Memories are meant to fade, Lenny. They’re designed that way for a reason.
– Angela Basset (Moon conjunct Pluto)

For Kierkegaard (Moon in Cancer) living in memories was the perfect life, because memories nourish us more than any reality. According to Kierkegaard in memories we find safety we can’t find in real life. But for many of us it is just the opposite: the memories are the hardest thing in our lives…

I remember a TV-program in which a man asked another whether he had any negative childhood memories. The man looked baffled: Are there any other kind? He must have had a Moon-Pluto configuration lurking somewhere.

“The capacity to forget is a gift of grace…”, wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Moon conjunct Pluto).

Instead of finding their happiness in memories, some Moon-Plutonians can stand almost anything in their lives except their memories; shutting out all their memories is the only way for them to live without constant pain. Most of them learn at some stage of their lives that they need an ability to forget. And that forgetting isn’t a bad thing in itself. Laurens van der Post (Moon conjunct Pluto in dwads) wrote how he learned in Africa from the natural peoples that there really is a positive aspect to ‘forgetting’. For most Moon-Plutonians there truly is.

BLOCKING THE PAST OUT?

In the memory of oppression, oppression perpetuates itself. The scar does the work of the wound. That is the real tragedy: that injustice retains the power to distort long after it has ceased to be real. It is a posthumous victory for the oppressors . – Leon Wieseltier, Scar Tissue.

Many strong Moon-Plutonians have lived through such horrible experiences that their only way to keep their sanity is to find a way of escape, at least emotionally and mentally, if not physically. Nature comes sometimes to their help: Those who have lived through tremendous suffering in their childhood may have a spontaneous loss of many of their childhood memories, some Moon-Plutonians lose all their memories – and find it to be one of their greatest blessings.

Irene with her Moon conjunct Pluto on IC had a very unstable home environment: an over-possessive and devouring mother and frequent changes of residence. As a small child Irene felt so insecure that she used to gather all her personal things under her mattress apparently hoping that this way she would still see them in the morning. All her sufferings left Irene without any memories of her childhood, she doesn’t even have any dreams about her family. In her first memories Irene is already over ten years old – and even those memories are all about things happening somewhere else, not in her home. Everything about her home and family is just a big black blur.

Yet Irene is sure that in her case it is not a question of an amnesia in the ordinary sense. She believes that in her mind there isn’t any memory traces at all, and that there never were. All the horrors of her childhood drove her so much “out of her consciousness” that most of the time she wasn’t present at all. Thus there couldn’t be any memories. In addition to her Moon-Pluto Irene has a very strong and afflicted Neptune, which may well reflect her experience of being able to escape hardships by distancing herself so totally out of the situation that in her mind she was somewhere else. She was living deep within, in inner worlds, yet she was not autistic. No one on her surroundings saw her mind travels, others saw her as quite normal.

Irene may well be right in claiming that there aren’t any memory traces in her mind. Some scientific researchers have come to a conclusion that in some severe long-standing trauma cases some part of the brain (hippocampus, I think) may have been so completely shut down by the stress that it had no capacity to form a memory during the event, thus it will always be impossible to “dredge up a conscious memory of the event”. If no memory was formed, no memory can be recovered. It is quite likely that many such cases, just like Irene, have strong Pluto and Neptune configurations, probably influencing the Moon, the IV house and/or the IC. Mercury is also often involved.

It is often said that Pluto on the Moon ‘kills’ the feelings, but perhaps Pluto doesn’t kill your feelings, it just kills those feelings that are not yours at all. If your personal feelings have got too mixed up with collective feelings, Pluto may kill the feelings until you somehow manage to extricate yourself from the collective emotional energies that prevent you from experiencing your own feelings.

Betty Lundsted writes about Moon-Pluto conjunction saying that:

with a littler effort, anyone can begin to recall early childhood memories”.

Perhaps most people could, but why should everyone. Some childhoods are best forgotten – and there may be childhoods like Irene’s without any true memories to recall.

LIVING IN FUTURE

A retentive memory is a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.

– Elbert Hubbard (Moon trine Pluto)

The best memories are those we have forgotten

wrote Alfred Capus (Moon sextile Pluto).

Memories are a way of re-living something. For a Moon-Plutonian it can mean reliving all those horrors many times over, thus meeting constantly people that once tortured you and made you suffer excruciatingly.

Because of a vulnerability created when you had yet no power to resist, all those past figures may still have the power to torture you or to bring you down. Life in some horror families may have been so oppressing that having no memories is what you need to live on. Memory loss is then nature’s way to heal and to protect someone living in overwhelming conditions.

Yet, although you can shut memories out – or even prevent them from forming to begin with – you can’t shut all the pain out, it has to be dealt with. Moon-Plutonians often act as psychic sponges, they feel everything that is going around them. They even may assume symptoms of other people. And it often seems to be their unavoidable fate that whenever there is a crisis situation somewhere, Moon-Plutonians will also be there. Perhaps it is because after having worked through their own pain, they have developed special talents for understanding and solving crisis situations in others’ lives.

There are many ways of dealing with the pain, diving deep into memories isn’t the best way for everyone. Moon-Plutonians may have no memories. And even if they have, those memories might just open their psyches to the influence of a destructive family daimon. And thus make them once again vulnerable to all those past horrors. Instead, they need to learn how to rise above it all, which may be quite difficult because their family may feel threatened and thus unwilling to loosen the grip of their very own burden bearer.

Some Moon-Plutonians go to therapy – or even become therapists themselves. Others learn to handle their pain through a religious or spiritual vocation. Some learn to turn their past horrors and sufferings to creative power working through their pain in their creative work. At this stage psychic practices – like reliving their past incarnations – may prove very dangerous and also unreliable. The information allegedly coming from the Moon-Plutonian’s past, might come from other sources, even from the unconscious of their torturers.

A long-standing trauma often creates strong unconscious psychic links in the victim – which will die in time if you let them be. But not if you open up doors voluntarily. There is always a reason why nature closes doors, and it’s seldom wise to go against nature. And with Moon-Pluto it may not be necessary either: Moon-Plutonians have such deep insights that they would probably learn very little from reliving the past. They have lived the pain through thousand times already, getting clear memory pictures would just activate that pain.

What’s gone and what’s past help, should be past grief.

-William Shakespeare

Last updated on June 9, 2015 at 12:00 am. Word Count: 1354