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 mate 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.

A restrained and unresponsive figure

The subjective image of your father portrayed in your birth horoscope is a highly ambivalent one. He seems to have been a rather conservative and withdrawn person, rooted in traditional values, and preoccupied with the responsibilities of mundane life. These are positive attributes, although you may not think so, and you have inherited from him a capacity to approach worldly challenges realistically and to actualise your potentials. But you have also experienced your father as restricting and disinterested in you, and you may have felt unloved or neglected by him. He might have been overly involved with his work, or been an undemonstrative or autocratic personality; and he was possibly also caught in the dilemma of a difficult marital relationship which made it hard for him to relate to you with overt warmth and sympathy. On some level you have been deeply hurt by your father's apparent disinterest, and you need to be careful not to repudiate all that he stands for because of your sense of inner injury. Otherwise, the "baby goes out with the bath-water", and the positive dimension of this solitary and withdrawn father-figure will be lost to you - resulting in a kind of eternal adolescence and a problem with authority in the world outside.

The expectation of rejection

You will also need to recognize that not all men are like your father, for you are prone to expect hurt and rejection from the men you love. Because you mistrust close relationships, always assuming that you will be dealt with in the end as you experienced your father dealing with you, you have a tendency to be unconsciously defensive and angry, and to try to make "deals" with your partners to ensure that they will go on loving you. This in turn can create the very thing you fear - for no person likes to be mistrusted or loved conditionally, and you can draw upon yourself the very rejection that you were trying so hard to avoid. In this respect you run the risk of unconsciously becoming like your father - avoiding closeness because of the fear of being vulnerable - while trying to defend yourself against such behaviour when you imagine it in others.

Dealing with an authority problem

Because of the experience of hurt in your relationship with your father, you may seek "good" fathers in the form of authority figures or traditional institutions which can provide you with the security you needed - but failed to obtain - from your own father. Alternatively and probably at the same time, you may carry within you great unconscious anger toward your father which is projected upon these same authority figures in the world, Thus you carry considerable conflict in you, and the patterns of your dealings in work will reflect this. Perhaps you need to look more honestly at this parent, trying to see his complex personality beyond the circle of your own sense of injury. Insight can help you to express more creatively your own potential for realism, discipline and authority; for although you have felt rejected and unwanted, the disappointment of your childhood can foster the development of great inner self-sufficiency and strength - if you can find the delicate balance between self-reliance and the capacity to express need of and trust in others.

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

A psychologically absent figure

It seems that, on a deep level, you did not know your father at all. It is on the inner level that this experience has occurred, although your father may have actually been physically absent in your childhood as well; but even if he was present, it is on the inner level that you have been "unfathered". There is a sense of emptiness or lack in connection with your experience of your father, and there is as a result a kind of lost quality about you yourself. No matter how much you achieve in life, you are a perpetual observer watching it all unfold on a cinema screen, without a sense of direct involvement in your own life. This rather lonely and lost quality has its roots in your childhood, and it is not wholly negative; for you have learned to develop a quality of detachment and self-containment which is of great value. But you need a great deal of encouragement and approval from others, because you were somehow not "real" to your father in early life and are therefore not always "real" to yourself now.

The need to develop self-value

Ultimately you will need to learn to father yourself, and to give yourself the support and encouragement you lacked in childhood. You are of value whether others approve of you or not, and the absence of a real father-figure at the beginning of life has fostered in you a craving for finding some faith and meaning that can offer compensation for your lostness and frequent sense of disconnection from life and from others. The more conscious you are of the empty space which your father has left in you, the more you can deal with it creatively; for your need for meaning can lead you into a deep appreciation not only of yourself and your strengths, but of a kind of divine inner father-principle that can form the basis for a code of ethics and beliefs on which to build your life. Thus, what may seem a negative experience in relation to your father could become the most important creative impetus in your development, for in finding this inner father you also find a renewed faith in yourself.

In addition to these images, there is still another additional figure portrayed by your birth horoscope which adds further complexity to your experience of your father.

The gifts of a strong intellect

Your father possessed a powerful intellectual capacity which has impressed you greatly, both in terms of your valuing of intelligence and in terms of your desire to achieve something in life through developing your own mental gifts. Your father was probably a highly educated and articulate person, or at the very least a clever and shrewd one, even if opportunities were lacking for him to pursue his intellectual ambitions. This experience of your father as a creature of mind is in many ways highly positive, for it has helped to foster an appreciation in you for the power of rational thought. Perhaps your father's expectations that you too achieve something in the mental realm have provided an impetus for you to develop your own abilities.

Balancing mental aspirations with loyalty to the heart

However, this dimension of your father, because it belongs chiefly to the clear heights of the intellect, contains also a certain critical and detached quality, and probably at times you felt rejected or unwelcome on the emotional level. You may have measured your own mental abilities against his expectations, and if you did not match up to them then you may carry within you a feeling of intellectual inferiority - probably unmerited, but painful to you nonetheless. You will need to be careful not to identify too much with your father's intellectual expectations, for there are many kinds of intelligence and not all of them like his. You do not have to be clever all the time. The intellectually powerful figure of your father needs to be balanced within you with an appreciation of the gifts of the heart something your father perhaps could not do - so that you can make the most creative use of your own mental potentials in a way which is individual and fulfilling for your own unique nature.

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. 7hirdly, 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.

There is still another image portrayed by your birth horoscope, which in certain ways conflicts with the experience of your mother described previously.

A figure of coolness and restraint

Although it may have seemed that your mother was emotionally generous to a fault, and gave freely to the point of total self-denial, you have been left with an uncomfortable inner feeling that in some way you were a burden and therefore unwanted. The contradiction portrayed by this difficult and challenging facet of your mother-image is one which it is most important for you to understand; for if you are unconscious of it, then you will tend to project your feeling of being criticised, disapproved of, or unwelcome onto others in your adult life, particularly in your sphere of work. Then you will be convinced that there is something wrong with you, rather than seeing the real root of your insecurity; and you may not aim high enough because of your deep-rooted fear of failure.

Potentials trapped by conventionality

There was probably a side of your mother - perhaps unconscious in her as well - which resented the sacrifices she had to make, and which sometimes felt trapped, cold and unresponsive to the demands which any child inevitably expresses. This does not mean she was a bad mother, but it means that she was human; and if her own conventional codes of behaviour, coupled with the standards of her upbringing, demanded that she be available at all times to her loved ones and that she always put others first, it should not be surprising that inwardly she might not have been capable of sustaining such sainthood. In fact she may have envied you your youth and your potentials, and this envy may have been one of the main components of her aloofness. Thus it is probable that, on some level, she did reject you - not because you were unlovable, but because she could not be honest about her emotional inconsistencies and her resentment remained unconscious - affecting you most powerfully. You have been given what psychology calls double messages in childhood by your mother - apparent love on the one hand, and indifference and even rejection on the other - and you will need to see with objectivity and compassion that this is the basis for your own uncertainty and lack of confidence; for you have blamed yourself, If you can face the real relationship with your mother, then you can integrate the more positive qualities which belong with this challenging and complex mother-image: a powerful sense of responsibility and a determination to live according to a "right" moral code, in ways which are best for you and nurture, rather than hinder, your own creative expression in life.

There is still another image portrayed by your birth horoscope, which in certain ways conflicts with the experience of your mother described first,

The dilemma of undeveloped intellectual potentials

Your mother seems to have possessed some very marked intellectual abilities; and even if she was not fortunate enough to have found the educational or professional opportunities to utilise her gifts, she was undoubtedly innately clever, versatile and articulate. It is likely that she was really the more intelligent of your parents, although your father may have possessed the academic qualifications and it may have been more important to her to express other sides of her nature. From her you inherit an appreciation of the gifts of the mind and an innate ability to develop your own intellectual gifts in various fields in life.

However, it is also likely that, if your mother's innate cleverness and inquisitiveness were not fully developed or expressed in a suitable career, she was bored and frustrated much of the time, and you may have been subjected to her critical tongue to the extent that you learned to fear it and are still, in adult life, highly sensitive to the criticism of others. Whatever your conscious perception might be of your mother, it may be important for you to recognise the power of her mind and the consequences for her and, in turn, for you if her innate abilities were denied or unlived. You possess the inherited gift of a quick and lively mind, and this gift of yours needs, and deserves, to be expressed through some profession which challenges your intellect and allows you full scope for your powers of expression.

The Parental Marriage

The relationship between your parents portrayed in your birth horoscope is an important symbol of your own internal model of male-female relationships. Just as you have inherited certain psychological patterns from your parents, so too you have inherited a set of attitudes toward love, partnership and emotional commitment. Also, the astrological portrait of the parental marriage is a symbol of the dynamic between the male and female sides of yourself - between the active, mental and spiritual dimension of your personality and the receptive, instinctual and emotional one. 7hus the parental marriage is both a description of an inner image of relationship and a picture of your potential for integrating the opposite poles of your own personality.

The following portrait of your parents' marriage is thus meant to be understood as a subjective, and perhaps even unconscious, image of certain attitudes which you may bring into your adult relationships - and into your way of dealing with the complexities of your inner nature. It is not a judgement on your parents. It is an inclination toward a certain pattern in human relationship which, although probably enacted to some extent by your actual parents during the years of your childhood, is really a facet of your own inner drama.

An appearance of harmonies masks differences

The emotional climate of your early years was, on the surface, tranquil and serene. The portrait offered by your birth horoscope suggests that you perceived your parents' marriage as a stable one either because it really did have a solid and harmonious base, or because the underlying conflicts and difficulties were not brought out into the open due to a kind of tacit agreement between your parents to remain loyal to one set of values and therefore to suppress any friction between them. Thus you have grown up with an internal image of parental harmony which, although it might require the voluntary sacrifice of some of your needs and feelings at various times in life, remains a primary goal for you in your own relationships.

This experience of a united front between your parents is an ambivalent psychological inheritance. It reflects a vision of stable and committed relationship, where peace is worth any effort, and you are more capable of achieving contentment than many people because you have such a deep conviction that it is possible. But you should also consider what kind of price each of your parents paid for their external stability during your childhood. It may be that, at different stages of your life, you might need to fight for what you want, and some conflict will probably be necessary in order for you to grow. But you have a tendency to avoid conflict, just as your parents did, hoping that by doing so you can preserve peace and keep things even and placid. You have a strong and serene inner nature, and a deep determination to find contentment in life; yours is not a struggling spirit, and you have a profound inner faith in your right to happiness.

Make sure that you do not pay too high a price for it; for there will be times when you will need to honestly confront difficulties in life, in other people and in yourself, and to display more decisiveness and aggression than is your want in order to achieve that harmony you desire so much.