Repeated Themes in Charts
November 12, 2004 (with chart)
http://cainer.com/ericfrancis/nov12.html
Hi Eric:
I have a question that has been bothering me for a while, and when I read your
comments on someone else's chart a while ago it made me want to ask you. What
you said was that it is very common to find the same theme repeated over and
over in a chart, and in my chart the theme seems to be that any progress has to
come through giving relationships with other people (Sun, Mars and Mercury in
the 7th house and north node in Taurus). Sometimes I feel taken advantage of;
and then I get angry with myself and others for not relying on myself more
(south node in Scorpio). It drives me crazy to think that it's always going to
be like this, but how can I break the cycle?
Love and peace
Sonia
born 8th June 1966 at 8:01 pm in
Dear Sonia:
Cycles are broken through a combination of raising awareness, making decisions,
and assessing where you're at. The process takes patience, and if you've been
struggling with one type of pattern for a long time, I am a believer in getting
help from a qualified, caring, down-to-earth therapist.
Today, however, let's do a little
astrology. That often counts for raising awareness.
We've got your chart above to work with,
so we can do this out loud. Yes, the partnership angles of your chart contain
some interesting themes as regards giving and receiving in relationships. But
there is something else that's worth looking at first, which is Mars in Gemini
on the 7th house cusp.
The 7th house is the basic angle of
partnership; it is directly opposite the ascendant, so the 1st/7th polarity is
basically "me/you" or "self/other."
Mars is the planet in red on the right
side of the chart, above the horizontal line; that line is the 7th house cusp,
also called the descendent (because when something gets near it, it is setting
or descending, as is Mars in your chart). That Mars is in the 7th house. That's
about as full-on and in-our-face as Mars can get. It is also in Gemini, which
is often a confrontational sign because it's so clearly dualistic (twins, two
of something relating to itself, or relating in a self-other pattern). Mars in
Gemini has a lot of fight to it. If this falls in the 7th house, you're likely
to experience that as coming from outside yourself.
Is it fair to say that your relationships
tend to be confrontational? The thing to watch with the 7th house is that it
has a bit of the tendency: "We don't see things as they are; we see them
as we are."
Is it fair to say that sometimes you feel
that confrontation coming from you, and sometimes from others, but that it
tends to show up fairly consistently?
Whatever you could say about such a Mars
placement in the chart of an adult, however, we need to remember that every
natal chart was once the chart of a child, and represented the life of a child.
And if I were to be presented this chart by a parent and asked what it meant
for their wee one, "I would say: It means you (mom or dad) better be very
kind to this kid, and stand up for them when other people get in their
face."
I am going to guess that this was not
quite the way things went when you were little.
In fact, in a counseling situation, this
chart would suggest strongly that there's a need to talk about childhood
situations, the condition of your household, and every other factor that could
have an influence on emotional stability in the first years of life. I would do
this in the form of gentle inquiries, asking about early memories, getting a
sense of the history of the parents' marriage, and a general description of the
home. I would want to know a little about your parents' lives growing up. You
would be amazed what that can reveal. Then, I would look for similarities
between that early home and the current situation in which you find yourself.
I can see the need for this discussion
based on a placement in the chart, at the very bottom: the Saturn-Chiron
conjunction in Pisces. Saturn is the yellow thing that looks sort of like a 4,
and Chiron is the orange key next to it; and they are near the pink Pisces
symbol.
Now is a good time for a discussion of
this particular aspect, which carried through the mid-1960s and is the cosmic
symbol of much of what happened in that era -- particularly the generation gap
that divided the young from the old in the United States, England, France and
many other countries. This generation gap appeared between the young adults and
their older parents; it also occurred between young parents and their young
children; and to an extent, it divided peers who identified with the younger or
the older generations. In actual fact, it was brutal, and it was often violent
-- be it emotionally or physically.
You have this aspect placed in the very
part of your chart that deals with your heritage, your family and your early
background. While the whole chart is experienced in childhood, there are
aspects of the chart that speak directly to those conditions so that the
astrologer has a sense of what he or she is dealing with. The 4th is a very
good place to get a sense of the emotional conditions of childhood,
particularly as they carry forth into the adult life. And I would say that
there was likely to have been an unusual degree of alienation in your home.
While that is helpful information, we
really need to know a lot more about what was going on there so that we can
relate it to the situation you find yourself in as regards your relationships
today.
And these relationships were not
"all bad" -- hardly anything ever is -- and in many respects, they
were rather beneficial. But it does not surprise me to learn that you feel like
you need to be more independent rather than interdependent because you were
likely to have been pushed to an unusual degree of self-sufficiency at way too
early of an age.
The second thing that I notice is that
you have the Sun in the 7th house as well. The Sun is that yellow circle with a
dot in the middle. This is a placement that emphasizes a primary psychological
orientation on relationships. In other words, with such a strong placement in
the 7th house (along with Mars) it is possible to live with an idea that
relationship is the most important -- or only -- thing that there is in life.
And this gets more interesting yet.
If we follow the wheel around a little
higher, there is a conjunction of Mercury and Jupiter on your 8th house cusp.
The 8th is another crucial relationship house. It is the house of debts and
credits; it is the house where we either lose ourselves, or find benefits of
another person. It goes deeper into the story of relationship than does the 7th
house. It talks more explicitly about what is exchanged, including what is
exchanged on the hidden levels; what money is exchanged; and what sexual energy
is exchanged.
The VERY most interesting quality of this
Mercury-Jupiter aspect that I see is that it involves two planets that rule
opposite signs -- Sagittarius (the ruler of your ascendant, the
"self" angle) and Mercury (the ruler of your descendent or 7th house,
your "other"). So these seemingly opposite planets are functioning as
one idea, and they are functioning exactly where you're going to seek deep
communion in relationships.
If we look at Juno on the north node in
the 6th house, we could surmise that you're going to seek most of your healing
through encountering others in relationship. So yes we get the same story over
and over again.
The short of it is that it's difficult
for you to think of yourself as existing outside of a relationship. That being
true, the question really becomes one of what is exchanged within that
relationship; and what the boundaries are within that relationship. And this is
going to take a good deal of self-investigation -- which, based on other
factors, I assume you've been doing. It is difficult not to take your chart for
granted, but that's pretty much what you have to do: know your chart, your self,
your history and your current life so well that you can see it all operating
vividly and take every possible opportunity to make a decision about who you
are -- not who you are to someone else, but who you are to you.
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