Robert Hand's Horoscope Symbols, published in 1981, asks a question that most as…

Horoscope Symbols — Deep Reading Notes

Name: Horoscope Symbols
Author: Robert Hand

Robert Hand's Horoscope Symbols, published in 1981, asks a question that most astrology books avoid: what do the symbols in a horoscope actually mean, and why should they mean anything at all? Hand walks through every component of the birth chart — planets, signs, houses, aspects — but refuses to treat them as a cookbook of fixed definitions. Instead, he investigates their philosophical foundations, asking what kind of reality astrological symbols participate in, how geometric relationships between celestial bodies could correspond to psychological dynamics, and what it means for a circle divided into twelve to map the structure of human experience. The result is simultaneously one of the best introductions to practical astrology and one of the most rigorous philosophical treatments of the subject. Hand writes with the clarity of a teacher and the intellectual honesty of someone who has spent decades grappling with the question of why astrology works without settling for easy answers.

The Question at Stake

The question that drives Horoscope Symbols is deceptively simple: what are horoscope symbols, and what makes them work? When an astrologer says that the Sun represents the core self, or that Saturn signifies limitation and structure, or that a square aspect produces tension, they are making claims about the relationship between astronomical configurations and human experience. Hand wants to know what grounds those claims. Are planets causes that produce effects in human behavior? Are they signs that correlate with psychological states through some unknown mechanism? Are they symbols whose meaning is constructed by the interpretive tradition, or do they point to something real in the fabric of existence?

These questions matter because the answer you give determines how you practice. If planets cause their effects through physical forces, then astrology is a branch of natural science and should submit to the same methods of verification. If the relationship is acausal — a matter of synchronicity or symbolic correspondence — then the epistemological demands are different, and the kind of knowledge astrology produces is closer to hermeneutics than to physics. If the symbols are merely conventional, then astrology is a language game with no claim on reality. Hand refuses to accept this last option, but he does not retreat into mysticism either. He wants a philosophical account that takes the reality of astrological experience seriously without abandoning intellectual rigor.

What makes this question still urgent, more than four decades after the book's publication, is that it has never been satisfactorily resolved. The astrological community has largely moved forward without settling its philosophical foundations, and the result is a discipline that works remarkably well in practice while remaining theoretically incoherent to outsiders and, often, to its own practitioners. Hand's attempt to address this incoherence head-on is what gives Horoscope Symbols its lasting significance.

The Arc of the Argument

Hand structures the book as a journey from the general to the specific, from philosophical groundwork to practical technique. He begins with the largest question — what is astrology? — and progressively narrows the focus until he is discussing the fine-grained mechanics of individual aspects and house systems. But the philosophical thread never disappears. Even in the most technical sections, Hand keeps returning to the question of meaning: not just what this symbol denotes, but why it denotes it and what kind of reality is implied.

The opening chapters establish the ontological framework. Hand surveys the main philosophical positions available to an astrologer — causation, synchronicity, symbolic correspondence, the holographic model — and argues that none of them is fully adequate on its own, but that something like a synthesis of synchronicity and symbolic participation comes closest to accounting for astrological experience. This philosophical ground-clearing is essential because it determines how you read everything that follows. If you approach the planets as causal agents, you read the subsequent chapters as descriptions of forces acting on you. If you approach them as symbols participating in a meaningful order, you read them as descriptions of the qualities of experience that your life is structured around.

From this foundation, Hand moves through the planets, treating each not as a list of keywords but as an ontological principle — a mode of being that every person must negotiate. He then takes up the signs, showing how the twelve-fold division of the zodiac follows an internal logic rooted in the interplay of elements, modalities, and polarities. The house system receives extended treatment, including a detailed comparison of the major house systems and their philosophical implications. Finally, aspects are presented as geometric divisions of the circle, each with a distinctive dynamic quality that cannot be reduced to the labels "good" and "bad." The arc moves steadily from metaphysics to technique, but the metaphysics never stops informing the technique.

Deep Dive: Core Arguments

The Ontology of Astrological Symbols

The philosophical heart of Horoscope Symbols lies in its sustained engagement with the question of how astrology relates to reality. Hand surveys several explanatory frameworks, testing each against his own experience as a practitioner and against the broader demands of philosophical coherence.

The causal model is the most intuitive but also the most problematic. If planetary positions cause psychological states or events through some physical mechanism — gravity, electromagnetism, an unknown force — then astrology should be testable by the methods of natural science. Hand acknowledges the appeal of this model but ultimately finds it inadequate. The known physical forces exerted by distant planets on individual human beings are negligibly small, and no mechanism has been identified that could selectively amplify these forces into the specific, differentiated effects that astrology describes. More fundamentally, the causal model implies a deterministic universe in which your behavior is mechanically produced by planetary positions, and Hand finds this implication both philosophically unsatisfying and inconsistent with the actual practice of chart interpretation, which always involves multiple possible manifestations of any given configuration.

The synchronicity model, drawn from Jung, proposes that planetary positions and psychological states are connected not by causation but by meaningful coincidence — they are parallel expressions of a single archetypal pattern. Hand finds this more promising, but he notes that Jung himself never fully developed the concept of synchronicity into a rigorous philosophical framework. The term names the phenomenon without explaining it. It tells you that a conjunction of Mars and Saturn and a simultaneous experience of frustrated ambition are connected by meaning, but it does not tell you what kind of reality meaning inhabits or how it links astronomical and psychological events.

Hand gravitates toward a position that might be called symbolic realism. Astrological symbols are not arbitrary labels attached to random celestial configurations. They participate in the realities they represent. The Sun is not merely assigned the meaning of the core self by convention; there is something about the Sun's actual role in the solar system — its centrality, its radiance, its life-giving function — that genuinely corresponds to the psychological function of selfhood. This is not a causal claim. Hand is not saying that the Sun's radiation produces your ego. He is saying that the Sun and the ego occupy analogous positions in their respective domains, and that this analogy is not accidental but reflects something about the structure of reality itself.

This position has deep roots in Western philosophy. It echoes the Neoplatonic doctrine of correspondences, in which different levels of reality — the celestial, the natural, the psychological — mirror each other because they all participate in the same archetypal forms. Hand does not name this tradition explicitly in every passage, but his thinking moves in its current. The practical consequence is that learning to read a horoscope is not learning a code — a set of arbitrary assignments to be memorized — but learning to perceive a pattern of meaning that is woven into the structure of existence.

Hand also discusses the holographic model as a possible framework — the idea, drawn from the physicist David Bohm, that every part of a hologram contains information about the whole. If reality has a holographic structure, then the state of the solar system at the moment of your birth could contain, in encoded form, the pattern of the whole that you are. This is a suggestive analogy rather than a rigorous explanation, and Hand treats it as such. He is not claiming that the universe is literally a hologram. He is noting that modern physics has produced conceptual models in which the whole-in-the-part relationship is no longer metaphysical speculation but a demonstrable property of certain physical systems. Whether this analogy can bear the weight of explaining astrological correspondence is another matter, but its presence in the book signals Hand's willingness to draw on the cutting edge of contemporary thought rather than retreating into purely traditional justifications.

Planets as Modes of Being

Hand's treatment of the planets is where the philosophical framework pays its most immediate dividends. Rather than offering the standard keyword approach — Sun equals will, Moon equals emotions, Mercury equals communication — he asks a deeper question: what mode of being does each planet represent? What function does it serve in the total economy of the psyche?

The Sun, in Hand's reading, represents the principle of individual self-integration. It is not simply your ego or your will. It is the center around which the rest of the personality organizes itself, the gravitational core that holds the diverse functions of the psyche in a coherent whole. When you "express your Sun," you are not performing one trait among many; you are manifesting the unifying principle that makes you recognizably yourself across all the changing circumstances of your life. This is why the Sun sign is both the most popularly known and the most frequently trivialized element of astrology. Pop astrology treats it as a personality type. Hand treats it as an ontological function — the principle of selfhood itself, the way you hold yourself together as a being.

The Moon, by contrast, represents the principle of receptivity and adaptation. Where the Sun radiates outward and organizes, the Moon absorbs, reflects, and responds. It governs not just emotions but the entire domain of habitual, instinctive, pre-reflective response — the way you react before you have time to think, the patterns you absorbed from your earliest environment and now repeat without awareness. Hand notes that the Moon's function is inherently conservative. It preserves what is familiar and resists what is new, not out of stubbornness but because its role is to maintain the continuity of experience. Without the Moon, the psyche would have no memory, no habit, no ground of emotional familiarity. It would be pure solar assertion without the capacity to receive, to be shaped by experience, to feel at home in the world.

Mercury occupies the position of the intermediary. Its function is connection — between ideas, between people, between inner experience and outer expression. Hand treats Mercury not merely as the planet of communication but as the principle of symbolic mediation itself. Language, thought, perception, classification — all of these are Mercurial activities because they all involve the creation of bridges between otherwise separate domains. When Mercury is prominent in a chart, the person's fundamental orientation is one of connecting, translating, and making sense of the world through the act of naming.

Venus represents the principle of evaluation and attraction. It governs not just love and beauty but the entire domain of aesthetic and relational judgment — the capacity to say "this is good, this is desirable, this belongs to me." Hand is careful to distinguish Venus from mere sentimentality. Venus at its most fundamental is the principle of harmony, the recognition of proportion and fitness that operates in art, in relationships, and in the simple act of knowing what you value. Mars, its complement, represents the principle of assertion and separation. Where Venus draws things together, Mars pushes them apart. It is the energy of differentiation, of claiming your own space, of acting on desire rather than merely appreciating it. Hand notes that Mars is often misunderstood as simply aggressive. More accurately, it is the principle of directed energy — the capacity to aim yourself at something and go after it. Whether that manifests as aggression, courage, sexual initiative, or athletic competition depends on context.

Jupiter and Saturn form the social pair. Jupiter represents expansion, the urge to grow beyond present limits, to seek meaning, to understand the larger order of things. Saturn represents contraction, the encounter with limit, the demand for structure, discipline, and accountability. Hand frames these two not as benefic and malefic — the traditional labels — but as complementary functions that every psyche needs. Jupiter without Saturn produces inflation, overextension, and a lack of form. Saturn without Jupiter produces rigidity, depression, and a life drained of meaning. The developmental task is to hold both, to pursue growth within structure and to find structure that serves growth rather than stifling it.

The outer planets — Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto — receive careful attention as transpersonal forces. Hand argues that they represent dimensions of experience that exceed the boundaries of individual consciousness. Uranus is the principle of sudden disruption and liberation — the lightning-bolt quality that shatters established patterns and opens new possibilities. Neptune is the principle of dissolution and transcendence — the capacity to merge with something larger than yourself, whether that manifests as spiritual experience, artistic vision, or confusion and escapism. Pluto is the principle of fundamental transformation — the destruction of what is outgrown and the regeneration that follows. Hand notes that these planets operate less through the individual will and more through forces that seem to come from beyond the ego, which is why their transits are often experienced as fateful or overwhelming.

The Internal Logic of the Signs

One of the most valuable features of Horoscope Symbols is Hand's demonstration that the twelve zodiac signs are not an arbitrary classification but follow an internal logic that can be understood through the systematic combination of a few organizing principles.

The first principle is polarity. The signs alternate between positive (active, extraverted) and negative (receptive, introverted) expression. Aries is positive, Taurus is negative, Gemini is positive, and so on through the zodiac. This alternation establishes a fundamental rhythm of assertion and reception that runs through the entire sign sequence.

The second principle is the threefold modality. Signs are cardinal, fixed, or mutable, and this division describes how energy is deployed. Cardinal signs initiate. They represent the impulse to begin, to start something new, to set a direction. Fixed signs sustain. They represent the capacity to maintain, to persist, to concentrate energy on what has already been established. Mutable signs adapt. They represent flexibility, transition, and the capacity to let go of one phase in preparation for the next. The modalities cycle through the zodiac in sequence — cardinal, fixed, mutable, cardinal, fixed, mutable — creating a repeating pattern of initiation, consolidation, and release.

The third principle is the fourfold elemental scheme. Fire signs (Aries, Leo, Sagittarius) operate through inspiration, enthusiasm, and direct self-expression. Earth signs (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn) operate through the senses, through material engagement, and through the need for tangible results. Air signs (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius) operate through ideas, through social relationship, and through the capacity for abstraction and conceptual thought. Water signs (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces) operate through feeling, through emotional depth, and through the permeable boundary between self and other.

Hand shows that each sign can be understood as a unique combination of polarity, modality, and element. Aries is positive, cardinal, fire — the most direct, initiating form of inspired action. Taurus is negative, fixed, earth — the most receptive, sustaining form of material engagement. Once you grasp this combinatorial logic, the signs stop being twelve separate personality types and start being twelve positions in a single developmental cycle. The zodiac becomes a philosophical mandala in which every possible combination of energy mode, deployment style, and experiential domain is represented. This insight transforms sign interpretation from memorization to understanding.

The Philosophy of Houses

Hand devotes more attention to the house system than perhaps any other astrology book of comparable scope, and for good reason. The houses are the most contested element of the horoscope, and the philosophical questions they raise cut to the heart of what astrology is.

A house system is a method of dividing the sky around the birth location into twelve sectors, each governing a different domain of life. But which method? The sky can be divided in many ways, and each method produces a different set of house cusps and, potentially, different planetary placements. Hand surveys the major house systems — Placidus, Koch, Equal House, Porphyry, Campanus, Regiomontanus, and others — and explains the mathematical and philosophical principles underlying each. He does not argue that one system is definitively correct. Instead, he uses the comparison to raise a more fundamental question: what, exactly, are the houses dividing?

If the houses divide the ecliptic (the apparent path of the Sun), then the sign-based division of the zodiac and the house system overlap in revealing ways, and the Equal House system has a natural elegance. If the houses divide space — the actual three-dimensional sphere of the sky around the birth location — then systems like Campanus and Placidus, which use different methods of spatial division, have stronger claims. Hand is transparent about the fact that this is an unresolved problem. Different house systems work well for different astrologers, and the lack of consensus suggests that the question involves philosophical assumptions about the nature of astrological space that the tradition has not fully articulated.

What Hand does insist on is that the houses are not simply a list of life topics. The first house is not just "self," the seventh house is not just "relationships," the tenth house is not just "career." Each house represents a mode of engagement with reality — a way of being in the world that encompasses but exceeds any particular topic. The first house is the domain of immediate self-encounter, the experience of being an individual presence. The seventh house is the domain of encounter with the other, the experience of being defined through relationship. The tenth house is the domain of public manifestation, the experience of having a role and a reputation in the social world. When you understand houses as modes of experience rather than filing categories, the interpretive possibilities become far richer.

Hand also addresses the question of derived houses — the practice of using one house as the starting point for a secondary twelve-house cycle that describes the affairs of a related person or situation. The seventh house, for instance, can be treated as the "first house" of the partner, making the eighth house (seventh from the second) the partner's resources, and so on. This technique, rooted in traditional astrology, extends the house system into a remarkably flexible interpretive tool, though Hand cautions that it should be used with philosophical awareness of what it assumes about the relationship between individual charts and shared experience.

One of the more quietly revolutionary aspects of Hand's house discussion is his treatment of the angular, succedent, and cadent classification. The four angular houses — the first, fourth, seventh, and tenth — sit at the cardinal points of the chart and represent the most direct, powerful modes of engagement. The succedent houses — the second, fifth, eighth, and eleventh — consolidate and develop what the angular houses initiate. The cadent houses — the third, sixth, ninth, and twelfth — adapt, process, and prepare for the next angular threshold. Hand observes that this threefold rhythm mirrors the cardinal-fixed-mutable rhythm of the signs, which is not coincidental: both reflect the same underlying pattern of initiation, sustaining, and transition. The parallel structure suggests that signs and houses are not two independent systems but two expressions of a single organizing logic operating at different levels of the horoscope. This observation, while easy to pass over quickly, has far-reaching consequences for chart interpretation. It means that the house system is not an overlay added to the zodiac from outside but an organic extension of the same principles that generate the sign sequence.

Aspects as Geometry of Relationship

The final major section of the book takes up aspects — the angular relationships between planets. Here, too, Hand goes beyond the conventional approach, which classifies aspects as "easy" (trines, sextiles) or "hard" (squares, oppositions) and assigns corresponding positive or negative meanings. He argues that this classification obscures what aspects actually are: geometric divisions of the circle, each with a distinctive quality that is better described in terms of dynamic character than in terms of fortune or misfortune.

The conjunction (0 degrees) represents fusion. Two planets in conjunction share the same point in the zodiac and their energies merge, for better or worse. The conjunction is the most intense aspect because there is no distance between the two principles involved — they are experienced as a single compound force. Whether this produces creative synthesis or confusion depends on the nature of the planets involved and the consciousness of the person living with the aspect.

The opposition (180 degrees) represents polarity and awareness. Two planets in opposition occupy opposite points of the zodiac and face each other across the chart. Hand argues that the opposition is fundamentally about the challenge of integrating two principles that seem to pull in opposite directions. The tension is real, but so is the potential for synthesis. The opposition demands that you see both sides, hold both ends of a polarity, and find a way of living that honors each. It is the most relational of the aspects, which is why it often manifests through interpersonal dynamics — you project one end of the opposition onto another person and then struggle to reclaim it.

The square (90 degrees) represents friction and compelled action. Planets at a square angle are in signs that share the same modality but different elements, creating a relationship of inherent tension that demands resolution through effort. Hand observes that squares produce the most visible external events precisely because their tension cannot be ignored or internalized — it pushes you to act, to change, to confront whatever is not working. The square is not "bad." It is demanding. It produces accomplishment through struggle, in contrast to the trine, which produces ease through natural affinity.

The trine (120 degrees) represents harmony and flow. Planets in trine share the same element, and their energies support each other effortlessly. Hand notes that trines are traditionally considered fortunate, but he complicates this by observing that too many trines in a chart can produce complacency. When everything comes easily, there is little impetus to grow. The trine gives you talent and grace, but it does not give you the motivation to develop them. A chart full of squares and a chart full of trines represent different developmental challenges: the first must learn to work with resistance, while the second must learn to generate its own momentum.

The sextile (60 degrees) represents opportunity and communication between compatible elements. It is a gentler, more deliberate form of the trine's harmony — potential rather than automatic flow, a door that must be opened rather than a current that carries you.

Hand also treats the minor aspects — the semi-sextile (30 degrees), the quincunx (150 degrees), the semi-square (45 degrees), the sesquiquadrate (135 degrees), and others — as meaningful divisions of the circle that the tradition has too often neglected. The quincunx, in particular, receives thoughtful treatment. Two planets in quincunx occupy signs with nothing in common — different element, different modality, different polarity — creating a relationship of persistent mutual incomprehension. The quincunx does not produce the direct confrontation of the square or the awareness of the opposition. It produces a more subtle and sometimes more insidious discomfort: two parts of yourself that cannot easily see each other and must be adjusted through conscious effort.

What unifies Hand's treatment of all the aspects is the conviction that geometry carries meaning. The division of a circle into two (opposition), three (trine), four (square), six (sextile), and twelve (semi-sextile) is not arbitrary. Each number has a qualitative character — twoness implies polarity, threeness implies harmony and completion, fourness implies structure and tension — and the aspects derive their meanings from these qualitative properties. This is a philosophical claim with roots in Pythagorean and Platonic thought, and it is one of the most quietly radical ideas in the book. If geometry carries meaning — if the angular relationship between two points in a circle has qualitative significance — then the cosmos is not the meaningless void of mechanistic science but a structured field in which mathematical relationships participate in the order of experience.

Intellectual Coordinates

Horoscope Symbols occupies a distinctive position in the landscape of astrological literature. It is a teaching text that doubles as a philosophical treatise, and this combination is rarer than it should be.

Within astrology, Hand's most important predecessor is Dane Rudhyar, who pioneered the philosophical and humanistic approach to astrology in works like The Astrology of Personality (1936) and The Astrological Houses (1972). Rudhyar argued that astrology should be understood as a symbolic language for the description of whole-person experience, not a predictive technique for forecasting isolated events. Hand inherits this orientation and develops it with greater philosophical precision and a more systematic treatment of the technical components of the chart. Where Rudhyar can be visionary and sometimes opaque, Hand is lucid and methodical.

Philosophically, Hand draws on a tradition that runs from Pythagoras through Plato and the Neoplatonists to the twentieth-century discourse on synchronicity and symbolic thought. He does not engage in extended philosophical argument in the style of Richard Tarnas's later work, but his thinking is informed by a clear awareness of the epistemological questions that astrology raises. The book can be read as a practical companion to the philosophical investigations that Tarnas would later undertake in Cosmos and Psyche (2006) — where Tarnas asks "what kind of universe must we live in for astrology to be possible?" Hand asks "given that astrology does seem to work, what do its symbols tell us about the structure of experience?"

The book has influenced generations of astrologers who sought more than a recipe book. It provided a framework within which subsequent authors — Howard Sasportas, Liz Greene, Steven Forrest — could develop their own approaches to chart interpretation while remaining grounded in a coherent understanding of what the symbols mean and why. Its treatment of houses, in particular, has shaped decades of debate about house systems, and its insistence on treating aspects as qualitative geometric relationships rather than simple good-or-bad labels has become mainstream in contemporary psychological astrology.

From a broader cultural perspective, Horoscope Symbols appeared at a moment when the astrological revival of the 1960s and 1970s had produced enormous popular interest in astrology but relatively little philosophical self-reflection within the astrological community. Sun-sign astrology dominated the popular imagination, and serious practitioners often lacked a vocabulary for explaining to themselves, let alone to outsiders, why their discipline had any claim to validity. Hand's book addressed this gap directly, providing a philosophical vocabulary that did not depend on appeals to ancient authority or mystical experience but engaged the questions on their own intellectual terms. In this sense, the book helped professionalize the discourse of modern astrology, giving practitioners tools for thinking clearly about what they were doing and why.

Implications for Practice

If you take Hand's philosophical framework seriously, your practice changes in several concrete ways. You stop treating the birth chart as a fixed description of character and start treating it as a map of the potentials and tensions that structure your experience. A square between Mars and Saturn is not a sentence of frustrated ambition. It is a description of the dynamic relationship between two principles — assertion and limitation — that you will negotiate throughout your life, with outcomes that depend on your consciousness, your choices, and the context you inhabit.

You also begin to take the house system question seriously as a philosophical problem rather than a mere technical preference. If houses represent modes of experience, then the choice between Placidus and Whole Sign is not just a question of which system "works better" in prediction. It is a question about what you think the houses are dividing and what kind of spatial or experiential reality they map.

When you read aspects, you start attending to the qualitative character of the geometry rather than reaching for the simplistic classifications. A trine does not mean everything is fine. A square does not mean everything is wrong. Each describes a distinctive relational dynamic between planetary principles, and your job as an interpreter is to articulate that dynamic in terms that illuminate the person's actual experience.

Hand's treatment of the signs also has practical consequences. When you understand that Scorpio is negative, fixed, water — the most concentrated, sustaining form of emotional engagement — you no longer need to memorize a list of Scorpio traits. You can derive the sign's character from its structural position in the combinatorial scheme. This transforms your practice from one of recall to one of reasoning. You understand not just what Scorpio is but why it is what it is, and that understanding makes your interpretations more flexible and more accurate when you encounter Scorpio energies manifesting in unexpected ways.

Perhaps most importantly, Hand's approach cultivates what might be called philosophical humility in the face of the chart. You do not know, and cannot know, exactly how a given configuration will manifest. What you can know is the quality of the experience, the nature of the tension or harmony, and the range of possible expressions. This is a significant form of knowledge, but it is not omniscience, and Hand's framework constantly reminds you of the difference.

Gaps and Vulnerabilities

The most significant vulnerability of Horoscope Symbols is the one Hand himself acknowledges: the absence of a fully developed philosophical framework capable of explaining how astrological symbolism works. Hand surveys the available options — causation, synchronicity, symbolic participation — and finds each insufficient, but he does not offer a synthesis that resolves the difficulty. He leaves the question open, which is honest but also means that the book's philosophical foundation remains provisional. A skeptic who demands a coherent mechanism will find the book philosophically suggestive rather than philosophically conclusive.

The treatment of house systems, while more thorough than in most comparable texts, does not resolve the house system debate, and the sheer number of options presented can leave the reader without clear guidance about which system to adopt and why. Hand's evenhanded comparison of the systems is intellectually admirable but practically frustrating for the student who simply wants to know which houses to use.

The book was published in 1981, and some of its philosophical references and scientific analogies reflect the intellectual landscape of that era. The discussion of quantum physics as a potential analogy for astrological correspondence, for instance, was speculative then and has become more contentious since, as physicists have pushed back against the popular use of quantum mechanics to validate non-materialist claims. A contemporary reader should approach these passages with awareness that the science-astrology interface has grown more rather than less complex in the intervening decades.

Finally, Hand's treatment of the outer planets, while thoughtful, necessarily rests on a shorter observational history than the treatment of the traditional planets. Pluto had been known for only fifty years when the book was written, and the meanings assigned to it were still being refined. The confidence with which Hand discusses Pluto's ontological significance should be measured against the fact that a half-century of observation is a thin empirical basis for claims about a planet's fundamental meaning.

Horoscope Symbols