None of what follows is medical advice. In fact, I believe that as medical advice it is mostly incorrect or, at best, misleading. But it’s still a true story . . .

When I was born, the doctor told my mother that she had a B-vitamin deficiency and that it was probably exacerbated by the fact that she was breastfeeding me. To correct the problem, he recommended that she drink a pint of Guinness Stout every day. It’s true that Guinness Stout contains Folate, which is a B vitamin necessary for the production of some of our genetic materials. The trouble with the theory is that a pint of the stuff provides only 3.2% of our necessary daily dose, which means we’d need to drink thirty beers per day to stay healthy – the devil is in the details, in other words.

Mom followed the doctor’s orders, which was no hardship for her. And, since I was breastfeeding, naturally that meant that I was following them too, albeit in second-hand fashion. Before I was three months old, I had drunk a lot of Guinness Stout via my mother. Without knowing it, I suspect I had quietly qualified for Irish citizenship.

Two decades later, while majoring in debauchery at the University of North Carolina, I again encountered Guinness. Even though I was unaware of my early history with it, I couldn’t get enough of the stuff. I loved it. I apparently actually once said, “Why, it’s just like mother’s milk!”

The lightbulb lit over my head when I shared my enthusiasm for Guinness with my mom, which led to her telling me the story.

Ah.

In this age of developmental psychology, it’s a truism that infants’ experiences play a pivotal role in the formation of their adult characters. For most of us, that has nothing to do with drinking Guinness Stout. But we all know the importance of actively loving newborn kids – touching them, looking into their eyes, speaking to them, and so forth. We all cringe when we hear stories of infants subjected to neglect or brutality. We understand how deep those kinds of scars can run. 

Unless we are completely divorced from human instinct – perhaps because of having been hurt when we were little – all of this is in the category of obvious things that “everybody knows.”

Can knowledge of a child’s chart play a helpful role in any of that? Can it make us better parents? By reflex, I’d say yes – but the truth of it is that I think much of the relevance of the natal chart in terms of raising a kid comes into full power only a little later on. That's when we start facing more complicated parenting choices. For example, children with a lot of Fire sign energy need more risk and adventure in their early lives than do more Watery children. With an infant, individuation is really just starting, so we’re mostly back to basics – love, touch, peace, and security, and no astrology necessary. In the first months of life, those universal fundamental needs loom larger than the more individualized ones. That remains true at least until the child attains some degree of mobility and agency. 

I believe that everything I just said about astrology and babies is fundamentally true – but with one glaring exception . . .

PROGRESSIONS

Most of us know the basic theory of astrological progressions. (Technically I am speaking here of what we call “secondary progressions.”) The basic idea is the soul of simplicity – days become years. Want to know the positions of your progressed planets on your thirtieth birthday? Check out their transiting positions thirty days after you were born. It’s that simple.

In progressions theory, we set up a resonance between Earth’s two most obvious rhythms – its daily rotation on its axis and its annual revolution around the Sun. We imagine one to be reflected in the other. It’s a whole lot like saying “in human years, Fido the dog is now in his eighties.” There too we set up a resonant equivalency between two cycles of different lengths – in that case, setting a dog’s typical lifespan in parallel to a human one. “European civilization reached maturity during the Renaissance of the 16th century” – there’s the same idea.

I’d be the first to say that the whole idea of progressions actually working seems completely crazy. But they do. For example, right as my own progressed Sun was entering Aries two summers ago, I found myself among towering icebergs floating in an inflatable raft over half a mile of ice-water on an arctic expedition – with a gigantic Fin whale breaching twenty feet away. Does that sound like Aries to you? 

Progressions work. 

BACK TO BABIES

Putting two and two together leads me to the point of this essay, and perhaps to a new and potentially very healing application of evolutionary astrology. It all stems from thinking deeply about the implications of one very simple, obvious idea:

• The transits of the first three months of life are an energetic rehearsal for the progressions of a lifetime.

“Three months” is somewhat arbitrary. It’s based on the rough notion that we might live “four score and ten years” –  to age ninety, in other words.  The point is that the transits of your first ninety days of life are your progressions for the next ninety years. If you tend toward actuarial optimism, you could think instead of a child’s first one hundred days. Some of us do make it to the century mark.   

Before I get to the heart of the matter, there’s one more quick technical point I should clarify. For purposes of simplicity, I am going to stick to the basic day-for-year model of progressions. Because the length of true astronomical “days” and “years” are rounded off a bit for practical purposes, there’s a tiny bit of slush in the system. The bottom line is that to know exactly when progressions “come due,” your computer will give you the precise answer.

CUTTING TO THE CHASE

Say a woman experiences progressed Venus conjuncting her Sun when she is twenty-seven years old. Pretty reliably, she’ll be “meeting someone” around that time. Again for purposes of simplicity, I’m going to keep our Venus-focus narrow and think about the dawn of a possible romantic relationship – maybe even meeting an old soulmate with whom the contract in this lifetime is marriage. (In practice, progressed Venus events can and do refer to all sorts of relationships, not just romantic ones.)

Now let’s get real. This woman is twenty-seven. She’s probably experienced some heartbreak in her life. Who hasn’t by the time they reach that age? She’s been lied to. She’s had people upon whom she counted fail her. Under the rays of her progressed Venus, she brings all of that baggage to bear upon this critical meeting with her true soulmate. 

Which part of her wins – her wounds or her soul?

In various forms and disguises, this is the universal human situation. This is the kind of evolutionary challenge we all face in our lives. Life is beautiful, but who would claim it is easy?

ENTER THE ASTROLOGICALLY-INFORMED PARENTS

Turn back the hands of time twenty-seven years. The woman in our tale has just been born. Lucky child – her parents understand her chart. They can see that in twenty-seven years, her progressed Venus will be conjuncting her Sun. That’s a long time from now, but right now the two or three day period when transiting Venus will cross her Sun is less than a month away. 

• It will soon be time for an “energetic rehearsal” for that big progression that’s still almost three decades into the future. 

As soon as transiting Venus gets within a couple of degrees of that conjunction, these conscious, astrologically-informed parents make sure to dote on their baby daughter. They give her an extra helping of holding her, loving her, and speaking softly to her. They gaze into her eyes. They help her feel worthy of love. In other words, they do their best to give her an experience of trust, affection, and bonding. Developmentally, that sweetness comes at exactly the right moment. The parents naturally do not know exactly what the future will bring, but supported by their knowledge of progressions, they can be sure that right now they are helping their baby daughter prepare for a relationship that still lies twenty-seven years down the road. Through the magic of progressions, they can already see it coming.

Synchronicity comes into play too, as it always does. Perhaps the baby’s aunt and uncle “just happen to” come by for a visit right around that time. They too coo over the new addition to the family. Since for purposes of this story I’m assuming heterosexuality, it’s particularly helpful that the baby “is touched by a strange man” right then – in this case, her loving uncle. Her energy body is imprinted with a positive experience in that regard right at the perfect developmental moment. The relevance to her future romance is obvious. 

Now let’s assume a very different astrological situation. Much later, when our newborn baby is forty-two years old, her progressed Sun will oppose Saturn. I’m not gloomy about Saturn times – they can be very wonderful. But they generally involve us having to take care of ourselves without much external help. They have a solitary quality. Often they require patience, persistence, and self-discipline. 

Anyone who’s ever had a kid is familiar with the following situation – you’re awakened in the wee hours by the child fussing. Do you immediately get up and tend to the baby? Do you give her a few minutes to see if she calms down? At what point do you decide to let her tough it out on her own? 

Armed with astrological understanding, the parents realize that their daughter is currently experiencing a transit of the Sun in opposition to her natal Saturn – and that this transit is preparing her developmentally for a major solitary effort she will need to make in her life forty-two years from now. They have no idea what form that effort will take, but they can be sure that success will depend on their daughter’s strength, patience, and self-sufficiency. 

They love her so this may be hard for them, but they know that they are serving their child’s soul by staying in bed that night and letting her work out whatever the problem is on her own. 

Of course, if that same child were fussing in exactly the same way two weeks earlier, back in that Venus time, the parents would know to immediately rush to her cradle and prove to her that they would always be there for her no matter what. Back then, she needed an experience of receiving love. Two weeks later, she needed an experience of taking care of herself without counting on anyone else to do it for her.

You get the idea. Once again, the transits of the first three months of life are an energetic rehearsal for the progressions of a lifetime. Conscious parents informed by the mysteries of evolutionary astrology can provide an extraordinarily prescient kind of support for their infants. And what loving parent could fail to feel wonderful about doing that? 

Let’s add one more piece to our puzzle. This one is about taking care of the mother and the father rather than focussing on the needs of their child. Being a parent involves making a lot of tough judgment calls. Everyone in that position sometimes second-guesses themselves, wondering if they’ve made a mistake and maybe even unintentionally damaged their child.  Those kinds of worries and self-doubts are understandably almost universal – and that’s because raising a child inevitably involves a lot of high-stakes guesswork. 

• With this kind of astrology on their side, people can “parent” with more confidence and avoid some of the misplaced guilt that so often goes along with trying to be a good mom or dad. 

Let me return briefly to my early adventures with Guinness Stout. I was born with Neptune very nearly stationary retrograde and closely square to my Sun. Transiting Neptune made its station just nine days after I was born and then retrograded back to its natal position after only eleven more days. In other words, it was at maximum power – progressed Neptune conjunct natal Neptune and square my Sun – when I was twenty years old. That was right when I was discovering Guinness Stout, all the while “majoring in debauchery at the University of North Carolina.” 

I didn’t go down the drain at that point, but I took a good close look at it.

Today, by progression slow-boat Neptune is only one degree away from the position it was in when I was born – it has barely moved in other words, and it continues to square my Sun. I still enjoy a Guinness, although I guess I always smile a little mysteriously when I drink one. I always remember to raise a glass to my old drinking buddy back there in the first months of my life – my mom – and I still love her, even though she left the planet back in 2017. 

I was lucky in the mom and dad department, and that’s something for which I am more grateful with every passing year. But my point is that the transits of my first three months of life are still echoing in my experience today, only they are now disguised as progressions. The same is true of yours.

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