central anyway. Why that played out in
interbellum 1930 with precisely that elusive trans-Neptunian pellet, and
again at hailing distance in 2015, is a cosmic mudra of an unknown
sphinx. But NASA could no more not go after this meme in its last gasp
at completing a solar circuit than it could avoid putting a man on the
Moon or send robots scuttling across equally inscrutable Martian deserts
in their time.
While perhaps little more than an escaped moon or common plutino
exoterically, esoterically Pluto is an alchemical vas hermeticum, a vessel
that, without revealing its nature, translates everything that comes into
contact with it into its own icons and symbologies. Plutonian artifacts
have a Möbius Strip quality (like a barber’s pole of energy) such that
their meanings oscillate, in a continuous way, from inside their vessel
onto its surface. At Pluto, opposite qualities like joy and despair, utopia
and apocalypse, grace and brutality—inside and outside—fuse or
exchange properties, as they become momentarily indistinguishable.
Much too far away to care, Pluto has bigger fish to fry.
I am reminded of words that transpersonal intelligence Seth invested
in our plane via his medium Jane Roberts:
“[T]his dimension [e.g., source realm] nurses your own world,
reaching down into your system. These realities are still only those at the
edge of the one in which you have your present existence. Far beyond
are others, so alien to you that I could not explain them. Yet they are
connected with your own life, and they find expression even within the
smallest cells of your flesh.”1
That’s Pluto in spades, a deeplying chimera across which Plutonian
sigils project a reality too alien for Earthlings to glean, transmit it right
down into their DNA as into the quantum states of their planet’s atoms,
every particle of dust, grain of sand, and morsel of soil and stone. Even
the ordinary Plutonian glob, more than 98 percent nitrogen ice,
reinvents itself beyond disclosure of its actual identity or reference point.
Science simply doesn’t reach that deep into a higher-dimensional
universe; it doesn’t look far enough into the heavens to see Pluto as
more than a pip of old Sol-orbiting rock (though of ambiguous enough
caliber to be worth quibbling over). Of course, that’s what it is in this
dimension or at this astrophysical vibration, but who knows how many
dimensions the starry field reflects as it twinkles from an
incomprehensibly vaster sky.
For these reasons I have re-scripted NASA’s secular Pluto (with its
photo op) to go after a more cryptic and numinous object: Body X, bad
boy of the Solar System, fluctuating signifier, meta-planetary dweller
between planes.
Again Seth, this time Seth II, a higher octave, speaks:
“We do not understand the nature of the reality you are creating, even
though the seeds were given to you by us. We respect it and revere it. Do
not let the weak sounds of this voice confuse you. The strength behind it
would form the world as you know it and sustain it for centuries.”2
Do not be confused by Pluto’s minute size, remote location, pallid
signal, and demotion to a dwarf. Honor the mystery instead. It is
creating our reality, even this nanosecond.
Meta-Pluto stands for our cardinal node and cosmic key. By its dual
existence it expresses our split emanation: self and cosmos. In a realm
beyond our understanding, it is generating the zodiac, the starry
heavens, and the terms for this world. It is pulling souls into the current
universe.
This anthology provides the rubric and premise of that proposition.
I had been tracking the New Horizons saga since the mission was
announced in 2001, at the time replacing the earlier Pluto Fast Flyby as
well as its more sophisticated successor, the Pluto Kuiper Express, neither
of which was ever built or launched. Both of them would have reached
Pluto by now, or well before the planet had traveled so far toward
aphelion (its farthest point from the Sun) that its gauze-thin atmosphere
froze out, i.e., crystallized and dropped to the ground in colorless snow.
That process, creeping along an icy, electrostatic lattice day by day, will
have wiped any remaining film from the crisp, starry Plutonian night by
2020. (The Earth’s atmosphere freezing out, by the way, would mean
millennial blizzards depositing miles-high glaciers and icebergs on an
airless terrain, then a gigantic white star exploding out of a black sky
across a blinding snowpack of dunes covering mountains, valleys, seas,
and plains.)
Each mission (Flyby and Express) was canceled, in turn, for lack of
funding, to be replaced by a more efficient concept. Finally, after an
intense political battle, NASA got a Pluto line-item approved; hired
subcontractors to fashion, program, and forge a metal bird for
deployment; and fired the robot into space on a flight plan delivering it
pretty much nonstop to where Pluto, traveling in its own eccentric orbit,
would cross its path 3,464 days later give or take a fortnight.
NASA’s unmanned interplanetary space program took shape in the
early sixties with Mariner’s missions to Mars and Venus. During the
heyday of Solar System reconnaissance (from roughly 1979 through a
smidgen into the aughts), probes visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus,
Neptune, and their moons, plus the asteroid Vesta (2011) and various
other asteroids and comets. They and hardware from several space
agencies—those of the Soviet Union, China, the European Union, Japan,
and India—flew by, orbited, and imaged the Moon, and the two planets
closer to the Sun than Earth, Mercury and Venus, usually as part of the
same mission by using a slingshot effect from Venus to get to Mercury.
The United States’s Pioneer 10 passed within eighty-one thousand
miles of Jupiter in 1973, inaugurating a series of ever closer encounters
with the region’s largest planet—Jupiter is an ideal slingshot for
accelerating probes to worlds beyond it too. Pioneer 11 conducted the
first flyby of Saturn in 1979, and two Voyager probes soon followed it
there. The second, Voyager 2, was slung into a pre-programmed
trajectory by Saturn’s gravitational field so that it intercepted Uranus in
1986 and, after being redirected by Uranian gravity, met Neptune on its
ellipse in 1989.
Soon after Mariner 4 reached Mars, the United States and Soviet Union
began parachuting satellites onto Venus (1966). In 1995 the United
States sent a probe from the Galileo orbiter onto Jupiter where it
collected fifty-eight minutes worth of data on exospheric and
thermospheric composition, temperature, radiation, band instabilities,
and weather while traveling at about thirty miles per second. Before it
could sink any further, it succumbed to local ambient pressure exceeding
twenty-three Earth atmospheres as well as a meteor-like 307 degrees
Fahrenheit.
En route to Jupiter, Galileo became the first artificial human object to
visit an asteroid (Gaspra) and then the first to detect an asteroidal moon
(Dactyl circling Ida).
Ten years later NASA programmed the Huygens vehicle to separate
from its Cassini spacecraft and land in the Xanadu region of Saturn’s
moon Titan. It settled on a high-albedo elevated plain that had multiple
channels running through it.
In November 2014, the European Space Agency separated the Philae
probe from its Rosetta spacecraft and bounced it onto the surface of
Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the first human touchdown on a
bolide. Launched in March 2004 from French Guiana, Philae preceded
New Horizons into space by more than a year.
And, of course, humans traveled to and walked on the Moon multiple
times during the U.S. Apollo program, the first such manned touchdown
in 1969.
Only Pluto was missing. It was too out-of-the-way, negligible, and
asteroid-like to merit a detour by Voyager 2 after “Grand Tour” stops at
Uranus and Neptune and their moons. On its way to the Kuiper Belt and
beyond, Voyager didn’t even consider Pluto—its Earthbound
programmers didn’t. Their more exigent priorities were to measure the
dwindling influence of the Sun to heliopause, to taste the interstellar
medium, and to carry a plaque into Deep Space bearing humankind’s
message to the universe.
Plus the puny ninth planet wasn’t deemed worth the cost of sending a
tailor-made payload otherwise.
However, after another decade of scientific advancement, a surprising
recognition took hold: the one missing orb was accessible by new,
relatively inexpensive technology. Blueprints for Pluto flybys graduated