Grand Cross Day Two! The Moon is in Aquarius this morning, applying to square Saturn in Scorpio. CNN Headline: Object of interest found in ocean. Since weve devoted so much time to Mars in Libra lately, lets shift focus and look at Jupiter in Cancer. The myth of the great mother. Its so easy to be uber positive whenever talking about Jupiter and especially whenever we use the phrase great mother. Put it all together and we get the second biggest monotheism of the new age...instead of source its great mother. Or else source becomes the great mother. We all come from and return to the great mother. We come from the great interconnected womb, and we will each return to the great womb. Sometimes the image is the ouroboros..the dragon or serpent eating its own tale, or eating its own young. Round and round we go, in the compassionate, close to the breast cycle of the almighty as embodying mother. By all accounts its a beautiful myth..near and dear to the Cancerian or Moon child in all of us. But can we learn to criticize even this dearly held image? Not because theres anything wrong with it but because its just so easy for us to get hung up on the concreteness of these gods....just as easy as it is to reduce all of the many gods back down to one thing. If there is one thing Ive found in my practice that allows me to really love and know the archetypes, truly appreciate them, its the ability to criticize and deconstruct them. Because its so tempting for the ego to try and grab on to these gods and use them as defense mechanisms. By deconstructing these myths (in a sense a very Uranian activity) we gain the ability to be in relationship with the gods rather than be so concretely identified with them (which is a form of hubris that usually hurts to figure our way out of!). Here are some of the ways we can get caught in the myth of the great mother: 1. To see all of reality, uniformly, as a unified thing called nature. 2. To see anything and everything in terms of stages of development (like seasons, flowers, etc). 3. To see things in terms of origins and returns to origins (this is closely related to the hero myth!) 4. To compare all forms of psycho-spiritual transformation to birth or stages of birth. 5. To think that emotions are more important than thoughts. 6. To talk about the origin of our afflictions in childhood or in some earlier moment, memory, or stage. 7. To see nature as a benevolent, pure, innocent thing, like mother/child. 8. To see nature in terms of a variety of feminine/mother archetypes. 9. To look at our relationships or psychic/spiritual issues in terms of our parents or ancestors. 10. To imagine a previously existing harmonious place or time, where people were 100% in tune with the earth and each other (often imaged as matriarchal). 11. To see humanity as needing to return to the divine mother. 12. To idealize the child or the stage of childhood as closer to the womb. First lets admit how much we love some of these archetypal images and ideas. Were in love with them! They call to us over and over again. And yet, like the image of the serpent eating itself, they can become a kind of navel-gazing, self-consuming, lala land...the dogma of all mighty as mother. Just like the shadow side of Cancer...the concern and compassion and mothering can become smothering and secretly self-interested...or passive aggressive. Okay--but why bring this up? Well, because during this grand cross time, with so many planets interacting there is such an opportunity for us to get a more relative, polyphonic understanding of the planetary archetypes. Now. To be fair, in all this criticism there is an archetype at work as well...the archetype of liberation from the structural literalisms of the archetypes. Thats Uranus. And it can just as easily become all consuming. The job for each of us thus becomes about understanding which archetype is consuming us, which archetype is calling to us, which archetype is filling us with new life, and new perspective. Which archetypes are deepening our soul work? And are we capable of deconstructing them at any point in time so that we might change and transform? Prayer: May we learn to hear the polyphony of the gods speaking to us right now, and may we discern the voice of our soul guide leading us through this transitional period.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Apr 2014 14:15:08 +0000