The Sun and Moon in Families

[katty]

The Sun and Moon in Families

By Erin Sullivan

more: http://www.astro.com/astrology/in_family_e.htm?xrn=12069885070.91816736555575

EXCERPT: ...With respect to the symbols, Sun and Moon, in the chart, we must be even more circumspect about not stereotyping or restricting their imagery. It is far too easy to designate parental roles to each of them because we have so much material which falls beautifully into place - and there are symbolic reasons that the Moon is more akin to the maternal line and the Sun the paternal, but it is not because the Sun and Moon are respectively masculine and feminine. However, we have to remember that the origins of the assignment of masculine to the Sun and feminine to the Moon are archaic, and from those origins, all our astrological interpretations have been extrapolated and overlaid with that information.


The first consideration before delving into the symbolism of the luminaries is that they each in their symbolic self are not confined to one or other parent. To relegate the Sun to the father and the Moon to the mother at best oversimplifies the imagery and at worst distorts completely our understanding of the full human person. However - and this is a major contingency - it is very likely that because of this stereotyping we do find our parents more one than the other. That is, we might find our mother more lunar than our father and vice versa, or our lunar nature more influenced and represented by mother and the solar character more enhanced by and embodied in our father. Then, based upon the interpretation of the Sun and Moon which is traditional now, we say our mother is the Moon and our father the Sun. From that, we interpret our charts, or worse, other people’s charts, in that way. All aspects from the Moon tell us what mother was like and all aspects from the Sun dictate our father’s legacy to us. Knowing this tendency, we must include in our own bias the very real condition of our inner relationship to the outer world - we are very much a product of our own civilization and role-typing. There is a deep collusion between what we project and what we receive. It then makes perfect sense that we should relate to the Moon/mother and Sun/father doctrine. I, myself, have done it, do it and likely will continue to find it appropriate and fitting in most cases, on the archetypal level.

It does not follow, however, that we must swallow it whole or continue to do this by rote. We might consider opening the end of our bias and incorporating the possibility that the Sun and Moon are our parents in the most archetypal sense. How the Great-Mother, Hero-Father archetype is portrayed in mothers and fathers and is individuated through each person is where creative interpretation should allow for greater latitude of solar or lunar expression.