O.m.g. whom truly WERE your parents before there was you?? And how the hell do they show up in your chart? I am so not an expert at Jungian Astro – though i love all things Jung. But my Jungian astro-shrink friend Michael McLay IS and this little rave is from one of his articles…When i first e-mailed with him years ago, I got the fright of my astro-life as i KNEW my chart et al but what he wrote me made me wonder if he’d actually been HIDING in the house that i grew up in & taking notes. Which makes one wonder – yet again – how weird is world we’re in…If our parents can be seen so clearly in our birth chart…
Michael’s rave is here but for a short-cut, think of the Sun-Mars-Saturn as being Dad & Moon-Venus as Mum. Then look at all the aspects they make, houses they rule & make up a little story about them. Oh all right, it’s sooo complex but for astro-fiends, fun. So you start with the relationship between Sun & Moon – what is the aspect between them? That is the relationship between your Mother & Father…
Alright, here is Mr McLay…
“If you are familiar with Arnold Mindell’s work, I think of the chart initially as a representation of the dreambody of the parental relationship. The chart shows us the psychological disposition of the mother and father, individually and collectively as a couple, at the time of the client’s birth. The masculine planets offer us some insight into the father’s experience, and the feminine planets offer us some insight into the mother’s experience. The flowing aspects to the masculine planets represent those aspects of the father’s personality that he was comfortable with, that were well integrated. The stressful aspects represent those areas of his life that were in conflict, that were not integrated. The same is true for the feminine planets and the mother. (I’m sure this is not new to most of you.)
When you look at many charts in this way, you begin to see that the chart represents the parents’ psychological legacy. Whatever they have actualized, individually and together, is passed down to us as a gift, something that works easily for us. Whatever they haven’t actualized is passed down as our life’s work. I like Jung’s statement about parental influence in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. He said, ‘I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished’.
While it is true that our parents create us biologically and psychologically, it is also not true. There are a number of esoteric traditions (Plato, Plotinus, etc.) that suggest that we choose the time, place, and circumstances of our birth. We choose our parents to reflect, to act out for us, to imprint upon us, the complexities of our individual destiny.
I like this idea. Whether we believe in past lives as literal events in time or not, it allows us to place our family experience in the realm of the archetypes, in the realm of divine play. We can imagine our parents as messengers, conveying the character and flavor of the gods, in the form of a complex drama, acted out for our benefit.”
“…looking at the actual parents via the symbols of the birth chart provides us with an objective, living, familiar model for reflecting upon the subtle and complex archetypal world that lies within us. This approach sees through the prevailing attitude that suggests that we grow despite our parental influence; that if we could only overcome our poor parenting, we may possibly become whole again. We become whole not despite our parent’s wounds, but because of them, through them. Archetypal psychologists tell us that we meet the gods through our own wounds, but our wounds are part of an inheritance. We stand on the shoulders of (wounded) giants.”
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