Erin Sullivan's latest book is a breakthrough both in astrology and psychology. The Astrology of Family Dynamics makes for gripping reading and shows us that astrology is the only system that demonstrates the complexities of the family as an organicwhole, the family's place in the collective, and the role an individual plays in carrying on the ancestral line. Sullivan writes with compassion and accuracy, weaving together various methods of analyzing and working with individuals and their families.

CHAPTER 1

The Individual andthe Collective

THE FAMILY OF HUMANITY

DYNASTIC LINEAGE: THE BIG PICTURE

We might look back over aeons and recognize our own personal self-development–justas we emerge from the womb, into our infancy, through our developmentalyears, past adolescence, into our twenties, the Saturn-return, the thirties, themid-life transition, to maturity in the fifties and second Saturn-return phaseand on into dotage, so does the collective culture emerge and develop. If we seethis as a cycle, and not as a linear experience, then the relationship betweenthe individual and the collective becomes quite intimate. Just as a cultureevolves, so does an individual: from embryo–total psychic participation with theenvironment–to birth through the initial stages of individuation, into full ego,or awareness of self, and the subsequent developmental periods, the process isremarkably parallel to how we appear to have evolved as a collective world-humanity.

We like to believe that the archaic mind was holistic, in that it perceived nosplit between nature and culture. There existed no differentiation between theindividual and his environment, no split between man and god, no vast chasmbetween thought and feeling or the sacred and profane. This kind ofconsciousness is called mythopoeic and can best be described as a state of mindin which one participates wholly in the environment without conscious awarenessof the separation from others or from the natural environment. These archaicpeoples, so-called primitives, appear to have been peaceable, relating to theirenvironment as they would to their own inner selves. Their known ritualsinvolved what the French mythographer Lévy-Bruhl termed participation mystique.That is, their consciousness was at one with the external world and theirpsychic relationship with nature wholly participatory–they did not subordinatenature in the way in which we now do, but took from nature what was needed forsurvival and apparently had a respect for animals, trees, the elemental forcesand various celestial phenomena which is keenly lacking today.

We know little about these most archaic humans–palaeontology shows us bonystructures, the skeletons of our ancestors, some of their relics and tools, butnot much about their culture. We truly know nothing. Just as we know nothingabout our intra-uterine experience. We speculate and have ideas, but no realknowledge of prehistorical humanity. It is the same with consciousness beforebirth. In the womb we existed in a realm beyond temporal and spatialdifferentiation, suspended in a warm, nurturing, eternal space. The rusticlifestyle of the archaic man was clearly fraught with survival-danger and primalterror, but he likely did not have neurosis or anxiety complexes. Just asarchaic civilization did, the incubating embryo has danger during itsdevelopment and psychologically it appears that this psychic knowledge ofthreat-in-the-womb affects the development of consciousness in the maturingperson. Just as archaic man knew of his environmental threats, so does thegestating infant, and though those threats are pre-conscious, they are highlyeffective in the psychological developmental process.

Infants, once born, do have survival concerns just as infant cultures havesurvival issues–but they do not have conscious worries about their relationshipwith their environment. Those problems arise much later in development–inparallel with the emergence of the individual ego and, in the case of culturaldevelopment, the collective ego. Babies are not neurotic, but the seeds for sucha condition are embedded in this infantile ground. Serious threats to aninfant's development will register in both the psyche and the viscera, settingthe tone for its future growth, body and soul. Likewise, serious threats to theprocess of culture arrest, or even retard to extinction, entire culturalcollectives. At worst, a culture can die out like the Inca did, but at best aculture flexes, mutates and adapts creatively to its external conditions andinner impulses. These potentials are also ours, as individuals.

As the ego of a child emerges from its psychic-womb, it begins to separate outits own identity from that of its mother and recognize itself as distinct anddifferent from others. The baby is still wholly dependent, but clearlyrecognizes itself in relationship to others, and gradually begins to experimentwith that relationship as the ego grows stronger and more impelling–and as itsphysical prowess increases. Cultures break out of the insular mode and begin totransgress the boundaries of different cultures, becoming assimilated,antagonistic, or allied ... so do we with our 'others'.

Ultimately, this breach between subjective self and objective other–which wecall perspective–is good and necessary; however, it can become so vast a rent inconsciousness as virtually to destroy an individual's connection to his or herdeepest, inner Self, and divorce him or her from the sacred and divine aspect oflife. Certainly we have seen this chasm in cultural development growincreasingly vast—the ancient Greeks worried about it, fretted and developed aphilosophy based upon the separation of the sacred and the profane. Hesiod, thesixth-century BC Greek agrarian-poet, felt that cutting trees, making canoes andplying the waters was unnatural and would result in all sorts of abominationsagainst natural law. If only he had known—; or maybe he did in diachronous time—justhow far his descendants would impose themselves upon nature's reserves.

As our global culture has developed, so have we as individuals: our own smallframes of reference–our families–have undergone radical rearranging in just thelast century, and particularly in the last thirty years, and are...