The Impact of Family – Part 15 – On the Generations
It is easy to want to view people in isolation and to understand them as unique and special individuals. This series is not interested in that folly and as such we will now touch the third rail of Astrology, namely family relationships. We’ll keep it light by focusing mostly on generational perspectives, but keep in mind that no person emerges into this world in isolation and the parents are the most potent and measurable of all influences.
Having reviewed each of the living generations it can be seen that forthcoming generations will begin to repeat Uranus placements of those who have come before. Today, Uranus nears the end of Taurus and will emerge into Gemini in a few short days time. That is the placement of the first cohort of Baby Boomers and it indicates that we will soon see a return of one of their generational patterns. These children, let’s call them the Cyberpunk Generation, will be mostly born to today’s Gen Z cohort. But who were the Baby Boomer version of Uranus in Gemini born to?
To understand this let’s take a look at our outer planet placements for the decades prior to the Baby Boomers:
Using our primary guideline of Uranus we can recognize three generations known to our cultural history. Immediately preceding the Baby Boomers are the Silent Generation and preceding them are the Greatest Generation. Before them we find the “Interbellum Generation,” and lost off the left side of the page would be the literary-famed “Lost Generation.”
The Greatest Generation, approximately 1912-1927, are the parents of the Baby Boomers. Their life is characterized by the Great Depression of their youth and World War 2 in their early adulthood. They are known as the generation who fought that war and are the people who settled in to the suburbs and had their three or four kids that constituted the “Baby Boom.” One thing we also see is that their Uranus placements were basically the same as those found in our current Gen Z. For that reason we can infer many things about the way of thinking of these people and note similarities to what we have already discussed about Gen Z. To the Baby Boomers, Gen Z will therefore exhibit a very familiar way of thinking that recalls to them their own parents, whether they realize it or not. It will be natural for the Baby Boomers to react to them in ways that mirror their reaction to their own parents. Fortunately, the Baby Boomer cohort got along famously with their own parents so this should present no problems at all.
In regards to aesthetics, we find Neptune in Leo in the Baby Boomer’s parental generation. This is the opposite of Aquarius found in Gen Z. We have not discussed the axis yet, but suffice to say that signs opposite each other represent something like two sides of the same coin. They are quite different – complimentary opposites – but they will share an underlying structural consistency. In the way we experience the aesthetics of another, the difference between them will be that the Greatest Generation will seem to enjoy things that clearly illustrate status and strong aesthetics in general, while Gen Z will prefer similarly strong aesthetics that convey status, but with a more detached and structured orientation. Both are going to the same place they are just taking different methods of transport to get there.
The much greater difference is found in their values. The Greatest Generation has Pluto in Cancer – showing a cohort very concerned with nurturing, protection, and security. It is easy to understand how they may have become this way, given what we know them to have experienced in their young lives. Further, it explains the old trope that the Baby Boomers were “spoiled” by their parents, producing the self-centered, narcissistic “Me Generation” stereotype they quickly earned as teenagers and young adults. Late into their lives the Greatest Generation maintained a conversation about “where they went wrong” in raising the Boomers. This reveals their Pluto in Cancer value system, concerned with their nurturing and what they reflected. For the Boomers with Pluto in Leo, this close-in nurturing would be experienced as something inhibiting to their deep-seated need to assert themselves, leading to the “generation gap” that was so well-documented between these two cohorts. The exacerbation of Uranus in Cancer in the second-half Boomer cohort shows us where the Boomers directly challenged the value system of their parents, and surely caused them great consternation.
Gen Z on the other hand has Pluto in Sagittarius. None of this generational drama among relatives they may have never met means much to them at all. Their values are wildly different and as such will produce wildly different outcomes than those found in the Greatest Generation. They will typically be the children of Pluto in Libra, creating a much greater ease and somewhat complimentary value systems, and we should not expect a repeat of the clashing we found with Boomers and their parents. Instead, owing to their parents usually having Neptune in Sagittarius, we should see them carry the aesthetic sensibility of the parents into their own primary values. Rather than conflicting with their parents they will be more likely to take very seriously the stance of their parents and work to put it into practice. Now we get to answer the question of which is worse – a generation who directly challenges the values of their parents, or one who takes on the affectations of their parents and turns them into real values.
By exploring these generational relationships we can better understand how one generation impacted another – particularly in a parental context – and also see how different combinations of elements can produce variations of generations that we have known before. Gen Z will think very similarly to the Greatest Generation, but they’ll express it differently and they’ll make wildly different choices. To know the choices that they will make simply look to the aesthetics of their parents, who were themselves raised by the children of the Greatest Generation and had taken their aesthetics of Neptune in Libra and converted them into the values of Pluto in Libra. Through this generational passing-down we can identify Gen Z as very much the complete product of our times, the collective effort of every living generation prior. Through them, we will harvest what we have collectively sown.
Leave a Reply