cancer, Madonna's mother passed away when Madonna was merely five years of age. It was this event that created the greatest impression on Madonna's fragile psyche, forcing her to mature quickly and instilling in her a passionate need for approval and acceptance. As she told American Film, "It left me with an intense longing to fill a sort of emptiness."(2) Through coping through the hardship of her mother's death, little Madonna Ciccone was already preparing to become the Madonna that would storm the world of popular music twenty years later.
In traditional and contemporary astrology, the Moon is symbolic of the mother and the general sphere of home life and domestic circumstances. As children, when the Moon in the birth chart receives significant transits from outer planets, our relationship to our mother changes or our relationship to our family and home life alters in some fashion. Later as adults, major transits to the Moon also includes renegotiating and revisiting unresolved issues stemming from childhood: self esteem, unsettled grief, emotional blocks, and other issues that have prohibited our maturation as adults.
During Madonna's mother's death, Madonna's natal Moon was receiving two significant transits from both Pluto and Uranus (see chart). Pluto transits are life altering in the deepest sense, forcing change and evolutionary transformation at the core of our being. Pluto forces an elimination of that which is outworn or has outgrown its purpose so that new development can occur. Often described as a death-rebirth sequence, a psycho-spiritual regeneration occurs during a Pluto transit. In Madonna's case, this transformation involved the literal death of her mother. Madonna's life and experience or her world was deeply uprooted and irrevocably altered. As biographer Mark Bego describes the alteration, "Uncontrollably, her innocent world of Barbie dolls and Shirley Temple dance lessons was shattered by the reality of death and loss. For the first time in her life she had to look death in the eye and try to comprehend it."(3) The raw, stark, and uncompromising quality that Bego describes is often a hallmark of Pluto periods in our lives, a time where simultaneously we experiencing wounding, pain, or even trauma, while also feeling unwaveringly reborn in some fashion.
At the same time that Pluto was transiting Madonna's Moon, Uranus was also conjoining her Moon by transit. As Pluto was to correlate with the actual death and the profound conversion of Madonna's world, the Uranus transit added the elements of shock, disarray and upheaval to her mother's death and the events surrounding it. If Pluto connotes deep transformation, Uranus suggests rapid, swift change and unpredictable destabilizing. In order to keep his financial situation solvent after his wife's death, Madonna's father, Tony Ciccone, had to split his family up, and Madonna and her siblings lived with various relatives for weeks on end. As Madonna was dealing with her mother's death as only a five-year-old could, her home life was in chaos and disarray; she was on the receiving end of the crazy-making face of Uranus.
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