Stars Advise Us for the III Millennium's Couples
by Ciro Discepolo
Before turning to the specific theme of this congress, and, then, to give, starting from my knowledge, some astrological advices to the couples of the new millennium, I would like to see this argument from a multidisciplinary prospective that consent us an approach the most correct as possible to the argument astrology and love.
Today we often assist to a kind of intellectual impotence from many people that, avoiding the risk to be indicated like a know-it-all person, prefer not to speak out of the very strict territories that the specializations and the super specializations of these years are producing in the world of the general culture.
We astrologers, by nature and conviction so close to a holistic vision of life and of the world, can subtract ourselves respect these forms of intellectual palisades and trying to have a Weltanschauung (conception of the world) the most complete on this as on other arguments.
For example, it is interesting, to start an analysis of this kind considering the point of view of a scientist that studies zoology. I am speaking about Desmond Morris, English, author of very great successful books that has studied the behavior of the animal man without permitting sociology and psychology to interfere too much with his opinions.
I underline it, not to denigrate these two human sciences, but to affirm, as I was saying before, the necessity of a real and a great cultural independence for every researcher. We cannot, at this purpose, not observe, as today everyone tends to explain everything from psychology, that once was very fought like astrology, and actually become, instead, almost the depositary of every knowledge and of every wisdom in the collective imaginary of the western world. Then Desmond Morris, I was saying. He, in the maximum freedom of thinking, has considered man not more or less than a great nude monkey (it is even the title of his best successful book), a primate that evolved himself respect the mammal from which he descends directly, but from which he has not lost all the genetic traces that determinate his behavior. In other terms the British scientist he began to observe monkeys for a long time, after he did the same thing with men and he obtained specific deductions that now I will resume for you because those are useful for the speech that we desire develop.
Morris studied, in particular, the sexual behavior of the animal couples and divided the same in three stages: formation of the couple, activities before the copula and copula. Trying to trace a parallel between the hairy monkey and the not hairy monkey, then man, Morris has asked himself why the animal couple can exist even in some short seasons of life and the human one, instead, tends to establish an exclusive and durable link that in many cases goes through the entire experience of the existence of two persons.
The conclusion, even if it can seem not verisimilar, is quite simple. Young animals emancipate themselves quite quickly respect their parents and early, sometimes very early, they abandon them to develop a completely independent destine. With men the things are really different because their children, to face life alone, need the strong help of their parents for very long periods, sometimes even too long. In these last years, in particular, we are assisting, always more, the phenomena of our children that don't decide to leave their parents' house before they are 30/35 years old. For this motive, according to Desmond Morris, men had to adapt his behavior respect a similar need and had to address himself towards an exclusive and durable couple relation, as marriage and living together, to save, then, children's security. In this direction the over Channel's researcher explains even men's sexual behavior that is not limited to a precise season of the year, but that becomes the inspirer, more unconscious than conscious, of the lymph that will have to aliment the couple relation and to carry it forward during the years.
It is a particular point of view, but interesting and to keep in evidence in the analysis that we want to conduct.
Passing to psychology we have to note that his founder's father, Sigmund Freud, under this aspect, doesn't move away too much respect the author above mentioned and sees, in sexual or psychosexual pulsion, the spring that more determines human behavior, with a particular evidence in the couple.
Carl Gustav Jung, as you know, had a very different thought because he recalled himself to archetypal meanings that are a part of the collective unconscious where microcosm echoes the macrocosm morphology and the chemism of human sentiments can be compared to the dialectic of planetary movements.
The great Zürich psychologist left us, in this sense, a brief but memorable work: the couple's study described in the book on synchronicity. As you, probably, remember Jung searched the statistic significance of some astrological configurations that traditional astrology assigns to couples.
In this research he could, in particular, establish the great importance of the archetype recalled from the conjunction Sun-Moon, the one that ancient alchemists named the coniuctio oppositorum and he verified that it is one of the most beautiful astrological aspects that there can be in a synastry. We are referring to that condition for which the man's Sun is joined to the woman's Moon. It constitutes an important information that everyone should know and of which all should keep in evidence in the river bed of those necessary knowledge for a couple in the projectness of life together, from the blood group to food intolerances to preferences for the sea or the mountain, only to recall a few simple examples.
Still Jungian is another very important researcher that made researches on couples. I am speaking about Verena Kast, psychotherapist, that teaches in the Zürich University and at the Carl Gustav Jung Institute of the same city. Kast asks herself which is the strength and which fragility of couples. According to her thought every couple is founded on a specific fantasy that, in turn, recalls a myth, an archetype, and that represents an "ideal charge particularly alive during the falling in love" that prolongs itself when the couple is consolidated.
In the instant of the falling in love "the lover changes himself to the lover's eyes, and the lover idealizes the sides of his own personality that the loved one shows to like".
This would be the couple's strength, but at the same time even fragility of this in the instant in which the fantastic contents could decrease to the eyes of one of the two. The Swiss studious advises, then, to be able to manage in these "relation fantasies" to know the myths better that are at the bottom of couples apparently very different between them, but that instead model themselves, very frequently, according to simple and repeatable schemes: Era and Zeus, Shiva and Shakti, Merlin and Viviane, Sulamite and Salomon can be translated in the couples with relations of the type mother-son, old man- young woman, spouse brother - spouse sister or in relations of a great fusion or a big reciprocal aggressiveness.
I invite who is interested to read the book "The couple", edition Red, for a deepened examination of these myths, but en passant, we can note, for example, that the Shakti and Shiva myth could be adapted to the couples in which one of the two had the Sun in the seventh House and was, then, directed to strongly idealize the relationship until to believe that love, the love relation and the world's creation are seen as an whole. In different words we are in front of the significative image of a banknote that, divided in half, doesn't have value.
In the Pygmalion myth that sculptures a woman in ivory that corresponds to his desires, we can see many men with strong Fire values and women in a dependence condition: for example teacher-student, psychotherapist-patient, head-secretary and so on. Women, often, in these cases, have values of the Sun kind in the seventh House or strong presences in Capricorn. Remember the film episode in Plaza Hotel in which Walter Mattau is able to seduce one of his ex girl friends, dazzled by the Hollywood myth, listing to her all a series of VIP names with which he was intimate.
In the Ishtar and Tammuz myth, the love goddess and her young lover, we could have a "her" with Venus joined to Mercury, for example, and a "him" with the Moon or Venus joined to Saturn.
In the Era and Zeus couple myth, instead, based on rivalry as a relation model, we can identify all those couples with the Sun in reciprocal square or in opposition, an important factor, according me, on which I will return soon.
Referring to Merlin and Viviane, or to the old wise man and to the young woman, we ideally rapport to those situations in which he has Venus or the Moon joined to Mercury and she the Moon, Venus or the Sun joined to Saturn.
Sulamite and Salomon remember us, at last, the couple spouse-sister and spouse-brother, or the relation fantasy of solidarity and of parity. Here, astrologically speaking, we find couples with strong Mercury, Aquarius and eleventh House values. I remember many of these that dividing their life, don't divide the bed, even being inseparable and feared, both, respect the idea of a possible separation.
Verena Kast concludes her interesting book remembering us the very great merit of Jung that consists "in to have underlined repeatedly that in every man exists a 'female' component (Anima) and in every woman a 'male' component (Animus).
Biology demonstrates that in the human organism exist, in different proportions, either male or female hormones. Jung has always sustained this principle and he even underlined that it is a matter of totality, that every person has to live the male and female component in base to his own proportions. In this way, he offered to many people the possibility to accept themselves the way they are, without obligating themselves to stick to a strict roles' conception".
More on sociological the approach of the sexologist and psychotherapist Maria Rita Parsi that, in her book "The Harmful Love", hypothesizes that a trauma suffered during childhood will condition our adult choices pushing us to pass from a wrong love story to another, in the desperate research of a cure that has nothing to do with love.
The Ingmar Bergman movie "The Strawberries' Place" could illustrate, adequately, the Parsi's thesis, not in the sense that the protagonist, an old medicine professor, had many lovers in his life, but in the sense that he closed himself in a selfishness without hope, exactly following a sentimental wound of his youth. The author continues with possible therapies for "sick" couples, but here we could exit from the track of our study and then leave this track and go to confront ourselves with the thought of other studious on the argument "love and couples".
The question that moves the Willy Pasini research, very famous psychologist, is: what is the couple for? This is even the title of one of his successful books, published by Mondadori, that offers us a trip on the couple's planet exactly in the direction of the third millennium. The first answer that the author gives to his question is: the couple is useful to prolong love and - he adds - "besides, to the very mistreated and vituperated life for two the world has not yet found a valid alternative".
The Swiss studious offers us some data, starting, quite uncomfortable, that obligate us to reflect very much. In America, every two marriages will celebrate a divorce. Second: "A nativity rate of minus zero demonstrates that getting together doesn't mean automatically procreate anymore. The center of interest is, then, progressively moved from children to the couple, the needs of which will tend to separate themselves from the ones of the family. Today making children is a secondary choice respect our desires and respect our sustenance capacities. And on the couple's life will pour on the expectative that once weighed on children".
As you are seeing it is enormously in conflict with Desmond Morris' thesis according to which the couple is so to permit raising children: if children tend to disappear, with a nativity rate near zero, then we must approve Pasini when he says that it is not the target of the union between a man and a woman. But if it is not this, which one is it?
It can surprise people, continues the psychology professor and scientific divulgator, but in according to Claude Lévi-Strauss e Sigmund Freud's studies "the universal law that is at the base of the couple formation is the incest's taboo".
Recently three French ethnologist, Françoise Zonabend, Elizabeth Copet Rougier and Marion Selz have received an important international prize for one of their researches respect the 10.000 societies' habits.
In according to these three researchers the forming of new couples is to attribute, prevalently, to three fundamental models: the prescriptive one (the partner will be imposed and he is a member of relative group), the semi complex one (for example the prohibition of a marriage between some consanguineous), the complex one ("the system that is in use in a great part of Asia and the West: apparently total, the freedom of choice is, in reality, limited by a thin rules' system that, by the fact, prohibit to subtract ourselves to our professional ambient, to our residence area, to our culture. In the most part of the cases women are to adapt themselves to it".
Then, from these studies, it should seem to emerge the concept of predictability in the union. It is also the thesis of the French sociologist Jean Claude Kaufmann and of a couple of other French studious, Michel Bozon and François Heran that, studying 3000 couples, they have come, even, to give us some mathematical rules of the type that in the 50% of the cases the members of a couple were born in the same region, the young girls that get married at the age of 18 chose an older partner in the measure of 4.5 years, the difference of the age decreases at 10 months if the young girl gets married at the age of 25, women chose, on average, men taller than them of 10 centimeters, men look for, over all, esthetical qualities in their lover and women prefer the social position of the partner more… We could continue this list more, but we advise the interested persons to read specialized books.
Interesting, even, the point of view of the Swiss sociologist Jean Kellerhals that synthesizes, in three points, the characteristics of the new century's couple: 1) the matrimonial project is moved from economical finalities (the family support) to affective finalities (reciprocal support); today the couple even means separation, transition stages and experimental families; 3) "the point of reference of life as two today will not be searched in the other, but among the our own sex members, and it is inside of this category that we search for comprehension".
Let's go back to Willy Pasini and let's list some finalities that, in according to him, intercept today's dyadic relation.
It could appear paradoxical, but in according to Pasini many couples that are being born, during these years, decide to do this avoiding the AIDS' danger, entrenching themselves or trying to entrench themselves, inside a secure monogamist relationship.
Another reason is the one of a good settlement search, a kind of insurance policy for the future. Even Francesco Alberoni is on this wave's length and he sustains to be, on the medium Italian's side, a vocation to the welfarism instead of the individualism. All of this will not surprise the ones that read Ernst Bernhard who affirmed that Italy lives under the Great Mother's mythologem for which our people in Italy desire, very much, a public office and security first of all.
Among the targets of marriage we even find, always in according to Pasini, the "Cinderella Fairytale" or the dream of many young girls to obtain a social boost like the very beautiful leading actress of "Pretty Woman". The epilog of this book is titled Which future for the couple? and it offers us, first of all, some statistics: in Italy one marriage, every three, will fail and only in Milan, think, every year will be 4500 separations and 2800 divorces. To the numbers follow the detailed analyses that the Swiss studious proposes to his readers and from which we keep the distance to address ourselves, definitively, towards the astrological argument.
In according to my opinion, answering quickly to the question that forms the object of this congress, astrology can come to help the third millennium couple over all at the knowledge level. I think that knowledge was the highest form of emancipation for humanity and so as to know that for specific African countries we can visit them only after an antimalarial therapy, so we would know which are the precise descriptions that a couple should have to last in time.
As many people know it is at least 30 years that I sustain the argument on the Aimed Solar Returns and on the Active Astrology that permits us to install some lightning conductors on the roof of our marriage hut to defend us from the arrows of the "bad stars". But it is not the argument that I wanted to illustrate to you, but I desired to tell you about the results of the statistic research applied to the rules that should guide us better for a partner choice.
On this argument everything and even the exact opposite of everything was said and we watch, as in no other fields, a total anarchy by astrologers that, sometimes, only on the wrong track of one of their own conviction, never legitimated from any serious research, invent some couple's alchemies all original as inexistent.
Personally I faced this problem many years ago when I realized that the results of my daily practice were in conflict with the others of the astrological tradition. In the first edition of my Guide to Astrology, in 1979, I wrote that "it would be necessary to teach children, in the elementary school, to avoid the relationships with subjects that have The Sun in the reciprocal square". But the practice that I had under my eyes, after many years of study, told me exactly the opposite thesis. For many years I followed a track: I was convinced that, at the opposite of which I had just affirmed, they were just the 90° Sun position to be the most numerous, followed by the others with the respective Sun at 180° and 0°. The other couples, those at 60° and 120°, in according to the Tradition, were, in my opinion, a lot less numerous.
Once, many years ago, during an international congress, I discussed of this with my friend Lisa Morpurgo and even she declared that was convinced of the same realty. However, it was exactly my Cremonese colleague to suggest me to develop a statistical research on this argument. And so I did together with Luigi Miele that was at my side in all the important researches conducted till now. This work was published in my quarterly magazine Ricerca '90 n°5, January 1991, and it is referred to the analysis of 2116 couples for a total of 4232 subjects obtained from the file Paris12.raw kindly furnished us, personally, from the great Michel Gauquelin that we are still thanking, together with his ex wife Françoise Gauquelin, to who we owe other very precious databases that we utilized successively. I will not give you the details on the technical data of that research, but I will report you only the conclusions from which it resulted that the couples formed from subjects with the Sun in reciprocal square or opposition were, certainly, in a greater number respect the ones with the luminaries in every astrological angle of trigone or sextile.
Later, in the number 12 of winter 1993 of the English magazine Correlation, a study very similar to ours was published, conducted by the colleague Jan Ruis on 2824 marriages, even they were selected by Gauquelin's data. And here is the shocking results, exactly identical to the one we obtained two years earlier: the aspects of 90° and 180° between the Sun and the Sun of the spouses, even if they were not statistically significant were, however, far more numerous respect the sextiles and trigons.
At this point, several months ago, when I was invited to participate to the yesterday and today's works, I told myself that I should have not chosen the way to rest on my laurels, but I decided to roll up my sleeves and to proceed to a new test about this work hypothesis.
And so, Luigi Miele and I, proceeded to a new statistical research and, with the help of a precious almost informatics engineer, sifted a new very numerous data sample. The precise technical details of this study will be presented, by me, at the next astrological congress on the 2, 3 and 4 June, in Vico Equense (near Sorrento, Italy). Now, instead, I will refer only on the final and essential data of this study. We started, once again, from Gauquelin's data samples and, exactly, from the files Lille.raw, Paris12.raw, Paris13.raw, Paris14b.raw, Paris14p.raw and Paris15.raw that collected, in total, 68001 subjects relative to 25391 families of which, however, only 15325 were formed by the father and the mother and then only on these we worked testing a final sample, so selected, of 30650 subjects. The research's results confirmed both the last two researches, ours published in 1991 and the Dutch one, published in 1993: the couples that had the Sun in square or in opposition were more numerous respect the ones with the Sun in trigone or sextile.
Well, it could be a little ring of the truth's chain, but it is a ring quite certain that, if it will be confirmed successively, can fix a rule that I already utilize for many years, the one that I named under the label of the so called "destiny signs" or those four signs that form a cross with our own solar sign and that, from the results that you have just learned, can justify the argument in according to which the most durable couples are the ones that belong to our zodiacal sign, to the one opposite and to the two in an angle of 90°.
To correct the false information already divulgated so much, in the past, that would be the signs in trigone or in sextile to promise relationships the most durable in time, it seems to me the best contribute that astrology can offer to the third millennium's couples to help them find a way with major successful chances.
Transalted from Italian: Ciro Discepolo and Anna Carmela Mellone
Essential Bibliography:
Ciro Discepolo Complete bibliography
Note 1: The present statistical work was addressed to the study of heterosexual
couples, not for a prejudice, but because the sample given to us from Michel
and Françoise Gauquelin was formed, uniquely, for married couples. If,
in the future, we will even be able to have a great number of homosexual couples,
then we will be very happy to study even this research segment.
Note 2: The original software utilized for this statistical research (not for
sale) was elaborated by Mario Maglietta, Luigi Miele and Ciro Discepolo.
Note 3: The complete study, by a statistical point of view, of the present research,
was published in another number of Ricerca '90.