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LIFE OF PI OR HOW TO TAME YOUR SHADOW (2)

The Moon in Leo needs to be the emotional centre, if the relation with the parents proves to be disappointing, as shows the opposition of Saturn, then, the individual can develop serious egotistic tendencies to compensate the lack of attention. Pi is an unreliable narrator, which means that the reader, or the audience, cannot know whether or not Pi is telling the truth. From the astrological and psychological perspective, this is irrelevant because through facts or lies, the psyche of Pi is all the same revealed to us. At the level of the archetypes, dreams, fantasies or raw facts, are expressions of the same symbolic reality.
LIFE OF PI OR HOW TO TAME YOUR SHADOW (2)_e0182773_137368.gif
Yan Martel
born on Jun/25, 1963,
in Salamanca, Spain
time unknown




Thus, Pi’s narcissistic obsession, represented by the Moon in Leo, totally isolates him, he is trapped in his own reflection; Saturn in Aquarius (the sign of society, circles of people and groups) cuts him off from human contact. Pi has to explore his own psyche, he has to confront and overcome his fears; if he wants to become a normal adjusted person, he needs to experience his instincts and self destructive drives. Saturn will make Pi confront his Shadow in a most painful way, but later on he will be able to live a happy life.

The zebra, the orang-utan, the hyena and the tiger, the four main animals traveling in the same boat with Pi, can be associated to the four elements in astrology or the four functions of his psyche. The zebra, the first to perish under the frightening voracious hyena, could be the air, the thinking function; a fast running animal like the zebra has no possibility of survival on the water; its black and white stripes, the continuous true or false statements and dualities, Pi likes thinking and talking, become totally inefficient. The Hyena, the earthy function, Pi’s ravenous appetite devours the logic (the zebra). Feeling is represented by the orang-utan which lost his babies; the sentimental aspect of the mother image is also killed by the ravenousness of the hyena. In a desperate situation, Hunger is the most radical instinct of auto preservation.

Evidently, the tiger represents the fire, the intuition and the will to live. At the first stage of the tragedy, the most desperate impulse is hunger, a concrete appetite that overrules feelings and thoughts; the hyena is capable of eating anything in order to preserve its life; but when the circumstances turn worse and help from the outside world does not come, Pi realizes that he has to evaluate his situation from a new perspective, that he has to organize his resources and find creative means for survival. Then, intuition assumes control of the situation; that is why the tiger, sleeping underneath the cover, emerges to the foreground; Pi will have to learn how handle this powerful animal (his own fire).

This is a beautiful and clear metaphor of how an inferior function changes into a revelation. There can be some controversy about what an inferior function is; for me, it is the function, or element, we tend to repress, despise, or use incongruously. If we come back to the idea that Pi’s conflict expresses Yan Martel’s Moon in Leo opposing Saturn in Aquarius, Pi’s fire had been invested in his narcissistic approach of wanting to belong to all sorts of religions, also of wanting unconsciously to be the focus of attention of his parents (he was the second child). On the one hand, the Bengal Tiger has a human name, Richard Parker, because the function (fire or intuition) is identified by Pi’s conscious; on the other, this tiger will keep its wild untamed nature. Pi’s has to learn how to avoid being eaten by the tiger and he has to set the boundaries; in exchange of this, Pi has to find how to feed the beast; he becomes a skilful fisher and water catcher, he learn how to use any item and instrument on the boat in an very imaginative way; and most of all, Pi discovers how live through faith and how to grasp the unique opportunity that life provides at any moment (the most important aspect of fire and intuition).

But is Richard Parker Pi’s Shadow? No, it is not. Saturn in Aquarius represents the real Shadow; before the shipwreck, Pi’s approach to religion was basically intellectual and external; during his adventure, he learns how to use intelligence supported by intuition. The air of Aquarius that Saturn was using to compensate for Pi’s awkwardness and lack of social skill is submitted to will power. The system that Pi organizes to survive is based on a clear Aquarian logic, control and innovation.

Early in the story, there is a key moment that Ang Lee dramatizes in a beautiful way; Pi’s father gives him a severe lesson when he shows him how a tiger can catch, kill and devour a goat; the scene involves violence and cruelty, but the message is passed: you cannot mess up with a predator, nature is unrelenting. This is clear example of a father figure working for a healthy development of the individual. With the Moon is Leo we associated to Pi, he could feel easily attracted to the beauty of the tiger, he could not sense the danger; the child can be lured by a motherly and comfortable idea of life, but the role of the father consists in separating the person, safely, from the mother bosom. The father’s lesson (whose authority is also associated to the Shadow) eventually helps Pi to save his life.

We did not have enough time and space to explore the connections between the three charts. As usual, the synchronicity is amazing; Yan Martel, the novelist, has Saturn in Aquarius; Suraj Sharma, the young Indian actor who plays Pi, has also Saturn in Aquarius conjunct to Martel’s; Ang Lee’s Saturn is in Scorpio, and because Suraj’s Saturn is square to Pluto in Scorpio, we can see that Lee’s Saturn allows a synthesis of the three charts, that is why he was able to make the movie, a perfect alchemy transforming the fears of our XXI century, how to survive when the structures of safety and power are collapsing, into pure gold; it means we have to focus on the essence of life.
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Suraj Sharma
born on March 21,1993,
New Delhi, India,
unknown time
LIFE OF PI OR HOW TO TAME YOUR SHADOW (2)_e0182773_1402284.gif
Ang Lee
born on Oct/23, 1954,
Pingtung, Taiwan,
unknown time

Suraj Sharma embodies perfectly well Pi’s character; his Sun in Aries makes him a fighter, a sort of pioneer, his Moon and Mercury in Pisces put him in this movie where he spends most of the time lost in the middle of a virtual ocean; a brilliant representation of the collective unconscious.(the end)

In Japanese
LIFE OF PI OR HOW TO TAME YOUR SHADOW (1)

by xavier_astro | 2013-05-15 00:00 | 映画  

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