Echo

I. INTRODUCTION

Once upon a time, in a less scientific age than ours, astrology was a respected study, based on ancient and empirically compiled principles and used by the learned for greater insight not only into the future, but into the soul. With the coming of the Age of Enlightenment, and the increase in man’s knowledge of the material universe, it seemed for a time that studies such as astrology, in company with other symbolic maps of the cosmos, had become anachronisms – pieces of superstitious nonsense which reflected a more ignorant and gullible era. But surprisingly, astrology, despite its detractors, has refused to go the way of the flat earth, the conjuring of demons, and the turning of lead into gold. It is alive and well, growing in popularity, and once again meriting the respect of intelligent minds – for it has been brought into the modern era through our increasing knowledge of psychology and of the inner nature of man. Subjected to many centuries of suppression and ridicule, astrology has outproven and outlasted its opponents, and eloquently demonstrates that it has something of great value to offer the modern individual seeking self-understanding.

In this horoscope analysis we have endeavoured, using the insights of astrology and psychology combined with the tools of advanced computer technology, to offer you an astrological portrait which is uniquely and individually focussed and which aims at providing greater self-knowledge. This is not fortune-telling astrology, but rather, psychological astrology, developed to as deep and sophisticated a level as is possible within the perimeters of computer interpretation. No computer can perform the task of an experienced human astrologer. But we think you will find this analysis a surprisingly profound and subtle interpretation of the complex dynamics at work within you.

Shakespeare once wrote that all the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players. In a sense, your birth horoscope is a metaphor for the individual play, complete with stage set, cast of characters, and story, which lies at the core of your life journey. It might be useful for you to remember the metaphor of the theatre as you read through the various sections of your astrological portrait, because it can help you to understand the real meaning of fate as it is reflected by astrology. Fate does not lie in your being subjected to random preordained events. It lies in the cast of characters which represent the deepest needs, conflicts and aspirations which lie within you. No person can be other than himself or herself; and every life experience, whether tiny and transient or major and transformative, reflects in some way the character of the individual.

II. YOUR PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPE

The rich array of individual attributes portrayed in your birth horoscope is set, as it is with everyone, against the backdrop of a certain temperament bias. We might call this bias your psychological “type”, for it is a typical or characteristic way of responding to the situations life brings you. No one begins life whole or perfect, and all people have certain areas of strength – sophisticated and well-adapted inner characters – to help them deal with challenges, conflicts and problems. Likewise, all people have certain areas of weakness -inner characters who are underdeveloped, neglected and troublesome.

Your psychological type does not remain static and unchanging through the whole of your life. There is something within all of us – whether we call it the unconscious, the Self, or the soul -which strives toward balance and completeness, and which tries to integrate into our lives all those qualities or inner characters which have been neglected or undervalued. At certain important junctures in life, it is as though some central core, deeper and wiser than the conscious “I”, draws us into conflicts which enable us to develop our weaker areas, so that we can become more complete as human beings. Thus you will find that, incorporated in the following paragraphs about your psychological type, are some suggestions about how you might facilitate this inner movement toward a more balanced perspective on life. Life does this for us, sooner or later. But sometimes it is more rewarding and less problematic if we cooperate with the process.

Romantic vision and a rich imagination

You are one of life’s true romantics, because your reality is the inner world of fantasy and imagination. The limitations of daily life can bore you, and you try at every available opportunity to inject into mundane situations a note of the mythic and the meaningful. However, your romanticism is constantly being challenged by another side of your personality: your fear of disruption to your material security. Although you dislike being tied to routines which seem inconsequential and stifling, life perpetually intrudes upon your dreams, forcing you into conflict between your vision and your practical limitations and needs. The great strength of your nature lies in your relationship to the creative power of the imagination, which enables you to peer into the future and envisage new possibilities which are not immediately apparent in the present. Because of this, you tend to see opportunities which others miss. You live in a world of potential, always looking toward the next project and the next enthusiasm. But there is a strong cynicism and worldliness beneath your romanticism which perpetually questions these hunches and dreams, making you feel restless and discontented whichever side of yourself you try to live.

Another strength in your character is your ability to discern subtle connections between apparently disparate facts and circumstances, and to see a story or a broader pattern which others might ignore. Thus you often grasp the essence of a situation or a person instantaneously, through a kind of “sixth sense” which is usually extremely accurate yet which you cannot logically explain. But here too you are often at war with yourself, for that small cynical voice in you begins to denigrate your intuitive perceptions and can cause you to become indecisive. You often find yourself in a typical dilemma: whether to invest your energies in a creative project which requires trust and courage because it involves untried new ideas, or whether to stay in a safe job which guarantees material stability yet which bores and frustrates you. Although you are not usually foolish with money, it is not the sole object of your efforts, and you need challenges and inspiration i
n your work. Yet you cannot wholly forget about your material security either, and are faced with the challenge of finding a vocation which is both creatively rewarding and materially productive. And this may take you a long time and encompass many mistakes and false starts.

The struggle against banality and mundane limits

If you attempt to live entirely in your imagination, you may run the risk of losing your connection with ordinary life – and with it, the capacity for contentment. Because of your resentment of boredom and routine, you may secretly yearn for an alternative life which is more glamourous, exciting or meaningful – without actually doing anything concrete about your craving for wider horizons. You also dislike having to select one thing to which you must apply yourself, preferring to live in a kind of provisional world – the “one day when I grow up…” syndrome, where all possibilities remain open to you. Yet if you pursue this approach to life exclusively, you will, with the passing of the years, feel increasingly unreal, as though you have somehow wasted your potentials and accomplished nothing solid in the end. Another manifestation of your conflict between the romantic, mystic realm and the hard world of facts and objects is your complex relationship with your own body, which often seems mysterious and frightening and which you may periodically neglect. You may resent having to fill your time with tasks like servicing the car and doing the monthly accounts, not to mention the dentist and the doctor; but your lack of attention to worldly and instinctual matters can result in constant irritations with mechanical objects breaking down, and also in problems with your health – not because you are intrinsically unhealthy, but because you tend to be sporadic in your care of your own body. You tend to swing between excessive and punishing diets and exercise routines to “master” the body, and times when you are not even aware that it exists.

You possess a unique and complicated nature, and you need to stand in the middle between your two extremes so that you can become a better friend to your body and your material environment while still validating and giving expression to your powerful creative imagination. This effort at better balance can be rewarding and exciting. You possess a capacity to respond to nature and to the beauty of the physical world – if you will only stop running away from it. In very personal matters such as sexual expression, your shyness about your body can also have repercussions, and here too there might be a promise of greater fulfilment if you can face more honestly the alien realm of the instincts which you sometimes fear. Your perception of physical reality may be overtly negative, and it is possible that family attitudes in your early life have contributed to your undervaluing of it. Yet you possess the potential to have the best of both worlds, and can aim very high indeed if you can learn the art of being an ordinary mortal.

The power of reason combines with the gift of fantasy

You possess unusual intellectual gifts to support and enhance your rich imagination. You may be a profound thinker, with a grasp of higher and broader concepts and an intuitive feeling for symbols and connections between systems of thought; and you could excel in spheres such as psychology, anthropology, history and artistic fields, where good powers of articulation and organization must be combined with imagination and vision. You may also be adept at business activities where speculative abilities and planning for future trends are required, and you are often a very successful gambler with untried new ideas and untested resources. Your imagination, although powerful and constantly active, never runs wild into chaos, but is always supported by clear rational thought. Therefore, you are one of those rare people who are not only able to leap to conclusions through the uncanny irrational power of the intuition, but can also explain yourself if necessary with a logical and coherent structure of thought.

However, your greatest challenge in life remains the problem of relating to the mundane world, and your capacity for systematising your intuitions into a coherent plan or structure may further divorce you from the “banal” world of the body and of material objects and responsibilities. Because you place considerable value on your reasoning capacities, you may try to analyse your way out of your essential fear of ordinary life through generalised systems of ideas – preferring to believe that you are preoccupied with higher and more important things. You may also use your mental and imaginative abilities to defend yourself against the threatening world of intimate relationships, where you often find commitment to be a problem and where you can only deal with unpleasant or demanding emotional encounters through a species of mental gymnastics where you reduce your own and the other person’s feelings to an intellectualised debate about abstract principles. You need to learn to form a better relationship to your feelings, so that you respond more sensitively not only to the needs of others, but also to your own. This can help you to learn which of your many potentials might really make you happy and which you need to select to give you some stability and sense of accomplishment in your ordinary life. Then you can begin to earth your marvellous imagination and vision in concrete terms without so much resentment of the time and effort required, and without so much fear of being trapped by relationships and by daily routines. Thus you can make choices with a better appreciation of what might personally fulfill you at different stages of your life.

III. CHARACTER AND SHADOW

One of the most important insights gained by depth psychology has been the revelation that people are dual in nature, and contain a basic polarity of a conscious and an unconscious self. There is the individual you are familiar with -the “I” that thinks, feels and acts in accustomed ways which you identify as yourself. And there is another, hidden individual -the shadow-side – which contains the less acceptable and less developed aspects of your personality, and which fights for a valued place in your life at the same time that it disrupts the complacency of your self-image. The interplay between the conscious and unconscious sides of you is a constantly shifting dance, changing at different stages of your life and altering according to the pressures and challenges which you encounter. The tension between the primary characters in your inner drama, described in the following paragraphs, is the source of energy which provides your life with movement, purpose, conflict and growth. There are other characters inside you too – supporting players who blend and conflict with the main ones to make you the unique individual you are. Where these are strongly marked in your horoscope, we have included a description of them as well. The story thus portrayed, with its complicated interaction of light and shadow, represents what is really meant by individual destiny.

A romantic vision of life colours all your experiences

“…And they lived happily ever after” is the way you would end all the chapters of your life, given the chance. Your romantic spirit believes in true love, goodness rewarded, evil punished, the essential fairness of life, and the ultimate achievement of all your rosy and glorious dreams. You tend to dwell up in the air a lot, but that is not because you are naive or stupid. It is just that what other people call real life does not agree with your picture of things. In a crisis or emergency you can be practical enough, and somehow your survival instincts inevitably attract to you precisely the right people and situations to help you cope – although you would disclaim any responsibility for thi
s, preferring to believe that it is just another example of the benign workings of the cosmos. You determinedly turn your back on anything ugly, sordid, brutal or unfair as though by ignoring it, it will cease to exist; and often, if you wait long enough, that is exactly what happens, because somebody else deals with the problem. You exude a quality of childlike brightness and charm which disarms even the most manipulative of souls, and without having to say much, you tend to restore even a more disillusioned person’s belief in the Never-never-land.

A firm belief in the good, the true and the beautiful

Beauty and harmony are essential to you, and you are capable of working very hard and devoting most of your energies to the task of acquiring them. You not only believe that life ought to be fair, pleasant, luxurious and peaceful; you have a firm conviction that you are entitled to happiness, and that if you do not possess it as a permanent fixture then something has gone seriously wrong. It might surprise you to discover how many people do not automatically assume, as you do, that such happiness is their right; but although you might feel sorry for such people because of their negative attitudes and low aims, you are not deterred from your determination to manifest your radiant inner picture of the world in your actual concrete life. Physical beauty also means a great deal to you, and you are neither the world’s best budgeter of finances nor are you temperamentally equipped to live for very long around cheap, ugly surroundings. It is not money in itself that matters to you – very likely it has a way of sliding through your fingers as soon as you get it – but style, pleasure, luxury and that indefinable something which is called “good taste”. You are also convinced on some profound unconscious level that the universe is fair, and if something unpleasant happens in the world then somebody must have at some time done something to deserve it, or the cosmos has some ulterior motive in mind; and at the end of it all, the good will triumph.

You have a highly idealised picture of what you call love, and the romantic trappings of courtship are a necessary part of relationship to you – flowers, music, candlelight and romantic words and gestures. Without constant demonstrations of affection, you shrivel like a plant without water. Never mind if you are sometimes a little mannered, stylised and not always true to your real and immediate feelings in how you express love; it matters to you that courtesy, charm and kindness are always present. If they are not, you are quite capable of moving elsewhere, not because you are disloyal -at least, you are loyal to your ideal if not in actual practise -but because you cannot bear your romantic dream of love being tarnished by boorish behaviour, cruelty or neglect, no matter how much someone professes to care for you.

The dilemma of feeling like an eternal child on christmas eve

Some part of you has refused to “grow up” and “face reality”, and nothing in the world can convince you that this is a bad thing. As far as you are concerned, growing up means becoming dead inside, and facing reality means selling it out; and you value your innate capacity for joy, spontaneity and childlike wonder too much to sacrifice it for the emptiness, boredom and defeat which others label maturity. You believe in your own unique destiny and in your right to people the world with handsome princes, beautiful princesses, dragons to be fought and treasures to be won; and if the actual people in your life fail to live up to your mythologised image of them, then it is the people who have failed, not your vision. You have certain innate assumptions about your own specialness and your god-given right to love, happiness and the freedom to pursue your pleasures, and although this can sometimes cross over the border from childlike spontaneity to outright narcissism and egocentricity, you offer your romantic vision of life with such charm and wholehearted conviction that others forgive you anyway, even if you have inadvertently been grossly insensitive to their feelings and their own individual natures.

You are truly a child at heart, and probably relate well to actual children because of your delightful capacity to inhabit their fantasy-world with them. Birthdays should have big parties with beautiful cakes, and Christmas should have a marvellously decorated tree and delicious surprises in the morning; and woe to anyone who tries to force a utilitarian and dreary approach to life on you. You would be happiest working in a creative field where your love of colour, drama and excessive emotion can be expressed without constriction – particularly the world of the theatre, of fiction or of poetry. Never mind that half the world has unfinished novels in their desk drawers; you possess enough imagination and believe enough in your own unique destiny to complete one.

Excessive idealism in love can lead to disappointment

You do not believe in loneliness, separateness or conflict. That may sound absurd, for these things are part of life; but nevertheless, you do not believe in them, and when you are confronted with them you generally react by first becoming disillusioned with the person or situation who has made you feel bad, and then looking elsewhere for that perfect ideal which continues unstained in your fantasies. You long for a state of oneness – a kind of mystical soul-union with another person, or a spiritual revelation – which will end, once and for all and forever, the awful experience of being lonely and separate, which you are determined to transcend. Plato’s fable about the original unity of the sexes which was sundered somewhere in the distant past and which has resulted in all men and women seeking their true other half, is very real to you, for this is your view of love and also your view of life; and life is not worth living without such a love. You are more prone than most people to being disappointed, because your expectations are so high. You have a quality of poignant melancholy which responds readily to certain kinds of music as well as to alcohol, and which makes you seem a little too precious and fragile at times.

Although in reality you are stronger than you seem, for your determination to avoid the bleak, cold world that others call reality is immovable, and nothing can quench your dreams. If they are irrevocably thwarted in the outer world, then you retreat into the inner, and can sometimes seem to be abstracted, aloof and inaccessible. What you sometimes inject into your personal relationships is really a kind of mystical longing – a desire to give up control and responsibility, and merge with a greater, more transcendent whole. If you can pursue this longing through a spiritual or creative rather than a human channel, you may find that people disappoint you less; for they can never provide you with the sense of all- embracing unconditional love that you seek – and believe you are prepared to give, if only you could find a suitable object. Very likely the only really suitable object is God, for if you offer so much of your own self to another person it can become a burden rather than a gift. Your compassion for others is very strong, particularly for the sad, lost part of people which seeks its redemption above and beyond worldly confines; for your perception of a higher and more loving dimension of life is not a false one. But perhaps you need to refrain from expecting it all the time, or demanding it from others quite so often.

The power of magic to enhance life

Thus your personality combines the qualities of hopefulness, faith and idealism and you strive to inject the beauty of your inner world into every thing and person you meet in life. Because of your natural charm and optimism, people are likely to value your company, for you b
ring with you the intimations of a higher, better and lovelier world, full of harmony and meaning, even when dealing with very mundane affairs. Yet you are not as fragile as you seem, for there is a toughness in you which springs from your absolute loyalty to your ideal vision of life. You are certainly prone to being hurt, disillusioned and disappointed very frequently, for you expect too much from people and from life, and would find it hard to be chained to work or relationships which offer no future potentials to explore. Yet such disappointments do not destroy your romantic spirit. They only make you even more determined to find what you are seeking. Thus you are surprisingly strong, for you bounce back from vicissitudes through your faith in the future; and although life will no doubt confront you constantly with the problem of human limitations and the ambivalent nature of fate, you will always remain inwardly a kind of child of the gods, hopefully pursuing the next adventure on the journey, the next creative opportunity, and the next romantic episode which will bring you closer to that perfect love you seek.

Hidden cynicism lies in the shadow

In contrast to your faith in life’s goodness and your dream of perfect unconditional love, there is another protagonist in your inner psychic drama. This hidden shadow-side of you comprises all those qualities which belong to you but which you have excluded from your conscious values and behaviour in order to retain your romantic vision of life. Despite your capacity to bounce back from hurts and disappointments with a positive philosophy and an undiminished faith in the ultimate higher purpose of all experiences, something in you does not recover so easily, and has perhaps never quite believed in all the fairness, truth, beauty and happiness – even in childhood. This secret side of your personality cannot accommodate the gap between your ideals and the complex problems, pain and limitations inherent in human experience; and there is thus a tension in you, a split between your optimistic philosophy and your deeper and darker perceptions. The more you repress this cynical and rather hard shadow-side, the more likely you are to fall prone to sudden depressions and black moods where everything seems purposeless; and also, the more likely you are to unconsciously express your cynicism as cold manipulation of others and a self-seeking, grasping determination to get as much as you can while the good times lasts.

A secret fear of darker dimensions of human nature

Sometimes your romanticism is a genuine reflection of the visionary and creative dimension of your personality; and sometimes it is a determined escape from a side of life which you know to be dark, harsh and frightening. However much you believe in true love and the redemptive potential of your faith, you have been exposed in childhood to a less attractive side of human relationship: those power-battles, destructive resentments, manipulative ploys and petty vendettas which so often lie beneath the surface of apparent good behaviour, and which have left you with a deep unconscious pocket of mistrust and bitterness about life. One of your parents – most probably your mother – was caught in a morass of despair and frustrated needs, although very likely she did not express this unhappiness overtly; and your secret shadow-side has learned well the hard lesson of being too dependent on another person and thus being subjected to hurt, humiliation and the breaking of pride. Sexual conflicts were probably also part of the unspoken problems embedded in your parental background, and the entire realm of your instinctual needs is a threatening issue for you. You tend to idealise love and virtually disembody it partly for this reason, because you are frightened of being controlled through your sexual and emotional needs and then rejected, humiliated or betrayed. Anger, hatred, desire for vengeance, hunger and outrage all bubble and boil in this netherworld of the passions, and sometimes you determinedly turn your face away from the power of your own passions lest they land you in the same dark place as your parents.

You need to believe that everything happens for a good reason and has some profound higher meaning; and that pain has some hidden cause and justification on a metaphysical level. But for your shadow-side, there is no reason or meaning or justification; people are merely unhappy through no fault of their own. Life is just unfair, and loving or depending on another person too much can lead to unendurable unhappiness, while coldness and callousness pass through life unscathed and unpunished. Although this dark side of you seems negative, you need to face it – which means facing your own underlying cynicism and fear of life – because, although it may at first appear brutal, it contains wisdom and a capacity for acceptance which you badly need to integrate into your sometimes excessively idealistic personality. Without the innate capacity to accept what cannot be changed, your idealism is too fragile, and you run the risk of racing in ever decreasing circles into a narrow escapist fantasy-world in order to avoid being hurt. You need to discover that you are strong enough to maintain your faith while still being able to accept people as they are – and to accept yourself as you are too, along with all your baser and less beautiful passions and needs.

A deep mistrust of people undermines the capacity to give freely

You dream perpetually of a world without loneliness and a love without separateness because you have already had a little too much loneliness and separateness in your childhood; and although your romantic imagination might have suppressed these early experiences, or your intellect considers them past because you understand the “reasons”, your shadow-side still dwells in a cold, lonely world where love always has conditions and strings attached and everyone has an ulterior motive. One of your parents -probably your mother – was unaffectionate or critical, and the general atmosphere of your early life seems to have been permeated with a good deal of duty, responsibility and rules for good behaviour but little joy and spontaneous affection. Also, there seems to be a theme of material hardship of some kind attached to your family background, which has remained dominant in the hidden side of you whatever your present circumstances – nothing is for free, life is a struggle, and one works to eat. It is as though some part of you has lived through times of bleak poverty – even though this poverty might have been emotional rather than material, or even experienced by your parents rather than yourself – and has never properly recovered. From the perspective of your shadow-side, everybody wants something, and love can only be relied on as long as you are of use to the loved one. You somehow expect to be hurt, used or abandoned, in complete contradiction to your conscious belief in the wonder and transformative power of love; and there is a deep bitterness in you which sometimes makes you try to buy love through gifts, good behaviour or making yourself needed and indispensable even though you may be unaware of setting up such bargains.

You may need to be more honest about facing this cynical, hard side of yourself, which expects nothing from anyone and knows that each person, however apparently altruistic, looks out for himself or herself; for within this apparently negative hard shell lies a worldly wisdom and an acceptance of the limitations of human love and human nature which need to be integrated into your overoptimistic personality. It is possible to combine faith and romanticism with a greater tolerance and compassion for people’s failings; for sometimes your very idealism can make you intolerant and unforgiving when you have been disappointed – and you then run the risk of secretly becoming the very thing you fear so much, a hard
and self-seeking person who does not love as claimed, but uses others for the gratification of his or her romantic fantasies. You may need to explore with greater insight and understanding the experiences of your childhood and the difficulties in your parents’ marriage, for this early part of your life holds the key to that shadow-side which you fear and yet which you need for its strength, its realism and its capacity for acceptance.

The need to honestly face the ambivalent nature of human motives

Thus your dark side is very dark indeed – for it contains many unacknowledged hurts and disappointments which have curdled into a cynical and embittered philosophy that contradicts quite intensely the beauty and optimism of your romantic spirit. Yet this cynical shadow is not something which should be got rid of, or despised and suppressed. It is dark in proportion to the intense light of your conscious world, where all things appear in fairy-tale shape and all colours are clear, brilliant and lit by heaven; and it is dangerous only when it is unconscious. Your shadow-side contains considerable strength, realism and wisdom, without which you are really quite unable to cope with life’s demands and disappointments. Without it as a friend, you doom yourself to a state of perpetual running; and sooner or later you will be unable to run any longer, but will have to turn and face the dark shape which runs behind you that is really the shape of your completed personality. You are, at heart, a poet and a child; and this is as it should be, for you have much grace, faith and light in you. But you need your shadow in order to relate honestly to life and people, and to bring your romantic vision to earth in a form which can endure in ordinary life.

Another pair of important characters

The characters described so far represent in their fundamental antagonism the main theme of your inner story. Besides these figures, there is another pair of conflicting figures indicated in your birth chart which are likely to be recognisable in your life. These figures are briefly described in the following paragraphs.

A poetic vision of life

Your reality is an enchanted domain, drawing its sustenance from an inner reservoir of images and dreams, and springing from a deep, non-rational conviction of some numinous power at work not only in your own creative efforts but in the whole of life. It is not that you are conventionally religious, nor even mystical in any usual sense; for the world of the imagination is too chaotic, passionate and sometimes dark for you to worship it in the humble posture of the spiritual devotee. But most of what you experience outside yourself – people, places, situations – is ultimately subordinated to the inner vision you have of its meaning and its essence. You resent having to explain yourself and your strange vision too plainly to more literal souls who think an object is merely an object rather than a symbol, a doorway and a vessel. Because your allegiance to the imaginal world is so strong, your adherence to the conventional codes of living is sporadic; and many people are likely to think you a little peculiar or eccentric. On the deepest level you are wedded to some inner voice, and any partner in your life needs to understand and adapt to this if the relationship is going to work. Even those whom you love most you tend to turn into symbols which inspire and constellate your inner world of images and dreams. Or, put another way, the mundane world and the ordinary actions of ordinary people, become infused with something magical and meaningful, which provides constant fuel for your imagination.

It is necessary for you to have some kind of creative medium, for your inner world is rich and boundless and far more important to you than any more conventional definition which society or loved ones might offer you on the subject of what life is really about. Money is nice, security desirable, and everyday pleasures appealing; but at heart you would forego all of these, or at least a good part of them, if you could find the right language to honour the realm of the soul which is your true reality. You may infuriate those around you with your casual dismissal of things they find important; but no one can question the sincerity of your vision, or the richness of your imagination, or your unmistakable vision of a life which is larger, deeper and more meaningful than life.

Hidden cynicism and materialism

Although you tend to have a certain secret contempt for those unimaginative people who cannot soar into the transpersonal realm nor intuitively recognise the hidden significance underlying every experience, you too have a banal, ordinary and materialistic side. But this dimension of your personality is likely to be repressed, and unconsciously projected upon less gifted or far-seeing souls toward whom you can then feel superior and delightfully misunderstood. This other character lives in the shadow-world of the unconscious, and when you encounter it within yourself it is likely to make you feel embarrassed, inadequate and unsure of yourself. Yet you need a better relationship with this secret shadow-side of your personality – not only to help you cope with the limits of ordinary life, but also to keep you within human bounds, so that you do not inflate and fly away into identification with your inner mythic figures to the point where you lose contact with the people around you.

Irritating though you might find this, the shadow-dimension of your personality has a great deal to contribute to your life. It can offer you the realistic sense of limits which can prune your creative aspirations down to manageable and achievable size; it can allow you to be ordinary and human when your inspiration has temporarily left you, allowing you to enjoy your life and other people even when you are not in the grip of some inner vision or daemon; and it can preserve your sense of humour about yourself and about life. Too much identification with the creatures of your fantasies can result in blockage and depression overwhelming you and destroying the very thing that matters most to you – your service to an inner creative source which is your perpetual companion and daemon, sometimes a friend and sometimes an enemy because it does not permit you placid contentment, but always vital and an unexplainable mystery, whether you call it the soul, the unconscious, God, the Devil, art, or love.

IV. THE FAMILY BACKGROUND

Family myths and psychological inheritance

Although you are an individual, you have emerged from a family background. A family is like a living organism, and it includes certain hereditary characteristics which have passed down through the generations. It also contains a particular set of psychological dynamics, an emotional climate which provides the first soil in which your nascent individuality took root in childhood. Thus you contain certain inner patterns, myths and attitudes toward life which you have acquired from the psychological soil of your family background. In other words, to return to our metaphor of the theatre, the characters in your inner drama are unique; but they carry a family inheritance.

Astrology cannot tell us about physical heredity. But it can tell us a great deal about psychological heredity, which runs through families in the same way that red hair or blue eyes do. Psychological inheritance of deeply rooted attitudes often takes place on hidden, unconscious levels of which individual family members are unaware. Family myths move down the generations as surely as a distinctive facial structure does. An example of a family myth might be: “All the men in this family have been self-made and successful.” Or, “All the women in thi
s family have been disappointed by their men.” Myths such as these do not need to be spoken, or even recognised, for they pass from one generation to the next via the unconscious, and they are communicated in a multitude of subtle, nonverbal ways. Thus the male child born into the family of “successful” men will inherit a particular set of expectations to which he will respond according to his own nature and his own inner characters. And the female child born into the family of “disappointed women” will inherit certain attitudes about relationships which will affect her later in life if she remains unaware of this inner script.

Because your family background is an integral part of your life story, it is reflected in your birth horoscope. Astrology can offer considerable helpful insight into this realm of life, for according to how conscious you are of the interplay between your own nature and your family inheritance, you will have more or less freedom of choice in life. Your parents themselves are also reflected in your horoscope, although they appear not as real three-dimensional people, but rather as images who embody a particular theme or set of attitudes. These parental images reflect how mother and father appear to you personally, how they operate as patterns within your own psyche, and how they support or conflict with the unfoldment of your own inner drama. The power of the family background should never be underestimated, for it is not the past. It is a living present within each of us. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote: “Never believe fate is more than the condensation of childhood.”

The image of the father in a woman’s chart

Father is not only a real person. He is the symbol of an inner pattern or perspective through which you relate to life. The image of the father portrayed in your birth horoscope therefore describes three things.

Firstly, it is a subjective picture of the qualities you experienced as most dominant in your relationship with your father – or whoever played the role of father in your early life.

Secondly, it is a symbol of what the masculine represents to you, for your father was the first man in your life. He is therefore a powerful unconscious influence not only on what you seek in male partners and on how you relate to men in general, but also on how you express the masculine or goal-orientated side of your own personality.

Thirdly, it is a picture of your own inner father-qualities: how you order and structure your life, how you envisage and pursue your goals, how you express and direct your will, and how you formulate your ethical codes and ideals.

His psychological absence leads to sadness and confusion

The subjective image of your father which is portrayed in your birth horoscope is a mysterious and complex one. You did not know your father as a solid and supportive personality – either because he was physically absent, or because you experienced his personality as too withdrawn, weak, aloof or unhappy to allow you much access to his true feelings and character. In a sense, you have had to sacrifice a genuine close relationship with your father, and there lies somewhere within you a sad longing for what you feel you did not have, coupled with a strong tendency to idealize the psychologically absent parent into a mystical figure and justify his inaccessibility by blaming yourself. Thus there is likely to be much confusion within you about your own worth because of your early relationship with your father, and you tend in adult life to look secretly to others as the arbiters of your sense of self-value.

The longing for a father-surrogate

Because your experience of your father has been a poignant and disappointing one, there are many qualities which you have had to acquire through your own experience in life. Most importantly, your early sacrifice means that you will need to learn how to father yourself – to find inner resources which provide the necessary ambition, will and determination to actualise your potentials and accomplish something worthwhile with your talents. Because you did not experience a strong and solid model of the masculine principle in early life, you perpetually struggle against the tendency to drift along hoping that someone or something – perhaps a father-surrogate of some kind – will descend from the vault of heaven and provide you with the impetus and strength to achieve your goals. Such father-surrogates have inevitably proved disappointing to you, for your father-image offers you a challenge which you must meet with your own resources. In grappling with this problem, you will find that you can willingly relinquish your deep-seated melancholy and disappointment, and can begin to see your father as a sensitive and fallible human being rather than a semi-divine figure who has on some level abandoned you.

Then the more creative dimension of this father-image can come into play within you, for your early experience of your father can open many doors to balance your sense of disappointment. The longing which your physically or emotionally absent father has inspired in you is really your own yearning for a set of spiritual values by which you can live. Behind the idealised image of your personal father stands the divine father. Thus your sacrifice is a creative one according to the deeper meaning of the word – to “make sacred” – for through your mysteriously inaccessible father you have inherited a profound sensitivity to the transpersonal world, and may find as your life progresses that the father you are seeking is really available after all – in the vitality and boundlessness of your own imaginative and spiritual life.

In addition to this dominant image, there is another figure portrayed by your birth horoscope which adds further complexity to your experience of your father.

High ideals, but little emotional support

Your father represented a quality of aloofness or detachment for you, which is highly creative on one level, and quite difficult on another. From him you have inherited a deep appreciation of the world of the mind, and a detached perspective on life which gives vision and breadth to your thinking. But you and your father were alienated – either because he was physically absent, or because he could not relate through ordinary demonstration of affection. He may have emphasised your education and mental development while at the same time subtly or overtly rejecting your feeling and instinctual needs – and you may have interpreted this rejection as your own failing and now, as an adult, strive toward too high an ideal of perfection while unnecessarily devaluing your more human needs.

Balancing head and heart

You can express your lofty standards and love of independence and clear thinking in a creative way, while still retaining a sense of self-worth in your emotional dealings with others. The heart is as valuable as the intellect, although the message you received from your father is that it is not; and you need to be careful not to become too rigid in your definition of what you think human beings, including yourself, ought to be. The power of this cool and lofty father-image within you is very great in both positive and negative ways, and you will need to stand firmly on the ground of your own human worth while exploring the clear heights of the mind and the spirit, which are your inheritance.

The image of the mother in a woman’s chart

Mother, like father, is not only a person. She is also the symbol of an essential principle in life, and of an inner dynamic or perspective through which we relate to life. The image of the mother which is portrayed in your bir
th horoscope therefore describes three things.

Firstly, it is a subjective description of the qualities most dominant in your relationship with your mother. Many of these will be known to you, but some might be surprising, because they reflect not only her outer behaviour, but her inner life – that side of her which was unexpressed and therefore of great power in terms of its effects on you.

Secondly, the mother-image in your horoscope is a portrait of what the feminine represents to you – how you relate to yourself as a woman, and how you experience other women.

Thirdly, it is a picture of your own “maternal” qualities – your capacity to nurture and care for yourself and others, your sense of safety and trust in life’s essential kindness, and your ability to flow with time and circumstances and to know instinctively when to wait and accept with wisdom the situations which life brings.

The image of Cinderella

The subjective image of your mother portrayed by your birth horoscope has all the delicacy and romance of a fairy tale. Although in outer appearance and behavior your mother may now, to your adult eyes, seem to you to have been anything but a fairy tale princess, there was much of Cinderella in her – an idealized figure who was subjected to a harsher and more difficult life than she would have wished for, and who may have appeared to your child’s perception – and to herself – as the beautiful but unfulfilled maiden whose prince never arrived no matter how many frogs she kissed. Even if your mother came from a poor background with few educational or social opportunities, she probably possessed a good deal of innate taste and refinement, and when younger she may have been quite beautiful, or at least attractive and magnetic. Within you, this disguised princess reflects your own deep love of beauty and grace, and your need for a life of harmony, pleasure and style – whether you express these qualities openly or not.

This romantic image of your mother is, however, highly ambivalent, particularly if you are unconscious of it and of your deeper feelings toward her. There may be a touch of Snow White in your way of relating to your mother, for you may have idealized her at the expense of your own confidence in yourself as a woman. Both you and your mother may have been secretly jealous of each other as rivals for any possible prince who might have appeared -particularly your father – and you may reenact this unconscious dynamic in your adult life where you turn other women into threatening rivals or superior creatures who seem to possess all the magnetic power you believe yourself to lack.

You may need to be more conscious of the romantic princess beneath whatever more prosaic or negative image you hold of your mother. This will help to free you from compulsive relationship patterns where your mother appears projected onto women as lovers or rivals, and it will also release the more creative dimension of this mother-image within yourself. Essentially it is a positive one, full of beauty, refinement and magnetism; and your own highly developed aesthetic side can bring much harmony and joy into your life. It may also be important for you to recognise that the mythic figure of the fairy tale princess is ultimately not a person, but an archetype, and that you are neither responsible for your mother’s disappointed romantic dreams nor need you give up your own.

The Parental Marriage

The relationship between your parents portrayed in your birth horoscope is an important symbol of your own internal model of male-female relationships. Just as you have inherited certain psychological patterns from your parents, so too you have inherited a set of attitudes toward love, partnership and emotional commitment. Also, the astrological portrait of the parental marriage is a symbol of the dynamic between the male and female sides of yourself – between the active, mental and spiritual dimension of your personality and the receptive, instinctual and emotional one. Thus the parental marriage is both a description of an inner image of relationship and a picture of your potential for integrating the opposite poles of your own personality.

The following portrait of your parents’ marriage is thus meant to be understood as a subjective, and perhaps even unconscious, image of certain attitudes which you may bring into your adult relationships – and into your way of dealing with the complexities of your inner nature. It is not a judgement on your parents. It is an inclination toward a certain pattern in human relationship which, although probably enacted to some extent by your actual parents during the years of your childhood, is really a facet of your own inner drama.

A struggle between willful personalities

The emotional climate into which you were born was one of conflict, overt or subtly expressed. Whether this conflict sprang from practical difficulties – such as financial pressures – or from a struggle of some kind between your parents which reflected a fundamental incompatibility of values within their marriage, your early life was not surrounded by harmony or stability. Although there is certainly no implication of blame attached to either parent in an astrological portrait, the atmosphere of your childhood was permeated by tension and conflict of wills, and probably neither parent was particularly happy or fulfilled. This early battleground in turn reflects a deep internal conflict. You contain within you similar incompatible viewpoints and sets of values – a collision between your ideals and your heart – and you tend to be somewhat touchy and edgy in your dealings with others because there is a constant state of tension and restlessness existing inside. You have a habit of swinging from one perspective to the other, going through distinct phases of behaviour each of which seems later on to be reprehensible or negative during the succeeding one. You are not at all clear just who you are or what you want a good deal of the time, and this confusion reflects the climate in which you spent your earliest years, swinging in sympathy toward first one parent and then the other.

It might be important for you to become better acquainted with these battling sides of yourself by looking more carefully at the different sets of values your parents represented to you. Although you were caught in a kind of cross-fire between them, you do not have to remain caught in your own. You can stand in the middle and recognise that both sets of needs within you have a right to be met, and that neither is wrong or unable to be fulfilled. You have a deep and sometimes very depressing conviction that you must always choose between what you want to fulfill your goals and what you need to be happy; but this is not a true “fate” with which you have been saddled. It is a response to a childhood in which no resolution could apparently occur between your parents, neither of whom could be wholly happy and fulfilled with the other. But within you a resolution is possible; and you can indeed embrace both and live a rich, varied and stimulating life, if you can learn not to judge yourself so harshly.

V. RELATIONSHIP PATTERNS

Relationships are among the most mysterious, rewarding and frustrating of all human experiences. Both astrology and psychology teach us that nothing that occurs within a relationship is chance – neither its beginning, nor its fluctuations and conflicts, nor its ending. But astrology cannot say whether you are “fated” to have a good or a bad marriage, or whether you ought to be with a Cancer or a Sagittarius. Your birth horoscope describes what you are like inside, and therefore what kind of patterns, needs and compulsions you are likely to bring into
your relationships with others. You cannot become somebody different, or send in your birth horoscope and request a new set of character. But you can be more or less conscious; and you always have the freedom to look at your own issues, to deal with needs which are your responsibility and not your partner’s, and to respond to both joy and pain in creative ways.

The following paragraphs describe your attitudes, needs, and typical patterns in close relationships. This description is written about you in terms of your dealings with the man in your life. However, if you are involved in a close relationship with someone of your own sex, you will find that the same attitudes, needs and patterns still apply. Whatever your sexual tastes, you are yourself – and it is your inner nature which ultimately dictates the course of your love-life.

Themes connected to relationship issues have already been mentioned in the previous chapters, where the basic archtypal figures dominating in your birth chart were described. Therefore some of the following description will repeat and broaden parts of what has been said already. Some might also contradict, and indicate an inner contradiction inherent in your attitude towards relationships.

The attractions of a worldly partner

Your delightfully romantic and curiously innocent vision of life circles around the dream of the perfect relationship where you and your partner live happily ever after. Because life is likely to give you a few knocks on this front (although it can never wholly tarnish your dream), you tend to be attracted to those people who are more worldly-wise than you, who can cope with the harder and darker facets of life, and who can be a kind of buffer between you and the nasty cold world outside. In other words, you like being fathered, and want a relationship where you can be enchantingly childlike, deeply loved and tenderly protected. A more realistic and worldly personality might in fact be very good for you, although you will need one day to compromise that bright vision at least a little bit if you do not wish to endlessly hop from one relationship to another trying to find the perfect knight. But you must be careful not to push your partner into permanently playing the role of good father. Certainly you need tenderness, understanding, and a sympathetic partner who can contain you while refraining from trying to destroy your dreams. But it is the sexual side of your relationships which is likely to cause you trouble if you put too much responsibility for taking care of everything onto your man and do not make some effort to face life’s challenges with your own strengths and resources. If you expect the earth to move and the heavens to open every time you kiss, then you are asking for trouble. Whoever said, “Love is never having to say you’re sorry” was being very silly.

Avoiding the third act of a Verdi opera

The ordinary ebbs and flows of passion and the ordinary little difficulties which arise in every long-term relationship can become huge mountainous problems for you because you expect no problems at all; and because you are always peering over the hills and far away just in case a handsomer prince might be seen riding in the distance, you tend to overreact in ways which do not do justice to your partner. You have a deep love of the theatrical and become easily bored without a little excitement in your life; but you are likely to be drawn to men who are more sober and restrained by nature and who can provide you with some balance. But then you can easily start interpreting restraint as coldness and sobriety as dullness if you cannot accommodate the reality of your partner as well as your fantasy of him. You are a natural romantic and have a good chance of creating what most people can only dream about and envy: a relationship which keeps its magic over the years. It is worth making some effort to work on your own problem of accommodating the limits of mortal life and of your mortal partner in order to obtain this rare gift.

There is more than one type of man you find yourself attracted to, for your relationship needs are not simple. In addition to the theme described above, there is another relationship pattern portrayed in your birth horoscope which is described briefly in the following paragraphs.

Attractions of a rational partner

You are so in love with the creatures of your imagination that often you are going to be drawn in your outer life to men who are more firmly grounded in mundane reality than you, who have made friends with the practical concerns of life, and who have the gift of formulating and articulating ideas and attitudes; for such a man can help you to learn to put your own mundane life in order and see it in a clearer perspective, while the richness of your inner world is an excellent complement to the clear rationality of a more pragmatic partner. But you need to learn not to devalue your loved one’s gifts because they seem sometimes more prosaic and quotidien when measured against your world of knights on white horses and cosmic conflagrations.

You may also need to learn that your partner is not some kind of father-surrogate who is expected to manage all the boring daily stuff while you dance with the gods in archetypal realms. Rather, you need to let him help you in your painful adjustment to outer reality. Your partner will not thank you for being treated like a cross between an accountant, a handyman and a Victorian parent who is expected to direct your thinking and decision-making while worshipping at the feet of the muse. A more rational and intellectually precise nature can balance you while learning from your own considerable creative gifts. Just as you need time and patience in formulating what you think, he needs time and patience in learning to swim in the chaos of the imagination.

The gift of affection and loyalty

You are not frightened of needing others, and within a close relationship you tend to express this need as a rare quality of sensitivity, affection and emotional loyalty toward your partner. You are rather sentimental in love, keeping old letters and remembering anniversaries, and you have a deep need for a tranquil domestic life and a sense of continuity with the family and the past. Love for you does not just happen instantaneously; it is built, little by little, upon shared memories and the mutually exchanged feelings of being needed and supportive when the difficult times come. Thus there is much of the maternal in your way of loving, and it is as important for you to feel useful and needed as it is for you to be fussed over and adored in more conventionally romantic ways. There is a strongly traditional and conservative element in you which does not like emotional surprises or unpredictability of any kind in a partner – even if your own moodiness makes you sometimes a little changeable yourself.

You may need to accept that your man is very likely not so attentive to the little details of life as you are, and perhaps of a more independent spirit than you; for despite your deep loyalty and your tendency to make sacrifices for your loved ones, you can easily become hurt, resentful and sulky if you feel your loving gestures and contributions are not properly appreciated. Try not to live by a double standard, for you must give your love freely or not at all. You cannot bargain with it in order to bind your man and guarantee yourself emotional security; and such ploys do not do justice to the grace, kindness and empathy which you have to offer your partner.

VI. PATHS TOWARD INTEGRATION

As you have seen from the preceding pages, your birth horoscope offers a detailed and in-depth portrait of many aspects of your life. It is also possible t
o step further back from the horoscope, and to use the faculties of a telescope rather than a microscope – so that an overview of the play comes into focus. The following provide also some suggestions of ways in which conscious effort might make it possible for you to achieve greater harmony between the different components within yourself, and to strengthen that centre of the personality which psychology calls the ego, the “I”. Free will may not include the possibility of becoming somebody else. But it might include the ability to stand firmly at the centre of your horoscope and feel related to the different aspects of your psyche, rather than wandering about blindly, feeling impotent and victimised by conflicting cross-currents and impulses from within yourself and from the world outside. Two people may have certain astrological configurations which are similar, but one might be buffeted by his or her inner demons like a rudderless small boat tossed on a difficult sea; while the other individual remains somehow solid and real as a person and can therefore navigate the boat intelligently through the ocean’s changing currents.

Contributing to human development

You will never find real fulfilment serving only yourself. The knowledge that you have contributed something to society and to the development of human consciousness is essential to your feeling that your life has some deeper purpose. Although you may have any number of interesting hobbies, companions and interests that bring you happiness, it is particularly in relation to the work you choose that you need to look beyond merely personal concerns and select a vocation which also benefits others in some way – especially in the realm of mental development. Because ideas and their power to promote change interest you, you might look within the spheres of education, sociology, group work, psychology or esoteric subjects for themes which might strike a spark in you.

Your intuitive sense of the underlying beauty and purpose of human life will help you to focus your energies on offering something which enhances and supports the welfare of others, although you may be more drawn to making your contribution through creative or spiritual channels rather than practical ones. But you should try not to hide the light of your imagination behind a bushel, for such an offering is as valid and important as the more obvious professions which concern themselves with helping individuals or society.

The more energy you put into work which encompasses a broader connection with the welfare of human beings as a group, the stronger your connection will grow with a sense of meaning and true self-esteem; for you have something special to offer others, and you need to believe in your own dreams. If you are caught in a narrow field of work and find yourself bored and restless, try to expand your life, even if it means taking a gamble with material security for a while. You have nothing to lose but your frustration.

Facing the environment with confidence

There is one area of life where any effort you make to face your fears and meet the challenge of expressing your own individuality will always result in increased strength and self-respect – even if you are not always successful. You have a deep sense of awkwardness and even inferiority whenever you are called upon to express your real feelings, ideas and nature – and because of this uncomfortable shyness you have acquired various masks and defenses which, although they might be detectable by many people, nevertheless prevent anyone from really coming close to you. Somehow you do not expect the world to respond to you, for you experience it as a hostile place full of people who will not appreciate you or let you have what you want. But you will never be satisfied hiding behind a facade, for you long to be seen and heard and valued as you are. You also lack confidence in yourself physically, and here too any effort to develop and give value to your body will result in greater self-confidence. You could, of course, simply go on hiding; for no one is going to force you to come out. But your own frustration might accomplish what life does not. You have plenty of courage and strength, for it takes courage and strength to build and sustain such strong defenses. Yet if you can apply this courage to the task of letting yourself be vulnerable – by taking the risk of being uninhibitedly and unashamedly yourself – you may find that in fact your personality is a potent and effective force. For you will have learned the hard way to be loyal to yourself.

Thus one of your great fears – of expressing your own individuality -can become the indestructible base on which you can build a truly authentic, original contribution which is of genuine benefit to others. For you will have built it from your own vision, your own experience, and the wisdom you have learned from both your disappointments and your achievements. Your true work in life lies with others; but you cannot borrow from the ideas of others in order to do it. You must find your inspiration within.

Astrological Data used for Psychological Horoscope

for Julia (female)

birthdate: 14 June 1978 local time 10:55 am

place: Dallas, TX (US) U.T. 15:55

96w48, 32n47 sid. time 02:58:10

PLANETARY POSITIONS

planet sign degree motion

Sun Gemini 23°13’47 in house 11 direct

Moon Libra 1°35’21 in house 2 direct

Mercury Gemini 23°26’29 in house 11 direct

Venus Cancer 28°06’45 in house 12 direct

Mars Virgo 0°18’12 in house 1 direct

Jupiter Cancer 12°03’52 in house 11 direct

Saturn Leo 25°45’52 in house 1 direct

Uranus Scorpio 12°52’07 in house 3 retrograde

Neptune Sagittarius 16°46’09 in house 4 retrograde

Pluto Libra 13°55’26 end of house 2 retrograde

Moon’s Node Libra 1°50’06 in house 2 retrograde

Planets at the end of a house are interpreted in the next house.

HOUSE POSITIONS (Placidus)

Ascendant Leo 21°36’52

2nd House Virgo 15°49’22

3rd House Libra 14°27’41

Imum Coeli Scorpio 17°00’24

5th House Sagittarius 20°40’50

6th House Capricorn 22°33’48

Descendant Aquarius 21°36’52

8th House Pisces 15°49’22

9th House Aries 14°27’41

Medium Coeli Taurus 17°00’24

11th House Gemini 20°40’50

12th House Cancer 22°33’48

MAJOR ASPECTS

Sun Square Moon 8°22

Sun Conjunction Mercury 0°13

Sun Sextile Saturn 2°32

Sun Opposition Neptune 6°27

Sun Trine Pluto 9°17

Sun Square Moon’s Node 8°36

Moon Square Mercury 8°09

Moon Sextile Venus 3°29

Moon Conjunction Moon’s Node 0°15

Mercury Sextile Saturn 2°19

Mercury Opposition Neptune 6°39

Mercury Trine Pluto 9°30

Mercury Square Moon’s Node 8°24

Venus Sextile Moon’s Node 3°43

Mars Conjunction Saturn 4°32

Jupiter Trine Uranus 0°48

Jupiter Square Pluto 1°52

Saturn Trine Neptune 8°59

Neptu
ne Sextile Pluto 2°51

Mars Conjunction Ascendant 8°41

Saturn Conjunction Ascendant 4°09

Uranus Opposition Medium Coeli 4°07

Numbers indicate orb (deviation from the exact aspect angle).