The Identification and Healing of Trauma
in Evolutionary Astrology
by Mark Jones
The Relationship of Uranus to Mercury, the nature of our learning and our mind:
The Key to the identification of trauma in Evolutionary Astrology is found in the role of Uranus, Aquarius and the 11thhouse. As the higher octave of Mercury we can link the Uranus function to that of the mind and of the memory, but whilst Mercury corresponds to left brain, conscious thoughts Uranus corresponds to the unconscious, that which we are not consciously aware of, but that which may emerge into consciousness either at a critical juncture in life, or through specialized states of consciousness (i.e. dreams, meditation or hypnotherapy).
We can in fact delineate the Mercury function in Gemini as that which gathers information, opinions and ideas from the environment around us (the mimicry with which the young child learns words for example) we can then expand the Mercury function in Virgo as that which begins to discriminate the appropriateness or reliability of the information gathered through the Gemini intake process. Through Jupiter, Sagittarius and the 9th house the information that through our intake (Gemini) and process of discrimination (Virgo) that we have allowed in then becomes part of our intuited and relied upon belief system – i.e. the overall context within which we begin to interpret all this information.
From the intake of information (Gemini, 3rdhouse), the discrimination of such information into what is most useful (Virgo, 6th house) and then the interpretation of such information in the light of our prevailing belief system or intuition of our relation to the Cosmos (Sagittarius, 9th house) the archetype of Uranus and Aquarius, 11th house corresponds with what we might call long-term memory, a strata of experience held within the sub-conscious. This may be contrasted with what we might call the conscious or short-term memory we find in Mercury. With Mercury we read, interpret and the filter through our beliefs what we read, or listen to within a classroom, with Uranus we operate on a completely different level.
Let me give a simple example from a recent therapy session I was working in. The young lady I was regressing consciously remembered some aspects of the material she was regressed into; she remembered consciously that her brother had attacked her father one day in the past when she was a young girl. When regressed however she remembered hitherto forgotten details, for example, the colour of her childhood room, the patterned curtains etc. She also remembered vividly the feeling of lack of safety engendered by the attack of the brother and seeing her father so vulnerable, this feeling was much more heightened that it would have been in merely expressing her conscious recall of the event. This vivid recall, the feeling of actually being there again is the direct intrusion of the 'Uranian' level of experience into her memory. The long-term memory, that aspect of the subconscious that does not seem to forget anything, is an aspect of the individual unconscious that we can correlate to the Aquarian archetype within Evolutionary Astrology. In fact we can open the extent of the memory to include the experiences we had within other lives, as other egos…
The Evolutionary Axis:
In Evolutionary Astrology we always begin with an analysis of Pluto as representative of the point of deepest unconscious security we enter this life with, as the point to which we were focused on to prior to this life and are likely to gravitate back towards… in a sense Pluto represents our greatest interest, our greatest strength and potentially our greatest blind spot. In my own case with Pluto in Virgo in the 9thhouse we can see that the focus as been on the nature of discriminating from various belief-systems and intuitions what the nature of personal and cosmological reality really is. We might observe a tendency of the individual to base the very core of personal security on the intuited nature of the meaning and purpose of their experience and indeed life itself, changes in the nature of how life is perceived to work or what it is perceived to mean may indeed produce profound insecurity or changes within the individual…as an example. The analysis of Pluto on this level can be found within Jeffrey Wolf Green seminal text Pluto: the Evolutionary Journey of the Soul.
From this understanding of Pluto, as to the nature of what kind of experience or learning the curve the Soul has gravitated towards in the past, including past lives we can then proceed to analysis of the South Node of the Moon to find out more as to the nature of that past. The Moon in Evolutionary Astrology correlates as to the nature of the Ego, the subjective lens that allows the concerns of the Soul (Pluto) to be focussed in this life, and into a meaningful sense of self-continuity moment by moment. The South Node of the Moon (the point at which the Moon descends and crosses the ecliptic, i.e. an abstract point in space specifying the point at which the orbit of the Moon moves it below the level of the constellations) therefore refers to the nature of the ego as it existed within former incarnations…the ruler of the South Node represents a further source of information as to the nature of these past ego’s and most specifically how they facilitated their own needs and the point of security as represented by Pluto.
Uranus as the Critical Astrological Signification of Trauma:
Whilst any stressful aspect between planets may indicate areas of difficulty within a person’s life we can analyse that critical ‘trauma signatures’ are found when Aquarian archetype is involved. A Trauma signature in the natal chart occurs with any one of the following significations
1) When a planet in the 11th house forms a stressful aspect to another planet.
2) When a planet in Aquarius form a stressful aspect to another planet
3) When a planet forms a stressful aspect to Uranus
4) Note: a stressful aspect in this context includes conjunctions (0 degrees), semi-squares (45 degrees), squares (90 degrees), sesqui-quadrates (135 degrees), inconjunctions (150 degrees) and oppositions (180 degrees).
The nature of the planets involved in stressful aspect to Uranus, a planet in Aquarius or the 11th house will provide further information about the nature of the trauma. For example:
When Saturn is involved this can indicate the physical nature of a trauma, that it may involve a physical wound or prior life death.
When Pluto is involved this can indicate the fact that the trauma has a primarily emotional or psychological nature, for example a betrayal, or severe psychological disorder.
When Neptune is involved this can indicate that the trauma has what we might call a psychic nature, for example severe disillusionment/emptiness, what we might call catatonia or states of ‘giving up’ even though the biological form survives.
Whereas the trauma signified by the stressful aspect to Uranus itself indicates what we might term a mental trauma. We have already explored the relationship of Uranus to Mercury; here we show that a mental trauma is one where the more subtle aspect of the mind remembers what has occurred in the past.
When Uranus is in stressful aspect to the inner or personal planets the nature of that mental trauma is revealed. So for example if Uranus is in stressful aspect to the Moon the nature of the ego or personal security has experienced trauma in the past. In this sense then the parental experience, specifically the experience of mothering or of security through the primary caregiver in the present life (Uranus with Moon) may contain echoes of the prior life traumatic memories. So whilst mother may be erratic or distant at times in the present life (Uranus-Moon) she will then trigger the prior-life memories of traumatic separation or insecurity… this is a critical point that must be returned to time and time again.
What distinguishes ‘trauma’ from mere stress within the chart (and the distinction may often be blurred in individual’s lives) is through the severity of the impact of the stress and also through the tendency for the trauma signature (via analysis of the Aquarian archetype) to reveal areas of stress that have been ongoing for an individual throughout multiple lifetimes. As a result the issue of the identification of the nature of said trauma and its potential for resolution become of critical importance in the individual’s life.
Obviously if any stressful aspect from Uranus or a planet in Aquarius or the 11th house reveals the potential for a trauma signature then we can clearly see that many natal charts will show the potential for trauma. Here we open to the perspective that form the point of view of Evolutionary Astrology the great majority of people are living their lives under the influence prior life experiences and events, such events may contain unresolved traumatic experiences or memories. Events or experiences that may frequently carry over unchanged into the present life unless sustained and meaningful effort is putting into transforming the pattern underlying the trauma.
Uranus through the Signs/Houses: suggested starting points for analysis of Trauma:
Uranus in the 1st house, Aries or in aspect to Mars: here trauma can result from the difficulty in accepting limitations within the given life context. Such limitations maybe physical, psychological or even karmic, and the trauma will occur with the struggle to accept their imposition on the individual’s personal freedom. In difficult cases there is a ‘superhuman’ complex. It may correspond to memories of having died at a young age in recent prior lives, early death of course being another form of limitation. To the extent that prior judgments or limitations were externally imposed on the individual there maybe fears of losing control. To the extent that the will is frozen by the trauma there is the potential for the ‘castration complex’, the subconscious fear that acting will lead to destruction.
Uranus in the 2nd house, Taurus or in aspect to Venus: here trauma occurs around the issue of the values system – imposed change either from without (an external event or authority) or within (a new insight for example) to a cherished value system or identified resource can cause profound upheaval and mental suffering. There may have been a huge shift in material resources. This signature can link to personal and collective experiences (war, famine etc) of loss, including ultimately loss of life (what one might call survival trauma). Memories of loss may produce a tendency to grasp or overly identify with things, which can cause furthering suffering.
Uranus in the 3rd house, Gemini or in aspect to Mercury: here trauma is caused by external or internal confrontations to the way one intellectually understands one’s reality. There is a strong identification with the thoughts and beliefs that can cause huge stress if those thoughts/beliefs undergo change. At worst this can produce a profound alienation from the world around the individual, as they experience themselves as being on a completely different wavelength, this alienation can become its own ‘trauma’ if prolonged. Trauma can occur through lack of reception for the ideas one does communicate, which emphasizes alienation, and can produce a fundamental resistance to participating in the world around them either because of the rejection or through rigidity in the mental life formed as a defence against the perceived or felt rejection.
Uranus in the 4th house, Cancer or in aspect to the Moon: here trauma originates in the lack of nurture or emotional empathy in the early home-life. This then leads to the situation of displaced emotions, where as an adult the unresolved childhood feelings arise in often deeply problematic ways, this can lead to a ‘re-traumatizing’ effect, where the original pain encountered with the parents is recreated without resolution with intimate partners/friends. There may be a particular problem with the mother in this life, an issue that often has profound prior life roots. This position can create an effect of ‘radical insecurity’, the feeling that emotionally speaking there is no foundation that is safe. This has the effect of throwing the person in on himself or herself. This itself can be deeply traumatic and can lead to ego fracturing, mental splitting and breakdown in some cases.
Uranus in the 5th house, Leo or in aspect to the Sun: here trauma can result from lack of acknowledgment of one’s gifts or contribution. It can correspond to periods where one has experienced a fall from grace. Trauma can occur because the self-image is unrealistically high, that one can be superhuman or without fault, feedback from life that this is not the case can then become destabilizing. Prior life subconscious memories of achievement or high status only fuel the frustration experienced around lack of acknowledgment. This also corresponds to a internally or externally directed need for total change, a situation which is inherently insecure as most people base their sense of security on what is familiar, and this change can promote traumatic mental disassociation/breakdown.
Uranus in the 6th house, Virgo, or in aspect to Mercury: here trauma can occur through an experience of persecution or critical feedback from the environment in which individuals find themselves. Such persecution can be either objective (say the inquisition) or subjective (paranoia). The intertwining of both the objective persecution and then the subjective fear of such persecution can problematically intertwine throughout multiple lifetimes. Their maybe deep-rooted sense of inadequacy or a mental pattern of not feeling ready for life or ‘good enough’. There maybe profound and traumatic struggles to find the right work, or to reform the work that people with this placement are involved in. The feeling of never being ready, of never full self-actualising can become its own vicious cycle whereby the individual is re-traumatizing themselves over and over as they move from one crisis to another… here crisis itself can become a mentality, a method, an addiction. There is often victimization and isolation underlining these trauma cycles. This can also indicate a situation in which the necessary discrimination applied to learning or to experience was fractured, or flawed in some way, leading to the potential for extreme cycles of behaviour – total lack of discrimination or near puritan levels of it for example.
Uranus in the 7th house, Libra, or in aspect to Venus: here trauma can be experienced through sudden or unexpected changes within the given relationship structures of a person’s life. Unexpected termination of partnership, the shift from partner to friend, can all cause problems. Trauma here is very much found in the nature of projected expectations that the individual is making onto others, and the projections made from others onto them. High degrees of irrational thinking and acting may exist within the relationships. The trauma here can run the range of excessive dependency, to fear of dependency (destroying any relationship that comes close to really mattering). As a result of sudden change and loss some of these individuals will develop a core detachment from others that is traumatic to the extent that it is dissociative and can be terribly lonely.
Uranus in the 8th house, Scorpio, or in aspect to Pluto: here trauma can occur through the experience of betrayal, real or imagined, where the other person one has been committed to appears to go through a nightmarish change of personality or direction and intense cataclysmic internal states can occur to the individual with this placement. This can correspond to the trauma of sadistic abuse, psychological torture of others and specifically sexual abuse or misuse of sexual energy. The impact of such experiences of betrayal can leave people unable or unwilling to trust again. There can be trauma here on the level of psychological confrontation, or test of wills… there can be the potential for incredible and acute psychological knowledge but also the potential that such knowledge is used aggressively, from the fear that has resulted from prior experiences of betrayal. This can produce the ‘get them before they get me’ mentality which is itself potentially extremely traumatic.
Uranus in the 9th house, Sagittarius or in aspect to Jupiter: here trauma can occur through the nature of a persons belief systems, which may run counter to the prevailing norms in the environment around them. This can itself then lead to the trauma of alienation from the culture or family unit that one has been born into. This alienation may pervade the consciousness and lead to an ongoing fear of misjudgment, of being taken the wrong way. There can be traumatic experiences here when belief systems that are extremely fixed and important to the individual are challenged in some extreme, troubling or effective way and mental suffering occurs in direct proportion to the amount of identification that was placed in the belief system. In extreme cases the alienation or loss of beliefs can promote a state of complete defeatism or despair, as if the world felt inside has absolutely no relationship to the one ‘out there’.
Uranus in the 10th house, Capricorn or in aspect to Saturn: here trauma can occur through one or both of the parents being dysfunctional or completely lacking in empathy. The lack of validation on a parental level can easily extend into society, whereby the person can struggle to feel accepted or validated. At its most extreme the mental trauma of feeling such lack of acceptance or judgment from one’s family or society can produce deep depression and despair. They’re maybe many prior life memories of judgmental family and cultural experiences, which compound the problem. This can produce a compressed psychology, a repressive emotional make-up and the psychology of futility as those in power never offer understanding or validation, as a result the individual can feel that there is not point to their life or to anything that they do.
Uranus in the 11th house, Aquarius: here trauma can occur when there is a realization that the individual is not living a life that is a reflection of their real self/nature. The discovery of the inner lie or the false self can be profoundly shocking in and of itself. There maybe a traumatic experience when trying to be or live in a different fashion to the mainstream, such shocks or fears of imagined or actual responses from the environment can promote a psychology of hiding which itself becomes part of the inner lie that is so troubling. Here the can be profound instability and fear involved in changing. Trauma can be experienced though friendships or groups, in that they suddenly change their view of the changing individual and may even be highly critical or persecutory.
Uranus in the 12th house, Pisces or in aspect to Neptune: trauma can occur here as the personality itself begins to dissolve or fall apart under external or internal pressure and stress. Trauma can occur through a profound need for escapism, either through substance use, excessive fantasy or delusion, all of which can have deeply disturbing effects of the person’s life, which include madness, or extremely disturbed behaviour. Trauma here can correspond to memories of imprisonment and persecution, which can lead to a psychology of hiding from others, indeed from life. To the extent that the spiritual impulse remains unrealised there is capacity for powerful disillusionment, fear and loss of meaning.
The Interconnection of Trauma, Healing and Liberation:
We have already made the link between Uranus as a higher octave of Mercury and corresponding to what we might call the long-term memory (incorporating the subconscious memory of childhood, or prior lives) alongside the more conscious memory contained in the symbolism of Mercury. This higher mind function contains more memories and awareness than merely the traumatic ones. In fact the traumatic memories may be seen simply as difficult standout moments that it becomes hard to forget (which in themselves have an educational potential throughout reincarnation, for example the remorse following a selfish or violent action). There maybe other essential memories and qualities held within the aspect of the mind symbolized by Uranus, for example potentialities and insights that could assist the individual in their life purpose.
One finds in prior life regression work for example that people in regression can at times access prior life abilities or awareness just as they can access traumatic memories. A therapist and close friend who did some regression work with me as a case study for the final part of my training initially regressed to a life a young priest in Egypt who was abandoned in a desert war after being excluded form the hierarchy of the temple because he criticized its policy of stockpiling grain whilst commoners starved. In the next life we touched on, his harmonious life as an apprentice to an elder and then as a successful community shaman and leader offered a powerful sense of his potential for service and community. Both these lives accessed over the course of a year symbolized a process in his life from a work situation in which he felt angry and resentful at the bureaucracy and incompetence to an increasing movement away from institutions that were regressive or punishing.
So the long-term memory holds gifts and awareness just as it holds trauma. This is one of the potentials we have to help people once we have used the natal chart to identify trauma, the same symbols that identify trauma can offer potential and awareness of a more integrative kind. In this sense the Aquarian archetype symbolizes the butterfly potential we all have – akin to what the evolutionary biologist Rupert Sheldrake (in The Presence of the Past) called morphogenetic fields, invisible magnetic fields of meaning around plants or animals that facilitate their growth into the potential symbolized by the field. From a perspective that places the spiritual will of humankind, their highest potential as foremost - this field could be seen as a magnet within the human on the deepest level, attracting the iron filings of reality into the appropriate shapes and patterns based on karmic potentiality. In this sense Uranus is electrical potential within the higher mind of the individual that sets the frequency or tone for the type of life experiences and their understanding (rather like selection of a radio frequency to a particular type of program).
In understanding the specific connection in the symbolism of Evolutionary Astrology between trauma and liberation (the dual role of Uranus, Aquarius and the 11th house) we must understand the archetypal conflict between Uranus and Saturn, that Uranus is always seeking liberation… liberation from what? From the structures and confining limitations of Saturn. In that sense there is an inherent tension between the two. There is a running joke on some therapy courses – how many relationships will go under during the training? When a person changes the partner is scared, how will this change affect the marriage, the existing life? There become three basic options, the person on the training changes and leaves the partner behind, the person on the training inhibits their own growth to stay within the limitations of the existing relationships (now even more painfully understood), or both work a way of growing together (the middle way).
In terms of Trauma we can see that throughout history there have been countless violent and problematic regimes, vast environmental and political disasters, huge wars, famine, mans inhumanity to man. All of that exists and so we have all partaken of this, whether we view this as occurring through the collective unconscious (Jung) or through our own reincarnational experience (Evolutionary Astrology). A critical factor though is that as we individuate, i.e. as we embrace our full potential (Uranus) we begin to rebel and reject outmoded institutions or forms of behaviour (Saturn), which can in turn become rejecting or punishing of this movement in ourselves. This can work on the relatively symbol level of the parent or partner who laughs at us for studying astrology all the way to someone being burnt at the stake for having used the moon cycles to plant their herbs, and using those herbs to heal someone. In this way the struggle between the individuating spirit (Uranus) and the consensus (Saturn) can itself become a major source of prior life (and current life) trauma and wounding.
An Analysis drawn from some useful Therapeutic Literature on Trauma:
In Waking the Tiger Peter A. Levine links traumatic experience to an incapacity of the organism to complete its survival response; this incompleteness leaves the body-mind in a state of excited suspension which becomes exhaustive to the entire system and which becomes its own vicious cycle, whereby the self constantly remembers the stimulus (the traumatic event) without ever being able to bring the cycle, or ‘gestalt’ to completion:
“A maladaptive response to a life-threatening event never completes itself. An example of this is when the nervous system unceasingly and unsuccessfully searches for appropriate responses. As it fails to find this critical information, the emotions of rage, terror, and helplessness escalate. This escalation spurs further activation and compels the search for significant images. Since the images it finds are associated with traumatic emotions, the images themselves may evoke further activation without supplying the appropriate response to complete the process…the result is a continuing and ever-escalating spiral in which we search for images…all of the images are related to highly aroused, similar emotional states, but are not necessarily useful to our survival at that moment. They are the fuel of the ‘trauma vortex.’”
Levine, p.212-13.
Here we have a description of the Uranian moment, the “need to have a whole picture immediately” (Levine p211) meeting the limitations of the pre-existing ego structure (Moon) and thinking processes of conscious memory (Mercury) whose attempts to create security for the individual based on the individual’s conscious prior experience fail. In failing they themselves provide energy to fuel the ‘trauma vortex’. Levine then argues that to heal the trauma generated the experience must be re-created in order that the psyche is able to complete the cycle of response and therefore liberate itself from the trapped emotions of a response that endlessly cycles the problem without ever addressing it, a feeling of going down the plug-hole, of psychic entropy. Levine argues that the re-experiencing that is necessary has a symbolic power that can be extraordinarily powerful for the healing of the individual – i.e. one does not have to literally re-experience the trauma, something that could be fatal or at the very least re-traumatizing, yet another round of the ‘trauma vortex’ but that instead,
“When we don’t become invested in finding a literal truth, we remain free to experience the full and compassionate healing afforded by the rhythmic exchange between the trauma and healing vortices that occur in renegotiation.”
So that by utilising the imagination, the creative aspect of the will of the individual, we are able to generate a ‘healing fiction’ (to borrow a phrase from James Hillman leading Archetypal Psychologist) in which the direction of the ‘trauma vortex’ is reversed into an integrative path. We are able to regain our vitality, strength and resourcefulness by re-enacting the trauma and completing what we were not able to complete. Levine’s emphasis, through the Jungian tradition is through the process of active imagination in which the individual is able to process through internal dialogue and imaginative journeying or path working. Specifically here, via the Deep Memory Process of Patricia Walsh or the Alchemical Hypnotherapy and transpersonal therapy that I practise, when we add the extra power of hypnotherapeutic induction or the capacity to facilitate encounter for the individual with their Higher Self, Inner Guides or Soul Contracts (see Caroline Myss) this approach of reliving and re-contextualising what was previously a traumatic event can take on a whole new level of meaning and potentiality. A brief sketch of guidelines for these enormously important therapeutic techniques may be found in Alchemical Hypnotherapy by David Quigley or in The Deep Memory Process work of Patricia Walsh and Dr Roger Woolger.
“When Innocence has been deprived of its entitlement, it becomes a diabolical spirit.”
In The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit Donald Kalsched outlines a central thesis in a complex and multi-dimensional fashion: that trauma tends to provoke (not produce, i.e. they are already present and then triggered.) a series of defence mechanisms in the psyche and that these defence mechanisms can become hyper-alert and begin to damage the very thing that they were designed to protect, the nascent identity of the individual. In this complex therapeutic text that focuses primarily on the impact of childhood trauma, or trauma within the development of the self, Levine’s idea of the ‘trauma vortex’ is exposed to be an aggressive and deeply problematic element of the Psyche’s own self-protection. A protective figure set against what it was designed to protect, an agent of internal sabotage, a disassociative element of the individual that can pro-actively engage in the disruption of even the most sincere and dedicated attempts to heal;
“Most contemporary analytic writers are inclined to see this attacking figure as an internalised version of the actual perpetrator of the trauma, who has ‘possessed’ the inner world of the trauma victim. But this popularised view is only half correct. The diabolical figure is often far more sadistic and brutal than any outer perpetrator, indicating that we are dealing with a psychological factor set loose in the inner world by trauma – an archetypal traumatogenic agency within the psyche itself.
No matter how frightening his or her brutality, the function of this ambivalent caretaker always seems to be the protection of the traumatized remainder of the personal spirit and its isolation from reality. It functions, if we can imagine its inner rationale, as a kind of inner ‘Jewish Defence League” (whose slogan after the Holocaust, reads ‘Never Again!’). ‘Never again,” says our tyrannical caretaker, ‘will the traumatized personal spirit of this child suffer this badly! Never again will it be this helpless in the face of cruel reality…before this happens I will disperse it into fragments (disassociation), or encapsulate it and soothe it with fantasy (schizoid withdrawal), or numb it with intoxicating substances (addiction), or persecute it to keep it from hoping for life in this world (depression)…. In this way I will preserve what is left of this prematurely amputated childhood – of an innocence that has suffered too much too soon!’”
What is so problematic about this saboteur is the profound disruption that it can bring to the healing process. Kalsched reasons that Freud’s own musings on the ‘Thanatos’ force, the death-principle emerged in part from his deep frustration at the incapacities of therapy to actually overcome this agent, to actually help people move beyond their own internally destructive energies. As a working therapist with many thousands of hours of experience working with individuals one encounters time and time again the truly profound capacity of the individual psyche to torture itself, punish and demonise itself for the very things that hurt it so much. To work with people involved in long-term recovery of traumatized aspects of their identity this destructive capacity cannot be ignored.
The Primal Wound by John Firman and Ann Gila:
“’There’s nothing to be afraid of.’ The ultimate reassurance and the ultimate terror’ – R.D. Laing.
It is clear why a disruption in an empathic connection to a unifying centre gives rise to the threat of non-being – this is a disruption in the continuity of being that flows from this connection. These moments of primal wounding are what self-psychology call empathic failures or self-object failures – those events in which we were not treated as living, conscious human beings, but as objects, as things. In Kohut’s words, ‘What leads to the human self’s destruction, however, is its exposure to the coldness, the indifference of the non-human, the non-empathically responding world’ (Kohut, 1984, 18). In Buber’s (1958) terms again, here are not empathic ‘I-Thou’ experiences, but cold, impersonal ‘I-It’ experiences. In these experiences we are torn away from human being and thrust toward human non-being, and our sense of self is profoundly wounded.”
In this sense it is the terror, or primal anxiety of the threat of non-being which haunts every traumatic experience, this is a state literally worse than death but it is the haunting of the psyche by absence or ‘emptiness’ in a nihilistic sense (as opposed to the term sunyata or emptiness in Buddhism which is in reference to the lack of inherent existence within non-dual perception). This fear of lack of being, one’s own ultimate extinction or irrelevance is in fact the complete opposite of what is meant by spiritual surrender. The mixing of these two ideas was named by Ken Wilber in A Brief History of Everything as the pre-trans fallacy, i.e. the threat of non-being is a pre-self fear, a lack of identity, the transpersonal surrender of the Self to the shining luminous void (as with Nisagardatta Maharaj in (I Am That) is quite literally a different order of experience.
We are most prone to the threat of non-being I or early childhood relationships (what psychology named object relations) and any breakdown in these relationships, prolonged beyond a certain level, will produce a lasting imprint of fear around this felt lack of identity or void. It is my opinion that in these early childhood conditions that we have no seeming conscious choice over that we witness the playing out of prior karma, and in a sense the extremely powerful emotional and psychic states that the child undergoes at this time hold memories and traces of these prior karmas. In this way the child’s very fears of non-being, that emerge when the primary caregivers are absent or unsympathetic mirrors prior life fears, compulsions and dependencies… in this way for example a child who had undergone a profound prior-life betrayal may be less trusting of the child who has not had this experience. As every parent will tell you children are not ‘blank slates’ but complex identities with their own unique quality, even on emergence (surely a mirror of the premise of astrology, we are born when the heavens movements mirror our karma…). To understand depth psychology then is to enter territory whereby underlying prior life traumas are a relevant issue, not insights that mainstream psychotherapy has been quick to adopt. In fact not a single one of the books I have summarized in this section, excellent though they are, has mentioned the idea of prior lives even once! Even though through simply practising psychotherapy openly I have experienced clients spontaneously enter prior life memories and recall. To really therapeutically get to grips with this one has to move into the alternative part of the world of hypnotherapy.
An Introduction to the Planetary Nodes of Uranus:
Whilst the Nodes of the Moon are the most commonly used in Astrology, every planet has nodes that represent the points at which the planet crosses the ecliptic. Between 1945 and 2007 the South Node of Uranus has ranged between 11-17 degrees of Sagittarius and the North Node of Uranus has ranged between 10-16 degrees of Gemini. Planets in close aspect to these points often have a role to play in the identification and resolution of trauma: so planets in aspect to the South Node of Uranus can offer information about the history of the trauma or awareness in an individual and planets in close aspect to the North Node of Uranus can hold information about the intended resolution. Unlike the Moon’s Nodes these points are not always opposite each other, so for example, on the day I was born (Feb 22 1971) the South Node of Uranus was at 16 degrees and 45 minutes Sagittarius and the North Node was at 10 degrees and 57 minutes Gemini. So my Mars at 18 Sag is conjunct the South Node without being as clearly opposite the North Node. Often however planets will aspect both Nodes.
We can make the general observation that with the South Node of Uranus in Sagittarius we are looking at memories being held in the long-term unconscious of lives lived within the context of a more direct felt perception with nature, cultures or experiences in line with natural law. We can be aware that the growth of the city states under patriarchy and the culmination of the industrialising powers has not always been kind to existing indigenous people who live closer to the land. This violent disassociation can become the source for traumatic experience. Jerome S. Bernstein a psychotherapist in private practice in New Mexico has written a provocative book called Living in the Borderland: the Evolution of Consciousness and the Challenge of Healing Trauma in which he argues that for many people the alienation of modern culture from nature, the land and the animal kingdom is inherently disturbing. He reworks the classic psychiatric pathology of Borderline Personality Disorder to come across the ‘Borderland’ dilemma, which is of clients retreating to imaginative/psychic experiences and spaces to compensate for and heal the wounding they have had in trying to integrate into the problematic system of modern culture.
The North Node of Uranus in Gemini speaks to me on that intuitive level of the need to communicate about the issue of trauma: we have grown in the 20th Century alone from a culture which frequently court martialled shell-shocked soldiers and had them lined up and shot to the first real detailed analysis of post-traumatic stress disorder after Vietnam and recently ‘Gulf War Syndrome’. More recently therapeutic culture has brought more issues into public domain, for example, the nature of abuse, co-dependency, addiction etc. Furthermore we might make the intuitive suggestion that relativity of belief, difference of opinion saturates the post-modern culture in a variety of deeply problematic ways. If the Sagittarius-Gemini polarity is to be healthily expressed here we need to validate a sense of personal, and even ultimate truth (Sagittarius) within a variety of personal and cultural voices (Gemini) without falling prey to the false gods of fundamentalism (Sagittarius) or meaningless opinions (Gemini).