The MC/IC Axis

Coming of age stories have a lot to teach us about the relationship between the Midheaven and the Imum Coeli in the natal chart, because they follow characters as they walk the path from childhood to adulthood, straddling their roots and their burgeoning identities. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros has a chapter called “Four Skinny Trees” which illustrates beautifully how Esperanza feels about her place in the world through the symbol of trees: “Their strength is their secret. They send ferocious roots beneath the ground. They grow up and they grow down and grab the earth between their hairy toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger.” Cisneros describes the IC/MC axis in a few lines better than an astrologer could. Whatever actions we take that face upwards and outwards are a result of the feelings buried deep beneath us, in our personal histories, our ancestral roots. 

Astrologers on the internet will point to the MC to help you hack the universe’s code for your “dream job” or “perfect career.” The MC can be that but it is so much more than that. It’s what you do out in the world as a result of the early experiences in life and the people who tie you to the past and to this earth. In fact, the MC speaks as much to our upbringing and our parents or our lineage as the IC does. If you’ve got Sagittarius ruling your MC, yes, you approach the world with zeal, enthusiasm, a wild sense of possibility and a need for direct action that embodies this – but you’re not always out in the world playing that role. You still have to come home at the end of the day. They grow up and they grow down. There’s something at the other end of that devil-may-care wisdom. There’s childlike wonder, there’s a need to prove your intelligence, your ability to process your surroundings as ideas and data rather than as emotional experiences, an uncertainty about who and what actually belongs to you and to whom and what you actually belong. And the more you grow into the passionate sage, the more you grip tightly to this idea that you can’t belong unless you have something to say, a witty quip, more knowledge than the person next to you. 

I see this a lot with transits to the natal chart. We expect to see family-related events when a planet in the sky conjoins our natal IC; we expect to see major career developments when a planet conjoins the MC. Well. I’ve seen just as many people lose parents, experience conflicts with family that create irreparable damage, and move house during a transit to the MC. Because they are connected. When your mother or father dies – which will happen to most of us in our lifetimes – it does impact your family, of course. But it also begs the question: who am I out in the world now that I am the eldest generation? How am I creating a legacy through my own work? How does my legacy connect to the legacy I was born out of? 

When you decide to move across the country during a transit to the MC, your public identity changes because your context changes. Yes, your home and living situation is altered, but you are also given the opportunity to view the public fruits of private years of growth and development through a new lens: Who is my family, now that I can see them from an outsider’s perspective? What does it mean to make a home somewhere where it isn’t handed down to me? What is the part of my past that I carried with me here that will never leave me?  

Of course, depending on the transit, this experience will have a different flavor. If it’s Uranus transiting your MC, a sudden loss could leave you feeling scattered, or like life is erupting into chaos. Structures and patterns that you took for granted might suddenly come crumbling down; new relationships or roles may fall into your lap without warning. Meanwhile, Neptune could make the whole experience feel like your life thus far has been a lie or an illusion and that you have no idea how to make your way out of the fog. Saturn could make you feel isolated or pressured, or that you’re not ready for whatever is coming your way but that you have no other option but to march on forward with gritted teeth. Planetary transits to the MC might make you “bite the sky” – or kneel before it, or stand under its downpour. But what it feels like internally, what it points you to, is whatever your toes are curled around.

And when a planet crosses the IC, will your family or your home be involved? It’s likely. I’m not suggesting otherwise. But it’s also possible that you’ll see the outcomes more tangibly in your public life or in the roles you play out in the world. Pluto on the IC could irrevocably transform the direction of your career or how you’re known to others. It could point the direction of your outward facing efforts in an entirely new direction. Once a designer, now an acupuncturist. Once a stay-at-home parent, now a 9-5er, or vice versa. When the roots are shifted, or uprooted and replanted, the tips of the highest branches move, too, and sometimes it’s harder even for us to see what’s going on in our subterranean world than how it is manifesting externally.

This is all to say, don’t limit yourself in the imaginative possibilities of what the MC and IC can tell you about yourself. Who you are out in the world, what you pursue, chase, build, generate, pass on – it’s all stemming from and feeding your roots. It’s a feedback loop. It’s a cycle. It’s four skinny trees who understand you.