_{Image from Revolver Mag: https://www.revolvermag.com/music/doja-cat-i-want-explore-raw-unfiltered-hardcore-punk}

You guys, I need to admit the shameful truth… for a long time I lived under the certainty that Doja Cat (aka Amala Ratna Zandile Dlamini) is a Scorpio Sun. So of course, when news of her weird behaviour and sudden (and extreme) style changes appeared in the media, I kept thinking “Yes, makes sense to me. She’s just Scorping out, let the woman do her Pluto-thing”. But her chart is showing me a different story! She is a 27 degrees Libra Sun with a Libra Ascendant at the 29th degree, the dreaded anaretic degree. The anaretic degree is considered by ancient astrologer to be the destroyer of worlds, as it marks the end, a story that comes full circle, and a stage of intense maturation that cannot go any further than meeting its demise. Any planets at 29 degrees in the natal chart are thought to work against the individual, to create self-sabotage and many losses. Doja has her Ascendant there, which means that the anaretic degree is colouring her opportunities in life, her physical changes and style choices into a dark sheen. As a Libra Sun, she is a natural artist, an intelligent creator, incarnated to beautify herself and her environment and everyone in it (if you disagree, see Donald Glover’s chart for another Libra example of excellence). This means that Doja’s identity is meant to go to extremes in this lifetime because she has the inner light and strength to find the middle ground. However, the opportunities & relationships she attracts towards herself might just very well be her demise.

Doja also has a pure but anxious Virgo Moon, sitting in opposition with ‘grandpa’ Saturn, which unfortunately is retrograde (so concentrated) and in sensitive Pisces. Ouch! This hurts, because Saturn drains and freezes whatever it touches. This means that her capacity to rest, to be kind, to dream, to feel feminine and be in her emotions is frozen and blocked, while the desire to do all these things is equally amplified. This makes her a tough cookie, someone who always needs to sacrifice something in order to write off her karma. But judging by her Aries South Node, she’s also a tough combative cookie, who needs to practice the game of relating to others in polite and considerate ways; fairness and being honest are two big issues here. With a Mercurian Moon, Doja was already prone to intellectualize her feelings and to relax mostly by working, but with the opposition aspect to Saturn, this energy is turned up on blast!

This aspect makes her slightly insensitive to the feelings of others, while at the same time deeply hurt by the personal events in her life. Not only that but Doja has a lot of planets which are considered ‘malefic’ by ancient astrologers (such as Pluto and Mars) in the house of her body, her identity and sense of self-confidence, the 1st house. This shows an individual who has to constantly fight for her place under the Sun. And even though resources and money could come to her easily (Jupiter in the 2nd house), this material wealth could further cause power-problems in her personal connections (Pluto conjunct Mars in the 1st house).

_{Image of Doja Cat and her birth-chart taken from https://www.astrotheme.com/astrology/Doja_Cat}

In addition, with her Moon in aspect to Saturn she has emotional burdens that create contradictions within herself, and by creating art she is able to somehow work through her ‘inner demons‘. So what we are witnessing now as a public, with the release of her album ‘Scarlet‘ and her EP ‘Paint the Town Red‘, is Doja having her Saturn return and showing us her level of emotional maturity and transformation as an artist; but most importantly of all, Doja is showing us her comfort zone (her Mars-primed 6th house that is, the house of work and daily routines). After all, Saturn represents Satan, the imagined of the horny, satyr, the lusty goat. This particular Saturn return is an emotionally draining and painful one to her, and her ‘antics’ are a way to cover up what she is internally struggling to accept and love about herself. When someone goes through a Saturn return, she or he undertakes a journey of the dark night of the soul, a period of aprox. 2 to 3 years in which they are pressured by circumstances to make some tough decisions: to cut out what no longer works and to amplify what already does, through hard work & the proverbial ‘blood, sweat and tears’. Saturn also gets one to focus on money and what are they really worth.

A Moon sitting in opposition to Saturn, like Doja has, shows a person with a difficult childhood and a hard and rejecting mother-figure. The child learns from a young age to toughen up and not to show emotions for fear of being ridiculed or worst, punished. So the work of expressing her feelings in a healthy and mature way is Doja’s lifetime karma. Many of her most difficult lessons will be felt internally, in relation to women and in connection to how she nurtures, loves and accept her own femininity and how careful she is with emotions (her own and those of other people). With Venus loosely conjunct Pluto (also at the final anaretic degree, the 29th) and placed in the first house of the body and conjunct Mars in Sagittarius, we are looking here at a woman with a ridiculous capacity to attract A LOT of attention from both men and women, but this form of attention may be sleezy, sexual and obsessive.

Doja will often need to transform her love life, beauty and finances in this lifetime, in order to revitalize her energy. A Venus in Scorpio is detrimental to an individual, since it makes the act of forming relationships similar to an extreme sport, a life-or-death affair than usually ends in rejection & heartbreak. In general, people take a rather relaxed approach to getting to know someone; not the Scorpio Venusian, who seems engaged in a ‘ride or die’ mentality in love, that is happy either with sketchy and brief, sexual hook-ups or intense, mind-body-soul bonding and nothing in-between. Getting the tone just right in love is a struggle. But Doja was given a Sun in Libra, in order to work at accomplishing this exact tas: keeping things in order, and reconciling sides.

Her Scorpio Venus is showing itself drastically in how Doja interacts with her fans, calling them out in often aggressive ways and then continuing to love on them and thank them for the support. This type of Venus is known to leak life force, and it can only renew itself if it sacrifices something, such as a toxic habit, a bad relationship and an Ego-belief. By beginning and then allowing some toxic relationships to crash and burn, Doja rises more powerful than before. And her Virgo Moon is meant to help her with this task, as Virgo purifies everything it touches. And so by turning to her emotions, and being honest about how she feels, Doja can clean up a lot of negative energy in her life. There is a distinctly playful side about her personality, her image and her music and that’s what I really like about her: she is intelligent enough to play into people’s fears, relying on shock-value to further her career and to move beyond what people expect of her. We all know that doing the same-old is not conducive to world-wide fame.

Most of us grew up seeing how Rihanna went from her ‘Music of the Sun‘ era to her ‘Good girl gone bad‘ period, and I kind of feel Doja is more or less giving Riri a silent nod with her new album (after all, her Saturn in Pisces is touching upon Riri’s Sun in Pisces and Doja’s South Node in Aries is conjunct Riri’s Moon, Venus, Jupiter and Ascendant in Aries, so they are soulfully linked). Doja is pretty honest about preferring fame to harmonious relationships or people-pleasing, even if getting better at PR is her uncomfortable growth-zone (North Node in Libra). It seems to me that after her initial success and her sweet, sugar-coated image (her manufactured North Node growth zone), Doja dived head first into her Aries Shadow, boldly mining it for creative inspiration. And it’s a beautiful thing in essence, even if not necessarily in her new, devilish image and frightening videos. It’s almost as if under the pressure of Saturn, Doja is showing us, who she is when she ‘hides’ in her Aries South Node in the 6th house. By the way, just to add some gasoline to the Internet fire ragging around Doja, the 6th house is traditionally known as the house of Wicca and witchcraft. Make of that what you will.

With both Neptune and Uranus in stoic and hard-working Capricorn in the communicative 3rd house, she’s a wordsmith, the kind of individual that gets a lot of inspiration to write and to come up with clever rhymes, seemingly organic and out of the blue, but almost always, generously creative. This is after all a woman who got tough guys to sign along with glee to the lyrics of a song about pussy power (Downtown). But is also feels like she’s making fun of herself, as she is giving us those heavy Lucifer-vibes, since she knows controversy sells records. That’s why I think that people who take her too seriously are missing the point. In the age when mostly shock-value is giving artists and creators a boost in prestige and income, Doja is a new-age consumate professional.

She’s tapping into taboos to make the dark shine under the neon glow of the almighty dollar. What’s not to love? As we are increasingly blocked from expressing our freedoms, financially frustrated by a socio-political disorder and pushed by scientists, nutritionists and health coaches to look our best and to perfect ourselves, Doja Cat is throwing a grenade into what sociologists call ‘the project of the Self‘ in this bold age of information and individualism. She’s cheekily saying: “It’s fun to be mean. It’s ok to be bad. If the world seems to be crumbling, then why not crumble with it?” And that’s how she shocks but also offers us all a sweet relief. Only those who cannot read beyond the lines or lack a basic introduction to the music world’s industrial complex, are veering into Satanic panic.

With a South Node in Aries and a Lilith in Gemini, Doja takes her power wherever she can and if she managed to scare you and fool you into thinking she’s a demoness, then even better for her and her sales. So rather than being spiritually alarmed, look at the situation with the eyes with which she herself is looking at it: creative liberation. The karmic payback for taking this liberation will come to her towards the end of this Saturnian transit, and I assume that out of all of her critics, nothing compares to how critical Doja can be on herself (again nod to her malefic afflicted Moon). But with a North Node in Libra in the sacrificial 12th house and a Saturn in Pisces in the 5th house, what Doja craves more than anything is to express herself freely and what she gets in return is feeling cramped, limited or suffocated by other people’s sensitivities. This is a woman who has to work hard to feel happy in this lifetime, to create work that is fun for others but especially to her. So cut her some slack and listen to her music – it’s actually really fun and sweet, even if the visuals have recently darkened (but it won’t last long).

With cosmic love,

Lexi