Message #410

[Lady Urania]

What we call the "inner life" of a person is conditioned mentally by the language, symbols, and collective thinking attitudes of his or her society and culture; it is conditioned emotionally by at first taken-for-granted patterns of inter-personal relationship, by the parental example, by the contagion of group feelings. Even if the individual rebels against the intellectual ways of thinking and the ethical, religious, and social ways of living of his family, group, or nation, this rebellion itself is conditioned by and starts from the primordial sense of "belonging" to a group. You cannot escape from the pressures of your collectivity and your culture; your very revolt must use words and gestures inherited from the cultural-social past in order to take a form and become effective.

Psychologist Carl Jung has spoken of the collective unconscious, not only as the repository of the harvest of experience of perhaps millions of generations, but even more as the sea out of which arise the many small islands that we know as individual persons. Thus, when the biological soli-lunar forces whose work it is to produce an individual human organism succeed in completing their outward-oriented drive in the development of the sexual aspect of a human personality, male or female, they do so by pushing back into the unconscious the countersexual forces. These may not seem active in a personal, conscious, and willful manner; but they are there, conditioning the psychological climate of the individual, somewhat as the sea, its currents, and its fogs condition the climate of the small island which has risen out of the water — and sometimes a tidal wave may submerge the island of consciousness!

The Planets of Soul
When Jupiter and Saturn are spoken of as "planets of soul," the term "soul" refers to the part of the total person which seeks ever to complement the outward-oriented, self-conscious and conscious other parts of the personality. Carl Jung speaks of this part as the anima in the man and the animus in the woman; he speaks of them as undifferentiated and often archaic psychic functions. They may manifest in dreams, in creative fantasies, sudden intuitions, and super-normal faculties — some of them now being called "parapsychological." They constitute the less obvious or "hidden" aspect of what the planets Jupiter and Saturn represent.

The individual person functioning outwardly as a male organism would find, if able to look into his psychic depths, a countersexual feminine power (the "anima"). It is this power which, unknown to the individual consciousness, urges him to seek not only social fellowship with other men, but also perhaps a dedicated participation in the collective activities of a group, of a church, of his nation, or even humanity as a whole. The "soul" of man is collectively oriented; that of woman is individualistically oriented — just because, as the childbearer, her outer nature and sex functions have to be pervaded (at least in conventional cases) with a dedication to the human species the existence of which she has to perpetuate.

Thus, the feminine type of intellect (also a part of her outer nature) is normally wide open to collectivizing social currents. A woman tends to conform to fashions as well as to institutionalized religion and ethics. But within the unconscious part of her psyche, the basic drive is toward individualization. If she accepts a state of devotion to the husband (so glorified in Hindu culture) or upon Jesus as Divine Beloved ( if she has a religious path instead of a love which will reveal to her true essential self), or upon some Oriental Teacher, Swami, or yogi (who supposedly can provide a magic technique of self-revelation), it is because her unconscious nature is forever seeking to reach a condition of individualistic integration. It is seeking this through a process of identification with some exemplar, with a catalyzing personality or life situation. Jupiter, the socializer, is, therefore, the symbol of a man's semi-conscious or totally unconscious psychic yearnings; while Saturn, the individualizer and stabilizer, is the symbol of a woman's inner drive.

This inner drive within the psyche may actually manifest as a deep, unclear compulsion seizing the man or woman and dominating his outer existence; but, in any case, it has as its foundations the countersexual forces. Very often what seems to a man or a woman to be the motive for his actions, or the cause of his feelings for a person or a situation, is not at all the real motive and cause. A man may join a fraternal organization — he thinks — because this would serve his outer social or business interests, his power of self-expression; but the real cause may be that his "soul" is yearning for deep social fellowship and group belonging — and this in a sense represents a kind of psychological "transference" of the infantile relationship of the boy to the mother in early childhood.

On the other hand, a woman may consciously believe that she is seeking the love of a man as an outlet for her sexual feelings while, in reality (but unconsciously or semi-consciously), she is yearning for a transcendent power that would reveal to her what she essentially is as a spiritual being. The sex play may be more often than not a pretext, a means to an unconscious or dimly conscious end. The love act for her is actually only a symbol; the reality, deep beyond the symbol, is the catalytic process which, in some mysterious manner, will reveal her true self to her. It is, thus, truly an "initiation" occurring in her inner life — an activity in which the unconscious countersexual part of the woman is the active factor. For the man, this act of love is normally a conscious expression of sex power, one of many events (or incidents) in his outer life.

The planet Saturn symbolizes for the woman the figure of the solemn Hierophant who celebrates the mysterious rite of purification from or through — whichever may be the case — her sexual nature. Saturn is in astrology the father image because the father is (or should be, in natural conditions of life) the symbol of authority and mind power; and — as the little girl feels in her psychic depths — he has been her mother's "initiator." The girl, identifying herself in her collective biological-social role with her mother, projects upon her father the unconscious yearning for individualization (which implies mental development). If the father is an unworthy or ineffectual screen for the projection by the girl of her father image, she feels frustrated and will tend subsequently to seek someone able to live up to her ideal image. In her quest, a deep confusion may develop because of a mixing up of the sexual and countersexual drives — and this brings many an American marriage to divorce. The "inner" and the "outer" short-circuit each other.

Likewise, a man's inner longing for fellowship and sharing — of which the Christian Communion and earlier forms of "sacred meals" taken in common in a mystic brotherhood are the religious expressions — may become confused and materialized when mixed up with the outer drive for power and wealth. These constitute a "socialized" kind of sexual and ego-building activity. Religious movements and secret brotherhoods (such as original Free Masonry) become easily perverted or, at least, materialized as the "outer" invades the "inner" and the body draws the soul in its vicious circles of desire.

Practical Applications
The difficulty in making use of the foregoing psychological facts and astrological concepts in the study of an individual's birth-chart is that several other factors may enter into the picture and affect the person's character and life. Above all, pressures from the environment, particularly the nature of the actual everyday relationship between child and parents at an early age and at the time of adolescence (the latter especially for the girl), can alter considerably the natural development of the personality. This relationship operates at both the inner and outer levels — and differently at each level.

For a boy, his mother is outwardly represented in the birth-chart as the Moon. The mother normally envelops the child with attention, care, and love. He depends upon her for his well-being and his meeting as successfully and happily as possible the everyday difficulties of existence. This outer dependence may tenaciously persist after adolescence, and the young man may transfer it to his wife. But there is also a subtler form of relationship affecting the boy's inner life, for he normally identifies himself with his mother in a communion of love participation. He and she constitute a "we" — they belong together — until perhaps this we feeling is shattered by the mother's carelessness or lack of real love. If the we feeling is shattered, the boy will carry through his life a psychic sense of being wounded or a feeling of inner emptiness. He will then seek to fill this emptiness by developing a social and Jupiterian yearning for fellowship, for being loved by his equals, for belonging to a group.

Thus, in a man's chart, the position of both the Moon and Jupiter have to be considered, in addition to that of the Sun, which is always an indicator of the basic drive for outer self-expression and self-aggrandizement, sexually or socially. This drive is instrumented by the Mars function (which rules all muscles and organs of action) and also by the Mercury function (which deals with the intellect and its associative memory). The mutual relationships (aspects, Parts, etc.) existing between these planets should enable one to make a relevant picture of the sexual and countersexual forces at work in the total personality of the man.

In a woman's chart, the Moon represents her female nature and also, during childhood and adolescence, her relationship to her mother, whom she normally wants to imitate. Even if she dislikes and rebels against the mother's behavior, she may eventually see herself repeating some of her mother's life patterns. The countersexual aspect of a girl's personality being represented by Saturn, the astrological aspect between the Moon and Saturn is quite revealing. When these two planets are in opposition, it is quite possible for the girl sooner or later to overcome completely the outer bodily pressures of her sexual drives upon her inner soul consciousness and mind. Yet a negative result can also occur in some cases — i.e., some kind of disassociation of the inner and outer life, perhaps a split personality.

A conjunction of the Moon and Saturn may indicate the beginning of a new cycle of life (if one believes in reincarnation) or a confused sense of insecurity, as if one were functioning in a new and unfamiliar spiritual environment. It may mean emotional involvement with the father; his presence and influence may polarize so strongly the girl's nature that it arouses ambivalent feelings of quasi-incestuous attraction and of guilt. Whether this complex reaction remains in a hazy subconscious background or, on the contrary, haunts the conscious personality depends theoretically on the planetary contacts between the father's and the daughter's charts.

A close contact between a man's Jupiter and a woman's Saturn is usually an indication of a karmic relationship whose roots reach deep in the past; a typical symbol would be a Romeo and Juliet situation. When a man's natal Sun is conjunct Jupiter, his personality tends to become a forceful expression of a deep inner compulsion to fulfill a superpersonal purpose. President Johnson is almost a representative of this situation; but the presence of Mars rising between Jupiter in Leo and the Sun in Virgo confuses the meaning of a conjunction which is neither close nor in one zodiacal sign. The best example is the great prophet, poet, and yogi Sri Aurobindo, whom his disciples consider an "avatar," i.e., the embodied expression of a divine destiny and purpose. He was born with the Sun near Jupiter just rising in Leo.

A retrograde Jupiter in a man's chart and a retrograde Saturn in a woman's chart tend to differentiate more sharply the inner from the outer life, the countersexual from the sexual aspects of the personality. But, I repeat, all such indications are subtly psychological and should hardly be considered in a superficial and quick chart analysis. They belong to a new type of psychological astrology which goes hand in hand with a psychology oriented toward a realization of the total meaning of the individual person.