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The Moon
Edited by Daniela Grazioli
There is a trembling Pisces moon with tears inside, a theatrical and dramatic Leo moon, the fearless and irritable Aries moon, the exacting and algid Libra moon … and so on, each one has its special moon.
But what is at the end this moon which also in astrology keeps the same charm and mystery that it has up there in the sky?
To do list its symbology (the house, the mother, childhood, sleep and so on.) like a shopping list is extremely reductive and far from its nature.
Iridescent and hidden silver threads connect these symbols between them in an inextricable and mysterious design to introduce us, in which we must get strip the cold logic of reason and listen to the voice of our emotions, since the moon is first of all our emotionality, our most instinctive and natural way of reacting to the facts of life.
The moon is our house since it shows us what things support us emotionally, that make us feel well, and in our house or in our room or in what we have chosen as our space, we are well, we feel ourselves protégés and feel confident. "My house, my house, although you are small, you seem like an abbey to me ", declares a popular saying , this wisdom is the house the moon tells us about.
The house, being the extension of the motherly embrace that received and looked after us, and therefore the moon is also the mother and childhood. And according to its position in the chart and the aspects that it receives from other planets, we can get an idea of the problems and of the gifts that our childhood and the relationship with our mother have left us.
In the same way, the moon is the image of the ideal companion a man looks for and it has its roots in the image of a female that was formed in the original relationship with the mother, the first great love of every man. The mother is also the first object of love for each woman, that from an object of desire transforms itself into the first and fundamental model / object of identification which each girl learns and aspires to. Think of all the times you put on the delightful high heeled shoes of your mother, or have observed her with that charming and limpid look that only children have, while you put lipstick on your lips, and then, facing the mirror, imitated her gestures feeling itself beautiful and important …
The traces of these dear and dreamy motherly images are buried inside of us, but they keep the same intensity and the same dazzling aspect they had then, they are on the border line between the woman whom we believe exists and our most profound womanliness which is often unexplored.
In the chart of a woman, therefore, the moon is the woman who she might be if she good get rid of her problems and fill the emptiness; it is the image of the mother who lives in her mind and still supports or conditions it; and therefore it is the mother who is or will be with her children; and then, … and then there are many other things.
The moon is a frontier planet: it slips slowly and silently onto the landscapes of the I, lighted by the light of the conscience and the unknown and dark regions of the unconscious, where it often and willingly crosses the frontier.
The moon together with the sun symbolises the polarity of male and female that are present in each one of us. If the sun looks ahead and with the light of the conscience it wants to be distinguished and light our own uniqueness, the moon looks back and wants to return to merging in the warm and cosy lap from which the life draws origin. The cycle of the moon is in fact intimately tied to the rhythms of nature and to the phases of the life, one is born, is grows up, blooms, withers, and dies.
In mythology we find certain goddesses who embody the feminine principle and illustrate that it is possible to express such an archetype in youth and in the maturity of a woman. Artemis / Diana, Athena / Minerva and Hestia / Vesta are three Virgo goddesses, in the sense what they do not belong to anybody, only to themselves.
Artemis is the Virgo hunter who lives in the woods in the company of the nymphs and she was the protector of girls from the age of marriage. She appears as a strict and savage character ready to kill to save a companion. Woe betide the man who sees her or her companions while they were swimming in the fresh waters of lakes or sylvan brooks. The hunter Actaeon who caught the goddess while she was bathing, was transformed into a deer for punishment and then torn to pieces by the dogs. Artemis is bound to an image of very united young woman with other women, as they demonstrate in fact by passing time in the company of nymphs and her interventions to help her companions. When the moon appeared in the sky, Artemis was always present and plants and animals danced. Astrologically the Artemis image is bound to the moons in the air signs, in fact women with an air moon have a great need for contact, communicating, mental stimuli, that they feel more they think and have the problem of managing to enter into contact and to recognise their emotional needs and those of others.
Athena/Minerva is a Virgo warlike woman who was born out of the head of Zeus, jumping out of the divine head with a battle cry that resounded so far to make the land and sky shudder, and was completely covered with weapons of brilliant gold and brandished a pointed lance, and in this way she presented to the astonished gods of Olympus. Already this birth, which was not very orthodox, which makes her Athena a daughter that was given birth by her father, underlines some characteristics of the goddess, first of all the “motherly one“ of Athena, who does not inherit anything, and secondly she is the goddess with “wise advice”, which indicated by the fact of coming out of the head / mind of Zeus, and lastly she was not born little, undefended and naked, she came into the light already an adult and fully armed. Athena, has nothing of what is symbolically seen as a "female ", on the contrary her behaviour is very male, for example she loves training for combat or riding horses and when she is called upon to try Clytemnestra for his crimes she condemns him without pity. Athena is bound to an image of woman who denies and refuses her own female part, and she was deprived in childhood of an effective contact with a motherly figure, freezing the own emotional life, and transforming her into a kind of Amazon. Astrologically the Athena figure is joined to the moons strongly characterised by Saturn.
lastly, Hestia/Vesta, the Virgo of the hearth, the only one among them in Olympus that never takes leaves for discussions or wars. Also Hestia, like Artemis and Athena, refuses each pretender and Virgo swears on the head of Zeus to remain, to never belong to anybody, Zeus in exchange ensures the first victim to her for each sacrifice and gives her gifts, since she will not be able to have weddings presents, to "be" a fire. Hestia is the gentlest, the most honest and charitable goddesses of Olympus, the fire of which Hestia is a keeper is sacred, woe betide if it goes out, the house or the city in which such a fire goes out is struck by misfortune. Hestia is therefore present in each house through the fire. No iconographic representations of her exist, it seems that anciently symbol of Hestia was a brazier, whose fire was maintained living under the ash, around this fire that was symbolically and practically the "centre", the family or the clan was brought together. This goddess is bound to the image of a woman in a certain sense without a face, women who do not present a clear and definite image in the world , but very much live in it. Astrologically speaking Hestia joins the moon’s strongly Neptune aspect that underlines the mystic aspect of the female.
In these three Virgo goddessess, Virgos in the sense that they have made a choice of independence, the construction of their identity does not pass through any other, but is completely pivoted on themselves. The contrary happens instead with the next three figures of goddesses, Demeter / Ceres, Hera / Juno, Persephone / Proserpina, whose events are all determined by the relationship that each one of them has with the others, or like a mother, a daughter or a wife. For all three the relationship is what gives substance to their identity, without the relation they lose their meaning, they do not exist. In such a relationship each of them, in different ways, would undergo physical or psychological violence, because, the myth tells us, it is extremely dangerous to build one’s own identity only based on the relationship one has with others.
She was, the goddess of marriage, she was the wife of Zeus. The god initially courted her without success, until he transformed himself into a cold cuckoo, she softened up, brought it near to her breast to warm it up, and suddenly Zeus came back to his divine form and raped the goddess who was thus forced to marry him. it is said the night of their wedding lasted for 300 years, in fact Hera would regularly bathe in the fountain of Canato whose water each time gave her back her virginity. After this long and impassioned honey moon, Zeus went back to his habits of a seducer, and their life was transformed into a sequence of arguments and revenge. She was, in fact, offended and humiliated by the continuous unfaithfulness of her husband, tortuous tricks were avenged plotting against him and with their children persecuting his lovers and their illegitimate offspring, in any case she always returned to Zeus to which, in a certain sense, she had entrusted her life. The Hera problem and that of women who live only through their marriage, is that this great affective and emotional dependence based on the relationship is the only guarantee of their security to the point that often it needs to be saved at all costs, means cancelling oneself out. In this way, if in spite of their sacrifice and their will they lose the relationship, they also lose their being. In this myth it does not happen, in fact the myth traces a traces a possible solution the problem. in fact, Hera, with an act of great personal creativity, decides to have a son alone without Zeus, a son who is only hers, her exclusive creation, in such a way as to create her own space inside which she is released from her dependence. Astrologically the Hera figure is bound to the moons strongly characterised by Pluto, and in fact women with such moons have a strong need to be independent and to have their own power and creativity.
Demeter, the goddess of wheat, of the crops, is not married to anybody, but she is a Core mother. The events that the myth tells us of Demeter are all based on the mother / daughter relationship and on the evolution that the present motherly side in the "female one" must complete. Demeter is firstly the mother who is nourishing, protects and joyfully looks after Core, her innocent daughter, that after the kidnapping and the rape inflicted by Hade's, will be called Persephone, the Lady of the reign of the dead. Demeter loses her daughter, loses everything and for nine days and nine nights and despairingly looks for Core, calling out her name unceasingly. On the tenth day she reaches Eleusi where she nurses of the son of the king of the city, thus continuing in this way to exalt her motherly function. Then she leaves the palace and is by now sure that her daughter has been kidnapped by Hades, so instead of going back to Olympus, she furiously keeps on wandering around the land, stopping the trees from giving fruits and the grass growing, so that men started starving. In vain she is implored several times to return to Olympus, but Demeter is inflexible and swears that the land will remain sterile until Core is returned to her. Core is not given back to her and the pain makes Demeter become sterile, unable to generate even Mother earth. In the end Core / Persephone will be able to return to Demeter each year and to pass with her two thirds of the year and with hades, her spouse, the last third. Received with pleasure by Demeter accepts and is reunited with her daughter with great joy , and knows that Core, the innocent "girl" who disappeared, is now Persephone, the spouse of hades and queen of the underworld, therefore their mother / daughter relationship is permanently changed. Demeter can no longer be the motherly source of support and protection in a physical sense, but must become a psychic mother able to leave her daughter free to follow her path. Lastly, Demeter in the central figure of the Eleusini Mysteries, a mysterious religion whose rites are celebrated each year to Eleusi, acquiring a spiritual valence, now that Demeter is Moreno longer only the mother Persephone, but becomes the spiritual "mother" of all her followers. Astrologically, the Demeter image is bound to the moon in Taurus or to the moons very much characterised by Jupiter, and women with these moons in fact have a very strong motherly sense and must learn to accept letting their children grow up.
Persephone, when she is Core, the sweet and innocent girl, the adored daughter of Demeter, lets herself live rather than just lives, unaware of the dangers that she does not see and does not want to see because she is not aware of them, and one day she easily lets herself be seduced by the colours and perfume of a deceitful flower and picks it. What happens next is that the land opens up to allow Hades to reach the earth, and then the rape, the kidnapping, the events that do not seem not to have any connection with her act of picking a flower; in fact all this symbolically represents the a clash with reality and the acquisition of awareness happens in such dramatic way because Core has kept on postponing this encounter kept on delegating her decisions to others, and she is therefore forced to grow up and to take responsibility for his life in a traumatic way. The descent to the underworld transforms Core into Persephone, transforms the girl into a "woman" able to be a spouse and to govern a reign, which is how Hermes finds her when he gives hades the request by Zeus to let Persephone return to her mother. Persephone returns, but before going up to earth again she tastes a red pomegranate, the food of the dead, and in this way becomes permanently attached to hades and to his reign, to which she always returns. The myth then tells us about Persephone as a benign and merciful Queen, who is faithful to her spouse. The Core/Persephone figure is tied to the image of women that labour to become and to be recognised like the subjective truths in their life, and generally it regards sweet women who maintain something infantile about them that leads them to attribute the responsibility of the events that happen in their life to others. Astrologically these characteristics can more easily be found in the Cancer moons or the ones tied to Venus.
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