Charles Harvey - Sun Sign, Moon Sign - Discover the personality secrets of the 144 sun-moon combinations

Imagine you are at a party. At most parties the aim is to make everyone feel at ease and sociable and, without realizing it, more in touch with their Moon level. Hence, parties are usually held in the evening, as the Sun is setting or has set, and the time of carousing begins. Nourishment is provided – plenty of food, drink, music and probably soft, muted lighting. These are all lunar things which encourage us to feel relaxed, more intimate, and in touch with our spontaneous feelings, or in other words our Moon side.

Now, imagine that you have had a bit too much to drink and you are drifting along with the mood, and are generally a bit ‘out of your head’. Suddenly someone behind you drops a glass which smashes on the floor. As this happens you find yourself ‘pulling yourself together’ and ‘getting back into your head’. You may shake yourself and blink your eyes so as to ‘wake up’ and be able to size up the situation and take appropriate action, such as stopping people stepping on the broken glass, or helping mop up the spilt drink. If the situation is potentially dangerous you may actually turn up the lights to ‘shed more light on things’.

This scene illustrates a shift of consciousness from the relaxed, cosy, soft-lit Moon level, to the more purposeful, bright-lit, focused, decision-making level of the Sun. Indeed, whenever you hear someone saying ‘pull yourself together’, you are hearing the instruction ‘move from your Moon level (where you have become over-identified with your feelings and emotional responses) into your Sun level (where you can have more conscious, decisive control of what is happening to you)’. If, while you are reading this, you take a moment out to say ‘pull yourself together’, you will probably find that as you do this you will pull your shoulders back and straighten up your spine. You are, as it were, taking possession of your body or, as we say, ‘becoming more self-possessed’. It is interesting to note that, astrologically, your back and spine are ruled by Leo, the Sun’s natural sign. So when we say of someone who is weak-willed that they are ‘spineless’ or ‘lacking backbone’ we are suggesting that they are lacking solar qualities.

To give another example of the way we switch levels in daily life – imagine you have just had a serious talk with your bank manager about your overdraft. With good Sun-level conviction you have assured him or her that you are working hard to get your debts paid off. Outside the bank you meet an old friend. You start talking and soon you are deep in the lunar world of your mutual memories and shared experiences. Then out of the corner of your eye you see the bank manager coming down the street. Immediately you recognize that you are ‘wasting time’. You straighten your back, ‘pull yourself together’ and briskly ‘go about your business’, back into your Sun level again. For most people such shifts of consciousness occur repeatedly throughout the day. With a bit of deliberate self-awareness you can catch yourself shifting between these levels.

We most obviously experience this shift when we wake in the morning from the lunar world of dreams. We gradually become conscious that it is time to get up and that there are things that have to be done. The more important the things are that have to be done, the more quickly we are likely to wake up and get going. (Indeed when there is a ‘big day’ ahead some people find it very difficult to surrender to the Moon level and her healing sleep.) This shift of consciousness represented by waking up is, for most people, normally around dawn as the Sun is beginning to rise in the sky. With sunrise, our own consciousness begins to rise, and we gradually leave the world of lunar unconsciousness behind.

Each of these cases illustrates the very normal process of moving our centre of consciousness from a responsive, reactive Moon mode to a purposeful, decision-making Sun mode, or vice versa. Each level serves an important purpose in our natures; each has its own strengths and weaknesses, its own desires and aspirations, and each will tend to pursue its own interests irrespective of the other. This is why so many people find that they are in conflict with themselves. One side pulls us one way, the other side pulls another. When this happens, we feel inclined to ask ‘Which is the real me?’

The answer, of course, is both. Ideally we need to be more aware of both, and to be more adept at recognizing when one is dominating to the detriment of the other. Indeed, as we shall see, the more we can accept, understand, and work with both these Sun and Moon levels, the more we will move towards that ‘inner marriage’ of the lord and lady within us, of which the great alchemists and philosophers have always spoken. We are this inner marriage all the time; there is no hard and fast separation of these modes in the way we actually live our lives. But is it a good marriage, or does one side feel like divorcing the other all too often?

You will find some of the ideas associated with Sun and Moon listed on the next page.

Table 1.The Sun and Moon can be seen to correspond to two very different ways of relating to the world. We each use both. When either is overemphasized, there is an imbalance. When both are used together (see Table 2), we can become increasingly vital and creative.

When our conscious, masculine side is at war with our feeling, feminine side, our life can become an endless struggle between what we feel we need to do and what we think we ought to do – like a child living with constantly arguing parents. This can lead to a perplexing sort of self-sabotage which trips us up at the crucial moment. Indeed, we say of some people that ‘their left hand does not know what their right hand is doing’. As we have seen above, this is just another way of saying that our left-brain, conscious, Sun side does not know what our right-brain, unconscious, Moon side is on about.

But experience shows that the more these two sides can be brought into contact with each other to form an inner dialogue, the more whole, fulfilled and creative our life becomes. In fact, there are times when these two aspects of ourselves do come together. As we wake we may remember a dream we have had. Dreams speak from our lunar side. By training our solar side deliberately to remember our dreams, we can learn to listen consciously to our unconscious. Working with dreams in this way gradually brings the conscious and unconscious mind first into a recognition of, and eventually into a dialogue with, each other.