Twin Peaks had a huge impact on me. I first watched the series as a teenager and it’s been on my mind since reading about the passing of its creator David Lynch.
So what can astrology tell us about the nature and meaning of the show?
Twin Peaks premiered April the 8th 1990 at 9PM. I’m using Los Angeles as the location, mainly because it feels right (but ABC has their headquarters in Burbank, so perhaps that gives the choice a bit more legitimacy).

The chart has Scorpio rising with Pluto near the Ascendant. Very fitting for a tv-show about a murder, but also for one that revolves around a mystery and things not being quite as they seem.
The Sun is in Aries in the 6th house. This was a pioneering show, not afraid to take the soap opera formula (6th house-ish) and use it to go somewhere completely different.
The Moon is in Libra in the 11th house so the visual style was an important part of the show’s DNA and that’s what gave it mass appeal (11th house).
That Moon is also part of an interesting t-square – there is a tension between it and a Neptune/Uranus conjunction in Capricorn in the 2nd house and a loose Chiron/Jupiter conjunction in Cancer in the 8th house.
This is the key to understanding the nature of the show.
Here we have that beautiful and pleasing Libra Moon in the house of the collective, in a tense aspect with the planet of the dream world (Neptune) and the planet of creativity, genius and sudden shocks and insights (Uranus) in the second house of safety and security.
Those placements in turn connect with an inner wounding (Chiron) and the planet of blessings and luck (Jupiter) in the sign of home and the homeland (Cancer) in the complex 8th house of sex, death and money.
The show spoke to something deep in the American psyche. And, as many writers have mentioned in the days following the passing of its creator, Twin Peaks turned the American dream on its head. It used the visual language of the small town with its picket fences and diners, its football stars and prom queens to worm its way to the rotten juice underneath it all.

There were the woods where things are not quite what they seem. There was domestic violence, abuse and corrupt businessmen, and a darkness at the heart of the seemingly perfect and “respectable” nuclear family.
This was exposed in almost a subliminal way and people kept watching – partly because of the feeling and the look (that Libra Moon) of the show.
The traditional chart ruler Mars also speaks of the show’s purpose. It sits almost right on the IC, the point of home, in Aquarius – close to the North Node in the 3rd house of communication (also conjunct the IC).
So the show also highlights all that is different and eccentric about the homeland (Aquarius IC) and the absurdity of the stories the country tells itself about itself.
I think the astrology also suggests that David Lynch, like many genius creators, was able to tap into something larger when he was creating the show. A story from the collective flowed through him and the people involved.
What is lovely to see in the many articles about him and the show that have been published recently is how he allowed space for that to happen on set.
In an article in the Guardian the actors remember the atmosphere:
Michael Ontkean (Sheriff Harry S Truman): David was purely and absolutely attentive to what’s in the air. He was always ready, willing and completely able to incorporate anything and everything into a scene. He calmly conducted the orchestra with all six senses. Number six being instinct/intuition.
Wendy Robie (Nadine Hurley): He would create something and then it was up to you. He’d leave this big empty box for you to fill. It was wonderful, an absolute faith: whatever bonkers thing he was going to set before you, your job was to fill it, to make it real, to make a human story.
This is a good lesson for all of us who create. To leave enough space and room for the magic to flow, for the right story to appear.
As this happened on a film set it makes me think of family constellations therapy, where the participants act out a role that’s been prescribed to them by someone in the group – and somehow (if it all works) there is magic, there is healing, there is something coming through the participants to create a resolution and a release of tension.
Twin Peaks was cathartic in the same way. Perhaps it was a bit like family constellations therapy for the US as the American dream started to crumble following the end of the Cold War. “What we thought was perfect wasn’t actually perfect.”
But perhaps there was something even more magical going on.
In a fascinating profile in The New Yorker the author speculates that David Lynch was able to tap into numinous forces in his work – that he was in fact a sort of shaman.
The actor Michael Horse, who plays Hawk in Twin Peaks, talks about feeling relief after being able to leave the room where the cast was filming a scene where Bob is possessing Leland Palmer.
“We were all in that room and I knew we were calling on evil”.
The article moves on to looking at surrealism and how surrealists like André Breton and his contemporaries believed they were investigating a higher reality and through the art they were connecting their audience to that higher reality.
The article continues:
“An acquaintance of mine is an energy healer: she sees spirits and auras, describes her past lives, goes on journeys out of her body at night, and converses with the dead. I can’t bring myself to believe in her experiences—I’m too rational—but I’m moved and fascinated by David Lynch, who explored the world she inhabits … Lynch knew that the old ways of being were still inside of us, waiting to be found.”
David Lynch was a shamanic creator. And the numinous was revealed and glimpsed through his work – often it seems as if he was able to channel darker forces and I wonder how he was able to work with and contain this in his own life.
It would have been part of his natal astrology with his North Node and a Mars/Saturn conjunction in the 8th house of the occult. A big part of his life probably revolved around figuring out how to contain and work with these forces. His Virgo Moon on the Midheaven might have helped as he channeled these energies into his work, he gave them a container and he kept his own mind safe by a rigorous mediation practice.
So what was it he channeled into Twin Peaks?
The synastry between the US and the Twin Peaks chart spells it out quite clearly:
The Twin Peaks Sun sits on top of the US’s inner wounding: Chiron. The Twin Peaks Chiron is on top of the US natal Sun.
This show brought the nation’s wounds into the light.
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