Q. How is it possible that you can describe a person’s parents in the birthchart?  I was quite shocked when an astrologer was able to describe my folks in some very significant ways to me.

A. Any astrologer worth his salt, especially the Jungian-influenced ones, should be able to do this with reasonable acuity. This is partly due to some very obvious pointers from traditional astrology and partly due to how much quality therapy and related training the individual astrologer has done.  

Its important to point out though is that the chart will describe more of the karma, the psychodynamics and underlying behaviour patterns that the individual experienced with his or her parents particularly during childhood, rather than it being an objective description of the parent. One only has to look at the charts of a bunch of siblings to see that the parents are represented in many different ways, with some consistent themes, based on each individual’s relationship…click ‘Read More’ to continue…

It’s also important to point out that the chart can describe some pretty awful dynamics in those relationships that, most of the time, have little to do with the parent’s heart of heart, their love or their best of conscious intensions for their child. It describes underlying psychological patterns that get activated by the relationship that often represent wounded and unconscious processes in the parent that have to do with their own childhood. The parent may be totally unaware of them. This is an important point, as some people are tempted to use what emerges in a reading to have a go at their folks, which is not always an effective thing to do, especially if you really want to heal. Far better to own that these dynamics are within your own chart, that the true work is with the image of our parents embedded within during childhood and go and do some good therapy.

On a technical level, the parents are reflected in the 4th and 10th Houses, by whatever signs, planets and asteroids are found there and, by anything that aspects those points or the Midheaven axis. Our Dads are also mirrored in the positions of the Sun, Saturn, Jupiter and often Mars as our first experience of the masculine in the world, in this life. Our mothers are reflected most obviously by the Moon position, that of Ceres, often Venus and by those images of the dark mother such as Lilith and the Black Moon, representing the ancient hidden lines of the deep feminine in a family system.

This is not an exhaustive list and there are many combinations and permutations that need a lot of skill and intuition to sort out but it is very fruitful work in understanding our family systems and on how the parents of our childhood have impacted us.