Liz Greene - The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope

First published in 1992 by

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

P. O. Box 612

York Beach, ME 03910-0612

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Copyright 1992 Liz Greene & Howard Sasportas

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Greene, Liz.

The Luminaries / Liz Greene & Howard Sasportas

p. cm. -(Seminars in psychological astrology: v.3)

1. Astrology. 2. Moon-Miscellanea. 3. Sun-Miscellanea

I, Sasportas, Howard. II. Title. III. Series.

BF1723.G74 1992

133.5'3dc20

91-43968

ISBN 0-87728-750-3

TCP

Cover illustration copyright 1992 Liz Greene

Typeset in 10 point Palatino

Printed in Canada

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992(R1997).

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To Alois and Elisabeth

and to their twin daughters, Artemis and Lilith, who were conceived at the time this seminar was given

The word luminary, according to the Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary, means, very simply, a source of light. It also describes one who illustrates any subject or instructs mankind. Thus a luminary in the world of literature or the theatre is someone with a great talentan actor like Laurence Olivier or a writer like Thomas Mannwho through his or her excellence defines the standard toward which we aspire. A luminary is one who sets an example, embodying the best of what might be achieved.

In an earlier and more poetic astrology, the Sun and Moon were called the Luminariesor, alternatively, the Lights. What are these luminaries, these exemplary instructors within us which define in their separate domains the internal standard toward which we aspire as individuals? In the past, astrology has interpreted planetary placements as a kind of immovable giventhe way we are made. The Sun and Moon are therefore said to represent essential characteristics which irrevocably define the individual personality. But any astrological factor is also a process, for when the human being is seen through the lens of psychological insight, he or she is not static, but moves through life in an unending process of change and development. An astrological placement describes an arrow which points somewhere, a creative energy which gradually layers flesh onto the bare bones of archetypal patterning, an intelligent movement which, over time, fills in the stark black-and-white outlines of the essential life-myth with the subtle colours of experience and individual choice. The luminaries in the horoscope are truly instructors, reflecting what we could one day become, portraying in symbolic form the best of what might be achieved.

Human beings are born unfinished. Compared to other animal species, we come into the world prematurely, depending for many years on others who can ensure our physical and psychological survival. A baby crocodile, newly emerged from the egg, has teeth which can bite, a fully coordinated body which can run and swim, and a rampant aggressive instinct which allows it to hunt for food and which protects it from other predators. But we, the magnum miraculum of nature, whom Shakespeare described as mewling and puking in the nurse's armstoothless, weak, uncoordinated and incapable of feeding ourselvesare born potential victims; for unless there is someone out there who can look after us, we will die. Cast from the Eden of the womb without those basic essentials of our own car, our own flat and our own American Express card, we need a mother or a mother-surrogate upon whom we can depend, and this immediate and absolute physical dependency gives rise to a profound and binding emotional attachment to the primal life-source which is counterbalanced only by our later struggles to separate from her. And because, in the beginning, mother is our whole world, we begin to perceive the world in the light of our earliest experience of her, and learn to mother ourselves according to the example given. If mother is a safe container who can sufficiently meet our basic needs Winicott's good enough mother then we become adults who trust life and believe that the world is essentially a kind and supportive place because we have learned by example how to be kind and supportive to ourselves. But if our needs are denigrated, manipulated or simply denied, then we grow into adults who believe that the world is full of predators of superhuman strength and cunning, and that life itself does not favour our survival, for we do not favour it ourselves. Mother gives us our first concrete model of the Moon's instructive self-nurturingour earliest example of what might be achieved. But the Moon, the luminary which teaches us how to care for ourselves according to our own unique needs, is ultimately within us, and can show usif our early containment was not good enoughhow to heal the wounds, so that life can be trusted after all.

Differentiating ourselves as entities in our own right, related to but not the same as mother, heralds our psychological birth. There is something within us which struggles against the utter dependency and fusion of infancy, and which propels us on the long and

It has been said that history is the story of the unfolding of consciousness. Just as our personal history begins with the emergence of the infant out of the waters of the womb, so too does the mythological history of the universe begin with the solar god or hero emerging triumphant out of the body of the primal Great Mother. The hero's battle with the mother-dragon and eventual apotheosis in the arms of his divine father is not, of course, the end of the story; for he must ultimately return from the Olympian heights and unite as a human being with his feminine counterpart, transformed through the hero's struggles from dragon into beloved. But the solar hero within us, embattled for a time (and sometimes a lifetime), is that inner luminary which guides the emancipation of the ego from the blind instinctual compulsions of nature into the initially lonely but truly indestructible light of me.

The Sun and Moon symbolise two very basic but very different psychological processes which operate within all of us. The lunar light which lures us back toward regressive fusion with mother and the safety of the uroboric container is also the light which teaches us how to relate, to care for ourselves and others, to belong, to feel compassion. The solar light which leads us into anxiety, danger and loneliness is also the light which instructs us in our hidden divinity andas Pico della Mirandola put it in the 15th centuryour right to be proud co-creators of God's universe. To find a viable balance between these two, an alchemical coniunctio which honours both, is the work of a lifetime. The differentiation of the self from fusion with the world of mother, nature and collective allows us to develop reason, will, power and choiceand in historical terms, this has generated the remarkable social and technological advances of our 20th century Western culture. We may glamourise the distant past of the more natural matriarchal world, but when we consider what was then on offeran average life-span of 25 years, a total helplessness in the face of disease and the forces of nature, and an utter disregard for the value of an individual life we might better appreciate what kind of gift our solar instructor has given us during the long sweep of our evolution out of the mother-cave. Yet perhaps we have gone too far, at the expense of heart and instinct; and our blind brutalisation of mother earth has led us to the brink of an ecological abyss. With our eyes on the brilliance of the solar light, we have mythically dissociated, rather than differentiated from, mother; and where we were once at her mercy, now she is at oursand so too are our bodies and our planet. In our personal lives, too, it seems that we are still struggling toward that rhythmic balance reflected by the cyclical dance of the Sun and Moon in the heavens. Jung said that if there is something wrong with society, there is something wrong with the individual; and if there is something wrong with the individual, there is something wrong with me. Me is both Sun and Moontwo inner instructors which, because of their unique placements in every birth chart, provide us with our personal standards of excellence in body, heart and mind, and our personal models of the best that might be achieved for the unfoldment of the spirit and the soul. However powerful the heavier planets might be in the birth chart, it is ultimately the Sun and Moon which must channel and embody these energies and fashion them into individual experience and expression. Understanding the Sun and Moon as descriptions of character traits is only the beginning of understanding astrology; yet developing what the luminaries symbolise so that we are fitting vessels for what lies within us may be the most challenging and the best of what we can achieve in an individual life.