The Astrology of Family Dynamics

The Astrology of Family Dynamics

by Erin Sullivan
The Astrology of Family Dynamics

The Astrology of Family Dynamics

by Erin Sullivan

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Overview

Erin Sullivan's latest book is a breakthrough both in astrology and psychology. The Astrology of Family Dynamics makes for gripping reading and shows us that astrology is the only system that demonstrates the complexities of the family as an organicwhole, the family's place in the collective, and the role an individual plays in carrying on the ancestral line. Sullivan writes with compassion and accuracy, weaving together various methods of analyzing and working with individuals and their families.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781578631797
Publisher: Red Wheel/Weiser
Publication date: 04/02/2001
Pages: 416
Sales rank: 701,221
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.93(d)

Read an Excerpt

The Astrology of Family Dynamics


By ERIN SULLIVAN

Samuel Weiser, Inc.

Copyright © 2001 Erin Sullivan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57863-179-7



CHAPTER 1

The Individual and the Collective


THE FAMILY OF HUMANITY

DYNASTIC LINEAGE: THE BIG PICTURE

We might look back over aeons and recognize our own personal self-development–just as we emerge from the womb, into our infancy, through our developmental years, past adolescence, into our twenties, the Saturn-return, the thirties, the mid-life transition, to maturity in the fifties and second Saturn-return phase and on into dotage, so does the collective culture emerge and develop. If we see this as a cycle, and not as a linear experience, then the relationship between the individual and the collective becomes quite intimate. Just as a culture evolves, so does an individual: from embryo–total psychic participation with the environment–to birth through the initial stages of individuation, into full ego, or awareness of self, and the subsequent developmental periods, the process is remarkably parallel to how we appear to have evolved as a collective world-humanity.

We like to believe that the archaic mind was holistic, in that it perceived no split between nature and culture. There existed no differentiation between the individual and his environment, no split between man and god, no vast chasm between thought and feeling or the sacred and profane. This kind of consciousness is called mythopoeic and can best be described as a state of mind in which one participates wholly in the environment without conscious awareness of the separation from others or from the natural environment. These archaic peoples, so-called primitives, appear to have been peaceable, relating to their environment as they would to their own inner selves. Their known rituals involved what the French mythographer Lévy-Bruhl termed participation mystique. That is, their consciousness was at one with the external world and their psychic relationship with nature wholly participatory–they did not subordinate nature in the way in which we now do, but took from nature what was needed for survival and apparently had a respect for animals, trees, the elemental forces and various celestial phenomena which is keenly lacking today.

We know little about these most archaic humans–palaeontology shows us bony structures, the skeletons of our ancestors, some of their relics and tools, but not much about their culture. We truly know nothing. Just as we know nothing about our intra-uterine experience. We speculate and have ideas, but no real knowledge of prehistorical humanity. It is the same with consciousness before birth. In the womb we existed in a realm beyond temporal and spatial differentiation, suspended in a warm, nurturing, eternal space. The rustic lifestyle of the archaic man was clearly fraught with survival-danger and primal terror, but he likely did not have neurosis or anxiety complexes. Just as archaic civilization did, the incubating embryo has danger during its development and psychologically it appears that this psychic knowledge of threat-in-the-womb affects the development of consciousness in the maturing person. Just as archaic man knew of his environmental threats, so does the gestating infant, and though those threats are pre-conscious, they are highly effective in the psychological developmental process.

Infants, once born, do have survival concerns just as infant cultures have survival issues–but they do not have conscious worries about their relationship with their environment. Those problems arise much later in development–in parallel with the emergence of the individual ego and, in the case of cultural development, the collective ego. Babies are not neurotic, but the seeds for such a condition are embedded in this infantile ground. Serious threats to an infant's development will register in both the psyche and the viscera, setting the tone for its future growth, body and soul. Likewise, serious threats to the process of culture arrest, or even retard to extinction, entire cultural collectives. At worst, a culture can die out like the Inca did, but at best a culture flexes, mutates and adapts creatively to its external conditions and inner impulses. These potentials are also ours, as individuals.

As the ego of a child emerges from its psychic-womb, it begins to separate out its own identity from that of its mother and recognize itself as distinct and different from others. The baby is still wholly dependent, but clearly recognizes itself in relationship to others, and gradually begins to experiment with that relationship as the ego grows stronger and more impelling–and as its physical prowess increases. Cultures break out of the insular mode and begin to transgress the boundaries of different cultures, becoming assimilated, antagonistic, or allied ... so do we with our 'others'.

Ultimately, this breach between subjective self and objective other–which we call perspective–is good and necessary; however, it can become so vast a rent in consciousness as virtually to destroy an individual's connection to his or her deepest, inner Self, and divorce him or her from the sacred and divine aspect of life. Certainly we have seen this chasm in cultural development grow increasingly vast—the ancient Greeks worried about it, fretted and developed a philosophy based upon the separation of the sacred and the profane. Hesiod, the sixth-century BC Greek agrarian-poet, felt that cutting trees, making canoes and plying the waters was unnatural and would result in all sorts of abominations against natural law. If only he had known—; or maybe he did in diachronous time—just how far his descendants would impose themselves upon nature's reserves.

As our global culture has developed, so have we as individuals: our own small frames of reference–our families–have undergone radical rearranging in just the last century, and particularly in the last thirty years, and are now rapidly fragmenting into unique formations. All these changes have rendered a social chaos, which truly is the genesis of all things. The long-term result will likely re-form collective groups into new cultural, philosophical and familial arrangements. The movement of the planets in a generational fashion describes how this is so and how we, as individuals, operate within that big picture.

The last 2,500 years have shown a remarkable evolutionary leap–technically, intellectually, physically and socially. The quickening of consciousness results now in a time in which a re-connection with natural law is urgent. The movement towards the epoch which will be ruled by the sign Aquarius, and away from the 2,100-year period of Pisces, marks a turning point from one way of viewing the world collectively towards a new, idealistic yet practical view. These epochal shifts are relative to our development as individuals within the collective ethos. As individuals we cannot move beyond the parenthetical boundaries of the epochal vision–even the rare Atman is a product of the time.

The Piscean age (ruled by Neptune and being the epoch from c. I BC to AD 2060) seems to have acted as a collective womb in which the compartmentalized concepts of the body-mind-soul of humanity have gestated to the point of giving birth to themselves as a single entity. The global family–unus mundus–is in the last stages of incubation, indeed, it is in the birth canal. The fast-approaching Aquarian epoch (ruled by Uranus and also around 2,100 years long) will demand a relationship between the individual and the collective which is more mutually interdependent. This is in direct contrast to the Piscean Christian imagery wherein someone else died for our sins, or wherein a monotheistic male god is the one responsible for all earthly and mortal action, and a cultural ethos in which the collective is responsible for the individual. This has ultimately resulted in a great fracturing of societies, and an alienation of individual persons not only from their culture, but from their families, and, more dangerously, from their own sense of self and divinity. It seems that major transitional periods are fraught with uncertainty, wherein unity is nowhere, and global disintegration threatens. Parallel to the collective disintegration lies the loss of identity of individuals.

The shift between the two epochs in which we find ourselves in the millennial period is one marked by a proliferation of new and experimental ideas. We are, and will be for decades to come, between the old epoch of Pisces moving in transition towards the coming epoch of Aquarius. In brief the two ages bring this imagery to mind:

* Piscean Age–individuals make up the collective, and the collective itself is responsible for the individual.

* Aquarian Age—the collective itself is an organic entity and each individual within it is responsible for the whole of the collective.


Naturally, this great leap will not in itself be complete until the era is almost done–in about 2,000 years time! It is a journey of heroic proportions, to be undertaken one-by-one in the name of all. One must not hold one's breath, however, and must continue to work within the existing systems to push them out beyond the boundaries of convention. This requires listening to a deep inner Self which has greater intelligence and longer memory than our intellectual mind.

As Joseph Campbell wrote: The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding ... It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse.' Indeed, we have arrived at the time where the individual is responsible for the collective.

We might look at the big picture in this way (see Figure 1):

1. We have an archaic memory which is the underpinning of all human need for connection to one another–this is time-out-of-mind.

2. In turn, this is contained within an epochal signature (the Ages: Virgo, Leo, Cancer, Gemini, Taurus, Aries and our own Pisces Age, on through to the arriving Aquarian Age, etc.) which oversees the major images and symbols of the time.

3. Then there is the 'current ethos' which is at this stage about fifty to sixty years in duration–the Zeitgeist. The Zeitgeist moves rapidly, however, and is a shape-shifter.

4. Within those temporal motifs exist the various ethnic cultures in the world.

5. And the cultures are further sub-divided into sects with social orders, religious beliefs and historical context.

6. We further differentiate in that structure into families. Families make up the small clusters, within which, at long last, lies:

7. THE INDIVIDUAL.


Astrologically, and greatly simplified, we might see this depicted as follows (see Figure 2):

The zodiac: circle of heaven, anima mundi–the world soul. It not only defines the Great Year (26,000-year cycle of the precession of the equinoxes), but also the earth-year, and the single day. In the individual sense, it defines the horoscope.

The planets: archetypal human agencies seen against the backdrop of the zodiac. The planets are a global picture, seen in the same heavens from all points on earth at different times of day. The planets are rendered individual by locus in the horoscope, by degree, sign and house.

The houses: oikos–Greek for 'family' and 'house'–they contain and mundify inner experiences. These are the sectors of the heavens as they are divided in accord with the time of day, again in relation to the zodiac. Houses and families give immediate relevance to outer life. They are one step out of one's own self.


Summary

Transits are just that–moving planets. The planets do not screech to a halt when someone is born; however, we do fix the planets in time and space to create a horoscope for that person.


It must be remembered at all times that a natal horoscope is a picture of the transits at the time of one's birth.

With this in mind, it becomes apparent that a person is a living, breathing, walking transit, and thus is an emblem of the Zeitgeist into which he or she was born. We are all of us moments in time, and in this way we individualize a collective circumstance–we are the constellation of the mundane world, and thus are born into a very large family.

The incubation of a human is short and fast in ratio to its succeeding lifespan, and if this parallel between the individual and the collective is even vaguely close, there is hope for humanity on a global scale, though in the 1990s–the turn of the millennium–there has been a prevailing pessimism. If, indeed, the collective is not to detonate itself, then a very rapid individuation process is required, and will occur on a consciousness level. Critical mass is fast approaching, and the generational impetus which might largely be a deeply unconscious motivation for survival has mutated already, and will continue to do so rapidly towards a new level of relationship between the individual and the collective. Without this shift, survival would not be possible. It seems that the only place to go now is 'up' and 'out', which is 'mind' and 'consciousness'–towards greater understanding of, and greater relationship between, the sacred and the profane, the mortal and immortal. The current obsession with knowledge and facts which has been in profound ascendancy since the mid-I 500s will need to make room for the unknown, the magical, and give way to wisdom, or we shall find ourselves fast outmoded and extinct as a species. The evolution of the generations according to planetary array speaks of this movement beyond the Cartesian split between nature and culture, art and science, human and divine, towards a new unified vision of being.

In the section which follows, we see how movement and acceleration might occur through the most recent generations into future ones—keeping in mind that each individual is going to 'translate' his and her own outer-planetary configuration though the more personal planets and in other more mysterious, fated and metaphysical ways.


EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION: ROUND AND ROUND WE GROW

Today's Planetary Configuration is Tomorrow's Leading Generation (see Figure 3)

In the course of Western development, the essentially positive process of emancipating the ego and consciousness from the tyranny of the unconscious has become negative. It has gone far beyond the division of conscious and unconscious into two systems and has brought about a schism between them; and, just as differentiation and specialization have degenerated into overspecialization, so this development has gone beyond the formation of individual personality and given rise to an atomized individualism. (Erich Neumann, History of Consciousness)


GENERATIONAL CONFIGURATIONS OF PLUTO AND NEPTUNE: PURPOSE AND VISION

Pluto in Leo sextile Neptune in Libra

We are fast arriving at a time in society where the concept and relationship of families is charged with Angst because no coherent picture exists of what, in fact, 'a family' is. Families are becoming as individual and unique in structure and content as individuals! Family-consciousness and consciousness of families is shifting forms rapidly, and, as we have seen, the collective urge plays a tremendous parallel role, as it always has. Many of us born in the post-Second-World-War period are still in the thrall of the ideal Western family: mummy, daddy, little girl and little boy–'us four and no more'. The American artist Norman Rockwell depicted this fantasy-family brilliantly in his illustrations, complete with gambolling family dog and cat napping by the fireside. It was so adorable it hurt to look at. The horror of this image is that not only does it now emerge as being patently untrue, but many of the largest group-generation to hit the planet (born between 1941 and 1958) are still clinging to the mummy–daddy picture and are reluctant to let go of that interior image, though shattered and saddened by its lack of reality. These people are all born with Pluto in Leo, the sign of the child, and will take their childhood to the grave. They (myself included in this generational imprint) may never leave off blaming mummy and daddy for everything physical and psychological. The Pluto in Leo generation identifies with the child archetype, which ultimately needs a parental context within which to operate functionally.
(Continues...)


Excerpted from The Astrology of Family Dynamics by ERIN SULLIVAN. Copyright © 2001 Erin Sullivan. Excerpted by permission of Samuel Weiser, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction          

PART I: The Big Picture: The Organic Family          

1. The Individual and the Collective          

2. The Nuclear Family as a System          

3. Family Patterns and Family Trees          

4. The Sun and Moon in Families          

5. Mothers and Fathers: Freud Had It Half Right          

6. Family Themes: Movers and Shakers in the Family          

7. Families and Our Familiars          

PART II: Family Dynamics          

8. The Modal Family: The Tension of Life          

9. The Elemental Family: Circuits of Being          

10. The Water Houses; The Ancestral Eyes of the Soul          

11. Families in Flux: Transits and Moving Forward          

PART III: Dynasty          

12. Real Lives, Real People          

13. Tobias: Touched by God          

14. Mohsin: Who am I?          

15. Rejected in the Womb          

16. What's Bred in the Bone: The Circuit Breaker          

17. The Procession of the Ancestors          

18. The Last in the Line: The Many in the One          

Appendix          

THE KENNEDY FAMILY          

OVER-DEVELOPMENT IN A SIGN          

Bibliography          

Index          

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