ASTROLOGY

Looking for mancies to foretell and forecast about relationships is a wide extended practice. In Astrology, synastries relate birth charts of parents and children, partners, couples, friends, unknown people, co-workers… no matter the age and even without knowing each other.

What does it mean when signs belong to the same element? What are the best patterns? What if there’s no good ones? Affinity is usually deduced by starting from these considerations, but we don't get a yes or no for an answer, because it'ss not even about a matter of degree!

Elements

Since Greek tradition, signs belong to some of the four natural elements: Fire, Earth, Air and Water. Each one is assigned to different specific areas across the birth chart's perimete,r but that’s a visual representation with no natural equivalence: elements are combined and transform each other.

Planetary positions and rising sign (or sign on the horizon at birth) indicate the predominating elements on charts. Traditionally, this is called balance of preponderances and lacks, although the reading doesn’t tell if those characteristics are actually expressed, dominated or even taken into consideration.

A birth chart’s reading is a static one, which means it describes that specific time at that moment. But human expression is not established according to that moment. What the chart displays is a karmic moment of the vital energy from when the present time is contemplated: is the person inclined to preponderances?, how preponderances and lacks are expressed in daily life?, how the person interacts with those who express his or her own birth chart’s lacks? 

Chart in motion

The most usual is finding astrological reports made from a static view, what doesn’t change, what seems to not move. But if there’s a recurrent observation is precisely people changing throughout time, simply because they’re alive.

Looking at the own dynamics and those of other people, what is static turns to dynamics as life goes on. Sometimes, those changes strenghten preponderances, some others the lacks, or both. Sometimes they’re indicated at birth, or are produced as a developmental effect, or are set by intentions or will at the present moment.

An esoteric reading on a birth chart points out those changes as integrating tendencies in internal relations. Since from those internal relations the person will meditate on external affinity.

Impulses behind changes

What produces motion and where does it lead to? In Astrology, different deterministic perspectives consider motion beyond the static moment at birth, or birth chart. Some of them consider planetary transits as the cause, although they don’t explain what happens when those indications don’t happen in daily life.

Other perspectives, mostly psychological ones, consider as well the balance of elements, aspects and transits, although the chart’s tendencies and probabilities are read as an interplay of personal ghosts and stories, with people even starting defensive moves when intensity produces excessive disonances. This type of reading doesn’t consider a specific destiny is set at birth, although when there’s no correlation between the chart’s projections and the experience, it considers the expression is abnormal to those parameters indicated by the chart.

For instance: a quite intense square usually indicates a conflict hard to be resolved. This is a psychological reasoning that points out there’s something to be resolved: since there’s an excessive intensity, homeostasis is unbalanced. But if intensity be not a problem, the person may reject some aspect of the configuration because of personal reasons either, so the rejection would produce a fragmented expression as a defensive move (projections, dissociations, etc.). Anyway, the chart is read from a disintegrative view, and based on defenses to be expected inside of what is normal at each time and place.

On the contrary, an esoteric-vital reading on the chart is quite different. First, it considers there are channels and flows of physical-ethereal base for the energy’s circulation, no matter the intensity. Fears and insecurity are not basic dispositions impulsing the chart’s dynamics.  Even time and place provide just normative expectations, not related with Astrology at all. 

This type of reading, the esoteric-vital one, gives real value to subjects such as karma, elemental’s development, human intention and free will. It also considers the chart’s tendencies as flows deriving into energetic fusions, which are the main dynamics taking closer or pushing away two people’s birth charts, and depending on their personal moments over time.

Likings about characteristics and intensities, and the dynamics to expect for (according to the type of reading), along with personal aims, take to meditate on greater or lesser affinity. Since the only incompatible situation is non-motion, in any expression, as it's contrary to life.