Yesterday we started saying our final goodbyes to summer by picking the 32 pumpkins in our little pumpkin patch. We decorated several of them and set aside some for baking.
As we move deeper into the time of year where there is, both literally and archetypally, more darkness than light each day, the topic of melancholy comes to mind, and so does a book by James Hillman that would make for perfect Libra season reading.
James Hillman defines melancholy as “a soul-making activity that produces depth, inwardness” (p. 140, On Melancholy and Depression).
Melancholy is Saturnian and slows us down. Saturn is the farthest away from the seven traditional planets and therefore, “relieve[s] you from involvement so that you get a new kind of distance and some new insights” (p. 131).
It is not coincidental that Saturn is considered exalted in Libra.
By contrast, Mars is considered in detriment in Libra, which I couldn’t help but think about when Hillman described Mars’ depressive side:
Old Mars in some of the ancient images is a rusty, cynical, isolated figure, encased in iron armor, or living in a tower. … That rusting, bitter, isolated, curmudgeonly, martial depression is a phenomenon you see in older men very often. Rusty, bitter, alone (p. 118).
Hillman encourages us to not remain subjective in our feelings of depression or melancholy, but to come down from the heights and recognize that what goes on inside us is also part of the world soul. “The point is that the world soul and the human soul are intimately reflecting each other and are connected.“
A problem of therapy is that it can leave you “somehow to carry your own life alone. It is all based on the idea that we are all individuals…the more we can understand that what we go through is universal, inevitable somehow, it gives it another dimension, a weight….” (p. 72).
That is another statement reminiscent of Libra and how it correlates with focusing on other people.
To not feel depressed is to not be a member of the planet. To not feel melancholy means utter alienation from the actuality of our times, and therefore, as I have insisted for many years, depression is a political statement, a protest in the soul against environmental misery, an adequate response to the pathological destruction going on in the daily world (p. 11, On Melancholy and Depression).
He even goes so far as to say that, “You may be sick, dysfunctional, because you are not living your political life” (p. 155). Kind of like that rusty, bitter, Mars!
Melancholy connects us to the great work ahead: tending to the “mending looms,” as Clarissa Pinkola Estés puts it, to “repair the unraveling of the world’s soul that is within our reach” (from Terror, Violence and the Impulse to Destroy).
Consultations:
Astrology | Tarot | Tarot and Type | Typestrology
Writing:
Subscribe to the Reading in Depth monthly newsletter
Get blog posts for free by email or on Substack (also free)
Index to my popular blog posts about personality typology
