Depth Astrology

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.

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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.

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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.