Last time we explored the four stages of evolution that a soul grows through on its journey back to where it came from. This process plays out through the Pluto placement and the Moon Nodes, along with their various aspects and rulers. Researching how this works has raised a lot of questions for me about the nature of the soul, but also the way Evolutionary Astrology defines certain planets. So in this post we’ll explore some of those questions…

Evolutionary Astrology focuses heavily on Pluto and the nodes but it also has a unique way of defining the other planets. Some of these definitions make sense within the usual parameters of astrology and psychology, while others don’t. For example, in Pluto, Jeff Green says the Sun represents how you integrate and give meaning to the evolutionary intent of the soul, while the Moon represents how this purpose and meaning is applied on a daily basis. No problem with any of that. But then he says:

“the Moon can be correlated to the ego and, on that basis, gives the personality a self-image in order for it (the egocentric personality of the Soul) to feel secure and to know itself.”

So according to Evolutionary Astrology, the Moon represents the ego, but the definition appears to combine the Sun (ego and self-image) and the Moon (feeling secure). Earlier in the book he says:

“Each personality that the Soul manifests, from lifetime to lifetime, has an ego (Moon) that serves as a focusing agent to create one’s own self-image.”

I find this confusing, probably because there’s no clear definition of any of the terms being used. I don’t see myself through the Moon – I feel through the Moon. I see myself through the Sun, and other types of astrology agree.

Astrology in general sees the Moon as relating to the feelings and instincts, how you respond instinctively without thinking, and what you need in order to feel safe. The Sun relates to the ego or sense of self and how you express yourself as an individual. It takes a little while to grow into your Sun so when you’re very young you express yourself through the Moon but without self-awareness.

In Healing the Soul, Mark Jones describes the Moon as relating to the conditioned self because it’s conditioned by the family and your early home life, which makes sense. But talking of conditioning makes me think of Saturn which creates the shadow by splitting off the ego and repressing unwanted material into the unconscious. He also says:

“the South Node of the Moon and its ruler symbolise very early childhood identity on a pre-verbal level as it exists before the current-life Moon imprint has had [a] chance to mature into the emerging infant ego.”

Obviously, there are different kinds of egos and they’re not all conscious like the one we would attribute to the Sun. I tend to think of the ego as being conscious and see it as a mental structure made up of the stories you tell about yourself and who you think you are. But according to Bruno Huber, the ego (or self) has three dimensions which relate to the Sun, Moon and Saturn. You have a physical, corporeal self (Saturn), a feeling self (Moon), and a rational self (Sun). More on that here.

Everybody seems to have their own definitions and ideas about these things and it all gets very tangled and confusing, especially when they don’t explain what they’re talking about. This is a big problem in astrology and psychology because the truth is, nobody really knows how any of it works. Sometimes it feels like we’re just making stuff up – and maybe we are!

The confusion may be due to the way the terms ‘ego’ and ‘self’ are used interchangeably but they’re not the same thing. From a psychological perspective the self is embodied and is what you feel yourself to be (i.e. the Moon) and the ego is your idea of yourself or self-image (i.e. the Sun). So it’s not necessarily wrong to say the Moon represents the ego if you’re talking about the self, as in the feeling self.

Those of you who aren’t Virgos are probably thinking, what’s her problem? It’s just words, let it go! But it’s not just words – it’s metaphysics.

Here’s the problem: Pluto fulfils the evolutionary intent of the soul through the Moon Nodes, and the Moon Nodes represent the evolutionary potential of the ego (or current life personality or self). Therefore, the Moon must represent the ego because the nodes show the history of the movement of the Moon back and forth over the ecliptic (the path of the Sun). That’s the logic of Evolutionary Astrology.

However, there’s no need to present it in those terms. We can also see the nodes as showing the relationship between the Sun and the Moon, i.e. the conscious ego and the feeling self. Looked at this way, the nodes show how the soul reflects itself into a new form over time. The nodes still represent the evolutionary potential of the ego but this now has a broader definition that incorporates both the Sun and the Moon.

The Sun is the centre of your identity and shows how you know yourself as a conscious being. The Moon reflects the light of the Sun and shows how you receive and relate on an instinctual level. You can’t come to know yourself without self-reflection and that is achieved through the Sun. On that basis alone, the Moon cannot represent the ego as the basis for your self-image.

In Psychosynthesis, the ego or small self (or ‘I’) is the core of the personality and is characterised by self-consciousness. It’s also seen as a pale reflection of the higher Self or soul, as Roberto Assagioli explains:

“the Ego should be regarded as a projection or reflection of the spiritual Self. … the Self projects a small portion, a spark, a tiny centre of self-consciousness. This self grows in self-awareness…and becomes aware of the Self…”

This isn’t an easy process because the spiritual Self or soul is hidden by “the 70,000 veils of maya” so we can’t see its source.

And that brings us to the next question: What is the soul and does Pluto represent it?

In Evolutionary Astrology Pluto represents the soul as well as our unconscious emotional security patterns. It makes sense to correlate the soul with the deep unconscious because most of us aren’t aware of that dimension of our being. Jeff Green says that Pluto represents:

“the Soul itself.”

You can call me Little Miss Annoying Virgo but I don’t think Pluto represents the soul as a whole. I have no trouble seeing Pluto as representing the deep evolutionary intent of the soul, but that’s not the same as saying it represents the soul itself. To be fair to Jeff Green, I don’t think he’s being that literal and there’s more subtlety in his work than that. Nothing in astrology should be taken literally and as Mark Jones says in Healing the Soul:

“The natal chart is not a cage from which we must be released. It is not a reality imposed upon us from without. The natal chart is the symbolic expression of the infinite field as it has been translated into human form and it is the expression of our karmic potentiality as held within that field.”

Astrology only makes sense when we look at it through a symbolic lens. The planets represent our inner struggle to understand the reality in which we find ourselves, regardless of what the Ultimate Reality may be – and nobody knows!

With that in mind, I don’t believe the entirety of the soul can be correlated to one planet in the birth chart. If the ego or small self is a projection of the soul into this reality, as Roberto Assagioli says, then the centre of that experience will be found in the Sun – which as Jeff Green says, helps to integrate and give meaning to the soul’s intentions.

The soul is an experience or process, not a ‘thing’. It can’t be located in one part of the chart because the whole chart is an expression of the soul. Imagine the chart (i.e. the person) being reflected into this world or realm or whatever it is, and the soul manifests through ALL of it. Pluto is only one part of that process. The soul also expresses itself through Uranus in the form of long-term memories, and connects you to the collective unconscious through Neptune, and so on.

The reality of the soul is far beyond anything that could be pinned on one planet or archetypal principle. As Roberto Assagioli says:

“The Self, the ‘Soul’, the true spiritual Centre, is…superconscious. It does exist, but in a realm or at a level that is ordinarily above the reach of the personal consciousness. Its reality is revealed by its manifestations.”

And that brings us to the question of the nature of the soul itself. Jeff Green takes his definition of the soul from various spiritual teachings and says:

“the Soul is an immutable consciousness that has its own individuality or identity that remains intact from life to life.”

Guess what? I have issues with this too! 😂

Firstly, if the soul is ‘immutable’ then it can’t change – immutable means unchanging. How then does the soul evolve? This problem seems to come from using the terms ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ as synonyms. But they’re not the same. I explored this in The Difference between Soul and Spirit where I show that spirit is eternal and transcendent, while soul is immanent and changeable.

To summarise: You are eternal spirit and you have a soul. The soul is how spirit manifests in the physical world, how it becomes embodied. So the soul is an expression of your relationship to this world and the other beings in it. This is why I see the whole birth chart as an expression of the soul.

Secondly, it follows from the above that the soul doesn’t enter the body at incarnation – the body is an emanation of the soul. In other words, consciousness comes first. So when the body dies, the soul (or whatever it is) continues. In Healing the Soul, Mark Jones says:

“The radical insight, in a way the genius of Green, is to identify the source of deepest unconscious security as lying within that part of the consciousness that experiences itself within the Bardo, or that continues to experience itself in some subtle stream before birth and after death and therefore, symbolically at least, in prior lives or in states of identification with other more subtle forms of consciousness.”

The easiest way to explain this is to call whatever continues ‘the soul’ and not worry about it too much. But this may hinder your evolution because you could become too attached to the idea of the soul and its survival. At some point, you’re going to have to let it go, along with everything else.

There may appear to be a line or lines of development from life to life as the ‘soul’ incarnates into new forms. But this continuity is an illusion and there’s no personal link between lives – at least, from a higher perspective. From our view, it appears as if an individual soul incarnates from life to life but the idea is no different to the belief that there’s an individual ‘self’ moving from moment to moment and that’s an illusion. This is Buddhism 101.

And no, that doesn’t mean there’s no self and no soul.

Buddhism states that there’s no self (anatta) in anything that exists. This sounds like nihilism but that’s a misunderstanding and one that the Buddha warned against. The concept of nonself just means that nothing inherently exists. Anything that comes into being can only exist in relationship to other things; they don’t exist in and of themselves. So the self and the soul only exist in relationship to the causes and conditions that precede them, and it’s these that give rise to rebirth.

There’s an excellent article here that explains this concept and how our experience of continuity between moments creates the illusion of a continuous self. The same applies to the soul and in actual fact there’s nothing to be reborn but:

“When life ceases the karmic energy rematerializes itself in another form. … Birth is the arising of the psycho-physical phenomenon…which is conditioned by karma, and not limited only to the present life, but having its source in the beginningless past and its continuation in the future…”

Just as an aside, Buddhism manages all this without a concept of God. But it does have the idea of the dharmakayawhich is the space or emptiness (shunyata) from which everything arises. The dharmakaya is the true form of the Buddha or Buddha nature, which is also your true nature. The goal of Buddhist practice is to free yourself from the karmic conditioning that prevents you from remembering who you really are.

Correlating Pluto with these karmic patterns of conditioning makes sense and it also reveals the deeply impersonal nature of the processes at work. Pluto represents the instinctual life force at the most elemental level and it never feels personal when it’s at work in your life which is why the energy is so hard to handle.

But Pluto isn’t the only force at work here. There could be other karmic patterns still in motion from ‘prior lives’ that have nothing to do with Pluto in the birth chart, such as Chiron, for example.

The point of all this nit-picking is that the soul isn’t meant to be taken literally, just like everything else we’ve been talking about. The soul is a process and a way for spirit to return to its source or God. From a certain perspective it appears to exist, just like the self, but its reality may be far stranger and mysterious. The final word goes to Roberto Assagioli:

“The fact that we have spoken of the ordinary self and the profounder Self must not be taken to mean that there are two separate and independent ‘I’s’, two beings in us. The Self in reality is one. What we call the ordinary self is that small part of the deeper Self that the waking consciousness is able to assimilate in a given moment…It is a reflection of what can become ever more clear and vivid; and it can perhaps someday succeed in uniting itself with its source.”

Read whole series here

Images: Valley; Dolls; Tree; Lake

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to support my work, please donate below 🍵. Thanks in advance! 🙏❤️