Freud: Taurus or Pisces?

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.

Taurus/Gemini cusp

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

Taurus art 1.10

Full-Figured Statuette, 35,000 Years Old, Provides New Clues to How Art Evolved. New York Times, May 12, 2009

Willem De Kooning (b. April 24, 1904)

Mother, mater, matter. Note the lack of feet, of locomotion, in the primitive female generative principal. My first dream in Jungian analysis was of a lady too fat to stand, in the parking lot of a supermarket, a group of us trying to help her up. My analyst, a sharp old thing now deceased named Greta van Fenema, (who knew Jung, gray hair in a bun, slacks), leaped to a high bookshelf and took down a volume with a large picture of the Willendorf Venus (11,000 years younger than the one pictured above). She explained my thralldom to the Great Mother archetype, and all the deplorable psychological and behavioral consequences ensuing.

cy twombly Taurus art 1.09

In the characteristic Cy Twombly (b. 25 April 1928) reproduced above, the singularity of matter (Taurus) is differentiated into two (Gemini) stones, slate and chalk, representing the possibility of communicative meaning (writing) as yet contentless. In the work below, he pays hommage to Taurus's tutelary deity, while exploring the way meaning and sensuosity awaken in crude scratchings.

Taurus Bull's Eye (1.08)

Jasper Johns, TargetAnecdote of two Tauruses: Mme de Stael, notorious conversational bulldozer, extorted four words from the famously taciturn Duke of Wellington ("who was scarcely known to speak"). 'Let me go away,' he cried, on hearing her announced. (in V. Woolf, Books and Portraits ) Illustrates the physical, Taurean principle that two material objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time.

Taurus art 1.07

Jasper Johns, b. May 15, 1930: the homogeneous Taurean physicality of the sculp-metal substance  negates the on-off binarism, the communicative Geminian essence of the light bulb. Always in Johns's work there is a reductive interplay of signal and substance, yet, despite the reduction, the stubborn physical integrity and sensuous materiality evokes multileveled reflective meaning.

Taurus art 1.05

A Taurus bull-etin pre-empts my planned programming.

I was going to post a massive Buddha. Did you know He is said to have been born, and to have achieved Enlightenment under the sign of Taurus? More pertinently, no restless seeking for Him: He declared he would sit under this one banyan tree until Enlightenment came, and so He did, they say, for thirty years. Stubborn.

Taurus art 1.04

"Jill" (1959) enamel on canvas, 7'6"x6'6" Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo

Frank Stella (b. 12 May 1936) took up large monochromatic canvases in the late fifties, around the same time as Yves Klein, but with the consistent organizing motif of the stripe, rather than the single Kleinian pigment  

" . . . binary, cruciform or concentric symmetries create an unworldly, hypnotic fixity, as of immutable, venerated emblems."

Taurus art 1.03

O Bull, return!

Taurus wants the concrete, the real. Here is one of the first substantive projects of astrological research to come out of digital data power.  Test Produces Significant Result for Astrology in World News Report. According to researcher Richard Schulz, the astrological outlook for the global economic situation is bleak.

But take heart: the nature of astrological prediction is to be incorrect. That's why it's such a delight when an astrological prediction comes true. It is the historical role of astrology to continually produce critique, challenge and failure. It is the Sisyphean science, to invoke another Taurean reference. Anyway, fixed earth Taurus is grounded in the unchanging. The Bull Tauruas always returns, or rather never really leaves;  the powerful energy of human productivity, labor, value, capital, all responses to natural, objective necessity--the World, all proceed and harness the subjective explosion of Aries.

Taurus Art 1.02

Norham Castle, Sunrise (c. 1845)

One of Turner's most popular paintings, it was never exhibited in his lifetime, and may be unfinished, yet is taken now to be one of his most characteristic works. The Taurean cows incorporate the elemental  massiveness of castle, sun, water and air.

 "Turner never lost his connection to reality. One of the last, semiabstract paintings in the show’s final gallery is a sunrise view of Norham Castle. . . . Amid its gorgeous smudges of blue castle, yellow sun and pale ochre shores are two cows, faint but definite, who have come for their morning drink.   New York Times

Taurus Art 1.0

Yves Klein (28 April 1928 - 1962). His "search . .  for the realization of matter" led to his fanciful commitment to a single color, the patented International Klein Blue, a mineral (lapis) pigment. Most of Klein's work is conceptual, abstract or geo-metric. Rarely, and only with tongue in cheek, did he descend to the mimetic or iterative, those being the province of the next sign, Gemini. His Globe reclaims Earth from history and language, and presents it as a mounted physical specimen, a planetary body. Venus is, of course, also a body, as well as the planetary ruler of Taurus, as fertility and the senses are bestirred out of the passive Earth.

Aries-Taurus cusp (#30)

The cusps are controversial. Although the word usually denotes a precise demarcation, I like to use it to describe the range of relationships, from antithesis to blending, which exist between adjacent zodiacal signs, a range that implicitly permeates even the purest expression of a sign. As the tropical and siderial zodiacs approach complete overlap, many new and penetrating truths are cuspal in nature.

The tragic sacrificial splendor of the corrida ritualizes the first zodiacal crisis of Self, where Aries encounters Taurus: freedom-craving spirit encounters material necessity, the obdurate World. The bull is color-blind, and it's the movement that he reacts to; it is the human participants in the corrida who react to the red color. More red even than the capote (which is in fact usually magenta) is the copious blood, the blood-soaked hide, that makes the point. The next, Taurus / Gemini, cusp is summond in the gesture of the stinging picadors and the banderillos, or the legend of the gadfly. The fixed earth principle provokes attack from both sides --

A hunch about Bernie Madoff

Bernie Madoff, born 29 April 1938, 3:30pm (speculative). Much is being made of how remarkable a man is Bernie Madoff, his "tragedy" has already been called Shakespearean. The most immense fraud in all history, perpetrated by a former president of the NASDAQ. "It may be impossible to overstate how extensive Bernard Madoff's apparently fraudulent investing seems to be." So the New York Post.

Sunday's New York Times has him a psychopath of "epic proportions" in his mastery of concealment, wrapped in "an Oz-like aura", revealing a trace of pathology only, perhaps, in "his punctilious ways" regarding "potential filth" which "sometimes veered into obsessive-compulsive behavior". His chart, even without a birthtime, certainly contains the potential for  larceny, with Pluto, the planet of lucre, square Mercury, the planet of thieves, while the Sun and two other bodies inhabit materialistic Taurus. My first guess: he was born after 10 am because that's when Moon entered Taurus as well. By 6 pm the Sun has moved from the 9th to the 10th degree of Taurus. I opt for the 9th degree, whose Sabian symbol is "A Christmas tree decorated" which is precisely what he was for many people, for quite a while. Among the early degrees of Taurus through which his Moon passed in those few hours, the Sabian symbol of the 4th degree reiterates the theme of wild largess: "The rainbow's pot of gold". When the 4th degree of Taurus held the Moon, Virgo was rising and Neptune (the planet of deception and illusion) was at 18 Virgo. Hence Madoff is probably now experiencing the crushing year-long Saturn-Uranus opposition very close, perhaps exactly, on his Ascendant-Neptune conjunction, which,  in Virgo, gives him that sensitively arched nose and rather chiseled features for a double Taurus, not to mention the neat-freak compulsion. Moreover, this birthtime puts the preponderance of planets (seven out of ten) in the 8th house vicinity, the house of "other people's money", with Saturn (losses) fatally on the cusp. Madoff is particularly noted for his early adoption and exploitation of computerized trading, so it's worth noting that with this birthtime Uranus, the planet of technical innovation, is on the cusp of the 9th. The opulence and excess of Jupiter square Venus in Taurus is icing on the cake -- truly an over-rich dish. Incidentally, although it has been stated in the press that Mrs. Madoff is not under suspicion, I notice that the Sun is closely embraced and midpointed by the Moon and Uranus, for which Ebertin gives: "an ambitious wife".

This Saturn-Uranus opposition is causing a lot of grief to people with stuff in 18-22 mutables: Caroline Kennedy has 20 Sag rising, Blagojevich has the Sun in 18 Sag.