presides over the harvest. Temporality and eternity are reflected in this pair. A new idea has no newness unless there is an old idea which it can supplant. Eternity has no relevance unless it is measured against the transient. If the puer is seen as a redeemer, then there must be something to be redeemed from. Always we find this shadow standing behind the puer, the shadow of the old man. Because of this indissoluble bond between senex and puer, between order and chaos, old and new, I think that when we consider the astrological significators which might relate to either, we must consider the polarity of puer and senex with each one. For example, Capricorn, which traditionally contains so many of the senex qualities, also possesses a shadow-side which is very adolescent and chaotic and spiritually alive. Gemini, which is a sign that contains many of the puer qualities, also possesses a shadow-side which is very rigid and structured and deeply reflective. Sometimes one face is in the light and the other in the shadow, and one cannot be too certain which face the individual will express at any point in life. All we can say is that the archetypal dilemma of the puer and the senex is part of the individual's journey in life. I have met Capricorns who behave like fake Geminis, and Geminis who behave like fake Capricorns. Sometimes it flips, at different ages and according to different circumstances. Alchemical symbolism is full of motifs about the sick old king and the young redeemer who is the old king resurrecrted. You can also find this motif in the Grail legends, where the old Fisher King has lost his potency and awaits redemption, and the youthful, brash Parzival, the puer, comes along and inadvertently bumbles into, his destiny. These two are always together in myth, and I believe they are also always together in the psyche. Sometimes the puer must battle with the senex, as Theseus must overthrow the rule of King Minos, or Jason must retrieve his rightful throne from wicked King Peleus. With opposites like this, the art is perhaps to live in a way which does not entail that constant splitting and taking sides which is so common a human way of coping with ambivalence. If both are allowed to live, then it is possible to find some kind of relationship between them, not necessarily perfect but at least workable. But if one half of this pair is unconscious, then a good deal of vital energy is wasted in bashing the unconscious side wherever it is met in projection in the world outside, and in suppressing it in oneself. To live with the ambivalence of senex and puer seems to be a very difficult thing to achieve.
— Howard Sasportas Liz Greene
The pair is indissoluble, and that indissolubility is what the psyche resists most. It is easy to identify with the puer — the new, the spiritually alive, the brash forward motion — and to meet the senex only in projection, as the obstacle, the rigid father-world, the thing blocking arrival. The ratio running beneath that identification promises something: if I stay young enough, fluid enough, if I keep moving, I will not have to inhabit the fixed and the heavy. What the passage surfaces is that the youthfulness itself is hollow without the old man standing behind it. Newness is only newness measured against what it supplants.
The Parzival figure bumbles into his destiny — note that word, *inadvertently* — because he has not resolved the polarity but stumbled through it unprepared. That is not a failure; it may be the only honest way the puer makes contact with anything real. The moment he believed he understood the Fisher King's wound in advance, he would have become a theologian of suffering rather than a witness to it. What Greene and Sasportas are pointing at is not that one should become balanced or integrate the opposites into some stable synthesis — the language of "workable relationship" is almost deliberately modest — but that constant splitting costs something specific: the energy spent suppressing the shadow-face is energy unavailable for whatever is actually alive in the moment. Capricorn playing fake Gemini knows this bill. So does its mirror.
Howard Sasportas Liz Greene·The Development of Personality: Seminars in Psychological Astrology, Volume 1·1987