Asteroid Bennu: What’s Not Seen, Yet Present?
By Kim Fairminer
Asteroid Bennu: What’s Not Seen, Yet Present?
A Strange Coincidence (or Is It?)
The material analysed was from the asteroid, Bennu. Asteroid number 101955 had just passed both Saturn and Neptune and was now at 5° Aries as the two outer planets met in the first degree of the zodiac. It was as if we earthlings had finally awoken to some kind of important connection. The messenger itself was already flying on its way again and we were left holding something strange and profound — the ingredients for life.
Meet Asteroid Bennu
Bennu was found by a team of scientists working from a missile testing range in New Mexico on 11 September 1999, as part of the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) Project, which was a large automated sky survey to identify space objects which might collide with Earth.
Although the scientists weren’t paying attention to the astrology, the asteroid, which would later be named Bennu by a third-grade student as part of a competition, was at 1° Aries 46′ in a snug applying sextile to Neptune in the earliest degrees of Aquarius.
Bennu’s sextile to Neptune in Aquarius suggests both idealistic hope for a better world and the potential distortion or dissolution of those hopes. Neptune is tricky like that; you often can’t really tell what is happening until it has happened.
Bennu is a self-generated deity, reflected in the Aries placement. In the myth, Bennu declares order on Neptunian chaos, a theme echoed in this aspect’s suggestion that individual action is needed to organise the visionary ideal. Neptune in airy Aquarius favours collective interests over personal ones, yet Bennu’s position in the self-centred sign of Aries suggests that individuals thrive within open social systems rather than being subsumed by them.
The Moon is in Libra and has just become visible in the waxing New Moon phase. Again, social interests are highlighted by the Moon in an air sign with a focus on pursuing peace, partnerships, and justice. The newness of the Moon echoes the placement of Bennu at the beginning of the zodiac, as well as the asteroid’s mythical associations and the frontier nature of astronomical research.
The Moon’s next aspect is the trine to Uranus, bringing the focus back to progressive Aquarius. Aquarius is ruled by Saturn and has a strong affinity with Uranus; these planets are in a fixed square in the discovery chart, bringing together the old and the new, the enduring and the spontaneous.
Asteroid research relies on precise science and committed teams working together with a shared visionary goal to uncover the mysteries of the solar system and protect Earth from impacts. The steady, methodical trine between the Sun/Mercury and Saturn in Earth signs describes their dedication and meticulousness, bringing order to our space maps and tracking of the solar system.
That sense of purpose to thwart the threat of planetary cataclysm is seen in the chart through the Mars/Pluto conjunction quincunx Jupiter. This aspect also speaks to the drive to blast rockets beyond Earth, perhaps foreshadowing the later mission to collect a sample of the asteroid itself. Bennu is one of the closest asteroids to Earth with the greatest (though still remote) potential to collide with Earth.
The loose and separating fixed T-square between Uranus, retrograde Saturn, and Venus (stationing direct) suggests a reduction of this collision risk. While we don’t have an exact time, this chart emphasises working steadily and cooperatively towards a shared ideal for the betterment of all – with a spicy exploratory kick.
The Bird That Started Everything
In the creation stories of ancient Egypt, Bennu was no ordinary bird. Although associated with several species across the dynasties, Bennu was a large heron by the time of the New Kingdom. Bennu flew over Nun, the primordial waters of chaos (Neptune) and landed on a rock or in a willow tree. From here, Bennu called out, establishing order and marking the beginning of creation.
Bennu is closely linked to the Sun god, Ra (also Re), as described in spell 29B of the Book of the Dead:
"I am the benu, the soul of Ra, who guides gods to the Netherworld when they go forth. The souls on earth will do what they desire, and the soul of [the deceased] will go forth at his desire."
(translated by Taylor, 20210)
Another epithet bestowed on Bennu is “He Who Came Into Being by Himself”, which is perfect for an asteroid discovered at the very beginning of the zodiac. Bennu is also described as “Lord of Jubilees” which refers to his ability to renew himself, like the daily rising of the Sun revered in ancient Egypt.
Aries is the Sun’s sign of exaltation. The conjunction of Mercury and the Sun in the discovery chart also resonates with the power of words to bring about order (so Virgo) described in Chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead:
I am that great benu-heron which is in Iunu
I am the one who assigns what exists
What does it mean?
As for the benu-heron, it is Osiris who is in Iunu
As for what exists, it is his corpse
Another version:
It is time and eternity
As for time, it is day
As for eternity, it is night(Allen Part a, Section 5, translated by Allen, 1974, accessed online at UCL Digital Egypt)
Iunu is the ancient Egyptian name for Heliopolis, the city of the Sun, where Bennu’s temples were located. It was here that priests conducted daily dawn rituals to honour the Sun’s rebirth and maintain the continuity of creation.
Bennu isn’t just a witness of creation, not a simple firing of a “starter’s gun” for events to unfold. Bennu assigns what is created — time, eternity, day, night. Without Bennu’s voice, there is only continued chaos. Bennu called everything into being.
It seems fitting that the material collected from this asteroid bearing the name of this revered deity may bring about a new understanding of the origins of life on Earth.
Birds as Divine Messengers
As part of OSIRIS-REx, the scientists closely studied the surface features of the asteroid, naming them all after birds and bird-like creatures from mythology.
While mythical Bennu was associated with the heron in the New Kingdom and also the namesake of a large but extinct heron species, research into Old Kingdom texts links Bennu to a variety of other birds including the yellow wagtail, kingfisher, and goose.
Birds have long been seen as messengers and symbols of prophecy in various cultures and mythologies. Their ability to fly high and see far into the distance has led humans to associate them with foresight, divine insight, and, also one imagines, hindsight. As creatures of Air, they can move in all directions through space and perhaps also through time, serving as intermediaries between humans and the gods or planets.
Birds speak to us of our own potential for change and transformation through spiritual connection. Currently, our symbolic experience of time is shifting from the era of Earth to the era of Air. We loosen our grip on physical commodities and separate ourselves from the grounding realities of soil, the land, and our bodies. We turn curiously to the exchange of data, invest in the economy of attention, and extend our realm outward through space travel and inward through mind control.
Things are changing – fast. During times of rapid change, we look at our environment for patterns, signs, and indications of what is to come. We look to the sky for omens. We look to astrology. Just as birds were ancient intermediaries between humanity and the heavens, scientists believe asteroids could be the intermediaries for life on Earth. What kind of intermediary role could asteroids fulfil in astrology?
Why Bennu?
The Osiris-REx probe to retrieve a sample from Bennu launched just a few days before the solar return of the discovery chart. Mercury and Mars returns had also recently occurred, so the ‘natal promise’ of the discovery chart was active. Bennu is conjunct the IC, symbolic of the mission’s goal of bringing the asteroid down from the sky to the Earth. The Moon is activating a T-square configuration, drawing on the dedication and commitment of Saturn in adventurous Sagittarius, which is square to Neptune in Pisces, relying on the meticulous calculations and preparation of Sun in Virgo, and getting fiery lift off with Mars. The Moon’s separating sextile to ascendant-ruling Venus suggests everything has been done right.
The return of the capsule occurred close to the solar return of the discovery chart. While spring is a favoured season for launches due to favourable weather conditions, landings are decided by mission requirements, so this timing is significant, not just seasonal. The chart has been set for 08:52 MDT Ogden Utah, which is close to Hill Air Force Base where the UTTR is located.
Fittingly, Bennu is conjunct the Cancer midheaven, opposite Moon-Pluto. The meaningful placement of relevant asteroid names is a regular source of delight for astrologers — although I do wonder what to make of these remarkable astrological winks from the Universe beyond the immediate and obvious synchronicity. Bennu above and the Moon, our protector, below in an Earth sign, conjunct Pluto, seems to give weight and gravitas to the return of the asteroid sample.
Mars is prominent on the Libra Ascendant, directly opposite the retrograde Mars in the sample collection chart. Venus is again the ascendant-ruler and has returned to her discovery chart position.
***
To me, these three mission milestone charts repeated point to Venus, which is in her guise as the bright morning star, stationing direct in the discovery chart – in the Sun’s sign, Leo. This is supported by the depiction of Venus in ancient Egyptian astronomy. Deb Houlding’s research into Egyptian planetary imagery explicitly links Bennu, not only the Sun, but also Venus, noting that Venus was known as ‘the star that crosses’ [the sky as morning and evening star] and “was originally depicted with the head of a heron-type bird, later as a two headed falcon”.
Other Asteroid Sampling Missions
Bennu is the third asteroid to have samples taken and returned to Earth for study. All three asteroids were discovered by the LINEAR projects at the same missile testing site in New Mexico, USA.
The first mission to attain a sample of an asteroid was undertaken by the Japanese space probe, Hayabusa (Japanese for falcon), to asteroid 25143 Itokawa (named after a rocket engineer). Ryugu 162173 was the second asteroid to be sampled, again by a Japanese team who named the probe Hayabusa2.
The Hayabusa2 and the OSIRIS-REx missions were active at the same time. Research published in August 2025 — when Saturn and Neptune were less than a degree apart at 1 Aries — revealed that Ryugu and Bennu were sibling asteroids, originating from the same parent body.
The name Ryugu is the mythical undersea palace of the Japanese Dragon God. Nun is the primordial watery abyss over which Bennu flew. Both asteroid names have links to water. Analysis of the Bennu sample detected the presence of water.
What Are We Actually Doing?
Or, more honestly, what am I doing? My astro-magical approach is grounded in traditional practice and tends to be oriented towards specific practical outcomes, and here I am poking about in asteroids and space missions. I have an aversion to space exploration (and, also palaeontology) for a variety of reasons.
Yet, as is true for many astrologers, strange news stories often pique my attention. The Bennu research filtering out to mainstream publications and into my digital feeds at the same time as the much-anticipated Saturn-Neptune conjunction was noteworthy. I had also recently read and reviewed Anne-Marie Chabellard's thoroughly researched book, In the Name of Love: The Asteroid Psyche, so perhaps the surveillance bots were listening.
I wondered about Bennu from astrological perspective and was excited to see that it was close to the major conjunction. And then, with the vaguest whiff of this article in the air, I casually checked my own chart. Bennu was conjunct my Ascendant ruler, which felt simultaneously like a green light and a dare to ignore it — it’s in Aries in my chart too.
Unseen Chaos Haunts Us
In 1980, The Planetary Society was founded with ‘decrease the risk of Earth being hit by an asteroid’ as one of its three purposes.
Asteroid sampling has brought us full circle. What began as a desire to find, and hopefully divert, a near-Earth object (NEO) from colliding into earth (i.e. destruction and death) has led to the discoveries about the origins of life — the two crowns of Bennu. The Atef crown pointing to Osiris in the Underworld; the solar disk pointing to Sun god, Ra. Even the abbreviation NEO reminds us of the prefix neo- which is from the Greek word for ‘new’ or ‘fresh’ - renewal.
The missions to collect samples from Bennu (and Ryugu) were prompted by fears that something unseen will lead to our doom, but also by the quest to discover the origins of our existence.
Neptunian Overwhelm
From 1990 to 2026, over 40 thousand near-Earth asteroids have been discovered. This includes 90% of asteroids over 1 km in size, which are the ones most likely to cause devastation on a global scale. Researchers are now cataloguing NEAs larger than 140 metres. (NEA specifically refers to asteroids, which following the gender conventions of Spanish language, points us back to the feminine archetypes that emerged with early asteroid astrology.)
As technology advances, more and more NEOs are being identified. The Rubin Observatory recently surveyed over 11 thousand new asteroids. Discoveries are being made in bulk.
That’s a lot of space objects for astronomers to track. It’s also a lot of asteroids for astrologers to keep track of and find meaning in.
What makes something astrologically real?
Even traditional astrology uses bodies no one can see and have no mass. The lunar nodes are just empty positions in space. Astrologers that omit the outer planets — Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto — are probably outnumbered by those that include them (at least in the Western tradition) even though they cannot be seen by the human eye without aid.
Astronomical classifications change. Ceres was originally thought to be a planet before being classified as an asteroid; now, like Pluto, it is a dwarf planet. And yet, despite being known since 1801, Ceres is not regularly included in charts as Pluto is.
There are branches of astrology that leap to use objects as soon as they are discovered, as if assigning meaning is a race — but meaning takes time and discernment.
It’s easy to forget that asteroid astrology is new and novel. It was little over 50 years ago, in 1973, that the first asteroid ephemeris was published by Eleanor Bach. Demetra George’s groundbreaking 1986 book, Asteroid Goddesses, popularised their use as an expression of feminine archetypes.
As astrologers, we often start by looking for clues in the discovery chart and concurrent events, but we are far from consistent in our approaches. We symbolically interpret scientific facts as well as the myth associated with the body’s name to derive meaning. We may lean on other systems, such as channelled imagery like the Sabian symbols. We look for ways that the newly discovered body could fill a gap in our current knowledge and experience.
This is what I’m doing here with Bennu — building meaning — but there’s that remarkable physical addition: the asteroid dust.
What does bringing asteroid dust to Earth tell us? Does that research add to our astrological understanding? Do the astrological signatures of the key moments of these long space missions add meaning?
There are some notable patterns emerging but only time will tell.
The Unseen Is Not Absent, but Untold
Before it was discovered in 1999, Bennu was there, along with a hundred thousand other asteroids. Before they were identified by scientists, those life-nurturing amino acids on Bennu were there. But they had not yet entered human awareness.
The question for astrologers isn’t whether, or not, to include unseen space bodies in their charts. It’s a question of connection between the endless sky and humanity across time.
The lunar nodes are just empty points in space - until there’s an eclipse observed and the cycles are tracked, which connects human consciousness and the phenomenon. An anonymous asteroid is a cataclysmic fever dream - until it is anchored amid the swirling chaos and given a name, a story, a place in the order of creation. Bringing a physical piece of that asteroid to Earth builds that relationship, strengthens that conscious connection.
Our relationship with Bennu is special because it is here with us. We can ask more of this asteroid because it is here with us.
The wisdom Bennu offers is this: We have the voice to bring divine order to our world. We speak and make it so.
***
One last weird thing about the asteroid samples … Scientists struggle to keep asteroid samples uncontaminated despite best efforts and strict protocols because Earth’s bacteria loves asteroid dust.
Though our experiences on Earth often seems turbulent and chaotic, life continues to thrive.
References
Accessed 1/6/26
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-30/-asteroid-bennu-scientists-discover-osiris-rex-life-/104875044
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/osiris-rex/
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/first-official-names-given-to-features-on-asteroid-bennu/
https://www.planetary.org/about
https://www.universetoday.com/articles/its-official-asteroids-ryugu-and-bennu-are-siblings
https://www.livescience.com/space/asteroids/all-5-letters-of-dna-found-on-an-asteroid-speeding-through-our-solar-system-what-do-they-tell-us-about-the-origins-of-life
https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/stats/
Accessed 16/6/26
https://asteroidday.org/resources/asteroid-learning/learn-how-asteroid-discovery- /
Accessed 18/6/26
https://rubinobservatory.org/news/11000-new-asteroids
Source for Book of the Dead Spell (via Wikipedia) - Taylor, John H. (translator), Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead: Journey through the afterlife. British Museum Press, London, 2010.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/literature/religious/bd17.html
https://www.skyscript.co.uk/heritage/egyptians3.html
Creative Commons images are available: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Bennu
AI Declaration:
Claude Sonnet 4.6 was used to find obscure details (like the times and locations of mission milestones) and to identify primary sources (i.e. translations of relevant sections of Book of the Dead).
Agent 141 – Kim Fairminer
Kim Fairminer is a respected astrologer, writer, and witch with over 25 years of magical practice. She has helped countless individuals achieve their goals, navigate challenges, and live their best lives.
Affectionately known as a “rockstar astrologer,” Kim’s readers, clients, and students praise her deep spiritual insights delivered with honesty, humour, and uncanny accuracy. A down-to-earth guide to the esoteric arts, Kim shares her expertise through horoscopes, consultations, courses, and books, passionately sharing knowledge of astrology, witchcraft, dreams, magic, and ritual. An avid learner, Kim’s holds formal qualifications in humanistic and horary astrology, transpersonal counselling, training, editing, and publishing. She is affiliated with esteemed organizations including Holistic Therapists Australia, Queensland Federation of Astrologers, the Organisation for Professional Astrology, the International Society for Astrological Research, and the Australian Fairy Tale Society.
Offering diverse services, from predictive and therapeutic astrology consultations to specialised horary astrology, bespoke spellwork, and group mentoring, Kim empowers individuals on their transformative journeys.
Kim writes, stargazes, and casts circles from her suburban Brisbane home. Discover more about her work at kimfairminer.com
