
Leonora Carrington: The Lost Surrealist is the story of a young woman with a remarkable imagination who never fitted into the Debutant society she was born to. Her story is a Heroine’s Journey in which she faces the abyss and walks a precarious line between the worlds as the Shaman Artist.
From her nouveau riche family home in Lancashire to the freedom of the Paris art scene followed by time in a Spanish asylum, Leonora finally finds her home and her soul in Mexico.
In her astrology chart, both the Sun and Venus are square the lunar nodal axis which in Evolutionary astrology are considered “skipped steps”, steps that for various reasons have been prohibited in the soul’s journey.
The Sun here represents a challenge to individuate and to find and maintain a personal vision in spite of the conflicts and challenges, particularly with others around her. In Leonora’s case her father had her sectioned and she was abandoned by her lover, the artist Max Ernst at a tender age. She was never accepted as an artist in her home country and as a woman working at the height of the Surrealist period among the male giants, she did not receive the recognition that she deserved.
With Venus square to the nodal axis, the skipped step points to how she related to herself and therefore others. The lesson here is to learn self love and self value, taking back projections placed on others. It also shows how she needed to become an artist and follow the inner world of her imagination regardless of how others perceived her.
I feel that Leonora was successful in resolving these issues in her long life. Vesta at 3 degrees of Aquarius on the apex of a Yod with the Moon and Neptune likewise suggest that she had a sacred purpose and that she was strongly called to fulfil it.
Leonora Carrington: The Lost Surrealist is currently available on BBC IPlayer.
In 1955, the artist created a tarot deck which went largely unnoticed until her death in 2011, aged 94.
