A Meaningful Path

Ancestral astrology is the work of holding natal charts from multiple generations side by side to reveal patterns of fate, behavior, trauma, and drama. Since becoming a father in 2021, this work has become one of the most meaningful parts of my practice. I now see that the entire birth chart is, in many ways, ancestral.

This is something I never came across in my education, but I was always interested in it: intergenerational, ancestral astrology work, holding natal charts of a family’s generations next to one another, with an eye for patterns of fate, behavior, trauma, and of course, drama. What has become clear to me is that the entire birth chart is largely ancestral.

What is Ancestral Astrology?

Collecting birth times across generations is a relatively recent practice, but it has opened a new frontier in astrology. With birthdays alone, we can track basic sign placements—for instance, Venus in Libra from my daughter back through me to my father. But the deeper patterns remain hidden without a birth time. The Moon shifts roughly twelve degrees every day, and the angles of the chart change every four minutes. These are the points where inherited patterns and karmic purpose reside.

The moment you took your first breath was perfectly timed, and you didn’t do it alone. Your ancestors were there then, and they are with you now. Every small gesture, from crushing a clove of garlic to cracking your knuckles, may have been done in strikingly similar fashions by your ancestors. This extends to personality as well. My daughter’s precise intellectual connection to the present moment, visible in her chart, is also present in her maternal grandmother’s chart, born under the same alignment over sixty years prior.

Why Birth Time Matters

The deepest patterns and characteristics of planetary placements are hard to trace without a birth time. The Moon covers roughly twelve degrees of the zodiac every twenty-four hours, meaning many of our inherited patterns can’t be pinned without a proximatet birth time. Additionally, the degrees of the ascendant, descendant, midheaven, and root of the chart change every four minutes, and these points carry significant karmic weight.

A Personal Example

To hold my own chart next to my father’s, we were each born with a midpoint structure containing the Sun, the Moon, and Pluto. This alignment happens for roughly eight hours each month (four separate days for about two hours each day), a very small window. I do not have an official birth time for father’s father, but on his date of birth in 1917, this same alignment happened for two hours in the afternoon (and this birth time aligns with him for other reasons, too). If I could trace birthdays back into further generations, I would. But I can conclude from what I do know that in my paternal line, we menfolk have been dealing with a complex, fixated, and repetitive emotional makeup for a long time.

One after the other, we have stowed it away and passed it on to the next generation. I shared earthly life with this grandfather for only seventy-four days, but with these insights into his chart, I can tap into a deep commonality that would otherwise be invisible to me. And through the lens of ancestral healing, I can without a doubt say that part of my fate or journey is reckoning with deep, circular emotions that are so immersive they can be hard to even identify. (A correlating epigenetic note: both my father and grandfather are veterans of war.)

Applications of Ancestral Astrology

If I have a son one day, we’ll see if the trait continues when his birth chart debuts. Potentially, I could even use this information as a tool for predicting my own son’s birth date and time. Pretty cool, right? (Update: we had a son! And while the Sun-Moon-Pluto combo is absent in his chart, he is most definitely not short on Pluto!)

As I think about it, there are quite a few mysteries which this sort of ancestral astrology can help us understand:

The ways parents and children are challenging each other to transform and develop
Unprocessed ancestral traumas that repeat through generations, in need of deeper attention
The magic and divine alignments behind a traumatic (or even simple) birth Points of connection and shared energy between generations
How a single person’s journey is unique and adds to their family legacy

All of these pathways feel incredibly powerful to me. The birth chart is often misrepresented as though each of us is an isolated entity, like we are only who we are because of our charts. But after a look at the avenues listed above, we can throw that notion out the window.

Discarding the Blank Slate

I must have been in my late teens when a teacher introduced me to the concept of the human tabula rasa: the idea that each of us arrives in this life as an empty canvas, awaiting impressions that form who we are (I realize I have greatly reduced the argument here). Now, the idea feels terribly sad to me—the result of a deep separation from nature that is tumbling humankind toward oblivion. An understanding of ourselves as ancestrally unrooted leads us only to a never-ending anxiety, constantly questioning our purpose and destiny. Consequently, we exhaust our life force on an endless search out there for who we are. But the birth chart directly contradicts this. Ancestral astrology shows us instead that each of us arrives earthside with the essential structures of our identities embedded within us, much the same as in the forest, each acorn contains a distinct potential oak tree.

This is not to suggest that our lives are unmagical, programmed and predetermined. But like the oak tree nearest to you right now, your life is part of a much longer narrative that has played out over countless generations. These ancestral stories are nonlinear, burled, flowering, fractal—rich with holes and mysteries, great deeds and tragedies. To understand your life in this context is in direct contradiction to the modern, western myth of a completely individuated hero’s journey to meaningfulness and glory.

The Ecosystem of Meaning

Recall the last time you shared a moment with the night sky. Did you feel small and insignificant? Or empowered and uplifted by the unquantifiable, unwitnessable web of magic that folds you into its sacred circuitry? Both feelings are important, but I advocate for the more of latter. It was that deep humbling before such vast mystery that catalyzed my spiritual connection with the planets. I was twenty-two, walking nightly under the constellations on a nearby trail, when I planted myself in the fact that everything is stardust. Little did I know the ecosystem of meaning I participated in, fed by this simple truth. We understand that ecosystem through astrology, and when we live authentically, we tend and wield that living magic, each in our special way. I call that magic Spacetime Coding.

Every natal chart is a mixture of ancestral planetary alignments and patterns distinct to that time, place, and person. In its fullness, no chart is ever duplicated, just as time never repeats itself. Unique, but not alone, both individual and indivisible from those who came before, you are a whole, which is part of a greater whole, which is part of a greater whole, which is part of a greater whole…

You get me?

How I Can Help You Explore Your Ancestral Patterns

If you are curious about what patterns run through your family line, I can help. In a family patterns reading, I incorporate family and relationship synastry to reveal the ancestral patterns that may be shaping your life.

What You’ll Learn in an Family Patterns Astrology Reading:

The planetary patterns you may have inherited from your parents or grandparents
How your chart compares to your children’s charts
Recurring emotional or behavioral dynamics across generations
The unique story you are adding to your family legacy
Understanding of what belongs to you and what came from somewhere else

This knowledge can help you break old patterns, heal family wounds, or simply understand yourself and your family more deeply.

Ancestral Astrology is Calling

Your connections to your living family and ancestors are probably not news to you. But the fact that we can work through astrology to understand and improve those relationships… Well, that’s remarkable. I encourage you to do some research on your own, if you have the tools. You can also work with me in a Family Patterns Astrology Reading. This service has been organically called out of me, and it’s what excites and teaches me the most right now.