Warhol a Leo, but the grid is Virgo's
Monday, September 14, 2009 at 05:24PM 
An incorrect Scorpio birthdate for Andy Warhol is in circulation. Its erroneous origin is discussed at AstroDataBank. The coyly secretive artist offered several different dates for his birth. The accepted birthdate of August 6, 1928 is therefore dubious. The birth certificate, not registered till 1945, was probably concocted by Warhol himself to satisfy a college registration requirement and is derived from an affidavit resting on the veracity (indeed, on the very existence) of the alleged birth midwife. This belated certificate has been supplemented as evidence by a "baptismal certificate" which on examination is equally derivative and indirect. Warhol was just the sort of person to shave some time off his age at the first possible opportunity. (“Eighteen years old and still not famous?”). I find it hard to believe that this notably dark Leo had seven planets in firesigns including sun and moon, sure representation of sunny extroversion, and few serious afflictions, as was the case on August 6, 1928. The 1928 horoscope is as much an ironic disguise as the blond wig.
One year earlier, however, we find a precise and powerful conjunction at the Venus/Pluto midpoint, of Jupiter and Uranus at 3 Aries, a degree whose Sabian symbol [M. E. Jone, The Sabian Symbols, 1953] reveals “an utterly naïve assimilation of self into its world and a complete flow of all effort toward some proper end,” which is consonant with both his gee whiz manner and his remarkable productivity and accomplishment. (That conjunction at 3 Aries appears with equal descriptive accuracy in the chart of John Ashbury, another unique and unsunny Leo genius born a few days before.) A late Scorpio moon, conjunct Saturn and square Neptune, also seems appropriate to his mysterious, dead-pan persona, not to mention his unflinching morbid subject matter: dead movie stars, electric chairs, auto crashes, JFK's assassination, various disasters, criminals, skulls, shadows, etc. That configuration was under the direct pressure of transiting Neptune when Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968.
;)
I also expected to see some Virgo in this Leo’s chart, since he employed the grid device continuously throughout his career, virtually his trademark mode of presentation. As Virgo is adjacent to Leo the absence of Virgo planets in the 1928 chart is conspicuous, but in the 1927 both Venus and Mars are in Virgo.
