by Claire-France Perez

When a psychologist deigns to consult an astrologer, various inherent biases set the stage. I'm used to the "counsel of last resort" to which astrologers have been relegated. This was one of those truly desperate moments.

"My son has run away," the woman sobbed, "He may be lost forever." I waited in supportive silence for my next clue. "He's schizophrenic, you know." Her son was on the high road, in the dangerous world out there. "I'm in a position to know, I'm a psychologist." Later in the conversation I learned she was still in supervision pending approval of her MFCC license. From her chart and her attitude I perceived a "know-it-all" shadow-type: a curiosity fueled by, but not really questioned or understood as, the motivation to uncover her own secret. The Animus was strong.

The astrologer has a "back door," around these ego constraints. Align the correct mythology, and like the annoying predictions of my sister who can watch any "whodunnit" and nail the antagonist in the first act, the astrologer also follows the thread of the dramatic story with an understanding of its winding resolution. Mythology as map provides the "instruction kit," for the astrologer-mythologist who can warn of rocky shoals or smooth sailing.

"How old is the boy?"

"He's 21." At that age I only wondered, from what did the boy have to run? He was gone, his chart free of disturbing difficulty. On the basis of Jung's "Heal the Mother" ethic, I focused on her to chart to set a course that could sail us toward resolution.

The mother's chart showed Libra was rising. The mythological clue? Follow the ruler of that sign, the Lady of the Night, Venus herself. Aphrodite and her golden girdle, the one that could move the crowds of people who stand in formation at football games. Why do they do it? "Because it's fun," they say. Venus rules mirth and entertainment. She connects us, then forces us back down to prove our love. For time immemorial, she has been obliging us mortals to commit to our loves, if only because she was such a wanton. Venus loves a crowd, a triangle and spats. That golden girdle moved Anthony to forget he was a general, all for the love of Cleopatra. Venus is sufficiently powerful to drug the most sober and keel the most steadfast. She can make us her slave.

But these conditions of Olympus are forbidden to us mortals. While the gods and goddesses may cavort and take their pleasure with "children," these are unconscious behaviors, belonging exclusively to the unconscious. They are not examples as set by parents! Mortals may not partake of these privilege without penalty. In fact, to displease these gods is to attract their millstone of hubris upon us!

While the client's left brain "superiority" had shut down in the moment of suffering, I had to find the closest parable to her chart, and create an ancient scene, something she would recognize as being her voice. I identified in my new client the shrewish Aphrodite/Venus of the Eros and Psyche story. The mortal mother was suffering the pangs of Aphrodite, in a drama which had separated her from (a secret lover) her son. The identification with the goddess was her hubris. She had to be returned to her human status on earth, and fulfill mortal obligations to her marriage. Taking the voice of Elizabeth Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, I read from the Eros & Psyche story, the role of Aphrodite's' scold of her son, Amor/Eros.

"Truly your behavior is most honorable and worthy of your birth and your own good name, first to trample your mother's, or rather your Queen's, bidding underfoot, to refuse to torment my enemy with base desires, and then actually to take her to your own wanton embraces, mere boy as you are, so that I must endure my enemy as my daughter-in-law! You seducer, you worthless boy, you matricidal wretch! You think no doubt, that you alone can have offspring and that I am too old to bear a child."

She slowly recognized her own voice from the shouting matches that had damaged the house with holes from their year of shared violence. To C.G. Jung, sentimentality was the shadow of violence. Her Libra "niceness" fitted the mask which disguised the violence from most, except the astrologer. In the unconscious such fighting and attacks are depicted by the alchemists as having a sexual nature, the "lovers" meeting at the conjunction of their spark.

This mother succeeded in her unconscious trysts by the way that would be "acceptable" as domestic violence. She understood my grasp, I could speak to her in the parables that the Right Brain knows all about, once again recalling them from the collective unconscious. She took my story in stride, mostly intellectually. The work of healing was yet to come.

I recommended a four-month progress plan that would put her in touch with the various of the starving archetypes ignored for the last year. It's like a lawn gone to ruin for neglect. Psyche had stolen all the worshipers from the Temple of Venus. Now, the client, in the role of Psyche, had to beg from Venus. The client would become the alchemist, and work her process on the days in which the transits of the two lovers of Olympia (Mars & Venus) would "hit" her chart's planetary archetypes. Her laboratory was her own stream of consciousness. She marked her calendar accordingly. The goal was to offer Venus' care and attention to her marriage bed, which for the period of violence with her son, had not been loving. Her home could use some repair.

She needed to work out. She became occupied with anticipating shifts between the (alchemically) heating and cooling of her own femininity: isolating on the days marked by Mars, cutting flowers on the days marked by Venus. She was permitted fantasizing about her son's whereabouts on only those dates and times which would allow her a "no damage" zone for her anxieties (Read the full story at www.AncientSky.com/runaway.htm). After a couple of setbacks produced out of inattention to her calendar, she called again about four months after our initial meeting.

During one of her now-habitual rituals of arranging fresh flowers in a vase, she received word that her son had been spotted on a local road. By virtue of a newly strengthened intuition, she and her husband delivered the very flowers to the police detective who had reported her good news. On their way home they picked up a hitchhiker: her son.

She spoke of their reunion connection to be a "lot sweeter than I can remember." The goddess has been returned to her lofty place in Olympus, and the mother to her own mortal home.