Review in The Mountain Astrologer, Issue 183, October-November 2015

 

Healing the Generations: Family Patterns in the Birth Chart

 

There are some cultures today in which tribal ancestors are still revered, and back in history this was the general attitude towards family ancestors too. There have been ancient cultures such as the Egyptian that did not only revere their ancestors but made them part of their lives. In their temple tombs, relationships with the dead were maintained on a daily basis so they could always be called on for protection and guidance when needed. Like the spiritualists today who offer séances our ancestors took for granted that the dead live on  and can interact with the living.

 

So how do they live on – as ghosts? I’ve seen apparitions in my time. They have appeared hovering in the air, cloudy forms with marked facial features and compelling eyes, scary indeed. But I discovered when still young that, if you stare them out, they dissolve back into thin air. One of the ghosts who regularly haunted me was the ghost of a dead grandfather.

 

Back in the 1960’s psychologists started looking at the dynamics of whole family systems when they were treating the problems of a disturbed family member. Then in the 80’s when systems science came in, we learned that each part of any kind of system affects and is affected by every other part. Also in the 80’when past-life regression therapy first became popular, some family therapists realised that their clients’ problems lay beyond present family dynamics and started looking back at their family history.

 

Family constellation therapy is a way of working with family patterns. In constellation workshops information is accessed from the family field by participants who are complete strangers to the family. It works like this: group participants are picked to represent family members, and stand in for them to create together a tableau of the family’s constellation. I’ve participated in some of these groups and experienced for myself intuitively picking up and acting out information concerning the characters I represented, all unknown to me. After allowing old wounds to come to light, this therapy method heals them through rituals of acceptance, acknowledgement and forgiveness.

 

So how does this work. Well, it’s claimed by some scientists today that our memories are located not in our brains but in invisible ‘fields’ surrounding us - like electromagnetic fields. Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance theory, for example, could be used to explain how an ancestor’s personality and life experience could be preserved as information in a ‘field’ surrounding living family members. Most of us can’t see these fields but psychics can, for example, see a number of subtle bodies surrounding the physical body as an aura, one of which is called the karmic body, and this contains both our personal karmic patterns and our family karma.

 

This could explain why, in a past life regression session, clients often relive scenes from the lives of their ancestors. Of course they could actually have been them, as it seems people often reincarnate into the same family. Or maybe they are accessing the ancestor’s memories, still present in the family karmic field. I studied to be a past life regression therapist back in the 1980’s and for twenty years, while I was working as an astrologer in Germany, I offered astrological counselling together with regression sessions. I always had the birth chart of the clients at hand, and at the end of the session used it to help the client understand the meaning of his or her experiences.

 

The personality and behavioural patterns of both our ancestors and immediate family are mirrored in our birth charts. Our planets stand not only for ourselves, but also for people who are close to us in our lives. For example the male planets – Sun, Mars, Jupiter - stand for qualities that we can find in father, grandfather, brothers and sons, and our female planets – Moon Venus, Ceres – for qualities in mother, grandmothers, sisters and daughters. We also find that the planets’ aspects and placements in our charts indicate family themes that are often repeated across the generations. My research has shown that these involve not only the blood line, but are also found in the charts of people who marry into the family. When the theme is a wounding one that has left deep scars, its repercussions have to be faced and healed consciously or unconsciously by members of the succeeding generations.   

 

Thus we may unconsciously take on the unresolved issues of our ancestors so it’s good to investigate our family history and learn as much as we can about them. Quite often emotional and mental disorders in an alive family member have been caused by traumatic events experienced by a dead relative. Or a seemingly unjust fate befalling a living member can be retribution for a crime or transgression committed by an ancestor hundreds of years ago. As it’s written in the Bible – the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children, yea unto the 4^th generation.

 

The first thing that catches our eye when we compare the charts of our close family members across several generations is the way the same zodiac signs are repeating. When I was more involved in this work than I am today, I did a survey on the frequency of this repetition to which the members of the Brighton and Hove astrology group contributed. I asked them to list the sun, moon, and ascendant signs if known, of their family members over three generations – grandparents, parents and children, or for the older participants grandchildren, for example.

 

 It proved quite strikingly the dominance of the same zodiac signs in close family charts. And also that in most families a high number of conjunctions and oppositions occur between sun signs. In half the families investigated examples were found of birthdays on the same day, including one case where three family members had the same birthday! There were also an above average number of polarities with family members having opposite sun signs and even more polarities if rising signs were included.

 

Each sign of the zodiac is an archetype with an archetypal field around it of themes, issues and challenges. My experience has taught me that our issues are expressed and ‘worked out’ in the family group. So when we compare family birth charts, we find the astrological patterns of other members locking into our own. This creates the intensity that characterises most family relationships as well as the feeling of inevitability around people we attract as marriage partners.  We may have an unconscious attraction to partners who will reinforce the astrological inheritance in the next generation through the children resulting from our union. Thus family patterns are preserved and become effective when separate family systems intermingle.

 

It’s said we choose our friends but we can’t choose our family, and so life often throws us together in the family with people we find severely challenging, and who may appear to us more like enemies. But if we see it as our karmic task to learn from our interactions with them, and come to understand them and accept them as they are, this could be our best opportunity to  grow spiritually in this life. In a mysterious way our difficult family members mirror sides of our self that we could be rejecting, and we need to accept and integrate. The closeness and unavoidableness of family relationships pressurises us to do this work.