"Generational" legacy Mercury in Aries?

[Jim Eshelman]

Here's a strange one - I don't know if it's a real effect, but it's not something I've seen in any of the other sign groupings.

Is there something about Mercury in Aries that leads to children of the eminent following in their footsteps with great success? It isn't part of traditional sign lore or obvious symbolism and it isn't something we find as easily with luminaries in Aries. Is it a coincidence?

Of the nearly 1,000 public figure charts in my example chart catalogue, 57 have Mercury in Aries. Of these, in addition to the obvious career legacy of royalty and the occasional Kennedy, I also see Candace Bergen, Julian Lennon, Ricky Nelson, Susan Strasberg, and Wynona Judd. Each of them is/was a significant entertainer who was a child of a significant entertainer.

This sort of thing happens in the world a lot, of course, but the same kind of pattern (as mentioned above) isn't in other Mercury sign clusters or Aries dminances.

There may be some kind of "dignity hand-off" that's more general, or perhaps a "willing and eager to optimize any advantage" at the start. The same list has three women whose eminence was furthered by their husbands (in all cases their dead husbands), though they rose to their own accomplishment beyond what was left to them - Joanne Clancy, Priscilla Presley, and Marjorie Cameron.

Or, this could all be coincidence.

Thoughts?

[Veronica]

Very very interesting......

My mother and her mother both have Mercury in Aries.

I have very often wished that they could see my life and what I've done with it and the home I created.

I really believe that they would not only feel like I am a resounding success, but that the struggles and hardships and sacrifices they endured .....would all be worth it.

I feel sometimes that throughout history moms have not had the liberty to truly enjoy motherhood and to truly love and experience thier children. In the past children died easily, were sent off to work, were sent to fosters, off to war.... and controlled in a million other ways by culture. Women had to work, and had husbands with demands, had cultural values pulling them to be things other then a mom.

I have enjoyed and observed and been a part of my children's life in a way that most women have never experienced. It's not a legacy like a mother daughter singing act or such, but I know my gram gave up her country and fortune to give her family a healthy and safe place. My mom was brilliant and could have worked but she too focused on raising her family.

I had been thinking recently about a stanza in a book that I always thought meant that a woman needs to put her children aside and focus on being her own star....and I struggled for years with that cold hearted seeming verbage.....and then one day I thought, well maybe that is true and is best for others, but maybe I'm different and the messenger of those words just never could fathom that someone like me exists.

[Jim Eshelman]

I wanted to double-check - from this specific list of charts, I haven't checked the "receipt of legacy" issue for Aries luminaries and at least some of these have Sun in Aries. Have I simply missed it as a general Aries theme.

The 71 Sun in Aries examples in the same catalogue, beside the hereditary monarch examples that are sort of a thing on their own (and quite abundant in Aries: Catherine de Medici, Queen Isabella, Catherine the Great, Queen Elizabeth II), I find Candace Bergen, Kourtney Kardashian, Ricky Nelson - some of the same people but about half the size of the list. (There are a few founders or progenitors of others' legacies, which isn't a surprise - overarching paternal authority is natural for Aries, so names like Hearst, Huxley, and Freud fit with the separate idea that they were powerful fathers.)

So... there are certainly a few here but nearly as many, which still makes it sound like the effect (if there IS a real effect) is especially in the Mercury placement. OTOH, I'm intentionally filtering out the royal legacies as possibly misleading us down a separate path, but in some senses it's the same sort of dynastic legacy.

When I look at the 76 Moon in Aries examples from the same set, the only clear example I find is Robert Downey Jr., the son of two film actors (though not of great note). For the most part, the Moon in Aries examples broke away from their roots rather than dyn, there iastically adhere to them. There are a couple of mother-related handoffs - Cheryl Crane is most famous for killing her mother's boyfriend to protect Mom, and Gary Duncan first learned astrology from his mom - but nothing of the dynastic inheritance fact. (Even among royals, my only two examples in this catalogue are the obvious Queen Elizabeth I and King Charles III, both of England.)

So, as was first presented, it's not a Moon in Aries phenomenon.

Allowing my brain, overnight, to rest on the nature of the symbolism (if there IS a phenomenon here), there is the sort of dynastic quality that is obvious in paternity (and sometimes maternity) handing it down - Catherine de Medici ensuring three of her sons were kings is no small feat! - but on the recipient end (which is what I'm exploring under Mercury), it's not so obvious.

[Jim Eshelman]

Maybe something broader such as a symbolism of generations, the rising and falling of individual lives in one long chain, much as in the raising of sheep - something pointedly discussed in the ancient texts. But, if this "generation of farm animals" sort of thing... why not something similar for people raising cattle, goats, or, for that matter, grapes? - If there is anything to it here, in Aries' root symbolism, it is in some version of the "rhythmic rise and fall" theme.

[Danica]

In order to understand this phenomenon, one needs to look at it differently than what's been the usual manner in which most people presently perceive the term (and concept of) "legacy".

The habituated, still most-common, perspective is that the Future (children) exists in order to keep-in-existence and carry-on the Past (parental patterns); the what-is-coming-Next is perceived as serving (functionally) to continue (as a paradigm, a pattern) that which already-has-sprang-into-being before and exists as pre-established in the Now (a given present-time).

From the evolutionary standpoint, this is backwards; Nature's own processes do not operate in this way; the Children do not exist "in order to continue the pattern of their parents", the parents exist in order to serve as substrate for the new patterns, which are the Children (and the parents are what they are - parents - solely due to there being the offspring - without this, these would not be "parents", but themselves simply "fruitless"-offspring of those coming before them ...).

The old/already-existing structures of any Living thread/species exist, functionally, FOR the New springing/sproutings; orientation of the natural movement of energy is: what-was is here now so that what-is-yet-to-be (and which wasn't before) can spring out into being.

So, from this (natural, evolutionary) perspective, in respect to such things as this astrological "legacy" patterning that we can see, children (new beings) are born into families where there is adequate substrate-quality present for what is their own, unique (of the children) mission/task to perform; the specific qualities of the paternal/maternal-conditions which are most suitable for this are "selected" (not at the level that the human mind operates, the deeper laws of Natural movement of energy navigate this) so that a child gets born exactly in the family which "provides the substrate-material" adequate to the peculiar, unique Work/mission/task of this New being.


And, practically speaking, what this implies, if you're a parent: look not for what your child "can do for you", seeing the child as "continuation of your lineage", perceiving it, basically, as your property/"investment" (there in order to serve the perpetuation of your own “name and tradition/legacy”, or genetic material), but instead, look what is it that you exist-to and can-best do for-the-child, not as "yours something", but as a new Human as such (the child does not belong to you; in truth, it is much more accurate to say that you, as parent, belong to the child!) --- existing not so that it itself would serve the further, ever tighter enclosure of pattern-bondage of perpetuating-the-already-existing (= inevitably leading toward dead-end), but to open-up the further development of the species, within the natural stream movement of toward-the-New, the what hasn't-been-before and is fully yet-Unknown.

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Re what this may mean in relation to the Mercury-Aries occurrences that Jim says above he has observed:

Planets are the non-stellar entourage of this our local Sun; the Zodiac are the stars themselves.

Maybe there's something intrinsic to the nature of Aries constellation, which we can not at all now perceive by habitually looking at signs primarily via their "meaning-connection" to the planets (the "what's-dignified-there" perspective), or, in other words, by staying within the framework of observing and attempting to understand the stars (even "only" the starry regions of the Zodiac belt) through what we can see and know about the planets (this perspective, although at first glance different, is by its essential quality ultimately the same as that of attempting to understand the Zodiac constellations/ stars via their fixed "connection" to the observed rhythm of four seasons of Earth's rotation around the Sun) ...

So, it will take its own time for patterns and occurrences like this to get to be actually understood.