News

Last week I found myself feeling unhinged. I was discombobulated, not myself, cast adrift, lost in a wilderness, feeling around in the dark -- pick your metaphor, something was amiss. I just couldn't put my finger on what. I opened the paper one morning and there it was, in black and white: The International Astronomical Union had voted the day before to demote Pluto from official planet status.

This is how the solar system was reconfigured: A bunch of suited-up scientists sat in a convention hall in Prague and passed a motion to reduce our solar system from nine planets to eight. Just like that. Pluto was too small, they agreed, to qualify as a major celestial body and had thereby been turfed down a level to "dwarf planet," along with a handful of other lesser known wee, icy bodies including Xena, Ceres and Charon.

I read the story with more than casual interest, for I myself, am a Plutonian. Which is not to say I hail from Pluto, but that Pluto is the dominant planet linked to my Zodiac sign, Scorpio.

For people born between Oct. 23 and Nov. 21, the news that Pluto is effectively off the chart is disturbing to say the least. What does this mean for my love life? My career? My finances?

I'm at a major crossroads here. My moon in is in the house of . . . nothing. Doesn't anybody care?

Lucky for me, an international army of astrologers do, and they've been in a tizzy since the news about Pluto.

All over the globe this week, charts were redrawn to reflect the change. Unlike astronomers, astrologers seem to have no problem contradicting each other, so there was no need for a convention.

Last weekend in the Miami Herald, Madalyn Tillis-Dineen, president of the dubiously-named Massachusetts-based National Council for Geocosmic Research reassured us, "You could argue that [Pluto's] demotion would cause a problem for people whose charts prominently feature Pluto, but I don't see those people suddenly losing their jobs or falling on hard times."

She went on to cite Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush as three examples of rock-solid now-planet-orphaned Scorps.

But I wasn't about to relax. Just the day before, Milton Black, an Australian astrologer who claims to have an astounding 580,000 clients, warned in the Wall Street Journal, "Scorpios can be extremely explosive and very direct, and this could be the trigger that makes them explode."

I was feeling explosive all right. Here I was -- a dark, brooding, creative, overly-romantic, prone-to-paranoia, mysterious, passionate, loyal, secretive, hot-stinging Scorpio -- with no planet to anchor my angst.

I called up my friend Tova, a long-time astrological dabbler, who gets three-month check-ups from a personal astrologer. She also happens to be pregnant and due for an appointment C-section on Halloween. The birth date of her first-born child was chosen for both health and astrological reasons. (Yes, her doctor thinks she's crazy.)

When I got her on the phone, Tova (whose brain is currently flooded with calming pregnancy hormones) seemed distinctly unfreaked about pressing the issue of Pluto.

"Did you know your baby is going to be born a planet orphan?" I asked her. "What are you going to do?"

She just laughed. "Poor kid. At least it'll be born in the year of the dog. And I always back everything up with numerology and palms anyway."

As far as I could glean on-line and in the papers, most of the of the major astrologers have decided to ignore the International Astronomical Union's decision and keep Pluto in the mix. As Tillis-Dineen told the Herald, "It's all about the placement of the planet in your chart. And we've worked with Pluto long enough that we know how it behaves."

Unfortunately, the way it behaves is not very interesting at all. Pluto, we now know, is just a distant spinning hunk of ice.

It's not fair. How come my Virgo friends get Venus? It's big and twinkly and gaseous. Or Aries. Aries gets Mars. There's water on Mars. Some day people might build a subdivision there. No one is ever going to build a ranch house on Pluto. I am so jealous -- which, by the way, is a Scorpio trait.

Tova's astrologer, Krishna Chawla, told me to forget about Pluto. "In Hindu astrology its influence is not considered important," he said. "In fact there's no Hindi word for Pluto. It's considered too far away."

My new ruling planet, he said, would be Mars. "Mars is the planet of passion and spark, active sex life, wild woman, bedroom eyes, whatever you call it, the same thing. Scorpios were considered secretive to start with. With Pluto gone, they will be considered more openly romantic, less secretly romantic."

This sounded okay. But being a possessive Scorpio, I wasn't keen on sharing an orb with Aries. Icy hunk or not, I want my own planet back. And it turns out, I'm not alone.

A backlash is afoot among dissident astronomers who note that only four per cent of the International Astronomical Union's members were there to vote on Pluto. There are bumper stickers for sale that say, "Honk if Pluto is still a planet."

I'm honking. I'm honking.

lmclaren@globeandmail.com