Welcome back to the second appointment of the astrological column "Every soul is a starβ. After having analyzed in the first article of this cycle the Gustav Meyrink's birth chart we can move on to an equally suggestive birth chart: born on March 13, 1907 in Bucharest, Mircea Eliade was one of the most important authors of traditional thought of the last century. Here we will talk about his birth chart in relation to his biography and thoughts about him.
di Flavio Margotti
REVIEW BY MARCO MACULOTTI
Mircea Eliade was mainly a phenomenologist of religions, anthropologist, philosopher and essayist; scholar of the archaic and oriental world, expert in yoga and shamanism, this general first observation brings us back to a first aspect of the birth sky, returned to this current time cycle from the 7th of March: the entrance of Saturn in Pisces. Saturn which is the component associated with man's concentration, mastery, control, realization, is found in a liminal sign which represents man's interaction with the flow of emotional energies which inhabit him in his abyss, and lead him to seek a something less, the immersion and release of oneself into the abyss of truth that swallows everything and processes it towards silence, a new beginning. Pisces are in fact a cosmological zoophany that express the contact with the oceanic "chaos" of synchronic reality. Best explained by his own words:
"By transforming all physiological acts into ceremonies, archaic man strives to "go beyond", to project himself beyond time (of becoming), into eternity."
"To take care of the work of time, it is necessary to go back and rejoin the beginning of the world."
This perception of reality "from inside the womb", this search for one βfetal consciousnessβ, primordial and super-personal it is aimed at the resolution and overcoming of the "cosmic horror" given by the eternity of time. On the other hand we are talking about the author of a book like The myth of the eternal return:
βA fact has amazed us above all in studying traditional societies: their revolt against concrete, historical time, their nostalgia for a periodic return to the mythical time of their origins, to the Β«great timeΒ». The meaning and function of what we have called "archetypes" and "repetition" revealed themselves to us only when we understood the will of those societies to reject concrete time, their hostility to any attempt at autonomous "history", i.e. of history without archetypal regulation.β
Here the voice of Saturn tries to interrupt the eternal flow of a "liquid" (unconscious) reality. Saturn fishing in the pond of chaos is the man who through this aspect trains his emotions to crystallize and study them in a more tangible way through symbols and myth, and from a higher point of view it indicates a rectification, a hardening through the clash of rational consciousness with depth, a knowing how to gain experience of the destructive force of the unconscious. Moreover, Pisces is the domicile sign of Jupiter (and Neptune) and therefore closely connected with the themes of philosophy and above all of religion, and Saturn as the god of time is the ruler of the concept of history.
This determined fusion is fully expressed by the concept of history of religions, i.e. crystallization of divine knowledge: dealing in a concrete, dedicated, disciplined way with spirituality, observing divine, eternal events, through human, profane and chronologically frameable ones. These elements which are central to Eliade's thought denote a conception of "history" which differs from "profane history": it is instead a "total story", which admits the chronological limits in order to grasp the eternal and active force operating before the cyclical representations, the sacred history of which the myth is the dispenser.
Saturn is also conjunct the Sun, increasing its influences in the life of the native (from the temperamental characteristics to the somatic-bodily and professional ones); this aspect indicates a person who focuses on himself, separated from the outside, technical and serious, involved in his work, who enslaves himself to support a will, often carries a melancholic, nihilistic or pessimistic attitude, participates in politics. This aspect can be seen from Eliade's adherence to the thought of the nationalist mystic Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. Moreover, Saturn, squaring the vision of the world, is likely to bring "extremism" or in any case a rigid, radical, cold vision of society and the fascination towards "totalitarianism", an aspect that could be summarized in the words: frangar not flectar.
One of the roots of this aspect is due to the importance of father in the life and perception of the native, to the archetype of the father. From a more psychoanalytical point of view one can observe an admiration of the father and at the same time the desire to dethrone/emasculate him, eradicate him (the revolt of Kronos towards his father Uranus) or "become his own father" (independence). One influence of his father that can be seen from his biography was that the latter registered the birth of his son four days before the actual date, to coincide with the liturgical feast of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste: this allows us to frame him as a strongly religious father and with the idea of ββprojecting his own son into a groove.
Starting to deal with the more personal parts of the natal chart, we observe that the native is Aquarius ascendant Pisces, denoting a drive for innovation and a super-individual awareness of the self that is found in the elevated idealism of his works, which go beyond the person of the subject and tend towards the "future" of humanity (as well as research and understanding of its past, historical as well as imaginal). Eliade owns one Moon positively located in Pisces and in the XNUMXst house, that is, a mind that seeks to immerse itself in the surrounding reality, to identify with the observed object, and all this is added to a high sensitivity and poetic skills. Emotions are above all connected to associations, intuitions, imaginations, research and the need for inspiration, to feel and merge through one's goals.
The relationship with the mother it is spontaneous, constructive and probably has a mother present and the relationship with the "woman" or female archetype is well anticipated, except for a few complications. In fact we know that in addition to the many changes in the field of affective spheres, Eliade ends up marrying a woman with an existential condition that is difficult to manage:
βNina MareΕ had not only a complicated financial situation, but also a tragic history behind her. She had been married to an officer and had fallen prey to a sudden passion for a lieutenant from Brasov. For the latter she left her husband and abandoned the marriage. However, the lover's family objected to the relationship. The lieutenant was sent on a mission to Paris and was forcibly married to another woman. Nina learned the news from the newspapers while she was waiting for her boyfriend to return home and had a shock. Eliade met her as a single woman, with an 11-year-old girl to support.β
"She was small, fair-haired, a good friend, and although, as I later found out, she led a hard life, she was always laughing, she was discreet, she didn't talk about her troubles."
But this complexity is not given by the dynamics of the Moon, but rather by a very particular aspect of the native, one Venus in XNUMXth house conjunct North Node and βunaspectedβ. In this male birth Venus can be interpreted as the archetype of the Lover, who resides in a somewhat ambiguous house such as the XII house (associated with isolation, with the most unusual trials), bringing in Eliade a compassionate attitude towards women who more closely follow a profound or problematic complexity, characterized by psychic disorders and existential afflictions; to refer to the biography:
βHis wife Nina Eliade fell ill with uterine cancer and died during their stay in Lisbon at the end of 1944. As the widower would later note, the disease was undoubtedly caused by an abortion operation he had undergone at the beginning of their married life. She then succumbed to bouts of depression, which were exacerbated as Romania and the Axis allies suffered heavy defeats on the Eastern Front."
This is an aspect that makes it a Lover-Artist, which seeks something that goes unnoticed compared to the achievements of the empirical world; and this is to be associated with a certain challenge fate, to knowing how to go further, given by the conjunction with the North Node. These characteristics projected towards the figure of the lover are authentically characteristic of Eliade himself: in fact, Venus in the XNUMXth house leads us to look for unusual friends, to deal with others in an unusual way or through unusual themes (let us remember that she is a Venus in Aquarius and therefore still more βeccentricβ and βavant-gardeβ), and leads the artist to seeing beauty in totality (the cosmic Shakti), in the unknown and in what is morally and socially shunned. Through his words this is decidedly more immediate:
Β βThe sacred manifests itself in any form, even the most aberrant.β
The fact that this Venus is unaspected greatly increases its introverted character and depth: when a planet is unaspected it is perceived as distant with respect to rational spontaneity and becomes something more intimate, and at the same time fatal, because the planet, not being held by other forces, is autonomous and its energy is not attenuated. This creates see-saw situations in life and imparts a certain sense of religious awareness of experiences. This Venus can be associated with one tantric vision of the woman and of the "all" as power, power associated in this case to the North Node, i.e. to a point in the sky where the native experiences a separation with his own past understood as an exclusively human part, reaching a redemption of his own life, through a realization instinct that amplifies the area of life in which it lies. For example: individual fulfillment through women, having a life in which the lover is a point of contact between the subject and destiny, and knowing that if one wants to fulfill one's destiny (not only sentimental, but, so to speak, "total") one must tend towards βthe loverβ and by analogy to all themes of Venus in the house where she lies.
A final starting point for analysis derives from the fact that, since the North Node is associated with an amplification of the self (a spiritual instinct or rather - without intending anything negative - a "titanism") as the North Node or the "head of the snake" (see myth of Rahu and Ketu, and the concept of "sharp thought", "with tortuous designs" associated with Prometheus and Kronos) is very connected to politics, making this Venus is a bearer of radical political ideas connected to profound reflections, ruthless towards the empirical reality. Let us remember that it is in the XII house, associated among other things with the "hidden enemies" observable in the idea of ββan international conspiracy of which Bolshevism and capitalism were seen as faces of the same tyranny of consciences through materialism and in the same dictatorship of money with which usury subjugates nations and kingdoms, in favor of a subversion of modernity seen as opposed to the regulatory function of traditional Romania and the saving force of "cosmic Christianity", and this cannot fail to bring us back to the youthful political adherence to the Iron Guard .
Continuing the discussion we now turn to Mercury, archetype of ingenuity which in this natal picture is characterized by a bold, daring intellect, an impulse to knowledge and an active and autonomous mastery of thought, composed of disruptive intuitions. This is because we find it in Ram, an Aries of the first degrees, thus taking into account poetic nuances and broader intuitions and less connected with the futility related to Pisces. It is interesting to note that it is located in the XNUMXst house, propitious for the acquisition and recognition of one's culture also at a social level, and moreover it is in contact with Jupiter, to underline a reason connected to philosophical, symbolic, religious interests.
Since symbols, myths, popular knowledge, the connection with ancestors and archaic cult systems are in Cancer, these themes are, in Eliade's case, analyzed in an even more profound way, also touching on the less clear or socially acceptable components. this being a Jupiter in Cancer conjunct Lilith, a sort of "pagan priest" who is not afraid to integrate the taboo into the spirit, the most visceral and then gory elements of religions, and above all knowing how to hold back and draw on dangerous knowledge, understand for yourself the mechanics of magic and the structure of the ritual.
This aspect is enhanced by the proximity to Neptune, but above all by Pluto in the XNUMXth house, a house in which this planet is very strong, which leads the subject to investigate his own origins (even in the racial sense) and to "disguise himself in the present" behind the spectral hologram of a deceased ancestor. The practice of observing the ancestor's skull and the domestic cult of the Lares and the Mani, which on a psychoanalytic level it symbolizes agonizing over the past, setting one's goals so that they coincide with the felt need for a resolution of the past (sometimes related to the family) and/or a yearning to acquire power (especially psychic) ββthrough the family.
We know from his biography that Eliade was a great connoisseur of languages, speaking eight of them: Romanian, French, Italian, English, German, Hebrew, Persian and Sanskrit. This brings us back, as mentioned above, to Mercury in the XNUMXst house, but above all to a Mars in Sagittarius (associated with foreigners and communication with foreign countries) in the XNUMXth house, from which we can deduce the yearning for a "realization" or rather a "conquest" of one's individual image through travel (Mars as physical movement, presence and contact) and possession of linguistic knowledge. Mars is also connected with writing (in the last article, dedicated to Meyrink, this speech was treated), so here it is connected to the realization as a writer.
It is the conditions of this Mars that illustrate the last part of this astrological discussion, with reference to the last condition of the biography, i.e. the death. There isn't much information about it but we know about the disease that struck the Romanian writer, ie arthritis, a disease which, like all external phenomena, is anagogically connected to a phenomenon that occurs first inside. This disease is symbolically connected to a mobility of the body, to a propulsion towards a more orderly dynamic act, i.e. to Mars. In this theme, in fact, we have a "maleficent" tension (meaning the tense declination of the planets that astrology calls "maleficent"), i.e. a great conflict of masculinity: this Mars is opposite Pluto (also associated with microbes, viruses and diseases) and in quadrature with the Sun and Saturn.
Here we can see the mark that this disease poses, i.e. the stigma that socially and internally affects a certain type of writers, as is the case in question, and at the same time the retaliation that they suffer deriving from the peculiar vision of the world made explicit through the work. You could call this experience βto die in writingβ, and one could also see it connected with suddenly no longer being able to write. It is as if, on a purely physical level, the bones stop supporting the body (martial lesion of Saturn) and the movement is consequently restricted, controlled (chronic affliction of Mars); in this the profession and the existential role is sometimes undermined (the Sun "struck" by a conjunction with a "malefic" planet in conflict aspect with another "malefic").
However, in conclusion, all these sometimes unfavorable if not downright "maleficent" astral configurations certainly did not stop Mircea Eliade on his path to realization: the stars only slightly scratched the ancient steel of his character, ascetic by nature through Joint Chiron to the ascendant and from this βchannelledβ:
βImages, symbols, myths are not irresponsible creations of the psyche; thus they respond to a need and fulfill an important function: to lay bare the most secret ways of being.β
Planetary composition:
β- 17%
β- 13%
β- 13%
β½- 11%
β - 11%
β- 9%
β- 8%
β- 7%
βΏ- 6%
β- 5%
