children create their parents

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The following dilemma in natal astrology bothers me from time to time. It may be more prominent in modern psychological astrology, with its parental complexes; yet traditional astrologers of the past were also concerned to delineate the native's parents' social status, income, and characters.

Does the child with a horoscope showing parental difficulties essentially have to create the "bad" parent?

According to whichever astrological system you use, I personally believe that the child's horoscope shows the child's experience of the parent, more than the literal parent. If the child has siblings, then each of them may have very different parental indicators. Sometimes parents might treat their children differently, or the family's fortunes might vary across the times at which the children are born and raised. But most loving parents try to be even-handed with their children. The parent's horoscope, further, will show its own traits for the parent-child relationship, and these might look positive even when the child's chart looks troubled.

However, the Hellenistic astrologers I've read were pretty clear that the horoscope described the actual parent. I've come across something comparable in the early books of psychological astrologer Liz Greene. A messed-up moon in Aries gives the standard psychological bad mother, responsible for her analysand son's neuroses.

What troubles me is the thought that if a child is born with a parentally difficult chart, does an ordinary mom or dad thereby have to become the difficult parent?

What kind of universe or philosophy would explain this type of reality, if that's what it is?

So far as I recall, the Fates of ancient Greece predicted one life at a time, not a suite of familial relationships. I don't know whether the philosophers, Muslim, or Christian astrologers addressed this quandary.

Your thoughts?

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I cannot think offhand what Christian philososophers say but I seem to remember that Jesus did not go along with the idea that the the sins of the father were visited on the child. Forgive me if I infer wrong but you seem to to suggest that a natal chart makes a baby guilty of having bad parents. Parents do often love one child over another but these parents are objective real people and not constructs. One can be born with bad parents , bad government or find oneself born in unfortunate times and this may or may not show up in the natal chart but we have to live with it one way or another
Matthew
Matthew Goulding

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Actually, I didn't suggest that a baby could be "guilty" of having bad parents. I and most people assume that babies are innocent of any type of wrong-doing. I mean, they're babies!

We could debate whether there is an incarnating soul that chooses its moment and place of birth, as well as its familial circumstances, such that it might "choose" a difficult parent in order to further its soul growth.

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The term " guilty " in this context was a bit strong I admit but if reincarnation comes into it and that belief comes from eastern ideas of karma then I will leave it for now

I was thinking of my school divinity teacher when i answered. She may have been Anglo-Indian Christian but unbidden she objected to karma. I do not object on religious grounds but simply because the concept is not well understood in the west

If our parents are lousy are we paying a karmic debt for being bad parents ourselves? Who can tell but I do know of good mothers who themselves had bad mothers but resolved to do a better job.

Let us take a traditional view that the fourth house ruler is the father and not the native's attitude. It opposes the native and so it comes to pass they argue worse than most. Bad luck or God revealing some purpose? Again who can tell?
Matthew
Matthew Goulding

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Many make the mistake of thinking that planet or sign = them. Like saying "I'm a Libra" and then making a self identification with it. For instance some assume that if the Sun is in fall there that it is somehow "bad". What this means is that the Sun is not supported in being itself in the way it would be in Aries or Leo, but the difficulty that the Sun has in expressing itself in the sky doesn't necessarily translate into difficulty for the native. For instance, Jimmy Carter has a Libra Sun and his presidency (Sun) was most noted for the Israeli peace accord. Some might say that he was a "weak" president which would be indicative of the Sun not asserting itself (sound like the opposite of Aries Sun).

It would be similarly the case with Sun in Aquarius, which is one of many "suns" and has to struggle to "stand out".

The same goes for the 4th house and the children's parents. In my experience counseling, usually the parental significators tend to show very similar circumstances, but that may be my personal astrological "client draw" bias (the bias that the astrologer has for drawing a certain type of client because of their nativity). But one should realize that some charts speak about some things and are mute on others. One should be alert for indications that the chart isn't trying to say anything about the parents, rather than try to force something out that isn't being said because the astrologer needs to fill in a time segment. Each chart wants to talk about something and one should be alert to what that is rather than go sign by sign or house by house or aspect by aspect.
Curtis Manwaring
Zoidiasoft Technologies, LLC

Re: children create their parents

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waybread wrote: Does the child with a horoscope showing parental difficulties essentially have to create the "bad" parent?
Your thoughts?
hi waybread.. good question and i like the others response - all individualistic and relevant...

i don't like the good/bad terms but they are used in life and astrology. i mostly think in musical terms - harmony - what is dissonant creates a tension that is complimented by some type of resolution.. some type of movement between stress and release - a kind of ebb and flow between the opposites if you will, is how i like to view astrology.. some charts appear much more difficult, but even the ones that seem positive present a challenge for the person with too much ease and not enough challenge.

i don't think the child with a chart showing parental difficulties has to create the 'bad' parent. maybe the child's experience is circumstantial and they do have a bad parent which i suppose is a more traditional astro viewpoint.. if one believes in the idea of karma, it is a hold over from the past.. neither of these ideas appeal to me as they leave out the idea of our freedom to choose how we respond to our circumstances which to me is the key ingredient to life..

in my own family - i have 2 siblings - we all experienced our parents differently... that suggests it's more about us then it is about them..

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To look at this conundrum in another way, and I personally think this has a big effect on the OP comments. Consider the influence of "Sibbling birth order" something of which is always passed from one generation to the next no doubt.

A quick intro > http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Birth_order

My own parents (and I'll try hard NOT to be subjective here, lol...)

Mother - 1st born,
Father - last born.

My mother always wanted to live within the same cluster of suburbs she grew up in, that is, the eastern suburbs of my home town and in the most upper middle class areas. This is typical behavior from 1st borns, trying to maintain the status quo of the native family unit she was born into and to improve or raise its socio-economic standing in any way possible.

Father on the other hand, being the last born in his clan, had this "I'm special because I'm the youngest" approach in his attitudes and values as he approached life. He could be a great entertainer when he wanted to be, in fact, I believe he would have gone far in a circus or something... lol..

The above quick summaries of my parents are well reflected in many psychology studies on this concept. A perusal of the net will unravel many research articles on this phenomenon.

As for myself... well, lets just say being in the middle has its challenges...lol... :)
Libra Sun/ Pisces Moon/ Sagittarius Rising

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A question that follows from this is, is there a purpose to bad experiences?

Purpose rather than karma, which is a horrific thought in the context of a small child's experience. A child doesn't understand what is happening to him.

The case of Baby Peter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Baby_P made me wonder why God or whatever decides what happens could possibly allow an innocent child to suffer like that, even if he is an eternal soul is there anything positive from that experience? Or does it damage a soul forever, as such experiences in young children would damage the person for life?

Baby Peter was born on 1st March 2006, London. He died on 3rd August 2007, London.

Transiting Pluto when he died in August 2007 was exactly 26.5 degrees Sagittarius, which was hard aspecting the Mercury of both Baby Peter and his mother. In my observations, Mercury represents events in the lives of a person's children at any time after birth, birth itself being the Moon. (Everyone here knows that Mercury also represents other things, but one common manifestation is a person's children, and the Moon does not represent a person's children imo). His mother's Saturn at 3.5 degrees Libra has an antiscion of 26.5 degrees Pisces, which is conjunct Peter's Mercury and square her own Mercury. So transiting Pluto was strongly manifesting her natal Mercury Saturn square.
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Fleur, I think you've raised important questions that we can't answer.

Looking at this child's chart for explanations begs the bigger and far more profound question of the type of universe or type of humanity that could allow horrible child abuse and murder to happen. And a horoscope won't show us that.

The Hellenistic astrologers had formulae for determining a baby "who would not be reared." They don't say why this should be the case, but we might assume high infant mortality in an ancient society, birth defects, and the like. What they don't say is that Romans exposed unwanted children, sometimes in garbage dumps. One hopes such a prediction never became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I might look for some violent propensity in either the child's or the parent's charts, but as you said, there is something far deeper about such cases.

I don't believe in karma in a strict Hindu sense. My readings suggest a different possibility; that souls incarnate to learn and to teach; or simply to complete some incomplete issue in their past life. Baby Peter's case apparently had profound implications for British child welfare and social services agencies. We might imagine an old soul who chose to incarnate as Baby Peter with the goal of reforming child welfare in Britain.

I realize this possibility sounds heretical, and I by no means mean to imply anything as horrible as "he asked for it." Alternatively, this was a shocking, senseless act, that runs far deeper philosophically than this or that aspect can indicate.

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misplaced my login/pssw, co-incidently found it just now...I remember a dear friend, long since passed, scorpio mercury : ) would LOOK at me and say, sometime we choose to incarnate again, even after we have "earned' the gift not to do so. To stir up the stagnant waters? To offer a gift?

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waybread wrote:To teach or to learn.
I will come to that in a moment but I had been giving this some thought lately. The instinct to do good good is the basic one whether one says it is following God's plan or whatever way one describes it but in a case of abusing one's own child - like baby P - it is clearly gone seriously wrong

Liberals used to be condemned for blaming society instead of the individual for crime but were they right? If the rulers and leaders are greedy and indifferent then can we be surprised that the people do wrong?

I watched a documentary about terminally ill children once. The parents of a nine-year wanted every avenue explored to save him. The kid was in daily pain and confided that he would accept what had happened and would rather face death. I would say that was teaching fortitude
Matthew Goulding