AstroDispatch.com

©2008 by Donna Cunningham, MSW

            In struggling to explain the phenomena of astrotwins to a student in my correspondence course, I came up with an apt metaphor.  Strictly speaking, astrotwins are two people born the same day, month, year, time, and place—and thus with charts that are identical in every way.  While it’s rare to meet an astrotwin, we often encounter people who are “date twins,” born the same day, month, and year, but at a different time or place.

 George W. Bush and Sylvester Stallone are date twins (July 6, 1947), and so were Lincoln and Darwin (February 12, 1809).  One unlikely pair is Margaret Thatcher and Lenny Bruce, both born October 13, 1925.  Some others my friend Karen McCauley found are Andy Griffith and Marilyn Monroe, Angela Bassett and Madonna, Newt Gingrich and Barry Manilow, Roger Ebert and Paul McCartney, Al Gore and Rhea Perlman.

 In my astrology practice, I once had a client who was born the same day, month, year, and one hour earlier than Charles Manson (November 12, 1934).  Manson is a notorious criminal serving a life sentence, and my client was the apparent opposite—he counseled sex offenders who were incarcerated.

            Skeptics use these examples to discredit astrology, and it puzzles those who want to believe as well. They’d speculate on my client’s “shadow self,” that perhaps he was sublimating his own violence by working in a prison.  And it’s possible that Margaret Thatcher, despite her veddy proper public façade, was as raunchy as Lenny Bruce in private.  Maybe—surely the same gifts and predilections can be expressed in a variety of ways.

 The birth counter at http://www.Worldometers.info says that there have been 103,000 births around the world already and it’s only 7:00 AM. No, wait—it’s now 7:10 and there are almost 106,000.  So there are about 300 people born around the world in each minute of clock time. They will all have the same core elements in their chart, but obviously their life stories and opportunities to develop their potentials will diverge wildly.

 So, where does astrology come into play?  How do we explain why there are several hundred people out there with essentially the same birth chart as Barak Obama, but only one of them is running for president?  The analogy I came up with is that the birth chart is a portrait of the soul, but it’s NOT the soul.  It is only one expression of the soul’s infinite potentials.  Only one of those souls is Barak Obama.

Likewise, have you ever visited an art class where the students were trying to do a picture of nude?  As you wander through the room, each student has rendered the subject in a different way—anything from strictly representational to highly abstract. The colors, the techniques, the styles come in infinite varieties.  They have attempted to capture the image, but they can’t capture the essence.

 It’s the same with a particular astrology chart. Each person born with it attempts to express its potentials, but does so in their own unique way and with varying degrees of success, depending on the materials at hand.  If you’ve got clay, you make a bust.  If you have pastel chalk, that’s what you use. And if you’ve got oils, you’ve got a better shot at appearing in an art gallery—IF you work hard and apply yourself for years and years. 

Well, this post is a preliminary sketch.  We’ll see if it works as a mural!

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