Frankenstein @ Scorpio Sagittarius Cusp

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.

Virgo 26 degrees: A boy with a censer

The occasion of the new moon taking place precisely at this moment in exact conjunction with the planet Saturn, opposing Uranus, suggests a turbulent month to come for many people. It would seem as good a time as any to contemplate the Sabian symbol and Marc Edmund Jones's profound interpretation for the 26th degree of Virgo:

"A boy with a censer. This is a symbol of individual initiative as a basic dynamic in the universal scheme of things, and it reveals itself most simply in our positive and necessarily self-seeking outreach to the world we would claim for ourselves. We make our conscious appeal to God , since it is a divine being which provides the over-all unity we recognize and enlist for our aspiration. Our motive is spiritual because we know we must share any reality we would care to possess. The keyword is rapture. When positive the degree is completeness of self-dedication and an achievement grounded in a consistent worthiness of living, and when negative, a resort to empty motions in order to avoid any appreciable self-expenditure."

And what exactly does it mean to contemplate this material, and to what end? Is the gesture perhaps a grand fatuity? I still wonder, and fling it out amongst us to see if it will fly. I personally am aware of the operation of the negative alternative at this very moment.

Taurus/Gemini cusp

Hermes/Mercury stealing the Oxen of Apollo, one of several mythic references to the cusp of Taurus and Gemini.