We begin with questions of personal integrity, solidity, and the inescapable fact that we all live in interconnected worlds - we do not exist as individual beings, although there is an individual pole to our experience. One could say we are always involved in our worlds and not as a separate entity, or that who we are is a function of an organism/environment field) (Perls, Hefferline, Goodman, 1994)
The idea of an "inner world" fundamentally different from an "outside world" is mythical - fictional, in a strict sense, but revealing. A boundary is how we separate inside world from outside world, so we feel we have personal integrity and can survive in a world much larger than ourselves. A boundary also establishes the means whereby we can participate in our world, on a personal bodily level or a larger more impersonal societal level.
Because there is no fundamental difference between "inside" and "outside" that we do not have to speak of one boundary, but of boundaries, boundary systems, or, even better, the ongoing processes of bounding.
In the solar system we see not only the interplay between inclusive and exclusive factors - so we can interplay with our worlds - but also of stable and changing factors, of morpho-static and morpho-genetic factors.
Saturn and Moon highlight the two morphostatic - conserving - factors in our solar systems and in our beings. This map shows the placement of morphogenetic and morphostatic elements within the solar system. Morphogenetic elements create change in otherwise stable systems, and morphostatic elements form a core of stability in a changing system, so that events don't spin out of control. "Some energy needs to be used to organize and maintain the system, and some needs to be directed to other task functions. Too much energy devoted to one at the expense of the other becomes problematic." (Becvar and Becvar, 1988, pg. 65).
In astrology, we see that Moon and Saturn manage changing boundaries between "our worlds" and the "outside world" - which enables us to find a place within ourselves and on the planet. They manage such a boundary that makes interchange with our worlds possible - they need not isolate us. Moon is the process of regulating, and Saturn is the process of making regulations.
Can look at "a person" topographically or dynamically. As much as possible I'd like to look at the planets as verbs, not nouns, and organization being found in patterns of interaction between processes and not any kind of defined hierarchy. Lets look at a topographical model, which specializes a reality which is actually ongoing. The original solar system to the ancients freezes reality but helps us make beginning sense of what we see. This is a map which defines and separates elements of a system, like the solar system.
The inner planets (I include Sun here, because that's where it is in the original cosmology) bring us into contact with our worlds, and the Moon and Saturn regulate that contact. Moon regulates our inner processes and inner stability, our day-to-day affairs and much of the automatic sequences that happen between us and our worlds. Saturn regulates the line between us and the greater society, and is the spokesperson for the greater society in us, and also keeps us from spilling all over the place. Moon regulates the boundary between us and a world that is familiar to us, and Saturn regulates the boundary between us and a world that is indifferent to us. Between Moon and Saturn we have the inner planets: Mercury and Venus connect us with our worlds, through mind and emotion, and Mars acts on that in a immediate way, and Jupiter provides a larger picture for it. (Sun is probably the factor of identification.) Beyond Saturn we have the outer planets - the fixed stars in ancient cosmology - and the zodiac constellations have had to do with ideal form that trickles down onto our level through the personal planets.
Both Moon and Saturn operate from the basis of homeostasis, which is to restore equilibrium. This is a principle common to living organisms, and Freud and his early orthodox followers used it to explain "drives" as natural kinds of excitations which need to be quieted through fulfillment, sublimation, or a repression of some kind. Fritz Perls, in Ego, Hunger, and Aggression (1948/1969), spoke of "organismic self-regulation" as the guiding principle of the human endeavor. Neither Freud nor Perls - except maybe toward the end of his life - had anything corresponding to our concept of Sun. Jung and Adler are much more solar, much more interested in wholeness and completion and personal evolution. Jung talked about "individuation", Adler about a solar rebellion against lunar and saturnian limitations. The same with humanistic and transpersonal, etc. But we're not talking about Sun in this lecture...
What is the experience, the phenomenology of Moon? Taking in, needing, dependency, adjusting and changing with circumstances, feeling comforted and safe and feeling the world is a trustworthy place and "the universe will provide". Negatively, Moon may manifest as neediness, all kinds of hunger, of poverty and deprivation. All these experiences are intimate, personal, and have a certain stance - a dependent passive one - toward the environment. We are at the receiving end.
When Einstein said that the most urgent questions is whether we consider the universe a friendly place, he was talking from his Moon.
Moon is the boundary of the earth locality-plane, it is closer to home, closer to where we live. It is more bodily and clicks into action earlier in our lives. Moon protects us and brings things in that will sustain us. Under ideal conditions, Moon focuses the activity of the inner planets so they meet our needs - it makes the sensing and connecting activity of Mercury, the emotional activity of Venus, and the excursions of Mars all do the job of providing the organism with what it needs.
We all know that Moon is our experience of being an infant, of requiring total comfort and support - it's a very difficult and complicated experience, because we need so much from our environment and can do so little for ourselves - we're all and only Moon, at that point. Moon is the phenomenon of being and feeling provided for, of correcting difficult experiences of being hungry, wet, tired, and also lonely. Moon, moment by moment, helps us fill in the gap - as infants and as adults, too - that started at birth when all of a sudden we were alone, isolated, no longer connected to our source. We need support against our own fundamental powerlessness in a large world.
Moon navigates between all the different providers of support for us. Our instincts, habits of body and mind and temperament, our relationships in which criticism is not allowed, food that feels great, a lot of events in our lives are lunar-based. Personal memories can support us - have you seen Bladerunner? Some of the replicants do not have supporting personal memories, are emotionally impoverished, and one has the memory grafted from her inventor's niece... Our nation, our religion, even astrology can support us in that way. Moon can operate consciously or unconsciously, and mostly the latter - because if we had to try to get support, it wouldn't be truly lunar - the emphasis is on our passivity.
There's another important factor, however, which is the Moon as providing "emergency functions"...
When an infant is frustrated, and no immediate gratification is available, how does the infant stave off anxiety? According to some object-relationships psychoanalysis, the infant hallucinates the object of satisfaction, forms an image that fulfills wishes. Moon's reality is fluid and does not distinguish between what is present and what is not present - the bottom line is the ability to calm us down. As adults, how do we use fantasy and daydream? Freud felt that all dreams were a compromise between our unrequited wants and our (lunar) infantile mind so we could get some sleep. Psychotic ideation is a result of an inability to tolerate present reality and we posit one that meets our needs and calms us down. (Nightmares, paranoia seem the function of imagination contaminated with Plutonic issues...) You can see that this lunar imagination functions to provide us with fundamental support so we feel comfortable and soothed and not existentially left out to dry, or twist slowly in the wind.
How about when the world is too much for us? When we can no longer use fantasy? When we are being overwhelmed by our worlds, how does the Moon come to the rescue? It allows us to withdraw unto ourselves, through decreasing stimulation, by "numbing" us. It also allows us to bring forth images that will comfort us.
And there's the function of addiction, of different substitutions we have for ourselves. After a hard week at work or your new course isn't well-received, or after a fight with your girlfriend, you might eat Doritos, watch a football game, eat chocolate, etc. And the more we feel we cannot regulate ourselves by other means, the more we go to these places for relief, the more they become habitual and begin to carry a life of their own...
Now lets look at interpretation:
And what about planets in close contact with Moon? Depending on the planet and the nature of the contact, it may be that the activity of that planet feels comforting, or, as above, that there's something you do that scares you, makes you feel unsafe. Of course, then Saturn may have to come in and force a peace by imposing a solution called a rule.
What light does this cast on squares between Moon and inner planets? - use examples that account for a disharmony between one's functions of "orientation and manipulation" and meeting one's needs.
The activity of the planet may feel too comforting and you use it beyond its means to support you. Or it can scare or destabilize you or make you have to apologize afterwards. Moon tends to become overwhelmed by outer planet aspects. Uranus can be completely destabilizing, and Neptune makes it difficult to remember what you're doing. Of course, there are wonderful outcomes, to the extent that a person can keep it simple on the personal activity of Moon itself, and let Uranus and Neptune add their own brilliance and profound insight. But first one needs to become an adult.
Whereas Moon is loose, variable, passive and does most of its work outside our awareness, Saturn is deliberative, conscious, determined, and in control. As Moon functions to make adjustments to restore an equilibrium, Moon is also variable and fluid. In Dante's Paradiso, it was the Inconstant - those who broke vows on penalty of death but remained virtuous - were placed in the "sphere of the Moon".
Who does Dante put on Saturn's sphere? The contemplatives - those who acted deliberately, consciously, in a focused way to step aside from what is tempting but transient for poisonous, to focus on what was really important, for them the contemplation of God. These are people who completely "owned" their Saturn, who made rules for themselves which worked for them.
Saturn is the farther boundary of our experience. Moon marks the need for connection between me and my environment, and Saturn marks the difference between me and my environment. Saturn provides different resources for safety against a world perceived as other, perceived as indifferent.
What is Saturn experience? Saturn is where we make rules, rules that define us and always have a negative in them ..."I will never....again." We don't remember when we made many of the rules for ourselves, but it is the act of rule-making that is definably Saturnian.
Moon is the instinctive self-regulating, it regulates by adaptation. Saturn is the creation of regulations, the noun.
Rules help us organize our experience and limits the quality of unpredictability to our experience. We become consistent within ourselves, and also a rule includes us in a larger whole. Jupiter also makes rules, that regulate our contact with all kinds of larger wholes, but within the orbit of Saturn - Saturnian rules are specifically concerned with our survival.
Under what circumstances do we make Saturnian rules? Of finding our worlds fundamentally alien to us. Under circumstances of being overwhelmed by our worlds, of finding ourselves not up to the task or ambition we've set for ourselves, of being exposed to the alien nature of the worlds we live in. These rules we make for ourselves keep us out of trouble. But are they wholly our rules? They are often thrust upon us by others - like parents and we "identify with the aggressor" and take on his injunctions for us, and they become our own. How our punishers live in us.
These injunctions/negative rules imply some kind of restricting ourselves - we conquer our own spontaneous adaptive self, we inhibit ourselves - we pay attention to what has defeated us, which we posit as a Reality Principle, consentual reality, what we have to "deal with".
Sign and element and house position of Saturn will provide some clues, as will connections Saturn may make to inner planets. The earlier in life, the more generically our Saturns will operate - and if we make too many rules too early, we begin life from a very limited way. Also the rules we make up too early tend to be much more absolute, all-encompassing, than the later ones, and some people operate on the basis of rules they made very early in life, much before they should have been making rules, due to prematurely contacting a world indifferent to us. Moon couldn't work totally on its own - had to use stronger means to help us survive.
What kinds of rules do we make?
"No one will ever know how much I need from another, or how much I love another".
"No one will ever see me and know who I am".
"I won't lose control of my body and shit all over the floor".
"I will keep all my feelings to myself".
"I won't run in front of a car".
"I'll never tell my parents how much I need their approval."
"I'll never let people see my anger or passion or desire to show off."
And on and on and on. You can see where this comes from, from the world being untrustworthy and reliable. We cannot trust our worlds completely, so we put limits on ourselves to "cope" with it.
To the extent that our rules limit us, they also create a stronger boundary between us and "the world". The world becomes more solidly "other" and incapable of meeting us where we live and to provide for us without our conscious exertion and manipulation. To that extend we become more isolated, set apart, on our own. We tend to institutionalize the whole thing and create a "false self" to use to work our everyday experience while we hide away and can thus keep ourselves intact. We all do this to some extent, but it can become pathological.
The result of Saturnian activity is that we're able to meet up with the farther boundary of our experience - the otherness of "Reality", we can survive in a universe wholly indifferent to us. This requires a part of us that is deliberate and cagey and defensive by nature. When too much of the world is other and not enough is familiar (Moon interactions!), we become too defensive and too rigid too much of the time.
Sign/element placement of Saturn can tell us what we've had to make rules about (although early experiences can operate more generically) and the planets that Saturn contacts may tell us what aspects of our behavior and interaction with the world we're more likely to make rules about. Examples.
As Saturn operates consciously and Moon operates unconsciously, they do cooperate to reinforce our inhibitions bodily and instinctively. Saturn makes the rules, then we forget we made them and they become unaware, unapproachable by deliberation - they become instinctive, we may carry them in our body, in our posture, etc. Moon will thus find a new equilibrium based on the need for limitation. Saturnian aware self-restraint becomes lunar unconscious self-restraint or "character armor" which once kept us safe and now just limits us. So the work of different kinds of therapy is to restore the self-limiting behaviors to awareness - if we go back to the rule-making process, make the rule-making process aware, we can then amend the rules. That's the idea, but once a limitation has become more lunar, it's intertwined with our need for safety and comfort and takes a lot of work to update. That's why people who want to change freak out and will feel completely threatened, until the matter is brought to awareness and becomes subject to time.
But Saturn can be brought up-to-date and make new versions of rules based on current reality. Ideally, Saturn will be just as adaptable as Moon, and not rigid at all, as we see the need to make rules for ourselves but they are arrived at intelligently, consonant with our sense of who we are and where we're going, and always subject for revision based on the changing nature of things. Having said that, lets look at another map...
We have the conserving elements, Moon and Saturn, the two boundaries. The inner planets, between the two boundaries, allow us to reach toward experience and fulfill our personal needs (Moon) and meet our personal goals (Sun). Inner planets are the outgoing and destabilizing elements - the morphogenetic ones - they create new forms - and so allow us to change and move forward. The inner planets will represent more our wants - and move forward; the Moon will represent our needs - to take in. That is until we reach the limits of Saturn's rule-making so we "cope" with "Reality", we meet the experience of wholly "other". Beyond the limits of Saturn, beyond our abilities to deliberate and restrict and control are Uranus and Neptune, which specifically work on disrupting and dissolving the regularity and certainty that Saturn works so hard for. Now, Uranus and Neptune act as messengers and examples of reality higher than our puny methods of control will ordinarily allow us. These two planets help us see what s "unfamiliar" and "indifferent" in a new light. Uranus and Neptune allow us to rework our basic rules in the light of updated experience, they allow for a new epistemology.
Let's fill in the gaps. In the center are three factors: the Earth implies the physical nature and that we're all part of the interconnected system of the earth-plane. The Sun wants everything, is the urge for completeness and wholeness - it's the "hero" myth at any stage of development. Pluto is the negative version of that. We never go from one level to another without having to disengage ourselves from the previous level, which has qualities of death and rebirth. Pluto also is concerned with power that resides at the core of an entity, not at its surface.
Ken Wilbur, in The Atman Project (1985), talks about eros and thanatos in manners much like Sun and Pluto. Eros is perpetuation of own existence at that level, the desire to recapture the wholeness, it resists the death of the separate self. Thanatos is the awareness of and avoidance of what threatens our destruction. "It is the terror inescapable in a separate self sense, the perception of the truth of our cut-off situation....Once the separate self emerges, the foggy atmosphere of death becomes the constant consort." When Eros exceeds Thanatos, translation proceeds and stabilization occurs. When Thanatos exceeds Eros, transformation to a different mode of self ensues, dis-identifies with the lower structure.
Why is Pluto at the core? Because that's where we live, and Pluto seems to effect us where we live. Pluto seems to work from the center out, Neptune and Uranus from the outside in.
Pluto can also teach us that the world is out to get us, that it is a dangerous place, do we need to find extreme ways to make ourselves safe - enormous pressure on Moon.
We can use Saturn to re-structure rules, based on new information, coming through from outer planet symbolism. These new rules can also come from negative injunctions. Pluto can carry one to a new level, and Saturn will, with the cooperation of the Sun, make rules that work for that level.
References
Becvar, D. & Becvar, R. (1988),
Family Therapy: a Systematic Integration Boston: Allyn & Bacon
Perls, F. (1969) Ego, Hunger, and Aggression New York, Vintage
Perls, Hefferline & Goodman (1994) Gestalt Therapy Highland, NY.: Gestalt
Journal Press
Wilbur (1985), The Atman Project Wheaton, Il., Quest Publications