Anima: The Search for Libra’s True Ruler
How a distant trans-Neptunian object may mirror the soul’s call to attunement
The Light at the Edge
In May 2025, astronomers announced a new object stirring at the far edge of the solar system. The trans-Neptunian object 2017 OF201 moves in an immense, elongated orbit that takes over twenty thousand earth years to circle the Sun. But what truly unsettles is its brightness. For a world so distant, it shines far more than would be expected, brighter than any object of its kind without a known size. No one yet knows why. It reflects more light than it should, as if insisting on being seen.
Could this luminous object be the long-missing outer ruler of Libra, finally arriving to complete the transpersonal rulership system that began with Uranus?
For centuries, astrology was forced to widen alongside astronomical vision. The discovery of Uranus in 1781 shattered the classical model. Neptune followed in 1846, then, in 1930, tiny but potent Pluto emerged in the firmament. With each new planet came a shift in rulership: Mars yielded Scorpio to Pluto, Saturn gave Aquarius to Uranus, and Jupiter’s hold on Pisces passed to Neptune.
A clear pattern emerges: the transpersonal signs have been re-assigned to the transpersonal slow-moving planets.
Yet, Libra remains the only transpersonal sign still ruled by a personal planet.
The Venus and Libra Problem
Astrological tradition tells us that Venus rules both Taurus and Libra.
At essence Venus is the planet of values.
It defines worth. It tells us what to cherish or reject—in people, experience or aesthetics. Without it we would have no way of orienting and striving as all would be equal and therefore void.
At home in Taurus, Venus manifests or identifies worth in stability, sufficiency, and the cultivation of abundance. These are practical values, not only geared toward long-term survival, but toward the substantiation of one’s character through skill, beauty, and wealth. Here value emerges gradually.
Venus is also said to govern how we relate to others in the pursuit of harmony. The association with Libra has long rested on its ties to aesthetics and relational balance. If Venus is in Libra you can expect someone who emphasizes values governed by objective principles of fair proportion.
Some may argue Venus governs both because value and harmony are somehow inseparable—but this conflates attunement with preference.
Libra, as an Air sign, operates by attuning to the patterns that seem to exist beyond the self. Symmetry and relatedness are not preferences but fundamental structures of reality. The conscious mind exist in relation to the universe—yin to yang—I in relation to you. This relatedness is not something born from mined worth, but from being an individual dependent on outside existence.
Harmony, in this sense, is a relational field aligned with the universe’s perennial ordering, whose presence is often made salient trough golden ratios and harmonics. There is no escaping from the universal component of beauty made correct through proportionality. Partnership, then, as Libra often mundanely point to, is a symmetrical ordering present in all conscious beings. Consciousness exists through impregnation in the meeting of opposites, not from from values which decide whether or not to see there is something outside of itself.
Libra’s energy is fundamentally distinct from that of Venus or Taurus. The only rationale for bundling them together lies in a conflation—mistaking partnership preference for the mode of attunement.
This becomes even clearer when we consider Libra’s opposition to Aries. If the 1st House is where we encounter and assert the self, then the 7th House is not merely the house of “partnership”—it is the domain of the Other, where we come face to face with what is not-us. We are magnetically drawn to the qualities associated with the sign on the 7th House cusp, as they seem to hold a complement we lack. Similarly, where Libra is placed in your chart is where you compromise parts of yourself as to maintain harmony with the world around you.
In this sense, Libra aligns closely with the Jungian concept of the Anima: the inner soul-image of the other that calls us toward wholeness. The Other completes us by being distinct from us. We complete the Other by being distinct from it.
The Arrival of Anima in Taurus
2017 OF201—the distant, luminous object—could have entered Taurus sometime around the 1300s or 1400s, though its ingress is still unclear. As of today (June 2025), as seen from Earth, Anima is located at Taurus 8°11′25″, and moves approximately 1° every 70–90 years. More data is still needed to confirm its orbit.
I will call this potential dwarf planet Anima.
If we imagine that Anima formerly resided in Aries prior to the 1300s, then its symbolic journey reflects a transformation in how humanity attunes to the world—from attunement through egoistic assertion (Aries) to attunement through substantiating worth (Taurus).
It is perhaps no coincidence that the Taurus ingress period marked the rise of capitalistic systems, the emergence of global trade networks, and the dawn of the early Renaissance. In the West, this was the era when feudalism collapsed and peasants began demanding wages for their labour. Italian city-states became mercantile hubs, property ownership emerged as a new symbol of power, and banking systems spread across Europe. The invention of double-entry bookkeeping in the 1300s made abstract value both trackable and portable.
The battlefield of Aries was gradually replaced by the marketplace of value. Humanity shifted from attunement through dominance and willpower to the ability to provide, exchange, and participate in mutual gain. The most resonant beings are those who provide—through talents, resources, or capital injection.
With enough of the right kind of “worth,” you can practically become anyone’s friend.
Much of how we relate to the collective appears to echo this transformation. Egalitarian democracy, along with workers’ and human rights, arose from a shared need for systems that recognize inherent worth—perhaps as a necessary counterbalance to capitalism, which tends to acknowledge only specific, measurable forms of value. Yet even these egalitarian ideals merely assert human worth; they do not verify it. And so, commercialism is likely to remain the dominant framework because it continues to offer, however imperfectly, a tangible method for proving one’s value.
Today, it is through the goods we offer, and the resonance of our skills, that we attune to that which is not-us. This attunement, however, as many critics of capitalism have noted, can become hollow or soul-draining when stripped of meaning beyond material equivalence.
With the Taurus ingress, the ancient structures of patriarchal kinship gave way to ideals of equal partnership, yet even these are often filtered through the lens of transactional worth. We unconsciously attune to others by offering our value in various currencies—the man offers his wallet, the woman her sexuality, or the relationship teeters on the equal division of domestic labour. We do not arrive empty-handed to the party; we bring a gift, a talent, a pleasing personality. And if we fail to do so, we quickly lose our capacity to perceive the the world objectively, as our subjective lack of worth is resentfully projected onto the Other.
Religion and spirituality, once sources of profound inner orientation, have declined since this Taurus ingress, and are now often reduced to tools of social cohesion or control (and ever more so exposed as such). The need for emotional depth and transformative meaning—Scorpio’s domain—is eclipsed as a mode of attunement. This is the Anima in Taurus’ shadow: too literal, too practical, too slow-moving. Resonance can only be proven through consistency, utility, and long-term returns.
We see this shadow vividly reflected in the landscape of social media. Worth is increasingly measured in quantifiable terms: likes, follows, views. In this regime, the easiest way to be “understood” is to be affirmed by numbers. Taurus’ earthy and sensual qualities seem to have overtaken the collective psyche, where physical beauty and visual allure have become a dominant currency of harmony. The body becomes a billboard, desirability a metric. Assign anything a number, and we become entranced—the easy way attuning with The Other.
Our capacity to truly relate to the Other appears increasingly impaired, as abstracted and recursive quantifications become a distorted reflection of our worth—and by extension, our ability to connect. With Neptune’s ingress into Aries, AI is rapidly moving in to fill that relational void, offering an algorithmic dream hyper-tailored to individual identity. Naturally, AI will attach itself to Anima’s archetypal influence—becoming, for some, a sycophant that flatters and echoes, and for others, an unprecedented tool to help manifest meaningful offerings.
The Anima, ever in motion, will likely shift into Gemini in less than two millennia. If my speculations are correct, capitalistic frameworks are unlikely to vanish before then. Rather, they will continue to evolve—so long as our way of adjusting ourselves to the Other remains rooted in our capacity to offer worth.
A New Rulership Paradigm
As astrologers, our task is not only to echo the tradition, but to realign with newly emerging evidence and symbolic insight. Although it is still too early to confirm whether 2017 OF201 holds genuine astrological significance, it remains symbolically viable to speculate.
The object’s luminosity is particularly intriguing—possibly the result of a highly reflective, icy surface. Fittingly, if this body were to govern Libra, one might expect it to possess an exceptional capacity to reflect, even across vast cosmic distances.
This essay is part of a broader inquiry into planetary rulership and their metaphysical integrity.
In a forthcoming article, I explore the proposition that Earth—not Mercury—may be the rightful ruler of Virgo, whose essence lies in conscious discernment and humble service to the Sun (Leo).
If there is interest, I also have extensive material exploring how Anima may already be impacting us through the lens of the Rave I’Ching degree system (Human Design), offering further nuance to its symbolic role.