This book by Los Angeles- based astrologer and witch Maja D’Aoust has two dimensions, and while I appreciate one, I find the other one leaving me skeptical.
What I enjoy about this book is author Maja D’Aoust’s explanation of shadow work and the psychological shadow. She writes that “most folk familiar with the term shadow work are witches, spiritual practitioners, or psychologists,” and that shadow work is found cross-culturally and long pre-dates the theories of Jung and Freud. She defines “shadow behavior” as “the desperate need to keep the dark from being part of the self.” She defines “shadow work “as “basically any set of techniques aimed at revealing or making known a part of the self or humanity that has become occulted, hidden, or repressed.”
For these tendencies, D’Aoust has coined a term. She calls them darchetypes, “the dark archetypes that hide from our awareness and are harder to see.” She writes that the various ways one hides shadow material from oneself and others is captured with the term “spiritual bypassing,” which means ignoring so-called negative energy, “through repression and shaming and discourage[ing] the expression of a negative or oppositional view.”
This introduction to shadow material is a useful summary. From there, though, D’Aoust says that what her book Astrology of the Shadow Self will do is “present a mechanism for dealing with negative energies, with the darcheypes, without spiritually bypassing them,” and that “one of the most powerful tools to accomplish this aim,” is astrology, “a central art in the occult.” Yes, it is, but how?
From the title, I thought this book was going to be about a common aspect found in many people’s natal charts: the opposition, where two or more planets are configured in opposite houses (areas of life, areas of the psyche.) Such opposing planets are like each other in that they share the same mode (cardinal, fixed, or mutable) and the same polarity (“feminine” or “masculine”) but they’re in different elements. Opposing planets form an axis. Their energies can be in conflict with each other or complementary, depending greatly on many factors in the natal chart as a whole and, crucially, on how the person whose chart it is--given their own experiences and free will--lives out the symbolism of their chart.
What D’Aoust is working with here, as natal chart oppositions, is something else. What she means by an opposition is that if someone’s Sun sign is Libra, their “shadow” Sun is Aries --regardless of whether the person has any planets in Aries, and irrespective of what houses are involved and what other aspects are prominent in the chart. Most of Astrology of the Shadow Self consists of D’Aoust’s short analyses, one planet at a time, one sign at a time. This is an approach astrologers call “cook book” astrology. If you know the sign of your natal Sun, Moon, and all the planets, you can flip through and read each section, and you might find specific insights. The problem, though, with cook book astrology is that it’s not like food cooking with a recipe that involves blending, stirring, heating, waiting, and so on. Cook book astrology addresses each planet in each sign, out of context. Here the approach is to assign key words and phrases for the “mask” or shadow of each sign.
The Libra Sun person, for example, is said to want peace by avoiding conflict. Their shadow side is then labeled as passive aggressiveness and the remedy, Aries, is the “need to become comfortable with confrontation.” That may be a good advisory for some Librans, but it glosses over the depth of the Libra/Aries dynamic, or any opposing pair of signs.
D’Aoust dubs the Cancer Sun person, for another example, as a pessimist, and with their shadow Sun in Capricorn, she writes that “the danger of this shadow ego is the loss of self through ambitious pursuits.” That’s just too glib, when one out of every twelve people has their natal Sun in Cancer.
Some of the short takes in this book may be useful for some readers. Or maybe not. What’s the use in an astrologer telling someone who has natal Venus in Gemini that they need to make friends and need to be free (sounds reasonable) and, yet, that they have “an inability to master commitment.” Is that true? Is it helpful? Cookbook astrology can do as much harm as good, especially when each planet in each sign is presented out of context.
Astrology is a useful art when an astrologer helps a client (or reader) to integrate the many symbols in a chart, each symbol having many different potentials. Someone with Mercury in Cancer, whose mental processes are entwined with emotions, may become a bitter gossip-monger, or a skilled chronicler of family histories. How do we know which path will be taken? I would have preferred reading case studies of how the author, as a practicing astrologer, works with clients, to understand how the multiple sign pairings in anyone’s chart--varied by many factors-- fit together in a life.
Particularly in looking for shadow dynamics in a natal chart, astrological symbolism is much too subtle, rich, and variegated to be reduced down to simple statements about this planet in that sign. I found this book’s approach to be too broad-brush for the important work of illuminating shadow material.
~review by: Sara R. Diamond
Author: Maja D’Aoust
Destiny Books, 2024
343 pages, $24.99
