|
 |
|
|
|
Astrologer's Notes:
Thinking Magically and Critically: Contemporary Astrology and What It Can Do For You:
|
|
|
The Water Houses:
The Ancestral Eyes Of The Soul
part 2 of 3
by Erin Sullivan |
|
|
|
|
|
The Fourth House: The Ancestral Family of Origin
'Full circle, from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb, we come: an ambiguous, enigmatical incursion into a world of solid matter that is soon to melt from us, like the substance of a dream.'
Joseph Campbell.
In the strictest sense of the meaning, the fourth house of the horoscope does mean our home, however, in the global community, 'home' might not mean the fourth house in the chart. That is, we may not live in the land of our nativity. The old saw, 'We are judged in the land of our nativity' means that no matter where we go, there we are, fourth house and all. In fact, our fourth house is bigger than we think - it is tenanted by family members who have passed on before us and those who have not yet been born. It is the house of the ancestors and the progeny of our own lives.
The fourth house is the house of greatest personal mystery.
Experiences occur there which never reach consciousness and clusters of planets around the I.C. can add to the mystery of it, rather than fully explain it. Like the roots of a great, ancient tree, our own source of deep earthy nourishment and life-blood is underground, hidden and protected from the light of day. That roots continue to grow and seek new ground in accord with the sprouting of fresh branches and leaves implies that our ancestral linkage is itself enriched with each new addition to its chain - and with each conscious step forward, we excite the ancestors into new life. In the same mysterious way as the tree, our own lives grow and branch and our roots sink deeper and more resiliently with each day, adding to our lives an inestimable measure of enriched life.
Many cultures place great emphasis on the ancestral spirits.
Their daily lives include their forebears in ways which might seem superstitious or sentimental to some. Yet, a majority of cultures pay great homage to their ancient pasts, not out of fear and oppression by ghosts, but because they are aware that within each of them as individuals lie the souls of all the ancestors whom went before. Through this mainline to the souls of family lineage the peoples of aboriginal cultures are strengthened and fortified emotionally, physically and spiritually. They are the spirits of the ancestors incarnate. Walking with the dead is taken for granted and great respect is paid to these foundations of life-blood, they are religiously involved with their progenitors.
That is not to say that we of the Western civilization are not respectful of the ancestors - after all, we are more than proud of our great-grandfather who started his own company, for instance, or of grandmother who courageously left her homeland for a new country, thus starting a fresh line of settlers. We are indeed! However, when we are considering aspects of an individual's nature and concentrating on his or her natal horoscope, we might run up against some mysterious blockage which we cannot 'explain'. There may be a haunting or a deep sadness which may not be completely accounted for in the psychology of the immediate family. Also, there may be a longing for a path or direction in life which is quite outside the expectations or understanding of one's immediate family. Sometimes there are inexplicable feelings of obligation toward maintaining a family situation or ritual which no-one appeared to consciously require from you.
We might be considerably more healthy if we had our ancestral linkage present in our nuclear family-structures in everyday ways. . . that is, by bringing in the grandparents, and their history we are one-step-removed from the immediate parents. This can reduce the emotional charge of the immediate parents and siblings. We are too close to our parents to fully appreciate their impact on our psyche, and it is often only when we reach our own mid-life that we truly see who they are, and by then they are very old or sometimes dead. The proximity can be blinding. It can either deify or under-appreciate the parents as people themselves. This is part of the nature of things, that the parents are merely a link to the past and a biological step forward into our future. However, if our myths, our history and our ancestral line were more emphasized then we might find more objectivity in the family structure.
Even more mysterious is the situation where an individual feels called to go back to a root-religion long abandoned by the family for generations. There are many cases where the person did not even know of their spiritual origins and was mysteriously drawn toward expressing a religion or a calling toward a place or idea! In a large family, there may be one person who carries the message of the ancestors and feels an obscure, but unequivocal mandate to fulfill that inner command. The fourth house can shed light on such situations, and add a rich dimension to one's awareness of participating in a very large family.
The fourth house is both womb and tomb - it is the fertile source of our own life and harbours the past shrouded in dignified mystery. We too often pass it off as 'mother' (or father in some cases), 'real-estate', or the address at which we live. It is all of those but more - it is where we live, where we find life and it is the root of all our longings to be. It is out of the fourth house that we individuate and become increasingly ourselves. We must continually go back into that labyrinth to wrest out lost or unborn aspects of individuality and bring them into daylight for foster and care and maturation. This is a lifelong process and one which must never be abandoned in the name of being 'all grown up'. If the process of individuation is as it appears to be, then it is never accomplished, but is transitive and ongoing.
The Moon and the sign Cancer are the rulers of this house, and the Moon represents the personal womb, as different from the twelfth house, the collective womb. These are very physical symbols, the Moon and Cancer. The personal container for our incarnation was our mother, and her nurture brought us to the brink of life. Once severed from her, the fourth house then becomes our place of containment for the early years of life, a place where all the family patterns and influences from generations past settle in our psyche.
The sign Cancer is the most secretive sign of all in that it can function with complete unconsciousness of its visceral - gut-reaction - motives, yet primarily operates by this intuitive and instinctual function. Cancer is deeply concerned with its territory, its manor, its home. The fourth house is how we respond on a deep, physical level to the world around us, based not only on our immediate nuclear family, but the ancestral pool from which we are comprised. So, the Moon and the fourth house then later becomes the foundation for the extension and procreation of the continuing family line, as we grow older, make our own homes, create our own families and so on. All of which is based on the mysterious combination of hundreds and thousands of ancestral bodies.
Nestled in the fourth house is the soulful recollection of everything related to the blood-line, one's dynastic family of origin. It is easy to transpose the fourth house as the mother because our mother is the vehicle for our incarnation, she houses us in gestation while our bodies mature mysteriously and secretly to term. (In ancient astrology the fourth house was the 'house of confinement', when a woman was pregnant and hidden from society). When does the soul enter this body? We do not know this answer, but it is sufficient to say that the soul is a often reluctant dweller in the body and its longings are to go home - somewhere, wherever 'home' is. As we read in the twelfth house, this home is a very large place, indeed.
Naturally, the actual conditions surrounding one's immediate family - parents, siblings - and one's created family - partner, children - all are found in this mysterious house. But, they, too are all part of this great reservoir of genes, codes, blood and bones. We are deeply entrenched in the web of the family and it is necessary to define oneself as separate from but belonging to a family. To a greater or lesser degree, depending upon how closed the unit is, liberation from the family is necessary for personal development. This may take the form of a simple maturation process, or perhaps the discovery that one is carrying a gift from the family lineage or holding the charge of neurotic family complexes.
I have found that the more complex the immediate family is, especially if it is extremely malignant, the more important it is that the fourth house be considered as a larger container than just that immediate family. We are trained to think that all our problems (and blessings) come directly from the interaction of the nuclear family in which we spent the formative years of our lives. This is patently not true. That way of thinking is fast becoming outmoded and by the time we are well into the 21st century will very likely cease to be a major consideration. The fact is, we are part of a much larger collective and are increasingly intertwined with global issues. The fourth house must also contain the history of the entire family pattern. If there are very hard aspects or several of the outer planets in the fourth house, there may be some characteristic that has been passed into the individual to transmute for the entire family lineage.
A word-play in ancient Greek is particularly profound in this sense: the Greek words for body and tomb are remarkably similar - body = soma and tomb = sema. The quote from Joseph Campbell at the start of this chapter highlights the soma/sema analogy, whether that is deliberate or not, I do not know. However we perceive body and soul, the Platonic view is thus: the body is the grave of the soul and its liberation is not only necessary but desirable. But the soul's journey after springing free of the body and its journey through the liminal place between incarnation is complicated and arduous. This we know from reading the twelfth house in which crossing the river Lethe required the soul to drink not too deeply from this 'river of forgetfulness'. This fourth house soul is the family soul, where we are intuitively connected to our ancestors and from whence we begin our incarnate journey. It is how we remember our history and what it has to offer us this time round.
The soul itself does recollect the past, but does the mind? If the mind does not recollect then the body will - and through the body of one's own self and the body of the family and the ancestral past, we recall ourselves and the innate wisdom of all that has gone before. We can only achieve this 'knowledge' of recollection in soulful ways - through feelings, dreams, images, urges, vocations, longings, hopes, fantasies, love, intimacy with one's own deepest self. We can only listen to the soul in the privacy of our own senses and bodies and minds.
We might be reminded of our soul's path through another person or an experience, but we are never knowledgeable, we never understand it in the intellect. The soul is not the intellect. The process of finding the ancestors and digging into the archaeology of the family psyche can bring us to the purpose of our life.
Because the houses are reflexive, that is they incorporate aspects by implication from the opposite house, the tenth house is also important as a family place. As the fourth house is the most secret the tenth house is the most public. Often we can see more clearly by reflection something that is too glaring or too deeply unconscious. A person fulfills his or her creative impetus based upon the security of self-discovery in the context of the family. If that foundation is shaky or disruptive, or the person has to work through dynastic patterns to get to his or her own essence, then arriving at personal creativity and security can be a major struggle.
The tension of the IC/MC and fourth/tenth house axis rests on a longing for a sense of continuity of past and urgency toward the future. They appear to be at odds, but when we really think of life and its paradoxes, it is this very tension which gives meaning and thrust to being alive. If one or the other becomes overwhelmingly dominant, then a real spiritual crisis occurs. That is, if one is inclined to ignore the longings of the soul to retreat in favour of the demands of the outer world, then the soul sickens and withers. If the soul has ascendancy to the extreme, then there is no excitation of the body/mind and a dullness, an apathy toward the world ensues and a loss of thumos - life-force, libido - arises and depression can result. Having a relative balance requires both body and soul to conspire and collude in what appears to be a transitory but highly interesting life.
A basic psychological premise proposes that we 'project' interior secrets in very public ways - we can measure our inner selves in the outside world by reflecting on the deeper, hidden meaning of our actions, accomplishments and associations with others. Planets in the fourth house speak eloquently about the foundations of our security and the relationship we have with the family as our personal fate.
When the Sun or Moon is in the fourth, it is the individual's very purpose in life to get to the essence of the family matrix. They enjoy it, unless there are very hard aspects to the lights, and if Venus and Mercury are also there, then there can be a general fascination with genetics, family patterns, history and the whole issue of families as a subject. They have been required to spend a great deal of their creative energy feeling secure - this is not automatically a security placement, but one in which security must be acquired through trust. Normally, an introverted signal, home, family and native roots are essential to their health and well-being. One can either carry on a family tradition in vocation or on the contrary, there can be a need to individuate right out of the family-system in order to become wholly independent. By nature this person is a dependent person - his or her identity is bound up with the whole family as a persona, hence the need to do one or other extreme.
Mars brings all the wars in the family history into the psyche of the person, they experience the inner war, and often are the rage carrier of the family. There are some erotic overtones, here, as well, and though not an indicator of incest (there is no single indicator of any pathology), this person picks up any unresolved sexual issues which are dormant or repressed in the immediate family. There may have been a sexual issue in the ancestors - secret homosexuality, prostitution, illegitimate children, and so forth, but all that must be brought into the open, and this is the one in the family destined to do that.
Jupiter in the fourth is the necessity of finding ones roots and cleansing them of all social guilt and ills. This is a joyful end, but can be a long, torturous and multi-cultural exploration. The person who undergoes this journey willingly, has the reward of freeing the family from its own curse, should there have been felt to be one. There has been a very powerful religion influencing the family, likely an ethnic one, or a history of oppression either by the family or of the family by cultural coincidence, a strong moral conditioning lies at the foundation of the family. The person may need to travel widely or leave their native land to complete this task.
Saturn in the fourth talks about feeling the responsibility for being the sole carrier of the not only the parent's but also the ancestral guilt. The child grows into the adult who feels the need to expiate the burdens of the family-system. There is often a confusion about the parents roles, where each of them is, for instance, who the nurturer is and who the provider is. The birth parents will likely have neglected to realize that this child is inherently anxious to please and 'knows' he or she is marked by a responsibility and thus they can damage his or her sense of personal authority by demanding too much regard for them as authorities or force upon the child their values or opinions. As adults they will be fascinated by history and their own origins.
Neptune in the fourth shows a fear of being lost, sacrificed, ignored or victimized; there is a sense of boundlessness which breeds fear of disappearing and very often that was compounded by real-life events. There may have been any number of circumstances that fed the sense of insecurity - alcoholic parent(s), ill parent - especially the mother, too many relocations in childhood, illness as a child resulting in isolation, or living, somehow, 'at sea'. There is a psychic fusion with the ancestors, and a sense of vagueness about the immediate, nuclear family ; people with this placement experience odd moments of atavism where they are cast out-of-time, they are frequently uncomfortable with contemporary society, though are often gifted at portraying themselves as being in synch with the zeitgeist. Their deep, inner vision of the world is not contemporaneous, but is beyond temporal bounds.
Uranus in the fourth symbolizes a strong need to individuate beyond the bounds of the immediate family. It will require strength and courage in adolescence to progress. Very often, there is a renegade in the background, a grandparent or ancestor who was very inventive or ingenious in some way, who failed according to his or her own lights, and the new chance rests in the soul of this person, his or her next opportunity to change the direction of the family. This is so often indicative of a total split between mother and father, where the child carries two vastly different family lines and they meet in him or her. Hence, the radical, revolutionary need to break out of both lines of the family which are meeting in such a conflicting way, and do something entirely different, to challenge and shock the nuclear family.
Pluto in the fourth speaks of a secret, of something hidden in the ancestral closet. There can be undercurrents in the family-system which are dark and mysterious, casting long shadows. It makes for an inquisitive child and a truth-seeking adult. If the family secrets are indeed, dire, then the Pluto/fourth person feels strongly his or her responsibility for purgation - of both her own personal soul, and the souls of the ancestors. Being carried along on the river of family secrets inevitably lends a feeling of helplessness, something the Pluto/fourth house person abhors, but has to cope with. Contact with the dead, the ancestral realm, the rituals of the past and also rituals of the present, like religious expression, healing, counseling others, and so forth seem to be effective paths for these people. They are truth-seekers.
Excerpt from The Astrology of Family Dynamics. Erin Sullivan. Weiser Books. York Beach, maine. 2001. ISSBN 1-57863-1793. 401 pages, index, illustrated. Ppbk.
|
|
|
|
|
Erin Sullivan,
Astrologer
|
 |
Erin Sullivan is one of the brightest lights in contemporary astrology. She has been integral to the growth of today's astrology, having founded many groups, run symposia, taught for over thirty years and presented at international conferences around the world.
She is Canadian born, and has lived in many cultures - in 1989 she moved to London England where she took on the position of Series Editor for Penguin, Arkana's prestigious Contemporary Astrology Series. Her tutoring for the Centre for Psychological Astrology in London gave birth to two of her books: Where in the World?Astro*Carto*Graphy and Relocation, and Venus and Jupiter: Bridging the Ideal and the Real.
Erin returned to North America in 1998, and continued to teach, write and consult with clientele from all nations. Her three other books are published by Samuel Weiser (now RedWheel/Weiser Publications):
The Astrology of Family Dynamics (a best seller)
Saturn in Transit: Boundaris of Mind Body and Soul,
and her masterpiece, Retrograde Planets: Traversing the Inner Landscape.
Her company, "Southwest Contemporary Astrology" publishes unique personalized astrology profiles - reports - available online on her website's secure shopper!
She now lives and practices and writes in her Rio Grande riverside home in Northern New Mexico.
Erin Sullivan
SOUTHWEST CONTEMPORARY ASTROLOGY Reports online at:
www.ErinSullivan.com
"As the World Turns: Your Personal Solar Return Profile" - a 60+ page booklet with predictive timing and trends for your solar year - fully illustrated with calendars, beautifully written.
"Your Personal Heroic Journey" - a 70 page booklet, illustrated with full interpretations for a lifetime of Saturn Transits - your cycles of growth and development.
1008 Paseo del Pueblo Sur, #255
TAOS, New Mexico,
87571-6412 USA
Tel: ( 1 ) 505-758-1931
Ext. 1 for SCA
Fax: ( 1 ) 505-751-1353
www.ErinSullivan.com
for Southwest Contemporary Astrology
Erin Sullivan
erinsullivan@newmex.com
|
 |
You'll find it in
The
Directory!
|
|
|
|
|
