Are You Cinderella or An Ugly Step-Sister?

The ugly step-sisters flank Cinderella in last year's panto at the Oxford Playhouse.

What is it about our brothers and sisters?

It's the longest relationship for most of us. And so often it is a knot of jealousy and loyalty, love and loathing, betrayal and trust. We share a history, we take each other for granted, we totally misunderstand each other, we know each other better than anyone...which is it?

It may well be the most complex relationship any of us have. And if you're lucky (or unlucky) enough to have a brother or sister, this relationship will have coloured the whole formation of your character – although you might not thinks so. Were you bullied or a bully? Were you babied or a baby? Were you the responsible one? Or the temperamental one? 

Cain kills Abel. Gustav Doré

In the past month or so, a number of people have come to me for readings with a similar issue at the core of their charts. They've been prompted to come for a wide range of reasons, but all have turned out to have a deep issue with a brother or sister.

Seldom does the subject of the sibling come up at first, but after we've been talking around things for a while, after we've started to really get into the chart together, the toxic sibling surfaces. Several people I've talked to have not spoken to a sibling for more than a decade.

Sibling relationships are amazingly rarely discussed in the psychological literature. It's a curious oversight, because this is likely the longest relationship that most of us will have. On the other hand, sibling relations are a central theme in folk and fairy tales. The disappearance of brothers and sisters from our discourse about the family is a feature of 20th century thinking.

The same thing has happened with astrology. There's a focus on father, mother, self and partner that excludes other relationships to the detriment of really understanding how an individual ticks.

And there's a key word - individual. I don't know why we lost sight of our brothers and sisters last century, but it could be to do with a central story of our current culture: boy meets girl, they marry, they breed, they die. This romantic trajectory is still supposedly the main life journey on which we are all engaged. But as we know, especially if you study astrology, life is a lot more complicated.

Brother has been turned into a little deer in
 this illustration by HJ Ford in the Red Fairy Book

In astrology, the third house is reserved for siblings, so is the sign Gemini and the planet Mercury. Planets in the third or Gemini or conjunct Mercury will tell you something about how you feel about your siblings. If you have nothing that chimes with this, look at the ruler of your third house.

Remember that these planets are not your brother or sister per se, but how you perceive them, how they are to you.

Here's something different that I have found to be important.

Keep in mind that your natal chart is a snapshot of the situation you are born into (as well as a portrait of you). So you can also find clues to the sibling relationship in the first and seventh houses. For example, planets exactly on the descendant often describe the older brother or sister, or simply the situation with them.

Why?

The seventh house is the house of equals, also rivals. If you were born with, say, Chiron, on the descendant, who would that Chiron be? Think about it.

Dig around on Donna Cunningham's excellent site, Sky Writer, for some insights into sibling relationships.