Libra (1): Getting the Balance Right
Libra
23rd
September – 23rd October
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| Libra, by Dan Hodgkin |
Libra,
the Balance, is the sign of the autumn equinox, when day and night are equal. It is associated with
relationships, marriage, and has been called ‘the sign of cosmic reciprocity’.
Its ruler is Venus, the goddess of love. The Greeks called it Zugos,’ the
Yoke’, and in Egypt it was represented by the goddess Ma’at, who judged the
dead, weighing their souls in the balance: those who passed her test were said
to be ‘light hearted’; those who failed were ‘heavy hearted’. Its decans are the
Cross, the Victim, and the Crown.
Mark 10:3-9
Jesus then left that place and went into the region of Judea and across the Jordan. Again crowds of people came to him and, as was his custom, he taught them.
Some Pharisees came and tested him by asking, 'Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?'
'What did Moses command you?' he replied.
'They said, 'Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.'
'It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,' Jesus replied. 'But at the beginning of creation God made them male and female. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.'
Dates refer to 2007 when this sermon was written.
On the 23rd September this year the sun entered the zodiacal sign of Libra. You can always tell when the sun is approaching this point on its journey through the heavens, because people start to say (when they can think of nothing else to say), ‘The nights are drawing in now, aren’t they?’ And indeed they are. The long days of summer are over. Now it’s dark at 7.30 pm, and most of us are getting out of bed before dawn. Now day and night are of equal duration – twelve hours or so of each – with the point of exactitude occurring on 23rd September, the day of the autumnal equinox. Six months ago we had the spring equinox, and day and night were equal then, too, but there is a difference between these two points: after the spring equinox, the light begins to dominate; after the autumn equinox, the darkness begins to prevail. Soon, it will be dark when you arrive at work, and dark before you set off home.
Jesus then left that place and went into the region of Judea and across the Jordan. Again crowds of people came to him and, as was his custom, he taught them.
Some Pharisees came and tested him by asking, 'Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?'
'What did Moses command you?' he replied.
'They said, 'Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.'
'It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,' Jesus replied. 'But at the beginning of creation God made them male and female. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.'
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Dates refer to 2007 when this sermon was written.
'Life's a great balancing act.' Dr. Seuss
On the 23rd September this year the sun entered the zodiacal sign of Libra. You can always tell when the sun is approaching this point on its journey through the heavens, because people start to say (when they can think of nothing else to say), ‘The nights are drawing in now, aren’t they?’ And indeed they are. The long days of summer are over. Now it’s dark at 7.30 pm, and most of us are getting out of bed before dawn. Now day and night are of equal duration – twelve hours or so of each – with the point of exactitude occurring on 23rd September, the day of the autumnal equinox. Six months ago we had the spring equinox, and day and night were equal then, too, but there is a difference between these two points: after the spring equinox, the light begins to dominate; after the autumn equinox, the darkness begins to prevail. Soon, it will be dark when you arrive at work, and dark before you set off home.
The
contrast between light and darkness, which is almost lost on us because of our
electric lights and round the clock lifestyle, would have had a marked impact
upon people in times gone by, who would have been compelled to organise their
lives around the natural rhythms of night and day. Daylight was for activity
and work; darkness for rest and sleep; in the daylight they could be reasonably
secure from predators and so could act alone; in the night they were vulnerable
and needed each other for safety and for comfort. We still say, ‘Things will
look different in the daylight,’ meaning that the light will put a temporary
end to those nameless fears which seem to beset us in the darkness. Brendan
Behan once described himself as ‘a daylight atheist’, a theological position
with which many of us will be familiar: when the sun is shining and we’ve
plenty to do, those nagging questions about existence which will often assail
us in the darkness seem to evaporate.
The
zodiac, which, as I’ve constantly stressed, is simply the path of the sun in
the sky, derives its imagery, in part, from this interplay of light and dark.
In the spring, when the light begins to dominate, we have the sign Aries, which
symbolises the growing light of individual consciousness struggling against the
forces of collective darkness, and so Aries comes to represent the loner, the
pioneer, the trailblazer, who heads off almost recklessly to chart new paths
for the rest of us to follow. In the autumn, when the darkness begins to
prevail, we have Aries’ complementary sign Libra, which symbolises intimacy,
relationships, marriage – social and communal activities, as opposed to
individualistic ones. Jeff Mayo, who taught me the language of astrology 40
years ago, and whose book Teach Yourself Astrology is still one of the
best introductions to the subject, says that Libra symbolises ‘the primitive
urge for unity and relatedness with others.... and the need to conform to an
ideal pattern of community life’. People who are strongly Libran are said to be
cooperative, socially aware, with a strong sense of justice and fair play.
Their ‘ruling planet’ is Venus, the planet of love and beauty, which tends to
render them amorous, stylish, artistic, refined, but with an unfortunate tendency
(they say) to laziness and self-indulgence.
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| Old Bailey figure 'Justice' |
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| 'Ma'at' weighing the souls of the dead |
The Greeks
called Libra Zugos, the Yoke, which refers to the wooden device fixed
across the necks of oxen to keep them together as they were pulling the plough,
reflecting once again the notion of harmony, balance, and working together,
which are central to the symbolism of Libra.
In the Gospel of Mark, the Libran section begins, appropriately,
with an argument over marriage. In
an attempt to trap Jesus into making an injudicious reply, some Pharisees ask
Jesus about the legality of divorcing one's wife. Jesus, quoting from the Book
of Genesis, tells them that male and female become ‘one flesh’ in marriage,
and that men shouldn’t separate what God has joined together.
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| Animals 'yoked' together |
For its time, this gospel
teaching on marriage was really radical. Marriage was not a sacred institution
in the ancient world and divorce was commonplace, even among the Jews, for whom
monogamy was the ideal. Theoretically, divorce was open to both parties, but
given the general status of women at that time, it was hardly an option for the
female. William Barclay
describes the situation as follows:
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| Humans 'yoked' together |
One thing vitiated the whole marriage relationship. The woman in the eyes of the law was a thing. She was at the absolute disposal of her father or of her husband. She had virtually no legal rights at all. To all intents and purposes a woman could not divorce her husband for any reason, and a man could divorce his wife for any cause at all. ‘A woman,’ said the Rabbinic law, ‘may be divorced with or without her will; but a man only with his will.’
Getting a divorce was very simple. The man had to give his wife a ‘bill
of divorcement’ in the presence of two witnesses. This stated: ‘Let this be
from me thy writ of divorce and letter of dismissal and deed of liberation,
that thou mayest marry whatsoever thou wilt.’
The passage from the Jewish
scriptures to which the Pharisees refer in their discussion with Jesus can be
found in Deuteronomy 24:1. The text states that a man may divorce his wife ‘if
she find no favour in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her’.
The prevailing opinion among rabbis at the time of Jesus was that this was a
specific reference to adultery, but certain rabbis, following Rabbi Akiba,
considered that ‘finding no favour’ in one's wife could simply mean that one no
longer thought her attractive. The rabbinic school of Hillel taught that a man
might divorce his wife if:
Divorce, it seems, was possible on the flimsiest of pretexts.
This teaching on the
sanctity of marriage is an obvious improvement on what preceded it, but the
total ban on divorce, which Jesus’ teaching has been used to justify, has left
its own legacy of misery and injustice, and I don’t think the text is really
advocating this. We undoubtedly need to extend the principles of justice,
fairness, and balance into our intimate lives, but there is a deeper meaning to
the text which has been missed in all the legalistic moralising which a purely
surface reading has occasioned. The mystical traditions preserve another
dimension to marriage which transcends its function as a social institution.
The union of male and female does not just refer to the coupling we call
matrimony. The ‘sacred marriage’ is something that occurs within the
individual. ‘In the beginning,’ it says in the Book of Genesis, ‘God
created them male and female’.
The original, perfect state of the human being is one of balance between spirit
(male) and matter (female) were joined in harmonious unity and balance – the
image of God -, before being sundered by the Fall.
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| yin-yang symbol |
At
about the same time that Lao Tzu was compiling the Tao Te Ching in China, Plato was writing Symposium in Greece. In this dialogue, Plato makes reference to a myth
that was probably very ancient even then, that at one time male and female were
joined together, and the human being had four legs not two, but because in that
state they were considered to present a threat to the gods, Zeus cut them in
two, and now the separated halves are doomed to spend their time seeking each
other. There was also a warning that, if the two legged creatures misbehave,
Zeus would cut them again! At the heart of this myth lies the notion that male
and female constitute a unity, a unity that has been lost, but which can and
must be re-established within the individual.
We find the same idea within Christian mysticism. We have tended to see marriage as the union of a man with a woman in mutually rewarding partnership with, traditionally, a clear demarcation of duties and responsibilities. This indeed is so, and has its place, but there is another dimension to this teaching which we find in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas:
The ‘sacred marriage’ is not the
public jamboree, complete with white dress, bridesmaids, posh food and an
exotic honeymoon. The sacred marriage occurs when the spiritually mature
individual is able to balance male and female, yang and yin, activity and
passivity, spirit and matter, science and mystery, striving and yielding,
adventure and repose, and a whole host of other complementary forces, within him or her self.
Balancing the
polarities within the self may take some doing but it doesn’t require us to
learn anything new or to embark upon years of spiritual training. In fact,
Robert Fulghum, in his celebrated essay All I Really Need to Know I Learned
in Kindergarten says that we were well acquainted with this principle
before we started big school. What did we learn by the sand pit in the
nursery?
Share everything.Play fair.Don’t hit people.Put things back where you found them.Clean up your own mess.Don’t take things that aren’t yours.Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.Wash your hands before you eat.Flush.Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
It’s as simple as that! And yet
how difficult is it in our 24/7, work-hard play-hard, striving, competitive,
comparative, acquisitive world is it to put these things into practice! But the great spiritual message of Libra, is
that just as day and night come naturally into equilibrium, so must we strive
to bring that sense of balance into our own lives. The reward – personally and
socially – for finding the balance is immense. As Plato’s myth intimates, when
the male and female principles are joined in harmony within an individual, she
attains a state in which she could almost challenge the gods.
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