I don’t know very much about Kobe Bryant, except that he was a famous basketball player. Over the weekend he was killed in a helicopter crash, along with his daugher and seven others. Astrologers are a morbid lot, and when this kind of thing happens, they try to use astrology to work out why it happened.
When you’re doing this kind of work, you need an accurate time of birth. Unfortuantely, we don’t know Kobe Bryant’s time of birth, only the day – August 23 1978. There are some posts on the internet that say he was born at 5 pm, but they can’t be verified. We therefore have to use a midday chart, set for his place of birth, Philadelphia (see above).
Let’s now look at this midday horoscope, and ask if there are any signatures of a violent death. We have to look at things that are obvious, that haven’t been gleaned with the benefit of hindsight. Well, the Moon in Taurus is opposition Uranus in Scorpio. This aspect is highly charged, and perhaps explosive. But it is not usual. Then there is his Venus-Mars-Pluto conjunction. It is certainly highly charged, but I wouldn’t have necessarily associated it with a violent death.
There is also a conjunction between the Sun and Saturn. On its own it is nothing special, and it may have indicated an ability to practice hard, particularly as the conjunction is in Virgo, a body-oriented sign. Yet we might also want to look at the Sun-Saturn conjunction in terms of directions. Without a birthtime we can’t use sophisticated systems of direction, such as primaries, but we can follow a simple, degree for a year approach.
Kobe Bryant’s Sun is at 0 degrees 10 minutes Virgo, with 30 arc minute accuracy. His Mars is at 12 degrees 9 minutes Libra. The angular separation between the two is therefore 41 degrees and 59 minutes. We might therefore expect something dramatic to happen around his 42 birthday, on August 23 2020. If we direct Saturn to Mars, the angular separation between the two is 38 degrees and 35 minutes, which equates to March 2017. So we might say that the period between March 2017 and August 23 2020 is dangerous. Unfortunately, that is not particularly precise.
We can then drill down further, and look at Bryant’s solar return for August 2019:
This chart is interesting, because we see a repeated signature. In the natal chart we have the Sun at zero degrees Virgo, Saturn at 3 degrees Virgo. In the return chart we have the Sun at zero degrees Virgo, Mars at 3 degrees Virgo – with Venus on the Sun-Mars midpoint. To my mind this a clear warning. There is a high chance of an accident, or some other notable mishap, between August 2019 and August 2020. So we have narrowed it down, but not enough.
We then drill down to the lunar return. We’re looking for a repeated signature, and in this case it is the Sun-Saturn conjunction that was in the natal chart. The lunar return of interest is set for January 5 2020:
The Sun-Saturn conjunction in the lunar return is not exact, but it is close enough to represent some kind of signature. It is important not because of the lunar return in isolatation, but because it shares features with the natal and solar return charts.
Then we have the death chart. At this stage I am using pure hindsight, but I believe it is the kind of hindsight that can help us to understand how astrology works:
We can see in the death chart that the Sun-Saturn conjunction has broken up, and is now over 12 degrees apart. We also notice a tight Venus-Mars square. Now this interesting. Kobe Bryant had a Venus-Mars conjunction in his horoscope. In his 2019 solar return there was also a Venus-Mars conjunction. In the death chart the midpoint of the wide Sun-Saturn conjunction is zero degrees 20 minutes Aquarius. The midpoint of the Venus-Mars square is at zero degrees 43 minutes Aquarius. In other words, they are exactly conjunct each other. The two aspects, existing in his horoscope, are concentrating one one point.
The signature of the natal chart and its one-degree directions has drilled down, through the mediums of the solar and lunar returns, to the moment of death. I am not saying that I could have predicted the event in advance, but I think that with skill and high attention to detail some kind of accident could have been forecast. Even without a birth time.
Wow, great drilling work! I wonder if midpoints in Aquarius are indicators that the death had something to do with air since Aquarius is an air sign 🙄
Kate,
Thanks for visiting the site. I don’t think that the sign of a midpoint is particularly important, and indications of death might be more connected with planetary combinations. Mars-Uranus, for example, might be a combination relating to death. Also, any planet on the Mars-Saturn midpoint might relate to the type of death. We are hindered, though, by the lack of a birth time.
I should say that I have received criticism for doing return charts without a time of birth. Such return charts don’t have any houses, and in the case of the lunar return, the position of the Moon covers an approximate 12 degree arc of possibilities.