In a weird blow to the collective, we recently found out that not only did Jane Birkin pass away on the 16th of July, but a mere 10 days after, on the 26th of July, Sinead O’Connor departed as well. When I heard such sad news, I immediately thought of ‘What is going on here?’ since I was aware that one thing these wonderful artists had in astrological common was the fact that they were Sagittarius Suns. Since the Spring of 2023, Sagittarius energy has been under pressure due to the squares received from Uranus conjunct Jupiter in Taurus and Saturn conjunct Neptune in Pisces – two energies which don’t blend well with Jupiterian optimism and exuberance. However, having squares to one’s natal Sun isn’t enough to predict or estimate the death of a celebrity, also because squares indicate a productive sense of frustration, they bring in dynamic changes and course corrections. However, it’s notoriously difficult to predict how an individual’s free will is going to use the astrological energy available to them; and often circumstances take a fated quality and end up escaping individual control. In such cases, astrologers need to look at the influence of the outer planets rather than the transits of the personal planets.
One thing which stands out is the fact that Sinead was undergoing her second Saturn return at the time of her death. The current transits of Saturn and Neptune in Pisces were crossing over her natal Saturn in Pisces in the 3rd house (the house of the local neighborhood & communication) and conjunct the asteroid Lilith (The Wild Feminine) and Chiron (the Wounded Healer). Not only that but Sinead’s Saturn is nataly placed in opposition to her Pluto (death and transformation) and in Virgo (the sign of health) and in the 9th house, conjunct Uranus (the energy of shock and sudden awareness). So, in spite of the fact that it’s too early to tell – because the investigation into her mysterious death is ongoing – I do feel like she might’ve been pressured (Saturn) by someone in her neighborhood (3rd house) of international origins (the 9th house). Let’s look more closely into her chart and see what else she might have in common with the late Jane Birkin.
Image of the birth-chart of Sinead O’Connor taken from https://www.astro-seek.com/birth-chart/sinead-o-connor-horoscope
Sinéad O’Connor was born on December 8th, 1966 in Dublin Ireland; she was 56 years old at the time of her death). Her Sun was in Sagittarius in the 1st house (conjunct Venus & her Ascendant) while her Moon was in Libra in the 10th house (loosely conjunct Mars). We see here the markers of a passionate persona who does not hold back when she needs to speak her truth. In addition, her North Node was in Taurus in the 5th house while her South Node was in Scorpio in the 11th house (conjunct Neptune and Mercury). This is the placement of an individual struggling with their self-worth and needing to overcome a lot of darkness in their lives (I briefly talked about this placement when I examined Pamela Anderson’s chart).
After 18th months of having her nodal return – since the nodes of the Moon travelled through the signs of Taurus and Scorpio from 19th January 2022 up until the 18th of July – Sinead also embarked on her second Saturn return (as the planet of karma moved into Pisces in March of this year). Those are some heavy karmic energies to deal with and I find it heart-breaking that she relocated to London during her nodal return in order to ‘feel less lonely’ only to find herself during a Saturn return, which mentally is a difficult time when one feels alone, pressured by external circumstances and criticized by people. Sinead had to find a way to channel Saturnian density into some form of meaningful work. It looked as if Sinead was indeed living up to the Saturnian pressure as she was rumored to have been working on another album and planning new tour dates, but I believe no one expected the ‘mother of all unexpected events’ to reach her doorstep, and still so early in her life.
For an artist like Sinead, having a South Node in Scorpio makes one comfortable with sudden and traumatic events that one simple must endure. A person with such a heavy karma undergoes a lot of loss, abuse and darkness as they are growing up. Oout of these experiences, the individual needs to create stability, calm, peace of mind and a healing form of art that brings the light into their soul again. And with Saturn in the spiritual and emotional sign of Pisces, soul healing was her duty in this lifetime. This Piscean energy also gave her that gorgeous voice and lyrical sensitivity. Sinead’s personal history is as sad as it gets, involving growing up with a violent mother, attending the Magdalene laundries and suffering deprivation and abuse, speaking out against the Catholic church and receiving backlash for that (Saturn in the 3rd house makes one receive their heaviest karma through their words and communications) but through it all she persevered: she raised 4 children, changed religions, fell in and out of love, was politically outspoken and kept performing. My favorite period of her career was her collaboration with Massive Attack on the album 100th Window, which to my mind is the most haunting presence she had in music.
Image of the birth-chart of Jane Birkin taken from https://www.astro-seek.com/birth-chart/jane-birkin-horoscope
I guess there isn’t much of a term of comparison, although Jane Birkin (born on December 14th 1946 in Marylebone, London, UK; aged 76 years old at time of death) had her Sun in the sign of Sagittarius in the 7th house (conjunct Mars, Lilith, Mercury and her South Node), her Moon was in Virgo in the 5th house and her Ascendant in Gemini (conjunct Uranus retrograde and her North Node). We see here someone with an opposite Ascendant to what Sinead had (Geminian rather than Sagittarian). In addition Jane had her Sun in the relational and romantic 7th house, while Sinead had it in the charismatic and individualistic, 1st house. So even if they are born under the same emotionally expressive Sagittarius energy, the areas of life and the manner in which both women play out these energies are contradictorily different.
Jane’s Venus placement was in Scorpio and conjunct Jupiter, the Great Benefic and in the service-prone 6th house, while her Mars placement was in Sagittarius conjunct that 7th house Jupiterian stellium mentioned above. These two, latter, personal placements of her Venus and Mars denote someone who was not only meant to achieve fame in her lifetime but also lived with, loved and gave birth to famous people (nod to Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon). Her Venus conjunct Jupiter energy is also the culprit behind the reason why Jane ended up being associated with one of the most expensive luxury goods, the famous Birkin bag created by Hermès and inspired by her image, and currently retailing at up to $300,000!
With her North Node in Gemini and South Node in Sagittarius, Jane was born to learn to take life less seriously, to adopt a light-hearted approach to her personal relationships and to communicate as much as she can. We see here gradually moving from her performative role in her youth, as a model and singer, and a muse to her famous partner, Serge Gainsbourg, to a more acting oriented career. I also see here someone who struggled with her emotions, feeling safe or rooted into a specific space and even might have had to put in a lot of effort into building her blended family life, since her karma, represented by Saturn is in the 4th house conjunct Pluto retrograde and in Leo. I’ sure that while she might’ve been a heavy-handed and rather intimidating mother with such a placement, she also provided her many children a sense of powerful safety, especially since with her Moon in the 5th house this is a woman who is emotionally attached to her children and someone in love with performing and the world of arts.
It’s interesting that Jane died this summer, right before the beginning of Leo season, as Venus was in Leo and preparing to begin her retrograde movement and as Lilith, the Wild Feminine Archetype and the bringer of ruin, was transiting through the sign of Leo. This summer must’ve felt heavy on Jane’s soul with so many transits going back and forth over her natal Saturn and Pluto and in the most private place of the zodiac, the 4th house. As a consequence of this energy, we are informed that Jane died at home, after a stroke which was a symptom which she had suffered from in the past. I feel like Jane left behind a rather quirky and chaotic body of work, but most importantly she left behind a legacy of freedom. From being censored for her work with Serge early in her career to her animal activism later on in life, she held a candle high for unbridled artistic & romantic expression; a mentality which I can see that her courageous & sensitive Cancer Sun daughter, Charlotte took to extremes in her career (nod to her continuous collaboration with Lars von Trier).
But this post is about Jane and Sinead, not anyone else that they loved or brought into this world. I guess that on a deeper level this post is about what we all collectively gained from their legacy; if I were to sum it up in a sentence that precious thing would be: being given permission to speak as women, live freely & take risks in life and in art, with wanton abandon.
I am a little bit obsessed. Ever since the nodes of the Moon switched signs, and shifted from the Scorpio/Taurus astrological axis to the Aries/Libra one on the 18th of July, I randomly started listening to Marylin Manson and Nine Inch Nails and kept to it on a daily basis (as I’m writing this, Coma White keeps playing in my mind, for example). It’s such a strange break in my habits, and I was wondering what pulled me in so suddenly to the dark rock figures of the 90s? Naturally, I had a look into Marylin Manson’s & Trent Reznor’s charts, and the idea for this post was created since the meaning behind this weird & spontaneous revival of interest started unraveling.
You see, much like myself in this period, Marylin Manson is having his nodal return, since I noticed that he was born with a North Node in Aries in the 8th house (and conjunct Chiron, the Wounded Healer and Saturn, the Lord of Karma sneakily placed in his 9th house). On the other hand, I have my North Node in Aries in the 6th house and conjunct Jupiter. Marylin Manson also has his Venus in Pisces, while my Sun and Mercury are in Pisces and these placements are currently being karmically linked by Saturn in the sign of Pisces, the Neptunian master of all things musical, emotional and spiritual. So the dark music that Marylin Manson creates with all that Martian intensity in the fiercest house of the zodiac (the 8th, ruled by Scorpio) makes me strangely happy in this period. Maybe happy is not the best word; his music makes me feel as if I just finished arguing with somebody and there is that relief that washes over me that finally the truth, no matter how brutal, has been conveyed.
Psychologically, Marilyn Manson’s music is facilitating in me a sort of healing regression to my past, bizarrely reminding me of my puberty, when as an anxious teen I had my eyes glued to MTV and can still remember how the videos for ‘The Nobodies‘, ‘The Beautiful People‘, and ‘Disposable Teens‘ terrorized me and I had to actively avoid them in order to sleep well at night. It was only during the ‘Dope Show‘ era that I could spend time actually looking at a Marylin Manson video but still the songs didn’t hook me in, I just found it scary and uncomfortable to watch. Aries is about identity, so this nostalgic dive into the past can help me understand better what messages I was exposed to while growing up.
Segway to my late 30s and I find the songs, aesthetic and lyrics of that dark rock era to be strangely comforting and pertinent to a lot of the social problems increasingly encroaching around me. I live in a loud neighborhood, where people constantly fight and shout at each other, construction workers abound and everything feels dusty and industrial. I also am feeling highly sensitive in this period and rather isolated, as Neptune & Saturn are conjunct my already Neptunian-afflicted Sun. So I think I can understand where Marylin Manson’s music is coming from now. It also helps that hearing someone scream in a rock song, takes the pressure out of my own capacity to get angry, because I can simply project it onto the song and sublimate my real-life emotional experience. I can’t pretend I feel attracted to either him or Trent Reznor, but it’s their music, the aesthetic and the lyrics that I kind of find comfortable enough to psychologically ‘live in’ at the moment, as the nodal return is stirring up some anger inside of me, some romantic longing, some regret, and fears about the future.
The hopeless desolation of this music, the biting social critiques, the fury of being seen and judged as an outcast, the extremity of feelings – I’m completely on board with that, while simultaneously remaining curious to see how long this phase with last (the nodal return is taking place across 18 months, but I doubt I can sustain the interest for that long). It’s interesting to see how the name that Marylin Manson chose for his shock-rock alter-ego stems from the metaphorization of his nodal placements, as he named the band after someone beautiful (Marylin Monroe, a representative of Venus) and someone violent (Charles Manson, a representative of Mars). The nodal axis of Libra and Aries deal with exactly these themes of peace & war, beauty & violence, masculinity & femininity, personal anger & social justice. I also find it fascinating that I was thinking of both Marylin Manson and Trent Reznor in this period, not knowing that Trent actually helped Marylin Manson in their debut & they actual had some sort of years-long, twisted, bromance that frequently ended up in feuds and reconciliations. This chaotic & karmic energy between them, emerges so clearly when we put their charts in synastry, and as always Venus and Saturn are heavily involved.
Marylin Manson, by his actual name Brian Hugh Warner (born January 5, 1969 in Canton, Ohio; 54 years old) is a Sun in Capricorn in the 5th house (conjunct his Part of Fortune) and a Moon in Leo in the 12th house conjunct his Leo Ascendant. After seeing this, it’s not surprising to me that he is such good friends with Johnny Depp since Johnny has a Moon in Capricorn and a Leo Ascendant too. Coming back to Brian’s chart, we see here a lot of Ego markers in tandem with a Light & Shadow play since he has strong Leo placements (light) in combination with Scorpio and Capricorn (dark). His Mars is in Scorpio (conjunct Neptune) and his Venus in Pisces, so we can witness here some pretty powerful romantic and emotional energies especially since these Watery energies are placed in his communicative 3rd house, private 4th house and relational 7th house.
The interesting thing is that Brian is getting ready for his second Saturn return which will begin for him from 2025 until 2027 and it will take place in his 9th house (the house of freedom, adventures and good luck) and in the pioneering sign of Aries and conjunct his North Node in Aries tied in to Chiron in the sign of Pisces. With both Saturn on his North Node and Venus conjunct Chiron, I can see why he might associate love with pain and mix in romance with cruelty. The final stretch of Pluto retrograde in his sign is also urging him to change right before his karmic retribution comes in, as Saturn will return. His buddy, Johnny Depp had a very public Saturn return in Aquarius in the courtroom, and I wonder if we will see Marylin in a similar position two years from now, as he is having to deal with an impressive number of abuse allegations.
Trent Reznor’s big three placements are: his Sun in Taurus in the 4th house (conjunct Mercury), his Capricorn Ascendant (conjunct Lilith) and his Moon in Sagittarius in the 12th house (conjunct the South Node in the 11th house). His Mars is in Virgo and Venus in Gemini, while the nodal axis is connected to the signs of Sagittarius and Gemini, with a really crowded North Node placement in Gemini in his 5th house involving conjunctions to Jupiter, Venus and the Part of Fortune. That’s fascinating to me because I recently saw an interview with him in which Trent mentioned how he played most instruments in his band at the beginning, and it spoke volumes to his 5th house Sun placement since the 5th house is the zodiac house of skill and talent (naturally ruled by Leo). He also mentions in the interview that he got a reputation of being ‘a control freak’ or an ‘ego maniac’ which speaks volume to how others perceive his Capricorn Ascendant trine Sun in Taurus blended energies. These two signs are the most stabilizing influences in the zodiac, and to create order and stability one has to exercise control over themselves and their surroundings.
The theme of control can be seen in Brian’s chart as well, since Trent’s Ascendant mirrors Brian’s Sun both in the security-obsessed sign of Capricorn, the sign of limits, effort and karma. Not only that but Trent is actually going through his second Saturn return as we speak, since his Saturn is in the sign of Pisces and in the 2nd house conjunct Chiron, the Wounded Healer. In an interesting synastry aspect, we can also see that Marylin is also having the transit of Saturn over his natal Venus in Pisces. To be honest, I am surprised at how many astrological energies these two men have in common in their chart. We see in Trent’s Saturn placement some problems with his sense of self-worth which could negatively reflect on his body, on the money he earns and the wealth he is able to create in life. He could make a lot but he might feel it is never enough, and judging by his materially-sensitive Taurus Sun and ambitious Capricorn Ascendant, the struggle for wealth & respect as an artist could have marked his whole life.
Looking into the backstory of how he created some of the NIN albums, it seems that this path towards self-love and making healthier decisions reached a pretty low point around the time Nine Inch Nails released the album ‘The Fragile’ in 1999, detailing he destruction of a man and Trent’s personal metaphor for his struggle with addiction. During that era, Pluto began its transit through the sign of Sagittarius in the year 1995 and it touched upon his natal Sagittarius Moon. Rather than analyzing his emotions, Trent did everything he could to avoid them which made him dive head first into addictive patterns at the root of which where emotional problems (Moon). By the time Pluto was ready to leave this sign, NIN released ‘With Teeth’ in 2005, an album covertly about recovery and re-empowerment. His self-worth and artistic struggles of that period stand as a testament of a Pluto’s transit capacity to break you and then re-make you.
Looking at the synastry points between the two men, I can see a pattern emerging. As Brian’s Sun in Capricorn (energy) touched upon Trent’s Ascendant (opportunity, direction), they took on this master and apprentice roles. Usually, having met someone who has the Ascendant in the same sign as your Sun, will make one attracted to look like the Ascendant person, so I guess that Marylin really enjoyed how Trent looked and the whole aesthetic of the Nine Inch Nails creative project, while having an Ascendant conjunct someone else’s Sun would make the Ascendant person obsessed with reaching the ambitious goals, prestige and charisma of the Sun-born placement so I think that on some subconscious level Trent did emulate a lot of Marylin Manson’s art after they met, it wasn’t all just Brian learning from him.
It’s also intriguing to notice how both men have Fire Moons, Brian having his in the sign of Leo and Trent in the sign of Sagittarius. Without this energy and with so much Earth governing their chart, both men would’ve been conformists; traditional types who would’ve respected hierarchies and allowed their lives to be confined by social norms, habits, codes of conduct and pragmatic achievements. But with these feisty lunar subconscious worlds, they both had a fire in their hearts to create, and to especially express anger in creative and powerful ways.
Anger is especially a big theme in Brian’s chart, since learning how to cope with it and integrate it as fuel for his creative work, rather than as violence against his partners is the key to his success in this lifetime. Unfortunately, anger is also one of the few emotions allowed in the construction of traditional forms of masculinity; it is a toxic character trait but one which many still associated with male privilege and dominion. It’s interesting to see that at the time when Pluto in Sagittarius was reshaping Trent’s body, finances and self-worth issues, Brian was building and then destroying his personal relationships. Following a short period of being married to the gorgeous Dita von Teese, he entered into a toxic relationships with the luminous Even Rachel Wood, but it has been speculated that both of these relationships failed due to infidelity, drug abuse and intimate partner abuse. Brian has a Pluto in Virgo in the 2nd house which is a marker of someone who may use money and material objects to control people, while his Mars in Scorpio in the 3rd house is also about verbal control or secrets texts messages and emails that could be created to solicit sex, to exert control and power or to keep things hidden; so I don’t doubt that there is some truth to the allegations.
A final word about their Moons – since the lunar placement matter a lot in the charts of artists – is that both men also have these lunar placements in the soft and imaginative 12th house of the zodiac, which tempers a little bit the strong passion, powerful anger and sense of entitlement they might feel, since a 12th house lunar placement gives one a penchant for suffering, a need for solitude, and a deep need to feel loved and held (this need could be so vast and deep that no human experience might be able to fulfill it, so the native turns to a higher power, like God and the angels…or in this case, the available demons). The 12th house is also a place of confinement (like a prison), privacy (secret bed pleasures) & altered states of consciousness (such as those induced by drugs or alcohol). And most of these landscapes of confinement, deep melancholy and mutated powerlessness figure prominently in the earlier and edgier songs and videos of both Nine Inch Nails and Marylin Manson. Those very images, that on a subconscious level at least, shaped my impressionable teen brain a couple of decades ago, especially because they seemed so obscene and forbidden.
If the music of Marylin Manson or Nine Inch Nails is something new to you, feel free to start here & here. Have a listen and let me know what you think (it’s certainly a different soundscape than what is popular today, in the ‘constant positivity’ era).
I know it’s Leo season and this post makes no sense as it is not about Leo energy, but I’ve been feeling quite nostalgic recently. Could be the combined energy of the Venus retrograde and the fact that the planet Pluto has been sitting this entire year, on top of my Immum Coeli (the seat of the soul, the root of an individual’s being) and in the 4th house, the most nostalgic house of the zodiac. Since the North Node entered Aries this past week, I shared on Instagram (@ms_bontemps) that I have been listening to a lot of 90s dark rock. I grew up glued to the television screen, watching American movies, MTV and Cartoon Network and absorbing like a sponge some pretty intense and charged up imagery.
If in other parts of the world, parents were applying the findings of psychological research which ascertained that children’s behavior’s were strongly influenced by what they saw on television (especially their mimicry of violent attitudes – see Bobo de clown experiments), in the post-communist Romanian landscape of the 90s, growing up with a colour Tv was a privilege and if we could, we all lavished in it. Most people couldn’t afford a television during Ceausescu’s times and even if they did, it mostly showcased black and white, scheduled propaganda. So because my parents thought that they were cool and progressive they did not consider it necessary to limit my screen time because they also believed it taught me English, a language I apparently needed to learn how to speak in order to seek my economic fortune elsewhere, once I was old enough to work and travel (which I did at some point and then returned home, as I became aware of my early conditioning & realized I like living in my own country).
In this context, I grew up watching most of the violent and sexually-charged things that were abundantly available in the dark ages of the Pluto in Scorpio era. This is why whenever I listen to Marylin Manson, Deftones, Bush or Nine Inch Nails or when I re-watch Terminator, the X Files, The Twilight Zone or Blade Runner, as disturbing as it may seem from a contemporary moral lens, I actually feel a fuzzy sense of nostalgia. Looking back, I see that we made a lot of progress in terms of how we protect children but at the same time we live in an increasingly surveilled and censored era which does impact the creativity one can exert in art, music and films.
Case in point, when was the last time you saw in the cinema a really good erotic thriller? I always think that as an adult if you want to consume such entertainment nothing beats the movies that were created between the years 1983 and 1995 (or the time-span of the Pluto in Scorpio era). And speaking of these movies, I was re-watching last night ‘Fatal Attraction’, which made me think of ‘Basic Instinct’ and suddenly I realized something interesting from an astrological point of view. Aside from the fact that both movies have reached cult status by now and both star Michael Douglas as the leading man (a truly bizarre casting choice), both movies are also lead by two awesome women who were born with Pisces Suns!
Sharon Stone who plays Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct and Glenn Close who plays Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction are both born in March but years apart. So I immediately thought, is there something in their charts that made them gravitate towards such roles? It is not surprising to me that they both reached public exposure during the Pluto in Scorpio, since Scorpio and Pisces are Water signs and as such they energetically support each other’s goals. So as Pluto was making a beautiful trine to both Sharon and Glenn’s Suns, they reached a public form of empowerment in their work by appearing in these movies in the years 1987 and 1992. One interesting fact that I wasn’t aware of until I started writing this article is that Sharon Stone lost custody of one of her sons after Basic Instinct appeared. The more you dive into this story the more you understand how unfairly she was treated, although karmically this can be explained by the strict energy of her Saturn in the 4th house placement (the house of privacy, nurturing and motherhood) conjunct her Moon (so affecting in a negative way her emotions and feminine receptivity). When unfair or cruel things happen to us that leave us often gobsmacked and in need of some logical explanations as to why we deserved that, then you can rest assured that karma and Saturn and Pluto are involved, and unfortunately Sharon has strong energies in her chart from both of these planets. She has even claimed in an interview that as she suffered a near fatal stroke in 2001, she was clinically dead for a couple of minutes and witnessed the afterlife.
Pluto deals with sexuality, intensity, violent passions and deep transformation. It also brings up themes of betrayal, control and murderous intentions. So Pluto shined its dark light and helped these actresses embody two of the most iconic roles of that era, being both laced with sexual intensity and murderous circumstances. But aside from the transit, was there something else in their natal charts that influenced this choice of roles? Let’s have a look at their charts and explore what else helped them embody the darker side of the dual, Pisces sign.
Sharon Stone’s was born on March 10, 1958 in Meadville, Pennsylvania. Her significant markers are her Sun in Pisces in the 7th house (conjunct Mercury and the asteroid Lilith, the Wild Feminine Archetype), her Moon in Sagittarius in the 4th house (loosely conjunct Saturn – I wrote about this placement of hers in a previous post, see here), and her Ascendant in Virgo (conjunct Pluto retrograde at 0 degrees!). Her destiny is marked by a powerful North Node in Scorpio in the 3rd house (conjunct Jupiter and Neptune) and a South Node in Taurus in the 9th house (conjunct her Part of Fortune). She actually went through a reverse nodal return in the years 2022 and 2023, which might have placed her in some destined and growth-related circumstances. This news-piece about her turning her home into an art studio really stuck with me, because we can see the influence of the Nodes at work in her life since Taurus energy rules over art and beauty, while Scorpio is about expressing emotions in a way that helps the soul transform. Therefore painting and making art is a perfect way to play with this Scorpio/Taurus nodal energy in her chart.
Glenn Close was born on March 19, 1947 in Greenwich, Connecticut and she is 76 years of age. Her big threes are her Sun in Pisces in the 8th house (conjunct Mars and Mercury retrograde), her Moon in Aquarius in the 7th house (conjunct Venus), and her Ascendant in Leo (conjunct Pluto and Saturn retrograde). Her destiny points revolve around a North Node in Gemini in the 11th house (conjunct Uranus) and a South Node in Sagittarius in the 5th house (conjunct the asteroid Lilith, the Wild Feminine Archetype). We can clearly see that Glenn’s destiny is to open people’s minds and to get them to think differently about art and femininity. She is doing this by mostly playing villains or gender-swapping characters with a fierce precision and commitment to her craft which I admire. for example she had some brilliant dialogues with John Malkovich when they played together in Dangerous Liaisons. It’s funny or rather fitting, because she shares a lunar placement with him, seeing as they both were born with an intelligent and provocative Moon in Aquarius, and Aquarius energy is all about witty discussions.
Coming back to her chart, the first thing that stands out to me is her Sun in the 8th house which offers Glenn a rather Scorpionic energy to her already emotional and imaginative Pisces identity. It could be why she is usually cast in the role of the villain like in ‘Fatal Attraction’ but also in the cartoony role of Cruella DeVil (which she played to perfection, because I can’t see any other person playing in this role *silent nod to Emma Stone, who tried*) or as the scheming Marquise de Merteuil from ‘Dangerous Liaisons’. In addition to this, Glenn is truly a force to reckon with since she has both Pluto and Saturn conjunct the most visible part of her chart, the Ascendant (her aura, her body, her presence and the opportunities she attracts towards her; so all of these are darkened by the energies of these two ‘malefics’). I think that in person, as on screen, Glenn can be quite intimidating and a little bit of a perfectionist who might’ve struggled with people’s perceptions of her – which I am sure where not that favorable (to put it mildly). Saturn and Pluto make people criticize you and teach you some harsh lessons through what you attract towards you, but Glenn seems to have developed so much fortitude and a healthy sense of humor in coping with these placements, which I attribute to her playful Leo Ascendant energy and her whimsy & intelligent Aquarius Moon.
She is an actress who received so many prizes and accolades in her career for her transformative acting and yet she never got an Oscar, which is the ultimate recognition as an experienced actress. She jokingly said she is ‘keeping the record up’ by being nominated for one 7 times already, but I can see that it is a karmic burden she is supposed to bear in her career since her capable and professional Midheaven in Taurus is unfortunately squared by her Saturn in Leo (and it is retrograde, which makes this energy even more dense and powerful). This placement is connected to slow rewards in work, a legacy that is built after overcoming many setbacks and frustrations, and also with the side-effect of not being the most popular with the public; nonetheless, I do believe she might receive an honorary Oscar for her entire career, since her South Node is in Sagittarius, the sign of competition, awards and growth and it could help unleash a big career blessing for her just when she least expects it.
Of course, in such an article I can only scratch the surface of the actual interpretation of the charts of these talented Piscean actresses. I was mostly interested in exploring why they received these roles and why these roles made them so well-known. As always, Pluto and Saturn have something to do with it but once we take a look at the position of the nodes of the Moon, the karmic South Node and dharmic North Node, it emerges quite clearly just how destined some things in our lives are and how in spite of our free-will the flow of life can lead us into situations that darken our perception before they bring on the light and adulation of many. If these actresses’ work is new to you, you can start here with Sharon Stone’s filmography and for Glenn Close please check out this list. Happy discoveries!
It’s the final day of Cancer season in 2023 and I thought I would create an ‘honorable mention’ looking into the birth-chart of the gorgeous Isabelle Adjani, a French actress who won 5 times the prestigious Cesar French Film Award and was nominated for an Oscar. She’s a fascinating person, not only due to her extra-ordinary beauty but also because of her strange personality, being known for her reclusiveness, vulnerability and strange interview comments.
Isabelle’s filmography includes some of the most intense performances I saw from a female lead and I always wondered whether I would be able to pick up from her chart what makes her gravitate towards these unusual cinematic performances. Her beauty alone would make her a prime contender for the role of a romantic heroine, but even when she chooses to play such roles (like in Queen Margot) the stories of her characters are ultimately tinged with blood, gore and despair. This week she re-appeared in the media due to her being accused of fraud by an ex-employee.
Isabelle’s big three astrological markers are her Sun in Cancer in the 4th house (conjunct Mars and Uranus), her Ascendant in Aries and her Moon in Libra in the 6th house (conjunct Neptune). She has a balanced mix of Air, Water and Fire in her chart, however these energies also portray a person who grew up in an environment in which the parents were in conflict and which might have taught her to internalize a set of contradictory values (this is a typical marker of a person born with a Sun square Moon aspect). We see here a person who is governed by the changeable and mysterious nature of the Moon, since she is not only a Cancerian but her Sun is also placed in the house naturally ruled by Cancer and the Moon, the private 4th house. So it could be said that she is a double-Cancerian, which means that the qualities and defects of this maternal sign, tend to be amplified in her energy. Her Sun’s placement in the 4th house is an indicator of just how naturally comfortable she feels away from the public eye and indeed many have called her ‘reclusive’. The Sun shows what our life revolves around, if you consider how the planets in our solar system revolve around the Sun, in much the same way the markers in a natal chart are also warmed and supported by the center of our focus in this lifetime, our identity (the Sun).
So for Isabelle, her life revolves around her home, her relationship to her family members, and I guess that she identifies strongly with her role as a mother. She is a person with a rich inner world and with some powerful emotions (Sun conjunct Mars). Emotions come over her in surprising ways and she is meant to learn and grow from her emotional reactivity (Mars conjunct Uranus). This is someone who can fly into fits of anger or passionate love and then as quickly she can detach and observe her reaction in order to extract wisdom from it and emotionally expand, especially if we look at her analytical Moon in Libra placement. I believe that this is why is such a good actress because she is able to feel things strongly but then she is also capable of detaching from this intimate intensity.
As a Cancerian she is natural born artist, with a phenomenal sensitivity and intuition. Indeed, this purity of method s obvious on screen, as you can almost touch her vulnerability, making her acting an almost palpable experience. However, there is a fury attached to this emotionality, a sense of mischievousness and cool control, which is given to her by her Uranus and Mars in Cancer placements. Her home life and private inner world is restless and electrifying with these placements flanking at the root of her being, the seat of the soul in astrology, the Immum Coeli. However, because her Ascendant is in brave and creative Aries, she is able to easily display the rich emotional content she has harvested inside, in those deep moments of reflection and analysis (due to her analytical Moon in Libra in the Virgoan and pragmatic 6th house). She acts from a deep and instinctive place and her characters seems pragmatic and visceral in their performances. She could deliver an over the top performance for sure, but her acting never seems inauthentic, and that is truly a gift. Isabelle calls her acting something akin to cellular memory retrieval (or ‘memoire cellulaire‘).
Movies stills of Isabelle Adjani from (top to bottom): Queen Margot (1994), Possession (1981) and The Story of Adele H. (1975)
Another interesting thing stands out of Isabelle’s chart: she has the so-called ‘mogul’ aspect of wealth & prestige in her chart, a powerful Jupiter conjunct Pluto in Leo in the 5th house. This aspect again underlines her destiny as an actress and performer and talks about experiencing a lot of joy and drawing her power from acting and performing, from showcasing her skills on stage, in front of other people. In addition, this is also a marker of a mother who really enjoyed her role of bringing children into the world and raising them, but she might’ve also been too intense, jealous and intimidating in her children’s eyes.
The 5th house rules also over short-term romances and great passions, so with this hot Jupiter (joy, expansion, luck) conjunct Pluto (intensity, drama, sexuality) in the combative and exuberant sign of Leo, you can only imagine the type of consuming love-affairs she had in her personal life. As a public, we know mostly of her relationships to Bruno Nuyten, Daniel Day Lewis and Jean Michelle Jarre, relationships which unfortunately ended up in separations and from which Isabelle remained with two rather handsome boys. It is said that Daniel Day Lewis (an Aries Sun) broke the news to Isabelle that he was leaving her by means of a fax when she was 7 months pregnant with their son (wow!). Isabelle, seems to not have that much luck in love and her personal relationships, as beautiful and talented as she is. She lost her brother in 2010 & some say that she got secretly married to a mysterious man in 2022.
The reasons why I am bringing up these separations and her loss is because we can see that she has a lot of love-related karma, since her Saturn is placed in intense Scorpio and in the house of other people and marriage, the 7th house. The fraud accusations seem to tall in line with this Saturnian presence which shows that some of the toughest karma Isabelle had to endure in this lifetime is related to her lovers, family members and business associates. Again secret intimacy, delayed or non-existing marriage, broken contractual agreements and tax-related issues are some of the most Saturn in Scorpio themes one could experience. A Saturn in Scorpio tends to freeze emotions and gives one issues related to sexuality and sexual pleasure. It puts one face to face with some painful emotional decisions and it can make a person either abstain from sex completely or become a Mary Magdalene character. The most difficult aspect is learning how to trust others and how to open up and show vulnerability. I guess we can see that Isabelle succeeds in her karmic ‘vulnerability test’, at least in her public role as an actress, but we won’t know for sure how painful this placement must’ve been for her in private.
And speaking about showing emotions and putting in the work of trusting more, Isabelle has another interesting aspect that reflects how her path in this lifetime is changing from one of a rational and detached soul story, to a passionate and feisty one. She has her South Node in Gemini in the 3rd house (this is her comfort zone), and her North Node in Sagittarius in the 9th house (this is her growth zone). Again we see a marker of natural-born actress, with her comfort zone being in the sign of the zodiac’s jester, Gemini. In addition, we know that she was born into a family with parents from different cultures and she was bilingual from an early age. So the visceral intensity that we see on screen is a direct influence of Isabelle working her dramatic Saturn in Scorpio in tandem with her South Node in Gemini/North Node in Sagittarius axis, which are both basically urging her soul to feel and to become more emotionally expressive. She is meant to let go of over-thinking things, playing the Devil’s advocate or being just cynical and intellectually detached from life (Gemini) and to display authenticity, to fight for what is right, to showcase passion and concentrate her energy on achieving one important goal at a time (Sagittarius). Her soul is moving her from a past-lifetime legacy of pessimism and duality, to a perception of life as an adventure replete with drama, passionate fights, and the search for truth and freedom.
I am hopelessly attracted to women who act in difficult roles, women who are brave and take risks in their career, women who seem complicated and who radiate a special kind of light, and I wrote about them in a previous post. So I understand if Isabelle might not be for everyone’s taste. But if you are like me (aka a Millennial who grew up watching French movies in her high-school years) and enjoy such a personality, for further explorations of Adjani’s work (especially if you are new to her) you can begin with these movies . I also enjoyed this video commentary of her extra-ordinarily disturbing performance in Possession (1981) Check them out and let me know your thoughts.
Images of Pamela Anderson in her hit show ‘Baywatch’ (left) & of Harrison Ford is his iconic role as Indiana Jones (right)
It’s Cancer season, so I thought it would be interesting to explore the charts of two famous Cancer Sun celebrities. For balance, I chose an actress and an actor, each well-know in their own right for different reasons. Well, I know this is an unlikely pairing but that’s why interpreting their charts is a fun and (I hope) informative experience. Although on the surface level you’d think that Pam and Harrison are worlds apart, if you dive deeper you would be surprised at some of their shared, core, crab sensitivities. Obviously, in this post I will barely scratch the surface of their astrological placements as I mean to give you some interesting insights mostly about their public persona, significant relationships and some of their karmic placements.
On one hand we have 90s bombshell Pamela Anderson (born on July 1, 1967 in Ladysmith, Canada; age 56 years) the woman with the most Playboy covers (14), who recently re-appeared in the public eye with her Netflix documentary ‘Pamela, a love story’, created to celebrate her unusual legacy and disconfirm a lot of the things depicted in the recent miniseries ‘Pam and Tommy’. Pamela’s big threes are: Sun in Cancer (conjunct Mercury), Moon in Aries (conjunct Saturn and Lilith!) and a Gemini Ascendant. Her North Node is in Taurus in the 11th house and her South Node is in Scorpio in the 5th house.
On the other hand we have ‘veteran’ actor Harrison Ford (born on July 13, 1942 in Chicago, Illinois, United States; age 81 years ), a reluctant celebrity who managed in his career to be part of two of the most successful film franchises there are: Star Wars and Indiana Jones (not to mention his cult performance in Blade Runner as detective Rick Deckard). Harrison’s big threes are: Sun & Moon in Cancer (conjunct Mercury and Jupiter on the Midheaven) and a Libra Ascendant (loosely conjunct Neptune, by degrees and not by sign). His South Node is in Pisces in the 5th house and his North Node is in Virgo in the 11th house.
Did you already notice something interesting that they have in common? Firstly, their North Nodes are placed in the same houses, the 5th & the 11th houses, even if in different astrological signs. The 5th house is the house of fun, entertainment, radiating light, being a skilled performer and having a strong personality, while the 11th house is the house of working as part of a group, detached communication, idealism and having a unique and progressive lifestyle. Both were born as natural performers and they were meant to create and live within their own social group, to be rebellious and innovative.
Secondly, their Water Suns are balanced by an Airy outer-wrapping since both have Ascendants in Air signs. Not only that but their karmic loads are pretty heavy and this karmic payback plays out for them in their private love life, in their personal relationships. Pam has the infamous Moon conjunct Saturn aspect, that unfortunately I am also intimately acquainted with and about which I have extensively written. Her placement is in feisty and charismatic Aries and it is conjunct the asteroid Lilith, the Wild Feminine Archetype, a marker of passion but also ruin in someone’s natal chart. In addition, Harrison has his Venus in Gemini conjunct Saturn, Uranus and also Lilith. When Saturn touches a person’s Moon (like in Pam’s case) or a person’s Venus (like in Harrison’s case), it limits the energy, freezing a person’s capacity to love, to feel things and to receive things from other people (be it gifts, compliments, affection etc). Saturn also separates things and grounds the energy in the chart of someone to a depressing degree. So Saturn is about deep emotional pain and painful romantic separations. In spite of the native’s best intentions, ultimately love can lead to a tough letting go and to some karmically-bound losses. The native is meant to learn emotional self-control, to remain stoic in front of life’s challenges and to put in emotion work if they want their relationships to last. Any fickleness is karmically punished, and fulfillment in love comes predominantly with old age.
And we see this energy play out very well in Pam’s love life. She attracts a large number of men towards her, but very few can fulfill her emotional needs. She is portrayed in the documentary as someone that falls in love very easily and is a hopeless romantic, but chasing the thrill of love could be a sign of a person that finds it hard to sustain affection for a longer period of time, which is a symptom of a Moon conjunct Saturn personality. Throw Lilith into this planetary combo, and we can see that in reality, Pamela’s deep emotional need is to work and to live independently rather than to become a trophy wife or a domestic goddess. Pam also said that she feels like Tommy Lee is the love of her life and yet she also feels like they can’t be together and the reason for this is that Tommy is a Sun in Libra, and in Pam’s synastry chart, his solar energy was opposing her Moon conjunct Saturn in Aries duo. As much as they loved each other, Saturn was bound to eventually separate them; I can also see that Pam might’ve felt like the parent in this connection, since she had her Saturn activated by Tommy’s Sun.
To my mind, the miniseries portrayed Pam in a kinder and more beautiful light than the documentary, who I feel made her look a bit unhinged. It’s strange to see Pamela’s desire to not be interpreted by other people, to not be overly sexualized or judged by others, when she simultaneously and actively sought this attention from the public by making some risqué career choices. This overt duality shows the contradictory nature of her Gemini Ascendant and how it can play out in the natal chart. It’s almost like Pam’s internal monologue could be: “I am a bombshell but also a nerd who loves to write”, “I am a moral mother but also a woman who earns money by objectifying her body to cater to the male gaze”. There’s nothing to blame or shame here, I actually really like Pam and am rooting for her to find true love and feel more emotionally settled in a partnership (especially as she is approaching her second Saturn return). It’s just an example of how astrological placements end up determining a person’s path in life. With a Midheaven in Aquarius, Pam is meant to leave behind a unique and outrageous legacy, a body of work (emphasis on the body) meant to open up people’s minds (…and it could take years before they catch up).
She is also not meant to feel comfortable with this legacy since her shy and domestic Cancer Sun sits in tenson with this progressive Aquarius Midheaven, so this is why we can visibly witness her discomfort at accepting the fact that she will forever be known as a sex symbol. When you are born with a South Node in Scorpio and a North Node in Taurus, like Pam was, your destiny in life is bound by the ark of redemption and it could show the path of an individual turned from ‘sinner’ to ‘saint’, from darkness to light, from obsessive relationships and intense, sexual magnetism to living a wealthy, moral and upstanding life. Interestingly enough, Pam’s story re-appeared in the collective when she had her nodal return, a time in a person’s life when they are hastily pushed in the direction of their destiny. She created this documentary and is currently working on a book which reinterprets her torrid love affair with Tommy Lee not from the perspective of a hot, mad love that made them marry 4 days after they met (South in Scorpio), but from the viewpoint of star-crossed soulmates who were also good and devoted parents (North Node in Taurus).
In terms of Harrison’s personal relationships, he has been married twice and is now in his third marriage with Ally Macbeal‘s leading actress, Calista Flockhart. He has an impressive number of children (5) not all of which are biological. When I take a closer look at the synastry aspects between his and Calista’s chart, I see here a true soul bond, a partnership that makes him look forward to things in life and helps him spiritually grow. Both Calista and Harrison have compatible Suns (he is a Cancer, she is a Scorpio) and compatible Ascendants (his is in Libra, hers is in Sagittarius). Moreover, his Venus (love) is conjunct her North Node in Gemini (destiny), while her Mars (sexuality) is conjunct his North Node in Virgo (destiny). Both partners have a Mercury-ruled North Node (him in Virgo, hers in Gemini), which means that learning to communicate and to organize their daily lives is essential for their success in this lifetime. In addition, they are both drawn toward supporting humanitarian and educational causes. Among other things that energetically and astrologically bind them together are the fact that her Venus is conjunct his Ascendant, so Calista genuinely finds him attractive and handsome, and even though there is a 20 years age difference between them, this works in their favor since Calista has a Moon conjunct Saturn in Aquarius. This aspect shows me that she has a tendency to fall in love with older, wiser types who bring her a sense of emotional safety, just like Harrison.
Furthermore, Harrison was meant to find love and feel happier in his relationships in the latter portion of his life, so after his second Saturn return (around 56-58 years of age) because of his Venus conjunct Saturn in Gemini; as you can notice both of these placements are in friendly and compatible Air signs, which I think balances their charts pretty well as it intellectualizes their Water sign sensitivities and cools of their fire placements (and Harrison has plenty of that in his chart, with an ultra-powerful Mars conjunct Pluto in Leo, an aspect that military leaders do well with, since it is said to bring victory in combat, even beyond death).
And since I mentioned this Leonic energy in Harrison’s chart, I want to bring up Pam’s Leonic placements because this is another thing they share in common: in spite of their moody and artistic Cancerian Sun, both Pam and Harrison are fighters, they are deeply passionate individuals who can easily get hot under the collar. In a man’s chart, usually his Mars placement shows the type of masculinity he tends to identify with and embody, while in a woman’s chart it is Venus which shows the femininity performed, or the way in which she loves and styles herself to feel attractive. Harrison has a Mars conjunct Pluto in Leo (an aspect which makes him part of the so called Baby boomer generation) so I think for him, as a man, he might’ve identified more with Leo-related qualities than his Cancer Sun. Although both Cancer and Leo are loving and warm energies, Leo represents strength, loyalty, traditionalism, honesty and romantic charisma. We could see this energy in Harrison in his earlier roles, as he channeled this darker and aggressive aspect of his personality in Blade Runner or Presumed Innocent. Pluto makes him an intense lover, deeply suspicious and jealous but also wonderfully protective and dedicated to his close inner circle. It is this Leo energy that helped him create the rebellious character of Hans Solo and give that infamous reply to Princess Leia’s confession of love to him with ‘I know’, rather than an ‘I love you back’ :))
Just as a sidenote, I always thought it was weird for me to watch Harrison on the screen since he resembles a lot my own father, who is a Libra Sun (left), especially when he was younger:
For Pam, we can see that she has her Venus conjunct Jupiter in Leo. A Venus in Leo shows someone who is very generous and big-hearted, they are warm, sexy and inviting. You want to date them and to be around them since they have a star-like quality. Leo Venuses are also attracted to famous people, to wealth and optimism, to the glitzy and glam side of life, but they might also provoke dramas when things become too quiet and peaceful or when they feel ignored. They can easily attract well-known people or hang around with people who have a star-like quality. The problem with this placements is that it could be too Ego-based in intimate relationships, and since Pam has this energy amplified by Jupiter, the planet of living large and lucky gambles, I could see why Pam has such a powerful force-field of attraction around her but also why her romances are doomed to fail. As a Leo Venus it is important to pay attention to the needs of others and to be careful how much you are giving and how much you are receiving in your close relationships, because you might take more than you give, or you could just expect others to adore you and find this to be the foundation of the relationship. Wearing your heart on your sleeve and acting out of impulse when you begin or end a connection, are also possible scenarios with a Sun-ruled love life. But no matter what happens, a Leo Venus shines and they will forever do so.
In spite of the romantic disappointments, Pamela remains an icon. Leo is also Yang energy, which means it is solar, masculine and competitive so this energy plays out better in the chart of a man than in that of a woman’s. Pam unfortunately has a lot of masculine, Yang planets in her inner world (her Moon, Venus and Jupiter) which can make her prone to taking the leader role in her romantic relationships and this might provoke arguments. She is nonetheless beautifully balanced in her energy by her Cancerian Sun and Mercury, her Libra Mars and her Pluto & Uranus in Virgo.
Finally, I thought it’s useful to focus on these Leonic placements in their charts because we are collectively undergoing the transit of the planet Venus in the sign of Leo, at the moment at which I am writing this article. This energy will intensify as Venus will go retrograde from the 22nd of July until the 3rd of September. So for 44 days and 44 nights, issues related to our personal attractiveness, how we use our strength in love, how we compete with others and what angers us in love and how we rise into our super-star qualities will be prominent. These issues will have to be worked inwards, since Venus retro is about going within and taking the focus from surface-level beauty to the beauty of one’s own character and inner values. So think about this: What or whom are you defending in love? What is worth fighting for in your daily reality? What angers you to the point of pushing you into action? And how do you use your heart to attract the genuine affection of others? Maybe these questions could serve as the beginning of some deep inner work. Although, I kind of feel like it would’ve been spiritually nourishing to sit down and talk to Pamela and Harrison about love & life. After all, the most beautiful quality of a Cancerian Sun is their wonderful capacity to tell insightful stories that truly touch our hearts.
Movie still of Catherine Deneuve in ‘Repulsion’ (1965), the first movie in the Apartment trilogy
The reason why I love writing so much is that it can help me make sense of difficult experiences in life. Writing brings a certain order to the chaos of living life here on Earth, and it can temporarily give the illusion of having understood yourself, people and human experiences. I say illusion because we can never fully know and oftentimes our words are taken out of context and misinterpreted. Much like it happened to the French philosopher Jeal-Paul Sartre whose sentence ‘Hell is other people’ was famously misused. Hell might be other people if our lives are rife with conflict; but people can also help us see paradise.
When you experience other people as erratic and unpredictable the world can turn into a pretty unsafe place. It may not be the quality of the world in itself, as unsafe but it appears as such to us, as we relate to others who don’t make sense or we can’t empathize with. To make everything even more complex, in this blocked process of understanding how our Selves are shaped by Other People’s words/actions/feelings, what we relate to might not necessarily be other people but parts of ourselves that haven’t been integrated into our conscious identity. Or to use a psychological term, we psychologically project the emotional content we hold within onto others, literally transforming our lived experience.
For example, the perceived pettiness of a neighbor becomes your own pettiness, the lack of honesty of a lover is your own unacknowledged dishonesty. In another instance, we compete with others who actually adore us, ending up in a weird competition with ourselves. People can often serve as our mirrors and they might show us things we don’t like. Establishing the difference between the person and your relationship to them is of great importance and it might just be what saves your sanity. In astrology, the themes described above (us versus others, I and them etc) belong to the 7th house, the place of sociable and balanced Libra, a pleasant Venus-ruled energy. While the 4th astrological house deals with our deep, authentic self, the one that was ruled by emotions and sensations, that one we embodied before socialization took place, as we were infants, suckling at out mothers’ breasts. That marked a time when we didn’t know yet the proper rules of conduct in society. When there are strong aspects to both of these houses due to the planetary transits that take place across them, we might have to analyze and integrate how our Authentic Self thrives or is controlled by the relationships it lives within.
In this article, I will explore how watching Roman Polanski’s ‘Apartment Trilogy’ triggered within me a massive wave of awareness which is eerily connected to both my current astrological transits and the director’s own natal birth-chart placements.
To have a home is not the same as being at home within the Self
Alone & at home. Alone in a home, without others. Alone with your feelings. And what feelings are you experiencing? Is it something safe and pleasant? After all, a house can make you feel protected from other people’s judgements. Or is there something sinister coming up to the surface, something you’ve taken a lot of time and energy to stuff down and never think of? When it is still and quiet and everything is orderly, the home can work as an echo chamber for all of our unexpressed emotions and repressed desires. The home can function as a womb, a psychological holding space into which we let go and let ourselves feel those things that we can never show the outside world. But what happens when the boundaries of this private place are trespassed by others? What can you risk showing other people? How vulnerable can you get? And what will you do to defend yourself from feeling vulnerable?
The place of this deep psychological becoming, the holding seat of the zodiac, the womb of creation and of everything that keeps us rooted into place (mentally, emotionally and physically) is the 4th house of the zodiac. This is a lunar house, shadowed by the Moon and governed by the watery sign of the Crab, the Cancer. This astrological space holds our childhood memories, our emotions related to our mother and how welcomed and safe we have felt within our given home and our culture of origin. This house contains feelings of belonging, psychological wholeness and the ways in which we get in touch with our souls (how we seek quiet, how we meditate, how we are able to stay present and the things which touch our hearts and make us dream nostalgically).
As I am writing this, I’m having a profound astrological transit to this house, more specifically the transit of the planet Pluto to my 4th house. Pluto is associated with darkness, despair, spiritual transformation and healing empowerment. It is the planet of death and the underworld, and when it touches the 4th house, the root of an individual, it brings up an emotional Underworld to be experienced by the native in their home, in their immediate living surroundings.
This spring and summer, I have been feeling the pressure to examine my emotions which tend to creep up on me in a furious way and rather suddenly, as they are bringing more awareness regarding what has been left unresolved in my past. This process began when I bought a flat in March of this year, an achievement towards which I have been working for years and which was supposed to be a wonderful celebration, but in reality turned out to be a day-mare. I woke up each day to erratic noises, abominable neighbors, tense family relationships, furniture replacements and unsafe district landscaping near my building which have been creating a nerve-bubble with the sole purpose of urging me to pay attention to my emotions and thoughts and how I can use them to become assertive and to protect my personal boundaries. In this period in which I am seeking answers as to why this is happening and what is the deeper meaning of such painful and nerve-wreaking experiences, I became enthralled by Roman Polanski‘s Apartment trilogy. This is a series of 3 films (Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby & The Tenant) which he shot between the years 1965 and 1976 that deal with claustrophobic apartments, increasing personal terror and ultimately the psychological breakdowns of individuals who are processing mysterious traumas.
Collage image of the movie posters that represent Polanski’s Apartment trilogy
Astrological Placements & the Awareness of Living within the Trauma
Roman has a Libra Ascendant, an aspect I share in common with him in my natal chart. In his chart, he also has a Uranus retrograde (a more concentrated energy, so a powerful one) in the sign of Aries (the sign of conflict and action) and in the house of other people, the 7th house. I have a similar transit of Uranus in my 7th house but in the sign of Taurus (wealth, pleasure and stability), and crossing almost perfectly conjunct over my natal Mars and Vertex in Taurus. In addition, Jupiter and the North Node have recently joined Uranus in this 7th house too, increasing the attention I am to give to my personal relationships. My experience with this energy has been incredibly similar to what the characters in Polanski’s trilogy are experiencing: nosy and weird neighbors who are calculated and function as projection screens of the protagonist’s past fears. A Uranus transit to the 7th house, would normally introduce some madness in personal relationships. It brings romantic connections, business partnerships or friendships that are episodic or asynchronous, often outright bizarre in their violence and shock-value. One is not meant to cling to these relationships but to learn from them and move one. The interesting aspect is that David Lynch, whose chart I analyzed back in January, has the same placement of Uranus in the 7th house, and just judging by his work, there are similar themes to Polanski’s movies; wherein madness, mystery and alienation are experienced by protagonists as they attempt to live with, communicate and understand Others (again, 7th house themes).
Picture of a younger-looking Roman Polanski next to his natal birth-chart from http://www.astrodienst.com
What produced a trigger in me was seeing in Polanski’s movies actions, themes and events which are happening in my current life circumstances in this period. A couple of weeks ago, a random post on Instagram suggested I watch ‘The Tenant’ and I thought ‘hmm interesting’ since the topic resonates with what I am going through in my own living space, ever since I bought a flat. But I also thought, hang on! The Tenant is part of a trilogy?? I was familiar with Polanski’s movie ‘Repulsion’ which to me, it has always been one of those disturbing movies that have haunted me for days, when I first saw it back in college. Re-watching it again, made me shudder since it was creepy how some of the psychological themes present in that movie have gravitated in my own mind-space and personal fantasies which came with the move into my new home. I’m choosing to be honest here because I want to draw your attention in this article to how astrology, movies and psychology are powerfully linked. And maybe this article can function as well as an account of psychological healing.
So, after seeing the Tenant and Repulsion, I rewatched Rosemary’s baby last week and even if the movie has a certain campy energy about it, the emotional suffocation and social control that Rosemary is experiencing is incredibly pertinent to a Pluto in the 4th house transit. Having some rough aspects (squares, oppositions, semi-sextiles) from other planets lodged in the 7th house, can create certain experiences in a person’s life that resemble what Polanski is showing us in his trilogy: how entering into a new space can also seed the grounds for conditions of psychological breakdowns, if the individual is not ready to transform and heal from the emotional ghosts of the past. On a symbolic level, the Devil & cult participants in Rosemary’s house, the angry and lusty boyfriend in Repulsion, and the older, French neighbors in the Tenant represent the emotions of the protagonists, whose lives are quickly changing and entering into an unknown territory. Resisting the unknown in life, therefore gives rise to conflict, tensions and ‘demons’.
Psychic Growth & Energetic Contamination
Moving home means to begin life again, in a completely new space, and in that transition, in that liminal space of leaving behind something old and facing something new, repressed feelings come up to the fore of our minds. Feelings sometimes come over us with such a force that we can perceive it as an emotional assault. We might then need to take emotional leave from some of the changing circumstances of our lives, although with transits to the 7th house we might not be given this leave time. We could be forced to deal with things head-on and to think-on-our-feet. In addition, the process of growth and expansion is accompanied by many fears, especially if the individual is struggling with self-worth issues. Moving into a new flat or buying a home represents the beginning of a new chapter in a person’s life, and as happy or successfully this might appear on the surface, the personal transformation of adapting and accommodating to a new environment, can also be brutal and mentally taxing.
Often-times the places we move into carry the energy of the previous owner and many times we could be influenced by this lingering or stagnant energy (especially is you are sensitive to psychic currents and energy). We might not know all the details of that person’s life and how they used the space we now inhabit, or to be honest we might not care so much to know. We simply want to move on with decorating our space, enjoying it and finding a new daily routine around this important territorial shift in our lives. But the karmic bond we share with the previous owner might not give us peace.
These aspects are explored in the Tenant *spoiler alert* in which the main character is practically negotiating his way into the flat of a woman who is suspected of having committed suicide. However, she survives and then follow a couple of days in which he is flirting with her best friend as he is putting moves on the landlord to rent the place. He is basically waiting for her to die so that he can move in, which in itself creates a certain type of karma that ends up haunting him. I could not stop thinking about a particular scene in the movie in which a handicapped girl is taken out her flat at night and made to wear a fool mask while the neighbors beat her with sticks. This is a feverish scene which The Tenant thinks he witnesses as a marker of the cruelty of his neighbors, but could it have also been a memory from the war that appeared projected onto the image of this collective of foreigners? I say this because the Tenant deals with the theme of being foreign, or being Other and different from the locals, a theme which could’ve cost you your life during the war, when cultural relationships were rigid & dangerous. I saw the young handicapped girl and the suicidal previous tenant as versions of the old world into which Polanski was born, a world that during his youth was torn apart by the savage energy of the Second World War.
Many scenes in the Tenant which take place in the present hark back to a painful emotional past flooded by what we can image were traumatic images of young Polanski growing up in a ravaged European landscape. After the war as conditions in his life changed, became more stable and prosperous, the repressed emotional content that was not properly integrated slowly unraveled in the creation of his on-screen characters and their intimate dramas became projected onto the walls of their new homes. What made the plots so interesting to follow was how this unresolved emotional material often spilled into the relationships the protagonists had with those in their environment, with neighbors, delivery people, local pets, children, policemen and cleaning staff. I guess here you could argue that we don’t know exactly how much of his own emotional experiences Polanski poured into his movies, especially since they are adaptations from novels. But looking at his chart, with a Leo Sun in his professional 10th house (conjunct witty Mercury and soul-transforming Pluto) I would say he poured his heart into it, to the point that he could’ve found it difficult to distinguish his creations from his personality (an experienced mirrored by the protagonist of the Tenant when he dresses up as a woman, almost to embody feminine pain; & knowing Polanski’s allegations of rape against minor girls, such scenes were so bone-chilling to watch in the movie).
Another important theme here is the destruction of feminine energy, the corruption of purity, or the almost energetic rape of what is supposed to be beautiful, tender, maternal, yielding and understanding. We witness how interactions with others can transform someone pure-hearted and kind into a suffering soul, something distorted and pained, if their own Shadows are not accepted. Both Catherine Deneuve (Libra Sun) and Mia Farrow (Aquarius Sun) are tormented in their roles by fear, fatigue and confusion to almost paroxistic levels. Towards the end of their stories, even if they start out as these shy, alluring and softly feminine presences, we watch how madness and suffering eventually overtake them.
But if you prefer a different take on a similar cinematic experience, I couldn’t help but think of Lars von Trier’s ‘Dogville‘. In that movie, a kind woman played by Nicole Kidman, is similarly abused by those around her as she is trying to integrate into a small town (but she is also hiding away from her past). She eventually strikes back in utmost anger, and in a way which is denied to the characters played by Catherine and Mia; needless to say, I found Dogville’s ending more satisfying, in spite of how it glorifies violence. Very much alike von Trier, another controversial director, you can say what you want about Polanski’s real life (and I do believe the child molestation allegations) but his work remains nonetheless powerful.
It is also slightly creepy to see the recurring astrological ‘coincidences’ I see between my transits and Polanski’s. Since December 2020, I have been having the transit of the planet Jupiter, then Saturn and finally Pluto to my natal 4th house (where I have my Juno & Venus in Aquarius placements). Polanski was born with a Saturn in the 4th house in Aquarius and loosely conjunct his North Node. With a North Node conjunct Saturn he will not have an easy destiny as many will criticize him and discourage him as he is working and building his legacy. His legacy will certainly endure in spite of the drama, but it will be forever tainted by karma (Saturn). In addition, with the North Node in the 4th house the home, the nation and feminine energy really are his destiny! Not only due to the fact that he created the Apartment trilogy but also because he made headlines regarding the murder of his wife, actress Sharon Tate by the Manson gang in their Los Angeles home. Again, sudden and spontaneous trauma in the home (Aquarius 4th house) that separated him from feminine energy (his wife, who was an Aquarius Sun) and might’ve also given him a lot of strong emotions to process (Saturn in the 4th house). Similarly, when I bought my flat, Pluto was at 0 degrees in Aquarius very near my IC (Immum Coeli) the seat of the soul. With so many intense planets in this part of the chart no wonder my imaginarium was triggered by Polanski’s.
Facing the Shadow
My flat on its own is cozy and warm, filled with light and has all the essential amenities. But inside of it I often feel restless and surrounded by a negativity which I meditate daily to tune out. This process builds inner strength but I wonder what the long-term events of this stress will have on me. To give you a flavour of what I am experiencing, during the first weeks when I moved in, locals started accusing me of putting poison around my doors and trying to murder their pets; they actively arrived one night to block my path and to berate me from ordering some furniture from IKEA and trying to get it into my flat; they knocked on my door demanding I pay them fees for services that were normal such as picking up old plates and furniture pieces; I often see human poo in front of one of the elevators; my nearby neighbor runs a brothel and occasional, loud music is pumping through my wall when the girl he pays gets a client; and another neighbor whose door is parallel to mine had a psychotic breakdown so severe that he had to be taken away and hospitalized (and there was a scary build-up which lasted 7 days before this had to happen). When I purchased the home all these things were hidden, nothing was noticeable.
These events happened fast and simultaneously to my adaptation to a new job, accommodating to living alone again, being exhausted and underfed, led me to have an angry outburst of which I am not exactly proud of. However, this event cleansed something in my soul, something old that needed to get out. Akin to the fearsome spirit of Kali-Ma, my voice escaped from my body as I started shouting at the building’s administrator in full-blown rage one evening. I seldomly get upset or angry but in that moment I felt I released a life-time’s repression onto him. My mother intervened to calm things down, as I was still reeling from the shock and for the next two days I felt a subtle tremble throughout my entire body and my nerves felt like they re-wired. Again, I am choosing to share this event not to expose myself to criticism and have readers label me as ‘insane’ but to showcase what can happen when your natal Mars (anger and willpower) in Taurus is perfectly conjunct the planet Uranus (the planet of shocks and surprises) in the 7th house (the house of other people) and both of them are squared (irritated) by Pluto in Aquarius in the 4th house (the house of deep emotions and the home). You might find it hard to control your anger. I am now exploring ways in which I can release tension without such outbursts, and I am thankful that nothing worse happened that day.
This experience pushed me into a period of intense Shadow work and especially boundary-setting within my environment. If there is something that I am learning from the characters of the Apartment trilogy & Dogville is that having strong boundaries and knowing who you are is what makes the difference between keeping sane and allowing other people to enter your mind, assault body, dump their emotional load onto you and invade your private space without permission. The trilogy is also helping me understand when this might be the actual case or when these are just perceptions based on deep fears. Fears of having my boundaries trespassed could also stem from another time, a long-gone period when I was powerless and small events in the present serve as triggers. As the feeling from the past resurfaces it is washing over me so that I may finally process it. I am learning to stay present and patient and as much as possible, non-reactive. Being in a curious mindset, staying well rested and well hydrated and trying to understand where the other person might be coming from (so using empathy) are the ways in which I cope at the moment with living in a space that I feel has rejected me from the beginning. And speaking of trauma and rejection, the wound of rejection is also surfacing in my life as I adjust to this new living space, helping me uncover moments from the past when I tried to become part of a collective but was shunned or maltreated. It also highlights how much I self-rejected throughout my life, by entering a collective with fear and mistrust rather than patience and optimism. Entering a collective in this way eventually led to a self-fulfilling prophecy that only isolated me more and cast me again into the Shadow for some more work. So being authentic is the only way to ‘fix this’.
I’m helped tremendously in this period by the transit of Jupiter in Taurus in my 7th house (easing me into Shadow work with more light and energy) and by the teacher-like influence of Saturn transiting over my conscious mind (Mercury) and my energy levels (the Sun). Saturn breaks down my Ego and helps me see where I am being prideful, insensitive, rushed and selfish. As things from the past are broken down, as attachments to who I thought I am are dissolving, a new psychic space is created for a different awareness to root & grow. I am letting go of the fear of expressing my emotions and I am allowing them to give me new insights and to surprise me into showing me who I really am, warts and all. I am letting go of the fear of ridicule and of perfectionism, understanding that I make mistakes and can go over them and repair and patch up situations with others, as I go along. Not everyone will be open to repairing things with me, not all will understand me, many will disagree with how I express myself, probably more than one person will label me as insane but to be honest I lived a stoic life until this point and have been called worse names – and there is no guarantee that if I fine-tune my behavior in order to mitigate the effects of the criticism of Others, they will eventually love me. So I will risk being my Self then.
Conclusion
While 7th house issues do pressure us into acknowledging the presence, needs and behavior’s of others in relation to who we are, the 4th house brings with it the awareness that a life lived from the inside-out, a private life, lived in accordance with what you feel, is the one that has the potential to bring you the most healing experiences. And that’s what matters the most for the soul. After all, I rely on the examples of Carl Gustav Jung (a Leo Sun) & Vincent Van Gogh (an Aries Sun) who were productive and some say produced renowned works when they were at their most vulnerable, either hospitalized or battling depression.
I have planets in these houses in a constant state of tension, as my natal Venus in the 4th squares my natal Mars in the 7th. I grew up witnessing angry shouting matches between my parents, and feeling on an intimate level the gender war both at home and in the darkened Romanian collective of the 90s. I’m just at the beginning of this Pluto in the 4th house transit (with a welcomed break at the moment as Pluto slid back into Capricorn until December 2023) but I am beginning to understand how it will work for me for the next 22 years and I hope it will bring me the kind of soul healing I need to manifest unconditional acceptance and love in my life. Having this noble ideal in mind, any upcoming break-downs and trauma will be more easily surpassed, especially since I know that at the core there lies something unbreakable inside of me, a luminous force which I hope that Pluto will only amplify. Perhaps hell is to some extent the approval we seek from other people, but you can overcome such behaviour. After all, it took Persephone a while to detach from her mother’s expectations and to become queen over her own inner darkness, once the initial shock of her descent into Hell subsided. As this happened she began subduing the darkness around her and masterfully learned to rule over the Underworld, together with Hades.
I normally refrain from sharing a lot of the beautiful emails I get as feedback for my astrological chart analyses and my tarot readings, but one crew member whom I have known since the beginning of my Youtube channel ‘The Spiritual Social’ just wrote me to let me know that she is living out her manifested love story. I was completely speechless as I was reading her account and had the biggest smile of disbelief on my face. In spite of doing the kind of work I felt spiritually called to do for a couple of years now, I have my share of moments of deep doubt and self-consciousness, especially since at the moment the planet Saturn is transiting over my natal Mercury (my mind) and my Sun (my energy) making me feel rather tough on myself and the work I am doing. Exactly in one such moment, A. sent me the letter I got permission to reproduce below. Talk about Divine intervention 🙂 It is a beautiful account of how someone with just a little support can bring into being their dream love story (and also a lovely compliment to my skills, I’ve got to admit that). Thank you A., and now I’ll let her tell you her inspiring story:
“One early morning in January 2020, I went into a twilight state in which I inadvertently saw a vision of a tattooed man with dark features. The vision was so real that I woke up in shock, knowing somehow that I loved this man, and that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. For months he remained heavy on my mind, taking up a lot of my headspace as I struggled to go through a massive career change and faced the stress and confusion of the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, I began to submerge myself into online tarot readings and watching videos about spirituality. The majority of the readings I watched were about my ‘future love,’ including the usual titles that involve ‘Who is Your Future Spouse?’ and ‘What Are Their Thoughts About You?’ It was around this time when I came across The Spiritual Social’s YouTube page. After watching several videos, I began to realize that you, Lexi, would somehow be able to understand my situation. I had some money saved up and had decided to invest in a reading.
First, I sent an email explaining my situation. I was hoping that you would understand where I was coming from. I knew on a deep level that you wouldn’t be the type that would dismiss my situation as nonsense. Fortunately, you didn’t. You thoughtfully responded by saying that you thought my situation was “beautiful” and had experienced something similar, yourself. You suggested that we do a General Reading to start, since I wasn’t sure if this man was an actual person, a spirit guide, or even just a figment of my imagination that I created to appease my ongoing stress. You then said that I would be able to ask for a Love Reading later on if I thought it was necessary. So we agreed to go along with the General Reading. This would be my first The Spiritual Social reading. The details are as follows:
First Reading: April 2020 The first few cards you pulled were some of the most difficult in the tarot: Death, The Hanged Man, and the 5 of Pentacles were among them. You noted that he was clearly going through a very difficult and dark time. You said that it seemed like he was coming out of a relationship, one that was karmic and intense. You read that it was his former girlfriend who had cheated on him, and maybe he had cheated on her as well. He was experiencing the end of this relationship and was reflecting on his life and where it was going. You then said something that brought some comfort to me: that it was good that we hadn’t met yet, because if we had, he would be very difficult to love. You also noted that the reason why I was ‘picking up on him’ (of sorts) was because I had reached the appropriate age where we would finally meet. You said it was because I had cleared all of my karma (interestingly, I had just completed my first Saturn return), but he was still clearing his, which was why there was a delay in our meeting.
A significant card that stood out to me for some reason was the ‘Full Moon in Sagittarius’ card from the Moon Oracle deck. Both you and I noticed the bright pink on the card. You mentioned that it was a signifier of the new love coming into my life. I also took note of the Sagittarius sign. As I am an Aries sun (and the only fire sign in my immediate family), I was glad to know that I was connecting with someone who would be compatible with my fiery energy. Another card was one that had the wolf on it (I regrettably can’t remember the card title or the deck it came from — I’m thinking it’s from an animal totem/spirit animal deck.) The wolf had a very striking stare, and you noted how it had ‘lone wolf’ energy. You then mentioned that the ‘lone wolf’ stereotype is actually a myth, that there is no such thing as a lone wolf in nature, as wolves are pack animals. This resonated with me not only because I also picked up on that energy, but also because I had long related to the lone wolf stereotype, myself. I thought, “This person and I must have a lot in common…”
You also asked if we could be given a card that would properly describe this individual. After a few shuffles, the King of Pentacles card shot out. You and I were both impressed. You read that this individual was going to be older, an Earth sign, and was good with money. The King was also possessively holding onto his pentacle, which you made note of. You said, “It’s like he’s saying, ‘It’s MIIIINE.’” You also mentioned that he would be very loyal (in fact, you kept saying that over and over), sensual, and a little controlling.
At the end of the reading, you looked into my question about what messages he might have for me. You very thoughtfully picked up on his feelings in that he wanted to move on from the strife that he was dealing with, he wanted to dedicate a new life to me, one where the house he lived in would be a home, and that his hard work would be justified by our relationship. You also picked up on his admiration for me and how ‘strong’ I was, and how I was going to help him view the world differently, especially how he viewed women, love, and life. He then also asked that I connect with him, and to not let him go. Because he was facing a very difficult time and needed my presence, he had somehow ‘called out’ to me and needed me to respond. I loved that reading and watched it over and over. Unfortunately, that summer was when your account got hacked and you lost all of your old recorded videos. I didn’t get a chance to save that reading, but I did manage to take note of those cards that really stood out to me. You told me that I would meet him within 10 months, but, unfortunately, 10 months came and went and I never met him.
Astrological Birth Chart Reading: Summer 2020 A few months after the reading, I was inspired to request a Natal Chart Reading from you. I was about to start my graduate degree program and was curious as to what type of energies I naturally exhibited in regard to how I learn, how I collaborate with others, and what my general life path was so I could apply that knowledge to my educational experience. Alas, I have a lot of contradictions in my chart, but you very graciously gave me a synopsis that helped me a lot. You gathered that I would have difficulty collecting dry facts due to my strong Aquarius placements (true); that as an Aries Mercury I was a slow-to-start communicator, but once I got going, I would not stop (true); because of my sixth house Jupiter I am most lucky by providing services to others and maintaining a daily checklist of chores (very true!); and that in time I would be rewarded with a family of my own, mostly comprised of friends, coworkers, and other community members, that I would care for as a matriarch. There was one big takeaway, though…
You indicated that I was destined for a life that would have me at the mercy of men, that I would need to be taken care of by them, and that I wasn’t meant to have a career as much as I was meant to be a traditional wife that would have her husband provide for her. This struck me as odd, as I have lived a mostly single life, and the reason why I was getting my graduate degree was to ensure that I could have a career and that I could provide for myself. But it got me thinking – could this ‘King of Pentacles’ character, the one who was good with money, be the one I was destined to be with? Could this all have been preordained?
Second Reading: April 2022 By Spring 2022, I had all but given up on this ‘vision’ of sorts, and figured that this ‘Lone Wolf’ was a figment of my imagination. I had gone back to my old ways of thinking that the rest of my life was to be spent alone, and I was struggling to make peace with that. That was when I decided to give myself a birthday present and requested a love reading from you. I figured if anyone could gauge where I stood in my love life, it would be you. This time, you didn’t seem to pick up on the same Lone Wolf energy as you did the first time. However, you did indicate that I would meet someone about whom I would be very curious. He, however, would not want to reciprocate my feelings. At least not at first. You picked up on a warning that I needed to ‘trust’ the energies of this person, even if they come across as rude or too arrogant for my taste, because there was a chance I would not take too kindly to their behavior and would be inclined to cut ties with them before any connection could be made. I was surprised at this, as it seemed to be a reaction that is out of character for me, but I heard you out. What was interesting is that you also pulled a card that had the wolf on it. I figured this was a strong sign that this person was the Lone Wolf, and that his energy never left me.
Results In May 2022, I was referred to a job by a close friend/coworker. I applied for the position and got the job within a few weeks. Everyone at the organization seemed nice, and I adjusted well to the new environment. One day, I completed a task and wasn’t sure what to do next. The supervisors at the time were unavailable, so I asked a coworker for help. He was very kind and showed me the rest of the work process. I found myself blushing, though, because I felt a very strange, yet strong attraction to him. There was definitely tension, and he seemed to pick up on it, too, because he started talking a lot and we ended up cracking terrible jokes and laughing nervously. I was horrified by my feelings, as I had just started that job and was afraid of losing it over an unprofessional interaction with a coworker.
It wasn’t long until we started talking more while at work, and I learned we had a lot in common. I found out he was a much older divorced man who had an adult daughter. His ex-wife had cheated on him which had led to the divorce. He, like me, had left the corporate world after years of abuse and had wound up in a part-time job in the public sector. He was very educated, with two advanced degrees, and was a college instructor at one point. He was passionate about books, movies, and all things pop culture. He also, like me, came from a religious family – something we often traded notes about.
One day, he approached me while we were both on break. He told me that he was writing a piece and wanted my expert opinion (because I told him I was a writer, too). I said yes, I would be happy to. He was glad and asked for my email so he could send it to me once he was finished. I obliged and gave him my email. Then he asked for my phone number so he could text me once he sent it. Once again, I obliged and gave him my number. The next day, he started texting me. It wasn’t about the piece, though. He was just texting me to see how I was doing. I politely replied that I was busy with my life as a working student, then asked him how his day was going. He replied with his daily to-do list, and the conversation went from there. It wasn’t long until he was texting me every day to see how I was doing. Eventually, he sent me pictures of him during his childhood and told me very personal stories about his life. It was also around that time he found an Ernest Hemingway book of short stories, one of which he had told me about during our work conversations, and had generously bought it for me. It was clear that he was interested in more than just writing critiques.
I’ll admit that when he first got my contact information, I did not realize he was asking in a romantic sense. I figured we were just two work colleagues who were evolving into friends. When he started sharing all of that personal information and buying me that gift, I was surprised. I didn’t see us that way. It was just another incident where I fell into the trap of missing signals, which is something I have been criticized for in the past. This is likely due to my general lack of self-worth, as I don’t consider myself attractive or interesting enough for such attention. As a result, I was frozen as to what to do. I didn’t know whether to be creeped out or to just go along with it. Something told me to not be too concerned, though, and that he didn’t mean any harm. In the end, I just assumed he was a lonely person who wanted someone to talk to, and I was happy to be that person.
It wasn’t long until he realized that maybe I wasn’t as interested as he was, so he stopped texting as often as he did. Daily texts turned into weekly texts. Weekly texts into monthly texts. Our work conversations continued, though, and he was very respectful each time we interacted. He didn’t seem to be upset that I didn’t reciprocate his feelings. We still talked like there was no issue. We bonded over the usual things. I noticed that he genuinely listened when I spoke, which was a kind of treatment I don’t often get in my life. I appreciated him for it. I don’t know how the idea came to me, but it did. One night, while thinking about a writing project I had started years ago but never completed, I decided to text him to see if he would be willing to read it. He said of course. I said great, and that I would probably have something written and sent to him at a later date. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I realized I had feelings for him…
It was during a long workday full of training and the staff was dismissed for lunch. I took one look at the designated lunch tables and noticed that all of them were full. I shrugged and excused myself to a quiet area of the building where I settled myself in a corner with some caffeine and a good book. I feared that I had alienated myself from the rest of the staff, but I shrugged it off. A few minutes later, he comes and sits down next to me, coyly asking why I was being “such a non-conformist.” I smiled and blushed, saying that I wasn’t, that there wasn’t any place to sit, and I wasn’t that hungry anyway. He smirked and then proceeded to ask me how I was, which triggered a long conversation that almost caused us to be late when going back to training. I think it was that incident that caused me to realize that I might have feelings for him after all.
Shortly after, we started texting daily again. Within a few weeks, we went on our first date. Then we started going on dates each week. By his birthday party in late December, I had met his daughter and made the debut as his girlfriend where I had met all of his close childhood friends. Our workplace chats became much longer and more in-depth in private. I then learned that he had had relationships with other women since his divorce, all of which were with younger women who either used him for attention or for his money (things I could never fathom as a painfully-modest woman!) I also learned that he had an aggressive personality, one with a temper that had an issue with authority, but underneath that tough, extroverted exterior lay a sensitive guy who just wanted to connect with someone.
I remember being happier than I had been in years. Each time I would go to visit him at his house, I would have a rampant case of butterflies. I would be so excited I could hardly contain myself. I felt like a child around him (in fact, I still do!). When I confessed all of this to him, he admitted that I made him feel the same, which was significant because he thought he wouldn’t have an experience like that again at his age. I knew I had found someone truly special, and I deeply regretted the lost months when we didn’t talk. It wasn’t until early January 2023 that I realized your readings seem to correlate with what I was experiencing. Had I finally met ‘The Lone Wolf?’ The one who had gotten me through the turbulence of the pandemic, and the changes I’ve experienced since then? The one I would misunderstand and want to write off? The one that I was destined to be with? I figured if I had had a telepathic relationship with him over these past few years, I must still have one now. So I decided to put him to the test.
For a few weeks, I kept sending him mental messages. The theme of these messages was, “(His name), tell me you’re The Wolf. Just tell me you’re The Wolf.” It wasn’t long until late one night at his house when we were relaxing after dinner and watching a movie. He got up and started moving around the room, turning off lights and giving the room a very mysterious, sexual energy. I asked him what he was doing. He responded with a smart comment. I responded with another smart comment. After which, he sat down next to me with a smirk on his face and said, “I’m a wolf.” I laughed and kissed him right then and there. I didn’t let him finish his sentence, because he already told me everything I needed to know.
Further Discoveries as a Result of Your Guidance The cards you pulled:
King of Pentacles: He is a much older Capricorn Sun who is good with money
Full Moon in Sagittarius: He is a Sagittarius Moon
Wolf cards in both readings, the first one with the ‘Lone Wolf,’ the second one with a wolf walking through the image. We have both had long conversations about the ‘Lone Wolf’ stereotype, how it’s not real, and yet how we both relate to it.
His Saturn and my Sun are both in Aries.
His Sun and my Saturn are both in Capricorn.
Our Mercury signs also follow the Capricorn/Aries dynamic – his is in Capricorn, mine is in Aries.
His Venus and my Pluto + Lilith are in Scorpio (another indicator of sexual attraction.)
His Juno and my Juno are in Scorpio.
He has several planets in Virgo, which aligns with my 8th House Virgo (I have been led to believe that this is an indicator that he can help me undergo a rebirth of sorts, which has definitely been the case thus far!) Again, there is only so much I can glean from this synastry reading as I do not have his birth time. However, I think that what I’ve gathered thus far indicates that we have a karmic relationship and were meant to find each other in this life – which is, in fact, something we’ve actually said to each other!
In Conclusion We’re still in the early stages of our relationship (only a few months in.) Even then, we still feel very close to each other and are now having discussions about sharing a home one day where the deed is in both of our names (which I guess coincides with your first reading, where you picked up his message of wanting to “build a home for us”). I have met a few of his close family members and each one likes me. He has also met a few my close relatives and they feel the same about him. It seems like this is a serious relationship that will likely be for the long term. I guess only time will tell!
Thank you again, Lexi! You are truly a gifted reader.
A.”
I’m truly honored and grateful to be able to help, although most of the work belongs to A. and the brave way in which she opened her heart to her love opportunity.
I am here to suport each and every one of you who needs someone to believe with and for them in those things that we keep secret & we don’t see and yet have the power to change our lives.
There’s just something about Gemini Suns that makes them so damn photogenic. So, it’s Gemini season and this article is mainly a reason for me to fan-girl over two Gemini celebrities I like. Aside from this, I hope to also hook you in and get you to look into conducting an astrological birth-chart reading for yourself or those whom you may be interested in. I guess we’ll do a two-in-one today, which fits with the topic at hand, the inner duality of a Gemini Sun.
Gemini Sun British singer Morrisey famously crooned: “I am the son, I am the heir / Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar / I am the son and heir / Of nothing in particular“. In addition, French existentialist philosopher and notorious Gemini Sun, Jean Paul Sartre affirmed: If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company. More recently, the British singer Billie Marten (a Gemini Sun herself) sings in ‘Mice‘ that “I can do things no human can do/ I can doubt myself and then I’ll doubt you” and to me these lines speak a lot about the inner duality inside of a Gemini personality, a complex mind who understands life as a game of trial and error (and some really funny moments).
In religious lore, a Geminian mind is usually associated with the Doubting Thomas, a man who allegedly rejected the resurrection of Christ until he was able to actually touch the martyr’s crucifixion wounds. More generally speaking, a Gemini is a person who displays signs of being a strong believer in something (since their shadow zone is Sagittarius aka the prophet), while simultaneously doubting themselves and everyone around them. Paradoxically, it is the act of doubting that strengthens their determination to uphold a value, belief or specific mindset.
Gemini energy is contradictory. A Gemini is that person who sulks in a class photo of beaming smiles, or that one who smirks at a funeral as everyone is bawling their eyes out. Often they do it just because it feels right to be different, at other times they do it to balance out the room, and most often than not, they do it for attention, to bring some sort of light-hearted, erratic energy into an otherwise organized, material existence. Most of the people I know, have met at least one Gemini in their lives who got on their nerves or they just struggled to understand. These people were also given some important information from the same Gemini that got their partner to reply to their text calls, landed them a job interview or set them free from a certain doubt or worry they were entertaining for ages. I guess the gift of Gemini energy is always pendulating in the in-between, that space from which humor creativity and truly brilliant ideas have a stubborn tendency to emerge. Although, you might find it hard to trust a Gemini, you have to admit their deadpan delivery and adolescent love of life, has a certain stroke of genius about it and ends up coloring reality in something lighter and brighter in the end. After all, it was Gemini Sun painter Egon Schiele who said: “All beautiful and noble qualities have been united in me… I shall be the fruit which will leave eternal vitality behind even after its decay. How great must be your joy, therefore, to have given birth to me“.
Gemini energy is overtly self-obsessed, this is why they make such great friends with Scorpio Suns. It is the energy of the God Odin in Norse mythology, the intense seeker of knowledge, the deity willing to sacrifice an eye in order to merge with the Tree of Life and sip from the fountain of knowledge. It is said his sacrifice gave us all the wisdom of the magical runes. In other mythological stories, Geminis appear as the Greek twins Castor and Polux, which today represent some of the stars in the Gemini constellation. However, Geminis are normally thought to be disciples of Hermes Trismegistus or his Roman equivalent, the God Mercury. Mercury’s alter ego in Egyptian lore was the wise God Thoth, the scribe of the hymns and poems dedicated to the Ennead. Have I lost you yet? Taking a deep dive into the world of facts is in itself, a daily Gemini preoccupation. But let’s turn our attention now to the two men I selected for this month’s birth-chart analyses.
Let’s start of first with Oliver Sim, one of the lead singers & bassist of the alternative British rock band The XX. Oliver is known for his incredible low and intimate, bass voice. If you need a sample try this live session of this BBC Philarmonic session, in which Jamie, Romy and Oly play for the public and always end up making me weep and feel dreamy; or you may want to listen to the songs Fiction or GMT, two pieces which I think illustrate so beautifully Oliver’s vocal range. Say what you want about how he looks, but this man can sing! And not in the oh-I’m-a-pop-star-look-at-me kind of way, but in a way in which when he open his mouth something also awakens in the soul of the listener. And there are some astrological blessings in his chart which show a propensity for Oliver to develop as an artist due to his innate talent. Let’s have a look at his chart:
Image of the birth-chart of Oliver Sim
Oliver has a Sun in Gemini conjunct Mercury in the 10th house (the house of Capricorn), a Moon in Pisces in the 6th house (the house of Virgo) and an Ascendant in Virgo. His Venus is in Taurus in the lucky but restless 9th house, while his Mars is in brave Aries but in the darkest house of the zodiac the 8th. It’s interesting to see his Pluto enshrouds his communicative 3rd house (a placement he shares in common with Humphrey Bogart, but in a different sign), while his Capricorn stellium composed of Uranus, Neptune and Saturn is spread across his 4th and 5th houses.
In contrast, Louis Garrel is a French actor of international appeal known for having played in La Belle Personne, Godard, Mon Amour. He also had a cameo in Heartbeats (Les Amours Imaginaires) but he rose to stardom when he appeared alongside Michael Pitt and Eva Green in Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers” at the beginning of the 2000s and more recently in Little Women, the Timothee Chalamet edition 🙂 Louis is a man with Greek perfection physical proportions, also known for his famous filmographer father (Philippe Garrel), his famous model wife (Laetitia Casta, who is 6 years older than him) and his rather strange opinions:
Image of the birth-chart of Louis Garrel
Louis has a Sun in Gemini in the 1st house (the house of Aries) conjunct his Mars, Ascendant and North Node and a Moon in Leo in the 4th house (conjunct Venus). That’s a lot of Air and it’s heated up by a stable Fire Moon! Moreover, his chart is anchored by an almost perfect conjunction between Pluto and Saturn retrograde in Libra in the 5th house, and an additional conjunction between Uranus and Jupiter in Sagittarius in the 7th house (loosely followed by Neptune too). His Mercury placement is especially interesting as it is placed at the final anaretic degree (the 29th) in the final house of the zodiac (the 12th house). Louis is certainly completing the development of his mental abilities in this incarnation and he might very well reincarnate as a wave of energy or some bizare thought-form in his next cosmic adventure, judging by the intense mental energies and karmic wrap ups which are present in his chart.
So Oliver has more Earth and Water energies which add a certain softens and dependability to his Air-marked solar energy, but it also gives him a higher emotionality and a heavier karma. While Louis has more fire in his chart which gives him a lot of confidence, a sexy physicality and a super-star allure. Oliver has recently come out to discuss his battle with HIV/AIDS since he was 17, his turn to alcohol to work out emotional issues related to his identity and his awesome solo album and movie ‘Hideous’ which helped hi process through such dark feelings. While Louis seems to have increased his family by one, after getting secretly married to Laetitia Cast, a famous beauty in France and who has amazing chemistry with him in their charts (they have a powerful double whammy in their charts due to their Venus-Mars placements, which often indicates a strong attraction between people).
Full disclosure, as hot as Louis objectively is, I would much rather have a heart-to-heart and a cup of coffee with Oly, who is consistently challenged by life in order to fully embody and rise into his stoic Sun in the 10th house placement. I just think that our conversations will be more interesting and I always had a ‘thing’ for soulful, gay men. On the other hand, I don’t see myself doing much talking with Louis, if you know what I mean 🙂 Which of the two (or should I say 4, since we have 2 Gemini couples) would you prefer to hang out with? Let me know down in the comments section.
All hail Jupiter in Taurus! And all hail one of the most charismatic Taurean representatives, the beautiful and talented Cher. I know this post is late because the Sun already has moved into Gemini, but I’ve been working two jobs in the last month and completely lost track of time, space and my middle name 🙂 I just took the ‘executive decision’ to name the month of May 2023 as Taurus territory and the month of June as Gemini’s playground, so in line with this…in today’s post we will unpack Cher’s chart and figure out exactly what makes this Sun in Taurus native so enduringly perfect in everything she does. This post is part of a monthly series in which I analyze the charts of celebrities born in the same month as the astrological season we currently find ourselves in…so Happy Birthday, Cher! May you live long & prosper. Now let’s investigate exactly what makes her have this enduring appeal in her line of work?
The birth-chart of Cher taken from astro.com
I guess the most obvious thing about Cher’s chart is that there is considerable Air energy packed in there: with her Gemini Venus, North Node & Uranus & her Jupiter in Libra conjunct Neptune! There are some prominent Earth placements (Sun, Mercury and her Moon), she has a bit of fire (Mars and Pluto) and some karmic water energy (Saturn in Cancer on the Ascendant). So overall the chart seems balanced but those Air planets do cast a progressive light over Cher’s life. She has maintained a youthful spirit, has a great sense of humour and seems rather ageless in her looks too (a point that is further supported by her Saturn in the 1st house, the main culprit which preserves the body for a much longer period of time than any other planet in a person’s chart). I also wouldn’t want to upset her, because with that Mars conjunct Pluto combination in the sign of the Strength card in tarot (Leo) she is a person with formidable force and willpower, although she can be occasionally also lazy and indulgent.
In addition, Cher’s destiny is marked by the sociable signs of Gemini and Sagittarius, as her South Node resides in the 6th house (the house of work, habits, routines and responsibilities) and in the lucky sign of Sagittarius, and her North Node is placed in the 12th house (the house of isolation, far-away trips, escapism and artistic talent) and in the witty sign of Gemini. Her North Node is also conjunct Venus and Uranus, so she was born to shock us with her extravagant looks, to open people’s minds and to get more in touch with progressive forms of femininity that seem dual, since Gemini is the sign of the Twins. The fact that she is worshipped by the LGBTQ+ community is another beautiful extension of this energy, as Uranus is the energy of breaking through societal taboos and Venus is about love and beauty, so through her looks, make-up and relationships, Cher is contributing to shifting people’s mindsets about gender identity. I also love that she is quite a traditionalist at heart but at the same time an ally for those who adhere to more progressive forms of gender identity and sexuality – this goes to show that one shouldn’t be judged by their sexual preferences since these might not have anything to do with a person’s public appeal or moral and political beliefs. Sometimes people are just contradictory and reflecting on their contradictions makes all of use smarter and wiser and open’s up our minds.
In addition, Cher was born to work in the field of art & to use her imagination to earn a living. She was born to sing, as she is a Taurus Sun and her erogenous zone is the neck and the throat, so over this part of the body she has full mastery. With her North Node in the 12th house she might not so easily believe in God or spirituality, but through her music and by having open-minded conversations with other people she can establish through her work a connection to the Divine. She’s supposed to draw light-heartedness and witty, communicative energy (North Node in Gemini) from painful emotional experiences related to being a woman, mothering and being mothered (Saturn in Cancer). Cher does mention her mother a lot in her memorable quotes, which shows that while she might not have had the most easy mother-daughter relationship, her mother was an important karmic teacher in her life and someone who taught her tough lessons about her body, identity and emotions (Saturn in Cancer in the first house). Saturn there has kept her body slim and pure but it also attracted a lot of criticism in her life – this placement reminds me of another wonderful but highly criticized singer, Lana del Rey who has a similar placement but in the sign of Scorpio.
I think the core of Cher’s inspiration in her music is unconsciously drawn from her lunar placement. Cher has her Moon in Capricorn which in itself shows some heavy karma with masculinity and symbolically with the father figure, who might not have been present or supportive of her path in life or able to provide for her. This deeply resilient and stoic energy resides in her 7th house of other people and contractual agreements so Cher is emotionally invested in her difficult relationships with others. On a deeper level the 7th house is also the house of the truth we acquire in life by loving others, the wisdom we gain when we listen to others and balance our viewpoints through negotiations. On some level, this means that she is significantly attached to her work-place relationships, to the people she met through her work and to the contractual agreements she made through her career. This placement also tells me that Cher took on the role of the ‘guy’ in most of her relationships, to become the breadwinner and the family administrator, as she was separated from many significant relationships or due to heavy criticism and backlash related to her personality and looks (Saturn in the 1st), she had to make the painful decision to separate from someone. She truly was born to be ‘strong enough’, like in her song.
Saturn in Cancer and a Moon in Capricorn combination shows an individual who is a traditionalist at heart but also someone who is more emotionally attached to her work ethic, to her public personality, to her business relationships rather than her intimate world, her private persona or her role as mother/daughter/wife etc. You can say whatever you want about Cher but ‘domestic’ is certainly not something I would ever associate with her image. And what I always loved about Cher was how honest and upfront she has always been about this in her interviews (after all, the truth is her comfort zone with that South Node in Sagittarius). She is notoriously known for saying ‘My mom said to me ‘one day you should settle down and marry a rich man’ I said ‘Mom, I am a rich man’, which is perhaps the most Moon in Capricorn thing I heard 🙂 Moreover, the energy of this Moon in Capricorn in the 7th house was forever immortalized when Cher released ‘I got you babe’ with Sonny. The song is about dependability and it is a duet, wittingly showing both 7th house themes of partnership and Saturnian themes of steadfastness and loyalty.
As a Taurus Sun, Cher is naturally very good in anything artistic, in generating and maintaining wealth and stable relationships around her. She is attractive in a sensual way, and also fiercely stubborn and loyal, so I don’t think you can so easily get her to do something she doesn’t want to or commit to something she doesn’t feel she can deliver. On this final point, I also want to mention that one of her famous hits ‘Walking in Memphis’ in which she wonders if ‘she truly feels the way she feels’ combines the energy of her free-spirited South Node in Sagittarius (the walking) with her emotionally analytical Saturn in Cancer (the doubtful nostalgia), which indicates again how we play out the combined energies in our chart in everything we create in our lives.
Cher is experiencing at the moment a blissful Sun conjunct Jupiter transit, in tandem with a Uranus, North Node and she has just completed a Mercury retrograde return in her sign too! Expect to hear her popping up in the news more in the coming months, even if it’s just to pay her respects to the passing on of some of her equally iconic musician friends, like Tina Turner. I wouldn’t be surprised if by the end of 2024 Cher will have released some new music or a film, so look out for that.
Briefly, I also want to mention something interesting I noticed about an up and coming Taurus Sun female celebrity, the rising star Ana de Armas. She is also a Taurus Sun, but differently to Cher, Ana actually has in her natal chart Jupiter in the sign of Taurus conjunct her Mercury, while Cher has her Jupiter in Libra in the 4th house (by the way, this placement shows someone with a beautiful inner world, a luminous soul and someone who also loves to spend a lot of time at home). Coming back to Ana, she is going to have a full year of not only Jupiter transiting across her Sun, but also her Jupiter return a time of great blessings (such as increased vitality, wealth, lucky opportunities and fame) in someone’s life.
Seeing as Ana’s career is at a pivotal point, expect her to go viral over-night or to put out some work that will be received well by critics and the public. Even controversy will support her name and brand in the coming year, so I am truly excited to see what she will do this year. I am not a really big fan, but she seems to be a sweet and beautiful woman who often finds it hard to relax (it’s that Sun opposite Pluto aspect in her chart and her South Node in Virgo). I enjoyed her roles in Knives Out & Blade Runner 2049, and am curious to see what else she will play in. With her North Node in Pisces, she was made to appear on screen and to become an actress or at least perform in some way; however, she also finds this experience to be a complete break from her comfort zone, so I hope she manages to hold on and get comfy within the discomfort. She had a couple of flops in the past year (see whatever Deep Water was) and some time in the spotlight that was highly controversial (for her Oscar nomination for Blonde), but Jupiter is now making a couple of her work goals come true with a lot more ease and speed.
By comparison to Cher, Ana doesn’t have the same, tough karmic energies that Cher has in her natal chart, but this also means that her appeal might not be as enduring or iconic as Cher’s. She’s still young so we’ll see how things progress for her. Overall, these are two beautiful, talented & pragmatic Taurean women with a benefic energy in their stride (Jupiter) which will help increase their wealth and popularity in the coming year, so what’s not to love? The blessings of Jupiter are especially needed because Taureans have been fragmented and challenged by the rebellious energy of Uranus transiting their Sun since May of 2018, a transit which will last up until April 2026. When Uranus comes to play, the native finds it very hard to obey other people’s rules because defending their personal and creative freedom suddenly becomes a priority in the native’s life. The benefic energy of Jupiter releases the native of the tension of Uranus, bringing about some lucky opportunities to experience freedom within social constraints. This energy will extend upon other Taurus celebrities and some who come to mind are Dwayne Johnson or The Rock and Henry Cavill (whom I astro-hunked a while ago). In spite of their overall success and mass-appeal, in the last years both of these Taurus men have been challenged in their careers and underwent some conflicts and setbacks: Cavill in his role as the Witcher and as Superman & The Rock for his role in Black Adam. So again, it will be interesting to see how things develop for them, now that the God of All Gods, Jupiter smiles down upon them.
Images of actors Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson (left) and Henry Cavill (right)
Lastly, if you happen to have any personal planets in the sign of Taurus (The Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus or Mars) then get ready to experience some blessings and some ease and relief in that area of your chart where the planets reside in. Since 2018 Uranus has been bringing lots of changes and some chaos in the lives of Taureans & Taurus-afflicted folk, and since last year as the North Node joined Uranus, things might have gotten even crazier! But now, the energy of the Great Benefic will release you of some tensions, much like it will also smooth some things in the lives of the famous Taureans I discussed above. Who is your favorite taurus celebrity? Let me know in the comments below & if you are interested in a personal birth-chart reading, I offer a range of reports at affordable prices here.
It’s Aries season and as I’m trying to stick to the ‘tradition’ of analyzing the chart of a famous celebrity each astrological season, one particular Aries lingered on my mind in this period. And he happened to pop up indirectly, as I was listening to a funny video on Youtube in which Alizee was breaking down Mathew Perry’s new book about addiction and the women in his life, in an attempt to uncover whether Matthew is sexist or just self-loathing. Spoiler alert, she concluded the latter. You can see the clip here:
As I was viewing this, I kept thinking “Ok, so I know that Matthew is a Sun in Leo, which makes him a Fire sign. Now another Fire sign known for his battle with addiction (but also someone who has made an amazing recovery) is Robert Downey Jr. Wait! It’s Aries season, let’s write about him and addiction then”. Not that you needed to know my train of thought, but this is how I reached this place of finding myself in a cafe in the center of Bucharest, on a rainy and grey April afternoon, studying the charts of Mathew and Robert and looking for clues that might point towards the astrological unravelling of their addiction stories. I’m especially interested in seeing why their recovery stories are so different and what can astrological transits tell us about the probability of overcoming addiction.
For those of you who are new to the filmography of these two actors, I can clue you in on the fact that before becoming Iron Man & Sherlock Holmes, Robert Downey Jr. had a successful career at the end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s appearing in movies like Less than Zero, The Pick-up Artist, Only You and Chaplin (for which he won an Oscar nomination). Following an incident where he was found driving while on drugs and after a period of incarceration, Robert made a slow recovery. During his period of recovery in the 2000s he played together with Nicole Kidman in a unique and strange movie inspired by the artworks of Diane Arbus, called ‘Fur‘, which I strongly recommend if you want to see a different side to Robert’s acting skills. The interesting thing about Robert is that even if he struggled with addiction and engaged in alleged days-long drug benders, and one of them apparently got him fired from the set of Ally Mcbeal, he somehow remained prolific, appearing in movies in a consistent way during the Pluto in Scorpio/Sagittarius/Capricorn eras. His powerful comeback however began in 2008, as Pluto entered Capricorn and harmonized some of his natal chart placements, which I will discuss in the following.
The same cannot be said however of Matthew Perry, who shot to wealth and fame in the 90s by playing Chandler Bing in the phenomenally successful series ‘Friends’. He then starred in only a couple of roles, most notably being his appearances in the Whole Nine Yards and its sequel. He went quiet for a good amount of time (about a decade) until last year (2022) when he launched a tell-all biography called “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing”. These facts aside, before I dive into the comparative analysis, I also need to show you their charts:
Birth-chart of Matthew Perry, born on August 19th 1969 in Williamstown, Massachusetts (age 53 years)
Birth-chart of Robert Downey Jr., born on April 4th 1965 in Manhattan, New York (age 58 years)
I want to write about addiction and healing and how it emerges from both Matthew’s and Robert’s natal charts. The interesting thing is that part of the healing process is seeing Robert create a documentary about his father’s life, called ‘Sr.’ It’s fascinating to see just how emotionally attached and close Robert has remained to his father, who was the one who initially got his son on this addiction path by offering him weed at the age of 6. I am remined here of the close emotional relationship that Johnny Depp shared to his verbally and physically abusive mother, and which also healed for him in court, as he had to reflect on that important maternal connection during his defamation trial against his ex-wife Amber Heard. In addition, Johnny also struggled with drug and alcohol consumption throughout this healing process. I was struck by how Robert seemed to have consumed drugs throughout his 20s and 30s in a co-dependent attempt to preserve an emotional connection to his father.
The theme of a certain fascination with the father who is somehow absent, is also present in Matthew’s narrative who mostly got to see his dad while growing up through the medium of ‘Old Spice’ commercials on TV. On the other hand, it seems like Matthew wasn’t introduced to drugs by his parents, but he did go through his parent’s divorce at the fragile age of just 1 year old, and then with his family having relocated to Canada following the separation. Matthew apparently grew up in a household where he had many step-siblings, which I guess on some level accentuated his feeling of alienation. Throughout his life he suffered a couple of accidents and he mentioned in interviews that the injuries he sustained led to him to develop drug habits that he found hard to bounce back from. Of course, we need to take into account that two other important factors were present in the lives of these two men, that might not usually show up for other addicted individuals: being actors and the subsequent fame they garnered, and their sexy and charismatic looks, which increased their popularity but might’ve complicated their capacity to form, meaningful emotional bonds with people. Matthew describes recently how he is ‘no longer afraid of love’, while Robert tears up in the Netflix documentary saying how he made the documentary to figure out his relationship to his father and that he doesn’t want to ‘miss a thing’. Which I think it’s very sweet, kind of like in the Aerosmith song, but this insight also reveals the state of his inner world, where addiction might have taken the place of an incapacity to let go of the idealized image of the father. The things that Matthew and Robert have in common are not only the fact that they are both actors, astrological Fire signs and both have their own personal addiction stories, but it seems that their understanding of their masculine sense of self is also built upon a fatherly model which is in one case ‘in-absentia’ or improvised (for Matthew) and in another it is toxic and in need of healing (for Robert).
To be more precise, what are the astrological things that both actors have in common? Well the first thing I noticed when I looked into their charts is that at the time at which I am writing this article (April, 2023) the planet Saturn is in the sign of Pisces. In Robert’s chart one can see that Saturn is nataly in the sign of Pisces and in the dark, intimate and obsessive 8th house. So this makes this specific transit, Robert’s second Saturn return! Not only that but in Matthew’s chart, Saturn is currently moving across his natal North Node in Pisces in the same 8th house. This blew my mind a little bit 🙂 Having any of the ‘malefic’ planets or points in the astrological house of power and healing (the sensitive 8th house, traditionally ruled by Pluto and the magnetic sign of Scorpio) can shape a person’s life to their core in emotionally profound ways. Any planets in the 8th house speak strongly of addictions and the incapacity to let things go; this is because Scorpionic energy is mind-body-soul, it is life and death, the Alpha & the Omega, an energy that carries long before the physical body is gone. While this house gives one a certain irresistible magnetic and sexual appeal, it can also bring up problems related to trust, obsessive thoughts, paranoia, self-harm and destruction. Jealousy and envy are powerful emotions which lie dormant in the 8th house and an outer planetary transit can easily trigger them, leaving the native to cope with these emotions as best as they can; and often, people cope by turning to alcohol, drugs or sex to numb the pain and the emotional intensity. Having either Saturn, Pluto, Mars, Lilith or the North Node in this house can bring up the darker energies out to play to the detriment of other healing and empowering aspects of this house. Nonetheless, we can see how Robert has been somehow protected by the force of Saturn in this house, because he survived his 1st Saturn return and made it to his second in great standing. Saturn tends to limit, separate and freeze a person’s energy in a given house or by transit, but it also preserves it and purifies someone’s energy in a methodical and slow-moving process.
So, with Robert, Saturn granted him the karma of emotional power: issues related to trusting others, feeling sexually potent, refusing to emotionally separate from family figures, and being overcome by self-destructive thoughts abounded in his life, but they were also purified and restrained as long as he continued to work both in his professional life (Saturn sitting opposite from the hard-working 2nd house of money and resources) and at his relationship to his father (which, with Saturn placed here, I can see that the relationship only got better with time). Another thing is that Pisces IS the sign of dependency, emotional sensitivity and addiction. This is the sign of the idealist who finds it hard to exist in the real world, with all its demands of bureaucracy, order and logic. Not only that but Pisceans are ruled by Neptune and Neptune is the ruler of cinema and the filmic environment. His Saturnian Pisces got Robert to experience success in his career and in his intimate life, much later than some of his peers, and all of this following after his first Saturn return experienced around the age of 29-30 years. As Robert is experiencing his second Saturn return, the focus falls on healing his relationship to his father and reflecting on the purification that Saturn brought in both of these men’s intimate lives, from what I assume were years of silent substance abuse. The pressure to create and to film, to appear on movie sets and to act, where embedded in Robert’s natal energy early on; unfortunately the addiction was the by-product of a co-dependent emotional state to his father and potentially a lack of finding an emotional anchor in his life in someone else. Once Robert met and fell in love with this producer wife, Susan Nicole Downey, things started looking up for him on all levels of his life. This is because Pisces energy – being a dual and romantic energy – needs another person’s strong intimate presence in their lives in order to focus and flourish. Coincidentally, Susan happens to be a Scorpio Sun (born on November 6, 1973), an interesting detail which complements Robert’s strong Saturn in Pisces in the 8th house energy, showing how time granted him a Scorpionic lover to fit with his ‘Pluto-flavoured’ Saturn.
Unfortunately, I don’t see Matthew being that lucky, because for him his 8th house is occupied by the North Node, a point which shows an individual’s dharma. Vedic astrologers call this point, Rahu and attribute certain malefic and obsessive tendencies to it, because of its association with the human willpower and Ego. Seeing how a dark and obsessive point lies in the most emotionally intense house of the zodiac, you can image the dharma that Matthew has to shoulder. For him, part of his destiny is to come face to face with the darker aspects of life and to go through pretty intense, life-and-death experiences in which strong emotions will constantly wash over him. This is the house of random and painful life events, from accidents to overdoses, to emergency operations and potential murders or stalking events, to sexual abuse and master-servant dynamics. This is also the house of healing and mending, strong creative urges and ancestral legacies and it shows an individual’s phenomenal capacity to bounce back from deep pain, rejection, abuse and dissolution. With the North Node there, Matthew has the task of learning how to surrender, forgive, let go and flow with life’s chaos rather than to fall back into his comfort zone (the South Node, Ketu) which points towards pleasure, materialism and common sense events. He is stuck on the Virgo-Pisces axis which describes going from control and order to creative messiness and emotional attachments. On a deeper level the 2nd house versus the 8th house axis also shows an individuals work-life balance, and as we can see Matthew is meant to gradually let go of work and of earning his income independently (the 2nd house which contains his South Node), in favour or falling in love and sharing his resources and his life with someone else (the 8th house which contains his North Node). Although being given a pretty rough ride, he is eventually learning to walk this path by letting go of the fear of love, as he mentioned in an interview connected to the release of his book. The 2nd house is also the house of the body and Matthew has his natal South Node in Virgo conjunct Mercury and Pluto there, and we can see the big transformations that Matthew’s physique has endured throughout the years with respect to how he thinks (Mercury) and where he draws his power from (Pluto).
In both of the charts I also see some problems regarding the use of both men’s sexual energies: it’s either blocked or stunted (in Robert’s chart) or too much and thereby it loses its meaning (in Matthew’s chart). So for both men this imbalance in their sexual energies can get them to either perform sexually too much or not at all, to avoid physical contact or to desperately crave it. Containing sexual energy and mastering it is benefic for creative work, but it can also lead to a lot of problems in the ways in which they person’s with such placements can express their emotions and desires to the ones they feel attracted to; as a consequence, rejections, separations, sexually transmitted diseases and issues of low self-esteem are possible, which can be quite tough especially for men who tend to associate their masculinity with their capacity to be virile and sexually confident. The key is to release the anxiety surrounding the blending of sex with emotions, and risk falling in love really hard for someone. That’s the typical 8th house treatment: loving so much it hurts…and then noticing how true love heals you, rather than betrays you. And that’s what Robert did 🙂 While we are still rooting for Matthew (or at least, I am, on some level).
Coming back to the astrological things they share in common, well I guess you noticed their Leonic Ascendant! (strangely enough, they share this in common with Johnny Depp too, another actor who has smouldering good lucks and suffered from addictions). Matthew has his Sun in the first house conjunct the Ascendant, while Robert has his Sun in the lucky 9th house conjunct Venus and Mercury. Looking at the current transits and how they affect both actor’s energies, I can also see some interesting patterns: Matthew is having at the moment his Chiron return in the sign of Aries and in his 9th house, while Robert is having a strong Jupiter conjunct Chiron transit over his natal Sun, Mercury and Venus in the sign of Aries. The 9th house shows the place in which we can unlock our good luck and the planets and points there show us the manner in which we can access this luck. I can see that Jupiter in Aries is helping both of these men become increasingly popular and more visible in the public’s eyes at the moment, but they are experiencing their blessings in a slightly different manner: for Robert, he can unlock his good luck by simply being himself (the Sun), by talking (Mercury) and by loving others (Venus); while for Matthew he can bring more good fortune in his life, if he heals from past trauma (Chiron).
But why did Robert’s career took off with the transit of Pluto in Capricorn, while Matthew went incognito for a while? Well, one reason for this is the preponderance of Earth planets in his chart which were harmoniously activated by compatible Capricorn: we can see that Robert has Jupiter conjunct his Moon in Taurus (which is an aspect that also shows that his mother was a source of emotional support and a solid nurturer in his life), together with a stellium in Virgo (involving Mars, Uranus, Pluto and the part of Fortune!) in the work-prone and financial 2nd house – so with these aspects being triggered by stable and supportive Pluto in Capricorn, no wonder he made a fortune, nourished himself better and got clean, all while achieving international stardom by consistently appearing in successful movies and franchises. On the other hand, in Matthew’s chart, although we a also see a Virgo stellium in the 2nd house that was indeed supported by Pluto in Capricorn, his other placements in Leo (Sun and Ascendant) together with his natal Jupiter and Uranus in Libra in the 3rd house and his Chiron in Aries in the 9th house were challenged during the 14 years-transit of Pluto in Capricorn. Having a preponderance of squares working simultaneously in an individual’s chart for a long period of time can take a toll on a person’s body and mental health, especially seeing as Matthew’s faith & growth (Jupiter in Libra) and sense of future and progress (Uranus) were put under pressure by Pluto in Capricorn. I’m not making excuses for a man who clearly made some conscious choices to engage in his own self-destruction, but I am mapping out the astrological fact that Matthew had a lot of tense influences acting upon him simultaneously which were hard to resist. And as you all know, we all have our good days and bad days. The charts do show to some extent why it was harder for Matthew to ‘bounce back’ career-wise compared to Robert who had a lot of benefic trines supporting him in the last years on his path to recovery and ultimately, to thriving. On a more optimistic note, I can also see that Matthew’s natal Saturn and Part of Fortune in Taurus were supported by the transit of Pluto in Capricorn – this means that with some effort and discipline, he managed to survive the intense, physical experiences he endured following from prolonged drug-consumption. The problem is that he also had these sensual and stubborn energies (Saturn in Taurus and Part of Fortune) sitting in tension with his personality (the Sun in Leo) and the opportunities he could attract to him (the Leo Ascendant), which I assume led to many personal frustrations and potential ‘battles of will’ with other people in his life (since the squares are between fixed signs).
One final thing I need to mention about the things that both of these men share in *astrological* common is that their Neptune in Scorpio lies in the 4th house. This is a marker that shows a propensity towards the idealization of their family lives, an increased emotionalism and an attraction to the world of the silver screen. This placement also denotes individuals with deeply sensitive souls but also quite powerful, sexual desires. A Neptune in the 4th house is someone who finds in hard to rest at home without the use of substances that can help one escape the mundane fabric of reality; it can describe a native who has addiction problems rooted deep in their ancestral DNA. The higher vibration of this energy would be coming home to a creative and intimate, family abode, but the lower vibration would be having escapist fantasies, indulging in substances, lewd sexual dynamics and intense emotional disappointments. A Neptune in Scorpio can also indicate some sexual activity in the family that took place behind closed doors and was buried deep for years. This energy affects Matthew in a stronger way than Robert, because Matthew has his Moon conjunct Neptune in Scorpio (and trining his North Node in Pisces but squaring his Leo Sun and Ascendant and opposing his Saturn in Taurus). The Moon shows how we rest, how we feel, what makes us feel safe and nourished. The Moon is also the emotional support that we get through life and it portrays the mother figure, which in Matthew’s case was a strong woman with a mysterious and elusive energy. So within Matthew there is a deeper struggle between light (Leo Sun) and dark (Moon in Scorpio) than it is inside Robert (whose Sun in Aries and Moon in Taurus sit a semi-sextile aspect to each other rather than a square).
As you can see, on the surface, these men seem to have a lot in common, both in terms of their qualities and bad luck in life, but at the same time, once we get deeper into their natal charts, in spite of ongoing astrological similarities we also see how one actor’s recovery path from addiction is harder than the other’s. There’s also the issue of how the public ends up perceiving their recovery. Again Robert has it luckier than Matthew. This is because Robert has a Moon and Jupiter in the 10th house and so close to the Midheaven (the point of the professional legacy). So he has an enduring appeal, a beautiful artistic image that is stable and trustworthy (Taurus). He is seen as a hero, as a sensitive man who made a successful emotional recovery and healing and became Iron Man. While Matthew is being criticized and scrutinized by the public upon the release of his book. Some of the criticism is based on how he squandered his privilege and his fame, but also the wealth he had, which he re-purposed in order to heal himself (Part of Fortune and Saturn in Taurus in his 10th house).
I hope you found this comparative analysis useful and feel free to let me know down in the comments section your thoughts regarding these actors and the astrological placements discussed in this article. Take care & until next time!
The Spiritual Social 