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Filial piety in China






A Chinese court has ordered a woman to visit her mother once every two months, state media say, in the first case since a new law on parental visits came into effect on Monday. The judgement was issued by a court in Wuxi, after a 77-year-old woman brought the case against her daughter. The court also ruled that the daughter and her husband had to provide financial help, reports said.

Filial piety - the concept of respecting your parents and elders-  has been a core element of Confucianism in China for thousands of years. Respecting this concept usually meant that the elderly would live out their old age with the care of children and grandchildren.  Conflict between the modernisation of China as well as the respecting of traditions however has been particularly prevalent in this area. The population of elderly within china (60 and over) is the largest in the world and has reached an estimated 128 million, equivalent to one in every ten people.





A simple technique to understand the message of an eclipse is to reduce all planets and midpoints to a 22.5 degree modulus. (This is the smallest hard aspect of the 180, 90, 45, 22.5 series sometimes called the 16th harmonic). Using the tiniest  of orbs for the  May  25, 2013 lunar eclipse we have the following planetary pictures [1]:


Sun =  Tisiphone =  Hephaistos/Tisiphone = Cupido/Psyche = Ceres/Neptune



TISIPHONE: Seek justice for "crimes against kinship, family;" dose of one's own medicine; fairness; just desserts; how and where and if one gets what they deserve.

CERES: The need for nurturing; food; the relationship between mother & child; issues of "taking care of" people, plants and animals; growths/cysts; herbs and grains.

HEPHAISTOS : Unfaithfulness; parental abandonment

CUPIDO: Family ; group unity or dynamics; home, residence

PSYCHE: raw wounds psychologically; vulnerability; the state of your mental health; head wounds; brain states.

Hephaistos/Tisiphone

 "Violations of the bonds of family and kinship"--and among those  are infidelity, parental abandonment ..I  think there'll be a concern for "justice"--for knowing/seeing that  people don't get away with mistreating those closest to them.

Ceres/Neptune
Mothers, mothering or children as victims or objects of pity. Then, you may hear of people who are  confused...about how to take care of themselves...... and about what "being taken care of" should have meant.


Tisiphone=Cupido/Psyche

"Paybacks" and trying to "get justice"  for wrongs one feels have been done them... you'll see that  some of that ire is directed at families, people who share a residence  or members of a group.  People may be especially aware of "the wrongs  they suffered THROUGH their family" too, and may seek to redress, may  want to "pay them back in kind"--do to them, in some way, what they feel  the family (or group) did (that was wrong, painful or caused problems.)




Regular readers are by now aware that eclipses manifest in events when progressed angles trigger  important planets and configurations in the eclipse chart. Progressing the eclipse chart to Monday, July 1, when the court order was delivered, we can see the four angles occupied  by  Kronos-Hades-Pluto-Uranus-Zeus along with asteroids Vesta [11cn47] and Ceres [18cn04] on the MC.



Hades-Ceres: ill treatment of parents
Ceres-Vesta : duty towards mother/ parents
Pluto-Uranus-Kronos : change of rules or laws


If we consider Jupiter [22ge41] to be conjunct the TNP Hades [1cn35] on the MC of the progressed chart  and therefore a part of the picture we see something very interesting. 

In ancient China, Alpha (Phact, 22ge22 and Epsilon Columba (28ge53) were Tchang-Jin, the Very Old People – the retired servants of the state, orphans. Lambda and Mu Columbae (27ge33 and 24ge55) were the sons. This asterism presided over filial piety – devotion to aged parents – a virtue very highly valued in China. [2]


[1] Delineate V2; Martha-Lang Wescott
[2] Secrets of the Ancient Skies; Diana K. Rosenberg (v.1; p.700)
Beautiful aspects of filial piety









Comments

  1. Law is ill-equipped to form a virtuous people. It is one thing to outlaw vice in its outward manifestation of conduct; how can legislation mandate virtuous conduct, or even instill virtue within a human soul? Mandating virtuous conduct, such as in Massachusetts’ “Good Samaritan” law, may be possible where the conduct is in public and thus readily enforceable. Virtue within the home is far more difficult for the law to reach and thus foster. Even vice behind closed doors, such as incest as well as physical and emotional abuse more generally, is difficult for police to catch. To an extent, property rights enable such vice and allow people the option of not being virtuous in a family context. Yet in countries in which an authoritarian state trumps even property rights, as in China, the question becomes whether legislation is the sort of thing that can foster or mandate virtuous conduct and even a virtuous character. See “China: Mandating the Virtue of Filial Piety by Law,” at http://thewordenreport.blogspot.com/2013/07/china-mandating-virtue-of-filial-piety.html

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