Prophetic linden
Mythic guardians of the U.S., Chiron into Taurus, Astro notes on the Solstice
Two old linden trees guard the entrance to Monticello, their roots plunging into the underworld to come up all yellow flower and little leaf, queens of the dead on the clearcut top of the mountain, guardians of Jefferson’s strange dome, which is to say, the lindens are perhaps the true prophets of the United States.
The mother of Chiron could not bear his form, and so she ran from her duty in shame. Kronos took pity on her, transforming her into a linden tree, granting her a not-quite immortal place in the realm of mothers.
Baucis, the wife of Philemon, became a linden tree in her old age, a gift from Zeus after she and Philemon proved their worthiness to the gods through their hospitality to strangers, through their receptivity to strangeness, how divinity often hid as this last, came through in mundane life in the guise of the bedraggled, odd-speaking traveler needing water, food, rest.
I visited Monticello at the start of this year with my family, when friends of ours from Nebraska stopped through for a post-holiday visit. Although I enjoyed the rich yellow of Jefferson’s dining room, the tiny beds tucked into alcove walls in the bedrooms, I was struck most of all by the linden trees out front and by a portrait of Salome in a corner near one room’s ceiling. I’ve been reading Jung this year more closely than I did once before; part of this work has involved annotating Liber Novus and Liz Greene’s wonderful studies1 on Jung’s interest in and work with astrology in his black books and the Red Book that came out of them. I can’t look at a portrait of Salome without wondering about the old psychologist’s soul and, indeed, about my own soul2, and, more to the point, about the true nature of the human being.3 I can’t look at a linden tree without thinking of Chiron’s abandoned and abandoning mother, on the one hand, and the never-turn-away heart of Baucis, on the other. I can’t encounter these beautiful, cthonic trees without my skin prickling with its own receptivity to the gods, without wondering in awe: What is nothing more than a “gift of pity” for one is the “bestowal of eternal divine honor” for another.
In the natal chart, Chiron shows us where we rage against the wound of our own lost paradise. We astrologers love to talk about the archetype of the wounded healer, but Chiron’s myth begins with the rejection by his mother. The gods take pity on her, because even the gods do not know what it means to try to live straddling two worlds. She becomes a linden tree, the mother of the wounded form. Greene tells of us Chiron’s parentage in Chiron in Love:4
He is the son of Kronos, whom we know in astrology as Saturn. Kronos seduced a nymph called Philrya, but when his wife Rhea discovered them in flagrante, he transformed himself into a stallion and galloped away to escape his wife’s ire, leaving Philrya alone and pregnant. When the child was born, Philrya found his centaur form repellent and frightening, and she abandoned him, begging the gods to transform her into any shape other than human so that she could escape her shame. Kronos, out of pity, turned her into a linden tree (22, 23).
Meanwhile, Baucis becomes a linden tree precisely because she knows and loves the divinity that is, nevertheless and impossibly, found within the heart of that wounded form:
According to Ovid’s tale, Philemon and his wife Baucis spontaneously offered unconditional kindness and generosity to Zeus and Hermes, who visited the old couple disguised as poor travellers. When the deities revealed themselves and promised them that their dearest wish would be granted, Philemon declared that he and his wife desired nothing more than to spend the remainder of their days serving at Zeus’ shrine, and to die at the same moment so that neither would be left grief-stricken and alone … At the moment of their simultaneous death, they were transformed into intertwined trees, Philemon into an oak and Baucis into a linden (94, Greene’s Astrological World of Jung’s ‘Liber Novus’).
The United States, the sorry heart of the West, is one such wounded form. At the home of the man who wrote its declaration into being, you will find two trees who can tell you more about this country’s future than anything on the guided tour.
Astro Notes
Happy Solstice! We celebrated by watching the finale of Widow’s Bay — good! But my favorite episode was the one that featured Patricia’s character as an analogy for awakening as she faced down her own lies, the island’s gaggle of hateful cool girls, and an undying serial killer, all while dressed in a hot pink tee shirt featuring images of the alchemical Sun and Moon. The Fool is the conjunction of the Sun and the Moon, as anonymous writes in Meditations on the Tarot5; the Fool walks the path between the Ineffable Godhead and Wisdom on the Tree of Life. The Fool risks madness, ostracization, for the chance at truly living, nevermind the break with consensus reality. Patricia is The Fool, par excellence, if you want to read the show as an analogy of what you’re bound to encounter when you walk a mystical path of enlightenment or, if you prefer Jungian speak, when you’re working on individuation. I hope I can find time to write about this in-depth this summer! We also celebrated the second month of our dear friends’ baby being in this world, attended a mountain-top funeral, let Kiernan get many long hours of chemo sleep, saw a black bear at sunset, and said as many prayers as we could over a short fire before the kids antagonized each other too much.
After seven years in Aries, Chiron moved into Taurus this past week. This is an intense, important, and transformative point in the horoscope where we struggle against themes of unfair suffering and the ways spite and vindictiveness often emerge from that suffering. There’s a chance for great compassion and the truest of loves to blossom here, but not because anything ever gets “fixed.” Instead, the compassion and love arises from elsewhere, that divine place inside of ourselves that, just as Jung turns toward and embraces Salome as his soul in Liber Novus, is moved by understanding on a level of reality that we don’t quite have words for. It’s a good moment to see where Chiron is in your natal chart, connect with that house, that degree, that sign more intimately. You can do so by pulling out the Minor Arcana card that is associated with your Chiron, and use it as a meditative or journaling guide. If you need help finding which card is connected to your Chiron, or where to find this placement in your chart, let me know! I’m also teaching a six-week class on the Minor Arcana, the natal chart, and the Kabbalah, beginning in August, where we’ll go into all of this, plus much more.
Astrologically, looking forward to the next little while, we’ve got Mercury about to station retrograde in Cancer, which will be the area of life where you’ll struggle to deepen your understanding of your own “realm of mothers.” In The Grail Legend, Emma Jung and Marie Louise von Franz write about this realm as the place of the collective unconscious, which Percival cannot access until he turns toward his longing and inadvertent disregard for his own mother. It’s in longing to see her again, in remembering her own cares and troubles, that he finds himself, at first and finally, in the place of the Grail Castle. I wrote about a monster that’s been in my own “realm of mothers” a few days ago; this kind of imaginal journey is par-for-the-course when our planetary psychopomp goes retrograde in the sign associated with the Chariot that carried Parminedes, pre-Socratic father of Logic into the Underworld to meet the Goddess. (That’s where logic and rationality come from — the divine, the underworld, the astral, not the other way around, btw.) Mars is on Algol this week.
