Michael Phelps, in case you don’t know, is an American swimmer, who has a huge number of Olympic gold medals. In fact he’s the most successful Olympian ever. So by all accounts a sporting hero and a credit to his country.
However things haven’t been entirely smooth for him. At the age of nineteen he was arrested for drunk driving, and now, in early 2009, he’s facing the bong scandal.
A bong is a type of water pipe, commonly used for smoking cannabis. A British tabloid newspaper, The News of the World, carried a ‘world exclusive’ last Sunday, which had a picture of Michael Phelps apparently smoking a bong.
The hero was immediately knocked off his pedestal. USA Swimming has suspended him from competitive swimming for three months and a contract he has with Kellogg’s is not going to be renewed.
So, what’s going on?
Astrologically, it’s all very simple. His Sun in Cancer is making an 180-degree opposition aspect to Neptune. Neptune rules the sea, and it also rules drugs and alcohol. So the same planetary energy that draws him to the swimming pool can also draw him to substance abuse.
Phelps also has a conjunction between the Sun and Mars. This gives him a lot of energy, and because the conjunction is in Cancer, it gets directed towards swimming. However in Phelps’s horoscope the influence of the Sun, Mars and Neptune merge with each other – in the jargon, he has the Sun aspecting the Mars-Neptune midpoint. This is a potentially dangerous configuration. I’ve know people with this configuration being attracted to things which are sleazy and unsavoury.
Reinhold Ebertin wrote this about Mars-Neptune:
…misdirected powers and capabilities …self-destroying forces and agents (such as narcotic poisons or drugs) …
But also
People connected with the water or with navigation.
Swimming is clearly a constructive way for Michael Phelps to deal with his Neptune, and it strikes me as being a bad idea for him to be banned from competitive swimming for any length of time, particularly as cannabis is a not a performance-enhancing drug – in fact quite the opposite!
While cannabis undoubtedly has its dangers, both physical and psychological, I believe they’re relatively minor compared with a lot of other things. In this light it seems strange that so much fuss is made about Phelps and the cannabis, yet not a word is spoken about the number of calories he consumes while training. I’ve read that it’s at least eight thousand, and in his autobiography, Beneath the Surface, he described his past breakfast habits as follows:
Start with three sandwiches of fried eggs, cheese, lettuce, tomato, fried onions, and mayonnaise; add one omelet, a bowl of grits, and three slices of French toast with powdered sugar; then wash down with three chocolate chip pancakes…
I’m no expert on health, but is that kind of diet really good for you? What if readers of his autobiography, regarding him as a role model, decided to adopt the same diet without having specialist supervision? Would it be any better for them than cannabis?
Copyright © 2009 Archie Dunlop
Keep visiting www.archiedunlop.com!
