“When I was 3 or 4, I inadvertently killed my father’s goldfish. I thought they must be bored of eating fish flakes, got ice cream wafers from the pantry for them, laid them out on top of the tank, the dye in the wafers leached out, the fish died. I felt like an accidental murderer and my father was furious.”

I opened Starlight and looked at my client’s Sky Map. Saturn sat in the constellation of Pisces, close to the knot of Al Rescha. To me this emphasized the opposition in my client’s chart, the ability to bring two opposing ways of seeing the world together and in doing so, breaking out of old family ruts and grooves.

My client works as a journalist but this configuration underlined her ability to show people both sides of an argument (Mercury-Venus in Libra), to give it an entirely new spin (Saturn in fall) and give it a formal structure through writing (Mercury-Saturn), teaching and publishing (3rd-9th axis).I began reading my client what Bernadette wrote about Pisces in Brady’s Book of Fixed Stars (Samuel Weiser, 1998, p.311):                       

 “The fish was an ancient symbol… It represented wisdom and was recognized as a female sign. The symbol for the fish was derived from the yoni. The Chinese Great Mother, called Kwan-yin, Yoni of Yonis, often appeared as a fish goddess. The Celts considered that eating fish would put new life in a womb. Their hero, Tuan, was eaten by a fish and the fish in turn was eaten by the queen of Ireland, who,  in the fullness of time, gave birth to him. Thus to eat of the salmon was also to grow in wisdom.   

The Greeks incorporated the fish as a sacred symbol through Aphrodite, in her form as a fish goddess called Aphrodite Salacia. She was depicted as a fertile mother nursing a child, and her temples contained ponds of fish…”

I was struck with the blinding flash of the obvious. My client’s early memory of killing her father’s goldfish which was still so “hot” for her, unresolved, misunderstood and guilt-ridden, was a clear articulation of this pattern in her Sky Map. Sitting in her chart was the knowledge that these fish were sacred – and she had killed them.As for any small child, the death of an animal friend or pet is an opportunity but this event became entirely personalized by the way it fitted in symbolically with her Sky Map. When the lessons for handling loss got missed at age 3, they came again with the death of her grandfathers at age 10… and again with the death of her mother at age 37… waiting for her to take on the mantle of female wisdom, the understanding of loss and separation and the necessity to resolve her relationship to the pain of separation in order to step forward with insights that she could shape for others (the Venus-Mercury-Saturn opposition in her chart).

Two points arise from this:

I know there was another person at StarLogos who had Saturn in the constellation of Pisces, close to the knot of Al Rescha and wondered if they wanted to write about this on this Blog. Secondly, does anyone else have an early memory of loss that fits symbolically in with their Sky Map in a similar way to my client? Needless to say I am going back immediately to revisit all my case studies in Life After Grief to see if there is a pattern here. Darrelyn

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