This week, I’ve been feeling quietly pleased – and somewhat amazed– to realise that I have been running this blog now for three years. It has been a truly pleasurable experience to share some of my astrological enthusiasms, and experience gained both from client work, student teaching – and Life, the greatest teacher of all. It’s been great to have had such an enjoyable and informative dialogue with commenters, making quite a few new blogging friends along the way. Creating the Facebook Page for the blog has also brought a whole new dimension, with a whole new spectrum of readers and commenters. Thanks, everyone! Keep reading and commenting!
Here is the most popular, most widely read post of the whole three years. What is it about TWINS that fascinates us so much?
Helene’s question:
My Answer:
During many years of teaching astrology classes, I found that the above questions came up very frequently.
It is important at this point to emphasise to readers who are familiar only with Sun Signs that to get ‘beyond the Sun Signs’ requires an individual’s horoscope to be drawn up for the date, place AND time of birth. Human beings are complex and contradictory. It’s not possible to approach any satisfying symbolic exploration of that complexity through the Sun or Star Sign alone.
A number of years ago, I decided to address the typical questions students asked about twins (summed up by Helene’s questions here) via one of the tutorial classes I ran for my more advanced students, all of whom had a good grasp of the basics of astrology, and some of whom were already practitioners in their own right.
One student – let’s call her Anna – was the devoted aunt to a set of twins in their mid teens, a boy and a girl – let’s call them Angus and Miriam. These two had been born less than fifteen minutes apart and had almost identical horoscopes.
I had formulated a theory about twins and astrology which I wanted to test out, so I obtained permission via Anna from Angus and Miriam’ s parents as well as the twins themselves, to calculate their horoscopes and discuss them anonymously in class.
My method was to put up on the board only one horoscope since there was so little difference between the twins’ horoscopes, and ask the students to take an hour to prepare along with me a basic outline of the key characteristics revealed by this one horoscope. We did the preparation as though we were preparing a birth chart for just one person.
The class knew nothing about either of the twins, and I asked Anna to observe us, but not to make any comments at all.
Once we had written up the outline, we spent the next hour discussing our findings with Anna, who knew her nephew and niece well.
I am writing this after a gap of about twenty years and no longer have the notes for detailed reference, so can only give a summary of the essence of what emerged from our discussion.
Anna found our summary from the one horoscope of the basic characteristics of both her nephew and niece to be very accurate. What was very clear was that certain traits were held in common, but that the rest were, as it were, divided up between the twins. To put it very simply, looking at a range of traits: 1,2,3 and 4 were recognisable in both; Miriam manifested traits 5,6 and 10 whilst Angus lived out traits 7, 8 and 9.
This very interesting and enlightening experiment does not of course constitute any kind of proof: but it bore out my impressions from reading about the similarities and differences in the lives of twins about whom I had read, as well as my own observations of twins I had come across from my own experience, as well as the few horoscope readings I had done for individuals who were twins.
What was this impression? Coming back to the analogy of the horoscope revealing the characters poised on life’s stage, waiting for the moment of birth to kick start the action of the play, it seemed that twins unconsciously chose which characters on their joint stage they were going to live out jointly – and the ones which they were going to live out separately.
The experiment which I did all those years ago with my students, Anna and her nephew and niece certainly bore out my theory….
After writing this piece I googled ‘astrology and twins’ to see what came up, and was pleased to find on my favourite astrology site, Astrodienst, that other astrologers including Dr Liz Greene had come to much the same conclusion.
As far as two people born at the same time in the same place is concerned, yes, they would in effect have the same horoscopes. You would certainly see considerable similarities if you studied both their lives over time. But each character on the stage at a given moment in time has a range of possible modes of expression. Thus the influence of different family circumstances and different opportunities, etc, would call forth a range of possible responses from the same basic character.
To read much more on this topic, do go over to master astrologer Donna Cunningham’s blog Sky Writer, where she has an excellent piece on the astrology of twins.
Then come back and let me know what YOU think!
Twins
800 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2013/2016
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page of Writing from the Twelfth House
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