The Moon as mother

One of the standard interpretations for the astrological Moon is the mother, and lately the problems I’ve always had around that have been crystallising for me. For lots of reasons. I’m really not comfortable, never have been, with the tendency to seek the father and mother in the natal chart. The focus on the literal parents as the cause of so many of our woes comes from modern psychology, combined somehow with the literal, deterministic astrology which I'd really hope we are leaving behind. I read recently a suggestion that this focus psychology has on the literal parents is a Pluto in Leo generation thing, the divine child throwing their toys out of the pram and seeking someone to blame. Perhaps there’s something in that (it was written by a Pluto in Leo person, for the record). As parents, we are operating in a particular cultural, social and collective context and we’re all doing our best within that. And however well we try to bring up our children, they are also influenced by that cultural, social and collective context in ways we can’t always control. We’re all operating from a particular familial, emotional, and ancestral legacy. To me, that’s the interesting symbolism to explore in the natal chart, not the specifics of one or more parents, each of whom is/was an individual with their own issues to deal with and path to follow, just as we all are.

And there’s another layer of complexity here. Mothering as a social role is really not valued in this capitalist patriarchal society, no caring role is. Having spent several years as a stay at home Mum and now a work at home Mum, I know firsthand how the work that we do as mothers, the caring and shaping that anyone taking on that role does, is somehow not taken seriously as real work. At the same time we are somehow absorbing the idea that it’s our failings to blame when our kids do something “wrong”. We are simultaneously devalued, and expected to be perfect. The stereotypes and social expectations around mothering are all distorted, and if we’re going to interpret the astrological Moon as the mother, we need to take that into account. Many of us who take on a mothering role are carrying a legacy of reluctant self sacrifice from our ancestor mothers, which has to be navigated when we take on any kind of caring role. But there’s also pressure from patriarchal capitalism to focus on the self, on the individual, to push ahead and achieve our goals, ideally whilst perpetuating the capitalist model by paying someone else to look after our children. The caring roles symbolised by our astrological Moon need to find a balance between these, our own way through all of the competing demands. There’s an awful lot of projection and cultural conditioning around the concept of mothering, not least that it is defined by a biological role and restricted to those who happen to identify as female. Neither of those things is true, and while our astrological interpretations perpetuate this reductionist attitude, astrology will stay stuck in the capitalist hetero-patriarchy. Which is most definitely not where it belongs.

So please, let’s bring the astrological Moon back to the chart owner, let’s talk about the Moon as our ability to nurture and to be nurtured, perhaps our experience of the archetype of carer. Astrology has a completely different worldview to the overculture - cyclical instead of linear, participative instead of determinist. As astrologers, we need to acknowledge where we’ve become caught up in that overculture, in the stories which define capitalism and the patriarchy but are not part of our astrological perspective. And then we need to make changes, starting with how we interpret a chart.