When I was a child there was an old TV commercial in which a nature goddess, adorned with daisies, was fed margarine and then told it was butter. The goddess lets loose a stream of thunder and lightning and shouts “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!!”

The planet formerly known as asteroid Ceres is one aspect of the Mother Nature archetype, and it’s interesting to me that her star has risen (when she was declared a dwarf planet along with Pluto) now when the natural world is being manipulated by humans to an incredible degree. The hubris of this manipulation ignores the fact that nature exists in a delicate ecological balance.

China has the largest weather modification program that exists with public knowledge, with each of its 30 provinces possessing its own weather modification base. I’m not certain how this can take place since weather modification has been prohibited by the United Nations since 1976, but it has long been rumored that the US, Israel and Russia have been carrying on secret weather manipulation experimentation, and after Hurricane Katrina there was much speculation that the increase in hurricanes that year could be a result of that manipulation. Meanwhile, the US Air Force used that event to announce their intention to “own the weather,” ostensibly to be able to predict future weather events but also to use weather as a weapon.

Ancient myths are full of warnings for men who attempt to take on the tasks of the gods, and I can’t help but wonder at the ecological balance that changing the weather may bring. The discovery of new planets has historically engendered a new way of looking at the world, and the reclassification of Ceres with Pluto and the new planet Eris seems significant in its timing. The promotion of Ceres seems especially synchronistic with the renewed focus on the health of the planet over the past year.