For parents, I am going to talk about the Sun and the Moon, about the 4th and 10th houses, and also a little bit about Saturn.
Symbols don’t belong to astrology exclusively. They belong to the human soul.
What the Sun and the Moon mean for astrologers is no different from what they mean when they appear in dreams, in children’s drawings, in myths, fairy tales or spiritual traditions.
In the previous video about children in the birth chart, I followed the symbolic thread starting with the Moon meaning mother: there are no mothers without children, the Moon then also means children. Children are emotional and vulnerable beings and they have plenty of needs. The Moon also means emotions, vulnerability and needs etc.
This is to show that symbols are not concepts with precise definitions. They are like fingers pointing in a particular direction.
Let’s follow another thread. Moon is Mother.
What else is Mother? Earth is Mother. We are out of astrology, but we are going to come back to it..
Mother Earth gives us our bodies, she provides the plants and animals that we eat, the materials to build our houses and the whole environment in which plants, animals and humans can thrive, and of course, Mother Earth also provides us with a human environment: family, tribe, nation… We are children of the Earth. By the way, I am not a vegan but I deeply respect those who are. Now, even if we don’t eat animals, some other animals do…
You must have noticed: food, shelter, environment, family, tribe, roots… These are all keywords associated with the Moon in astrology.
Our mother is not just our own mother but she is Mother Earth and our relationship with her is symbolised by the Moon.
Let me read a sentence from Mircea Eliade, in The Sacred and the Profane.
“Woman is mystically held to be one with the earth, childbearing is seen as a variant, on the human scale, of the telluric fecundity.”
When we were babies, our mother was the world to us. Then, as we grew up, our experience of being provided with food, shelter and the security to belong expanded from mother to family and home, from home to village or city, and eventually from village or city to motherland and from motherland to mother earth. The Moon in the astrological chart reflects all these circles.
Now, back to symbolic language. We are not children of the Earth only. We are children of Heaven and Earth.
Again, heaven is not part of the astrological indicators! Heaven is above, it manifests as the sky, with all the stars and the planets, the Moon and of course the Sun in it.
Actually, the sky in the zodiac is symbolised by Aquarius. Not only Uranus, modern ruler of the sign, is the God of the Sky, Gaia’s lover, but Aquarius, the Water Bearer himself, is. I used to think that Aquarius, an Air sign with Water in it, was a symbol of the clouds. But maybe the cloud is only the jug, the container carried by the Water Bearer, the sky that fecundates the Earth when pouring down as rain…
Aquarius is opposed to Leo, ruled by the Sun. Opposed signs show stark contrasts between the two opposite polarities of one axis. Opposites coincide: what would be the sun without the sky, what would be the sky without the sun?
We are children of Heaven and Earth, we are children of the Sun and the Moon, there is no contradiction between these two symbolic statements.
The great cosmic forces manifest, for babies, as Mum and Dad. The Sun symbolises our relationship with Father Sky, with Spirit. This started with how we related to our own particular Dad, when we were small and he was representing the whole world beyond mother to us.
Spirit is a word that’s difficult to define, we can think of the meaning or purpose we give to our life, our beliefs and our experiences of a mystical nature, and our own unique individuality seeking for expression and creation. We may also include culture – as opposed to nature – in the key words.
Now of course men and women are only representing Mother Earth and Father Sky for small children. Our reality is that we are all made of flesh and spirit… and we can also consider that there is a Spirit of the Earth and a Spirit of the Sky and that ultimately it all comes from the Unique Great Spirit – so there is nothing here which can justify ideas of superiority and inferiority between genders.
So to sum it up, the Moon says something about our relationship with our own particular mother, and beyond her, with Mother Earth, and the Sun says something about the relationship with our own particular father, and beyond him, with Spirit.
And of course, let me repeat, symbols are like fingers pointing in a particular direction. What is shown in a chart is a path of evolution.
Now I want to talk about the 4th and the 10th house.
Astrological tradition used to see the father in the 4th house and the mother in the 10th.
This is disorienting for modern astrologers who consider that there is a correspondence between houses and signs.
The 4th house, if understood as a concrete manifestation of the energy of the sign Cancer… should be the mother, if Moon is mother.
However, as I’ve just explained, what the Moon means starts with our own particular mother, then expands to home and family…
Throughout centuries of patriarchy the father was the head of the family. His wife and their children wore his name. He was the one who was likely to inherit the domain if there was one, and if not he was supposed to be the breadwinner anyway, the provider. You can see how these themes tie up with Earth and Moon symbolism.
Traditional astrology also saw the mother in the 10th house – if only because it’s the opposite house, or simply out of experience, without a narrative about it.
Modern astrology solves the dilemma in seeing in the 4th house the nurturing parent, or even better, the nurturing function: food, shelter, security, emotional connections, our roots. In the 10th we see the structuring function: parents also teach their children how to behave and how not to behave, and it’s easy to understand how our attitude ends up becoming our social status.. Mothers also do a lot of structuring, there is no doubt about that!
This leads me to talk about Saturn, traditional significator of structure, boundaries and authority. Sometimes we come across the statement that Saturn is Daddy, which makes sense only if we assume that authority belongs to the father. This is true only to some extent.
Mothers get plenty of opportunities for saying “no” and “you have to” and “you shouldn’t” in general, and especially when the children are small. Throughout ages, men have not been the first ones to run change nappies and demand that the child used the chamber pot. So mothers are symbolised by Saturn as well. So modern astrologers who consider there is an analogy between houses and signs, and in this case, between 10th house, Saturn and Capricorn, can also see the 10th house as symbolising mother without contradiction.
Planets don’t represent people but functions. Authority is a parental function, and Saturn, as ruler of Aquarius and Capricorn, rules over the two signs opposed to Cancer and Leo – where Moon and Sun rule.
What are these indicators doing in your chart? You know where to start, follow the threads!
Jean-Marc Pierson
Storyteller, astrologer, philosopher
