Luis Bunuel, the Surrealist film-maker, was the epitome of Pisces. With the Sun and Mercury in that sign, he also had Neptune Rising in Gemini, the ultimate in cinematic consciousness.
So aside from being a double Pisces, his ruling planet was in mutual reception with Neptune, amplifying the effect like subterranean sonic waves. Bunuel was also 70% Mutable – most of his astro was in Pisces, Gemini, and Sagittarius. He’d walk off sets rather than define himself or a project he deemed to be in flow state and of course, he perfected the Mutable Fade-Out.
More Pisceaness: “Since I reject the idea of a divine watchmaker* (a notion even more mysterious than the mystery it supposedly explains), then I must consent to live in a kind of shadowy confusion.”
And, from My Last Sigh – his memoirs – “even today I have no idea what the truth is, or what I did with it.”
What he did with it was kind of fascinating – his take on ‘bourgeois society’ saw him blacklisted in America as a communist and the Vatican condemned him for his film Viridiana. Bunuel basically invented the ‘secretly decadent Nun and Priest’ genre. Fittingly, he was Sun square Moon, Venus square Saturn, Lilith, and asteroid Magdalene (in Virgo) square his Sun/Moon. It’s the ultimate astro-kit for a fuqed-up Catholic vibe expressed through artistic genius.
But his wife, Jeanne Rucar, was also a Sun-Mercury Pisces, an Olympian gymnast and aspirant actor who relinquished her career to support his. Even allowing for the acceptable tone of that era, he sounds like a prick of a husband: multiple affairs but flying into jealous rages if she spoke to men, barring her from working on the grounds of impropriety, swapping the piano she loved to play every day for three bottles of champagne…
Her memoir, apparently written to balance the fact she and the children were barely mentioned in his, was even called Reminisces Of A Woman Without A Piano. Her husband was evidently a Surrealist in his work and a Traditionalist at home. Bunuel was my first History Crush and I remember trying to research his wife when I was a teenager, hoping for a vast love story. Nada. She was a cipher, as mysterious as the Holy Ghost herself.
To discover this talent compelled to not only content herself with “household chores” but to be chaperoned and obey domestic-gulag level rules is disillusioning, to say the least. We never got to see how her Mercury trine Neptune/Node might have looked in free expression. The memoirs, says Dominique Russell, read like Stockholm Syndrome.
This post has strayed way off mission lol but anyway, thoughts?
*When he speaks of a “divine watchmaker”, I think “Saturn.”
Picasso, Buñuel…whatever their natal looks like, at the end of the day we are talking about Spanish men from a certain generation…
Jeanne would be way out there today. POW!
I would love to read her memoirs, but it looks like they’re not in ENglish? Also, did you know that Stockholm Syndrome is actually a myth? Jess Hill writes about it in SEE WHAT YOU MADE ME DO. It was a complete myth.
It’s the Return of the Goddess in so many forms. All these forgotten woman being reclaimed and acknowledged. I love it!
But the ‘Stockholm syndrome is sadly still alive and kicking, An epic version of this can be found in the graphic novels (actually, I still call them comics)’ Hex Wives’. Now sadly discontinued.
MM – your blog provided the original Hex Wives recommendation – for which, many thanks!
I’ve got 5 planets in Pisces opposite the mid-60’s Pluto/Uranus conjunction. When I saw an astrologer, he said “You don’t have relationships, you take hostages”.
He sounds like an abusive a-hole. I’m glad his wife wrote her own memoir! Screw him! I’ve heard of him, but I’m not familiar with his work, so I’ve got no attachment. A long time ago I read something about the Pisces/Virgo axis being the archetypes of the tyrant and the oppressed or abuser/victim. But, Mutable, yeah… I’ve got Pisces moon, natally, and have done the fade out at times, but it’s usually when I don’t feel safe. I also dissociate a lot because I have ptsd, so I’m like there, but not there. I’m dealing with a very VERY low Neptunian Pisces sun neighbor right now, an absolute demon. Been dealing with her pretty much since we first moved in here a year ago. I could write pages, and I’m still trying to figure out how to handle/navigate the situation. The management here has been some help, but the low Neptunian manipulates and charms them and outright lies, too, so that the problems still persist, though there have been some improvements. I hope she and her demon-in-training daughter do the disappearing act and fade out soon and move away! One can only hope!
Always disappointing when art crushes turn out to be pricks. Can I put in a request for Niki De Saint Phalle? I always dreamed of visiting her Tarot Garden.
Mystic, would you have enough astro info/bandwidth to do Hans or Jean Arp? He was known by BOTH NAMES. Like either/or/and. He was married also, and a surrealist who would never have walked out the door, more likely have calibrated carefully his response. What about Nusch, surrealist model and Eluard’s artistic wife? I have strong probs Neptunian old school past but vivid resonance with Surrealism, not as much the people, except for the man i did my Arts Thesis about (a Kataka, a poet and wordsmith for the movement) during my first post trauma year of study 5hat 8sn’t a blur. There are higher Neptunian Surrealists (who kept me going) i didn’t like the medal-bearing ones ever. I was in my teens, doing the research. Something brings me closer back there now.
If a man snatched my piano, he’d never wake up again.
The title of her memoir alone makes me suicidal/homicidal. Or is that just Mars in Aries…
From somewhere i cannot recall, is the idea that Pisceans resemble a fish, and of course there are all different kinds. I have seen this kind of Piscean face. Does he remind you of any kind of fish? Does she? It’s familiar but just out of reach
Piranha him.
He sounds like a total control freak, which sounds the opposite of mutable, but perhaps the response a mutable has to try and make sense of their shifting and mobile experience of things. After all, Film making is all about creating your own world and trapping it on celluloid. And it was surreal cinema, so he even owned the meaning, without having to share it with anyone unless, of course, he wanted to. He held the cards. I don’t like the sound of him based on how he treated his wife alone.
Thank you very much for this discovery. I read “Mi último suspiro” when I was a teenager and was fascinated but I regret it. “Human beings” who treat others like this don’t deserve our time.
Gee this post brought up strong emotions for my strong Aquarian, Capricorn moon mum who was born in the early 20’s. She has passed over now.
What would her life had been like if she had been born in this era.
I mean my era.