Light and Shadow in the Family

by Lynn Bell

Gifts and talents, shadow and light, are rarely equally distributed in a family. The shadow can be cast by a larger than life personality, a parent, a grandparent, a mythic ancestor, or by a sibling. When an individual appears with exceptional gifts, beauty or brilliance, others may find themselves less attended to. A bright light may be a gift for a family, a source of pride on many levels. And yet others may feel left out, hidden, or unimportant. Such difficult emotions run through families, they are often pushed into the unconscious, and emerge as emotional or even physical symptoms. The descendants of famous individuals often struggle to live up to an exceptional ancestor. In my own clientele I have seen stories of alcoholism, and suicide in the wake of a famous ancestor. The Kennedy family, with its tragic deaths among several generations is a telling example.

Alternatively, when a child is strange or unusual in some way he/she can become the carrier of negative projections, of fear or anxiety. This is a difficult position in a family and often enough it is not easy for others to acknowledge consciously. The death of a child, or a beloved family member can haunt the child who follows.

I have worked with a number of women, who felt an overwhelming dislike or rejection for one of their children at the moment of birth. These reactions seem mysterious, inexplicable, and are often hidden because such negative feelings are culturally taboo. Difficult Saturn aspects from the child’s chart to the mother’s personal planets are one signature for such a visceral reaction. Another person’s Saturn can push us up against our weaknesses, our own difficulties. In a parent-child relationship such aspects are lived without interruption, and activated by transits at particularly key moments. It is as if the mother ‘knows’ her child will challenge her. Saturn aspects can also be experienced as structure and safety, and with wisdom and foresight, can be worked with to a certain extent.

In one example a mother’s Mars at 16 Aquarius 27 minutes is opposite her son’s Saturn at 16 Leo 33 minutes and his ascendant at 18 Leo 58. She had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized three months after his birth. She confessed to me that she ‘hated’ him as soon as she saw him and could not overcome this feeling however much she tried. Throughout his childhood she would refer to him as ‘bad’, ‘wild’, ‘impossible’ while her youngest son, born when his brother was eight, was ‘an angel’. The inter chart aspects of Mars opposite Saturn indicate fear of violence between the two charts. Indeed when this young man was a teenager he threatened his parents with a kitchen knife. His anger, however, was directed principally at his father, who was controlling and authoritarian, as might be expected with Saturn square Sun and Mars in the young man’s chart. This young man had problems with drugs and even went to jail. Later his life stabilized and he became a loving husband and father with a good job. The question we must ask is whether the mother intuited something when he was born, or whether her inner fear created the very experiences that were so difficult. One clue is from the mother’s own story. Her mother was emotionally abusive, and in her family of origin she was the ‘difficult’ one. Her maternal grandmother had also been rejected by her own mother. Clearly there is a pattern of feminine anger and rejection that is transmitted from generation to generation. However in this example, the mother had a more neutral relationship with her own daughter, the first child, and it was the second child who carried the shadow. Both birth position and gender were flipped. These family patterns have great power, and often repeat over generations, until something is broken or healed,

In another example, an idealistic young mother who we shall call Natasha, married a man form another country. During the pregnancy her partner was very unsettled and even thought of running away. She gave birth far from her home, surrounded by strangers in a hospital where doctors and nurses spoke a foreign language. This experience as well as a life of movement, travel and uprooting, are well described by a stellium of planets in the 12th house. Soon after her son was born her husband was seized with wanderlust and they travelled around Europe for nine months, she described this experience as hellish. Her son Anton, was originally given a different name, but she always felt there was something wrong and that he needed to be renamed so they legally changed his birth name when he was two. Alden became Anton.

Anton was born with six planets in mutable signs and many squares between them. Saturn in Sagittarius is conjunct Mercury and squares both Jupiter and Mars in Pisces. At 14 degrees 17 minute’s Anton’s Saturn closely squares Natasha’s Moon at 11 Pisces 42. By the age of two, when Mars is strongly activated in young children, Natasha began to feel an aversion to this part of his personality. He reminded her of her brother, who was cruel and took delight in torturing her, in killing insects and hurting animals. She grew up with anxiety and nightmares, but her parents brushed it off when she went to them for help. So it is not surprising that these difficult memories would arise in the relationship with her son. She was in other aspects a wonderful, kind, gracious and mother and had a very different relationship with her two younger children, born five and 6 and a half years later. The younger two were ‘sweeties’ and ‘babies.”

Anton’s father reproached his wife for her harsh treatment of their eldest son. When Anton was fifteen his father abandoned the family for another woman, moving to a different continent. Saturn was opposing Pluto at the time, touching both Anton’s Saturn and Natasha’s Moon. Not only was it a terribly difficult time for all of them but Anton was out of control, taking wild physical risks, setting things on fire, talking of suicide. He made Natasha’s grief even more difficult. During this time she was forced to deal with the unexpressed emotions towards her cruel brother, mirrored back to her in her son’s adolescent crisis. While mother and son love each other, they find it almost impossible to be close, and distance is a theme in this family. The three siblings have become wanderers as well, each living in a different country. In family synastry, Pluto is another planet that can create discomfort. When it is strong in individual synastry. Across generations, it can indicate a mystery, a hidden zone that neither person can quite understand. Pluto moves so slowly several children can have these contacts with a parent.

Anton’s Pluto has a tight, dissonant connection to his mother’s chart. His Pluto in Scorpio squares her Mercury Saturn Mars conjunction in Aquarius. This synastry well describes the dark thoughts that arose in her towards him, thoughts that in many way were influenced by the difficulties with her own brother. Natasha’s brother died of a brain tumor in his early 30’s. Knowing, many years on, that he may have had the tumor for years, was not enough to entirely mitigate the trauma from that relationship. In psychological terms this is called projection, meaning the emotional response to a person or to a difficult event is unconsciously experienced in response to someone, who often has little or nothing to do with the original trigger.

Another Example: Camille Claudel

Another shadow can be cast by a death that has occurred before a child’s birth. This is the case in the chart of Camille Claudel, a talented French sculptor with a passionate, tragic life, and her famous brother, diplomat and author Paul Claudel. Camille was born 16 months after a first child, her brother Henri, died when he was only a few weeks old. Much work has been done on the lives of children who are ‘carrying’ the shadow of a dead sibling, and whether a parent has sufficiently mourned that death. Pluto is often strong in the birth charts of these ‘replacement’ children. Scorpio rising, and Pluto conjunct the Descendent in Camille Claudel’s chart are a fitting description for the shadow of a lost sibling. Scorpio rising charts often wrestle with the relationship between life and death, creation and destruction.

There are many responses possible to the loss of a child; the child that follows can be the reservoir of redoubled hope for the family. Often enough, a parent walls off feelings for the next child, for the loss is too painful to allow an attachment. This seems to be the case with Camille’s mother, Louise Athenaise. She bonded much more strongly with her next child, Louise, who became a more conventional wife and mother.

Camille Claudel was born with a conjunction of Sun and Jupiter in tropical Sagittarius in wide opposition to Mars. Her fiery nature was meant for big things, grand gestures, especially given a trine to the Moon and Neptune in Aries. With such a big personality she tyrannized her younger siblings.
Her brother Paul had a similar Fire signature: his Jupiter in Aries conjuncts both Midheaven and Neptune and trines a 1st house Leo Sun. Their father believed fully in his children’s genius, and agreed to move the family to Paris when Camille was 17 so she could study sculpture. She soon became the assistant and protégé of Rodin, and was his lover for twelve years. Rodin refused to leave his long term mistress for Camille, a source of increasing frustration.

Yet as an artist she thrived, her own work was admired and recognized, and beginning to be shown in prestigious galleries. In 1892, an abortion (perhaps not the first) woke her determination to be independent from Rodin. This corresponded to her brother’s first foreign assignment, bringing distance from both men at a time transiting Pluto and Neptune were conjunct Mars.

Despite Camille’s extraordinary energy and talent, the Venus-Saturn square in her chart in mutual reception reveals a deep fracture affecting her self worth, her ability to feel loved. After a period of struggle and poverty the reputation of her work continued to grow. From 1897 to 1905 she was able to support herself with her sculpture. Always a difficult personality, in 1905 she began to slip into paranoia and madness, quarreling with her patron, barricading her studio, setting traps for intruders. She ultimately descended into madness, stopped seeing others, stopped bathing, while imagining plots against her, particularly persecution by Rodin and his associates. And yet she still sculpted. In 1912 she would take a sledgehammer and smash her creations. When her father died in 1913, at her brother’s initiative, she was committed to an asylum. Her mother never saw her alive again, refusing to visit her daughter. I could not find the birth date for Camille’s mother, but she was born in 1840, a year Saturn was mostly in the middle degrees of Sagittarius, near Camille’s Sun.

As I wrote in my book Planetary Threads, “all brothers and sisters share a common experience for a time, but their talents and abilities are rarely evenly distributed. It may happen that one child carries more of the light than the others even without seeking to, and for a sibling that follows, it is hard not to be left a larger portion of shadow. At best each child will look for a space where he or she can hold their own. With a first child like William, (James) a “divine child,” what is left over for the others?”

Paul Claudel became a famous author, a playwright in verse, as well as a poet. He was eventually elected to the Academie Francaise, France’s highest literary honor. He and his sister were very close as children and into adulthood. At twenty, Paul had an experience of religious illumination and became a devout Catholic. Paul had even thought of becoming a priest, and at 32 he again tried to leave his diplomatic career to enter a monastery. This powerful religious impulse is described by Jupiter in the 9th, Neptune MC, a Pisces Moon, and the many trines to his 12th house planets. It was when Camille told him she had an abortion that he changed towards her; he saw her as irredeemable.

His sister’s life was deeply unconventional for a woman of her background, driven by passion, sex, artistic ambition, and finally destroyed by madness. Despite the letters she wrote begging him to be freed from the asylum he never gave his consent, even after their mother’s death in 1929. Camille in fact had become the shadow, the rejected, the locked away, the denied. She represents, in part, rejected aspects of the artistic self. Her last thirty years were spent in a mental hospital where she died of malnutrition in 1943, when the Germans cut food supplies. During the 30 years she was there, her brother visited her perhaps 12 times. They became light and shadow to each other.

There is an extreme contrast between the lives of the brother and sister. He is everything you are supposed to be: upright, respected professionally and artistically, deeply religious, successful. She is everything no woman is supposed to be: wild sexual, unbounded, passionate, unmarried, an artist, and finally mad. Without the presence of her father who continued to believe in her, she was lost. The brother no longer believed in her, and her mother never had. We see the paradox of the powerful Sun Jupiter conjunction in Camille's chart, coupled with a difficult, daemonic 12th house Saturn.

Locked away in in her brother’s Paul's 12th house is a conjunction of Venus and Uranus, a fitting reflection of a socially unacceptable feminine sexuality and spirit, as well as Mercury, the ruler of the third house of siblings. Paul’s 12th house describes his sister Camille all too well. What was Paul suppressing in his own nature, in keeping his sister locked away for so many years?

Camille's Moon falls on the Jupiter midheaven and Neptune in Paul's chart. She had a great influence over him as a child. When he stepped out of her power, he stepped into his religious illumination.

For years Camille Claudel, was erased in the memory of her family. Documents, letters, any trace of her was suppressed, she became a family secret until Paul’s granddaughter asked a question about a sculpture, and began to investigate. She spent 20 years and finally wrote a book about Camille, which led to a film and a rediscovery of this talented, tragic artist. Ironically, both in French and English, Wikipedia now describes Paul Claudel as “the younger brother of sculptor Camille Claudel”. Paul’s reputation has diminished, while his sister’s star has grown brighter.

There are many other ways that light and shadow move through a family, their interplay ripples through the generations. I invite you to explore them in your own family histories.

Sources and Notes:
ADB for the birthday of Paul and Camile Claudel (bc AA)
Natasha: 20/2/62 7:12 Am NY, NY AA (Bc AA)
Anton: 22/121986 7:48 am, Copenhagen Denmark (bc AA)
Bell, Lynn, Planetary Threads, p 218-19 Ibis Press, Lake Worth, Fl. 2013 (1999)
Clark, Brian. The Sibling Constellation, Arkana, Penguin, London, England 1999
http://www.ouvroir.info/libresfeuillets/?p=711

Image sources:
Camille Claudel: 1884 - César - www.camilleclaudel.asso.fr (Public domain)
Paul Claudel: Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Charts: provided by author
Other images: CC0 Creative Commons, via pixabay.com

First published in: ivcconference.com/constellation-news/, 2018.

Author:
Lynn Bell is a Paris-based astrologer whose work spans multiple cultures as a speaker, teacher, author and consultant in astrology. Initially self-taught, she quickly built a private practice with an international clientele. Lynn is interested in many aspects of astrology, from mundane cycles to archetypes and mythology, the relation between soma and psyche, to reflection on the psychological implications of traditional astrology. She lectures and teaches seminars around the world.
Her website is: https://www.lynnbellastrology.com/

© 2018/19 - Lynn Bell - Constellation News

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