Sarah Burke, a famous skier, has just died, after a catastrophic accident.  I’d never heard of her before, but her photo is getting everywhere.  I read the following comment, on the website of the National Post:

Her death stings, because it is unfair, because Sarah Burke was too young and too smart and too pretty and too warm and too well-liked and too remarkable, as an athlete, to leave us so soon.

If you’re an atheist these sentiments sound reasonable, but from a spiritual perspective they perhaps need to be questioned.  Life is transitory, and we move from one stage to the next with consummate ease.  Some higher, immortal force is guiding us, and it makes the decisions about when it’s time to move on.

Sometimes our destinies are part of a wider, collective event – like the passengers on the Titanic, or the soldiers fighting in the Somme.  The collective destiny will always over-ride the individual one.

Yet if collective issues aren’t at stake, death is about completion.  ’Tetelestai’, as Christ said on the cross.  It is finished, the work is done.  We’ve done all we can in this life time.  Or we’ve committed ourselves to a path which is no longer in accord with our wider destiny, and for one reason or another it’s too late to change it.  Alternatively, we might be needed somewhere else.

Sarah Burke was born on September 3 1982, which made her 29 years old.  I don’t have her time of birth, but nonetheless, from an astrological point of view, her death makes sense.

She was born on the day of a Full Moon, her Sun being in Virgo, her Moon in Pisces.  People born at the time of a Full Moon have already worked out who they are and what they want to do, and they’re ready to show the world what they are capable of doing.  Like adult butterflies in all their glory – they’re not going to get any better, because they’re at their peak.  This is described very beautifully in the Wilhelm version of the I Ching, when describing Hexagram 55, ‘Abundance’:

ABUNDANCE has success.  The king attains abundance.  Be not sad.  Be like the sun at midday.

The sun at midday doesn’t get any stronger.  Enjoy the brilliance while it’s around, and don’t get sad at sunset.

The Full Moon might also offer hints about the accident itself.  The Sun in Virgo is careful, and leaves nothing to chance.  The Moon in Pisces gets carried along with the current, and doesn’t ask too many questions.  The Sun and the Moon are therefore at odds with each other, and as Sarah Burke grew older, the Moon would become stronger than the Sun – because the Moon is a female principle, and in women, after about twenty-two years old, the Moon is usually more dominant than the Sun.

In this light, she wasn’t insured for her accident, and I believe that her massive hospital bills had to be payed through donations.  That’s the kind of situation that sensible Virgos don’t get themselves into.  On the other hand it would be typical Pisces, trusting that everything would turn out for the best and the worst would never happen.

Another thing to consider is the positions of Mars and Saturn in Sarah Burke’s horoscope.  These planets are unfortunate, and together they’re associated with death.  If you’re doing dangerous sports, they have to be carefully observed.  Using the Noon positions on September 3 1982, she had Saturn at 19 degrees and 57 minutes Libra, and Mars at 19 degrees 5 minutes Scorpio.  So these two planets are one sign apart, because Scorpio is the sign immediately following Libra.  To be more precise, Mars and Saturn are 29.13 degrees away from each other.  Using a symbolic measure of one degree for a year, we can then say that just after she was twenty-nine years old (ie when she was 29.13 years old) the full potential of Mars and Saturn could be released.  This equates to mid to late October 2011, which is only three months short of her actual death.  If she had been born at 0.00 am on September 3 it would have been early June 2011, at 23.59 pm mid to late February 2012.  So without an exact birth time, we can say that there was a zone of extreme danger from July 2011 through to February 2012.

Then there’s the issue of the Saturn return.  Saturn is the planet of Karma, and it takes twenty-nine or thirty years to go around the Sun.  So when you’re 29 Saturn returns to the place it was when you were born.  It can be a difficult time.  We’re no longer children, and we have to take responsibility for our destiny.  Also, if we’re going down the wrong path, Fate will make us painfully aware of the fact.

Sarah Burke had already had her Saturn Return, a few months earlier.  She might have been adapting to the responsibilities of marriage, but she was still skiing.  You might think that’s obvious.  She’s was a brilliant skier, so surely she should carry on skiing.  However in this case I am convinced that it was wrong for her to continue skiing at the top level, and she certainly shouldn’t have been aiming to compete in the 2014 Olympics.  Yes, she might have had the talent to win, but the fact she died on her Saturn return suggests to me that from a spiritual point of view she had taken skiing as far as she should have done, and that she should have been turning her attention to new challenges.  Unfortunately she couldn’t make the change in this lifetime, because her conscious mind was so locked on this one activity.  Therefore death intervened.

We should also remember that Sarah Burke was a famous person, and people followed her example.  When you’re famous, and you’re a role model, Fate pays a very close interest in you – a much closer interest than if you’re an ordinary person like you and me.  Perhaps Fate wanted to call time on certain aspects of winter sports, which were no longer useful for humanity’s development.  It might then have been necessary for Sarah Burke to be reassigned.

Copyright © 2012 Archie Dunlop