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The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope
The Luminaries
The Greene-Sasportas seminar volume dedicated to the two luminaries — Sun and Moon — as the central psychological axis of the horoscope. The Sun, in the book’s reading, is the ego-complex and the mythic signature of the individual’s unfolding; the Moon is 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). To read the Sun sign is to read the myth one is living out — not a trait, but a story with specific gods. The Moon chapters extend the reading to inherited emotional patterns: the Moon in Capricorn that “may take on [caretaking] as his or her duty or responsibility” while “keeping up their staunchest defences, acting in a rigid way, drawing clear boundaries.” The 12th house material is the book’s most psychoanalytically sharp — planets in the 12th carry “needs which cannot find expression through the family psyche, and which lie beneath the surface in the individual, creating deep unconscious hungers which always threaten to erupt and disturb outer life.”
The book formalizes what The Development of Personality had practiced — astrological aspects read as depth-psychological diagnostics. It is the second charter text of psychological astrology and the more Jungian-luminous of the seminar volumes.