Jodi Arias’ time of birth has now been released, and is available at astro.com. She was born on July 9 1980 at 1.52 am in Salinas, California. Her birth chart heads this post.
The trouble about horoscopes like this is, that we’re looking at something after the event. If we try hard enough we can find the signature of a killer in any horoscope. Yet as far as Jodi is concerned, there is nothing that really stands out.
We can I suppose point to her Taurus Ascendant. Lots of people have Taurus rising, but maybe this rising sign can give a singularity of purpose, that can be particularly strong when it comes to relationships. So if you tell someone with Taurus rising that it’s over, don’t expect a simple, straight-forward parting of the waves. However that’s not the same as resorting to homicide!
Interestingly, Ruth Ellis had Taurus rising. If you’re from Britain, you’ll know that she was the last woman to be hanged in the United Kingdom, in 1955. Like Jodi, Ruth Ellis was a woman in her late twenties in an abusive relationship, and like Jodi she got hold of a gun and shot her partner. And like Jodi, Ruth Ellis made sure that her partner was dead. She chased after him, outside a pub in North London, and brought him down with one shot; she then fired three more shots into his body, including one in the back, at a range of an inch. Unlike Jodi, Ruth Ellis never make any attempt to hide her guilt, and unlike Jodi the public were sympathetic to her case, especially after she was sentenced to death. And unlike Jodi, for Ruth Ellis everything happened quickly. She committed the crime on April 10 1955, she was sentenced to death in June 1955 and she was hanged the following month. So Ruth Ellis, just over three months after committing the crime, was herself dead.
Ruth Ellis said something very important just before her execution: ‘It is quite clear to me that I was not the person who shot him. When I saw myself with the revolver I knew I was another person.’ This should perhaps influence how we see the horoscope of some killers. Jodi Arias hasn’t got the horoscope of a killer, but instead an interaction between her psychology, and outside circumstances, made her become a killer.
What made Jodi a killer was her interaction with Travis Alexander, though in some respects Travis is flagged in her horoscope. As she was born at night, one takes Mars rather than the Sun as the primary ruler of the man in her life, and her Mars is somewhat unintegrated with the rest of her chart. By the way, Mars is also ruler of her Seventh House of relationships, because she has Scorpio on the Seventh House cusp.
Her Mars is right at the end of Virgo, in the Sixth House, with no close aspects to any other planet in the horoscope. To me this Mars represents a man who is fastidious and hypocritical, who lives his life by double standards. He could be obsessed by the body, and also be critical about other people’s physical appearance. Yet because of Mars’ unaspected nature, it is difficult for her to integrate this image of masculinity into her nature.
Looking at the killing, it’s clear that sex played a big role, so it is important to look at Jodi’s sexuality. She has Saturn semi-square her Venus-Mars midpoint. I think this is crucial. As a person, she has issues with sexuality, and I doubt she was able to use her sexual expression in a particularly healthy way. This reminds us that very often the people who are the most sexually inhibited are often the most promiscuous. Sex was all much of a muchness, and that’s probably why she allowed Travis such a free hand with her body.
Yet the damage was hinted at by the connection between Travis’ Mars in the eighth degree of Gemini and Jodi’s Moon in the eleventh degree of this same sign. See below for Travis’ horoscope:
In a female horoscope the Moon is arguably the most important planet, so Travis’ Mars smashed into her Moon – an attraction that turned into a violation. Furthermore, Jodi’s Moon was square her Jupiter in Virgo, that hints at excessive behavior on her part.
Incidentally, Travis had Venus, Mars and Jupiter in Gemini. He might have been a Leo, but the Gemini influence was substantial. A supposed motivational speaker, and someone who enjoyed variety, especially in relationships. The kind of variety that doesn’t have an emotional consequence, remembering that he lacks any traditional planets in Water signs. Though what’s really interesting is that Jodi’s Venus in Gemini is at 16 degrees of the sign, the same degree as Travis’ Venus-Mars midpoint. The Venus-Mars combination is about sexuality, and clearly there was something about Jodi that really turned him on – and turned on his fantasies.
I don’t know precisely why Jodi killed Travis, but I’m thinking that the two of them saw the relationship in different ways. For Travis is was an interesting sexual adventure, for Jodi it was an existential issue – she felt that she gave everything to Travis, and the sexual submission was all part of it. Yet the moment Travis wanted to end the relationship, the reality might have have dawned on her. The man she gave everything to (at least in her subjective view) wanted to walk away. This meant, existentially, that she had to kill him. In this light, I’m reminded of Jean Paul Sartre’s statement, when talking about colonialism, that a slave can only be free when he confronts his master and kills him.
One final observation about Jodi’s horoscope is that she has Uranus in the Seventh House. I remember reading a Nineteeth Century astrology book that described Uranus in the Seventh as ‘death by the mob’. Furthermore, Jodi’s nodal axis, so often associated with Karma, is exactly square Uranus – her Uranus is at 22 degree Scorpio, her North Node at 22 degrees Leo. When she killed Travis, on June 4 2008, the North Node was at 22 Aquarius, the South Node by definition at 22 degrees Leo. In other words, some powerful, collective forces were at work.
Somehow Jodi has attracted the wrath of the mob, and it seems that commentator after commentator wants to get on board the ‘kill Jodi’ bandwagon. I doubt the mob will succeed in taking her all the way to the gurney, but they are certainly trying their hardest. So in some way Jodi’s fate is to draw out the anger and hatred that’s festering in society. We might therefore say that the whole thing is not about Jodi and it’s not about Travis – it’s about America.