Astrological Hand-me-downs

I first posted on this topic in 2007. Time for another look:

I've always felt fairly confident, from personal experience, observation and a little bit of Aquarian logic, that astrological traits flow through families, but it seems that when subjected to rigorous testing the theory doesn't hold up. Michel Gauquelin carried out exhaustive research in the 1960s and 70s without finding anything as conclusive as astrologers might have expected.

I have a copy of Gauquelin's book "Planetary Heredity". It's not easy reading! Here's what he had concluded by
Chapter 9:

"For the convenience of the reader, let me summarize the main findings. My investigations of over 25,000 deliveries have found that children tend to be born when the same significant celestial body (the Moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter or Saturn) is in the same diurnal zone (rise culmination, or outside) as it was at the birth of their parents. There is no effect for the Sun or other planets, or for astrological signs, aspects and houses. The effect is not influenced by sex, duration of labor or birth order. It is increased if both parents share the same diurnal positions. It tends to disappear if the birth is artificially induced. The effect is not large, but is reproducible and statistically highly significant."

So "something is going on", but not exactly as previously surmised. I just wonder though, if going up close with a powerful microscope, as Monsieur Gauquelin did so efficiently, doesn't blind us to the bigger picture. If you examine an oil painting up close with a magnifying glass, you do not see what the painting portrays, you see only random, meaningless brush strokes.

Astrologer C.E.O. Carter points out in his Encyclopedia of Psychological Astrology :

"However, it cannot be doubted that any part of the nativity may represent an inherited trait, and the examination of the nativities of members of the same family confirms this. In a case known to the writer, the father and his three sons, and six out of ten grandchildren, had Saturn in either Aries or Cancer! It is also frequently found that the same sign is prominent in the great majority of the horoscopes of a family, containing, as a rule, one of the Lights, or the ascendant."

I can't help thinking that there's something else - something important that we just don't know yet, which needs to be included in the equation, before scientists like M. Gauquelin can get a clear view of the big picture.

Some comments from 2007:

I am right there with you with the astrology / genetics connection, which I see as incredibly strong. Even though astrology is part of the holographic universe that has a foot in other dimensions as well as this one, I still think that this could be a “theory” that has weight which could be demonstrated using the scientific method. Perhaps we need to look at different variables.
(Melody)


I'm also interested in analyzing the astrological family patterns.
I've written an article about an interesting case found on my activity:
http://www.ciuboda.com/post/family-patterns-ceres-grand-cross/80
(Dan)


Though by no means proven, I've tended to see that elements tend to run in families, through the Sun, Moon, and Ascendant. My family are all Water signs and I am the lone Earth Sign; this explains a lot about why I always felt like the odd one out of the bunch. My mother's family is full of Water, too, especially Cancer (my Dad is a Cancer); the exceptions are the two "rebels" of the family: My aunt will Earth Sun and Moon and my uncle with Air Sun and Moon.
My Dad's family (his planets are all clustered in Cancer and Libra with only Mercury in Leo) also has this strong focus on Water and Air, though both my Aunts have Earth Ascendants (I seem to get along better with members of my family that have a strong earth placement).
In my immediate family, we all have Water or Earth Suns and Fire or Air Moons. I also share a Leo Moon with my mother. The Ascendants are all Water or Air too (the most prominent signs), except for my Capricorn Rising.
My cousin's daughter was born Saturday, and is a Virgo Sun, Taurus Moon with Scorpio Rising. Her father is Sun in Taurus, Moon in Pisces and her mother is Sun in Capricorn Moon in Cancer (unkown ascendants). I find it rare in family charts to see kids who are elementally different to their parents.
Also, I have seen many charts where the Mother shares the moon sign with one of her children or it is in the same element (also, kids with moon signs that share the same planetary ruler). In my immediate family, the exception is my brother, but his Aquarius Moon opposes (by sign, not degree) both mine and my Mom's! So it's not completely unrelated. My other brother has a Sag Moon.
(RCSL)

Original post & comments here.


My own credentials for thinking that there are astrological hand-me-downs in family circles :
My mother had three planets in Cancer, I had Cancer rising natally. She also had Jupiter in Pisces, as do I. My father had Sun in Aquarius as do I, he had Saturn in Aries, as do I, and Mercury in Capricorn, as do I. Degrees are different in each case, but zodiac signs are the same. I don't have birth times for my parents, so can't compare rising signs. Mother had Sun in Libra, making us an Airy trio. My Dad's family has quite a strong Aquarius influence among my uncles and cousins. I can only assume it was inherited from my paternal grandfather's unknown father. My mother's father had Sun in Gemini, more Airiness. She inherited the Cancer emphasis from her Taurus Sun mother who also had emphasis on Cancer.


Some links to other material on this topic:

Astrology and Heredity: a Personal Detective Story by Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum.

The Australian Parent-Child Astrological Research Project by Bernadette Brady.

Astrology and Heredity: The Thread of Life a book by Rosemary Peel

The Astrology of Family Dynamics by Erin Sullivan (I like the look of this one - read pages from it at Google Books

All in the Family: Cloning, Genetics & Astrology by Valerie Vaughan.

Another post of mine: Family Astrology ~ Family Portraits

WHY GRANDPARENTS COUNT (OFTEN) MORE

GUEST POST BY GIAN PAUL

For children, and with respect to one's parents or grand-parents we will always be that, the better part of the "old ones" are the grand-parents, most of the time anyway. Astrology gives some answers for that, tentatively at least. Also, I must say beforehand, that my comments are due to an often tense relationship I have had with my father. But knowing that this is not a big exception and quite often also happens to others, father and son or mother and daughter, this post may be helpful to someone else, rather than just being of "astrological interest".

At the boarding school I attended there was a truly genial teacher of natural sciences. He had a strange head, very conical, which earned him the nick-name of Dr. Pot (Topf in German). Had he lived longer (he died shortly after our class had graduated), he would have been proud to discover that about one third of his pupils became either chemists, physicists or medical doctors.

"Dr. Topf" is mentioned here because he presented an intriguing idea, but also added that there was no proof for that, and that he hoped that one of his students may prove it one day. He said that the human being was built on 48 chromosomes etc. In his view, as every human has 4 grand-parents, most probably each of them was contributing with 12 chromosomes. In a democratic world that is, an interesting detail, he gave. I do not know if science today has been able to corroborate "Dr Topf's" assumption.



It actually is not even so important (except for science maybe). What struck me then, was that my all-dominating, controlling father was not the only one who had contributed to my existence, and neither my mother who was exceedingly obedient to him, as at least I was thinking then, at the "revolting age of puberty". I clearly preferred all my grand parents over my parents and to discover a biological explanation for that was very satisfactory.

Besides "Dr. Topf's" scientific (although not proven) theory, there was circumstantial evidence for such preferences. Not only were the grand parents much more patient and rarely criticized us (I have a brother), but they took us more seriously and listened to us. But, and that was some consolation, my parents were not different from other parents, I rapidly found out from several of my classmates. Parents lack objectivity with respect to their immediate offspring. Or patience. Today I realize in all objectivity, that the grand parents, for having more life experience, have an advantage. They also usually see their grand children in more favorable circumstances than just day-to-day. At Christmas, birthdays and during other often special circumstances. But in fact my relationship was much better with my grand parents. And "Dr. Topf" gave the reason and I believe this somewhat "defused" the problems I had with my father.

Unfortunately I never attempted to have a conversation about this with my parents or one of my grand fathers, especially one of them who had a scientific mind. It might have helped to further clear the "generational conflicts" from which I suffered and which were really stupid, creating permanent tensions, especially with my father.

Later on, when I got involved with astrology, I tried to find out about any links a natal horoscope may offer to one's parents and grand parents. As usually happens, I started with myself and others in my family. What I rapidly discovered, also extending my observation to people outside the family, is that a child very often has, if not the same Sun-sign as one of his grand-parents, so his/her Ascendant often turns out to be of the Sun-sign of one of his grand-parents.

My Ascendant is Sagittarius, both my parents were sun-sign Sagittarius. In that sense I am a direct product of my parents. So I had to look further for the reasons for my sun-sign, Aries. Three(!)of my grand parents were Aries. My parent's respective Ascendants were Libra for my mother, Scorpio for my (quite dictatorial) father. The one grand parent who was not Aries, was a Virgo, my maternal grandmother. I was very close to her - and happen to have Moon in Virgo. This, for me, was an important corroboration of the value of astrology (which I then was still contemplating with some skepticism).




My brother, a Leo, has Ascendant in Virgo (same as the sun-sign of the grand mother just mentioned). Two of my three cousins are sun-sign Leos. I suspect that one of my 4 grand parents must have had Ascendant in Leo. But could not investigate as I do not have their hour of birth. But my brother's and 2 of 3 cousins' sun-sign in Leo points the way for that being probable. (Most likely, a grand parent's sun-sign reappears in one or several of his/her grand children's Ascendant or sun-sign. Or vice-versa).

As time went by, I met people who had doubts about their birth hour or could not find it at all, especially in Brazil. Lula, the outgoing president here, e.g. even has two dates of birth: one for the day his mother says he was born, another for the day his father went (as Lula said himself on donkey's back) to the next town to register the birth of his first son. Did he indicate the day of birth, if he remembered that, or the day he arrived in town and his son was registered? That Lula is a Scorpio appears certain (judging by his character), but exactly on which day in October or November 1945 he was born, nobody knows.

For most of the cases where I proceeded to "rectify" a horoscope (a technique used when the birth hour of somebody is uncertain or totally unknown and presenting quite a job, but rewarding), I inquired about the sun-signs of the grand parents of the person concerned. And, without having "kept statistics" for that, it often helped to confirm my findings when the Ascendants were in doubt.

This may sound like a lot of technicalities for non-astrologers, but isn't this blog designed to explain and to help finding out what's on Twilight's (and her reader's) Ecliptic? What happens to people in their childhood often leaves an imprint for life. And given a child's dependence on adults, parents and grand parents play a decisive role in many cases.

The further one investigates, the more many things appear to be connected. With respect to one's parents, one may be well advised to take into account what Dr. Topf's "thing with a democratic distribution of chromosomes" may mean in practice: More access for children to their grand parents. But that needs intelligent behavior and understanding by the parents. If grand parents are mostly used as a "dumping-ground" for children when needed, it creates the wrong premises. Parents should beware of the sensitivities involved. On all sides.

The position defended here is mostly the one of children. However, the interests of parents are not being neglected by recognizing the important role grand parents can play. Children have a great deal of "genetical sensitivity" which over time, as they grow up, may disappear. But it probably is something much more fundamental than imagined and astrology appears to have some explanation for that.