Libra (23 September - 22 October)
original art by Bex McKay
Miguel de Cervantes – Don’t Call Him Don
Miguel de Cervantes (29 September 1547) is more than just The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, his best-known work, although the character Don Quixote does embody his Libra qualities well.
De Cervantes spent most of his life poor. His father, a barber-surgeon (which wasn’t the prestigious career you might think), moved the family around a great deal, looking for work. Libras are air signs, along with Aquarius and Gemini. Unlike Gemini, Libras have focus in reaching their goals. Although he was poor and his family itinerant, de Cervantes was a precocious child who attended Jesuit schools in Córdova and Seville until 1566 when his family moved to Madrid to get ahead of the debt collector. It’s around this time that his first works were written and published. The very first known works published by de Cervantes are poems included in a collection marking the death of Elizabeth of Valois, Queen of Spain.
The tarot card for this month is the 2 of swords, which, upright, emphasizes being pulled between relationships. De Cervantes in November of 1584, de Cervantes’s first child was born to the wife of a Madrid innkeeper. In December of 1584, he married the teenage daughter of a wealthy widow. When the mother of his child died in 1598, rather than try raising a teenage girl with whom he’d never had a relationship, he gave her care over to his sister. De Cervantes spent time as a soldier, a prisoner of war, and a tax collector. He drew on his experiences to
Libras like to think, dissect, and analyze, and we can see from his work the fact that he was willing to hold up a mirror to the society of his time. The 2 of swords, reversed, indicates a realization of the truth, and while de Cervantes knew the cruelty of society all too well, poor Don Quixote never had the same epiphany.
The first part of the book sees Alonso Quijano, a man who has lost his mind while reading chivalric novels (See? Nothing good ever comes of reading!) and redubbed himself Don Quixote. He goes on what he sees as a series of chivalric adventures where he attempts to right what he perceives of as wrongs perpetrated by a powerful people upon a less-powerful ones, only to have the wrongs go on unimpeded after he leaves. Don Quixote is often abused and beaten by the people he encounters. Using the conceit of a madman allowed de Cervantes to point out these injustices while not overtly accusing or offending the rich and powerful, true to his diplomatic Libra nature.
While the first part of Don Quixote, published in 1605, took the form of a picaresque, the second part, published in 1615, shows a more mature writer with more life experience under his belt. While the first part is a popular comic romp, the second part is more thoughtful and complex (as befits cerebral Libra).
While we know much about de Cervantes from his works and contemporaneous documents, there is far more we don’t know. For instance, while Libras typically have attractive, popular personalities, de Cervantes wasn’t so popular that he ever had his portrait painted, so we have no idea what he looks like. And while we don’t know for sure how he died, the symptoms he complained of at the end of his life would point to diabetes, which was untreatable at the time. It’s thought that he died on the same day as Shakespeare.
