Анна Шиман
Draft translation. This text was translated automatically and has not been proofread yet — if something reads oddly, it does.
The code of a person’s purpose along the 1-7 and 4-10 house axes of the horoscope.
Through “hardship to the stars”.
Sometimes the grim bankruptcy of a human soul makes me feel like a bailiff in my sessions. Every time, the same scenario plays out. A woman brings me the battered scroll of her fate — her natal chart, a psychological test or simply the story of her childhood hurts — and waits for the verdict with her heart in her mouth. She longs to learn her “higher purpose”. She believes that somewhere up there, on the heavenly heights of the spirit, a plan of hints for this life has been written out for her.
But first let’s look at that endless lament about the “rotten husbands” who ruined her life, which I have been hearing for years!
Surrounded by self-development books, with hundreds of marathons behind her, a woman looks down on her far too down-to-earth, tired husband. She feels she has “outgrown” this marriage, that her “vibrations have become too subtle” for his primitive nature.
While such “enlightened” souls save the world in their fantasies, a real disaster is sometimes unfolding in their own families. A person who claims a personality of cosmic scale turns out to be utterly helpless in front of an unpaid rent bill. And, like a coward, they offload onto the children the suppressed aggression born of that helplessness. A mum who is “searching for her purpose” can meditate for hours, but let a child spill some milk and the mask of holiness falls away, revealing a face twisted with rage.
Very often this is the moment infidelity walks onto the stage. Either the husband, starved of simple female warmth, finds comfort elsewhere, or she herself throws herself into the arms of yet another “karmic twin”. A loud divorce follows. The woman is sure that now, at last, she is free of “toxic ties”.
But psychoanalysis keeps reminding us, mercilessly and tediously, that you can change the actors, but if you have not rewritten the play, the script will repeat itself. A year or two into the new relationship the mask slips again, and she discovers with horror that next to her is the very same “rotten” man, only seen in profile.
Why? Because her First house — her personality — has stayed the same. She has not owned her own coldness, manipulativeness and cruelty. She has repressed them, and the people around her have obediently made infidelity and betrayal real on the outside.
This is sham enlightenment and one more sophisticated way of spinning in the same wheel of suffering, stepping on the same astrological rake again and again.
The human ego is built on duality, and we cannot climb to the summit of development while our feet are stuck in the swamp of an unlived childhood. The inner core that everyone is looking for (with or without success), the psychic structure of a person, rests on a cross (what a coincidence, right?), where the horizontal of earthly existence crosses the vertical of the spirit. And as long as these axes are out of balance, any ascent will sooner or later end in a painful fall and a new round of samsara.
The Mirror and the Wicked Troll. The axis of the first and seventh houses of the horoscope.
A person’s grandest and most tormenting delusion is the belief that the people around them are the independent authors of their pain and their reactions.
People come to me wounded by marriages that have lasted for years, or by relationships without commitment.
“He is destroying me,” they say. “She drains my strength.” For years they wage an exhausting, petty war “for justice”, trying to re-educate, remake, suppress and crush their partner.
Do you know what they all have in common? They cannot leave! Inside them there seems to be a magnet or an invisible hook that binds them together and won’t let them break the relationship off.
In the language of psychology this is called projection, and in the language of archetypes, the dynamics of the First and Seventh houses of the horoscope.
The First house is our Ascendant, our facade, our mask, and at the same time a mechanism of psychic adaptation rigidly fixed in childhood. It is how our essential energy once met its surroundings and froze in a certain position.
The Seventh house is our Shadow. Everything we have repressed out of our First house (our weakness, our aggression, our greed or our sensuality), the psyche, by the law of self-regulation, projects outwards. And then that very distortion happens: a splinter of the broken mirror gets into our eye, and our finest, noblest qualities turn against us. Without integrating the shadow side, sincere kindness starts to be felt by others as surrender and weakness, an invitation to be used. And our purity and trust inevitably turn into a defenceless, self-sacrificing naivety that keeps getting wounded on other people’s cynicism.
The person is genuinely baffled: “I’m so kind to people, so why do they walk all over me?”
But the thing is, the world is only acting out the very strength the person has banished from their own First house. They attract harsh, despotic Seventh-house partners exactly until they understand something important. To protect their kindness, they need to give it back its rightful boundaries: the right to say “no”, the right to be angry and the right to draw a firm line where your territory ends.
If warring spouses found the courage to lower their weapons for a moment and look into the eyes of their “enemy”, they would recoil in horror. For the Seventh house always reflects what we have locked in the cellar of the First. Our longest partners come into our lives not for comfort but to balance out our lazy ego, bloated with defences, and make us grow. But an infantile person prefers to smash the mirror, call their partner a troll and run off into a new relationship, where exactly the same reflection will be waiting.
And until this turn towards oneself has happened, the battle on the horizontal of the material world will go on, pulling us into an even deeper cycle of life scripts and keeping us on the 1 — 7 house axis for an endlessly long time. Sometimes for a whole lifetime.
A jellyfish in the ocean, or the trauma of the first separation. The axis of the fourth and first houses.
Where does this rage come from? Why do we need, as badly as we need air, another person to belong to us completely, to dissolve in us, to have no will of their own?
To understand this, a psychologist has to descend into the pre-dawn mist of human existence — into the Fourth house of the chart, the home of the unconscious, of body memory and primal instincts.
Think of a baby. It does not know where it ends and the world begins. It is a jellyfish, swaying blissfully in the warm ocean of its mother. Mum is its Fourth house, its basic safety. But this paradise is biologically doomed. A day comes when the ocean recedes. Mum is late home from work. Mum closes the toilet door. Mum leaves the child alone. In that moment of blissful fusion the first and most desperate human catastrophe is born: the trauma of separation.
First a bodily pattern of terror forms, then an emotional block, and then a mental construct, a belief. The child learns to survive by leaning on the First house, building the personality’s defence mechanisms and, most actively of all, a new personality that will fit like a puzzle piece into the family’s current script.
But the trauma of the Fourth house does not go anywhere. Thirty years later a grown, strong man makes an ugly jealous scene over an unanswered message, and a successful woman falls into a panicky depression if her partner takes a break in the relationship. We frantically search the Seventh house for that same mum from the Fourth. We demand oceanic fusion from our earthly partners. And this invisible weight drags us down to the very bottom of the ancestral cauldron, never letting us rise to the 4 — 10 house axis of the horoscope.
Three hundred tonnes of pure gold. The depth of the fourth house of the horoscope.
When, while working with a psychologist, a person finally understands that their partner is not to blame, they begin to turn towards themselves and dig deeper. And they discover that their Fourth house is a huge ancestral cauldron in which a soup is simmering, made of everything in that family line that was repressed, not lived through, not absorbed, not said and not done.
The human body and psyche are not made artificially. Psychically we are woven from the flesh and blood, the tears, the unspoken hurts, the unlived grief and the bright achievements and victories of our ancestors. Our spirit, a spark of the absolute, falls into this heavy mental and emotional field of the family line, lowering its vibrations in order to take on form. And instead of living our own life, we unconsciously begin to serve the debts of the past. So it was, so it is, so it will be.
“I take offence at my husband exactly the way my mother took offence at my father, and my grandmother at my grandfather.” “I hate men the way I hated my father, and my mother hated hers.” These insights sound in my sessions like a bitter poison that we have yet to turn into a healing remedy through awareness. In that moment a person understands that a huge share of their life energy, a whole “three hundred tonnes of psychic gold”, has been invested in old blocks. Resentment towards mother, the war with father for justice, shame, guilt, childhood deficits: that is where all our libido goes. Our “I” turns out to be stuffed away and scattered across the chests and cellars of the past, leaving us drained and powerless in the present. We become energy bankrupts. And in this drained state we make a common mistake. We try to make a treacherous escape from our own weaknesses and hopelessness, and call it “spiritual development”.
The ego and the search for purpose. The axis of the fourth and tenth houses of the horoscope.
The human psyche is by nature greedy, conservative and incredibly lazy. Our ego wants all the privileges of maturity without passing through the scorching crucible of transformation. That is exactly why express methods are so popular right now: “find out your purpose in an hour”, “activate your wealth point”.
People come to me and say: “I looked at my Tenth house — it is the top of the chart, my MC, my higher purpose. I want scale, I want to save the world, but I can’t feel my great mission. Help me!” But when I ask whether they can earn their own bread, keep their own biological body in order through routine and diet, bear being alone and not lash out at their children, they wave the question away in irritation. It is all too boring. The ego doesn’t want to keep a journal, doesn’t want to write out its destructive thoughts monotonously, doesn’t want to spend years nurturing meanings and going through the dry daily routine of self-reflection. It wants the ascending triangle of evolution straight to the stars, right from this mortal earth. All this is too mundane for their “great spirit”. They do not see that behind their lofty talk of universal love hides plain desertion from reality.
The law of the psychic cross is unbending, and the vertical of the spirit (the 4-10 house) will not rest on emptiness. You will not reach the Tenth house (social mission and maturity) until you have put the First (personality) and the Fourth (psychological roots and autonomy) in order. Without this earthly base your spirituality remains no more than a compensatory mask, behind which hides the same frightened, infantile child running away from reality.
Real personal growth is not a flight into the clouds; it is bringing light into your own inner cellars. To begin the ascent to the Tenth house, you first need to bring your will and energy back out of the chests and cellars of your unconscious.
The energy of libido. A person as a battery.
In the end, the aim of any genuine depth work and spiritual search is not to learn to command the elements, foretell fate or bend people to your will. The only thing truly within our power is managing ourselves by observing the natural cycles of the psyche. We have to learn to dress for the inner “weather” and to store up food in time for the winters of the soul. For this we have to learn patience, discipline and self-regulation, because searching does not cancel ordinary, real life.
When a person stops spinning chaotically through scripts along the horizontal of the 1 — 7 axes, stops training their partners and making claims against their parents, their ego, their “I”, finally makes the great turn. It returns to the geometric centre of the cross formed by the two cardinal axes of the horoscope.
What does this mean in practice?
Resentment is a very expensive loan that our psyche pays off to the past every day. Holding on for years to resentment towards our mother or to a husband’s betrayal, we literally clench our body in a spasm, spending more than half our vital force on not going mad from old pain. But when this block breaks through in a session with a psychologist, through honest tears and acceptance, the defence falls. The psyche instantly takes back a colossal amount of the strength it was holding down. A person often changes physically before your eyes. Their shoulders straighten, the constant tiredness goes, and their gaze, once pleading and sad, becomes clear and “alight”.
This is the real expansion of personal influence that people call “the scale of a personality”. When you no longer need to spend your strength fighting the ghosts of the past, all your power unfolds into the present. Those around you instantly pick up this new steadiness, and you begin to be heard, your opinion counts, and your projects finally get the energy to come true
Only when a person is centred and whole do the two main currents of the Universe begin to flow through them freely: the descending current of the spirit, taking on form, and the ascending current of earthly experience lived through and understood. The person becomes a battery able to withstand the enormous voltage of reality. They no longer look for answers in horoscopes. Rather, they use them for navigation. They do not look for answers in other people’s eyes. They become the answer themselves. They simply step into the unknown of their day and for the first time in their life begin to live their own, and only their own, true fate.
But this has nothing to do with power over the world as an immature ego sees it.
Ariadne’s thread. Why going down into the Labyrinth of your horoscope matters more than any instructions about your purpose.
Let’s turn to the ancient Greek myth of Ariadne’s thread and Theseus, but rethink it psychoanalytically. The chart is not the path itself; it is only the thread (the process). The Labyrinth and the Minotaur are our life and our traumas. All of this is hidden in the depths of the unconscious of our fourth house.
When a person demands a ready-made instruction for their life from a natal chart, I always remember the ancient myth of the Cretan labyrinth.
Picture Theseus holding his breath at the entrance to the stone maw, where a monster breathes in the dark. Ariadne gives him a ball of thread.
What does a modern person do when a horoscope or a psychological test is put into their hands? They sit down on a stone at the entrance, unwind the thread on their knees, study its structure, thickness and colour, and declare: “Now I know everything about my purpose. My mission is the thread.” They try to use the chart as a blueprint of the Labyrinth, hoping the paper will spare them the terror of meeting their own darkness.
But this is an illusion. Ariadne’s thread, and with it your natal chart, is not the path itself. It is only a landmark. It is a fine mental guide, encoded in symbols, which means nothing at all until you have taken the first step into your labyrinth.
There is only one way to learn your purpose, come out into the light and become the hero of your own fate: by looking back from the very depths of the Labyrinth. You have to walk through the dark corridors of your past, work through the heavy experience of childhood blocks and meet face to face with your own Minotaur: your repressed traumas, family curses and fears. With your fourth house.
The chart does not insure you against mistakes and pain. It only promises that if you find the courage to smelt the poison of what you have lived through into awareness, you will not lose your mind in these invisible corridors and will be able to come back, carrying in your hands the “alchemical gold” of a renewed soul. Purpose is born not at the moment of reading the starry scroll, but at the moment you take responsibility for every step you take along the roads of reality.
That is why, on the “Symbolon. Initiation by Symbol” course, as early as September we will take the mysterious Symbolon cards into our hands. They will become that very thread of Ariadne for you. This is a tool for those who are ready to go down into the Labyrinth of their Shadow, uncover the true causes of their relationship scripts and win back the right to be the author, not the hostage, of their own fate.
Anna Shyman, psychologist.
