Yesterday an article on the BBC website caught my attention. According to research carried out by the University of Ulster daughters make a family more open and willing to discuss feelings.”Emotional expression is fundamental to good psychological health and having sisters promotes this in families,” said Professor Tony Cassidy. While boys it seems just bring trouble and strife. Siblings are a third house affair so where do astrologers stand on this issue? Can we agree with the experts?
I have two sisters and I am the middle one. Books have been written about this unenviable “piggy in the middle” position -so maybe I am biased. But honestly…what a load of old codswollop. Surely you need to examine the lives of more than 571 people before coming out with such generalisations? Siblings fall astrologically under the third house of the horoscope, planets placed in this house and the aspects they make, will tell us something about our sibling relationships. But this is not the full story. Really we also need to look at houses, four and ten, the parental axis, to get a more complete picture. In my opinion even this does not go far enough. I find to my amazement that family relationships have a tendency to repeat themselves. My mother was also one of three sisters. She was – just like me – the middle one. As a child my mother often talked about how her mother had favoured her younger sister.
Remarkably however, after the birth of my sister, eleven years my junior, my mother too clearly favoured – you guessed it, my younger sister. So, though a family history will not repeat itself exactly, we can certainly recognise a familiar tune.
DNA runs through horoscopes too, through the angles of a chart, through the position of the planets, the aspects. It is more than a biological issue – it is also a soul issue. This is why we often see births and deaths coinciding and children being born on – for example – great grandmother’s birthday. Such research is an oversimplification of a complex issue and really adds nothing at all to our knowledge of family relationships. Give me astrology any day!
As far as I am concerned, mother daughter relationships are as complex as father son relationships. Sibling relationships are a minefield. In my family the oldest and the youngest sister haven’t spoken for years. So much for the openess that the Ulster Researches refer to.
What ever way we look at it, families give us good bones to cut our teeth on. But seriously… Do sisters really make people happy? You tell me!!