The Luminaries

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SUN AND MOON IN THE HOROSCOPE

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

Contents

CHAPTER 1

Mothers and Matriarchy

THE MYTHOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF THE MOON

By Liz Greene

In this session we will explore the Moon, mothers and matriarchy. I want to saya word first about the illustration you have been given (see figure 1 on p. 4).We will work with these mythological maps for both the Sun and the Moonthroughout week. This particular diagram is meant to help you find your wayaround an interconnected group of lunar mythic images, but it is not adefinitive compilation, as there are obviously a great many figures and themes Ihave not included. The ones I shall refer to this afternoon are intended asimaginative triggers which might help deepen your insight into the astrologicalsymbol of the Moon. Mythic images are self-portrayals by the psyche of its ownprocesses. If we explore these images and see how they operate within people onan everyday personal level, we can begin to grasp the multidimensional symbol ofthe Moon much more profoundly and subtly than if we tried to list simpledefinitions.

I would like you to first put to one side all the astrological knowledge youhave acquired about the Moon in the horoscope, and think about your directexperience of the actual physical Moon in the heavens. Have you ever observed itregularly over its monthly cycle? I think every astrological student should havea telescope and a good astronomical map. The lunar cycle is quite miraculous towatch, and it can provoke strong imaginative and emotional reactions in us, asit has done in human beings for millennia. The full Moon is very magical andhypnotic, and can sometimes even seem sinister, as if it were a mysterious eyewatching us from the darkness of the night sky. How many of you have ever playedthe old childhood game, and tried to find a face in the full Moon? All of you?Well, you are proving my point. It's almost impossible, if we are with someoneand the Moon is full overhead, to avoid pointing at it—"Oh, look at the Moon!"we say, although one could scarcely miss it. And have you ever admired one ofthose elegant, slender crescent Moons? There is something so terribly fragileand delicate and even poignant about this phase of the Moon. It never appearssinister in the way the full Moon sometimes does. Have any of you ever watched alunar eclipse? This is a strange and rather baleful phenomenon, because the Moondarkens, turning blood red or brown; in ancient and medieval times this wasinterpreted as the herald of some dreadful event.

Imagine what it might have been like to watch the Moon in ancient times, withoutany knowledge of the material universe, and you will begin to realise how verypowerful a symbol it has always been, and how splendid a hook for our psychicprojections. If you were a Neolithic cave-dweller, the first obvious fact aboutthe physical Moon which you would notice is that it is always changing, yet itrepeats its cycle in an unchanging way. From one night to the next the Moon'sshape is different, yet you can always be sure it will repeat its pattern in amonth's time. The Moon is a paradox: It is unreliable at the same time that itscycle is utterly reliable. Sometimes it gives light, but not quite enough toclarify anything, while at other times the light vanishes altogether and thenight is black. So if you were an ancient traveller relying on the Moon's lightat night, you would have fallen into trouble very soon, because of theinexorable shrinking of the light. Thus the Moon was viewed as treacherous, andthe earliest lunar goddesses who personified it are paradoxical and ambiguous incharacter.

It might be useful to remember that in built-up areas in Western countries weare accustomed to seeing the night lights of towns and cities reflected againstcloud banks; and this reflection can extend for many, many miles. We live in anage of electricity, and have no recollection of times when houses were lit byhearth fires or candles or oil lamps. Thus the night sky is never really totallydark, but we do not realise it. Many city-dwellers have never seen a truly blacknight. Unless we are on board a ship in the middle of the Atlantic, or inrelatively uninhabited countryside such as the Australian Outback or the SaharaDesert, we almost never experience the absolute darkness of the new Moon whichour ancestors did. And when there is lunar light, it is a very peculiar light,which bleaches the colour from everything. Ordinary landscapes and objects lookstrange and otherworldly under the full Moon. If one is romantically occupied,then this light is enchanting. But if one is alone, it can be very disturbing.

Nursery rhymes are full of the magic of the Moon—the Man in the Moon, and theMoon being made of green cheese, and the cow jumping over the Moon. Pop songsand romantic tunes address the Moon—"Blue Moon," "Fly Me to the Moon," and soon. The Moon makes us think of lovers, but also of lunatics, the latter wordderiving from the Latin luna. There are fairy and folk tales about peopleturning into wolves or vampires when the Moon is full, and about people goingmad if the light of the full Moon shines through the window on one's face duringsleep—hence the association with lunacy. Even before we begin to look at themythic figures who cluster around the different lunar phases, we can see thatthe Moon has invoked the most extraordinary fantasies and projections from thehuman imagination over the centuries. These fantasies invariably concern thenight world of human emotions —love, madness and sorcery.

The perpetually changing yet constant lunar cycle has gathered to itself acharacteristic body of myth, with which many of you will be familiar. The lunardeities, who are usually female (although there are exceptions) most oftenappear in a triad, or with three aspects which reflect the three distinct phasesof the full, new and crescent Moon. If we play about with the images which thesethree phases invoke, we can see how the new Moon, the treacherous black Moon,was associated with death, gestation, sorcery, and the Greek goddess Hekate whopresided over birth and black magic. After the dark of the Moon, the crescentMoon appears with its virginal delicacy and promise, looking as though it isready to be impregnated by something. It is shaped like a bowl, open to thatwhich may penetrate it from outside. The crescent Moon was linked with thevirgin goddess Persephone, who was abducted by Hades. It was also said to be theemblem of Artemis, the virgin huntress and mistress of wild beasts, whom we willlook at more closely later. The full Moon in contrast has a pregnant look; it isround and juicy, lush and ripe, and might give birth at any moment. This is theMoon at its maximum power, the apex of the lunar cycle, and it was associatedwith the fertility goddess Demeter, mother of all living things. Then the Moonbegins to wane, growing thinner and darker, and then suddenly it is not thereany more. Hekate, the old crone, is now in power once again, hidden in theunderworld weaving her spells and spinning the future in the darkness.

The triad of lunar deities which has always been associated with the Moonreflects an archetypal human experience, projected onto the physical Moon in theheavens. One important dimension of this experience is the body itself, whichreflects in its own cyclical development and mortality the phases of the Moon.The lunar deities presided over the yearly cycle of vegetation, and also overthe human cycle of birth and death. Thus the Moon in myth governs the organicrealm of the body and the instincts, which is why these deities are usuallyfemale—it is out of the female body that we are all born and receive our firstfood. The lunar cycle was called the Great Round, reflecting its connection withfate and with things always coming back again, endlessly repeating. All thingswhich are mortal have their cycle, and it is a universal rather than anindividual cycle, since individuals die but the species continues to regenerateitself.

From the solar perspective, the body is only of value as a symbol. Solarconsciousness is concerned with that which is eternal, and it does not givevalue to birth, fruition, disintegration and death. The world of the body istranscended in the light of day, and we are offered instead the promise ofimmortality and of ultimate meaning. If we identify exclusively with this day-world,we disconnect from the Moon, at least for a time, for the Moon is a"distraction," part of the web of Maya, as they might say in Hindu circles. Ifwe view and experience things through the Moon, life is not constant andeternal, for we are viewing a play in which the ordinary person incarnated inlife has the lead role. Everything is in a state of flux, bound to the wheel ofFortune and Time.

Now, there are individuals who are more attuned to viewing through the lunarlens because of the Moon's importance in their birth charts, and it is thechangeability and cyclical nature of reality which seem the dominantcharacteristic of life to them. Safety and security and the warmth of humancontact thus become much more important than any abstract quest for meaning,because life is so full of flux and must be coped with from day to day. Thesepeople are especially gifted at keeping their feet on the ground and dealingwith events and people in a sensible, reassuring and compassionate way. Becausewe all have the Moon in the horoscope, all of us are capable of experiencing theworld and ourselves through the Moon's eye. Some of us get stuck there andcannot look beyond our immediate personal circumstances. Equally, some of usdon't look sufficiently at the cyclical nature of reality, and consequentlycannot cope very well with ordinary life, because we are addicted to eternityand have forgotten how to trust the instincts and work intelligently with time.

The Moon was associated in medieval times with the goddess Fortuna, whom some ofyou will recognise in the card of the Wheel of Fortune in the Tarot deck. Youmay also know the opening verses of Orff's Carmina Burana:

O Fortune, changeable as the Moon!
You always wax or wane;
Hateful life is one moment hard
And the next moment favours the gambler.
Poverty, power,
All melt like ice.

Whenever we reach a peak moment in life, a full Moon moment when things arecoming to fruition, we can be sure that there is a past which has led to thismoment, a hidden beginning when the seed was sown at the dark of the Moon and atime of promise and development when the Moon was in its crescent phase. And wecan also be sure that there is a future when decay sets in, and the cycle mustcontinue to its inevitable end, because nothing in mortal life remains the same.Then, as the Moon wanes and the moment passes, we look back to the past whenthings seemed so full of promise. When we view life through the eye of the Moon,there is always a looking back to the past, and the feeling of the body growingolder reflects this looking back to the youth of the crescent Moon with itsunlived potentials. We can always remember a time when we had more energy andfewer wrinkles, even if we are only 20. Once upon a time, in childhood, the bodywas young and unfinished. Once upon a time, one was naive and innocent and open,before experience intruded like the Serpent in the Garden and shaped one'sperceptions and values. So you can see that there is a deep poignancy andmelancholy attached to the Moon. The Moon sings in a minor key, becauseeverything passes. We cannot stay anywhere forever, because we will outgrow itone day, and must face the dark of the Moon before a new birth and newpotentials can emerge. And if one is identified with the lunar landscape, deathis the inevitable end of the cycle. Under the light of the Moon, everything inlife follows the Great Round. Relationships have their cycles. Creativity hasits cycles, as any artist can tell you. Family life has cycles, and so dofinancial affairs (Fortuna rules the stock market), and so too does history.Everything comes back round again, and there is nothing new under the Sunbecause the Moon has done it all before. Now it is interesting to look at thepositive and negative dimensions of this cyclical experience of life, which isreally a psychological state of being. We might call it matriarchal, because itis a vision of life which is essentially female and organic, reflecting theprocesses of conception, pregnancy, birth, puberty, maturation, ageing anddying. Mythically, matriarchal consciousness is concerned with natural cycles,giving priority to harmony with the Great Round rather than to a human will orspirit which can transcend it.

We can easily idealise matriarchal consciousness, voicing a perhaps necessarycounterbalance to the destructive power of too much rationality and will. Thisis rather in vogue in certain circles at the moment. But it is possible to havetoo much of a good thing, which is the case with every planet. Because the Moongoverns the realm of nature, a purely matriarchal consciousness dispenses withthe value of the individual, giving absolute importance to family and to tribe,justifying the suppression or destruction of individual self-expression if thesecurity of the group is threatened. There are no ethics or principles in thisdomain, nor any disciplined use of the will. All is justified by instinctualneed and preservation of the species. Many women are angered at having projectedon them by men the darker lunar qualities of manipulativeness, treacherous-ness,unreliability, moodiness and emotional voracity. I have heard numerous mencomplain of how difficult it is to work with or discuss things objectively withwomen, because reasonableness and cooperation fly out of the window in the faceof personal feelings. But these qualities will often be very pronounced in anyperson, male or female, where the Moon dominates the horoscope. You can begin tosee what an extreme lunar consciousness is all about, which is why the lunardeities were seen not only as nourishes and child protectors, but also as childswallowers and castratore.

Equally, it is not difficult to see what happens if we remain unrelated to theMoon. We may lose our sense of connection with and care for the body, which on amore global level means disconnection with and lack of care for nature and theliving earth. It is the body which reminds us that we are mortal. Our bodiesexperience pain, sickness and ageing as well as pleasure and delight. We alsohave body moods, for our emotional states are intimately connected with ourbodies. It is impossible to say which comes first. Low blood sugar and a poorlyfunctioning thyroid gland reflect depression, and depression affects the immunesystem, so we get a cold, which depresses us even more. Sometimes we get up inthe morning just feeling rotten, with puffy faces, and the weather is alsorotten, but how can we say that one causes the other? Or might our bodies, beingpart of an interconnected world organism, simply move in harmony with climaticchanges more than we realise? What we eat has a profound effect on our moods,but our moods in turn affect what we eat. If we are unhappy or stressed, we grabfor "comfort food" like chocolate, which in turn makes us feel unhappy andstressed because the blood sugar level crashes afterward, which makes usdepressed. And so on. If we cannot sleep, we feel pretty rough; but if we arefeeling rough, we cannot sleep. You can see how circular it all is. It is thebody, the domain of the Moon, which keeps us in touch with life in the moment,whether it is the dark or the light face of experience we are encountering.Without sufficient expression of the Moon, it is not only the body whichsuffers. It is our capacity to experience life in the present. Then it comes asa horrible shock when we discover that life has somehow flown by without ourreally knowing we have lived it. The container remains empty, so there is nomemory, no feeling of continuity, and no sense of a fruitful past.

We might consider more closely two of the figures in the diagram, Gaia andDemeter. Both of these are very ancient earth goddesses, of which Gaia is theelder, the original female principle with whom the heaven god Ouranos mates tocreate the manifest cosmos. Demeter is a later, more humanised version of thesame figure. The earth goddess or earth mother is really an image of theanimating principle in nature itself, the intelligent and purposeful life forcewithin the material universe, which has been associated since earliest timeswith the Moon. She not only embodies the world of nature as a unified life-form,but also the human body, which is our primary direct experience of her. Theearth mother is thus a mythic portrayal of our experience of our body life,which is beyond our control and therefore seems numinous or divine.
(Continues...)Excerpted from The Luminaries by LIZ GREENE, Howard Sasportas. Copyright © 1992 Liz Greene & Howard Sasportas. Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
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