ARCHETYPES & ASTROLOGY
Despite people coming to have an astro-psychological reading, one of the most common questions that I got even before starting a consultation is: will this relationship last? Am I going to find a new job?
At the beginning, it seems that the Soul of the client needs just some concrete answers in which to feel safe and comfortable rather than all those psychological aspects within the chart.
What happens during a consultation? I know some people that use the Natal Chart as an extra tool to start a therapy with the client (and that’s really cool!), but the psychological experience would be different from the one I am offering. Why? Because I will have just two hours, even two hours and a half if I am lucky enough, to provide an exhaustive introduction of a Natal Chart. Can a person have his/her personal journey through the history of his soul within this amount of time? And how can we put together the puzzle of a unique life letting the person be the active part of the process?
A Natal Chart represents a really nice drawing of your Soul, it shows what was happening in the sky in the exact moment in which your body got into this dimension, the geometric relationship among the planets and the asteroids. Like Kepler said “The soul of the newly born baby is marked for life by the pattern of the stars at the moment it comes into the world, unconsciously remembers it, and remains sensitive to the return of configurations of a similar kind.” The birth chart represents the primordial image of the soul, an archetypical map of the psyche that could be used as a tool to access the foundation of our psychic structure.
C. G. Jung established an important distinction among archetypes, which constitute the milestones of the psyche. An archetype forms the core of a complex concept, while our personal associations form the idea of it. He proposed that we are each born with a collective unconscious. This contains a set of shared memories and ideas, which we can all identify with, regardless of the culture that we were born into or the time period in which we live. We cannot communicate through the collective unconscious, but we recognise some of the same ideas innately, including archetypes.
For example, many cultures have cultivated similar myths independently of one another, which feature similar characters and themes, such as the creation of the universe. Jung noted that within the collective unconscious there exist a number of archetypes which we can all recognise. An archetype is the model image of a person or role and includes the mother figure, father, wise old man and clown/joker, amongst others. The mother figure, for example, has caring qualities; she is dependable and compassionate. We all hold similar ideas of the mother figure and we see her across cultures and in our language - such as the term 'mother nature'.
Archetypes are often incarnated as characters in myths, novels and Zodiac. For example the Tarots: the mother archetype is seen in the qualities of the Empress card, whilst the Hermit embodies the wise old man archetype. Then we have the planetary archetypes and their archetypical meaning that would help us during our investigation.
The shadow archetype is composed primarily of the elements of ourselves that we consider to be negative. We do not show this side of the self to the outside world as it can be a source of anxiety or shame. The shadow may contain repressed ideas or thoughts which we do not wish to integrate into our outward persona, but these must be resolved in order to achieve individuation. However, it may also include positive traits, such as perceived weaknesses (for example, empathy) which may not fit into the 'toughness' that a person wants to present as a part of their persona.
Astrology offers aN immediate access to the symbolic archetypes using our memories and experiences wrapped around them.
The Natal Chart is a powerful tool that could be used like a dream, and the main idea is that the person would be guided in the process of unfolding the symbols of the charts within me. I am a translator of the symbols of the universe related to your Soul, but the symbols will get meaning once the person will recognize them. Who could be considered an expert of your Soul more than yourself?
My aim would be to connect the daily experiences in a symbolic way to help you to open up some aspects of your personality. I make suppositions and suggestions about the manifestations of the planets and their archetypes recalled by the planets. The main idea is that the person would recognize and see the logic beyond the words and not the opposite. During this process, I will link the everyday experiences and relationships with some specific people to the archetypical sphere. Both the client and I will contribute to the history of the chart in order to be sure that the person would have an idea about the symbols in their own chart and how they could express it.
Two of the images I am usually analysing in depth are the parents of the consultant. (what a surprise!)
This gives a clear idea of the surroundings the client had during his own life, and especially at the beginning of it: which situations, colours and moods were among the family members, their attitude as a couple and as parents.
The masculine planets give us some insights relatively to the experience of the father while the feminine planets to that of the mother. Harmonic aspects to masculine planets represent those characteristics of the personality of the father with which he/she felt comfortable while the dynamic aspects will show those areas of life that were in conflict and not well integrated. The same process would be applied for the feminine planets and the mother.
After analysing an interesting number of charts, I realized that there are some psychological aspects of parents that are transmitted as a gift if they worked out for them, while that will give them to us as a hot potato if they didn’t manage the task in their existence.
Jung stated in his autobiography "I have the obvious feeling of being under the influence of things or problems that were left unfinished or unanswered by my parents, my grandparents, and even my father's ancestors. It often seems that there is one impersonal karma that passes from parents to children. I've always seemed to have to answer to problems that fate had placed on my ancestors and that they had not yet answered; Or of things that from previous ages had been left unfinished. "(Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C. G. Jung).
The fact that parents create us, biologically and psychologically, is true and unrealistic at the same time. There are several esoteric traditions that indicate that we are the one choose the time, place and circumstances of birth. We choose our parents.
It allows us - whether we believe in past lives or not- to include what is our experience of the family of origin in the realm of the archetypes. It is possible to imagine the parents as messengers that bring us the characteristics and the taste of the Gods in the form of a complex theatrical work.
Opening a consultation by exploring the parental image is useful for a number of reasons. It gives us an objective input in the persons' story. The consultant always has the expectation I should already know everything. They think I know how to read their mind, or maybe something terrible is going to happen in the future and I'm going to tell them. Even worse, maybe I already know something terrible is going to happen to them. I do not intend to reveal my secret. They believe they arrive, sit, cross their arms and wait to be astonished from the revelations I have in store for them.
What do I do instead? I just put some order and remove the dust from your own story and shake a bit your characters. It's not about discovering something new, but about unfolding something already inside you. I will ask you if your Moon in the 2nd house in Capricorn and its planetary archetype really manifest and why this happened for your personal path. And we will be drinking a cup of tea and trying to put all the puzzle pieces together. The discussion on the parents puts the person in relation to their personal history.
We are not looking for the causes of the problems with the parents, but examine them like a play.
Imagine a consultant who has the Square Sun - Neptune. He just met me for the first time and he has only two hours to "check his horoscope".
How do I get to the core of his experience of Sun – Neptune if we don’t talk about the parents? How can I get the person opening up about something deep like some specific aspects? And more importantly, how long will it take? I can ask them questions intuitively but when I get into their vulnerability, what I think is a core problem – how can I get there in a reasonable amount of time? If the Sun represents the central meaning of your identity, the ego, and the oceanic Neptune fits in like a plug in the grip, how would you feel it?
“Do you feel like you have the ego that slips you away from all sides? Have ever experienced a fleeting fear of drowning? Or the feeling of being like in mobile sands? “ And I'm sure you could hear the doors of the psyche that, closing down, replies" No, I do not really think so. I do not recognize it at all. "
In fact I can - and often I do - ask some of these questions roughly, using these same words, but only after first exploring the wounds of the parents. We brought the wound into the consultation room and we both know what it is about. Parents constitute a bridge between the objective and the subjective world. They are somebody else but they are also our blood and our flesh.
After exploring the wound of the Sun - Neptune father and the nature of Neptune as an archetype, we have all the ingredients to reconvert the sense of inferiority of the person within a new context. The father left an hole open in your soul. It is not a pleasant one, it is a painful and confusing feeling of not really being the world that is connected to the interior image of his father, which in turn is linked to the archetype of Neptune. Do you see how this could be re-elaborated on its own? The archetype of the sacrifice is transmitted through the wound of his father.
The point is not trying to tell something about the mother or father of the consultant, but asking questions that open the conversation in the direction indicated by the symbols in the chart.
Parents provide us with practical, objective, and useful tools to reflect on the subtle and complex archetypal world that is within us. This approach sees beyond the predominant view that it is. It grows in spite of parental influence, and if only we can overcome the deficiencies in education received, we could probably be back to being complete individuals. Is it worth giving a try, no?