Astrodreamer

Frankenstein @ Scorpio Sagittarius Cusp

2009-11-18T16:42:06Z

Boris Karloff: wouldn’t we like him to be a Scorpio? Actually he barely escaped it, born at 10:30 am (it is said), when the Sun, whose disc takes a whole day to pass from one degree to the next, was about 80% over the cusp into degree zero of Sagittarius. . . . But Sag is open and good-humored, not at all Scorpio--gothic, intense, secretive, moody, the typical Halloween horror cliche, so what gives? . . . . . Looking at Karloff’s chart , we see nothing else in Sag to reinforce that almost home-free-all Sun but a vivid close conjunction of Jupiter/Mercury in Scorpio, as if harpooning the escapee back onto the horror ship; and another close conjunction nearby: Venus with Scorpio-and-electricity-related Uranus, the formative Frankenstein zap. It’s as if the lonely, uncompleted, botched Sagittarian self, a tall, loping athlete, staggers out of the other side of death, enlivened by a jolt of eelish Scorpio bio-electricity. The life-creating intimacy of Scorpio sex is madly perverted into an abortive reverse electrocution, harnessing the atomic power of the cusp, a gap in the solar plasma. Appreciate the mad cosmic grandeur of Dr. Frankenstein's experiment; in Karloff's chart he had the perfect subject. Unfortunately he didn't employ an astrologer to calculate the correct moment. . . . . . The gentle monster’s pathos derives from the fact that the mistimed Scorpio/Uranus life-shock infused the benign personal energies of Mercury, Venus and Jupiter. The five planets clustered around Karloff’s astronomical zenith are a little rebus of the Frankenstein monster character. A botched resurrection, he rejects Scorpionic blood, fangs and decay, he seeks Sag freedom and life. As a real person Karloff (actually William Henry Pratt) identified with and projected his sunsign Sag, not Scorpio; his biographer Peter Underwood said he had a “well-known aversion to the word horror” which he associated with the repulsive. His personal self-awareness had nothing to do with the psychological miasms of the horror movie genre. Rather than horror he preferred the word terror which he thought of as a pleasurable thrill, “good clean fun" for healthy children, practical joking. . . . . I wish critics of astrology could sometimes advance from Scorpionic suspicion to Sagittarian adventurousness and see astrological coincidences as fun and thrills, rather than deception and evil. . . . . The split between Scorpio and Sag in Karloff’s identity is echoed in the common misapplication of Dr. Frankenstein’s name to the nameless monster. Off the set he was passionate about cricket, soccer and rugby. He bred Bedlington terriers and Scotties and kept a menagerie of farm animals, and loved entertaining children.

Aries Botero, Valentino and Red

2009-10-29T02:01:24Z

Fernando Botero, (b. April 19, 1932): Femme habillee par Valentino. Aries painter Botero is not afeard of red, for sure, tho I wouldn't say it plays a special role in his work. But he was attracted by fashion designer Valentino's great romance with the color. Valentino is a Taurus, but the Sun is his sole Taurus planet, while his chart's outstanding element is a powerful triple conjunction in Aries of Mars, Mercury and Uranus (all trine Jupiter), which he shares with Botero, who was born only three weeks before him.

Aquarius and the Rainbow

2009-10-21T19:54:03Z

Stellar spectra

Color associations to the signs and planets are not rigidly assigned, and are based on subjective psychological affinities. Some are no-brainers, like red being associated with the planet Mars and the sign Aries (which is “ruled” by Mars) -- the war god evokes blood, anger (seeing red), the red planet, even the iron (oxide) of weaponry, which is also the source of blood’s color. Then the Moon and its associated sign, Cancer the Crab, suggests silver or white, also the moonlike pearl and nacre, esthetic essence of the crustacean.

Some signs have less definite color associations, but sun-ruled Leo, the Lion, one of the 3 PRISM I, Gerhard Richterfiresigns, is obviously related to gold, yellow, orange, and to sunlight itself, if that can be called a color. Aquarius is the sign directly opposite Leo in the zodiac and the two signs are poles of a larger system. Hence, as Leo is sunlight, Aquarius is the spectrum of frequencies of which sunlight is composed, i. e. the rainbow. As Leo speaks of the Sun complacently imagining itselfPIXEL, Gerhard Richter, b. Feb. 9, 1932 the center of its universe, Aquarius reminds that each of the infinite stars is itself a sun. (And each star has its unique spectral analysis, or rainbow variant.)

This metaphor generates a whole rainbow of antinomies. Leo is the autocrat, Aquarius the anti-authoritarian rebel, democrat or collectivist; Leo the individual, Aquarius the species; Leo the Self, Aquarius the group; Leo egoistic subjectivity, Aquarius detached, scientific objectivity. Leo is the heart/sun/nucleus, Aquarius the circulatory system/orbiting planets/electronic current. Aquarius is a political sign, the rainbow a joyous symbol of the coalition of minorities, yet Aquarius can also be conservative in characteristic ways, embracing a libertarianism in revolt against an oppressive consensus. Norman Rockwell, 2/3/94; Jackson Pollock, 1/28/12
Altho an air sign, Aquarius, in ruling circulation, is associated with rivers and streams (whence the flowing symbol of the waterbearer), and more abstractly, with the cycle of ocean, vapors, winds, clouds, rain, river, ocean. The rainbow (an unexpected element of that cycle) is associated with promise and hope, and Aquarius is associated with futurity: the first 10 signs cover the known past and present, Aquarius, the 11th, the airy, insubstantial future, or a cuclical concept of time and eternity, the Eternal Now, “modernism”, the epiphanic Instant, the electrical zap, the accident, the gratuitous, the lightning strike, etc.) With respect to the future, both utopia (for instance the neotribalism of “Age of Aquarius” hippiedom) and super-rational distopia are offered. Aquarius is thus particularly associated with both the threat and promise of ever-increasing scientific objectivity, the very concept a transcendent abstraction called Knowledge, Truth or Mind.

Freud: Taurus or Pisces?

2009-10-17T04:57:26Z

For some time I’ve been pursuing the idea that Freud’s correct birthday was March 6, not May 6. The almost universally accepted May 6, 1856 date (6:30 pm, Freiberg, Moravia, now Pribor, Czech Republic) appears authoritatively in the first sentence of Freud’s official biography, written by his close associate and disciple, Ernest Jones. Yet that very sentence bears a footnote (deleted from the abridged edition) joking that the actual birth may have taken place two months earlier, seven months after the wedding of Freud’s parents.

Freud wrote a book called Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, yet this blatant, jocular slur against his mother has been ignored by most biographers, even though he himself exposed suspicions that he was sired by his half-brother.

To my mind, given all that we now know about Freud, the March 6 horoscope is the more apt of the two. I will not repeat here the biographical and astrological material supporting my opinion, which was published in an article in the Astrological Journal (March/April 2000). I have only recently, however, come across Freud and Moses: The Long Journey Home by Emanuel Rice, M. D., who reports that one of the most compelling documents supporting the May 6 birthdate, the so-called “inscription” in the Family Bible, is not an inscription at all, but merely sheets of paper found in the rebound book, which is otherwise empty of any family records.

The carefully transcribed birth data include the (alleged) date of the month and the day of the week for the birth and the circumcision, in the gentile and the Jewish calendars, eight dates in all. But it is followed by a charmingly spontaneous (and ungrammatical) sentence that is marred by a slip of the pen: “On the fourth of [illegible], [1]856, my son mentioned above, long may he live, got three teeth. Freud himself insisted, “most mistakes in writing dates are motivated”. Is it possible that the slip reveals the fear that the true date of the first dentition might undermine the carefully wrought falsification above it? The sentence has a tender charm that throws into question the veridicality of the formal sentences above; which also include the solemn record of Sigmund's grandfather's death. Does one put death and baby teeth on the same page?

Granted, other documentary obstacles remain in the way of the March birthdate. However, the reverential attitude towards and legendary status of some of these documents suggest they may not have been examined interrogatively. Several poor photo copies are contradicted by earlier reported descriptions. Many biographies elide the fact that Freud's two uncles were professional forgers. One of the uncles was imprisoned, much to Freud's shame, and the Manchester branch of the Freud family was implicated; Manchester was the manufacturing source of counterfeit rubles that flooded eastern Europe via Vienna prior to WW 1 and we know surprisingly little, given the glut of biographical research, about the Manchester Freuds.

The circumstances around Freud's birthrecords therefore are far from transparent. He was not born in the orthodox shtetl where no one could keep a secret, but in a small enclave of suspiciously foreign Ostjuden, stigmatized and transient, hardly to be distinguished from gypsies, the piety of some family members notwithstanding. At the time of his birth, the family was crowded into one room above the shop of a gentile locksmith.

It is worth pointing out that the March birthdate has numerous supporters, including some distinguished Freudian scholars and theorists: Marie Balmary made the most extensive argument in Psychoanalysing Psychoanalysis (1979); Wladimir Granoff assents in the published 1975 lectures Filiations, philosopher Andrea Nye; and Jay and Jean Harris, both MDs about whom I can learn nothing, in The One-Eyed Doctor Sigismund Freud (1984). (Although the Harrises are not apparently astrological they also indicate the role of ichthyologic (i. e. Piscean) imagery in Freud's story.) The issue is even raised in some psychology textbooks. Though unproven, it is far from inplausible.

It is hard to read (for instance) the last chapter of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and not feel that Freud was, at times, massively daft, in a way best described by the amazing close conjunction of Sun, Moon, Neptune and Jupiter, all square Saturn, which took place on March 6, 1856. There is a gradually assembling consensus that the vast influence of Freud on the mind of the twentieth century was in some way delusional. As formers markers of personal identity are slowly eroded under the influence of psychopharmacology, the digitalization of communication and the archive, assisted reproductive technologies, etc., we look back on the Freudian mythos with the newly-liberated cultist’s stunned sense of incomprehension and wonder. At any rate, nothing seems more dated than Freud’s desperate insistence on the orthogonality of the rational and the irrational. That's the Saturn square Pisces in the March 6 chart; that’s why I’m glad I always kept up my astrology.

Conglomeration of Gemini nonsense.

2009-10-10T20:24:36Z

After long absence, and to dispel the heavy atmosphere I’ve breathed, something a little silly perhaps, arbitrary and unchronological, entirely consequent on the vagaries of TCM programming. This goes back to Gemini, the Hands, and the Taurus cusp. Remember the beloved, underutilized Robert Montgomery? Born exactly on the cusp of Taurus and Gemini (Sun was at 29d30’ Taurus at noon on his time-unknown birthday), this is arguably his best film. On the poster his dense, puzzled face contemplates his murderous digits, detached, vaguely disturbed, with a glimmer of dawning understanding and horror. What a perfect summary of the relationship of safe, premental Taurean fixity to the adjacent restlessness and dangerous manipulations of Gemini. As Montgomery’s Mars is conjunct the Sun at 2 Gemini, the fingers particularly signify violence, rather than, say, intelligence, or creativity. Interestingly, co-star Rosalind Russell is also a Gemini, and her hand is also expressively emphasized in the poster art. Russell ends the film with a line that is bizarre, but aptly Geminian: “You not only saved my life, you saved my reason!”

The great, and now rather unfashionable, novelist Thomas Mann, an exemplary Gemini, noted in his diary on April 14, 1937: ". . . Night Must Fall, an excellent film with Robert Montgomery, who represents a good psychological type and has distinctly Joseph-like moments. Quite interested." Since Joseph was Mann's deeply felt alter-ego, with whom he shared his own horoscopic placements in his massive novel, Joseph and His Brothers, this response to Montgomery's character, a not exactly "good", silver-tongued, criminal charmer, is clearly a bit of astrological self-recognition.Thomas Mann and friends

Incidentally, the third co-star of this film, Dame May Whitty, was also a Gemini, and what a Geminian name. While I'm drivelling on, to make another mad point, the late great Beatrice Lillie (aka Lady Peel) was a Gemini (and in talking of Gemini, do enjoy finding double letters in the name) and the Gemini poet Theodore Roethke (b. May 25, 1908) was once compelled to pen these immortal lines:

Bees and lilies there were,

Either to other,--

Which would you rather?

Bees and lilies were there.

Donald Evans, Virgo artist #9

2009-09-29T22:30:28Z

DONALD EVANS (b. 28 August 1945, Morristown NJ, 6:40 am) was another artist born under Virgo whose work is organized by the Grid. The postage stamp and its perforated sheets provided the rectilinear, regulated containment for Evans’s fantasy. He created the postal art for scores of imaginary nations; peculiarly distinctive, whimsical, exotic or banal, as philatelic images tend to be, executed with microscopic precision and tongue in cheek. Virgonian imagery predominates: catalogues of flora and fauna, natural landscapes, textiles, crafts, alphanumerics, and daily minutiae.

More of his work is here.

What to make of his premature death at the age of thirty-one, as enigmatic and abrupt as one of his postage stamps? His contained wanderlust led him to expatriate to the distinctly unexotic and safe Amsterdam, where he was ironically trapped in a fire in his neat apartment/studio (on 29 April 1977).

I have two fine copies of THE WORLD OF DONALD EVANS by Willy Eisenhart (1980, paperback, 173 pages, numerous plates) at the store. $22.00

Order one here: wkkbooks@localnet.com

David McKirdy: Virgo Grid Artist #7

2009-09-22T00:17:39Z

I met an amazing artist from Tampa named David McKirdy. He told me he was a Virgo. His work is almost entirely grid-based. He punches holes or burns them into his medium with an etching tool. Needless to say, digital reproduction hardly captures the delicacy and devotion in each of his pieces. In a 2007 interview he said, "I'm not doing it for the excitement. There's not a thrill of spontaneity. ... It's about going to work and doing something that I believe in. I really like the field when it's finished, even though it is in some cases very grueling."

Virgo Grid Artist #8: Will Shortz

2009-09-21T14:33:27Z

Will Shortz, born 26 August 1952, is the crossword puzzle editor of the New York Times. However, with both Moon and Mars in Scorpio, his interests go beyond crosswords, to puzzles in general; he styles himself an enigmatologist.

Samaras more Virgo Grids(6)

2009-09-20T15:35:14Z

Bit of a hurry today. More Virgo artists with the grid habit.

2 above by Lucas Samaras (b. Sept. 14, 1936)

the gemini cancer cusp

2009-09-19T16:45:53Z

Casting about for a thought or two of value in this morass of self-pity and “avoidance of self-expenditure” . . . I return to the subject of the cusps, with certain searchers in mind.
I come to the simple question asked where Gemini becomes Cancer: Is language magic?

Out of the prelinguistic strength of Taurus the Stone, in Gemini the dual echo emergifests. The frantic conundrum of terrified split Being that self-experienced in Aries, that gradually troubled the cud-chewing mountainous Taurus, darted forth a mere mouse, a tiny stinging gadfly, finally a single, external, visible, definable, iterable signal. Gemini. A message, a peep, a poke. Aries offered a subjective Hereness. Taurus thought it over. Gemini triumphantly declared an objective Thereness. Cancer, the fourth sign, is Water.

Each fourth sign is Water. Water is Mystery. Cancer turns the empty binarism of Gemini into an infinitude of possibilities, for which the pair of unpredictable pincers is a comedic symbol. Cancer turns the rational geometry of Gemini’s parallel into the double helix of DNA. One can run with this metaphor. For instance: Gemini rules the pair, the male and female gametes, Cancer the resultant pregnancy and birth. Gemini is the pure information of letters and digit; Cancer is the fertile imaginative capacity that transforms that information into human meaning; the book vs. someone to read it. Each fourth sign in the zodiac is a water sign, following an air sign. Air is rational intellect, water irrational emotion. Thus the zodiac proclaims that rationalism is invariably superceded by something mysterious, involving love and death. But these ruminations add nothing really to what’s already in the literature. For instance, in C. E. O Carter’s classic:

“To those who are chiefly developed on the mental side, as is so often the case in the modern world, the passage from Gemini to Cancer seems a retrogression. After attaining the keen if limited mentality of Gemini, what a fall it seems to pass back to a sign that is largely instinctive and has the reputation of wallowing in emotion, especially of the gloomier kind!”
Essays on the Foundations of Astrology, 1947