Astro-Twins – The astrological chart as a portrait of the soul

Have you ever met an astrotwin? How much did you look like? Were there uncanny parallels between their lives, or were they radically different? Strictly speaking, astrotwins are two people born on the same day, month, year, time, and place, and therefore with identical charts in every way. While it’s rare to meet an exact astrotwin, we often come across people who are “dating twins,” born on the same day, month, and year, but at a different time or place.

George W. Bush and Sylvester Stallone are twins (July 6, 1947), as are Lincoln and Darwin (February 12, 1809). An unlikely couple is Margaret Thatcher and Lenny Bruce, both born October 13, 1925. Some other couples 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 on the same day, month, year, and one hour before Charles Manson (November 12, 1934). Manson is a notorious criminal serving a life sentence, and my client was apparently the opposite: he counseled incarcerated sex offenders.

Skeptics use these examples to discredit astrology, and it baffles those who want to believe as well. They speculated about the “shadow me” of my client, who was perhaps sublimating his own violence by working in a prison. And it’s possible that Margaret Thatcher, despite her very proper public facade of hers, was just as raunchy as Lenny Bruce in private. Perhaps so, surely the same gifts and predilections can be expressed in different ways.

The birth counter at www.Worldometers.info says that there have already been 103,000 births worldwide and it is only 7:00 AM. No wait, it’s now 7:10 and there are almost 106,000. Every day about 350,000 date twins are born, and among them, depending on the time and place of birth, hundreds of astrotwins. 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 with essentially the same birth chart as Barak Obama, but only one of them is running for president? The analogy that occurred to me is that the natal chart is a portrait of the soul, but it is NOT the soul. It is just an expression of the infinite potentials of the soul. Just one of those souls is Barack Obama.

That is why I say that the birth chart is a portrait of the soul. Have you ever visited an art class where the students were trying to take a nude photo? As he wanders through the room, each student has interpreted the subject in a different way, from strictly figurative to highly abstract. Colors, techniques, styles come in infinite varieties. They have tried to capture the image, but they cannot capture the essence.

It is the same with a particular birth chart. Each person born with it attempts to express her potential, but does so in her own way and with varying degrees of success, depending on the materials available. If you have clay, you make a bust. If you have pastel chalk, that’s what you use. And if you have oil paintings, you have a better chance of being featured in an art gallery, IF you work hard and strive for years and years.

Well, this blog post is a rough sketch. Let’s see if it works as a mural!