South Node Virgo, Moon in Virgo

The Moon in Virgo and the South Node in Virgo hold the emotional memories from your childhood and from the forgotten “emotional memories” of past lives. From the re-incarnational perspective, the Moon and South Node show the particular emotional “hangover” that’s most impacting you in this life now. We don’t usually clearly remember “facts” from very early in life, nor do we usually remember our past lives. What we feel instead is an emotional undertone—a lunar feeling—and perhaps a sense that something in our past is unresolved and still needing healing…and loving.


So the South Node holds the forgotten memory and feels a bit like waking from a dream but not remembering the storyline. By describing some of this South Node and lunar “story” we bring it into consciousness, thereby allowing our present life story to change. We may recognize something of the old patterns and emotions that no longer serve us now. We can learn to love and be loved differently.

In the past you may have felt that you were the person who always had to do the right thing, and because you were being observed, you had high expectations of yourself and others did too. You may have been a doctor, priest, or skilled craftsperson in a previous life—someone who was expected to be precise and perfect. You may have had competitive siblings or demanding parents…or you may have been under the strict eye of someone older and more controlling--- or even a cultural system (Puritanism or Nazi-ism) that disempowered you in setting strict standards of behavior.


In a former life, or in some ways in this life, there may be a tendency to still want to continue to do things “just right.” And this perfectionism is a harsh standard to live up to it—in attempting to be perfect you inevitably fail; and thereby internalize a feeling of inadequacy or shame….this could also have come from the results of living under the ego-shattering impact of discipleship under an exacting master, guru, or person who had “power over you” (even sexual abuse).Having been the one who was duty-bound and played according to the ‘Rules’ in a former life (or earlier in this one) you now have the chance to relax your linear mind and move towards your heart’s true desires. What is it you truly long for now? Is it love, beauty, imaginative creativity? Or is it simply the chance to relax your guard and take in the view from the mountaintop? Now you have the chance to unite the impulses of your head with those of your heart. You can dare to be gentle with yourself now, and dare to make mistakes, to be imperfect and to let some details go; being compassionate and forgiving with yourself as well as with others.


It’s a good idea to practice getting out of unpleasant situations gracefully rather than being duty-bound or judgmental. You don’t “have to be right” now or confrontational, and you can dare to use your intuition and take action even when you don’t have all the answers. You don’t have to over-analyze things any more. You don’t have to struggle so much now to survive or evolve—instead you are called to move beyond “scarcity mentality” and a self-limiting place of “humble exactitude”. Part of your soul-yearning in this life is to learn to simply trust in the process of life and to surrender your anxieties to a higher power. You are more loved than you realize.

So in love relationships, you will find “soul medicine” in the soft edges and accepting ways of your Pisces North Node. Compassionate, imaginative, inclusive, and—even boundary-less at times, this Pisces/Virgo axis calls for rounding the edges of your psyche so that you are neither critical of yourself or others.


Neptune rules Pisces, so all Neptunian activities are good for you…whether it be walking along the beach by the ocean, meditating, having a glass of wine, or playing imaginatively like a child. Love relationships are healing when they move away from the humble, disciplined and earth bound nature of Virgo to the realms where the head and the heart unite in the less discriminating waters of Pisces. ~ Elizabeth Spring www.elizabethspring.com http://SouthNodeAstrology.blogspot.com

the unearthing of Carl Jung's Red Book

“This Jung, he was a bodhisattva,” Martin said to me that day. “This is the greatest psychic explorer of the 20th century, and this book tells the story of his inner life.” He added, “It gives me goose bumps just thinking about it.” He had at that point yet to lay eyes on the book, but for him that made it all the more tantalizing. His hope was that the Red Book would “reinvigorate” Jungian psychology, or at the very least bring himself personally closer to Jung. “Will I understand it?” he said. “Probably not. Will it disappoint? Probably. Will it inspire? How could it not?” He paused a moment, seeming to think it through. “I want to be transformed by it,” he said finally. “That’s all there is.”

IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND and decode the Red Book — a process he says required more than five years of concentrated work — Sonu Shamdasani took long, rambling walks on London’s Hampstead Heath. He would translate the book in the morning, then walk miles in the park in the afternoon, his mind trying to follow the rabbit’s path Jung had forged through his own mind.
Shamdasani is 46. He has thick black hair, a punctilious eye for detail and an understated, even somnolent, way of speaking. He is friendly but not particularly given to small talk. If Stephen Martin is — in Jungian terms — a “feeling type,” then Shamdasani, who teaches at the University College London’s Wellcome Trust Center for the History of Medicine and keeps a book by the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus by his sofa for light reading, is a “thinking type.”

He has studied Jungian psychology for more than 15 years and is particularly drawn to the breadth of Jung’s psychology and his knowledge of Eastern thought, as well as the historical richness of his era, a period when visionary writing was more common, when science and art were more entwined and when Europe was slipping into the psychic upheaval of war. He tends to be suspicious of interpretive thinking that’s not anchored by hard fact — and has, in fact, made a habit of attacking anybody he deems guilty of sloppy scholarship — and also maintains a generally unsentimental attitude toward Jung. Both of these qualities make him, at times, awkward company among both Jungians and Jungs.

The relationship between historians and the families of history’s luminaries is, almost by nature, one of mutual disenchantment. One side works to extract; the other to protect. One pushes; one pulls. Stephen Joyce, James Joyce’s literary executor and last living heir, has compared scholars and biographers to “rats and lice.” Vladimir Nabokov’s son Dmitri recently told an interviewer that he considered destroying his father’s last known novel in order to rescue it from the “monstrous nincompoops” who had already picked over his father’s life and works. T. S. Eliot’s widow, Valerie Fletcher, has actively kept his papers out of the hands of biographers, and Anna Freud was, during her lifetime, notoriously selective about who was allowed to read and quote from her father’s archives.Even against this backdrop, the Jungs, led by Ulrich Hoerni, the chief literary administrator, have distinguished themselves with their custodial vigor. Over the years, they have tried to interfere with the publication of books perceived to be negative or inaccurate (including one by the award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair), engaged in legal standoffs with Jungians and other academics over rights to Jung’s work and maintained a state of high agitation concerning the way C. G. Jung is portrayed. Shamdasani was initially cautious with Jung’s heirs. “They had a retinue of people coming to them and asking to see the crown jewels,” he told me in London this summer. “And the standard reply was, ‘Get lost.’ ”

Shamdasani first approached the family with a proposal to edit and eventually publish the Red Book in 1997, which turned out to be an opportune moment. Franz Jung, a vehement opponent of exposing Jung’s private side, had recently died, and the family was reeling from the publication of two controversial and widely discussed books by an American psychologist named Richard Noll, who proposed that Jung was a philandering, self-appointed prophet of a sun-worshiping Aryan cult and that several of his central ideas were either plagiarized or based upon falsified research.

While the attacks by Noll might have normally propelled the family to more vociferously guard the Red Book, Shamdasani showed up with the right bargaining chips — two partial typed draft manuscripts (without illustrations) of the Red Book he had dug up elsewhere. One was sitting on a bookshelf in a house in southern Switzerland, at the home of the elderly daughter of a woman who once worked as a transcriptionist and translator for Jung. The second he found at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, in an uncataloged box of papers belonging to a well-known German publisher. The fact that there were partial copies of the Red Book signified two things — one, that Jung had distributed it to at least a few friends, presumably soliciting feedback for publication; and two, that the book, so long considered private and inaccessible, was in fact findable. The specter of Richard Noll and anybody else who, they feared, might want to taint Jung by quoting selectively from the book loomed large. With or without the family’s blessing, the Red Book — or at least parts of it — would likely become public at some point soon, “probably,” Shamdasani wrote ominously in a report to the family, “in sensationalistic form.”

For about two years, Shamdasani flew back and forth to Zurich, making his case to Jung’s heirs. He had lunches and coffees and delivered a lecture. Finally, after what were by all accounts tense deliberations inside the family, Shamdasani was given a small salary and a color copy of the original book and was granted permission to proceed in preparing it for publication, though he was bound by a strict confidentiality agreement. When money ran short in 2003, the Philemon Foundation was created to finance Shamdasani’s research.

This October through early January, the book will be able to be seen at the Rubin Museum. The Philemon foundation finally raised the money for the research and we can now see the book (as well as buy a copy from amazon.com).

Written by Sara Corbet for the NYTimes, and reprinted here by Elizabeth Spring http://www.elizabethspring.com/ http://carljungsredbook.blogspot.com/

Radio Interview about "The Red Book"

This 30 minute radio interview on Jung's Red Book is excellent. Carl Jung had a ferocious dedication to his inner life, and we all benefit from his courageous journey into this world.

Alchemy and astrology and art, (especially mandalas) were tools Jung used for working with the deep psyche. Evolutionary astrology and Jungian psychology meet hand in hand in this deep exploration where symbolism and mundane reality meet...

Here's the link for the radio interview: http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/09/carl-jungs-secret-book

Carl Jung's Red Book

I was so excited about the publication of Carl Jung's journal: "The Red Book" that I started a new blog on it that some of you readers will enjoy! Here's the link: http://carljungsredbook.blogspot.com/

This blog on the South Node will continue focusing on the Nodes, but the new one will be about the "coming out" out of this exciting book next month in New York City. I've started the blog with a post that tells the story of the Red Book and the process of its finally emergence...I'd love to hear your comments and share stories. That's all for now...check it out!

Scorpio South Node, Scorpio Moon

The Moon in Scorpio and the South Node in Scorpio are both ruled by Pluto, “Lord of the Underworld” and is the archetypal symbol of death and rebirth. Scorpio in this context has struggled to transform and be re-born like the phoenix, and somewhere in all that struggling has come an exhaustion and weariness of the spirit. Pluto is a planet ruling an intense passionate sign, and the Scorpio storyline is often about the price it costs to come into one’s own power. Having your Moon or South Node here suggests that you can heal and regenerate yourself—and others—more skillfully than any other sign, but you can also be secretive, reflective, mysterious and sometimes revengeful or jealous. So this “Hades Moon” and South Node Scorpio often reflect the journey of coming into one’s own power the hard way.

Scorpio Moon and South Node in Scorpio know the dark side of life; the areas that are taboo, and the horrific tragedies that befall humans. Tragedies leave scars in their wake, and though you’ve had great courage to look and survive these times, there’s a heaviness of spirit that often remains, as well as a suspiciousness and fear. This life is now one where you are being called to rethink your values, your priorities, and to allow the old ways of loving and being loved to “die and be reborn.”


There’s great gold in Scorpio’s shadowy inheritance---it has a hard won wisdom and occult knowledge that can serve you well when used right. But as always with Scorpio, there can be a tendency to see the “glass as half empty rather than half full” because of an intuitive awareness of what wasn’t “right” earlier in this life or in a former life. You may have paid too much attention to other people’s business rather than our own. You were—or are--the power behind the throne, or the one who “borrowed” another’s values, glory, money or husband. Your own yearning may have brought on drama and melodrama.


Now there’s a call to love and be loved from a different perspective. No more tragic love stories, no more battles for power, struggles for revenge, hidden agendas and all the stuff of great novels. Just peace. Negotiation. Serenity. That’s the movement that is called for with a Scorpio Moon or South Node. Your Soul needs a rest from trauma and melodrama—and you deserve it. There’s no need to sabotage or save in the realm of love, but instead to find ways that life can be sweeter and easier with those you love, and that comfort itself and the simple joys in life are often what makes life worth living.

The Moon in Scorpio and the South Node in Scorpio hold the emotional memories from your childhood and from the forgotten “emotional memories” of past lives. From the reincarnational perspective, both these points show the particular emotional “hangover” that is most impacting you in this life now. We don’t usually remember “facts” from very early in life, nor do we usually remember our past lives. What we feel instead is an emotional undertone—a lunar feeling—that something in our Soul hurts—and that something in our past is unresolved. It’s like waking from an uncomfortable dream but not remembering the storyline—and this is the unresolved issue that the South Node and the Moon in our birth chart describes. By describing some of this lunar story, we bring it into consciousness, and then we can move into changing our present life story, by recognizing the old patterns and emotions that no longer serve us now. We can learn to love and be loved differently.
Elizabeth Spring www.elizabethspring.com
http://SouthNodeAstrology.blogspot.com