My first instinct with this one was Saturn: the organization, the predictability, the safety of the grid-like pattern. But then I thought: No, Uranus: energy, electricity. Or Mercury: thousands of little connections [...]]]> Most of the time, when I look at the picture of the week, I see right away the astrological archetype with which the image aligns.

My first instinct with this one was Saturn: the organization, the predictability, the safety of the grid-like pattern. But then I thought: No, Uranus: energy, electricity. Or Mercury: thousands of little connections all bringing energy to an undefined, in-between space.

All of these archetypes are true to the image in their own way but they don’t really get to the core of it for me. What is most striking about this photo, in my view, is the stark, bright, white light against the utter blackness: the striking oppositeness come together. Secondarily (or perhaps primarily, depending on the viewer), the grid pattern kind of couches or embraces a cross, which in the Christian tradition is the symbol of light penetrating dark.

But what is light penetrating dark in terms of astrology? I don’t think I can choose a single planet or sign to reflect that idea, for light and dark are such basic archetypal energies that undergird and run through all of life, through all the energies we carry within us: Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Sagittarius, Cancer — each of these and every other astrological energy carries its own brand of light and dark into embodiment, into the life of the person who carries that energy.

For instance, Venus is the goddess of love and beauty and, as such, represents merging relationship, sensuality, art and luscious enjoyment of life. But she can also be desperate and demanding, vain and superficial. These are two sides of the same coin, the light and the shadow of a single archetypal energy that lives in all of us.

There are others: Mercury’s quick wit, light laughter and adaptability is shadowed by detachment, fickleness and nit-picky-ness; Jupiter’s wisdom, perspective and generosity may be darkened by arrogance, excess and sloth.

When we accept, embody or live out only one side of an archetype, denying the other side’s potential within us, we run into trouble. This is the condition first identified by Sigmund Freud as projection and cast into mythic terms by Carl Jung as shadow.

Western astrologers have long identified shadow with the seventh house (the house of relationship), suggesting that we draw people to us who have the qualities we are not yet ready to accept in ourselves and integrate into our consciousness.

But we can experience shadow in any house of the horoscope, for example if we have a strong seventh house and little in its opposite house, the first, we may identify more completely with others than with ourselves, making the self into shadow material: fear of being alone, denial of one’s own worth, self-effacement or self-abnegation or self-mutilation, to go to the extreme. If our ninth house is dominant over the third, we may find ourselves in an ivory tower, alienated from community, and thus critical of people who have strong local connections and networks. And so forth.

This is all shadow material. Light penetrates shadow through the channel of consciousness, of becoming aware of where your shadows lie, where they’re sourced, how they’re triggered, how they grow.

Consciousness, in turn, is cultivated by self-reflection, self-honesty and ventures into the darkness, to discover and retrieve and reclaim what is there. It can be done, to some extent, on one’s own, but is more often effective with a faithful guide, a Virgil to one’s Dante or a Gandalf to one’s Frodo. Such guides can bring the wisdom, insight, faith, humbleness and even humor we need to believe in our own survival through the dark shadows of our own psyche. They can help us find our own light.

Image: Drake Guan

In ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, the frog [...]]]> Ask a friend to name an animal commonly depicted in literature, myth and culture, and the answer isn’t likely to be “frog.” But from the ancient Egyptian goddess Heket to The Frog Prince to Michigan J. Frog, the croaking amphibians have populated the cultural imagination for thousands of years.

In ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, the frog was associated with fertility, probably in part because the animals appeared in droves following the annual flooding of the Nile, whose silt deposits fertilized the Egyptian soil. In Asia, frogs are harbingers of fortune and luck, as they are in Scotland: “Households often keep stone frogs in their gardens and they are often given as house warming presents.” (Source) And in the Celtic Druidic tradition:

[The frog] unites the elements of water and earth, bringing joy, delight and healing in its singing and hopping … The frog possesses an extremely sensitive skin, considered magical by shamans. A companion of the rain spirits, the frog can help you develop sensitivity to others, to healing and to sound through your skin and your whole body and aura. (Source)

This symbolic sensitivity actually shows up on a scientific level as frogs are a documented sentinel, or indicator, species. In recent years, deformities in frogs have been noted as an early indicator of chemical farm pollution impacting local ecosystems. (Source) As well, in nature, frogs occupy the space between water and land, much as Heket represents the final stages of childbirth, when the baby emerges from the amniotic fluid to come live on the drier earth.

The composition of the photo above (wittingly? unwittingly?) reveals this sensitive in-the-margins space that frogs occupy both in the scientific research and in the cultural imagination: The stone sculpture of the frog sits at the shoreline between foliage and bark, and its skin is painted both red and blue, as if it could flux back and forth between two innate ways of being. (In Huber astrology, different colors represent different energies: red squares and oppositions are active; blue sextiles and trines are restful.)

The astrological archetype that first jumps to mind when I think about these characteristics of the frog is Mercury: it is light, flexible, sensitive, magical; it traverses the margins between defined worlds. But Mercury is a bit “drier” than a frog, airier and more detached than water and earth would suggest. So I want to say the frog, perhaps, is Mercury in a water sign (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces) or, under the right conditions, in an earth sign (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn). Or perhaps it is Mercury coupled with Virgo or the Moon or maybe even Jupiter: a planet that brings it a waterier, earthier sensibility, that deepens its sensitivity in an intuitive and sensual way.

There is one more element in the photo above that deserves comment: the paint is peeling. The frog is obviously old and may be neglected or forgotten (or, on the other hand, intentionally left to the weather). Whatever the case, there is a whisper of Saturn here, of the slow decay that comes with time. In our culture, we tend to turn away from such things.

But the photo instead shows how, over time, the bravely sensitive — and patient — person exposes what is underneath, makes raw and available what is inside, perhaps to help others, perhaps to move closer authenticity, perhaps to become more fertile with the deepening of each passing year.

Photo: lisa_eglinton

I love this picture because I have no idea what it means.

To me it looks like sophisticated doodling, the meanderings of a creative mind stuck in a dull situation: chemistry class, a doctor’s waiting room, a train station without a train.

I fantasize that my ignorance would be enlightened if I could only read — what’s that, [...]]]>

I love this picture because I have no idea what it means.

To me it looks like sophisticated doodling, the meanderings of a creative mind stuck in a dull situation: chemistry class, a doctor’s waiting room, a train station without a train.

I fantasize that my ignorance would be enlightened if I could only read — what’s that, French? Italian? — but maybe it wouldn’t. Perhaps the words are meaningful only in the turnabout pathways of the artist’s wandering mind.

The picture evokes the Mercury archetype and his tendency to show up in the in-between places, in those spaces of life where boredom looms, in the margins between more noticeable events. The Roman god Mercury — Hermes, in the Greek — was in constant motion, wings on his feet, traveling between Olympus, earth and the underworld to deliver messages between gods and monsters and humans. He was the only one who could slip in and out of Hades without paying the ferryman.

We all have Mercury in our minds, slipping between the layers of our psyches, moving from conscious awareness (Oh! I should be taking notes on what the teacher is saying!) to the mundane insects of thought that cross our paths (I wonder if they’ll have that pea soup again at the cafe today.) to the unconscious, often-unwanted depths (I really don’t deserve all the good in my life.) to the upper registers of love and connectedness (I feel so alive today!).

Though he is normally associated, in the astrological chart, with mundane thought, Mercury’s real power lies in his ability to connect things. On a physiological level, connections are brain neurons — that is, the ability to process information through our minds. On a practical, everyday level, connections are made through language: through the words we hear and the words we speak back (which, by the way, are processed through neurons).

But on an esoteric level, connections are metaphor. And Mercury is the master of metaphor.

Carl Jung said that metaphor-making is the primary function of the psyche. Metaphor means, literally, to carry between. Interestingly, both parts of the word, both meta and phor, are related in their roots to words meaning “childbirth” and “midwife.” So there is a sense, in a metaphor, of carrying and delivering something profound, creative and meaningful in the space in-between two people. The thing is not Person 1, and the thing is not Person 2. It is something entirely third, but which connects the two together.

Where Mercury is concerned, the quintessential example of metaphor is language. All language is a symbol of something else: the word apple is a symbol of the apple sitting on my desk; the word relationship is a symbol of the collection of interactions between us; the word run is a symbol of me moving fast using my feet.

And all symbols, or metaphors, and thus all words, are ways of mediating between two things: a real thing and a way of representing it with my lips, with my tongue; a real feeling and the connection I want to have with you through it; an idea I have and the way it will become manifest in life.

And so I look at the picture above and I see Mercury in the margins, some sketching or maybe doodling that is a symbol of what’s going on in the artist’s mind in some in-between space: a space where a gap exists between what is going on around him or her and what is going on inside him or her.

The pictures here look like something being born from the artist’s inside to the artist’s outside. I see symbols being made, symbols that represent something in the mind that wants to come to the fore, symbols that are more direct even than words, that speak directly to the psyche instead of through the often-twisting manner of language, symbols that evoke quiet and pensiveness and reflectiveness and perhaps age.

Perhaps memory.

Photo: La Eu la lia

For the record, I don’t have a beard in waking life.

I awoke in the full mood of fall and went about the tasks of the morning [...]]]> Last night I dreamt I shaved off my beard — a stylized goatee that came to a perfect point at the bottom, the sides curving around my jaws like little arms.

For the record, I don’t have a beard in waking life.

I awoke in the full mood of fall and went about the tasks of the morning without thinking much about it. But when the boys were gone, NPR was turned off and the dishes had settled in their stacks, the dream came back quietly.

In essence, I think, it was about shedding what had grown: saying goodbye to the old, getting ready for the new. It was an appropriate, if funny, dream for the change of season.

Even though it’s not officially fall yet, the summer cycle is definitely closing: Ask anyone who has school-age children, or arthritis. Last week on our midwest visit, there was talk of sweaters, hayrides and apple presses. Even here in southern California, the air is a little crisper and the traffic much thicker than last week. And Starbucks has mercifully brought back its pumpkin spice latté.

This is the time of year when, in my quieter moments, I tend to remember the ancient myth of Persephone, who picked a flower and was whisked away into the underworld by Hades (Pluto) himself. Persephone’s mother, the earth goddess Demeter, mourned the loss of her child and withheld the harvest from the people until Zeus (Jupiter) brokered a deal: Persephone would stay in the underworld with Hades for one-third of each year and reunite with her mother during the remaining eight months. The separation, disappearance, change in cycles was necessary for the growth of both mother and daughter.

There are more complexities to the story, but its core truth lies in these simple details; and we see that truth reflected, also, in the horoscope chart. Bruno and Louise Huber identified a way to interpret the chart as a “life clock” — starting with birth at the ascendant and spending six years in each house. At a certain point in each house, people tend to turn inward. They feel their active energy thwarted or stilled. They are forced to take stock and turn the season of their life toward the next more active, more outwardly-effective cycle.

This internal period can often be felt as a crisis point — the point where, like Demeter, no matter how hard you try, you simply cannot get what you want. Waiting is necessary, and that can be frustrating. It can even feel like death — like being dragged into the underworld against your will, like being taken away from everything light and abundant and familiar.

But the Demeter story, and the Hubers’ work, and astrology in general remind us, each in their own ways, that life happens in cycles, and thus the underworld period is essential. Shortcuts and bypasses are decidedly not advised.

See: The flower germinates; it blossoms; it dies. The school year begins; it proceeds; it ends. Babies are born; the family coheres; the children grow up and move away. Before the third phase of each cycle, we must catch our breaths, because in truth that third phase is just the preparation for the next cycle: As it dies, the flower must seed the next crop. As the school year ends, the student must make ready for the next. As they grow up and move away, our children prepare to give birth themselves.

I know a lot of people who say they feel nostalgic every year as fall begins. Maybe some of the nostalgia is a longing for eternal summer, but there’s something deeper going on there, too, I think: a wistfulness for the cycle that was, perhaps; an uncomfortable acknowledgment that time always urges us forward; a wish for the familiar footprints we’ve already put down. We know that place behind us. Why can’t we just stay there, or jump forward to the next activity? Why must we power down a bit now?

And yet we know the fall, too. Its familiarity, it smells and its slower tempo are ancient and comforting. Its darker days cloister us indoors, where we are forced to face the internal. We survive the cold, and the dark, and the frightening because we must — and because our fiber is thicker and heartier than we give ourselves credit for in the bright sweat of summer.

Yet it’s often as surprising to remember our own strength, and our own tenacity, and our own depth, as it is to dream of a woman shaving off her pointed goatee to prepare for what’s next.

Go to Meditations for the End of Summer

Photo credits: Bearded lady, life cycles, autumn

I’m working on fleshing the ideas out into a full-length article but I’m itching [...]]]> Yesterday marked the fourth workshop in our Astro-Play series at Yoga Grounds, with Vera on yoga and myself on astrology. Yesterday’s theme was the process of goal-setting and goal-getting, as prismed through the Capricorn archetype, as illustrated through the Grimm Brothers fairy-tale Rapunzel.

I’m working on fleshing the ideas out into a full-length article but I’m itching to share a couple themes that I didn’t get to in the short time allotted. I hope participants will find this an interesting supplement to the workshop (and that others will find it merely interesting).

The recurring symbol I’m most interested in exploring is the use of stone in the Rapunzel story. It is especially intriguing, I think, since Capricorn is an earth sign — signaling practicality, patience, tactility, solidity and determination. These are all traits that can assist in setting and reaching goals. But look at what happens to the image of stone at three key points throughout the story.

Stone Wall: The first appearance of stone comes when the poor miller, father of Rapunzel herself, jumps the stone wall dividing his garden from the witch’s. The wall is meant to be a boundary, a dividing line that signals a limitation, a law, a social custom that demarcates one person’s property from another’s. But the miller steals over the wall at night — breaches the accepted boundary when he believes he won’t be seen — in order to take something that the law says he must not take: radishes that his pregnant wife craves that are growing not in his garden, but in the garden of the witch next door.

The wall is a symbol for limits (when we stonewall something, we put up our hand and say “no,” refusing all arguments and pleas). But it turns out to be an ineffective one. In the context of pursuing goals, the message here is that, faced with a powerful craving or temptation — and lacking the capacity for resistance — we are vulnerable to crossing the line that separates achievement of the goal from lack thereof. Unless we are aware of the temptation, and work consciously to build our own strength against it, we will continually find ways to breach the wall. We will repeatedly keep ourselves separate from our goal.

For example, if our goal is to lose weight, we may breach the wall through excuses like, “Just one cookie won’t hurt” or “She spent so long making dinner — it would be impolite to refuse.” In our workshop, we looked at a cross-section of a stone wall and noted how much it looks like a spine — each vertebra stacked upon the next. When that wall is not strong, we become spineless against our temptations. In fact, the idea of “spinelessness” seemed to echo the miller’s actions not just because he stole the radishes (he apparently never considered knocking on the witch’s door and explaining the situation) but also because, ultimately, he gave into the witch’s demand for the baby Rapunzel as exorbitant payment for his crime.

If you find yourself prone to breaching the boundaries you have set for yourself — whether in pursuit of a goal or for some other purpose — you might consider doing some spine-strengthening yoga. We did some last night, preceded by muscle-testing with various substances. After the yoga, we muscle-tested again and found ourselves much better able to resist things like coffee, sugar and other temptations that tend to thwart our goals.

Stone Tower: The witch indeed takes Rapunzel, on the day she is born, as restitution for her father’s crime. When Rapunzel is 12 years old, the witch locks her in the topmost room of a stone tower without door or stairs. Now the image of stone — of the patience, determination and solidity that were utterly lacking in her father and in the stone wall — has become a tall, imposing structure. Much in contrast to the long, low line of stones along the ground, which was probably crumbling and easy to breach, the tower is imagined as a rigid, impenetrable structure that is impervious to callers who lack the secret words.

The stone tower is so impenetrable, in fact, that it imprisons the girl Rapunzel in a state of innocence (literally, not-knowing) — infantilized and atrophied at a point in life when she should be growing, blossoming and experiencing the pleasures of the world on the ground. This is the polar opposite of the spinelessness of the stone wall. Here, the spine is rigid from the imposition of too much authority, from the totalitarian-style treatment of Rapunzel by the witch. And after a time, certainly, the witch’s demeanor becomes so engraved on Rapunzel’s psyche that the girl begins to believe, herself, that she cannot exist outside the stone walls of a high, impenetrable tower: She internalizes the rigidity imposed upon her from without.

This might not be so terrible if growth or juice or lust for life existed for Rapunzel in the confines of the tower. But the suggestion is one of sameness, boredom and loneliness — a stultifying existence contrary to growth and blossoming. This might look, in modern life, like a person who has stayed too long in the same job “for the sake of the children” or “because Dad always wanted me to take over the family business.” Reluctance to risk other people’s needs or desires can imprison our own passion, enslave us to other people’s ideas of who we should be. Obligation, submission, fear, guilt and shame all live in this place.

If you find yourself pursuing a goal that has lost its juice for you — because of obligation, politeness, habit, whatever — your yoga might be one of flexibility. Like the ability to stand up for yourself and adhere to important limits, flexibility is also centered on the spine. Think about the obligations, assumptions and habits that have built up around your goal. Do some work on building flexibility in both your mind and your body, and see what kind of twists and turns the “can’ts” and “shoulds” in your life end up taking.

Stone Well: The prince begins visiting Rapunzel each night, and the two hatch a plan to get her out of the tower. But the girl lets it slip that she has a lover and, furious, the witch cuts off Rapunzel’s famous hair and throws her — pregnant with twins — out of the tower to wander in the desert. That night, the prince comes and, when he sees the witch in Rapunzel’s room, falls off the tower, blinding himself on the thorns below. He, too, wanders the desert for many years. And then one day, he hears Rapunzel singing as she draws water from a well.

While the tower represents rigidity, and the wall represents spinelessness, the stone well represents practical, purposeful and effective limits. The well is both a signal that something unseen is close by — that the goal is within reach — and a structure to protect that thing while also allowing access to it: neither totally confining like the tower nor totally open like the wall. Even imagistically, a well is halfway between a wall and a tower: a low wall, really, in the circular shape of a tower, which can be entered from above but that descends far below the earth to welcome water into its deep, narrow bowl.

In astrology and other symbol systems, water represents, among other things, the feeling function. Drawn from deep within the earth, the suggestion is one of unconscious feeling being brought up into consciousness. Capricorn, like Rapunzel in the desert, must survive on its own, drawing on its own resources to climb to the top. This process is often practical, tedious, tangible and necessarily patient: earth energy. Rapunzel learns how to survive the worst imaginable circumstances. Now, when water appears in the story, we know that she is ready for relationship to flow back into her life.

Capricorn is usually signaled by a mountain goat, but its esoteric animal is the mythic sea goat. Half-goat, half-fish, it embodies the intrepid independence of the mountain goat while also suggesting the need to integrate the feeling function that lives opposite it in the chart, in Cancer. In traditional astrology, Cancer and its ruler, the Moon, are identified with the mother, but in Huber astrology that honor goes to Saturn, the ruler of Capricorn. In either case, the suggestion is that Rapunzel has now become an integrated mother who can draw on deep feeling for her children while also imposing the fair limits they will need in order to become thriving adults.

And the love relationship for which Rapunzel is now ready is drawn on her own established internal authority — her knowledge that she has built her own foundation from which to act freely. She is not a dewy dumpling confined in a tower or a frightened girl thrown into the desert. She has survived the desert, raised two children in it and become a bona fide woman on her own terms. The pinnacle of the story is that, within this harsh environment, she even finds water — finds the capacity to love and relate, to give and take, drawn up from the harsh ground of her solitary survival. The stone well surrounding this new adventure is an assurance (or a caution?) that she will neither succumb to the dewy nature of naive love, nor allow it to calcify into a prison of her own making.

These are the balance points in the pursuit of any goal: How to observe the limits without becoming enslaved to them; how to stick with a plan while maintaining flexibility within it; how to keep alive passion for the work while also surviving the harsh desert in which you may find yourself. Strength and flexibility; passion and practicality.

***
In the end, the blind prince follows the sound of Rapunzel’s voice to the well. The family is reunited, Rapunzel’s tears restore the prince’s sight, and the couple and their children go off to live in the castle — happily ever after, of course: the ultimate goal.

The castle is a metaphor for the final fulfillment of Rapunzel’s dream. She has gone from victim of her father’s tender spinelessness, to victim of her stepmother’s rigid fury, to solitary survivor, to the embodiment of alive, integrated wholeness.

The delightful thing about a castle is that it is so complex. There are turrets and moats, towers and keeps, chapels and stables and kitchens and courts. It is really a symbol of the rich inner life each of us has, of all 360 degrees of possibility embodied in the horoscope chart. Some rooms get used more than others; some are uncomfortable; some are adored. Some are open in the summer and closed in the winter. Some are private while others are public.

The possibilities are, as they say, endless.

***
The other theme I would like to have touched on in yesterday’s workshop was the appearance of various head coverings throughout the Rapunzel story. Though the Grimm Brothers might not have envisioned it this way, the phrase “witch’s hat” conjures a clear and striking image in modern culture. A handsome prince must necessarily come with a jeweled crown. Of course Rapunzel herself is distinguished by her long hair — and then by her shorn locks later in the story. We can even imagine the miller with a dilapidated cap and his wife with a scarf tied over her hair.

As Capricorn symbolizes the archetype of individuation, of distinguishing oneself from others in the process of fulfilling your destiny — and as its energy is encompassed in the 10th house at the top of the chart — it seems appropriate to look at how we treat our hair, our hats, our brains and other things up top for a look at another aspect of this archetype.

But that’s for another time.