It often happens that when a person comes to consult an astrologer, they are amazed to hear the characters of their parents described accurately. “How is it possible,” they ask, “that you can manage to speak about my father and mother without ever having met them, and without looking at their birth charts?”
The question, completely understandable from someone who knows little or nothing about astrology, throws into sharp relief an important fact about planetary symbology: the Sun and the Moon, which correspond to the father and the mother, also correspond to the two parts of the ‘I’, to the two fundamental nuclei of our personalities, and that automatically underlines the fundamental importance that parents assume in the patterns of our lives. With regard to life, phenomenon or cosmic mystery, it is opportune to remember the latest and most up to date definition from biology: to be a living being is to be able to reproduce oneself.
The ancient concept of “generation”, from which the Italian word for parents, ‘genitori’ is of course derived, has been replaced by the concept of reproduction, and the Zodiac seems to confirm the importance of this repetitive imprinting, condensing it into just two symbols – Sun and Moon – the two components of the individual personality and the reproductive roots from which that personality had its origins, that is the father and the mother. To conserve the species, each one of us must in character be a copy of our parents; but to affirm our individuality, indispensable in the battle against death, each one of us must also create a space for autonomous action. The conflict between these two undercurrents creates the diversity in human behaviour.
I have set myself the task of analysing the relations between father and son, and mother and daughter, but, before undertaking that analysis, I would like to highlight a phenomenon of no little importance: the birth chart reveals both an objective reality and a subjective reality. That is, it reveals both a situation that can be assessed by the judgement of an impartial observer and a situation that appears, although perhaps distorted, in the perception of the person most directly involved. So it is that a mother may be considered excellent by outsiders, but, to her own son, her own children, she may be seen as wanting.

Alongside the needs of the individual we must list also the demands that society has placed on our way of life, and which rightly create a substantial difference between father-son and mother-daughter relationships.
I do not intend to speak here of the phallic imprint on the human story, well known to all, but I would like to highlight some nuances of it that are present in the father-son relationship. In identifying itself with phallic violence, the masculine ‘I’ assumes a precarious nature, and the continuous search for affirmation hides a fundamental insecurity.
The nightmare of impotence is the secret mainspring of masculine behaviour, and in the case in point, is also the not-so-secret mainspring of the behaviour of the father towards the son, seen above all as the future male, the one who will reach a triumphant masculinity when he – the father – is beginning to decline. And here the Zodiac symbology becomes truly illuminating, seeing that Saturn, the icy old man who stands in opposition to solar vitality, gathers to himself the fearful attributes of power and this shows us in a very clear way the pivotal support of historical social structures: senile impotence is protected and defended through the exercise of authority. The ancient tribal chief and the less ancient pater familias assumed for themselves the right over life and death in order to prolong to the maximum the exercise of their authority.

In the birth chart of a son, I realised that this eternal, latent desire to emasculate on the part of the father must be analysed remaining aware not only of the position and aspect of the Sun, but also those of Saturn. If there are bad relations between these two signs, one can diagnose with almost complete certainty the oppressive, authoritative and intransigent presence of a dominating father. Sometimes, such fathers have performed a dominant role in their own private lives, as an army colonel, an influential political figure a ruthless captain of industry. Sometimes, on the other hand, the father exercised a paralysing influence on the active development of the son only thanks to his own prestige, his own intelligence, his own personal charm. Let us not forget, in fact, the concept of “reproduction” which I mentioned a little earlier. The son tends to imitate the father, to take him as a model, to succeed him in the role of patriarch. Thus a weak man lacking in quality, risks feeling himself perennially diminished by comparison with a brilliant, prestigious father figure and we could say that, even without the direct intention of the parent, the son will pursue in such cases a process of self-castration, which often manifests itself in dreadful neuroses or in psychosomatic illness.
To establish up to what point the direct or indirect emasculating influence of the father will have an effect on the son, we must undertake first of all the analysis of the two symbols of male sexuality: Pluto and Mars. If these signs are very strong or prominent in the chart, we can without doubt exclude a process of self-castration, because the son will very soon find reassurance not only in sex, but also in their own personal activity. We certainly can not exclude the presence of an intentional, deliberate emasculator, given negative Sun-Saturn aspects, but it will be easy to predict that such a father will, in time, be overcome or ignored, at least within certain limits. Partial or total harm from Mars and Pluto allied to negative Sun and Saturn aspects do not leave us with much cause for hope.
Another element that can offer assistance and defence for the son against paternal oppression is a good arrangement of the planet of the tenth house. And here I must question an old prejudice in the practice of astrology that seems completely illogical and devoid of senses, that is, the identification of the tenth house with the mother. The tenth house corresponds to Capricorn, a very robust sign, and, concerned as it is for the accommodation and exaltation of Saturn and Mars, it is utterly masculine. Be assured that I do not intend to reverse the position and identify the tenth house with the father. No. The fourth house remains linked to both parents, and wholly with the birth house, the birth environment that surrounds the son during infancy rightly symbolised by Moon-Cancer. The tenth house stands for the possibility of tearing oneself way from the family environment in order to conquer one’s own autonomy. The symbolism of Capricorn, linked to the backbone, where all the motor centres exercise control, speaks very clearly of this capacity to stand on our own two feet. This is why a strong tenth house, in a male chart that reveals an emasculating father, will be extremely important in aiding recovery and preventing further castration.
All the other houses, naturally, line up perfectly with diagnoses pertinent to the father-son relationship, with particular regard to the position of the Sun, because the father figure is not always necessarily a castrator; we could thus have an absent father, physically or morally far from the son with a Sun in the ninth house, a mediocre father with the Sun in the sixth house, a weak father, or a companion father, with the Sun in the eleventh house, and so on. More detailed analysis over time confirms this, because when the father figure fades or becomes distant, almost always the mother figure comes to centre stage, but the mother-son relationship will not be dealt with here. I will simply mention the fact, confirmed by experience, that a Sun in the twelfth house can indicate a substitute father figure; a stepfather, a tutor, a mother’s lover who has taken the place of the husband.
The Zodiac is just as eloquent when it comes to the mother-daughter relationship and allows us to analyse this relationship both on the level of individual behaviour and in the wider context of social structures. The female anatomy leaves a woman completely free of castration complexes, which appear only, in vicarious form, when a female subject is made more masculine by a very strong position of Mars in the birth chart. The mother-daughter antagonism, therefore, assumes a very different character from that of the father-son antagonism. Distanced from the nightmare of impotence, there remains the nightmare of being unable to seduce, since in the female astrological chart the Mars- phallus is substituted by the Venus-beauty, the Venus-glamour. And here the Zodiacal symbology reveals an important distinction: while the father figure can divide itself into Sun and Saturn, the mother figure remains concentrated on the Moon, which represents also the nucleus of femininity in a much more complete way that the Sun represents the nucleus of virility. After all, the symbolic identification of the Moon with infancy draws the mother-daughter conflict back to the infancy itself, to the first years of life, something that happens much more rarely in the father-son conflict. Apparently less violent, the negative maternal influence is often more underhand and tenacious.

The anatomical difference between the two sexes produces a parallel difference in behaviour and mentality that, hidden for centuries by skilful mechanisms of censorship, is only coming to light now, although some great feminist writers, from Aristofane to Boccaccio, to Ariosto, were aware of it long ago: the sexual readiness of the male is much more limited and vulnerable than the sexual readiness of the woman. It is this that has driven the man to protect himself with the institution of marriage, forcing women into monogamy. But take note: the natural tendency towards promiscuity, which has always been present in women, notwithstanding the drastic sanctions of the patriarchy, comes with another form of vulnerability, properly attributable to the awareness, if only in theory, of the amount of experience possible and the more or less unlimited period of active sexual potential. And in fact, while men often find sufficient reassurance of their own virility through self-contemplation, women depend on others for proof of their capacity for seduction. This is why negative astrological aspects that, striking at the Moon, entrap femininity through the mother figure, almost without exception indicate a ‘rival complex’ and drive such women to conquer “another’s man” rather than seduce the man they truly like.
The life story of a son morally “castrated” often includes the picture of a hard and authoritarian father, whereas the life story of an unsatisfied woman brings us just as frequently into the presence of a charming and seductive mother. A mother, in a nutshell, who has extinguished the vitality of her daughter, or who has unleashed painful frustrations, by the simple fact of having hogged the limelight.
There are genuinely repressive mothers, and it is obvious, and here it is vital to examine the position of the Moon in the signs, because a Moon in Virgo can reveal to us a mother frigidly obsessed by order, or a Moon in Capricorn can reveal to us a gloomy and moralistic mother, but the consequences, at least in my experience, are much less severe than those linked to the picture of a Moon-mother in Gemini, eternally youthful and charming, or a Moon-mother in Leo, eternally dominating.
The possibility of recovery is of course dependent on the two positions of Venus and of X in the birth chart.
Unfortunately, that fact that the orbit of X – or Proserpina – has not yet been established (astronomers are confident that will happen this year, with the help of a comet) but remains hypothetical, which denies us a complete analysis of the birth chat from that point of view.
Nevertheless, it is already now possible to say that positive aspects of X, for example in trigon with the Jupiter, may assure a woman of her erotic potential in such a way as to overcome any complex with the mother-rival.

A strong tenth house can also have an important role in aiding the conquest of autonomy but this may however, it must be said, develop in areas far from that of the emotional-sexual life, leaving untouched some deep problems. I must emphasise that the presence of the Moon in the tenth house, rather than reinforcing femininity, is often an indication of foolish insecurity and confirms the inappropriateness of placing the mother figure at a point that would be illogical to attribute to the mother.
I would like to conclude my very brief and certainly not exhaustive article on so important a topic, with some practical advice. Bernard Shaw used to say that after the age of thirty, everyone is responsible for their own identities. Astrologically speaking, whoever continues to blame their parents after the age of thirty is responsible for their own failures and their own neuroses.