Moon – Saturn Aspects – The Call of the Hungry Soul

People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way other’s do?

M. F. K. Fisher, The Art of Eating

Life begins with a food fest: a cry, a breast, and chorus of celebratory hormones. A good meal is a nutritive communion: a re-enactment of the primal reunion between body and soul. Bread is broken, wine is shared, and our connection to life is renewed. To comprehend the nature of our relationship with food is to explore the nature of our hunger, for hunger is not only the want of food, it is the longing for love. In myth, fairytale, and legend, to be hungry is to be motherless, homeless and condemned to a life of exile and wandering. It is to be deprived of a place with a community of one’s fellows. Along with mothers, infants, and emotional attachments, food is a lunar concern. Alienation falls under the rulership of Saturn, the guardian of melancholia and solitude. When he fixes his gaze upon the Moon, an enantiodromia, (a tension of extreme opposites) is constellated.

Of the four traditional planetary pairs (Moon-Saturn; Sun-Saturn; Mercury-Jupiter; and Venus-Mars)[1] that cross the spokes of the zodiacal wheel, none are more fundamentally at odds than the Moon and Saturn, guardians of the two solstitial thresholds on the powerful Cardinal Axis (Cancer and Capricorn).

The Moon is Earth’s closest companion: the container of change, flux, and uncertainty. She rules over the watery realms of life, the womb-like receptivity and inter-connectivity required for human nurturing and bonding. As the primordial archetypal image of the mother, the Moon’s placement in the horoscope depicts our experience of giving and receiving nourishment.

Saturn is exactly the opposite. Slow, distant, and solitary, he stands for the drive toward self-sufficiency, solid accomplishment, and singular achievement. As the significator of separateness, he tells us how we must learn to distinguish ourselves from others to build our own unique place in the outer world. Hard, masculine, and authoritative, he insists on the establishment of clear and precise boundaries between this and that. The Moon obliterates such distinctions. Associated with the nocturnal, unconscious dimension of life, she rules over dreams, unspoken communication, and blurs the boundary between past and present. She signifies the instinctual body-memory which ‘remembers’ that which is inaccessible to the rational intellect. Saturn’s concern is with literal daylight reality-concrete facts, rules, order, and structure. Master of the school of hard knocks and hard work, he is associated with life’s obstacles which must be scaled and limits which must be overcome. When Saturn enters human life, he reminds us, relentlessly, that we may not avoid confronting practical, physical, on-the-ground reality.

This inherent contradiction between the Moon and Saturn is deeply rooted in the human imagination. In the Theogony, Hesiod tells us that the Earth Mother, Gaia “first bore a child” who was starry Ouranos “to cover her all over.” Finally, after an endless production of offspring who were forcibly kept hidden in her body, she gave birth to “crafty Kronos, the most terrible of children,” to whom she then slipped an deadly, adamantine sickle that he used to castrate his father/brother. In this singular act of vengeance (for Kronos “hated his lusty father”) the primal family is splintered into a appalling saga of mistrust, envy, generational rivalry, marital discord, and the consequent neglect and abandonment of children-a story which has become the hallmark of human psychological life.[2]

In myth and in astrology, Kronos (Saturn) exemplifies all the attributes of a rigid and disassociated paternal principle: He, as his father before him, swallows his own children one after another. Thus, whenever patriarchal Saturn steps into the lunar realm of the Mother, an uneasy tension of opposites is constellated between birth and death; youth and age; mother and father; home and exile; fertility and barrenness; dependency and self-sufficiency; and nourishment (water) and poison (lead). Life becomes a harsh and uncertain proposition.

Following this motif, classical astrology associates Moon/Saturn conjugations with inauspicious beginnings such as poverty, exposure (infanticide), orphanhood, exile, and starvation. Vettius Valens (2nd century CE) wrote that they signify “those who are dispirited through certain separations or sorrows” and “the deaths of necessary persons.”[3] In the early 20th century, Alfred Witte would put it simply as an “old, single, or unhappy woman.”[4] Isabelle Hickey was only slightly more circumspect. “Emotions are too crystallized,” she says, “not from innate selfishness, but from a hurt to the feelings early in life by a parent.”[5] Most modern astrologers would agree that people born under this signature are burdened with a profound sense of having survived some kind of early hardship. Ties between Saturn and the Moon point unequivocally to some form of early crisis involving the relationship with the mother.

Infancy is a fragile and creative time, marking the most rapid and demanding phase of human development. As we all know, proper emotional and physical food provides nutritive sustenance for this early growth. In astrology, the importance of this process is reflected in the Moon’s governance over what is known as “the mother-infant dyad,” and corresponds to lunar associations with the breasts and the stomach – the source and repository of the primal nectar. For an infant, food is truly the “first abode.” A small baby is unable to differentiate between me-in-here and you-out-there, so all his experience is “mother’s milk” including its own internal responses to bodily and psychic stimuli. From the moment the baby draws in his first breath of oxygen, his entire experience of the world-from eating and elimination to the stimulation of sounds, smells, colors, and shapes-is absorbed into the fabric of its emotional and physical body. One of the most significant experiences in an infant’s life is the onset of powerful hunger pangs (and the bowel’s subsequent urge to evacuate) that awaken it repeatedly from its timeless reverie, and plunge it into a temporal crisis of unnameable fear and helplessness. Yet, within days of birth, the baby will learn that Mother (her smell, the sound of her voice, and soon, her particular facial features) is the source of both food (pleasure) and safety (comfort); that she is the holder and bestower of the warm liquid that obliterates the painful monster of hunger. The child learns quickly to long for the maternal embrace.

When we look to the Moon to provide a description of a person’s emotional life, we are essentially recalling the psyche’s digestion of early life experiences. A mother’s (or primary caretaker’s) unconditional love is essential to healthy human development. If a baby’s hungry cries are met with warm milk that is sweet and plentiful (Moon-Jupiter), and comforting sounds of pleasure and joy (Moon-Venus), she will learn that her fear will be alleviated with love and understanding. As an adult, she will not be afraid to expect that others will be available to help her respond to her needs, which in turn will provide her with a solid basis for the establishment of a healthy sense of identity. However, if the milk is long in coming, and impatiently (Moon-Mars) or grudgingly given (Moon-Saturn), she will learn to believe that life is cold and painful (Moon-Saturn), and that her efforts to reach out for care and comfort (Moon) will be met with some form of rejection (Saturn). Her sense of self-regard will be uncertain and halting. She will be hungry, not only for food, but for love and approval.

Filling the Emptiness

An example of the difficulties portrayed by Moon-Saturn constellations in the horoscope is the eruption of psychosomatic disorders related to eating and food. Over the past few years, I have been struck by the number of women I have encountered with these aspects (particularly the conjunction and the opposition) in their charts who have suffered, at some point during their lives, from bulimia nervosa, a psychological affliction which has become something of an epidemic over the past 25 to 30 years. Bulimic women eat as though they have been literally starved; binging uncontrollably on large quantities of food in short periods of time, which they then purge by taking dangerous doses of laxatives, self-induced vomiting, and/or embarking upon aggressive exercise regimes. For a women caught in its grip, repetitive cycles of stuffing and purging become an all-consuming and dangerous obsession which they, often, repeat several times a day.

Perhaps the most striking feature of bulimia is that the hunger which drives the overeating phase of the cycle is never described in physical terms. Instead it seems to be a deeply instinctive response to acute emotional distress. Food can be a magical gift of comfort and security-the liquid transmission of maternal care and concern. This equation is demonstrated in the all too familiar urge to break out the ice cream during an emotional crisis, harkening back to a time when distress and fear were ameliorated with a warm breast (or its substitute). For the compulsive over-eater, the need for love and acceptance seems to be so overwhelming and deeply buried in the body’s (preverbal) memory that the desire to eat becomes a-temporal. Food becomes a literal and symbolic numinosum; it is sought to assuage an archaic and nameless hungriness that continuously erupts out from a past-from-nowhere. The eternal drive to eat is the body-memory’s attempt to console an unbearable and unexpressed experience of hunger and abandonment, which are experienced as one and the same thing. As one woman put it, “Eating gives me a sense of existence. Sometimes it is the only thing that can fill the horrible emptiness within me.”

Psychological observation has shown that if, during the first months of life, an infant’s cries for food (love) is ignored for too long (or too frequently) his primordial anguish and sense of abandonment becomes “crystalized” into his sense of self-identity and into his experience of the world around him. His early trauma becomes the canvass onto which his later life-experience is projected. Depth psychology has shown that if the Saturnian principle of hardening, restriction, and limit enters the lunar realm before the child is able to metabolize a sustainable bond with the mother (or a primary caretaker), he develops a omnipotent delusion self-sufficiency. By blocking his painful [pre-verbal] experience of rejection and abandonment, the infant retreats into a “heroic withdrawal” in order to cope its experience of unnameable anguish.[6] From this “depressive position” he develops an unrealistic expectation of his own capacity for self-care,[7] which in turn inhibits his later ability to form relationships based upon the principal of give and take. His experience of abandonment is not forgotten; rather it remains repressed within the most inaccessible regions of the unconscious memory: in the bones, cells, muscles, nerves, and organs of his physical body. Later in life, this early suffering can be relived in somatic disorders ranging from migraines, eczema and psoriasis to digestive problems, auto-immune diseases, allergies-and in a particularly modern expression-eating disorders.[8]

Sarah Ferguson has the Moon in Aries in the 5th house, square Saturn in Capricorn in the 2nd. (see birth chart) Her difficulties with food showed up between twelve and thirteen years of age when her mother divorced her father to marry an Argentinean lover (Moon ruling the 9th); this left Sarah feeling completely forsaken (Saturn) during a crucial period. She doesn’t remember “feeling unhappy,” and to quash her guilty feeling (Saturn) that she was somehow responsible for her mother’s abandonment (Saturn) of the family (Moon), she “just ate and put on weight.” Later, upon her marriage to the Duke of York, she found herself pilloried by the tabloid press (Saturn ruling the 3rd house) as the “Duchess of Pork” due to her obvious struggles with her weight, as well as her compulsive (Saturn in the 2nd) and conspicuous spending (Moon, ruler of the 8th house of debts in the 5th house of gambling and extravagance). In 1996, after a highly publicized and particularly humiliating revelation of an extra-marital affair, Sarah and her husband, Andrew, divorced. “Overweight, in debt and terribly unhappy,” she hit rock-bottom, and then – in true Aries style – she fought back with discipline (Saturn), determined to gain control over her finances (Saturn in the 2nd) and to put and end to her pattern of yo-yo dieting. Almost overnight, she was transformed from a ‘Royal black sheep’ (Saturn square Aries Moon!) into a model of good taste and decorum. In 1997, she managed to land a lucrative contract with the weight-loss company, Weight Watchers. In her role as a spokesperson for the company, she helps women to identify with what drives them to cycles of eating and starving, Sarah has identified four triggers in her own life which signal a compulsion to overeat: “feeling sad and lonely;” “traveling” (i.e., leaving home); “becoming overtired;” and being “overwhelmed by too many obligations” -all classic manifestations of a Moon-Saturn aspect. She credits her ability to identify the roots of her emotional needs and her reliance on food as a being the genesis of a real breakthrough in her life, and has allowed her to experience both happiness and autonomy.[9]

Of course, it would be erroneous to assume a concrete correlation between a specific psychological disorder and a particular astrological configuration. Not everyone who has a Moon/Saturn aspect is destined to struggle with bulimia or some other eating disorder, nor must it be present in a natal horoscope to erupt. Many people who have this aspect in their charts have discovered productive and creative ways to integrate the contradiction inherent in this planetary relationship – such as the Dalai Lama, (see birth chart) who was born under the opposition and, who in his exile has brought a message to the world that embraces the totality of all experience.

As James Hillman, author of The Soul’s Code, says: “Our lives may be determined less by our childhood then by the way we learned to imagine our childhoods.”[10] Natal aspects constitute what Hillman would call a particular “archetypal perspective.” In other words, the astrological Moon provides an archetypal portrait of a child’s inner image of the mother, rather than description as to who she really is. For instance, child who is “wired” to view life with an attitude (Moon) of scarcity (Saturn) will be more likely to respond to change (Moon) as though it is threatening and dangerous (Saturn), rather than as a series of hopeful and interesting opportunities (Moon-Jupiter). For this reason, it would be simplistic and counterproductive to blame Mother for all of our suffering, who is a human being and not an archetype. She may be genuinely trying to do as best she can, within the constraints of her own emotional and physical circumstances. A Saturnian mother may be an inveterate worrier. Her life may, indeed, be riddled with all sorts of dangers and uncertainties, and surround her infant with an aura of fear and worry instead of the safety and security she intends. Even when a child does indeed experience literal abandonment, the fault may not lie with the mother herself (though it is unrealistic to expect an infant to understand this), but with a patriarchal family or culture who withholds its support.

Deeply embedded within a natal Moon-Saturn constellation is the image of an “old soul”-a child born into a reservoir of wisdom beyond her years who has the capacity to take on responsibilities out of step with her chronological age. As one woman with a Capricorn Moon, who (due to her mother’s death) found herself taking on the role of a surrogate mother to a much younger sibling said: “I was never a baby girl. I was born a baby woman.” James Hillman has described old as “. . . independent of years. There are old children with old eyes, whose oldness displays their distinctive character . . . old souls who seem to be waiting to catch up to the time when they can finally come into their own. Estranged in childhood, distressed in youth, they have been old from the beginning” (emphasis added).[11] Reinhold Ebertin has associated this combination with positive attributes like discipline, thoughtfulness, and self control, as well as with a sense of duty, and the capacity to relate to others with conscientious care and attention.[12] Moon-Saturn children are often those who step forward during times of crisis, to assume responsibility for others, as well as themselves. Often, they find themselves “mothering” their own mothers.

The Soul’s Hunger

Lauren was born with the Moon and Saturn in Taurus (see birth chart). The only child of her parent’s second marriage, she was born into a family which was deeply divided and desperately unhappy. Her earliest memories are of tremendous chaos, and a dreadful fear of being alone. Her mother (herself an orphan with a Moon-Saturn opposition) was depressed, alcoholic and prone to violent eruptions of anger. She was consumed with bitterness toward Lauren’s father, whom she resented for what she saw as a failure on his part to rescue her from her chronic unhappiness. It was never a secret in the family that Lauren’s conception and birth had been desperate strategy to hang onto the security (Moon-Saturn) of her new marriage. As her destructive behavior increasingly drove family members and friends away, she reflexively turned to Lauren for the unquestioning love and devotion that only a mother (or dependent and frightened child) can give. By the time Lauren entered primary school, she had become her mother’s sole caretaker and confidante. Her childhood was consumed by a struggle to assuage both her own and her mother’s guilt, and futile attempts forestall the inevitable drunken rages which could instantaneously plunge her entire world into an abyss of terror. Lauren was utterly forsaken by her mother’s inability to mediate her own experience of primal abandonment (Moon-Saturn), yet she adored her (Moon exalted in Taurus) and relied on her as her only anchor in a constantly shifting world (Mercury, ruler IC conjoined with Moon and Saturn). She also felt deeply responsible for her mother’s misery (Moon-Saturn), and by the time she reached adolescence, she was completely enmeshed in her mother’s fearfully fragmented and apocalyptic world-view.

Soon after Lauren’s first transiting Saturn and progressed lunar oppositions triggered her natal Moon-Saturn conjunction in the 3rd house, she was sent to boarding school in a foreign country where lonely “beyond words,” she fell into a vicious cycle of binging and purging. “I felt invisible,” she said. “Like I was living in a black hole. . . I wanted so badly to be thin . . . for people to like me, but I couldn’t fit in. Only food erased the loneliness and I would eat and eat until I couldn’t feel anything. Then I would end up hating myself, and I would have to throw it all up like I could just regurgitate all that was hateful and despicable in me. But it never worked and I would begin to eat again to bury the empty pain . . . Once I started to eat, I couldn’t stop, no matter how hard I tried. I was afraid that I could never fill the pit of loneliness that gnawed at my core. It was a living hell.” Notice how Lauren reflexively turned inward (to an unremembered past) to alleviate her profound grief. She had no idea how to reach out to others (with words or gestures) for the support that she needed during this difficult transitional time.

In patriarchal cultures, it is generally the mothers who nurture and preserve social and religious traditions. This is reflected in one of the astrological Moon’s significations: the polis, or “the city.”[13] In mundane astrology, Moon-Saturn configurations can depict a shame-based culture[14] wherein “a person’s own conception of who he is and the conception of others are therefore identical.”[15] In such cultures, individual development is suppressed by unforgiving “shoulds” and “oughts” that have been interjected into an inner expectation of absolute conformity. For a person whose identity is defined by cultural ideals, falling short can be catastrophic: rendered utterly unlovable and is “identical with being abnormal, sick ‘leprous’ and above all ‘condemned'”[16] to a life of exile upon the rim of a chaotic abyss of humiliation and defilement from which there is no [known] return or redemption.

Moon-Saturn women whose sense of meaning and purpose tends to be centered around their relationships with family and community are especially vulnerable to such shaming. We live in a youth-obsessed culture that ignores ‘old women’ (another literal delineation of a Moon-Saturn configuration). Nor do we have much time for “fat” women, “lonely women,” “poor women,” “barren women,” or so-called “ugly women”. Those who haven’t figured out how [to afford] to maintain the illusion of living forever at the height of a wide-eyed estrogen flush are increasingly sidelined. Popular images of women who mature into a graceful acceptance of their body’s aging process are rare, and it is hard to avoid the feeling that a woman’s primary responsibility is to stay under thirty and to always be, well, “just great!” There is an implicit [Saturnian] accusation in this state of affairs which whispers of the woman whose flesh and fortunes have so “shamefully” fallen: she must have done something really horrific to bring this upon herself!

The lunar dimension longs for an immersion into the collective, whereas the Saturnian principle drives us toward conscious differentiation and reminds us that we cannot develop and maintain a singular identity while straining for approval from others. For a Moon-Saturn woman, tyrannized by her need for cultural (i.e., maternal) approval, the transition into an autonomous maturity can provoke a crisis of abandonment, either actual or emotional. Confronted with the Saturnian ‘reality’ that she has [necessarily] failed to measure up to collective ideals, she can collapse into a soul-wrenching posture of intense humiliation and shame that reconstitutes her early experience of unbearable abandonment. Etymologically, to be abandoned means literally to be “un-called” or to be “without a destiny”.[17] It is to be severed from a remembrance of one’s real identity. As astrologers know, to ignore[18] the call to be who and what we truly are can unleash the wheels of fate an ‘inner necessity'[19] can ‘arrange’ for us to be-either literally or metaphorically-tossed out of the collective fold. For Moon-Saturn women, the call-to-destiny is exceptionally demanding. Accepting that she can never, ever be perfectly “perfect” requires the cultivation of courage, humility, and self-honesty-all pre-requisites for the development of a whole personality, the true calling of Moon/Saturn configurations.

In Lauren’s case, she had to sacrifice (which literally means “to perform a sacred act”) her dependency upon her mother, and by extension, her desire for the unquestioning approval for her family and society. When she was finally able to make the break, she began to develop a powerful sense of her own identity. She gave up her belief that she should be cute and petite and learned to embrace the dignified beauty bestowed by her strong, tall frame. Above all, she found security (Moon) in a newfound sense of autonomy (Saturn).

Inner Reunion

According to the psychologist C.G. Jung, ‘wholeness’ symbolizes the integrative unity of the Self which is able to contain its opposite-chaos-without disintegrating into “nothingness.” Just as the Moon rules over the generation of new life, Saturn is present at every ending, including an infant’s initial separation from the maternal womb. They mark temporal goal posts in the process of coming-to-be and passing-away. As a dual unity, they represent an essential coincidentia oppositorum: the androgynous and integrative unity that simultaneously incorporates the principles of both the patriarchy (Saturn) and the matriarchy (Moon), or in Platonic terms, the “Same” and the “Other.”

A life that is both authentic and generative requires that both be fully honored and integrated. While Moon-Saturn aspects often manifest as a chronic, unrequited hunger for love and security, they can also liberate us from an unconscious bondage (Saturn) to the past (Moon), whether that past is a catastrophic childhood or a frozen social or religious tradition. When Moon-Saturn individuals are able to integrate the existential “fact” of their aloneness in the world, they can become tremendous reservoirs (Moon) of discipline, strength, and wisdom (Saturn). Thus, their suffering is transmuted into genuine and compassionate wisdom. The archaic split between a soulful yearning for eternal unity (Moon) and the temporal and physical borderland between life and death (Saturn) can be consciously tended, assimilated, and digested.

As Moon-Saturn natives discover their innate capacity to sustain the tension between separation and union, they become able to incarnate a unique calling-into-the-world which is, at once, unrepeatable and universal. They therefore become the recipients and the transmitters of genuine wisdom, the mana, the sacred food which is the fruit of a life lived well and artfully bestowed, together, by Saturn and the Moon, upon their chosen ones.

Notes

1. In traditional astrology, a distinct pattern is seen among the seven visible planets (including the Sun and Moon), based upon the relationships to their domiciles. Beginning with the Moon, ruler of the feminine sign of Cancer, and the Sun, lord of the masculine sign of Leo, we can see that each is opposes by one of the two signs that Saturn rules: Capricorn and Aquarius, respectively. Mercury and Jupiter rule the four mutable signs (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, and Pisces), and their domiciles form a grand cross. Likewise, Venus and Mars together rule a cardinal axis (Libra-Aries) and a fixed axis (Taurus-Scorpio).

2. Hesiod, Theogony, trans. Richard S. Caldwell, Focus Classical Library, 1987, pp. 125-180.

3. Vettius Valens, The Anthology: Book 1,. trans. Robert Schmidt, Golden Hind Press, 1993, p. 2.

4. Alfred Witte, Rules for Planetary Pictures, trans. Richard Svehla, Penelope Publications, 1998, p. 120.

5. Hickey, Isabelle, Astrology: A Cosmic Science, Altieri Press, 1970, p. 176.

6. Mara Sidoli, When the Body Speals: The Archetypes in the Body, Routledge, 2000, pp. 16-17.

7. Ibid., p .64. Melanie Klein’s term to describe the “ambivalent stance” assumed by an infant who simultaneously experiences both positive and negative feelings toward the same “object”, i.e. mother.

8. Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation, Inner Traditions, 1985, p. 59.

9. During 1996 and 1997, transiting Pluto conjoined Sarah’s 1st house Jupiter; transiting Jupiter conjoined her Saturn in the 2nd while squaring her 5th house Moon. Saturn entered Aries and throughout the second half of 1996 and the early part of 1997, crossed back and forth over Sarah’s Moon – Saturn square. During this time, her weight reached 222 lbs. and her financial debts skyrocketed to £4 million.

10. James Hillman, The Souls’ Code: In Search of Character and Calling, Random House, 1996, p. 4.

11. James Hillman, The Force of Character and the Lasting Life, Random House, 1999, p. 41.

12. Reinhold Ebertin, Combination of Stellar Influences, trans. Alfred G. Roosedale and Linda Kratzsche, American Federation of Astrologers, 1994, p. 102.

13. In Hellenistic astrology as well as in modern mundane astrology, the Moon signifies, “the masses”, or “the gathering of crowds.” Jung identified this principle as “the collective unconscious” – emphasizing the unconscious, instinctive, undifferentiated dual unity inherent in and necessary to the mother-infant coupling. See Valens, 1993, p. 2.

14. Examples include the Islamic Republic of Iran (Apr 1, 1979) with a square between Moon at 6 Ge 46 and Saturn at 8 Vi18 and the now deposed Republic of Iraq which was established under an opposition (Jul 14, 1958) between the Moon at 19 Ge 01 and Saturn at 20 Sg 21. Campion, Nicholas, The Book of World Horoscopes, Bristol, UK: Cinnabar Books, 1996, pp. 205-208.

15. W. H. Auden as quoted in Edelman, Sandra, Turning the Gorgon: A Meditation on Shame, 1998, p. 20.

16. Neumann, Erich, The Child: Structure and Dynamics of a Nascent Personality, trans. Ralph Manheim, Boston: Shambala, 1990, p. 86.

17. According to Webster’s, the verb abandon means: 1. Give up (something) completely; 2. to leave, forsake, desert; 3. to yield completely. When the verb becomes a noun (or a state) we begin to see some of the ambiguity inherent in abandonment. 1. surrender to one’s feelings or impulses; letting oneself go, 2. Unrestrained freedom of activity. Surrender leading to liberation! The word becomes more paradoxical when we examine the Germanic roots. In Old English, the word hannon means to” summon”, “proclaim” which is itself related to the Middle English ban “to issue an edict of proclamation” and “to forbid or prohibit”, or more archaically, “to curse or condemn”. Thus, we could say that to be abandoned is to be “left alone”, and subject to (or condemned by) the power of the call (the summoning)! See Marion Woodman’s The Pregnant Virgin, pp 33-34.

18. The ousia (essential being or nature) of Saturn is ananke and agnoia. In Greek, Agnoia means ignorance, or more literally, to not notice or see: to refuse remembrance. See Valens, 1993, p. 7.

19. In The Myth of Er in Plato’s Republic, Ananke is the implacable Goddess Necessity (the fate which binds and constrains) who holds on her lap the “whorl” or spindle of the Cosmos around which the planets, Sun and Moon spin in eternal fixed orbits. It was she who binds to men their chosen lots (fate) by assigning them a personal daemon, whose task is to constrain the soul’s motion so that it stays true to the image affixed to their particular image (i.e. horoscope). See Hillman, 1996, p. 44-49.

 Darcy Woodall

See also: Moon Saturn Aspects – The Karmic Legacy

Last updated on May 19, 2017 at 4:52 am. Word Count: 4836