Palin: There's no there there

 Aquarian Gertrude Stein’s comment about her hometown, Oakland CA,  “There is no there there.” points to the distinctly Aquarian imprint of Palin’s personality: daffy, wacky, spacey, airhead. This variation of unformedness of personality is the demeanor of a particular female Aquarian stereotype: disconcerting, saucer-eyed, strange-voiced, unblinking. Mia Farrow, Carol Channing, Tammy Grimes, Farrah Fawcett, Vanna White, Paris Hilton, with Palin’s own distinctive spunk, and telegenic skin.

 Palin’s got fully five of the seven bodies of the classical solar system located in the single sign of Aquarius. Gertrude Stein had a sizeable imbalance of Aquarius as well. Recall that she wrote her life story in the third person and in the guise of the autobiography of someone else. Her lesser known sequel was a book called “Everybody’s Autobiography”. Aquarians try to wiggle out of acknowledging there’s a Self there. Their sense of self is weak, they may diffuse their selves to include multitudes, or they may defend to the death against their oceanic insecurities, with a kewpie doll (or bow-tie) persona, or a shiny new, pre-fabricated belief system. Radical Aquarian Norman Mailer narrates his experience in the third person as a character named Aquarius in “Of a Fire on the Moon”; Chapter one is called “A Loss of Self”. Reactionary Aquarius historian Henry Adams narrates his great autobiography in the third person too. Two radical Russian distopias by Aquarian writers envisioned worlds in which the “I” is banished: Ayn Rand in “Anthem” and Zamyatin in “We”. [1924.  SciFi collectors: Banned by the Soviets, it first appeared in English translated by Gregory Zilboorg. I have a rare copy of the first edition at whokilledkenny books.]

Sarah Palin's Horoscope

            Sarah Palin was born in Sandpoint, Idaho on February 11, 1964. Her horoscope is being devoured by internet astrologers, but there is no certainty yet about her time of birth.   Regardless of the time of day she was born, she’s got the Sun in close, ugly conjunction to Mars and Saturn (the Lesser and Greater Malefics, respectively). The conjunction is quite close; the three bodies are found within a span of four degrees, in the sign of Aquarius.

            If a client presented with this configuration in her birthchart, I would heave a sigh and say a prayer. I would immediately search for amelioration.  Today’s humanistic astrology doesn’t want to say that a configuration is simply ‘bad’. Many ordinary people with nearly the same configuration will lead lives  damaged or merely emphasized by Energy (Mars) and Necessity (Saturn), in other words, hard work: manual laborers, soldiers, prison guards, trained athletes, even “energetic people who are able to overcome the greatest difficulties”.

            In the chart of a powerful political leader, however, the grim imagery of Mars, the War God, and Saturn, the Reaper, joined with the conscious Solar Ego, evokes a ruler who presides over devastation. McCain’s age and melanomas cannot be ignored; if he is elected there is a strong possibility that Palin will succeed him. Similar configurations to hers appear in the charts of Francis Joseph of Austria (who led the Austro-Hungarian empire to collapse), also Herbert Hoover (who ushered in the Great Depression), also less remembered figures, like Carlos I of Portugal, who saw his nation go bankrupt twice and was assassinated.  The Hamburg Astrology school’s lexicon provides the phrase “To be cause of death” for the association of these three planets, with Mars at the midpoint as here.  Clearly a hawk, having killed her moose and championed “barbaric” aerial hunting of wolves and bears, she casually suggested we go to war with Russia. Her short political history in Alaska is an accumulation of administrative brusqueness. There is joking talk of pit bulls. Her state-trooper brother-in-law tasered his eleven year old step-son. Joking aside, there is a fatality towards destruction, an affinity for strife, and a cold, hard hand in the triple conjunction of Sun, Mars and Saturn that might make an astrologer shudder.

            On the birthdate the Moon passed from Capricorn to Aquarius at 9 am. Therefore the chances are 5 to 3 that the Moon is in Aquarius. If not, it’s in Capricorn and we have Abraham Lincoln’s Sun/Moon combination, which ought to give a slow, methodical political climb with plenty of opposition, and a somber demeanor. But the chances (and the rumored 4:40 pm birthtime) favor the Aquarius Moon, which to my mind is more apt, and could hardly be more dire. For, in addition to the fatal triple conjunction in Aquarius, the planet Mercury is also found in that sign, plus the Moon gives us five, fully half of the ten modern astrological bodies located in just one of the twelve zodiac signs. Pulling back a layer, and more weightily, all five are among the classical seven planets. This is an extreme and unusual imbalance, made much more dangerous by being in Aquarius, the sign of extremities, eccentricities, and downright weirdness. Herman Kahn, the futurologist who was the model for Dr. Strangelove, was an Aquarian. It is all too likely that under the gravest immediate stress Sarah Palin would launch destruction “without blinking.”