Psychological Horoscope Analysis

Romantic vision and the gift of imagination * The romantic vision rejects life's limitations * Sensitivity to others combines with a creative imagination

A romantic vision of life colours all your experiences * A firm belief in the good, the true and the beautiful * The dilemma of feeling like an eternal child on christmas eve * A sentimental heart adds charm and warmth * Excessive idealism in love can lead to disappointment * The power of magic to enhance life

Hidden cynicism lies in the shadow * A secret fear of darker dimensions of human nature * A deep mistrust of people undermines the capacity to give freely * The need to honestly face the ambivalent nature of human motives

Living for and through others * A powerful will to dominate is hidden

Family myths and psychological inheritance * The image of the father in a woman's chart * His psychological absence leads to sadness and confusion * The longing for a father-surrogate

The image of the mother in a woman's chart * Selflessness and self-sacrifice * The power of martyrdom * Qualities of beauty and fragility

The attractions of a worldly partner * Avoiding the third act of a Verdi opera * A devotional quality of heart * The pleasures of the verbal love-game

A journey into the unseen world * Facing the environment with confidence

Copyright Astrodienst AG 1997. All Rights are reserved. 27-Oct-1997

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.

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 the gift of imagination

You are one of the world's true romantics, for your intensely active imagination must always inject into ordinary circumstances an aura of meaning, potential and purpose without which you find daily life inconsequential and sometimes suffocating. The great strength of your nature lies in your well-developed relationship to the creative power of the unconscious, which allows you to look into the future and envisage potentials which are not immediately apparent in the present. Because of this, you tend to see opportunities which others miss. You have a habit of living mostly in the future, always looking toward the next project and the next stage of the journey. Yours is a temperament which will never stagnate, because whatever you have accomplished, it is experienced not as a final achievement but as a temporary stage on the way to something bigger, better, more enriching and more meaningful.

Another strength in your character is your ability to appreciate the connections between apparently disparate facts and circumstances, and to see a story or a hidden pattern which others might ignore. You often have an instantaneous grasp of all the important factors in a situation, and can leap with a kind of hunch or "sixth sense" to a conclusion which is usually extremely accurate yet which you may not always be able to explain logically. You may or may not literally gamble with money, but you are probably willing to back your stronger hunches with effort, and therefore often obtain rewarding experiences or material gains through means which others would not dare to try. There is a quality of liveliness and colour about your interpretations of life which makes all your experiences seem like worthwhile lessons. Bad times cannot keep you down for long, for the next opportunity is always just around the corner. Mere security with no future creative possibilities is a kind of death to you, and you will often abandon your efforts just when they are about to bear fruit because it is the challenge and the journey, rather than the goal, which excite you most.

The romantic vision rejects life's limitations

However, because of your emphasis on the imaginative and intuitive side of life, you run the risk of forgetting worldly limits. You tend to be on rather poor terms with day-to-day reality and its responsibilities and demands, because these thwart the vision that means so much to you. You may resent the boredom of a routine job, feeling secretly that you are entitled to something more special and glamourous; or you may dislike having to bind yourself to domestic obligations because these stop the flow of the imagination. You may also resist having to select one thing to which you must apply yourself, preferring to feel that you have many potentials open in the future; and this could result in you becoming a "jack of all trades" who dabbles in everything and produces nothing lasting. This is the "one day when I grow up..." syndrome, which may be appropriate in youth but which begins to feel rather uncomfortable with the passing of the years.

You tend to neglect your body, or drive it too hard. You may forget at times to rest and eat sensibly; and the world of mechanical objects may seem personally inimical to you because things constantly break down and need attention and fixing. Having your time filled by tasks like servicing the car and doing the monthly accounts can make you extremely irritable. But the more you ignore this side of life the worse it tends to get, and there will not always be someone else there to clean up the mess which you leave behind. Your lack of attention to your body may result in problems with your health, not because you are intrinsically unhealthy - in fact, you are probably blessed with a strong and energetic constitution - but because any living thing, including the flesh of which you are made, resents neglect and may retaliate with a message of its own. You are inclined to be ill at ease with your body because you have not befriended it, and thus tend toward hypochondria, or an obsession with "mastering" the body through strenuous diets and exercises which might be more punishing than helpful because they are excessive.

You will sooner or later need to make better friends with the physical world. This effort can be rewarding and exciting because your sensual nature, although often repressed or neglected, is powerful and capable of great intensity and pleasure, and your uncannily accurate intuition can also be applied to practical matters to ensure your success. Any achievement of a material kind can be enormously rewarding to you, and you possess a rare capacity to respond to nature and to the beauty of the physical world - if you will only stop running away from what you call "lower" or "unimportant". In very personal matters such as sexual expression your unease with the body can also make you shy and awkward, and here too there might be a promise of much greater fulfilment if you can allow yourself to experience the powerful demands of the instincts which you sometimes fear. Your perception of physical reality may be too negative, and it is possible that family attitudes in your early life have contributed to your undervaluing of yourself in this realm of life. If you can learn the art of being an ordinary mortal in a sometimes unromantic world, then your unusual and powerful imaginative gifts will always bring you new adventures as well as earning you concrete rewards.

Sensitivity to others combines with a creative imagination

Your imaginative abilities are supported by a deep instinctive insight into human behaviour and motives. You have a profound response to the world of symbols, myths and images, and may excel in one of the arts, such as music, painting, dance or theatre, where your ability to intuit character and mimic it in plastic forms may give you exceptional talents. Or you may combine your imagination and your sensitivity to the handling of others' problems, offering much sympathy and vision to loved ones or to those whom you might choose to counsel or help. Your grasp of the potentials of a situation combines with sensitivity and compassion for the needs and problems of others, and this lends a human touch to the strange and often uncanny abilities of your intuition. Your great gift lies in the sensing of human potential and the deeper and more meaningful lessons to be found in life's dilemmas; and you blend this with gentleness and a sense of timing that can allow you to midwife this potential in yourself and in others. Your imagination never divorces itself from the world of human feelings because your perceptiveness and concern will always keep you related to other people, so that all your creative hunches and inspirations ultimately work to enhance and enrich interpersonal relationships.

Your deepest challenge in life, however, still remains the problem of earthing your vision and sense of human potential within the confines of material reality; and here your dependency upon human contact may make it even more difficult for you to cope with the restrictions and responsibilities that the world imposes upon you. Life sometimes requires a tough survival instinct and a capacity to cope alone if necessary. Your need to express your creative imagination through relationships with others may cause you to fear the cold self-sufficiency that situations sometimes demand of you. Occasionally too empathetic and idealistic for your own good, you have difficulty in drawing boundaries around yourself, and perpetually take on the burden of others' problems - not only because you are compassionate, but also because you do not know how to be firm about your own limits. And because your natural romanticism tends to express itself through faith in the potential of a relationship, you find it hard to face the imperfect reality of another person, preferring to live in a fantasy-image of what he or she could become rather than accepting the person who confronts you in actuality. You need to learn greater detachment and a more objective vision of life, and also could benefit from more overt stating of your ideas and needs to others - rather than hoping to be instantaneously and telepathically understood. Not everyone is as intuitive as you, and being able to be clear and direct about who you are and what you want can help you to a much greater sense of confidence in inhabiting that concrete world which you both fear and yet ultimately must embrace in order to feel real and secure in life.

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 this, 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.

A sentimental heart adds charm and warmth

There is a quality of softness and gentleness in you which sometimes borders on the sentimental, but which gives your personality enormous delicacy and charm. You are the sort of person who could wear old- fashioned styles with panache, and surround yourself with precious antique furnishings to create a private, enchanted world within the drearier actual one. You have considerable sensitivity to the feelings of others, and your tact and diplomacy are useful gifts in any personal or professional relationship. You are also acutely sensitive yourself, reacting to coldness or criticism by scuttling back into your enchanted private world where no one ever says an unkind word and where lovers are always true to each other. You are moody and melancholy, with a kind of "olde-worlde" touch of sadness like a character from a fin-de-siècle novel; but you are neither naive nor stupid about people, and know very well how to protect your feelings and your security should the occasion warrant. Thus you contain a strange paradox within you - a kind of hard shrewdness and canniness combined with a determination to create around yourself a gentle, slightly out of focus lifestyle which appears extremely vulnerable and easily shattered. But you do not shatter easily. You bruise, but your allegiance to your inner values is firm and unshakeable, and eventually you come out of hiding to try again. You tend to look back at the past a lot, both your own (which you have a tendency to romanticise and view through delicately tinted lenses) and the longer past, in the form of history. Anything from the mists of medieval romance draws you, for the world is full of knights alone and palely loitering and also full of sleeping princesses waiting for the kiss of a lover to awaken. History is also a place where you can inject your own interpretations without threat of someone rising from the dead to contradict you. With all this gossamer dream-spinning, however, you survive better than most, for you mistrust people on principle until you get to know them, and stay as far away from their potential hurtfulness as possible.

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 bring 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.

Living for and through others

Your openheartedness and strong feelings of empathy for others make you a supportive, caring and naturally self-sacrificing personality. You would do anything for those you love, and tend to forgive them almost anything; and however much you are hurt and disappointed, you do not lose your belief in the importance of kindness or in the worthiness of others. You are not inclined toward cold ambition, or the need to be somebody in the world's eyes. For this reason you function at your best when working in a cooperative capacity - linking people together and smoothing over dilemmas, supervising group networks and activities, and interpreting to others the directions of more aggressive souls. You love the feeling that you have been helpful to somebody, and whether it is in your work or your personal life, you need to be needed - not for any enduring strength or dynamism, but for your fluid empathy and understanding, your imagination, and your capacity to forgive. You are not very adept at drawing boundaries and protecting yourself, for you hate the feeling of isolation which too much self-reliance produces - and you would rather love and suffer, than be unloving and unharmed.

You are strong and intense in your emotional needs and tenacious in your desire to keep your relationships intact and your loved ones close; yet you do not like to show your strength directly, preferring to display a kind of helplessness and vulnerability which invoke compassion at best, sometimes pity, and at worst anger because people sense that you are not being totally out in the open and somehow feel manipulated by you. You tend to equate love with suffering - an equation which may not necessarily be a truth about life, but which is unquestionably your truth - as though you cannot justify your need for love unless it has been purified through self-immolation. If you wish to espouse such a philosophy of life, which may actually spring more from a deep-seated belief that you are undeserving than from true saintliness of soul, that is your right; and you are in good company, for such qualities belong to the pageant of the saints and martyrs and holy men and women of history. But do not be surprised if others do not espouse your philosophy, and try not to be quite so judgmental if they do not seem as loving as you believe you are. Perhaps they actually are - but in a different, although equally valid, way.

A powerful will to dominate is hidden

Besides your considerate and self-effacing personality, there is a hidden side of you which contains all those qualities which you have excluded or suppressed from your conscious values and behaviour in order to preserve the relationships and the kind self-image which are so important to you. This shadow-side is a good deal more self-centred and ruthless than you might think, and if you remain unconscious of its independent and forceful qualities then you are likely to imagine that you see these attributes in all those people by whom you are fascinated, positively or negatively - particularly individuals with whom you fall in love and who seem to embody a decisiveness, self-containment and freedom that you often lack. It is extremely important that you face this hidden side of you; for although it threatens your high ideals of love and sacrifice, it is necessary for your survival and your autonomy. Without a relationship with your own strong will, you run the risk of becoming one of life's professional victims, always at the mercy of others' wishes, feelings and actions, and never able to take charge of your own life.

It is not your horoscope which fates you with disappointment, but your own refusal to live what is in you. Because other people are so terribly important to you, you are frightened of losing them through too much directness and overt selfishness; and you tend to adapt subtler, more manipulative means of getting what you want. Although you will always place compassion and cooperation at the top of your list of priorities, no amount of self-effacement will turn you into a saint. It might be fruitful for you to consider how much your preoccupation with being so good and loving is connected with difficult experiences in childhood. You are a complicated person with liberal doses of both lovingness and wilfulness; and this makes you deep, interesting and vital. You have more to offer life, others and yourself than a sacrificial role.

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 this 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 idealise 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.

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 birth 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.

Selflessness and self-sacrifice

The subjective image of your mother portrayed in your birth horoscope is a poignant one. There is much of the mythic or archetypal Suffering Woman contained in this image, and probably your mother experienced many difficult circumstances in her life - either in her own childhood or in her marriage, or through illness or financial difficulty, or through the necessity of sacrificing her most cherished desires in order to look after others. Although your mother may have made sacrifices willingly because of her love and need of her family, nevertheless you have within you considerable guilt about her unhappiness, and a deep unconscious conviction that you are in some way responsible for redeeming her sacrifices through your own self-sacrifice. This places a great inner obligation on you, which you may carry without realising it, yet which has probably led you to choose a field of work where you have to deal with and help the pain or confusion of others. The experience of passive suffering and sacrifice which you have inherited through your relationship with your mother gives you a deep well of compassion, sensitivity and responsiveness to the emotional needs of others. This receptivity is a gift, which can be expressed either in an artistic field where sensitivity to the moods of the audience is required, or in the helping professions where it is so obviously needed.

The power of martyrdom

But the experience of sadness and disillusioned dreams embodied by your mother needs to be understood clearly, for otherwise your sense of guilt may lead you to lose a sense of your own boundaries and personal rights. You may allow others to take constant advantage of your ready sympathy, and forget that you too need nurturing. Perhaps you need to be stronger in affirming your right to be selfish, and more realistic in seeing that there is a certain manipulative dimension to the person who is consistently a passive victim of life and a certain manipulative dimension to your mother.

You may also fear deep commitment in relationship because of the threat of being drained, used up, and forced to sacrifice your own needs and potentials on behalf of another; for within you the image of your mother represents the price paid for too great dependency on others. But although you may sometimes appear independent and even hard, inwardly you are vulnerable and responsive and need the love of others just as your mother did.

The unique sensitivity and compassion which accompany this mother-image within you are rare gifts, but you will need to learn to express them while at the same time retaining a firm and realistic commitment to your own limits and boundaries. You know a great deal about pain, sacrifice, and helplessness, and also a great deal about manipulation through emotional blackmail - the darker face of this mother-image inside you. This profound instinctual wisdom is your inheritance, and if you can learn the delicate distinction between compassionate response to others and a kind of guilty bowing to emotional blackmail, then you will on the most profound level have truly redeemed whatever sacrifices your mother had to make - by being a whole person yourself, and a model to others of the fact that love and self-immolation do not necessarily go together.

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

Qualities of beauty and fragility

Your experience of your mother is deepened and rendered more potent by the fact that, on some level, you romanticised and idealised her, so that she emerges as a kind of princess from a fairy tale. Although she may seem to you to be anything but that now, nevertheless during your childhood you - and perhaps she as well - perceived in her many of the qualities of Cinderella: a refined and graceful figure who was subjected to a harsher and more difficult life than she might have wished for, but whose prince never arrived no matter how many frogs she kissed. Even if your mother had few material or educational opportunities, she probably possessed innate good taste and may, when younger, have been quite beautiful, or at least charming and popular.

Within you, this fairy tale princess embodies your own love of beauty, and your need for a life of harmony and pleasure. In order to express these qualities most creatively, you will need to be aware of this graceful aesthetic inheritance from your mother; for if you are unconscious of it, you run the risk of channelling your unconscious feelings about her into certain typical triangular relationship patterns which may cause you some dilemmas in adult life.

Your unconscious idealisation of your mother may make you feel unattractive and inferior as a woman in comparison to her, and you may unwittingly project onto her qualities of grace and sexual power which really belong to you. This may be true even if you do not recognise her in this way in your ordinary consciousness. Then you may have problems of envy with other women, and a tendency to make or find rivals among your own sex, becoming involved with men who seem to be attached elsewhere.

The fairy tale princess which is part of your image of your mother is really a highly positive figure, for it embodies your own refinement, taste and idealism. Your mother was not only a mother, but very much of a woman for you as well, and if you can face this dimension of your relationship with her then you can live out the best of this inheritance in your own personal and professional life.

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.

A devotional quality of heart

You are a truly kind person, with a quality of universality to your love that makes you sympathetic to just about everybody - particularly those who seem to be victims of life. This makes you particularly responsive in your close relationships, and you are inclined to make many sacrifices, great and small, in the name of love and because you understand all too well the needs and difficulties of your man. You love with a rather devotional quality, and you need to make sure that you do not spread yourself on the ground like a carpet for your partner to walk on simply because you are so generous-hearted. Your man can easily take advantage of you without meaning to; and you need to learn to say no sometimes, and to ask for what you want occasionally rather than adapting yourself so exclusively to his needs. Not only your partner but all your friends are likely to appreciate your sympathetic nature. What might not be quite so appreciated is your tendency to be so sympathetic that you get pulled into romantic and sexual entanglements out of pity and the inability to say no - entanglements which you must then lie your way out of. It is possible to be too kind and too willing to give yourself away because of momentary empathy or enchantment, with the result that you wind up doing the thing you hate the most - hurting someone else.

The pleasures of the verbal love-game

Intelligence and a capacity to share your thoughts are qualities you value highly in a partner if you are to build a long-term relationship with any man. No matter how attractive, charming, socially suitable or erotically exciting a lover is, in the end you tend to become bored if you cannot talk to him. And when you become bored, you become critical and even nitpicking, finding fault everywhere and making your dissatisfaction known through chronic flirtations with other people which tell your partner loudly and clearly that you are suffocating. There is a touch of the intellectual snob about you, but it is not mere posturing; you are a clever and sophisticated person with strong aesthetic sensitivities, and you genuinely love the world of the mind. Your partner must be able to share in that world, and nothing less will do. You also like to use words a lot, to talk, philosophise and theorise about love; and you may have difficulties with a more taciturn or dour type of man who cannot play with romantic words and gestures as you can. In part, you love this kind of verbal love-game for its own sake, because it is stylish and graceful and makes love interesting; and in part you do it because you tend to protect your feelings with your intellect so that you are less vulnerable. There is a rather cool and detached side to your love-nature which, however initially smitten you might be, quickly assesses the intelligence of your man and gives a rating. And you expect your partner to have the same capacity for detachment and reason, for you dislike steamy emotional scenes and rapidly become evasive, aloof and disinterested if your man starts becoming what you call irrational. You need and deserve an intellectual match. What you can afford a little less of is your critical tongue, which can reduce anyone to ribbons - and often when he has done nothing to merit it except express needs which you construe as voiced in an inappropriate way. After all, not even the most intelligent partner - not to mention you yourself - can be clever and articulate all the time.

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 to 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.

A journey into the unseen world

You will never find real fulfillment by clinging to material reality and ignoring the unseen and invisible dimensions of life. You possess an innate connection with the deeper and larger ocean of the collective unconscious and all that it contains - the domain of fantasy, myth, mystical feeling and the inheritance of the past. In other words, your life can only take on meaning if you give expression to your poetic soul, which also means giving value to the creative and spiritual worlds. Many things in the past - particularly the family past - have affected you and held you in a state of confusion or apathy, although you may not be fully conscious of what goes on inside you. At some point you may need to explore this area of what might be called "family karma" - not merely to seek pathologies and negative experiences, but to understand how you are the recipient and the vessel of talents and urges which may go back for many generations but which others in your family have not been able to express. It is the inner world which holds the key to your sense of meaning and purpose in life, and it is not just your personal inner world - it is the whole rich backdrop of human mystical longing and creative aspiration, for which, in your own small but unique way, you are a medium.

In some ways your nature suits your need to serve something greater than yourself, for this is part of your vision of love. But you are more inclined to offer your devotion to another individual, rather than seeking that numinous source which stands behind all people. Try to separate your loving feelings about those close to you from the deeper and more mystical feelings which mark the path to the inner world. For if you confuse a loved one with the vast realm of the spirit, you will wind up feeling powerless, impotent and victimised; but if you can distinguish that alternative reality which is the true object of your devotion, you can find genuine meaning and fulfillment in life without having to suffer so much on a personal level.

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 unashamedly expressing your own individuality - can become the indestructible base from which you can launch your voyage into the unknown waters of the unconscious. For the more confident you become in the worth of your own ideas and feelings, the less overwhelmed you will feel when confronted by the amorphous sea of human longing and aspiration; and the more capable you will be of turning your imaginative inner perceptions into creative forms which bear the unique stamp of your own personality while at the same time expressing the universality of the inner world.

Copyright Astrodienst AG 1997. All Rights are reserved. 27-Oct-1997