Jump to: Description, Inspiration, Meaning, Myth: Good Will Hunting

Myth: The Nemean Lion

The Nemean lion is a mythical lion terrorizing the inhabitants of Nemea, which was either raised by Hera or thrown from the moon by Selene at Hera’s request. Heracles was sent by King Eurystheus to slay this lion as the first of his twelve labors. In the beginning he sees no tracks or signs of the lion, and when the beast eventually shows up, Heracles shoots arrows at it, twice, and tries to crack its skull with his mighty club but the lion’s golden pelt is so tough no regular weapons can pierce it. Realizing this, Heracles corners the lion in its cave and strangles it with his bare hands. After failing to skin the lion with his knife, he succeeds when Athena suggests to use one of the lion’s claws, then wears its hide as an armor.

Card description

The scene for this card is simple: a lion standing under a bright noonday sun in what looks like a pretty hot desert. Yet, it’s not a completely dry desert as it features an oasis with a point of water and three palm trees providing a bit of shade. Water is a common symbol for the unconscious, hinting that no matter how conscious we think we are about everything under the sun, there will always be things that are not so cut and dry. Things we just don’t know about. And that’s actually refreshing! If the unknown appears frightening, take heart, because it’s also from the water of the beyond that new life can come from.

Inspiration

For the design of the lion I was inspired by heraldry, choosing what’s called a “sejant guardant” position (or “attitude”)–which is a lion that’s sitting with both forepaws on the ground, looking toward the viewer. The meaning of the lion in heraldry is similar to that of Leo, it symbolizes royalty, power, strength and leadership. And if you’re wondering whether positions means anything in particular, they do not. Attitudes in heraldry are used mainly to differentiate and identify a person or group, which would explain why there are so many variations. I could have chosen any attitude, but I think this one makes a pretty confident lion. You might even imagine Heracles hiding under its skin.

“Leos love to be admired, not only for their physical appearance but also for what they do. Being placed on a pedestal doesn’t bother them in the least. Often natural leaders, they will revel in exemplifying the best traits of the group they represent–whether family, social, or political. Yet most Leos prefer to accomplish tasks without fanfare, wishing to convey a highly confident, secure image.”

–The Secret Language of Birthdays

For the sun my design was inspired by old prints from alchemy, where it is often shown with human features. It felt like a good fit for the strong personality of Leos. I also liked that the alchemical sun has some rays that are straight and others that are curved, which symbolize, respectively, the light of the sun and its heat (or consciousness and emotions). And to emphasize the difference, I painted the curved rays of my sun in red.

Then for the landscape I chose a desert and palm trees, in part to represent the intense summer heat of that time of year, and to show the ability to overcome it with a refreshing source of water and a bit of shade. Palm trees are also a fitting symbol for Leo since they represent fame, blessings, victory, and they also relate to Apollo.

“The tree of the desert oasis, the palm offers a vision of refreshment, pleasure and the fruits of erotic union, redemption in the wilderness, compassion for the suffering, and bliss to those who gratefully kneel to drink the distant water of the beyond in the palm tree’s cool shade.”

–Taschen, Book of Symbols (Palm Tree)

Meaning

Leo is only the fifth sign in the zodiac but looking at this card, it almost feels like this could be the end of the journey. This lion seems to have it all: earthly power, strength, courage, the divine wisdom of the sun, the blessings of the palms, and more. To add to this good fortune, there’s also an oasis basking in the light of an eternal sunshine.

The oasis is an image of hope, it’s a refuge, a place to rejuvenate. Travelers stop there to rest, recharge, and be safe. It’s also where seekers can go to find inspiration, purpose or relief from despair. As a symbol, the oasis represents the idea that even in the most difficult times there can be moments of relief, even joy, making it an image of survival.

But sometimes an oasis can turn out to be a mirage. On a spiritual journey this state of bliss could mean premature enlightenment, thinking that one is further along than one really is. In stories, it can be a test or a temptation for the hero to not finish the journey. For example Santiago in The Alchemist wants to marry and settle in the oasis, and Pi Patel in Life of Pi is tempted to stay on the floating island. It’s hard for the hero to leave, and it’s hard for us to accept that the story doesn’t end in this happy place.

There is also in the image of the oasis a certain kind of eternal youth, like the feeling of wholeness and vitality we felt as kids. Or a children’s land where all desires and impulses can be satisfied and everything is in harmony. Yet being young also implies a kind of vulnerability.

As we grow up we learn to repress our natural impulses and affects, and push them into the shadow in order to fit into society, or to protect ourselves. But these don’t go away, they just become unconscious and remain stuck in an infantile state, like a Nemean lion roaming in the land of our psyche.

“Lions, like all wild animals, indicate latent affects. The lion plays an important part in alchemy and has much the same meaning. It is a ‘fiery’ animal, an emblem of the devil, and stands for the danger of being swallowed by the unconscious.”

–Jung, CW 12, Psychology and Alchemy [277]

“Frequently depressed people dream of voracious lions or other devouring animals such as dragons, but particularly lions, which means they are depressed because they are frustrated in the fulfillment of their wild desires,” Von Franz explains in her book on Alchemy. She goes on to say that the frustrated desire to have it all, a beautiful partner, money, happiness, and so on, is a paradise fantasy (much like the American dream).

This paradise fantasy, says Von Franz, is a religious image of psychic wholeness, or what Jung calls the Self, and is entirely legitimate in itself. The childish thing is to project it in outer life (or on another person) and want it there. Outer life is the realm of consciousness, which is only part of the whole psyche.

Likewise, the ego is only aware of a small part of our full personality so to become more whole we have to venture beyond what we know, which to the ego feels like “the other side.” Getting to a wider state of awareness then is like overcoming death. To find and fight the lion, we have to allow ourselves to be led by the unconscious. It’s not something that can be thought through.

And that may be why the Nemean lion lives in a cave, in the shadow (or what we don’t know about ourselves). Like the green lion of alchemy, it devours consciousness. A cave is a kind of womb, and also a tomb, so it’s considered a place of death, initiation, and rebirth. (Taschen) And that may be the main theme of the Leo myth. Heracles the solar hero wrestling with the Nemean lion is an image of the ego grappling with wild affects beyond the bounds of what it knows.

The main attribute and most terrifying thing about this Nemean Lion is that its skin is impervious to weapons. Normal defenses can’t work against its attacks. If you think about what weapons are compared to hands, they’re man-made objects. A lot of thoughts go into making them. So weapons could represent thoughts, or the intellect, unable to pierce through the thick skin of this lion. Hot issues need to be wrestled with emotionally, not from a distance.

But why not just leave this dangerous lion alone? Because, those wild affects also contain unconscious bits of our personality, with untapped creativity and vitality (what Jung called complexes). The Strength card in the Tarot shows that handling this lion requires a human touch. The woman tames the lion not by beating it into submission or repressing it, but by respecting its needs and coexisting with it (which is also what a good therapist can do).

“It is of course impossible to free oneself from one’s childhood without devoting a great deal of work to it, as Freud’s research have long since shown. Nor can it be achieved through intellectual knowledge only; what is alone effective is a remembering that is also re-experiencing… This personal unconscious must always be dealt with first, that is, made conscious, otherwise the gateway to the collective unconscious cannot be opened.”

CW Vol 12, Psychology and Alchemy [81]

To turn the beast into a kingly lion (or the green lion into the red one) is not a one and done task. It takes Heracles three trials to figure out how to kill the Nemean Lion. This pattern of three is typical of the road of trials in Campbell’s hero’s journey, and also many fairy tales, as Von Franz points out.

The number three has to do with movement and with time, she says. And we can see that in the myth when Heracles shoots a first arrow, a second arrow, then hits the lion with the club. These are three steps with movement. Then there is a fourth step which is a static finale, which is when Heracles figures out that his weapons are useless and throws them on the ground to tackle the lion with his bare hands.

That pattern feels meaningful because the hero goes from three to four, or a consciousness that’s based in time, i.e. the everyday world, to a reality which is timeless. By overcoming the lion, Heracles has access to the awareness and intelligence of the sun, symbolized by wearing the lion’s skin. This is a deeper consciousness, one that includes the heart, not just the head.

The sun on the card is a symbol of the conscious ego, it’s the center of the cosmos, the all-seeing one, which “on the personal level is our deepest identity, the true self and authority, the source of our dignity and integrity.” (Hauck) It has two sets of seven rays, one is about awareness and the other about emotions, with the number seven meaning completeness or totality.

Jung writes (CW 12, par 83): “in the language of initiation, seven stands for the highest stage of illumination and would therefore be the coveted goal of all desire… If this interpretation is correct, it would mean that the process of integrating the personal unconscious was actually at an end. Thereafter the collective unconscious would begin to open up…” (which in the hero’s journey would the next stage in Virgo).

In alchemy this process of initiation is made of steps going through the seven metals or the seven visible planets, from the most material to the most spiritual: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Moon, ending with the Sun. The planets represent the various archetypal qualities which make up a personality, each of us with a unique combination.

By integrating levels of reality going from Saturn to the Sun, in other words from matter and survival, society, love, intellect, to the soul and spirit, the goal is to become more and more conscious of one’s true self and unique identity (much like in modern therapy). Obviously, this process is on-going and not necessarily linear. So this isn’t the final end, but overcoming the lion is nevertheless a crowning achievement.

“The idea of the ascent through the seven spheres of the planets symbolizes the return of the soul to the sun-god from whom it originated… Thus the Isis mystery described by Apuelius culminated in what early medieval alchemy called the solificatio, where the initiand was crowned as Helios.”

–Jung, CW 12, Psychology and Alchemy [66]

Modern Myth: Good Will Hunting

Will, the unusually smart guy struggling with deep emotional wounds in Good Will Hunting, is like a modern form of Heracles wrestling with the Nemean lion. Although centuries apart, both stories share a similar premise: a troubled childhood. Will has been abused as a child by the foster parents who were supposed to take care of him, and Heracles too was persecuted by a parental figure, his stepmother Hera.

Inner split

This kind of childhood leaves one in an emotional desert and the only way to survive it is to create one’s own oasis. For Will that oasis is made of books, mathematics, and loyal friends who will protect him no matter what. So part of Will’s personality, the one he shows in public, is to be like his friends: he gets into fights, drinks and plays ball while working in construction.

The other part of his personality, the genius part that reads voraciously, remembers everything effortlessly, and can easily make sense of complicated math symbols, that part is kept hidden—even from himself. But his friends can see how smart he is. And even though consciously Will wants to stay in the safe world that he knows, something inside wants his talent go out into the world. Before long, he gets the attention of an M.I.T. professor and dates a girl studying at Harvard.

Let the healing begin

But the heart of the film, really, are the therapy sessions.

The first session with Sean is the scene that I feel most embodies the myth of the Nemean lion. Will first tries to attack Sean with a couple critiques about his books and just like the arrows of Heracles bouncing off the lion, his remarks fall flat. After that they talk about lifting weights, but Sean beats him on that front too. Then Will spots Sean’s painting, judges the composition and colors, then moves on to more personal attacks like Sean’s state of mind, until he finds the real sore point: Sean’s wife.

With his beard and stocky physique, Sean has not only the look of a lion, but also the temperament. Wise, magnanimous, strong, courageous, yet also fierce. He grabs Will by the throat and tells him to never disrespects his wife again.

Then unlike the other therapists, Sean agrees to continue seeing Will. In the language of myth, he’s found the lion. But there still remain the task of overcoming it and putting on the skin—or for Will to find his own wisdom.

Alchemy

Much like alchemy, Will’s therapy evolves over the course of seven session where he matures from a scared kid to finally owning his own authority. If you look for it you might even see the progression of the planets in these sessions—probably not because the writers applied alchemy, but because it’s what’s emotionally true.

Starting with Saturn, the first session focuses on material reality and limits: Sean’s books, his exercise regime, and the painting in his office. Will tests his limits by examining Sean’s space. Sean’s response is also very physical. Then the scene where Sean brings Will outside is Jupiter, the planet of expansion. Sean shows Will how limited his life is and that books have nothing on real life experiences. Moving back to the office, Mars is when Will asserts himself by not talking the whole session. Then in the following session, he breaks the silence with an erotic joke. That’s the planet Venus, which concerns love and relationships. Sean starts to build trust, talks about his wife and shares with Will what intimacy is all about.

Meanwhile, Will gets more intimate with Skylar, the girl from Harvard. He wonders if she’s the one and asks Sean about that. At the heart of Will’s question is the duality of Mercury and his struggle to reconcile the rational and the intuitive. Sean shows him that when you follow your gut, you make the right decisions and have no regrets. But that’s still too hard for Will, who can’t find good reasons to follow Skylar to California or take a job with the government. So in the next session, the level of the Moon and subconscious, Sean helps Will see his blind side, questioning his motive behind taking a job at a prestigious college.

Back on the job with Chuck, Will gets another surprise. His best friend tells him he’s hoping for the day Will won’t be there, because it would mean he’s moved on to better things. Then he witnesses a heated argument between Sean and Lambeau over his future. This paves the way for the crucial session where Will breaks down emotionally for the first time. At the highest level of the Sun, which is about identity and inner authority, Will is back to being just a vulnerable kid. Sean helps him release the pain from his childhood and overcome the lion.

In the last meeting, we learn that Will has taken a job and also that Sean is going to be traveling for a little while. He too is changed by their encounter. Before meeting Will, Sean had no hope for the future. Now he plans to travel. He’s starting his own cycle, leaving the dark world of Saturn for that of Jupiter.

In the next scene we see Will’s friends give him a car for his 21st birthday. This changes everything, because he doesn’t depends on others to get places anymore. Will now wears the lion’s skin. He can make his own choices.

A Matter of Choice

At about the same age as Will, Heracles also faced a choice regarding his fate. A choice between vice and virtue—a pleasant and easy life or a hard but honorable one. He chose the latter.

But which life (or job) is more honorable in Good Will Hunting? Which is harder? It’s not so clear. We see all four characters, Will, Chuck, Lambeau and Sean, more or less struggle with this.

Part of what makes this movie so relatable and universal are the questions it asks. What is a successful life, what is a failed one? What do you want to do?

Will can’t answer that because he doesn’t know who he is. His inner split is perfectly reflected in the two contradictory father figures, Lambeau and Sean. Part of him wants a clear answer, a clear path, while another part of him is open to the unknown. It’s an impossible choice.

But often there’s a third solution to get out of the double bind. One that is neither one or the other, and both at the same time. Here, that third thing is to “go see about a girl.” Skylar represents a clear goal and also the unknown. She herself knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to try new things.

We don’t know what’s going on in Will’s head as he’s driving down that road. But who cares. The head only wants this or that. The heart wants what it wants, and that’s what matters.

Summary

Element: Fixed Fire Ruler: Sun Symbol: the Lion Motto: I succeed

Keywords: Vitality, youth, creativity, personality, individuality, emotions, power, will, consciousness, intellect, reason, illumination, trials, conflict, success, victory
Qualities: Strength, courage, loyalty, confidence, assertion, leadership, self-esteem, bright
Shadow: self-centeredness, arrogance, pride, domination, rage, war, ferocity, cruelty
Opposite: Aquarius

Sources:

C.G. Jung – C.W. Vol 12, Psychology and Alchemy par. 73-83
Von Franz – Alchemy, p.104-106, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, p.89
D.W. Hauck – The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Alchemy (Lions of Alchemy, The Ladder of The Planets)
Taschen – The Book of Symbols, Reflections on Archetypal Images
J.C. Cooper – An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols
G. Goldschneider, J. Elffers – The Secret Language of Birthdays
Wikipedia

Thanks for reading! If you like my work, a cup of coffee would be much appreciated 🙏.

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Jump to: Description, Inspiration, Meaning, Myth: The Wizard of Oz

Myth: The Lernaean Hydra

Heracles fights the Lernaean Hydra as part of his twelve labors. This is a multi-headed serpent that Hera raised just to slay Heracles. After shooting flaming arrows to bring it out of its lair, Heracles tries to cut off the Hydra’s heads but each time two or more grow back. So his nephew comes up with the genius idea to burn the necks after cutting the heads. Seeing that Heracles is winning, Hera sends a giant Crab to distract him but Heracles crushes it under his foot and gives the Hydra its coup de grace with Athena’s golden sword. Heracles then buries its immortal head under a large rock.

Card description

Conjuring the powers of the moon and the ocean, the crab dances back and forth to the rhythms of the tides. Or perhaps it’s the moon which exerts her influence? As if tearing the fabric of the night, the moon reveals a glimpse of the bright world behind the veil. The crab, completely focused on that world, is caught in a different time and place as the moon goes through phases, the ocean keeps making waves, and the crab sheds its shell. Dark and mysterious, the spiral of the seashell calls from within, while the stone and starfish balance the scene with the calming and centering presence we like to call home.

Inspiration

An image from Taschen’s Book of Symbols showing a crab holding the moon between its claws was my initial inspiration for this card (see below). But instead of having the crab entirely submerged in the ocean, I chose to show it only partly in the water. I wanted to give the crab a little foothold on land, which for the purpose of the hero’s journey, suits well the stage of crossing the threshold.

Thinking about crabs and crossing into a new world, I was also inspired by the memory of one of my nephews coming to California as an eighteen-month old toddler. It might have been his first trips to the beach. He was completely fascinated by the little crabs, and spent hours looking for them among the rocks.

I debated whether to draw a full or partial moon, and chose the crescent because to me it’s such an iconic symbol for the moon. The crab holding a crescent would make the drawing a little awkward, so I place the moon higher up in the sky, where it would normally be.

You may perhaps notice a kind of illusion in the drawing, which is fitting for an image of Cancer: on one hand the crab appears to stand in the foreground with the ocean receding behind, but if you squint your eyes you might also imagine it submerged in a shallow part of the ocean, as if looking at the moon through the surface of the water (but the idea of adding ripples of color around the moon only came later, while working on the scan of the painting).

After searching online and loving the color of the green shore crabs, I chose to paint the crab green instead of the more typical red. But these green shore crabs, when they delay molting, actually do become red. Since their shells are thicker they’re stronger and more aggressive than the green ones, but that makes them also less adaptive to their environment (which is interesting, on a symbolic level).

“The crescent suggests the horned gateway of the moon’s eternal cycling and if it promises an end to every beginning, it equally signifies the promise of beginning wherever there is end.”

–Taschen, The Big Book of Symbols

Card Meaning

On the surface this card may look like just a simple beach scene. Nothing unusual: a crab, conch shell, rock and starfish on a beach under the moonlight. But if you dig a little deeper, you might notice that many of these elements have something in common: they regenerate. The crab sheds its shell, the ocean makes waves, the moon goes through phases, and even the starfish can regrow its limbs. Maybe that’s why we like going to the beach! It regenerates us.

But when Heracles fights the Hydra what he’s fighting, really, is this constant regeneration. As soon as he cuts one head, more heads grow back, making this dragon practically invincible. However strong Heracles is, he’s overwhelmed! And can’t fight all these heads by himself.

The Hydra, as a serpent living in a swamp, a watery creature, is like water; which is “the source of all potential, fertility, the unmanifest.” In itself this isn’t bad, often it can be a good thing actually. But with the Hydra this potential isn’t transformed, it’s just being regenerated. It moves endlessly like waves in the ocean, and becomes more like “illusion, vicissitude or agitation” (Cooper).

Faced with all this agitation, Heracles calls his nephew for help, who then realizes the Hydra’s weak point: fire. Fire means the heat of the emotions, which in myths and rituals, generally has a transforming quality; it speeds up the maturing process and clarifies things; it burns what can be destroyed, and what’s left then becomes a symbol of immortality. (Von Franz)

It’s only when Heracles applies the fire of emotions in his struggle that he’s able to cut through this watery confusion. What remains is the immortal head of the Hydra, which Heracles puts under a rock. You might see it as a foundation stone, “the rock on which the universe is founded, the source of the water of life, and which prevails against Hades and the powers of the underworld.” So it’s like this head a protection against relapses into darkness.

”Without the fire of emotions no development takes place and no higher consciousness can be reached. If someone in analysis is dispassionate about it and does not suffer–if there is neither the fire of despair not hatred not conflict nor fury nor annoyance not anything of that kind–one can be sure that not much will be constellated and it will be a blah-blah analysis forever.”

–Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, p. 104

When I showed this card to a friend in a reading, she remarked that maybe the crab was too caught up in the moon, and didn’t see the treasures behind its back. I love her interpretation and what I notice when looking at the card this way, is that the moon and the ocean grabbing the attention of the crab are in a way both impersonal, they belong to everyone.

But a shell, a rock, or a starfish you can hold in your hand, it’s more personal. And if the treasure they hold is of a personal nature, then it could be something like the sense of self, which under collective influences would be especially valuable.

The moon and the ocean are also both mother symbols, and if you recall, in the myth it’s Hera who raised the Hydra. As a dark mother figure, she represents the primal instincts of life, as well as the blissful unconsciousness of childhood. In a way, the Hydra is the multi-headed monster from our childhood which Athena, the goddess of wisdom (or the urge to be more conscious), help overcome.

So you could see the myth as like a fight against the dragon of our past, and in the background there are these two goddesses who pull us back and forth, like the crab along the shoreline: Hera, luring us toward the water into the inner world, and Athena, helping us get back to the land.

“Moon and crab are associated with mother, night, water, feeling, and also with the changeable, moody and inconstant.”

–Taschen, The Big Book of Symbols

This ambiguous place between land and water, conscious and unconscious, partly in the light of the moon, partly in the dark, is also the metaphorical gate where the hero crosses the threshold into the special world in the hero’s journey.

That threshold between known and unknown isn’t always straightforward and the passage from one state to another not always smooth. Other than having to fight a threshold guardian, the hero might land in the belly of the whale and like Dorothy in Oz, get swallowed up into the dream world, hopefully to return having recovered the lost soul and rebuilt a sense of self.

“Dreams are integral to the world of Cancer. If the ocean, whose tides are controlled by the moon, may be said to represent the universe of diffuse feelings, then The Crab itself can symbolize the crystallization of those emotions in a single being. The armor of the Crab hides its extremely sensitive interior world from view.”

– The Secret Language of Birthdays

Modern Myth: The Wizard of Oz

From Kansas to Oz

When I was seventeen I babysat a little three-year old girl for a couple months over the summer. Every day we went to her closet, pulled out her “party shoes,” then put on The Wizard of Oz and watched the same scenes over and over again as she danced with the characters in front of the TV. Having not grown up in the States or speaking English, I didn’t know what the movie was about and it took many years before I finally saw the beginning part and realized that these strange characters were actually based on Dorothy’s life.

Now when I look at this movie, I see the harshness of the Depression era as a reflection of the emotional poverty Dorothy found herself in. In that first scene, she is obviously distressed and no one around her seems to care. Her aunt just tells her to not get into trouble, the three farm workers point out what’s wrong with her, and her uncle Henry is simply checked out. Her only friend is her dog Toto and Mrs Gulch is about to have it put to death.

So when the fortune-teller makes up the story that her aunt is sick, who is the only person she could rely on to be taken care of, it all gets to be too much for Dorothy: a tornado suddenly unleashes, mixing up the objective world of facts with her subjective inner world.

Dorothy’s Conflict

In this ambiguous place, Dorothy finds herself in the same kind of threshold as in my card of Cancer or where Heracles fights the Hydra. It’s this thin line between conscious and unconscious, personal and impersonal, and is where light and dark forces clash.

For Dorothy this conflict is between what the law requires and what she feels to be right. How can the law condemn an innocent dog? Mrs Gulch says he’s a menace to the community, but she knows her dog, he didn’t mean any harm. But symbolically, a dog is both good and bad, and it serves as guide to the unconscious: if Toto gets Dorothy into trouble, he also saves the day more than once and in the end is the one that gets her out of trouble.

But deep down the underlying conflict is also between life and death, which can be seen in the use of the color green. The face of the Wicked Witch is of course green, and on her it’s the green of death and putrefaction. But there is also a lot of green in Emerald City, where it’s the color of spring, new life, hope and gladness. It’s interesting too, considering my choice of green for the crab, that there is so much of it in the movie. Since it’s the color of nature and of the feminine, green can also relate to the archetypal conflict of the mother.

In Oz the Wicked Witch of the West is similar to Hera, the dark mother figure, and Glenda, the witch of the North helping Dorothy and her three companions would be like Athena, the hero’s advocate. All together the little group would represent the hero Heracles, as a complete ego with its four functions (thinking, feeling, sensing and intuition). And I would say that perhaps the land of Oz and its characters, which is what the four are fighting, would be the equivalent of the multi-headed Hydra, and the Wizard is the immortal head.

“The triumph of the hero is that he is often wounded but he wins in as much as he emerges potent enough, accomplished enough, and able to command some success and autonomy in the world, and not become a monster himself, which is one of the terrible challenges of course, is that children are always at risk of becoming what has been done to them. As Chesterton said: Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”

― Joseph Lee, This Jungian Life (Luxury Beliefs episode)

The Resolution

What defeats the Wicked Witch is the same thing as for the Hydra: the meeting of fire and water. Heracles needs the fire of emotions against the watery serpent, while in the movie it’s the reverse, Dorothy needs water to dissolve the destructive fire of the Wicked Witch.

In both cases, though, the defeat of the dark mother is what allows the healing of the soul. In the myth it’s symbolized by the immortal head which Heracles cuts with the golden sword of Athena, while in Oz it’s the head of the Wizard. And the lesson for Dorothy and her companions goes on step further: they discover that their wish was always inside of them.

Perhaps Dorothy was able to go home all along, but without the journey she would have gone right back to the same troubles. What she went through in Oz was a kind of shamanic journey, one which helped her reconnect with the richness in her soul: her capacity to feel, to fight, to be self-aware, and most importantly, that she has a home within herself.

Summary

Element: Cardinal Water Ruler: Moon Symbol: the Crab Motto: I care

Keywords: regeneration, change, distraction, agitation, transition, illusion, ambiguity, life and death, attachment, family, relationships, home, mother, emotions, inner life, rebirth
Qualities: Sensitivity, closeness, nurturing, imagination, renewal, soulfulness
Shadow: Unconsciousness, insensitivity, possessiveness, need for security
Opposite: Capricorn

Sources:

This Jungian Life Podcast (Threshold, Loss of Soul, Luxury Beliefs)
Esther Hardings, Psychic Energy (The Dragon and the Hero)
M.-L. Von Franz, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, pp.104-105
Taschen – The Book of Symbols, Reflections on Archetypal Images
J.C. Cooper – An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols
G. Goldschneider, J. Elffers – The Secret Language of Birthdays
Wikipedia

Thanks for reading! If you like my work, a cup of coffee would be much appreciated 🙏.

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Sheet with twelve zodiac stickers

• Art by Sophie Dufresne for Sophiequi
• Dimensions: 7 × 9 in
• Vinyl / Matte
• Ready to ship

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

• A hero’s journey through the Zodiac

• Myth and meaning of Capricorn

• Myth and meaning of Scorpio

Jump to: Description, Inspiration, Meaning, Modern Myth: Arrival

Myth: Death of ORION

Most myths for Scorpio have to do with the giant huntsman Orion, born from the hide of a bull fertilized by Zeus, Poseidon and Hermes then buried in the womb of the earth. In one version Orion is hunting with Artemis and her mother Leto, then boasts that he can kill any animal on Earth. Upon hearing this, Gaia gets upset and sends a giant scorpion to kill him. In another version it is a jealous Apollo, the twin brother of Artemis, who tricks Artemis into shooting at a distant target which turns out to be Orion. Then Zeus places Orion and the scorpion among the stars as a memorial.

Card description

Tucked in the safety of its hiding place, the scorpion is ready to strike anyone who gets too close. The comet flying by in the sky shows that the scorpion is able to attack or react at lightning speed. Associated with sudden events, revelation, or omen, the comet also suggests a situation taking place in the realm of the magical, irrational and emotional. Whatever it is, expect the unexpected. The scorpion might strike, but like the mandrake it contains both poison and medicine. Even though it might hurt, it can also bring healing.

Inspiration

Ever since I saw the mandrake in Taschen's Book of Symbols, I’ve been waiting for the right occasion to use this magical plant in a drawing. Scorpio seemed the perfect fit. Like the scorpion, it’s poisonous and medicinal, and also associated with magic.

Because its root resembles a person, people believed that it shrieked when pulled out of the ground and would kill or drive insane whoever heard the scream. So there was this whole procedure to pull the plant out. Under the light of the moon, a dog was tied to the mandrake and bribed with food in order to pull out the plant while blocking one’s ears to not hear the scream of the plant.

So the idea for my drawing was to replaced the root of the mandrake with the scorpion since both are dangerous and potentially healing.

Taschen’s Book of Symbols says of scorpions that they are by nature solitaries shunning light. “Adapted to rain forest, deserts and urban settings, they burrow in the sand and wait at the opening for prey and secrete themselves in crevices of buildings or under rocks, debris or bark.”

One might also add to this list: a shower glove. I experienced it first hand on a trip in Mexico, years ago. A baby scorpion had found a hiding place there and stung me! The hole drawn in the ground reminded me of that experience, and the way the scorpion stung me so suddenly was not like the moonlight of the mandrake legend but more like a comet shooting across the sky.

PS: Almost a year after writing this post, and over three years after making this drawing, I found a cool connection between the myth of Orion and the comet: apparently Orion had two daughters, Menippe and Metioche, and after his death they were transformed into comets by Persephone.

“Scorpio has the capacity to shun human contact if it wishes, and deal with serious matters in a purposeful fashion. Pluto grants volcanic sexual energies as well as an insight into the mysteries of metamorphosis and transformation.”

–The Secret Language of Birthdays

Card meaning

Fundamentally, the death/resurrection and mutilation/regeneration symbols of Scorpio evoke transformation. It might be personal, or perhaps even transpersonal, but like all transformations it’s something mysterious and also scary because ultimately to transform is to go through a kind of death, and in some way implies having to hand oneself off to something larger in order to survive the transformation.

To represent this deep and most likely unpleasant experience, the zodiac uses the symbol of the scorpion. This is a creature that tends to hides under rocks and in crevices and strikes its prey by surprise (and so does the snake and eagle). Whatever is behind the transformation in question may well have been building up under the surface for some time, the seeds planted long ago, growing completely unnoticed. But when it strikes, it’s as if the change comes out of nowhere.

This kind of change is not easy to integrate and has a profound and lasting effect on one’s life. It might happens at midlife or perhaps following a revelation or secret that has just come to light. In the card this is represented by the comet flashing across the sky.

Because the sighting of comets was often connected to times of political, social, or religious upheaval, they came to symbolize imminent calamities like war, fire, or disease. But comets have also been seen as messengers of the sun gods. In other words, their appearance can also foretell something enlightening.

“Because of their origination in the heavens and their suddenness and brightness, comets like meteors and UFOs are potent hooks for psychic projections. Jung speculated that they represents strange contents from the collective unconscious that oppose the values held consciously by the culture.”

–Taschen, The Book of Symbols, Comet Symbolism

Whether dark or enlightening, the comet’s trajectory originates from regions infinitely far away and brings us back down to earth. But the power and real danger here is underground, which is the realm of Hades or Pluto, the god associated with Scorpio’s ruling planet.

At the entrance of Hades, which is the Greek underworld, we find the “Hell Hound” Cerberus whose job it is to prevent the dead from leaving the underworld. Its three heads kind of remind me of the three dangling fruit on the mandrake. Think about the story of how people used to tie a dog to the root of the mandrake to pull it out. There too you find the idea that dogs somehow know how to handle death. They help hunters, after all.

Hunters usually are the ones who bring death, but in Orion’s myth the huntsman is killed so he actually becomes prey. By boasting to impress Artemis, Orion infuriates the goddess of the earth, Gaia, who then instantly sends the Scorpion and shows Orion her own power to bring death.

On one hand, Orion’s death makes me think of what Jung calls the sacrifice of the “natural man,” which is to sacrifice one’s naive trust in nature or childlike unconsciousness (C.W. 8, par 751).

On the other hand, Orion could represent a boastful consciousness which thinks it can overpower unconscious forces just out of sheer will. But the will is no match against archaic forces such as represented by the scorpion, a creature which is thousands of years old.

The scorpion could also represent the “automatic and instinctive activity of the unconscious,” as Jung would say (C.W. 7 par 253), purposely taking over the conscious will to restore balance where consciousness is not able to. But however it happens, the goal is to bring about a transformation of the personality.

Being hunter and prey also implies seeing both sides of a story, thus gaining a wider perspective. In a way, the mandrake expresses this idea too. As a plant we might think of it as prey but it’s also a predator like the scorpion since it’s poisonous and has the power to kill.

When still embedded in the ground the mandrake root is considered dangerous and diabolical, like the earth goddess in Orion’s myth, or like the enchantress Circe, whose emblem is the mandrake. Circe turns her enemies into animals and is famous for her knowledge of potions and herbs, which can not only curse but also heal and purify.

The root of the mandrake was thought to relieve depression and insomnia and was also used as anesthetic and aphrodisiac. However, harvesting its magic was risky because the root of the mandrake was believed to shriek and bring death or madness to whoever heard it, so elaborate precautions were needed to extract it from the ground.

“One might take [these precautions] as saying that ferocious dark energies are necessary to extract the magical content from the unconscious depths, and they can only do their work in the darkness and not in an everyday state of mind. However, these energies have to be sacrificed once the work is done, less they take over the conscious life.”

–Taschen, The Book of Symbols, Mandrake Symbolism

The danger of extracting this magical content is a good metaphor for the step I associate with Scorpio in Campbell’s hero’s journey, Atonement with the father, where “the hero must confront and be initiated by whatever holds the ultimate power in their life”.

This is often a figure who has life and death power, which in the myth of Orion is not a father figure but Gaia—mother Earth, or the Great Mother, and has the task of shattering the hero’s boastful ego.

In The Problem of the Puer Aeternus (the eternal child), Von Franz says: “if you venture into life, into reality, instead of keeping outside so as to avoid suffering, you will find that life is also death; if you accept your life, you really, in the deepest sense of the word, accept death, and that is what the puer does not want. He does not want to accept mortality, and that is why he does not want to go into reality, because the end of it is the realization of his weakness and his mortality.”

The death of Orion by the scorpion stings because we don’t like heroes to die. They’re supposed to be immortal! But let’s consider the other side of this story: maybe the immortal hero has to die, so that the mortal man can live.

Because it resembles a person, the root of the mandrake could be seen as the parts of our personality which have long been buried. Pulling them out into the light is hard and not without pain. It’s like having a taste of our own medicine. But letting the hero in us die, ultimately, is necessary because it brings out our humanity.

Modern Myth: Arrival

What modern movie do you think could compare to the death of a huntsman by a giant scorpion? I considered “Don’t Look Up” and other sci-fi films like “The Matrix” or “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” but eventually I settled on “Arrival,” mainly because I love its very human mother-daughter story and overall beauty.

But the more I let it simmer in my mind, the more I started to see parallels with the symbols of the card as well as the myth of Orion. First, there’s the shocking revelation of Louise’s visions which is like a metaphorical comet for us the audience!

The language of the aliens and the discovery that it opens time could compare to the magic of the mandrake. But here the danger—or scorpion—is not so much the aliens as it is what we humans project onto them; that is our own history, filled with miscommunication, war, and destruction.

the role of Language

Language is, in a way, also central in the myth. Orion dies because of something he said. He’s punished for uttering words just as if he had done the deed. In Arrival, Abbott the alien dies because people confuse the word “tool” with “weapon” and immediately assume the aliens will attack. In the intensity of the moment, it’s as if time collapses and then “saying equals doing.”

Louise’s use and knowledge of language up until the meeting with the aliens is intellectual. It comes from the head. She actually says to Ian—trust me, you can “understand” all about communication and still end up alone. But as she learns the alien’s language, her understanding becomes more visceral, emotional–in the metaphor of the logogram, more “whole”.

Louise as Artemis and the fear of existence

Although the meaning I gave the myth earlier was about Orion being the hunter and the hunted, there is an interpretation of the film that gave me another perspective: Louise’s fear of existence. This made me think of Artemis. That she is the eternal maiden, and how the attack on her suitor Orion, whether from Gaia or Apollo, could be a projection of Artemis’ own unconscious, unknowingly designed to keep her alone.

At some point Louise says “I feel like everything that happens in there comes down to the two of us.” And this makes me wonder if perhaps the real lesson of Scorpio, and of the atonement of the hero’s journey, is to see that we are the source of our own life, and perhaps, also, the makers of our own tragedies.

On a personal level, you could say that Ian is a kind of Orion. Although he doesn’t actually die, from Louise’s perspective he might as well be dead since she loses him. Her betrayal in this case acts like the scorpion.

When Louise says to her daughter that Ian thought she made the wrong choice, I find that ambiguous because she made two choices, really. One is to have Hannah anyway, but the other choice is to not tell Ian about it.

It seems to me that by not telling Ian, she robbed him of his own free will. And that this could be the choice he’s mad about. That he had no choice in the matter. Had she told him what she knew, perhaps they could have fought it out? And maybe, because he loves her, would have accepted to have Hannah too? Hannah would have still died, but Louise would not be grieving her daughter alone.

But Hannah could also be taken a symbol of Louise’s inner child, a link to the wholeness of childhood (Hannah being a palindrome, the name itself a symbol for wholeness). Hannah’s death then could represent an emotional crisis in Louise’s inner world. The moment she lets go of the unconscious maiden in herself, the eternal Artemis, to finally embrace her full human destiny.

Summary

Element: Fixed Water Ruler: Mars & Pluto Symbol: the Scorpio Motto: I confront

Keywords: Transformation, metamorphosis, healing, the need to go deep inside, death, depth, intensity, magic, unconscious, hidden, dark, tragic, solitary, atonement with the father, revenge
Qualities: changeable, profound, powerful, deep, meaningful, direct
Shadow: Fateful, dark, treacherous, hostile, self-destructive, controlling
Opposite: Taurus

Sources:

C.G. Jung – Collected Works Vol. 8 par. 751, Vol. 7 par. 248, 252-253
M.-L. Von Franz – The Problem of the Puer Aeternus
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Taschen – The Book of Symbols, Reflections on Archetypal Images
G. Goldschneider, J. Elffers – The Secret Language of Birthdays
Wikipedia

Thanks for reading! If you like my work, a cup of coffee would be much appreciated 🙏.

FROM MY SHOP

Let Scorpio and its love of mystery inspire you to seek truth in the dark.

• Art by Sophie Dufresne for Sophiequi
• Dimensions: 2 × 2 in
• Eco-friendly certified UV-LED inks
• Printed on sustainable cherry wood
• Flexible enough for curved surfaces
• Use as sticker or magnet
• Made in the USA
• Ready to ship

I hope you dig this, happy birthday!

• Art by Sophie Dufresne for Sophiequi
• Dimensions: A6 or 4.13 × 5.83 in
• Gold A6 envelope provided
• blank inside
• Smooth cover paper 16pt
• Ready to ship

Sheet with twelve zodiac stickers

• Art by Sophie Dufresne for Sophiequi
• Dimensions: 7 × 9 in
• Vinyl / Matte
• Ready to ship

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

• A hero’s journey through the Zodiac

• Myth and meaning of Taurus

• Myth and meaning of Pisces

Jump to: Description, Inspiration, Meaning, Myth: Groundhog Day

Myths of Aphrodite

The myths of Pisces originate with the Syrian goddess Atargatis, identifed with Aphrodite by the Greeks. In one myth Aphrodite and her son Eros flee from the monster Typhon (like Pan in the Capricorn myth) by jumping in the Euphrates river and are saved by a pair of twin fish. Or Aphrodite and Eros tie each other with a rope and transform themselves into fish. The other myth involves a large egg that falls in the water and two fishes help by rolling the egg onto the shore. There, it gets hatched by two doves until it’s warm enough and then Aphrodite is born.

Card description

This dreamy scene takes place deep into the ocean, where two fishes swim in opposite directions. Tied as they are, they can’t get very far from each other. Where one leaves, the other arrives, both caught in a never ending cycle. Tucked between two beds of seaweed and coral providing food and shelter, it seems there is no where else to go for the fish but up or down, along wavy lines marking past or future levels of evolution. As if floating in eternity, a midnight sun shines on the horizon, reflecting both sky and sea, and foreboding the birth of divine love.

Inspiration

In all the ancient art I’ve seen, the two fishes are sometimes shown with a cord, sometimes without, so I could have gone either way but decided to include the cord because it makes it clear that the two fishes are not only connected but also in some way forcing each other to swim in opposite directions.

After drawing some kind of sea vegetation next to the fish, I added the horizon line and without much thinking traced a circle over it and a few waves below. It seemed apropos to come full circle on the last sign of the zodiac, but I also liked that the circle connects air and water like the two rulers Jupiter and Neptune, gods of the sky and the ocean.

In the painting I added corals and also tried what a sea urchin would look like in the composition but it seemed to compete too much with the sun so I removed it from the final illustration. The colors I chose for the fish, purple and red, emphasize the mystical and emotional character of the fish.

I then always do a fair amount of adjustments after scanning the painting, like improving the contrast, modifying colors and adding details. And to make the sun shine a bit more I added concentric blue circles around the sky area. It kinds of reminds me of the Hollywood Bowl, and in a way, the feeling of sitting in nature with a whole bunch of people listening to music together express very much the spirit of Pisces.

“The leadership of Neptune lends a dreamy, spiritual and deeply emotional quality to the Pisces personality… Pisces are highly empathic and sensitive to the difficulties of others; they tend to respond with compassion in the face of misfortune. However Pisces must beware that others do not impose unduly on them or take advantage of their acquiescence.”

–The Secret Language of Birthdays

Card Meaning

All the symbols in this card point to some kind of rebirth: the water, the fish, the sun plunging into the sea, and even the coral growing at the bottom of the ocean. Coral is the immortal tree of the Mother Goddess connected to the moon and rebirth, the giver of life which protects against evil, and in alchemy “he that eats of its fruits shall hunger no more. (Pythagoras)”

The ocean or water is itself a symbol of the Great Mother, it’s the universal womb we all come from, the source of life which contains all potentials. To dive into water, symbolically, is to search for the secret of life, for the ultimate mystery.

By jumping in the water to escape the monster Typhon, Aphrodite and Eros go through a kind of baptism which is like a return of the soul to the primordial state of purity. And if you think of what these gods stand for, various types of love including lust and egotistical desire, escaping the monster might be a kind of evolution in terms of love, of the capacity to love. Like leaving behind egotistical ways of being to become a more compassionate and selfless kind of person.

The other myth is a similar idea but with different symbols. There, it’s an egg that falls into the water, also representing rebirth, and what is born out of this egg which is hatched by doves, is the goddess of love.

“In the Upper Paleolithic period, approximately 12,000 B.C.E., circular, oval and elliptical painted egg forms began to appear as symbols of regeneration and rebirth. They survive today in the Easter ritual of painting eggs and rolling them onto the earth for the springtime renewal of vegetation after the torpor of winter (Gimbutas, 213).”

–Taschen, The Book of Symbols

But rather than simply being hatched by the doves, this egg goes through a journey in the water where it is carried by fishes. And it’s these fishes, not the doves, which are placed in the sky to become the constellation of Pisces. So the participation of the fish must be bringing something more. Same for the other myth, with Aphrodite and Eros transforming themselves into fish.

What the fishes would bring, symbolically, is linked to fertility and to the unborn child. It’s a new life, something totally unconscious, which is not yet defined and doesn’t have a clear direction. So whatever it is could go either way.

Fish have an ambivalent meaning, sometimes they’re seen as voracious and unclean, sometimes as pure and representing the soul. Yet as the myths suggest, they are either mother and son or related to an egg, so these fishes are originally one. “Wholeness is perforce paradoxical in its manifestations,” says Jung, “and the two fishes going in opposite directions, or the cooperation of birds and fishes, are an instructive illustration of this.”

This paradoxical nature of wholeness also belongs to the Self, symbolized in the card as the midnight sun shining above the fishes. This is how I was thinking of this circle, intuitively, when tracing it… as a way to reconcile the potential conflict between these two fishes pulling in different directions.

“When Apuelius was initiated into the Isis mysteries, he described how he was illumined not by the heavenly sun but by the midnight sun, which he met face to face when he descended into the underworld. That would mean an experience which cannot be reached by intellectual effort, or exercises in concentration, or Yoga, or the Exercitia Spiritualia, but rather an experience of the Self, which one can only have by accepting the unconscious and the unknown in life and the difficulty of living one’s own conflict.”

– Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus

There are a few ways to look at this sun motif, symbolically. First, it’s a circle and the circle, having no beginning and no end, represents eternity and a never-ending cycle. Then there is its golden color, which relates to things like illumination, the sacred, and wisdom. Also, gold in alchemy is the goal, it’s attaining the center. And that’s what the Self is, it’s the center of the whole psyche including conscious and unconscious.

Finally, the three concentric circles around it can stand for triads like past, present, and future or heavens, earth, and hell, the phases of the moon, and the process of reconciliation of opposites.

But the opposites in Pisces, such as good and evil or matter and spirit, I think are not the same as for example in Gemini. The difference seems to be in the symbols. Compared to horsemen, which is something much closer to human consciousness, the two fishes would represent something very deep in the unconscious, like the Self.

“The self is a union of opposites par excellence… it is however absolutely paradoxical in that it represents in every respect thesis and antithesis, and at the same time synthesis.” – C.G. Jung

An experience of the Self generates a conflict for the ego because the Self transcend the very notion of opposites, which is how the ego is used to operate. In the hero’s journey this corresponds to the stage of freedom to live, where the hero realizes his or her unity with all life and becomes conscious of the repercussion of his or her actions.

In the Power of Myth, Campbell cites the Divine Comedy, in which “Dante realizes that the love of God informs the whole universe down to the lowest pits of hell.” That may be how Aphrodite relates to the fish. That if one goes down into the very depths of oneself, beneath all the complicated conflicts and contradictions, what’s there is love. And perhaps it goes the other way too, that where there’s love there are also conflicts and contradictions.

As long as the fishes struggles to go left and right, they’re going to stay stuck in an endless cycle. But if they can relax within their limitations, they’ll realize that the sun shines above the very spot where they are.

Modern myth: Groundhog Day

Many elements in Groundhog Day fit the themes of Pisces: the time of the year (winter into spring), an endless cycle, love, transformation, also conflicts and opposites. Even the making of the film was kind of “piscean.” For instance it was winter, and very cold, when the filming started and springtime when they finished. The script went through countless rewrites, even during filming. Also, there were conflicts between the director and main actor, Harold Ramis and Bill Murray, who had different ideas about the film.

The idea for the script– a smug weatherman named Phil Connors trapped in a small town and reliving the same day over and over again– came from thinking about immortality, and what a person would do with all that time. Would it become boring, and could a person incapable of change be able to transform, given enough time? To put it mythologically, it’s as if Phil is having an encounter with eternity (or the Self).

The two Phils

Underneath the egocentric, mean, and sarcastic Phil, there is deep down another Phil: one who cares about people and has unexplored talents. That Phil needs to come up to the surface. It’s as if up until that day his life was carried by one of the fish and then the other fish all of a sudden takes over to get him to change.

Rita is Phil’s Aphrodite. Jung would say his “soul image” or anima. How Phil sees Rita is what he himself needs to be in order to become his whole self. At the beginning he sees her as a pure object of desire. It reflects his behavior at that stage, like when he eats everything on the menu. Then when he tries to impress her on dates, he sees an intelligent woman with talent. So he learns the piano, ice sculpting, French poetry, but that only gets him so far.

As long as Phil resists in himself what he most admires in Rita–her sincere kindness, he can’t escape the loop. It’s only when he stops trying to manipulate her into loving him and truly opens up to her, that he become for others the selfless person he sees in Rita–and also when she starts to love him. At that point the two fishes reconcile, and the loop finally ends.

Summary

Element: Mutable Water Ruler: Jupiter & Neptune Symbol: the Fish Motto: I love

Keywords: Love, empathy, soul, art, cycles and repetitions, rebirth, opposites, eternity, oneness, self, wisdom, wonder, projections
Qualities: Kind, caring, peaceful, fluid, intuitive, spiritual, soulful, imagination, artistry
Shadow: Conflicted, contradictory, paradoxical, evasive, illusions, gullible
Opposite: Virgo

Sources:

C.G. Jung, Collected Works Vol. 12 and Vol. 9 part 2
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with the Thousand Faces & Power of Myth
Von Franz – The Interpretation of Fairy Tales (The Bewitched Princess)
Taschen – The Book of Symbols, Reflections on Archetypal Images
J.C. Cooper – An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols
G. Goldschneider, J. Elffers – The Secret Language of Birthdays
Wikipedia

Thanks for reading! If you like my work, a cup of coffee would be much appreciated 🙏.

FROM MY SHOP

Let Pisces and its compassion inspire you to make peace with the world.

• Art by Sophie Dufresne for Sophiequi
• Dimensions: 2 × 2 in
• Eco-friendly certified UV-LED inks
• Printed on sustainable cherry wood
• Flexible enough for curved surfaces
• Use as sticker or magnet
• Made in the USA
• Ready to ship

Any which way, happy birthday!

• Art by Sophie Dufresne for Sophiequi
• Dimensions: A6 or 4.13 × 5.83 in
• Gold A6 envelope provided
• blank inside
• Smooth cover paper 16pt
• Ready to ship

Sheet with twelve zodiac stickers

• Art by Sophie Dufresne for Sophiequi
• Dimensions: 7 × 9 in
• Vinyl / Matte
• Ready to ship

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

• A hero’s journey through the Zodiac

• Myth and meaning of Virgo

• Myth and meaning of Cancer

The girl is a princess who’s mother sends her to get married but along the way the maid who accompanied her takes her dress and when they arrive pretends to be her to marry the prince. Without her royal clothes, the princess is given the job of a goose girl and almost forgets who she is.

From the Jungian point of view the marriage of the false bride to the prince has something to do with the persona, or the mask we wear in front of other people. When we adapt so much of ourselves to fit collective ideals, our real essence or individuality (the princess) is completely repressed into a shadow role, which here is being a goose girl.

Although she’s in a tough spot, the princess manages to rescue the head of a magical talking horse, which everyday reminds her who she really is. The horse relates to the mind, reason, or swift thinking, but it can also represent the wind, as do the geese. The wind itself is also a strong symbol of spirit.

So her being away from the royal court and tending the geese appears to be a kind of spiritual task, similar in a way to the sewing of the shirts in The Six Swans. The main difference is that here it’s the king who’s missing at the beginning instead of the queen.

But in both cases this is a silent task. The heroine has to keep quiet about her situation and also do her best to fight off any disruption. This isn’t easy because there is a boy named Conrad who tends the geese with the princess and tries to steal strands of her golden hair as she lets them loose. To stop him, she asks the wind to blow his hat so he has to run and chase it while she fixes her hair.

The hair, because it’s attached to the head, relates to something like thoughts or intuition, while the hat of the young boy might represent an immature mind that’s jumping to conclusions or using ready-made expressions or formulas. The spirit brings fresh and playful ideas but perhaps the hat covers them with a certain coarseness or lack of subtlety. Kind of like making a building with Lego blocks or drawing with big crayons.

But I find it curious that Conrad, who’s a relatively minor character in the story, is the only one to be given a name. If we know his name, then he could represents a more personal aspect, which the princess keeps at a distance. I’m also reminded of a French expression, parler à travers son chapeau (to speak through one’s hat), which means to speak about something one has no experience of.

By blowing off his hat with the wind, the princess has a chance to comb and gather her hair or thoughts undisturbed, but she also keeps him away from things he can’t understand. And this in turn brings about a way out of her situation.

After this little scene repeats a couple of times, Conrad is frustrated and goes to the king to complain. The king, curious about this girl who can talk to the wind, follows them the next day and watches the scene from a distance as the same thing happens for the third time.

When they return home with the geese in the evening, the king asks the princess why she did all this. But she can’t tell him because she sworn on her life not to tell anyone what the maid did to her. “If you won’t tell me, say it to the iron oven,” the king then says to the girl.

And as she confesses to the oven, the king of course listens, and learns that she is a king’s daughter and that the maid took her place at the side of the prince and made her a goose girl. Hearing this, the king calls the son and reveals to him she’s the true bride. At night the princess sits at the table, unrecognized by the maid who they trick in pronouncing her own death sentence.

I skipped a few scenes but that’s the gist of it, which is enough material to enhance my drawing with more of the story. Since the main point of the tale is that the princess loses sight of who she is, I thought of adding a shadow to the goose girl and give it the shape of the true princess with a nice dress and a crown.

The colors of the dress are inspired by the silver and gold given by the mother when the girl leaves. To symbolize the mother’s heart split in two from her daughter’s demise, the top of the dress is decorated with two halves of a dandelion’s puff ball.

Do you remember how fun it was to blow puff balls when you were a kid? The dandelion is playful, like Conrad. It spreads its seeds by itself, with the wind, and as a weed it grows without needing to be cultivated. It’s a humble plant, like the princess. It also makes a good symbol for this story because of its connection to the wind.

Symbolically, the dandelion relates to healing and divination. Drinking it as a tea is supposed to increase psychic ability, and people make wishes when blowing the puff balls or use it as a love oracle.

But it also brought back some early memories of studying with the Petit Larousse, an illustrated encyclopedia with the motto “Je sème a tout vent” (I sow to all winds) and the logo of a girl blowing on a dandelion puff ball.

While searching for it on the internet, I found a wikipedia page of a 1952 documentary named after the motto, about an alien coming to earth after an apocalypse and trying to understand our world through the illustrations of the Petit Larousse. I love this metaphor, because doing my work sometimes feels a bit like that, like I’m the alien trying to understand the unconscious through images.

So you see how the symbol the dandelion has many facets. It reflects the transformative, playful and nourishing qualities of the spirit. And also how it spreads, not by talking, but through an unconscious communication, like how the princess talks to the oven and the king hears, indirectly.

I didn’t want to stop at the princess stuck being a goose girl, so I imagined the rest of the sequence ending as her true self. The animation begins with the princess having lost sight of who she is and believing she is a goose girl. The second phase is the dandelions growing around her (like the talking horse reminding her who she is), and the shadow taking the shape of the princess. As she remembers more and more, the dandelions are incorporated in her dress and image of herself, that’s the third phase. Finally, when she’s seen for who she is (as the king hears the truth), she appears at the court in her true colors, and her mother’s heart is no longer broken.

Jump to: Description, Inspiration, Meaning, Myth: Truman Show

Myths of the Water Bearer

The oldest myth of Aquarius is associated with Enki, the Sumerian god of of fresh water, intelligence, mischief, creation, fertility, healing, and art. When the gods try to destroy humanity with a flood, Enki intervenes by getting Atrahasis to build an ark like Noah’s, filled with animals. In Greek mythology the flood is caused by Zeus, angry by the hubris of the king of Arcadia testing his omniscience by offering his son as sacrifice. Deucalion and his wife survive in a chest and repopulate the earth by creating humans out of stones. Or instead of a flood, Zeus appears as an eagle and takes the young shepherd Ganymede to Olympus to be the cup-bearer of the gods.

Card Description

Under a magical starry night, a young Water Bearer kneels on an unusual path, straddling the ordinary and the divine while pouring cosmic waters from a golden vessel that fertilizes the world below. The golden color of the vase recalls the sun, its divine power, and enlightenment. Nourished by this kind of water, two blooming lotuses represent expansion and manifestation, while two budding lotuses show the potential for more consciousness. There will always be things we don’t know, and the need to expect the unexpected. And yet, the round tree implies a self-contained world with no beginning and no end, telling us that everything is already perfect as it is.

Inspiration

Looking at images of the Water Bearer immediately made me think of the Star card in the Tarot, which is the main inspiration for my design. But instead of a woman kneeling it’s a young man, like Ganymede, and instead of pouring water from two vases, the water comes out from only one large vessel.

I found this story called The Golden Pitcher, which also inspired me because there’s a tree, a lake, and a golden pitcher. The pitcher is in the tree and all the young people thinks it’s at the bottom of the lake because of the reflection on the water. The one who solves the riddle is an old man, and the tale’s conclusion is that the wisdom that comes with age is valuable.

The young people in that story only see concrete reality, because that’s the limit of consciousness. But as our bodies age, our consciousness expands so we can see beyond this limit. And as an air sign that’s what Aquarius is good at, transcending material limitations.

Another difference with the Tarot card is that the young man has a foot half in the water, half on the ground, and his leg is not completely resting on the ground as in the Star card. But I don’t think it changes the meaning too much, the point is that Aquarius has a foot partly in the unconscious, and that’s where his unique insights come from.

The lotuses in the water add a little eastern flavor, because Ganymede being taken by a large eagle to the realm of the gods sounded like enlightenment, or at least an increase in consciousness. Some flowers are opened, some not. I was thinking that the ones below the stream of water opens, and the others don’t. But since the lotus bud symbolizes potential, it could be that some potential doesn’t get manifested. We can’t do everything. When some doors close, others open.

There aren't any trees in Ganymede’s myth so I looked up the kind of trees that grow on Mount Olympus. One of them is the ash tree (Fraxinus), which is the same kind as Yggdrasil, the giant World tree in Norse mythology. And this works well with Aquarius, because Zeus is said to have created the humans of the Bronze Age from an ash tree, and that period ended with the big flood of Deucalion, which is one of the myths of Aquarius.

While working on the painting I decided to add stars, which were not in the original sketch, but a big surface of dark blue like that needed a little something. Stars are a good symbol for Aquarius because as the “eyes of the night” they mean spiritual enlightenment or the presence of divinity. They were also seen by the Greeks as drops of blood of the god Uranus, which is another connection to the ash tree and the Bronze Age, because it was from his blood that ash-tree nymphs came from.

At first, I liked the idea of flowing rivers coming from the tree but after making the painting it seemed confusing to have these and the stream from the vase. Rather than repaint the whole thing, I borrowed a piece of landscape from another painting and as I turned it around, a path appeared. And I liked that because the meaning of a path sounds like Uranus: “going into the unknown, where there is no path, is the task of the hero, the genius, the prophet, that may result in the discovery of a new path for stumbling humankind.” (Taschen)

“The Aquarius personality can be characterized by increasing detachment from earthly life as well as a childlike, somewhat fanciful (but wise) attitude. The highly accepting orientation of the Aquarian transcends material restrictions or limitations. However the leadership of Uranus lends an unpredictability, eccentricity, and erratic quality to the Aquarius personality. Trying to outguess an Aquarian may prove to be an impossible task.”

–The Secret Language of Birthdays

Meaning

From the myths it seems there could be two ways to approach this card. On one hand there are the flood myths where the whole earth is washed out and then humanity is rebuilt, and on the other there’s the myth of Ganymede, where a simple human being is elevated to the realm of the gods and trusted into their secrets.

A flood affects many people, so from that point of view the card would have a collective character, something that affects or relates to a group of people or even the whole society. Symbolically, floods represent death and regeneration and according to Jung the ark or chest is an analogy of the womb, and surviving the flood is like a rebirth.

“It is typical of the sun myth that the hero, once he is united with the woman ‘hard to attain,’ is exposed in a cask and thrown out to sea, and then lands on a distant shore to begin a new life. The meaning is clear enough: it is the longing to attain rebirth through a return to the womb, and to become immortal like the sun.” (Jung, CW5, par. 312)

In both myths the flood is a retribution of the gods because humans extended themselves a little too far. Symbolically, the gods might be irrational, emotional or archetypal forces flowing from the collective unconscious. So the flood would represent a state where a person, group, or society is submerged in the unconscious or perhaps unconsciously identified with an archetype. The lotuses in the card then may be like archetypes which bloom when activated, otherwise remaining a budding potential.

In both myths humanity was restored by a human being with a little help from a god, in other words a hero: Atrahasis with the help of Enki, and Deucalion with the help of Prometheus. And perhaps this raising of the human state to that of a god is what the flood myths have in common with Ganymede, except the ascension in that myth is more explicit.

The myth of Ganymede reminds me of another card from the Tarot, but in a different deck. In the Tarot de Vieville, instead of the Tower the 16th trump is a shepherd boy (like Ganymede) with his flock all packed around a tree. A fiery sun is piercing through what I imagine are clouds, with little drops falling from the sky. I’m not sure what those mean but it’s clear that something magical is happening. The shepherd is looking up, no longer preoccupied by his sheep.

In the Problem of the Puer Aeternus, Marie-Louise Von Franz talks a lot about the symbolism of the sheep – innocence, naive idealism, crowd mentality – and how it relates to the divine child, which is just what Ganymede is: when taken to Olympus, he’s granted eternal youth and immortality. There’s also a certain idea of innocence with the floods since they mean a washing away of sin and purification of humanity. And with the lotus flower coming out of the muddy waters too, which is linked with a superhuman or divine birth.

To become an individual in a psychological sense, means to transcend one’s attachment to the group and yet it doesn’t mean being special, apart from other human beings. Part of the process of individuation is to accept that each of us is a simple human being. The Water Bearer himself, his nudity and kneeling posture, is a symbol of this necessary humility. Ganymede having the humble job of tending sheep probably says a similar thing.

You have to know how you’re like everyone else before you can see your own uniqueness. For example, to understand my cat it helps to first know about cats in general. We all are one and many, and this is represented in the card by the stars and the lotuses.

“Man as an individual is a very suspicious phenomenon whose right to exist could be questioned by the biologist, since from that point of view he is significant only as a collective creature or as a particle in the mass. The cultural point of view gives man a meaning apart from the mass, and this, in the course of centuries, led to the development of personality and the cult of the hero.” (Jung, C.W. 5 par. 258)

This paradox of the one and many is also explicit with Aquarius and its two rulers: Saturn is the social order and conformity, and Uranus the love for freedom and originality. But also, the symbol for Aquarius, the Water Bearer, has some similarity with the Cosmic Man, the original human being. To be in touch with this original oneness, which needs nothing outside of itself, is to know our own uniqueness. The same idea is behind the tree in the card (which is round like a mandala).

In Campbell’s hero’s journey, Aquarius would be the stage called master of the two worlds. This masterly passage between the two worlds, as Campbell calls it, is when the hero can relate to both the inner and outer world. When these two realities are finally reconciled, one becomes an individual, that is both an ordinary and unique human being.

“The existence of human beings will never be satisfactorily explained in terms of power, sex, survival, perpetuation of the species, and so on. That is, man’s main purpose is not to eat, drink, etc., but to be human. Above and beyond these drives, our inner psychic reality serves to manifest a living mystery that can be expressed only by a symbol, and for its expression the unconscious often chooses the powerful image of the Cosmic Man.”

– Marie-Louise Von Franz, Man and His Symbols

Modern Myth: The Truman Show

The best modern example for Aquarius I can think of would be The Truman Show. Truman is like the Ganymede of our age. Pulled from the world as an innocent child by Christof (a powerful Zeus-like TV producer), he is raised by fake parents, in a fake world. In this divine realm, Truman is made immortal by the cameras of Christof’s TV show. And his unconscious genuineness is the “nectar” that keeps the gods, i.e. the audience, young.

Yet his whole life is predictable, and in the safety of that bubble Truman grows up to be a perfectly average guy. At least that’s what he believes, and how he appears to be on the outside. But on the inside, he’s filled with a secret longing for the unknown, and love, because for his whole life he’s never had real connections with people.

Up until he starts to question his reality, Truman is a typical puer aeternus, an eternal child: innocent, naive, in search of freedom, but unable to free himself from the mother. Mother symbols are everywhere in the movie: his wife Meryl is a nurse (and of course she wants a child), the city is a mother symbol too, also the surrounding sea, and even the boat he escapes on is named “Santa Maria,” the holy mother.

The only person who’s shown a real connection to Truman is Sylvia. And she becomes Truman’s path to love and truth. She’s the “woman hard to attain” that Jung talked about, who gets “the sun-god hero thrown out to sea.” And Truman really does go through a night sea-journey, a death and rebirth. That scene always gets to me, and all the elements of the myths are there: the crashing waves, the lightning, his little boat like a barrel lost at sea.

Transition into the second half of life

It’s a movie, but it’s also reality (foreboding reality TV and the internet), because we all have to go through something like this experience, psychologically, at some point in our lives. That last scene with Christof is almost like a meeting with the Cosmic Man. Truman learns that he’s the star of the show, and the proof that he doesn’t care about fame is that he leaves. There’s no need to perform, but he gives Christof and the audience his usual catch phrase, which is hilarious.

Jung says our life is like the course of the sun. In the first part of life, what matters are things like having children, making money, and gaining social status. This is what he calls “the phase of nature.” But once the sun has reached its zenith and starts to descend the goals change, and then we begin what Jung calls “the cultural phase.” A sort of second puberty, “another storm and stress period” says Jung, where we face new problems, which can’t be solved with the old recipes. “What youth must find outside, the man of life’s afternoon must find within himself.”

That storm scene is what it’s like to confront the unconscious, and Truman on his little boat, trying not to drown, is the ego’s struggle. “The most dangerous revolutionary is within ourselves, and all must realize this who wish to pass over safely into the second half of life.” Although Truman is a young man, I think the transition Truman goes through may just as well be about this transition into the second half of life.

Summary

Element: Fixed Air Ruler: Saturn & Uranus Symbol: the Water Bearer Motto: I inspire

Keywords: Society, global matters, collective, one and many, individuality, humanity, objectivity, ingenuity, revolution, unexpected, renewal
Qualities: Potential for growth, hope for the future, newness, spontaneity, openness, humanitarian, hero
Shadow: Escape, life as a prison, immaturity, egocentrism, inconsistency, idealist, everyman
Opposite: Leo

Sources:

Marie-Louise Von Franz – The Problem of the Puer Aeternus
C.G. Jung, CW. Vol 5, Symbols of Transformation
C.G. Jung, CW. Vol 7, Two Essays in Analytical Psychology
E.F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype
Taschen – The Book of Symbols, Reflections on Archetypal Images
J.C. Cooper – An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols
G. Goldschneider, J. Elffers – The Secret Language of Birthdays
Wikipedia

Thanks for reading! If you like my work, a cup of coffee would be much appreciated 🙏.

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I came across this tale again recently in Marie-Louise Von Franz’s book about The Feminine in Fairy Tales. It made me think of an unconscious sketch I did a while back: two large birds that emerged from 6-7 random lines drawn with my eyes closed.

At that time I didn’t know what to make of these giants birds or what they might refer to, but since I’ve been exploring the meaning of swans and animating them this month, I decided to make them swans and to illustrate the sketch based on this fairy tale.

In the story, the swans are actually boys. Their father is a king and as usual, the wife is no longer around and he remarries. His new wife is the daughter of a witch, a nodding old woman. He had to marry her after getting lost in the woods while hunting and told by the old woman that this was the price for showing him the way out.

The king is suspicious of his new wife so he hides his six sons and daughter in the forest, but because he’s so often out visiting them she gets suspicious and follows him. Being the evil stepmother, she wants to get rid of the children and succeeds turning the boys into swans by throwing magical shirts on them, but misses the daughter who had stayed in.

The swans fly over the forest, and each night as the sun sets they can become boys again for fifteen minutes. They blow air on each other until their feathers all fall away, then strip off their swan-skin as if it were a shirt. The part where they fly over the forest is my illustration, with four extra birds added to make six.

During the fifteen minutes her brothers are boys again she asks them how to revert the curse. They tell her it would be too hard for her, but that she would have to make 6 little shirts out of star-flowers and not speak a word or laugh for 6 whole years. She sets out to do it and during that time manages to meet a king and marry, have 3 children, all without uttering a word.

This creates a lot of misunderstanding with the wicked mother of the king, who steals the babies and accuses her of eating them. She almost ends up burned at the stake for being a witch but thankfully her swan brothers come back right on time and exonerate her as they turn back into boys with the star-flower shirts.

Because the girl didn’t have time to finish the last shirt for the youngest brother, he is left with a swan wing. She’s reconciled with the king, her brothers are all back, everyone is happy except that one brother has a wing instead of a left arm. If this was a TV show, it would be a clue that there’s going to be a Season 2.

As for me, I felt a bit dissatisfied after illustrating the swans. How could I not draw these flower shirts? Since I got this far, I wanted to see them, and also see the swans transform into boys wearing the shirts. Maybe you would too. So I walked around my neighborhood, and spotted flowers that would work for the illustration. They’re supposed to be aster flowers, but these looked better to me.

In my illustration there are two brothers instead of six. I prefer the simplicity, but also it makes me think of my own brothers. They’re the oldest and youngest in the family, six years apart (like the six years in the story). If my family was a sandwich, my brothers would be the bread (and us four girls, the meat!).

Let’s say that the brother without the wing represents all five siblings, that he’s the collective aspect of a big family, which I think might be a theme in the story, because it’s not the usual two or three sons or daughters, it’s six boys and one daughter.

Growing up in a large family means often feeling like just one of many, with the youngest sometimes almost like an only child because there’s no one after so that child remains the baby for longer than the others. I’m thinking that the star-flower shirts may express something like that with the stars motif, in the sense that the stars in the sky are all alike but each is also an individual star… we all have a unique destiny, which at the same time is also a common human life.

And this is reflected in the flowers that I picked. You see how the purple flowers are uniformly scattered and the orange flowers are tightly clustered around a center. Since he’s closer to the wholeness of childhood, I put the flowers arranged in circles on the youngest brother’s shirt.

The swan shadows behind the boys are there to explain the wing, and I hope it adds just enough of a question mark that someone might be curious about the story instead of brushing it off because it’s too much of a puzzle. I also feel like the shadows express the open-endedness of the story. Like looming shadows of what happened to the brothers, and the awareness that they could transform back into swans if not careful.

I also made an animation of the brothers turning into swans and then back into boys. It’s nothing fancy but I just find it satisfying to see the swans change! Maybe you will too. And turn on the volume if you want to hear the sound.

While illustrating the boys and figuring out the sequence for the animation, I’ve been thinking about what this fairy tale might mean on a deeper level. I spoke about the associations with my brothers, but what might the characters and themes in this story symbolize on a more universal level?

Marie-Louise Von Franz goes into this in detail in the book and makes very enlightening associations with historical materials like alchemy, mythology, and number symbolism. I won’t go into it because she describes this better than I could, but you can look at the brief summary I made below with the symbols in my illustration. What I’d like to try is look at the story in the context of someone’s life or artistic practice.

If you do an image search of “The Six Swans” on the internet, you’ll see a lot of images of the heroine where she’s surrounded by the swans and almost none that are showing the brothers. The reason why I chose to focus on the transformation of the brothers is because of that sketch I started with, which was unconscious, so it wasn’t a choice I made consciously.

And I feel that this is the whole point. If I had intentionally chosen the scene, I might have also drawn the heroine in the midst of all the swans. Probably because it’s a beautiful, sensual, scene. But also, because I would naturally gravitate to it as a subjective experience.

As women we tend to identify with the woman in the picture, and as artists it’s just easier to draw our own body than those of men. But maybe we should start to draw men more to get to know our minds better? Doing this illustration and trying to understand the fairy tale made me think about how I relate to the masculine.

Many of the choices I’ve made in my career, and I’ve changed career many times, have been influenced in some way by advice from a man in my life… cousin, friend, boyfriend, husband, colleague… It’s almost as if I needed a nod from the outside to move me in some direction. But the more I look back on my life and try to understand myself the more I realize this outside advice and initiative was really an unconscious projection of the masculine inside of me.

And I feel a similar thing is happening to the heroine in the story. Her brothers would be the inner masculine, which she unconsciously projects onto them. Then I see the witch’s daughter as the shadow of the heroine, which are all those things that are unacceptable to our family or society and get rejected into the unconscious. By marrying the old king, this shadow becomes conscious and it affects the brothers.

They are transformed into swans and fly away into the forest, like fantasies taking her away from outer life. When she goes after them, the brothers tell her that to save them would be too hard for her. In a woman’s life, that would be the thoughts that she’s powerless, that she can’t do anything to change her reality. And to get out of this rut the heroine has to take a stand against that and then climb a tree where she sews the little star-flower shirts.

These shirts kind of remind me of the flower power fashion of the 60s and why not, because the star-flowers are flowers, or plants, which are also stars so they have some kind of spiritual power. Sewing the star shirts then would be like a psychedelic experience, or spiritual transformation– not intellectual but emotional, all peace and love –where the girl connects with her original wholeness, or the “oneness" of existence,” and this helps her find the seeds of her individuality.

While doing this the heroine has to stay silent and this creates trouble with the negative stepmother who steal her babies, and falsely accuses her. This might be something like problems of communication in a woman’s life, or misunderstandings with others in her entourage. Or creative work not resonating with people, possibly because it’s not shared at the right time.

It’s only when her brothers return that she gets her voice back and the king can finally understand her. This feels different than other types of fairy tales where the happy ending only needs the marriage of the heroine with the prince or king. It seems that the heroine needs her six brothers around to be successful.

And yet, the youngest brother is left with a swan wing, which feels like something isn’t quite resolved. Looking at another one of my sketches from the same period, it seems to be a similar thing, and almost as if the bird has been transformed into a leaf in a previous life. As if the problem might also have been there in previous generations. The lines on the leaf kind of look like the lines on a vinyl record and the wing like the needle has gotten stuck.

But it might also simply mean that not everything can be understood or explained. The wing could be a remnant of immaturity, or perhaps a lasting connection with the inner world. Since it says they all live happily and in peace for many years, it seems to be a positive thing, so it could be something like a source of creativity.

Jump to: Description, Inspiration, Meaning, Myth: Dead Poets Society

Myth of Castor and Pollux

Castor and Pollux are the twin half-brothers known together as the Dioscuri. The divine twins are often portrayed as horsemen, serving as rescuers and healers of mankind. Their mother Leda was seduced by Zeus disguised as a swan, and the same night she slept with her husband. From this night came two eggs: one with Castor and Pollux and the other with the beautiful Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra. The twin that takes after Zeus, Pollux, is immortal and the other, Castor, is mortal. During a fight, Castor dies and goes to the underworld. Pollux misses him so much that he makes a deal with Zeus so they can split their time between Olympus and Hades.

Card description

This card is all about contrast. Castor and Pollux are sitting on black and white horses, they have light and dark hair, everything is night and day. Literally. The twins wear the colors of the stars in the Gemini constellation: blue for the mortal Castor and gold for the immortal Pollux. Embracing and perfectly mirroring one another, they represents the link between Olympus and Hades, or between the immortal and mortal parts of ourselves. Same thing with the sun and moon above: the sun symbolizes eternity, while the changing moon represents time. Next to them grows the irises of the goddess Iris, who like Mercury is a messenger of the gods, delivering messages between gods and mortals.

Inspiration

Images of Castor and Pollux sometimes show the twins with horses, sometimes without. They might be sitting on the horses, or standing next to them. However I liked how the twins are embracing each other in this sculpture. So I combined the two and drew the twins embracing and sitting on the horses at the same time.

Since the myth represents dualism and opposites in general, there’s one dark horse and the other light, and it’s the same for the hair. If you google Castor and Pollux constellation you can see their color in the sky: Castor's color is blue and Pollux being closer to the sun is the golden one. To match the constellation, I made their togas the same color as the stars.

Like in my Virgo card, the sun and moon represent Mercury, since in alchemy Mercury stands for the marriage of Sol and Luna. They’re also opposites, which also works with the duality of Gemini. While they’re separate in Virgo, the sun and moon in this card are united. It’s the unity behind the duality of the twins. Something like a symbol for the egg they were born from.

Because it’s about twins and my design plays with symmetry, I used a neat tool in Procreate which automatically traces the other side as you draw. It would have been really hard to do that myself. The symmetry comes out perfect, as perfect as the gods. Almost too perfect. So after printing the Procreate drawing, I traced the design by hand and painted it with gouache, which made it more human.

Although it started with two identical sides there end up being tiny differences here and there that made each side unique, even more so with the gouache painting. Being an identical twin myself, it made me feel like this is how Nature does it in the womb. Two beings come from the same mold, but taking each one individually they don’t come out exactly the same. It’s not a copy/paste process.

When choosing the colors for the painting, I made the background of one twin a blue sky to be the daytime or Olympus, and the other side a dark blue shade to be the nighttime or Hades. The irises on either side represent the goddess Iris, who like Hermes or Mercury was a messenger of the gods, delivering messages to mortals humans.

“Geminis like being part of a group. They tend to liven up any social situation with their flow of ideas and verbal facility. However they may not readily accept the responsibilities of group membership. They are often accused of being fickle and even superficial, but in their view changing one’s mind is no sin.”

–The Secret Language of Birthdays

Meaning

Starting with the myth of Leda and the swan, we already see an encounter between mortal and immortal. “When a woman encounters the Self it is often expressed as a celestial impregnating power,” says Edinger. Here the celestial power would be Zeus in the form of a bird, the swan.

The swan symbolizes a spiritual aspect of the unconscious psyche, according to Marie-Louise Von Franz. “Like all birds, it represents intuitions and hunches, sudden ideas and feelings which come seemingly from nowhere and fly off again.”

Out of this union comes one or two eggs, depending on the version of the myth. Whichever it is, the egg is a significant symbol: it’s the life principle, the hidden origin and mystery of being, the beginning, the womb, undifferentiated totality, the perfect state of unified opposites. This original wholeness in the card is shown with the conjunction of the sun and moon.

That the twins are born from Zeus in the form of a swan is also interesting, symbolically, because the swan in mythology is a bird that sings before its death and so knows the future. In that sense, the swan almost could be a sign that one of the twins is going to die.

The twins are a metaphor for the mortal and immortal parts of ourselves, the ego and the Self, which are the same and also very different. The Self is the center of the objective psyche, the original unity symbolized by the immortal twin and the ego is the center of consciousness represented by the mortal twin. Behind this motif is the idea of a relationship between the ego and the Self. And the duality is what makes the relationship possible.

“The ego lives on earth but the name of the Self is written in heaven. This same psychological fact is represented by the myth of the Dioscuri; one son of Zeus, Castor, is mortal; the other, Pollux, is immortal, beyond space and time.”

– E.F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype

To facilitate this relationship between the mortal self, or ego, and the immortal Self, the cards has iris flowers on either side of the twins, which stand for the goddess Iris, a personification of the rainbow. Rainbows for the Greeks were like a bridge connecting heaven and earth. Through this rainbow Iris brought messages of the gods to the mortals, in particular those of Hera, the goddess of marriage.

Horses are another symbol which facilitate swift connection between the two worlds. The horse in general symbolizes energy and libido, with the white horse belonging to the sun god and the black horse to Hades. In the card there would be an exchange between the two worlds, since the horses are each in the opposite realm.

Finally, there’s an interesting parallel to make with Plato’s chariot allegory. His charioteer, represents reason and intellect and drives a chariot pulled by two horses: a white horse which is obedient, honorable, tempered and modest and a black horse which is unruly, insolent, and proud. You can imagine trying to control these horses is a lot of trouble. Thankfully, with two riders in the Gemini card and good communication these opposites in our soul can learn to reconcile.

“If you accept your life into reality, you really, in the deepest sense of the word, accept death, and that is what the puer does not want. He does not want to accept mortality, and that is why he does not want to go into reality, because the end of it is the realization of his weakness and of his mortality. He identifies with the immortal and does not want to accept the mortal twin, but by going into life he would assimilate the mortal brother.”

– M.L. Von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus

Modern Myth: Dead Poets Society

A lot of the same themes as Gemini can be found in Dead Poets Society: duality, opposites, reason vs passion, life and death. I could of course pick out other things, and maybe find that it fits other signs too, but the point is to try to understand the Gemini myth in a modern context by looking at it through the movie’s lens.

Right in the opening scene, it’s pretty clear that Welton Academy represents the side of reason, order, and rigid conformity. Four pillars structure everything: tradition, honor, discipline, excellence. There are no girls, no eros, no individuality.

Gemini aims to correct one-sided situations like this. In the movie it’s done by bringing in Mr. Keating, a former student who’s come back as a teacher. He’s everything that the school is not: passionate, humorous, he relates to the students individually. Where the school is serious, rational, and all about standards and preparing the kids to live in society, Keating compensates by telling them to find their own  way and defy conformity.

This I think is what the Gemini myth is about, in a nutshell. The conformity and the school is the original wholeness, the mother, the egg. Keating wants to crack the shell of these kids, separate them from the original wholeness, have them discover the twins within. What makes them unique. That’s what he does in the carpe diem scene. He faces them with the human paradox, which is to know that, like the swan, we’re going to die.

Facing the paradox of mortality

Encountering the swan leads to the knowledge of death, that one of the twin is mortal. That time is limited. It’s a shock to the kids in the movie, and by the sound of the comedic trailer from 1989 it was probably a shock to the audience too.

Having one twin die in the myth could also be a metaphor for becoming one-sided, neurotic. But the twins make a deal with Zeus to share both sides. Psychologically it means the ability to handle paradox, to reconcile the opposites. The story is set in the society of the 1950s, which had an especially hard time doing that. So on a collective level, the movie ends with things staying the same.

The transformation happens more on an individual level. Each kid has a different reaction to the paradox brought by Keating, but still, most remain one-sided. Dalton sides against the school. Cameron sides with the school against Mr Keating. Neil is also one-sided but because the fight is within himself, his story ends in tragedy.

There’s a side of him that’s just like his father, we see it when he burst out against Todd and says “Jesus Todd, what side are you on?” Right after that, he has the same expression than his dad on his face. Only he’s unaware of that. He goes entirely over to Keating’s side, and of course his father reacts. But his father himself is so one-sided, Neil has nowhere to go, he feels trapped. His father won’t give him an inch, and sadly, neither does Neil. And the play ends up being his swan song.

But two of the kids were able to deal with the paradox: Knox and Todd. Knox finds love, while Todd finds himself. Todd is not only changed by Keating, but also by Neil. He and Neil are like the twins of Gemini. At some point Todd says that he’s not like Neil, “I’m not like you, you say things and people listen, I’m not like that”, but after Neil’s death, he finds within himself those same leadership qualities that Neil had. He’s learned to listen to his feelings and now inspire others to do too.

Summary

Element: Mutable Air Ruler: Mercury Symbol: the Twins Motto: I share

Keywords: Communication, relationships, learning, unity, duality, duplicity, paradox, conformity, individuality, mortality, immortality
Qualities: Social, gregarious, good with words, sharing ideas, friendly
Shadow: Fickle, changing one’s mind, conforming, need for social acceptance
Opposite: Sagittarius

Sources:

Edward F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype
Barbara Hannah, The Archetypal Symbolism of Animals
Marie-Louise Von Franz – The Interpretation of Fairy Tales
Taschen – The Book of Symbols, Reflections on Archetypal Images
J.C. Cooper – An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols
G. Goldschneider, J. Elffers – The Secret Language of Birthdays
Wikipedia

Thanks for reading! If you like my work, a cup of coffee would be much appreciated 🙏.

FROM MY SHOP

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• A hero’s journey through the Zodiac

• Myth and meaning of Sagittarius

• Myth and meaning of Pisces

Jump to: Description, Inspiration, Meaning, Myth: Devil Wears Prada

Myths of the goddess Themis

Like her mother Gaia, Themis is an earth goddess. She represents the justice of nature, its divine order or the will of the gods. Having the gift of prophecy, she was the oracle at Delphi before Apollo. Her role was to teach humans moderation and good behavior, and she also had a hand in relationships – between man and woman and within the family. She’s the one who told Aphrodite (Venus) that her son Eros (desire) needed a brother, Anteros (love returned). Yet, together with Zeus she also plotted the start of the Trojan War. Themis and Zeus had six daughters, who brought visible order to the world: the three Fates and the Horae – one of which, Dike, was also a goddess of justice. While Themis ruled over divine justice, her daughter was responsible for human justice.

Card Description

Standing between two laurel trees, the goddess of divine order, law and custom, Themis, carefully holds the scales of justice as she balances the forces of nature – sometimes light, sometimes dark. Her asymmetrical skirt shows she can tip the scales and call for Nemesis when needed. Wrapped in a purple veil like the Oracle of Delphi, she’s able to see outside the present, into the past and the future. The three stars on her tiara recall at once the three aspects of time, her three daughters the Horae, or the three Fates. Behind her, the laurels of Apollo cast the light and shadow of reason while the roses symbolize her ability to feel and balance different points of view when reaching a judgment.

Inspiration

Looking at various images and sculptures of Libra and Lady Justice, I was drawn by the simplicity of medieval illustrations in which the woman is only holding scales, with no blindfold or sword. The sword felt to me like an awkward thing to draw, and I preferred to focus on Themis and the wider balance of nature and prophecy.

To show the dual aspect of nature I put the goddess between two trees, one light, one dark, also thinking this could be a symbol of justice in terms of right and wrong. Or, of consciousness and the unconscious, and that way introduce the idea of prophecy and of knowledge coming from the unconscious.

As I was drawing the woman, an old song from my teenage years just randomly popped in my mind. In the lyrics there’s a line that goes something like this “the moon will be my diadem, to wear at my astral marriage.” This made me think of adding three stars over her head as a kind of tiara. Three stars, because three is a balance between opposites, like the sign of Libra.

Once I got to making the painting, I wanted the trees to be more specific. Since there aren’t really black and white trees in nature I turned to the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil and went deeper into the story of Themis and of the Oracle of Delphi. From this research I learned that the priestess was inspired by Apollo and laurel trees for her prophecies.

So I painted two laurel trees, but instead of making the trees different I painted light and dark shadows on the ground – similar to the cracks in the earth at Delphi, which is what gave off vapors and put the priestess in a trance.

Then flipping through Taschen’s Alchemy and Mysticism, an image caught my eye. It was a female figure with two serpents below, which made me think of the Tree of Knowledge (which it was, since the king and queen below represent Adam and Eve). This is where I got the idea of the light and dark dress and of adding a veil.

“We could all be mediums, and all have absolute knowledge, if the bright light of our ego consciousness would not dim it. That is why the medium needs an ‘abaissement du niveau mental’ and has to go into a trance, a sleep-like state, to pull up his or her knowledge.”

–M.L. Von Franz, On Divination and Synchronicity, p.39-40

After the painting was done, it looked to me a little bare, too simple, or austere. Searching for what to add, I came across another story about the laurel tree: how the wife of the Roman emperor Augustus planted a sprig of laurel on the grounds of her villa at Prima Porte, which grew into a full-size tree then lead to an entire grove of laurel trees. In the villa there was a room with a large mural painted on all four walls with trees, birds, and roses.

This gave me the idea of adding roses, which I liked because it felt like they would soften the overall image and make Themis look more like a nature goddess (and she was, since her mother was Gaia). I also liked the idea of roses because it’s the flower of Venus.

It took a few tries to figure out how to paint these roses and where they would go. Should they bloom on single long stems? Coil around the laurel trees like serpents? In the end I decided for shorter stems and to form a kind of hedge on either side of the trees.

“Libra aims at fair treatment for all, but can at times be overly judgmental. The venusian aspects of Libra are usually well appreciated by others, including sensuousness, charm, grace and good humor.”

–The Secret Language of Birthdays

Meaning

The main idea with this card is that nature, which we’re all a part of, keeps everything in balance – whether it’s the different organs inside our bodies, the different species on the earth, or even the different archetypes in our psyche.

Like nature, we have an inborn need for balance, for things to be fair. From our own personal point of view, we know what’s fair. But add hundred of thousands of people, each with their own idea of what’s fair, and it gets real complicated very quickly. So we try to codify things, how to conduct ourselves or decide what’s fair for everyone. And we write down a whole complicated set of laws. But time is a problem, because with time things change, and laws get out of date. You see the trouble we’re in.

Themis, however, stands above all this. She knows the past, present, and future. Her law is above our human laws, above our understanding of fair, which is to make laws the same for everybody. She is the mother of the three Fates, who decide every individual destiny. What’s fair for Themis depends on the person.

Themis is also the mother of the three Horae, the word Hora meaning “the correct moment.” Each hora first ruled a season (Spring, Summer, Autumn) then their rule was extended to human life, and became Lawfulness, Justice and Peace. But the main idea I think was that whether something is right or not depends on the time it’s done. Planting is right in the spring, but not in the summer. You could not say that planting is always right or always wrong. It depends when.

“Man would do well to heed the wise counsel of the mother and obey the inexorable law of nature which sets limits to every being. He ought never to forget that the world exists only because opposing forces are held in equilibrium.”

–Jung, C.W. Vol. 9 part 1, par. 174

The goddess in the card can be either Themis or Nemesis. Both are aspects of the goddess of nature. Nature sometimes is just, sometimes also cruelly revengeful, an aspect which has been forgotten in our patriarchal civilization, says Marie-Louise Von Franz. This revenge might be the consequence of “wrong behavior or illness, a wrong attitude, not necessarily immoral but not in accordance with nature… [so] a person will have bad luck, though no moral law has been broken.”

The everyday world of our senses and consciousness is like the veil worn by the goddess. That’s the idea of the veil of Isis. Nature has secrets which are hidden behind a veil, which might be why we’re so often not aware of having broken her rules. In the card the goddess also has a veil, but her veil is lowered, so this would be a moment when suddenly one knows what’s happening. The moment of truth has come.

“The stirring up of conflict is a Luciferian virtue in the true sense of the word. Conflict engenders fire, the fire of affects and emotions, and like every other fire it has two aspects, that of combustion and that of creating light… There is no change from darkness to light or from inertia to movement without emotions.”

–Jung, The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, C.W. Vol 9i, par 179

You see how the goddess holds her left hand in the air, it’s as if this moment of truth makes her uneasy. There’s a bit of a conflict is in her surroundings, between the laurels of Apollo – reason and intuition, and the roses of Venus – love and desire.

One story that relates to Apollo and the laurel tree is the myth of Apollo and Daphne. It starts with Apollo getting into an argument with Eros by saying that the boy’s bow and arrows are not as powerful as his. He’s the god of sunlight and prophecy, arguing with the god of love and desire.

Eros gets angry at Apollo and takes revenge. With one of his arrow he shoots Apollo, who falls madly in love with Daphne, then he shoots Daphne with a second arrow, making her run away from this love. Apollo pursues her but she runs fast. At some point she can’t run anymore, so she cries to her father to be saved and then she’s transformed into a laurel tree.

Apollo can’t help but love Daphne anyway and vows to honor her by making the laurel tree immortal (evergreen). Then from the laurel he makes crowns of victory, and the tree becomes a symbol of peace, purification and divination.

“In antiquity the rose belonged to the cult of the goddess Venus and of her divine child Eros (Cupid)… In Christianity, therefore, the symbol of the rose became split into two aspects: it became a symbol of the Virgin Mary and heavenly love and, on the other hand, of earthly lust–the Venus aspect.”

–M.L. Von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus

In my view Apollo wins and Eros loses, really. Because Daphne, the object of Apollo’s love, becomes a pure laurel tree, symbolically transforming from the lust of Eros to a more pure Apollonian kind of love. This reminds me of Campbell speaking about the love of the troubadours in the 12th century. How at that time love started to develop as a person to person thing instead of the more impersonal lust and brotherly love.

Both kinds of love are present in the card, in the light and dark aspects of the rose symbol. And the goddess in the middle aims to balance both sides.

Another aspect of the rose relates to feelings, and also to what Jung calls the feeling function. This is what allows us to determine what we like, what we don’t like, perceive nuances and discriminate between different things. The ability to feel is important to know ourselves better and treat others as individuals.

In Campbell’s hero’s journey, the stage of Woman as the Temptress is perhaps similar to the argument between Apollo and Eros. The temptation might be to fall too much on the Eros side and personal needs, or it could be to fall too much on the side of Apollo and what makes sense or is expected. In a way, this stage is the moment of truth before the big crisis. Will the hero commit to a journey that is not only bigger than oneself, but also truly oneself?

Modern Myth: The Devil Wears Prada

It’s been almost twenty years since this movie came out, and the character of Miranda Priestly is still fascinating. Many movies have a character like Andy, overcoming impossible odds, transforming, and coming into her own at the end, but Miranda is something else. She remains undefinable. I think the resemblance between her and Themis, the nature goddess of divine law and customs, is striking.

Fashion itself is something of a divine law: an industry which has to do with customs, social norms—and if you consider trends—time as well. It has something of the realm of the gods.

Like the goddess, Miranda’s opinion is the only one that matters. She has high expectations, even for the weather. She can see the future and decides other people’s fate. She is famously ruthless, and when someone deceives her expectations, her punishment is personal.

Miranda’s duality

But what strikes me is Miranda’s duality. In her life as well as in her character. The fact that she has twins, and two assistants instead of one. She’s using this to pin them against one another, but also to push them harder.

There’s a similar kind of relationship about work with two daughters in the German fairy tale of Mother Holle. The mother prefers her own daughter and treats the stepdaughter pretty badly, giving her all the work much like with Andy at the beginning of the movie. But the heroine falls into a magical world, and there the laws are reversed. She’s rewarded for her hard work by Mother Holle and returns covered in gold. Then the lazy daughter is sent by the mother so she can come back with gold too, but instead she gets covered in pitch (bad luck).

Fate and Luck

I can’t help but make a parallel between the second daughter and Emily, who’s had pretty bad luck throughout the movie. First she gets a cold, which prevents her to go to the benefit, then she’s also hit by a car.

But Emily was hard working too, so how come she gets all the bad luck?

It doesn’t seem fair. Something else must hang in the balance, which I suspect might have something do to with Themis and the order of nature. From nature’s perspective, Emily is unbalanced. She denies her body, starves herself, and refrains going to the restroom if nobody is at the desk.

Andy, on the other hand, is pretty lucky. The gods seems to be on her side, whereas Emily, and even Nigel, are less in control of their fate. Maybe Andy’s attitude toward Miranda, and towards social expectations, is the difference. While she struggles to maintain her life balance, Andy never loses herself or her self-respect. When Miranda says “everybody wants to be us,” what to do becomes clear to Andy: she just wants to be herself.

The Devil Wears Prada – “Everybody wants to be us” scene

Summary

Element: Cardinal Air Ruler: Venus Symbol: the Scales Motto: I consider

Keywords: Balance, harmony, peace, quality, service to the greater good, ethics, custom, compromise, choice, individuality, social order
Qualities: Fair, adaptable, appropriate, charm, grace, wisdom, doing the “right” thing, uncompromising, truthful
Shadow: Judgmental, revengeful, compromising, Faustian deal with the devil, resting on one’s laurels
Opposite: Aries

Sources:

M.-L. Von Franz – The Interpretation of Fairy Tales
C. G. Jung – The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, C.W. Vol 9i
Taschen – The Book of Symbols, Reflections on Archetypal Images
J.C. Cooper – An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols
G. Goldschneider, J. Elffers – The Secret Language of Birthdays
Wikipedia

Thanks for reading! If you like my work, a cup of coffee would be much appreciated 🙏.

FROM MY SHOP

Let Libra and its sound judgement inspire you to own your choices.

• Art by Sophie Dufresne for Sophiequi
• Dimensions: 2 × 2 in
• Eco-friendly certified UV-LED inks
• Printed on sustainable cherry wood
• Flexible enough for curved surfaces
• Use as sticker or magnet
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Either way, have a fabulous birthday!

• Art by Sophie Dufresne for Sophiequi
• Dimensions: A6 or 4.13 × 5.83 in
• Gold A6 envelope provided
• blank inside
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• Ready to ship

Sheet with twelve zodiac stickers

• Art by Sophie Dufresne for Sophiequi
• Dimensions: 7 × 9 in
• Vinyl / Matte
• Ready to ship

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

• A hero’s journey through the Zodiac

• Myth and meaning of Aries

• Myth and meaning of Taurus

As soon as I saw the drawing I thought the rose should be on the woman’s head, that’s what’s blocking. But as far as how to do that in myself, I had no idea. The sketch stayed as it was, a black and white drawing in a forgotten sketchbook on my bookshelves for a few years.

The things I’m working this month on have a lot to do with roses and beauty, which made me think of this sketch and want to paint it. I don’t know why I hadn’t seen that before, but looking at the drawing again, I thought of the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty. This Jungian Life podcast talked about it on a relatively recent episode. Also Marie-Louise Von Franz analyzed it in detail in one of her books on fairy tales.

It’s a story that touches on the problem of eros– the dark, wild, aspect of Nature and of the feminine, and the problem is that our culture repressed it. The king invites 12 wise women when Sleeping Beauty is born but there’s a 13th woman who’s been forgotten, and because she’s pissed she curses the girl.

And you see, in my sketch there was also 12 leaves on the stem, I too had forgotten the 13th! That’s why I couldn’t figure it out, haha. In the painting version I made sure to have one leaf for each of the 13 wise women.

At fifteen, the girl pricks her finger on a spindle and falls asleep for 100 years. A thick hedge of briars grows around the castle, and no one can get through. Von Franz sees this hedge of thorns as a symbol of being overly sensitive or touchy. But with respect to my drawing, I see another side of this isolation.

The girl is Sleeping “Beauty.” Beauty is something that women have always personified, often that’s all people can see of a woman. We all want to be beautiful, but beauty can also be like this hedge behind which our intimate, authentic self remains unseen and isolated.

It’s clearer to me now, after adding colors, movement and music to my sketch, that this girl is kept away from love, and from feeling. Probably because she’s too much in her head. To recover her feeling self, the rose needs to be completely aligned.

But see, when I thought the rose should move on top, I only pictured it in my head. Which is ironic, because I think the solution is similar than in the fairy tale: time. To add a time dimension to the still image. Once I took the time to actually create the image, you know, paint the different pieces and animate them, it’s like the girl woke up. She went from a wild rose to a wise rose. To actually be seen, one needs to feel what it’s like to not be a still image.

“…very often, in mythological symbolism, [the rose is] the place of an inner mystical transformation.”

– M.-L. Von Franz, The problem of the Puer Aeternus

"– All roses are open to the elements, Your Majesty. They bud, bloom, and fade.

– Is that so, Madam?

– The rose grows entirely unaware, changing naturally from one state to another. And although the elements may treat her cruelly, she knows nothing of it and continues to her end without judgment on her beauty. Alas! It is not the same for us.”

“A wise rose” scene in A Little Chaos

Jump to: Description, Inspiration, Meaning, Shawshank Redemption

Myths of the goat-god Pan

In Greek mythology the sea-goat is linked with Aegipan, the god Pan in his goat-god aspect. Together with the infant Zeus, Aegipan was nurtured by Amalthea in a cave at Mount Ida. Zeus was so strong he broke one of Amalthea’s horn which became the cornucopia (horn of plenty) sometimes associated with the constellation of Capricorn. When the monster Typhon tries to overthrow Zeus for the supremacy of the cosmos, Aegipan and Hermes help him steal his tendons hidden in the Corycian Cave and get back his strength. And in a battle of the gods with Typhon, Pan gives himself a fish tail and escapes by jumping in the Nile river.

Card description

The sea-goat lives on a small paradise island, the perfect place to put up one’s legs while dipping a large fish tail in the water. The pear tree provides nourishment like Amalthea, the cornucopia, or the Golden Age of Cronus (Saturn). The scene is plunged in Saturn’s orange atmosphere with four waves in the water forming rings around the planet.

Although there is plenty of water to make plants grow on the island, the space is pretty limited. But you see how deep it goes. One tree at a time there is continual growth, which shows the cardinal Earth sign’s capacity for achievement.

Inspiration

My first encounter with the sea-goat happened in another context than the zodiac. I was flipping through my book of symbols one day and coming to the page about the goat, suddenly had this memory of a French story from my childhood. It’s about a goat wanting to return to nature and escaping the farm for the freedom of the mountain. The problem is, a dangerous wolf also lives there.

Reading the story again as an adult, I felt kind of conflicted by the goat’s situation. It seemed like there were no good options. How could the goat be free without either going back to the farm or be devoured by the wolf?

I decided to make a drawing of the story and see if I could figure out a way out of this double bind. One thing I wondered was, what if I added water? Which led me to the strange creature of the sea-goat.

Say a lot of rain fell and created a sea around the mountain. An island would form and the wolf would have to adapt. It might transform into a fish, swallow half of the goat, and this way end-up a sea-goat. And the tree would change too. Instead of splitting the farm and the mountain and point the finger at the goat, it could bring both sides together.

This sounded good in theory, but it also felt like kind of a lonely end. So instead I went for another solution. It was also inspired by a children story, except in that story there were not one but four animals escaping the farm. And instead of ending up martyrs like the goat, they join forces and meet a much better fate.

So the sea-goat idea remained in my sketchbook. Until two years ago, I decided to make a calendar based on the myths of the zodiac. I remembered this little sketch and thought of using it for the month of Capricorn.

I kept the sketch almost the same, except for the fig tree which I replaced with a pear tree and four waves that I added in the water, like rings around Saturn. Why a pear tree… mostly because I preferred the way it looks, but also I was thinking about the French expression “couper la poire en deux,” which means “splitting the difference.” It would balance the highs and lows of the sea-goat.

“In creation myths, islands portray the beginning of consciousness, small, vulnerable bits of earth fetched up from the bottom of the cosmic sea that are easily resubmerged. Island can represent the locus of a psychic factor that maroons one from what is most vital in the self. Or, it may express the unforeseen, inviolable space where the treasure of self is found.”

– Taschen, Book of Symbols

Meaning

It’s hard to make sense of the different myths for Capricorn. They all seems so different. But the more I thought about them all the more I started to see a common thread, which also aligns with this conflict of the goat and the wolf I was trying to resolve. And that’s innocence.

In the myth of Amalthea there’s the innocent state of the infant Zeus, and the bliss of being fed by a nourishing mother. Around the same time, his father Saturn presided over the Golden Age, a period of plenty where there was no need for rules and everyone did the right thing.

Then Zeus grows up, overthrows Saturn, becomes the all powerful sky god, and we get the next myth. Typhon comes along and challenges Zeus to rule the cosmos. It’s a similar conflict than my goat story, a kind of fight for innocence. But while Zeus succeeds in defeating Typhon, the goat in my story has no fighting chance against the wolf.

The next myth offers a solution: rather than fight when attacked by Typhon, Pan jumps in the Nile river and gives himself a fish tail. What that myth represents is hard to pinpoint. But one of the meanings for Capricornus (the goat-fish) is to be “the life-giving power of the water.”

And it’s true that the Nile was a great source of sustenance. But also, it was linked to processes of birth, growth, and death leading to the afterlife.

Intuitively, I’m inclined to think that the fish tail represents a connection to the afterlife, to eternity. It’s the return to nature that the goat sought in my story. That is, the unspoiled harmonious wilderness of the shepherds and their god Pan. That part of us that never changes, the eternal child.

“You must not do anything because it is right, but because it is your wish. Right is a word and Wrong is a word, but the sun shines in the morning and the dew falls in the dusk without thinking of these words which have no meaning...”

–Pan in "The Crock of Gold" by James Stephens (p. 23)

Then there’s also this bizarre myth where Enki (the Sumerian god of water, knowledge, craft, and creation) fertilizes the earth and makes seven plants grow. Despite the warnings he eats all of the fruit and becomes pregnant from eating his own semen.

Seven parts of his body then start to swell and he’s in so much pain because he has no way to give birth. So a sacred fox fetches his wife Ninhursag, who accepts to take the pregnancy and then gives birth to gods of healing for the different parts of the body.

That myth makes a point of connecting the fertile water (psyche) to the body, with the idea that creation and healing comes from a balance of the two. Eating fruit that one can’t give birth to is also like having fantasies that can never become real. But without Enki’s fertile water there would be no fruit. To create something you first have to dream.

I like this myth and I think that in my drawing for Capricorn the fruit is the key to this balance between psyche and body, height and depth, or highs and lows. Symbolically, the fruit means “immortality; it’s the essence, the culmination and result of one state and the seed of the next.”

Marie-Louise Von Franz says that at the end of life there is something eternal that remains, which in certain dreams shows up as a fruit. Psychologically, this fruit represents our efforts to become conscious. That if we make the effort there will be this immortal fruit which is preserved in other lives.

Specifically, the pear is a symbol for hope and good health. It also represents love and motherhood. In my drawing it’s kind of an antidote for the ups and downs of the sea-goat, the double-bind of Mr. Seguin’s goat, or the righteousness of Zeus.

“Capricorns tends toward the conservative, but this does not always keep them from seeking the heights, which they often surmount in a patient and persistent manner. Capricorns do not particularly care how long it takes them to achieve their ends. They believe in working and reworking their materials slowly and carefully, and rarely give up.”

–The Secret Language of Birthdays

In the hero’s journey this card is the return stage, which is the stage where the hero has to bring back the boon of immortality into the everyday world of time. In a way it’s also the struggle of the artist. To find inspiration in the fertile water while also managing the ups and down of life.

“And yet, if the monomyth is to fulfill its promise, not human failure or superhuman success but human success is what shall have to be shown. That is the problem of the crisis of the threshold of the return.”

–Cambell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p.300

This island of the sea-goat happens to fit the definition of paradise pretty well: a space enclosed or surrounded by the sea and which is only open to the heavens.

There are two types of paradise: Paradise Lost, or the Fall is “the descent from unity into duality and multiplicity in manifestation;” Paradise Regained is “the return to unity, to the spiritual center, man's conquest of himself and regaining pristine innocence.”

That helps to more fully understand the meaning of the sea-goat, and the kind of trouble it takes to reconcile its two halves: the fish tail is the return to unity, the psychic emotional realm, and the goat half is the material realm of everyday life and its duality.

The goat part is what’s most associated with Capricorn, it’s the part that manifests and accomplishes goals. But for that it also needs the part that dreams those goals, the fish part. When the two don’t align, life doesn’t feel quite as engaging.

Sometimes I see Capricorn only shown as a goat. Maybe it’s because the sea-goat is such an awkward thing to draw. But I think then it’s missing a really important ingredient. Because living everyday life without a hint of immortality feels a bit like prison.

Modern Myth: The Shawshank Redemption

When this movie first came out in the theater I was living in Virginia, working on a masters in mathematics. It was a funny thing to me that an American movie would have a protagonist with a French Canadian name. Dufresne happens to be my name too. That made it easy to identify with Andy. But I also did for the same reason countless other people identify with Andy since then. The feeling of having been wrongly convicted.

Andy’s biggest problem is that his emotions were all bottled up inside. He says it himself. “My wife used to say I’m a hard man to know, like a closed book. Complained about it all the time… I drove her away, and that’s why she died, because of me, the way I am.”

One of the rare times we ever see Andy lose his grip is in the opening scene, when he recalls the night he caught his wife cheating. But in court, faced with incriminating evidence, he remains calm. To the people of the court, he appears cold and remorseless. Seen as a monster, he is imprisoned and suffers a similar fate as Typhon locked in Tartarus by the sky god Zeus.

hope and The search for freedom

Even though he’s thrown in a system that sees people as either good or bad, Andy treats others like human beings. In the end, Andy says it doesn’t really matter whether he is innocent or not. That it’s the way he was, not expressing his feelings, that pushed his wife away. Maybe it’s that acceptance that sets him free. He’s a bit like Pan jumping in the Nile river to escape Typhon, and when he escaped prison he also did jump in a river!

By the way, Andy also shares his love of music with Pan, who played the pipe. After his return from isolation in the hole, Andy says that music is the feeling that “there are places in the world that aren’t made out of stone, that there’s something inside that they can’t get to, they can’t touch, it’s yours…” And when Red asks what that is, he says “hope.”

What he means by that is not quite clear, but I don’t think it’s just some event in the future. Yes, he was digging his tunnel the whole time, and surely that gave him hope. But I think it’s more like a connection to eternity, to the true self. It’s what made him feel free. The kind of freedom one wants for others, too.

“Remember Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies. I will be hoping that this letter finds you, and finds you well.”

– Andy Dufresne

Summary

Element: Cardinal Earth Ruler: Saturn Symbol: the Seagoat Motto: I persist

Keywords: rules, limits, structure, time, long-term goals, reality, humanity, hope, freedom, aspiration, optimism, mastery, achievement, duty
Qualities: persevering, patient, practical, serious, disciplined, controlled, responsible, rational, ordered, newness, potential for growth, hope for the future
Shadow: unbounded instinct, denying limitations, fantasizing, temporary, not growing up, escape, life as prison
Opposite: Cancer

Sources:

This Jungian Life – The Provisional Life
Marie-Louise Von Franz – Les Rêves et la Destinée
Tara Brach – How Hope Can Heal and Free Us
Heidi Priebe – Self-Sabotage: Eliminate It With Shadow Work
Joseph Campbell – The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Taschen – The Book of Symbols, Reflections on Archetypal Images
J.C. Cooper – An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols
G. Goldschneider, J. Elffers – The Secret Language of Birthdays
Wikipedia

Thanks for reading! If you like my work, a cup of coffee would be much appreciated 🙏.

FROM MY SHOP

Let Capricorn and its ability to persevere inspire you to get back on your feet.

• Art by Sophie Dufresne for Sophiequi
• Dimensions: 2 × 2 in
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• Flexible enough for curved surfaces
• Use as sticker or magnet
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Time to get a year older!

• Art by Sophie Dufresne for Sophiequi
• Dimensions: A6 or 4.13 × 5.83 in
• Gold A6 envelope provided
• blank inside
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Sheet with twelve zodiac stickers

• Art by Sophie Dufresne for Sophiequi
• Dimensions: 7 × 9 in
• Vinyl / Matte
• Ready to ship

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

• A hero’s journey through the Zodiac

• Myth and meaning of Virgo

• Myth and meaning of Aries

I started this painting to send him as a housewarming present, and got as far as blocking out the room and furniture pieces but didn’t have time to finish before he moved. And I guess I got busy after that cause the painting ended up buried in my studio under a pile of other work.

The other day I was clearing some stuff, found it, and decided to tackle the rest. I don’t have a picture of that stage of the painting, but the rug is where I had gotten stuck in my first session, which is interesting because symbolically it happens to link to the idea of carrying a piece of home when moving to a new place.

In her book on the Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Marie-Louise Von Franz talks about the symbol of the carpet, and she says that for North African nomadic tribes it was like a piece of maternal soil, or Mother Earth. It was their own symbolic territory wherever they went. The geometric designs of their carpets also carried a deep significance for them and was the basis of their whole life.

She says that in fairy tales the carpet often means the great pattern of our life, which “we constantly build out by our ego decisions and only in old age do we look back and see that our whole life had a pattern.” And “this purposiveness of an individual life pattern, which gives one a feeling of meaningfulness, is very often symbolized in the carpet.”

In the Grimm’s fairy tale she analyzes, The Three Feathers, there are no more good carpets at the king’s court (i.e. the collective conscious attitude), due to the feminine principles having been forgotten, so the king sends his three sons to find a carpet again and with it the pattern of life.

Think of the dude in The Big Lebowsky and how much trouble he got into just to get his rug back! As he said, it really tied the room together…

The Big Lebowski – That rug really tied the room together, did it not…

Well I found the same thing happened with this painting. I asked myself, who makes good rugs? And I thought of Jonathan Adler. I ran a search for his rugs on the internet and found this one, which may be an older design. My rendition of it is a little creative, but I guess it’s not meant to be exact. Once I put it in, though, it completely revived the painting. Pretty much as Von Franz said, that carpet gave my painting a new purpose, a new meaning.

After that I looked for an image to put in the picture frame between the two windows and found this link with a list of fifty of the most famous paintings. As I scrolled down the page, number 17, the painting of Henri Rousseau The Sleeping Gypsy, caught my eye. This is what Rousseau said about his painting: “A mandolin player, lies with her jar beside her (a vase with drinking water), overcome by fatigue in a deep sleep. A lion chance to pass by picks up her scent yet does not devour her. There is a moonlight effect, very poetic.”

My image of course is tiny and a super simplified version of Rousseau’s painting, with only a lion and desert in the moonlight. But it’s enough to get the gist of it. I made this choice very intuitively and didn’t think of it until well after finishing the painting, but my nephew was really into gypsy jazz around that time! Notice, also, how similar the colorful stripes of the gypsy’s dress in Rousseau’s painting is to the rug in my painting…

And to put the finishing touch, I got the idea of the brick wall from looking at this design article. Through it there is a door opening into a dark room, which to me represents the unconscious, and symbolizes the creative source, or energy, that feeds the aliveness of the room.

I don’t know what my nephew’s taste is like and never saw his apartment, but I imagine this room would suit his artistic temperament. I’m calling it the Gypsy Room.

I started by eliminating some of the elements to make the composition less cluttered: the kids by the snowman, the car driving by, the entire skating ring as well as the house next to it. That allowed me to move the greeting in the center of the design and clear some space in the sky to add a large full moon. There was one this year at Christmas and it was so beautiful.

The other big change was the colors. In the old version they were not very Christmas-like, and for this new version I wanted them to be a bit more traditional and closer to my current palette.

Once I got the ideas for the new composition and colors, I painted a background in gouache of the mountain, road, and fir trees, adding a natural gradient to the sky to place the scene at twilight and that way make it more magical. Then I picked a font that looks close to my handwriting as a guide and drew the letters in Photoshop.

Between Christmas and New Year I met a friend for breakfast at the Farmers Market next to the Grove in Los Angeles – shown in the photo below. Seeing all the decorations around the buildings and the big Christmas tree inspired me to add some greenery and ornaments to the houses and trees in my illustration.

I wanted to add some snow on the trees and did some tests in gouache on the background painting, which didn’t turn out so great, so instead I experimented in Photoshop and arrived at these wavy lines that could also double as some kind of garlands.

In the same way that the twilight is a sort of magical in-between time, I wanted to change the style of clothing on the people to place them in a timeless period. I love the style of the 1920s, kind of art nouveau or deco, so I searched for winter coats of that era.

Below you can see the evolution of the outfits from ordinary contemporary styles to a more glamorous and timeless fashion. Not so much vintage, I guess, as a little more grown-up. While the original illustration had a certain kids feel to it, this one I think makes a holiday card you could give to any age demographics.

And here’s the final version shown below. Now imagine the night has just begun to fall, wild life is stirring, skiers are coming home, but the full moon gives just enough light to sneak in a last snowball fight before going inside...

Jump to: Description, Meaning, Myth: The Breakfast Club

Myth: The Apis Bull

The solar disk between the horns of the Apis symbolized for the Egyptians the power of the king. And since the horns had the shape of a crescent moon, it was as if the sun survived in the night, or as though the power of the king lived on in the afterlife.

This symbol was so real to the Egyptians that an actual bull was chosen to be the Apis, which needed to have special markings like a white triangle on its forehead. During its lifetime, the animal was treated like royalty and sacrificed before it got old so that the new bull would seem to be the same as the previous one, thus being immortal.

Card description

Surrounded by luxurious olive trees and crocus flowers, the Apis bull in this card illustrates the fertile and nurturing quality of the earth, characteristic of Taurus as a fixed earth sign.

Like Ferdinand, this peaceful bull just loves to sit and smell the flowers, showing the sign’s love for sensuous beauty and its tendency to put down roots.

Instead of the solar disk, the bull holds between its horns Venus, the planet ruling Taurus. Even in our sky, it’s not unusual for Venus to be near the crescent moon. But Venus also has a connection to the bull in her role of heavenly mother goddess, which involves the sacrifice of a bull.

Card meaning

How Venus as mother goddess relates to the bull is an old story, which has to do with the moon and its phases. The full moon is the mother goddess while the bull, with its crescent-shaped horns, symbolizes the son-god hero. As the moon wanes, the son dies and as it waxes he is reborn.

This moon mother and son live in a symbiotic relationship, the two go together. The child depends on the mother for all of his desires, and the mother gets satisfaction in fulfilling them.

However, at some point this dependence has to be outgrown. And this might be one possible reason for the sacrifice of the bull: to overcome our animal instincts, such as to be mothered or to mother. Through this sacrifice, the son dies and is reborn a man.

But why sacrifice a bull? One probable reason is that it was very valuable. To sacrifice something that’s worth a lot, one has to let go of the desire to possess it. Which can be a challenge for a fixed earth sign. But as the energy invested in the desire is released, it can be regained in another form.

A literal example of this is given by the Greeks, for whom the bull was Dionysus: they would sprinkle the bull’s blood over their field to make the crops grow. At some point however they stopped sacrificing the bull, believing its presence alone was enough to wake up the life force of the earth and the plants.

But the idea of the bull producing wealth probably goes way back. By harnessing its strength and fertility, our ancestors were able to plow and harvest the land, which brought food and the first stable communities. With a bull or a cow, one could have a good living.

Think of the word cattle, which is derived from capital (“of the head”) and means a person’s wealth, stock or property. Then from capital, we got “capitalism” and the stock market. Also, we still speak of a bull market when it’s doing well.

And that might be another connection between the bull and Venus: pleasure and prosperity, represented in the card by the surrounding crocuses and olive trees.

The crocus flower as symbol means spring, fertility, and cheerfulness. From crocuses we harvest saffron–one of the most expensive spice in the world, and we also get a dye for fabrics or oil for cosmetics.

And the olive tree symbolizes peace, wealth, and endurance. It’s also the dwelling place and an emblem of the moon, while the olive itself is linked with fruitfulness and immortality, much like the fertile and eternal Apis.

But both olive trees and crocuses are part of the vegetation that grows on the island of Crete, which is where the myth of Europa takes place.

In this myth, the bull is a disguise of Zeus and its energy is the urge to conquer other lands. Zeus brings Europa to Crete, where she becomes queen and has with him three sons. Meanwhile, her three brothers go looking for her and end up each founding a new colony.

With the eternal Apis, the harmonious balance of the universe was maintained through a regular sacrifice. But in the myth of Europa the bull is exchanged for gifts from Zeus, all having to do with certainty and security.

And what happens next? Her son, the king Minos, fails to sacrifice the bull that gets him on the throne. Instead of returning it to Poseidon, he keeps the bull for himself. His empire prospers, but under the surface this untamed desire affects the queen. And her desire for the bull results in a monstrous child, the Minotaur, which Minos locks up in a labyrinth, a youth-eating monster hiding in the maze of childhood patterns.

Ferdinand the bull is another kind of story. He’s not even aware of his fierceness, it shows up by accident as he sits on a bee. When comes the time for the bull fight, he’s back to his old self and there is no sacrifice. Ferdinand in the end still sits under the trees, smelling the flowers.

This might be the danger the hero faces in the second stage on the hero’s journey: refusing the call to adventure. Why go on a risky venture when one can stay in the comfort of home or mother? But not going on the adventure may be just as risky. Under the surface, Ferdinand the fierce could popup at any moment.

With the Minotaur however, the trouble is evident and eventually leads to a resolution. Theseus comes and cuts through the confusion of the labyrinth, killing the monster and freeing all the young men and maidens that were stuck in childhood patterns. To come out of that confusion, the trick of the hero is Ariadne’s thread: love, or a way to remember how he got there.

Modern Myth: The Breakfast Club

The five teenagers spending their Saturday in detention are like the young men and maiden of Athens sent to be devoured by the Minotaur, i.e. Vernon, the school principal, who even tells Bender “don’t mess with the bull, young man, or you’ll get the horns”. The school itself is the labyrinth, especially in that scene where the kids are running through the corridors, trying to avoid Vernon.

Because he is the catalyst for change, I’d say that Bender is most like Theseus. He frees the other kids, while he himself ends up with a bunch of extra Saturdays in detention, maybe because he’s the one who is the least taken care of at home. Underneath his brave and defiant attitude perhaps he craves extra attention.

As for the influence of Venus, notice the mother goddess statue in the library. She might be behind the whole plot as the forces of Eros.. inciting the teenagers to talk and relate, even creating two couples by the end.

Summary

Element: Fixed Earth Ruler: Venus Symbol: the Bull Motto: I have

Keywords: Fertility, wealth, royalty, peace, putting down roots, security, certainty, inheritance, investing, self-regeneration, sacrifice, material possessions, desire, mothering, childhood patterns, refusing the call to adventure
Qualities: Stability, prosperity, endurance, nurturing, loyalty, harmony
Shadow: Stubbornness, procrastination, stagnation, possessiveness, dependence
Opposite: Scorpio

Sources:

Online Etymology Dictionary – capital and cattle
Joseph Campbell – The Hero with a Thousand Faces (p. 34)
Esther Hardings – Woman’s Mysteries (The Sacrifice of the Son)
Marie-Louise Von Franz – The Interpretation of Fairy tales (p.89)
Taschen – The Book of Symbols, Reflections on Archetypal Images
G. Goldschneider, J. Elffers – The Secret Language of Birthdays
Wikipedia

Thanks for reading! If you like my work, a cup of coffee would be much appreciated 🙏.

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

Let Taurus and its stable disposition inspire you to stop and smell the flowers!

• Art by Sophie Dufresne for Sophiequi
• Dimensions: 2 × 2 in
• Eco-friendly certified UV-LED inks
• Printed on sustainable cherry wood
• Flexible enough for curved surfaces
• Use as sticker or magnet
• Made in the USA
• Ready to ship

It’s your birthday, relax!

• Art by Sophie Dufresne for Sophiequi
• Dimensions: A6 or 4.13 × 5.83 in
• Gold A6 envelope provided
• blank inside
• Smooth cover paper 16pt
• Ready to ship

Sheet with twelve zodiac stickers

• Art by Sophie Dufresne for Sophiequi
• Dimensions: 7 × 9 in
• Vinyl / Matte
• Ready to ship

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

• A hero’s journey through the Zodiac

• Myth and meaning of Scorpio

• Myth and meaning of Libra

Jump to: Description, Inspiration, Meaning, Myth: Pretty Woman

Myth: Persephone

The story begins with Hades, lord of the underworld, who comes up to the surface and with the consent of her father Zeus, grabs Persephone while she is out picking flowers and takes her into the land of the dead. Realizing that her daughter is gone, Demeter is really upset and with the help of Hecate and her torches, looks for Persephone all over the earth. While she searches the crops stop growing, and eventually Zeus has to order his brother Hades to return Persephone. Hermes is sent to fetch her, but because Hades gave his bride a few pomegranate seeds to eat, she has to remain underground for part of the year, which then creates the seasons.

Card description

In my card for Virgo, I thought of the cypresses as the grieving of Demeter in winter and the new corn as the return of Persephone in the spring. The golden corn was for the summer months, and the sheaf of corn in the Virgin’s hand for the fall harvest. So the idea is that the whole cycle of the year is represented, and it also shows the mutable quality of the earth in Virgo.

The scene bathes in the moonlight with soft shadows as the sun disappears below the ground, and this refers to Persephone’s descent into the underworld and also to Virgo’s ruler Mercury, who is the god that can cross the boundary between the upper and lower worlds. The colors of the dress, white and red together means death, so it’s another connection to the underworld.

Inspiration

Being a Virgo, this concept felt the most personal of all the signs and the most difficult to come up with. Virgos are known to be organized and practical but the story of Persephone is kind of messy. How could a story like that fit into a neat little drawing? The myth focuses on the distress of Demeter but I imagine the experience for Persephone must have been even more confusing.

It helped that, in typical Virgo fashion, I had some rules to make my illustrations. They all had to have a nature element, a tree or plant, to complement the myth. And for this the perfect tree was the Mediterranean cypress because it's a symbol of mourning which relates to the grief of Demeter.

In antiquity, the cypress was associated with death and the underworld because it didn't grow back when it was cut too severely. I always loved this tree though because it reminds me of vintage posters of southern France or Italy. Van Gogh also had a painting with cypresses in his wheat field series. His were very tormented, but normally cypresses look pretty clean. Or distinct I guess. They stand on their own, just like the Virgin is one-in-herself.

Another rule I had was to include the ruling planet in some form. And to represent Mercury I use the sun and moon because in alchemy Mercury is the marriage of the sun and moon, meaning the union of the rational left brain with the intuitive right brain. Twilight is the moment when the sun and the moon are together and in Roman mythology that's what Mercury symbolizes, he is the twilight god of boundaries and he brings souls to the underworld.

In ancient art, grain goddesses were often shown sitting on a pile of grain but they were shown sideways with the people to whom they handed out the grain, or full front facing. In my drawing I chose a three-quarter pose for the goddess, to give her a little more dimension and depth of feelings. In a way she is both Demeter mourning for her daughter and Persephone, a bit lost in thoughts, perhaps in the underworld or right before Hades shows up, and it's this distracted state that allows him to grab her.

Instead of having the goddess sitting on a pile of grain I preferred to show her in the midst of the fields, and represent the four seasons by drawing not just the full grown grain but also the young sprouting stalks. But it almost looks like the goddess has these barriers all around her. Perhaps it’s her way to deal with the chaos of merging the two world. Past, present, future, being isolated from one another.

“The inner world of Virgo is not so much a dreamy one (like that of Cancer or Pisces) but one taken up with analyzing, solving, assessing.”

In the original sketch I drew corn rather than wheat, but I think they're pretty similar in terms of symbolism. Once I finished the painting the stalks felt much too stiff so I repainted another version with wheat, which I wasn’t too happy with either, so I worked on it in the computer and ended up somewhere between the two. It also took a few trials to get the expression right for the face of the goddess. I wanted her to look quiet, in a sort of peaceful melancholic way.

Card Meaning

If you're a creative person, you might be familiar with these periods where you don't have ideas or energy to create anything. And then one day you're inspired again. That's one way to look at this card. This Jungian Life podcast has an episode about this, they call this a creative depression. The energy goes underground for some time, which feels like being dragged against your will. A bit like Hades taking Persephone underground. But in the end it brings something meaningful. Persephone returns with the bounty of spring.

Another way to look at the myth is to compare it with the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty (Briar Rose). Marie-Louise Von Franz sees it as a special variation of the myth of Persephone. Both are about a young girl who disappears into death, or sleep, and returns at a certain time. But instead of being taken by the god of the dead, Hades, she is cursed by a wise woman, one of 13 who is not invited to the feast at her birth because there are only 12 golden plates.

I didn’t noticed that before, but in my sketch there are 12 tree/stalks around the goddess and she holds number 13. But apparently the numbers can vary in different versions of the tale, sometimes it's 7 and 8, or 2 and 3. The general idea is that the numbers don't fit so one godmother is left out and upset then puts a curse on the daughter.

But 12 and 13 are significant in other ways. Campbell says that 13 is the place of ultimate union between heaven and earth, and it’s where time and eternity come together. He points out that the 13th card in the Tarot deck is the Death card, but death as the way to eternal life, since there are other cards beyond this one. At the Last Supper they were 12 at the table and the 13th was the one who was to die, but since he is beyond death, doesn’t die.

Sleeping Beauty also doesn’t die. At first she’s supposed to, but one of the benevolent godmothers softens the curse to her falling asleep for one hundred years. And it’s not just her, the whole kingdom. A long period of time such as a hundred years is like an eternity, so symbolically it could means that the heroine is outside the everyday world of time, in the archetypal realm of the collective unconscious. And by being in contact with that realm the prince comes and everybody wakes up.

In the myth of Persephone, Demeter is the mother figure who gets upset and there also it affects everyone. The crops stop growing and everything gets stale because the daughter is gone. According to Von Franz, the daughters in myths are usually a little more human than the mother goddesses, who tend to have primal emotional reactions.

She sees the mother goddess who’s been ignored in this tale as a possible personification of hurt feelings, vanity or resentment. And that the daughter is capable of reflection and judgement instead of just following her impulses. In my painting the single sheaf of wheat in the goddess’ hand is less perfect, more human and individual than the stalks of wheat below her. There are no others like it, so it brings something new.

Then the daughter is the one who restores life for everyone, and the state of wholeness is symbolized by her marriage with the god or the prince. Psychologically, it means the coming together of the conscious and unconscious. I didn’t know this when choosing the colors of Persephone’s dress in my card, but the red and white in combination is very important symbolically because it means a union of opposites.

So this card also expresses the mystical marriage Joseph Campbell talks about in the hero’s journey, at the stage called meeting with the goddess. The “goddess,” as he defines it, is the “world creatrix, ever mother, ever virgin.” She gives life, nourishes, embraces, but she also brings death so she unite all pairs of opposites. Meeting this goddess leads to accepting life as a whole.

When Persephone eats the seeds, she can’t go back to being the pure maiden unaware of the underworld. The old part of her dies, but she herself still lives. The two worlds, upper and lower, are then united. And this creates the four seasons (with the number four also a symbol of wholeness). The earth becomes fertile again, but in a conscious way.

Modern Myth: Pretty Woman

There are lots of interesting parallels between the movie Pretty Woman and the myth of Persephone. Vivian lives off the street but in a way she’s also a kind of “virgin”: she doesn’t belong to any pimp, doesn’t do drugs, and is a “safety” girl. A man who is her “uncle” brings her into his world, where she also eats seeds, strawberry seeds on the first night, which in a way also leads to making a deal for her to stay. Six days in the movie and six months in the myth.

But I think one important point the movie and the myth both make is the contrast between nature and culture. Hollywood is the land of dreams but also the land of nature, the dark side, the underworld. The upper world is the hills, the land of culture, or high society. There’s something of the Apollonian vs the Dionysian.

At the beginning of the movie those two worlds are completely separate, but then like the myth, something brings them together. Hades irrupts in the upper world, and Edward does the same except it’s the other way around, he lands in Hollywood where he meets his Persephone, Vivian.

Both are changed forever with this encounter, and their worlds too. Vivian’s meeting with culture gets her to go back to school and help her friend Kit do the same. Edward’s meeting with nature gets him to build rather than destroy companies. Vivian gets her fairy tale, Hades gets his queen. And we get the seasons, agriculture, and the abundance shown in the card.

Summary

Element: Mutable Earth Ruler: Mercury Symbol: the Virgin Motto: I cultivate

Keywords: Individual vs system or community, management of resources, compartmentalization, order, cyclical change, routines, nature vs culture, natural rhythms, letting nature takes its course, inner life, choice, abundance
Qualities: discerning, selective, independent, good time management, practical, productive
Shadow: Ignoring one’s own needs or feelings, cut off, following the system or systematizing, creative block, feeling lost or hurt
Opposite: Pisces

Sources:

This Jungian Life podcast – Creative Depression, Briar Rose
Marie-Louise Von Franz – The Feminine in Fairy Tales
Joseph Campbell – The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Lost Teachings of Joseph Campbell, Volume II, Cassette 2
From Darkness to Light: The Mystery Religions of Ancient Greece
Oxford Classical Dictionary – Persephone/Kore
Jessica Davidson – Zodiac Myth: The Story Behind Virgo
G. Goldschneider, J. Elffers – The Secret Language of Birthdays

Thanks for reading! If you like my work, a cup of coffee would be much appreciated 🙏.

FROM MY SHOP

Let Virgo and its aspirations inspire you to serve a greater purpose!

• Art by Sophie Dufresne for Sophiequi
• Dimensions: 2 × 2 in
• Eco-friendly certified UV-LED inks
• Printed on sustainable cherry wood
• Flexible enough for curved surfaces
• Use as sticker or magnet
• Made in the USA
• Ready to ship

It’s your birthday, time to let your hair down!

• Art by Sophie Dufresne for Sophiequi
• Dimensions: A6 or 4.13 × 5.83 in
• Gold A6 envelope provided
• blank inside
• Smooth cover paper 16pt
• Ready to ship

Sheet with twelve zodiac stickers

• Art by Sophie Dufresne for Sophiequi
• Dimensions: 7 × 9 in
• Vinyl / Matte
• Ready to ship

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

• A hero’s journey through the Zodiac

• Myth and meaning of Pisces

• Myth and meaning of Gemini

Jump to: Description, Inspiration, Meaning, Myth: Walter Mitty

Myth: The Golden Fleece

King Athamas had two children with the cloud nymph Nephele, a boy named Phrixus and girl named Helle. One day, the king falls for another woman, Ino. Nephele leaves in anger, which causes a drought, then Ino plots to have the children sacrificed under the pretense of saving the town’s crops. Coming to her children’s rescue, Nephele sends the flying, golden-fleeced ram, Chrysomallus, which takes the kids over the ocean. While on the ram, Helle falls in the sea and into the arms of Poseidon, but Phrixus makes it safely to Colchis. There, he marries the daughter of king Aeëtes (son of Helios) and in thanks, sacrifices the ram to Zeus. He then gives the Golden Fleece to the king, who hangs it on an oak tree belonging to Ares.

Card description

Leaping with energy across the way, the ram is leaving on an adventure. Above its head, the ruling planet Mars shines like the new spring sun, illustrating the ram’s single-minded focus while on its mission.

In the background a low cumulus cloud covers a turbulent ocean, located next to an imposing oak tree. The redness of the oak and its spread-out branches evoke the intensity and radiance of fire – the element of Aries in its cardinal, most essential, form. This is the fire which animates the sign and gives it its strong will and passionate emotions.

Inspiration

To compose my illustration I took some elements from the story of the Golden Fleece, like the oak tree where the fleece of the ram hangs after being sacrificed and the ocean over which the ram flies and Helle falls into.

I wondered which moment of the myth would be best to represent and, depending on the answer, where to place the ocean. Should it be on the right, and show the moment before the ram flies over the ocean? Or should it be on the left and show the moment after Phrixus makes it to Colchis but before he sacrifices the ram?

After playing around with the sketch I decided for the second idea, so that the ocean on the left represents the past, where the ram came from, and the tree represents the future, where the ram will end up.

Then I added the ruling planet, Mars (or Ares, to whom the oak tree belongs), placing it on the right where it fell above the ram’s head. But it could also be a kind of sun and represent Helios, the sun god and father of the king of Colchis.

After scanning the painting in Photoshop, I wanted a better demarcation between the two blues where the ocean meets the sky, so I put a cloud there, without even realizing that Nephele, the kids’ mother who sent the ram, was herself a cloud, since she was a cloud nymph. It made the story more complete.

Card meaning

The myth seems to opposes the forces of Poseidon and the ocean to those of the sky and sun gods, Zeus and Helios. You can see that in the contrast between the movement of the ocean and the steadfastness of the oak tree that’s on the card.

The endless motion of the ocean’s waves implies time, and Helle is the one to fall into it perhaps because as a young girl she’d be having a monthly cycle, which also connects her to time and material existence. She falls right where the ram crosses over from Europe to Asia, which is an interesting detail.

If Europe refers to the West and its emphasis on the individual, and Asia to the impersonal philosophy of the East, it could be that the essential meaning of the myth is the tension between time and eternity, or the ego and the Self.

While Helle falls in the water and under the power of Poseidon, Phrixus makes it safely to Colchis, so it’s like there’s a kind of transition from the lunar world of time to the eternal land of the sun. The first thing Phrixus does when he gets there is to sacrifice the ram to Zeus Phyxius, an aspect of Zeus which symbolizes refuge, and hangs the fleece on an oak tree sacred to Mars (Ares).

So underneath the boldness, willpower and action of Aries is perhaps a search for a stronger consciousness. In Campbell’s hero’s journey, this stage corresponds with the call to adventure. Phryxus answers the call and goes to the land of the sun, but he doesn’t yet return with the boon of eternity. No one can get to the golden fleece without putting up a fight, which is what Jason later has to do.

The oak in general symbolizes strength, protection, durability, courage and truth (J.C. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols), all qualities which may characterize Aries too. But Jung also finds the oak to be a symbol of the eternal consciousness of the Self:

“In the alchemical fairy tale ‘The Spirit in the Bottle,’ the dark, mercurial spirit of transformation is hidden in the roots of an oak tree. Jung found this image of the treasure-containing oak to be a beautiful evocation of the Self, the unconscious core of the personality, a royal figure among all the other contents of the unconscious.” (Taschen’s Book of Symbols)

One way to define the Self is that it’s the combination of all our selves, past and future. The oak tree in the card, with its twelve branches springing from a central trunk then is like the Self with all of its selves, as if saying “I am,” the motto associated with Aries.

And since the golden ram was a gift from Hermes (i.e. Mercury), it also carries this mercurial spirit Jung speaks of, bringing other meanings to the card: excitable, volatile, sprightly, emotional.

The sheep-looking cloud represents a certain childlike innocence, and in a way so does Nephele. She is the good mother, rescuing the children, while Ino is the bad mother who threatens them. Like Nephele, this cloud has no dark side. There’s actually no shadows in the whole illustration, only a bright sun. Phrixus is like the eternal child escaping the world of time to remain in the land of the sun.

“There are many fairy tales in which a pair of children are persecuted by a stepmother. Generally, one of the two is killed and then transformed by a spell and redeemed by the other partner. There is this same type of child-myth also in classical Greek mythology. For instance there is the story of the two children of Nephele… the children are persecuted by their stepmother and they fly away through the air on a golden ram, but Helle falls into the sea and dies. The brother, Phrixus, escapes and later sacrifices the ram whose fleece is fastened to a tree… One could say that all these motifs of a couple of children, a little brother and sister, who are always partly killed and partly restored to life, are images of the inner totality of man (i.e. the Self) which in its infantile preformation has to be cut away so that ego consciousness may mature,” says Marie-Louise Von Franz.

And this sets the stage for Jason’s later call to adventure: a journey where to retrieve the fleece and win back the throne from his uncle Pelias, Jason will have to ally himself to Medea, the dark feminine, in order to overcome the powers of nature and reconnect with the immortal Self.

“The lamb is innocence and gold the supreme treasure, hence the quest for the golden fleece is also the search for spiritual illumination, the supreme identity, regaining immortality and the attempt to gain the seemingly unattainable. To attain this it is necessary to overcome the dark side of nature, symbolized by the dragon and Medea, requiring heroic or mystical conquest. The fleece is found on a tree, symbolizing the Tree of Life and is guarded by the dragon as guardian of treasures.” – J.C. Cooper

Modern Myth: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Walter works at Life magazine but ironically, isn’t truly living. After his father died at a young age, he took a job to help support his mom and sister and never got to fulfill his dreams of traveling the world. Growing up too fast, he never had the chance to explore who he is, hasn’t done anything noteworthy or mentionable. His life is empty while he constantly escapes into extraordinary adventures in his daydreams.

Until changes at the office force Walter out of his comfort zone. Playing the role of Pelias in the myth of the Golden Fleece, Ted Hendricks takes over the direction of the magazine and Walter finds himself like Jason called on a quest to retrieve the missing “negative 25,” the quintessence of life. Like Jason with Medea, Walter gets magical inspiration from his love interest, Cheryl Melhoff. And like Jason, Walter faces the dark side of nature on his adventure: he fights a shark, finds himself near an erupting volcano, and crosses the Himalayas.

What the movie makes more clear than the myth, is that the goal of the quest is to find that lost connection with the Self. When Walter finally sees the photo of the missing negative 25, it’s a picture of himself. All this time the negative was right under his nose, in the wallet. But it took the adventure to find it.

Summary

Element: Cardinal Fire Ruler: Mars Symbol: the Ram Motto: I am

Keywords: Energy, emotions, action, willpower, new beginnings, innocence, eternal child, search for eternity, power of destiny, call to adventure
Qualities: Strength, durability, courage, assertiveness, leadership, action, excitement, liveliness, spirit, sunny disposition
Shadow: Impulsivity, escape, volatility, impatience, immaturity, naivety
Opposite: Libra

Sources:

Marie-Louise Von Franz – The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, p.72
Taschen – The Book of Symbols, Reflections on Archetypal Images
J.C. Cooper – An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols
G. Goldschneider, J. Elffers – The Secret Language of Birthdays
Wikipedia

Thanks for reading! If you like my work, a cup of coffee would be much appreciated 🙏.

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• A hero’s journey through the Zodiac

• Myth and meaning of Libra

• Myth and meaning of Sagittarius

I took this photo in Palm Springs back in 2013, which was just the beginning of my journey inward. I didn’t know at the time where the path would take me, or what that quote from John Muir really meant. It’s easier to see the road after the journey than before. And perhaps it’s better that way, otherwise we would never go on adventures.

The journey inward is an emotional one… there can be bliss, confusion and potential pitfalls. Religions and rituals used to guide us along, or maybe even guard us from, this experience. Many of these communal supports have now faded away and those who are called to take this journey have to face it alone, and may feel a little lost at times. This is where something like Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey can be so helpful, because it’s like a map that tells us where we might be on the path.

While researching the zodiac for my calendar project, I found that the diagram of the Grand Cycle of Life in The Secret Language of Birthdays looked similar to that of the hero’s journey. And I thought, what if the zodiac was actually a kind of map to help us transform as the earth does every year? Could it match the stages of the hero’s journey? Turns out that yes! And after condensing the seventeen stages from The Hero With a Thousands Faces into twelve, I arrived at something like the diagram below.

From this bird’s eye view, you can see that as the sun cycles through the seasons, the sequence of the signs around the zodiac does fit the hero’s journey pretty well: the hero departs in the spring, crosses into a world of supernatural wonder in the summer, descends into darkness is in the fall, goes through a death and rebirth around the winter solstice, and returns in the winter.

Following the natural rhythms of the earth, the zodiac’s myths and metaphors connect us to deep processes of inner transformation. It’s interesting to see the way the myths evolve from stories of kings and conquests, to heroes fighting monsters, then nature goddesses, half-animal gods, a deified shepherd boy, and finally the birth of the goddess of love.

Like the hero going on an adventure, the zodiac starts in Aries with a dissatisfying situation: a king leaving his wife for another woman, kids having to be sacrificed, a stolen throne. Then as we go from one myth to the next, there seems to be a gradually deeper encounter with the forces of nature, first having to be fought and then integrated.

Like for the typical hero, the overall pattern in the zodiac seems to open up an ordinary world which had become stale or too narrow. As we go briefly through each of the signs and explore how the myths relates to the stages of hero’s journey, notice also how the planetary rulers bring just the right energy to teach the hero about that particular stage.

Aries - Call to Adventure

The myth of the Golden Fleece sets the stage for the original conflict behind the whole adventure. An angry cloud nymph who’s husband king left her for another woman creates a drought. The new wife plots to have the king’s children sacrificed to save the town’s crops, and the cloud mother sweeps in with a flying ram to save her children. The ram is then sacrificed and its fleece hung on an oak tree sacred to Mars, the warrior god who creates conditions that allow crops to grow.

The call to adventure comes when the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit, says Campbell. The herald calling to destiny is often dark and judged evil: with Phrixus it’s the stepmother, and later it’s Pelias, sending Jason and the Argonauts on their quest.

Taurus - Refusal of the Call

Venus, ruling Taurus in her earthly aspect, can “give military victory, sexual success, good fortune and prosperity,” making life indeed so comfortable the hero might just refuse the call and dismiss the adventure.

Refusing the call converts the adventure into its negative, says Campbell, eventually turning the flowering world of the hero into a wasteland even if, like King Minos, he succeeds in building a great empire. For the king’s greed turns all that fertile energy inward, which results in a walled labyrinth hiding a monstrous creature: the Minotaur. Thankfully, Theseus comes and kills the monster, and so the adventure continues.

Gemini - Supernatural Aid

Every quest comes with some form of help or guidance: the hero meets a mentor, receiving what Campbell calls supernatural aid. This represents some protecting power of destiny, or helpful forces from the unconscious, which appear once the hero is committed to the quest.

This stage happens under the rulership of Mercury, messenger of the gods and guide of souls to the underworld. In the myth of the twins Castor and Pollux, regarded as helpers of mankind, one twin is immortal, the other is not. When Castor dies, Pollux strikes a deal with Zeus so that he can share his immortality with Castor. By accepting to be mortal, Pollux makes a real commitment to the adventure of life.

Cancer - crossing the threshold

With the help of supernatural forces, the hero is ready to leave the limits of the ordinary world and cross the first threshold. This stage occurs under the rulership of the moon and its instinctive need for home and security.

Heracles fights the multi-headed monster Hydra, living at the entrance of the underworld and acting as a threshold guardian. Sensing that Heracles is winning, the goddess Hera sends the giant crab Karkinos to distract him but the hero crushes it under his foot. Thus he emerges from the crab’s regressive pull in a kind of rebirth, similar to what Campbell calls the belly of the whale, a final separation from the hero’s known self and world.

Leo - the road of trials

Now moving into the unknown, the hero embarks on the road of trials where he must face a series of tests to begin the transformation (often in patterns of threes).

Under the rulership of the Sun – associated with the conscious ego, personal power, creativity and leadership – Heracles prepares to fight the Nemean Lion. The challenge lasts thirty days, during which he first tries to kill the lion with normal weapons and fails, then with a clever use of darkness (or supernatural aid), he knocks out the lion and strangles it with his bare hands. Failing at skinning the lion with his knife, he again receives supernatural help, with Athena telling him to use one of the lion’s claws. Finally, Hercules wears the lion’s skin, symbolizing the higher awareness of the sun.

Virgo - Meeting with the Goddess

After the trials and transformation comes the meeting with the goddess, a sacred marriage where the hero must reconcile the dual nature of life (or love) and find unity within a greater totality. Ruling Virgo at this stage is Mercury as keeper of boundaries and acting like a bridge between upper and lower world.

Persephone is taken by Hades while picking flowers in a field, then becomes queen of the underworld. In terrible grief, Demeter stops the growing of crops while searching for her daughter, forcing Hades and Zeus to accept the demand for her return. But having eaten a few seeds in the underground, Persephone must stay there part of the year, thus reconciling light and dark, and creating the cycle of the seasons.

Libra - Woman as the Temptress

Campbell calls this step woman as the temptress, meaning that the hero now has to face the moral problem of being in a world which includes both light and dark. Thus the side of Venus ruling Libra, at this stage, is her divine aspect – favoring beauty, harmony, grace, and the urge to sympathize or unite with others.

Balancing the scales and forces of the universe, Themis – goddess of justice, divine order, law and custom – holds the hero to a high standard, as do the norms of society. Themis is not wrathful, but when she is disregarded Nemesis steps in and brings retribution. Testing the hero’s integrity, the quest may require going against what others think, say or want, in order to remain true to herself or to the adventure.

Scorpio - Atonement

Now comes the darkest point of the journey: atonement with the father, by which the hero breaks past the ego and its fear of death. Governing Scorpio at this stage is Pluto, lord of the underworld associated with depth, power and regeneration, as well as a quietly strategic Mars, pulling the strings beneath the surface.

In the myth of the death of Orion, the hunter boasts to Artemis, goddess of wilderness and the hunt, how he could kill any beast on Earth. Upon hearing this, Gaia sends the giant Scorpion to sting and kill Orion – symbolically sacrificing the hero/ego. Then at the demand of Artemis, Zeus (the ultimate father figure) places Orion among the stars – a moment of apotheosis by which the hero transcends the time-based world of ego.

Sagittarius - the ultimate boon

After the release of death, the hero catches a glimpse of eternity in a moment of god-like realization. With a greater understanding of his own being and the world, he gets the ultimate boon: immortality (or whatever the quest was about). This stage is under the rulership of Jupiter, supreme god of the sky and largest planet – favoring expansion, healing, fortune, and higher education.

The wise centaur Chiron, teacher of heroes and immortal like his father Cronus, is trained by Apollo in the arts of archery, healing, and prophecy. Ironically, he gets wounded by an arrow dipped in the Hydra’s blood – an accident he does not foresee, and which results in a wound he cannot heal. In pain, Chiron makes a deal with Zeus and willingly gives his immortality to Prometheus.

Capricorn - The Return

Having reached the goal, the hero may then refuse to return, be forced to escape in a magic flight, or pulled back to reality with a rescue from without. Ruling Capricorn at this stage, is Saturn and its concerns for goals, time and reality.

Attacked by the monster Typhon, the nature god Pan jumps in a river, and the parts of his body above the water remain a goat while the parts below turn into a fish tail. The sea goat, climbing up on land while pulled down toward the eternal waters of life, shows how difficult it is for the hero to cross the return threshold. Somehow, the connection with the other world must be kept, or there’s a risk of losing the boon when returning on ordinary ground.

Aquarius - Master of the Two Worlds

The hero’s task is now to become a master of the two worlds, stitching the two together. And what better way to reconcile the everyday and supernatural than the two rulers of Aquarius: the reason and objectivity of Saturn with the genius and unpredictability of Uranus.

The flowing vase of Aquarius pouring cosmic waters onto the world would have been a familiar image at a time when many were employed in the old profession of water carrier. With the myth of Ganymede, the symbol turns into a human cup-bearer serving ambrosia to the gods. Both images reflect the social aspect of this stage, whether bringing the supernatural world back to society and everyday life, or feeding the inner world with outer experiences.

Pisces - Freedom to Live

The hero now flows between inner and outer reality, similarly to Pisces. Like the two fishes tied by a cord, Jupiter rules alongside Neptune with the expansive clarity of the sky, and his brother with the fluidity of the sea.

In a similar union of sky and sea, the myth of Pisces has an egg fall into the Euphrates, rolled onto the shore by two fishes, and hatched by doves. Then out of the egg comes Aphrodite in her celestial form. For the hero, this means he’s released from the adventure and gains a new freedom to live. No longer centered in the ego and its fears but established in the Self, the hero lives in the present. The boon brings vitality to those around and restores the world.

In this brief overview of the hero’s journey through the zodiac you can see how this pattern seems to be embedded in the very fabric of our lives: seasons, planets and all. Year after year, Mars is the one to push us on the adventure, while Venus prefers the status quo. Mercury acts as the mentor, Pluto as the dark father. Jupiter brings the boon, Saturn gets us to return.

Even without knowing much about what the planets stands for or the details of each myth, the images of the cards themselves evoke the emotion of the stage it corresponds to. Sagittarius shows the fantastic feeling of getting the ultimate boon, Cancer the mysterious experience of crossing the threshold, Capricorn the balancing act of the return, and so on. And this emotional recognition may be all you need to know where you stand on the journey.

If you liked this journey through the zodiac, perhaps you’ll enjoy my brand new deck: the Ingenious Zodiac. At once an oracle, an introduction to the zodiac, and a tool for self-discovery, you can use these cards to navigate every day situations in a more symbolic way, discover unconscious patterns at work in your life and transform how you typically respond to challenging situations.

More info:

J.Campbell – The Hero with a Thousands Faces, video
G. Goldschneider, J. Elffers – The Secret Language of Birthdays

Thanks for reading! If you like my work, a cup of coffee would be much appreciated 🙏.

Then he also says, “the fact is that in former times men did not reflect upon their symbols; they lived them and were unconsciously animated by their meaning.” I find that’s also true when creating an image. Many times I just follow my sense of aesthetics and what excites me, and it’s only later that I might reflect on the symbols and what they mean.

This piece is one of those which happened rather spontaneously. I was at my neighbor’s studio for our monthly paint night and chose a photo from the big binder of images that serve as inspiration for when we come to paint without anything specific in mind.

Of course, the choice to paint pine trees was influenced by the season, but it was only later that the idea of making a holiday illustration came about. I actually worked on it on Christmas day since there wasn’t enough time before. I did a search on “Christmas lake” to find some ideas and zeroed in on a photo of a snowy island with a few nice buildings in the middle of a lake.

From there I decorated the trees in the foreground, added hand-lettering to say “Happy Holidays,” spruced up the background with more snow and color, then filled the obvious empty spot with a Santa Claus in a sleigh pulled by reindeer. And, done. Everyone gets what this image is about in one glance.

To present it, I said something like “it’s a little Christmas town that perhaps exists somewhere near the North Pole.” I don’t know where the lake in my painting actually is, and for the illustration it doesn’t really matter, but it’s kind of interesting that the picture I looked at for Christmas inspiration, a place in Slovenia called Lake Bled, has a similar type of setting with mountains and pine trees around a lake with an island.

I never heard of this place before, but apparently it was a sacred area all the way back to the Bronze Age, 13th-12th century BC, where gold artifacts with markings of the solar and lunar years were found in a deposit on the shore of the lake. And centuries later, it seems to still be sacred, since there’s a pilgrimage church on the island dedicated to the assumption of Mary.

Symbolically, this idea of the sacred feminine appears to be all around, in the mountains and in the lake. The mountain is earth and female, impregnated by a male sky, and the lake also is a feminine symbol, seen as a kind of sustaining mother providing water, food, and shelter for those living on her shores.

In my illustration, there are also seven snowflakes falling from the sky, adding an extra winter touch to the picture. Seven symbolize wholeness and completion, and also happen to be the number of the Great Mother.

The Winter Solstice itself is feminine, being “the Great Mother, Queen of Heaven, giving birth to the Son of Light,” according to J.C. Cooper. And in Taschen’s words, it’s “the birth of the divine light in a time of great darkness, and the overcoming of death in the sun’s eternal rejuvenation.”

Even the island, as a symbol, tells a story similar to the birth of light—the beginnings of consciousness, which in creation myths are like islands starting as small pieces of earth taken from the bottom of a cosmic sea. (Taschen)

But the most well-known symbol of the Winter Solstice is perhaps the Christmas tree, “the tree of rebirth and immortality, New Year and fresh beginnings, the Tree of Paradise of lights and gifts, shining by night.” And speaking of why we decorate it, “each light is a soul and the lights also represent the sun, moon and stars shining in the branches of the Cosmic Tree.” (J.C. Cooper, DK Books).

As for the 5-pointed star on top of the tree, it means aspiration, light, the spiritual, and education. (J.C. Cooper) The star on Pittsburgh’s tree above is pretty perfect, and it’s uncanny how similar the colors are to the ornaments in my illustration, especially that I almost went for red ornaments and found this photo only after the fact. It turns out gold, silver, and blue are fitting colors for the sun, moon and stars.

But what about Santa? The one I drew is inspired by the American invention of Santa Claus, itself a mix of several symbols and traditions such as the European Saint Nicholas, English Father Christmas, and Dutch Sinterklaas. Santa is part of a gift-giving tradition that may go back as far as ancient Rome, with the Saturnalia festival happening around the Winter Solstice.

Also surrounding the symbolism of the Winter Solstice, there are the antlers of the stag (or reindeer), which connect to the idea of death and rebirth because of their annual regeneration. Under stag symbolism, J.C. Cooper writes that “stags draw the vehicles of Father Time and Father Christmas.” That’s interesting, and I’ve not seen stags connected to Father Time anywhere else, but I like the idea.

Whether we know it or not, symbols carry unconscious messages that help us through the different transitions of life. Every year I feel a little unprepared when the holidays arrive, almost like I’m being sucked into some sort of machine. But by giving in to all of the rituals, decorating a tree, baking, gift-giving and celebrating, this season really is like a death and rebirth, and I find myself ready again to start a whole new year.

Sources:

Taschen – The Book of Symbols, Reflections on Archetypal Images
J.C. Cooper – An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols
DK Books – Signs & Symbols, An Illustrated Guide to Their Origins and Meanings
Wikipedia

Thanks for reading! If you like my work, a cup of coffee would be much appreciated 🙏.

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