A reader asks:
How can you tell the level of someone’s maturity from their chart?
I don’t think you can tell the level of a person’s maturity by looking at their chart. Further, I don’t think the level of a person’s maturity is static. Not through their lives or even from year to year or week to week even from day to day.
As an example, I have a chart and it is set. But planets transit those set points so my life is fluid. My moods are fluid and the level of my maturity is also fluid.
I may have certain aspects of my personality under control for the most part but that doesn’t mean I can’t stumble. It doesn’t mean I can’t have a bad day and find myself acting in ways or feelings things I thought I had wrapped up long ago.
Also, a chart is describes energy very well but it does not tell how a person expresses the energy. For example, I have Venus square Neptune in my chart. I may be in love with a priest or be a nun. I may be in love with a drunk and a person incarcerated either in prison or by mental illness. I may make movies about lovers pining and I could go on and on with endless possibilities of how these planets combine.
As another example, my husband has Mars in aspect to Saturn which is commonly associated with violence and cruelty. He became a world-class, highly disciplined soldier.
What this comes down to is free will. I may have achieved a level of maturity but I have to maintain that level on a day to day, hour to hour basis. As far as I am concerned there are no guarantees of that. In fact I reject the whole concept of absolutes in favor of the 80/20 rule which is something that can actually be sustained. That would go something like this:
I am at my best, 80% of the time. I figure this is much better than being at my best 20% of time but no, no, definitely no, there is no way you can tell the level of maturity of a person from a chart.
If you want to know something along those lines you have to observe them and their life and even then your ability to judge is suspect and dependent on your own level of maturity so unless you are spectacularly confident and/or invited to judge another person, I’d say stay out of it.
Anyone else have ideas?
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bravo! Well said!
“As another example, my husband has Mars in aspect to Saturn which is commonly associated with violence and cruelty. He became a world-class, very disciplined soldier.”
Exactly! If I do not like how the energy is expressing itself in my life. I just change it to a more positive form of the same energy. That is the true gift of astrology, the wisdom to exchange fate for chosen destiny using free will!
My first thought is that maybe points that reveal insight into karmic history and process could tell you about the maturity of a person, like the nodes, lunation phase or pluto’s position by house. But I myself am a case in point against saying “she is mature or immature because of these factors.”
My lunation phase is New Moon, which indicates this life is the beginning of a new learning cycle for me, but that doesn’t mean it’s my soul’s first time around the block.
I’m reading Stephen Arroyo’s Chart Interpretation Handbook right now, and based on this and your post, astrology gives the most concrete information about a person only when you have context. The birth chart is a picture of how and where the energies will express.
Funny coincidence, I just bought a used copy of Liz Greene’s Saturn book this past weekend, it’s sooooo good.
As another example, my son has a Grand Water Trine. I’ve never met anyone so completely out of touch with their feelings. And for being 17, his 7 year old sister is centuries more mature and responsiblem than him.
I love your 80/20 rule interpretation…love it, love it:/ Fluid and subject to both sides and every sort of angle of interpretation. I’ve gotta write that down somewhere I and see when I’m in my judge suit that is too tight.