Sun and Moon as luminaries

The traditional astrological term luminaries names the Sun and the Moon — the two lights by which the other planetary configurations become legible. In Greene and Sasportas’s The Luminaries (1992) the luminaries are read as the two central psychological axes of the horoscope: the Sun as the ego-complex and the mythic signature of the individual’s developmental task, the Moon as the feeling-memory matrix and the inherited emotional life of the family psyche.

“The mythic themes which reflect the Sun sign and its ruler are extremely rich. They describe some of the main archetypal patterns behind the person’s unfoldment as an individual” (Greene 1992). The Sun sign, in this reading, is not a personality trait but a myth one is living out — a specific story with specific gods whose pattern the individual inherits and works through. The Moon signs and aspects register the emotional-somatic inheritance: “the Moon in Capricorn may take this on as his or her duty or responsibility… keeping up their staunchest defences, acting in a rigid way, drawing clear boundaries” (Greene 1992).

The Sun/Moon polarity as psychological axis has explicit Jungian pedigree. Jung treated the solar-lunar pair in Mysterium Coniunctionis as the alchemical coniunctio‘s primary figures — Sol and Luna, king and queen, conscious and unconscious. Greene and Sasportas inherit the alchemical framing but deploy it at the individual chart level: every horoscope rehearses the Sol-Luna coniunctio as the psyche’s central developmental problem. The atom is distinct from planetary-gods-as-archetypal-complexes in that it picks out the specifically binary luminary structure rather than the broader planetary pantheon.

Relationships

• planetary-gods-as-archetypal-complexes
• coniunctio
• ego-self-axis
• senex-saturn

Primary sources

• greene-sasportas-luminaries (Greene 1992)
• jung-mysterium-coniunctionis (Jung 1955)