Astrology, Prediction and Comment

In the 1990s I remember talking to an editor at Penguin about writing popular non-fiction.  He told me to imagine that I was writing for a ten-year old.  He also gave me examples of books that had done well.  He pointed to one book about choosing lottery numbers, and another on estimating your dog’s IQ.  Although I had a degree in psychology, there’s no way I could have estimated any dog’s intelligence.  I didn’t even like dogs, regardless of their star sign – Virgo dogs, Scorpio dogs, Sagittarian dogs, they were all the same to me and of no interest.  But I do understand that dogs are a popular subject, and that if you can give dogowners an insight into their pet’s psychology they might pay you handsomely.

It’s then not surprising that there are pet psychics making an excellent living.  I suppose they can directly communicate with the pet’s soul, and also read their aura.  Spot wants a  change of scene, wants to be closer to trees and water… and perhaps snow, because in his last incarnation bar one he was on the sledge team that took Amundsen to the South Pole.  Easy money, if you can spin the words.

We then move on to horoscopes.  If you can do the chart of a human, you can do the chart of a dog.  However there are some complicatons.  Many dogs are rescues, where the birth time is unknown.  Even if you know what date the dog was born, the breeder may not know the birth time.  And then there’s the problem of litter size.  Loads of puppies are going to be born at roughly the same time, with similar horoscopes.  It’s like with humans, except worse.  Babies are born at the same time and the same place, and they often grow up to have very different personalities and destinies.  The puppies of the same purebred litter can go in many directions.  A Crufts champion, a family pet, a prisoner in a cage.

As far as my dog is concerned, I know that she was born on December 13 2008 in the Slovak Republic.  I don’t know what time she was born.  As I result, I don’t have her Ascendant or even her Moon sign.  At midday the Moon was in Cancer, but if she was born in the early morning it would have been in Gemini.

The dog’s name is  Čuvi. Note the accent on the C – the name is pronounced something like “Choovi”.  She is a Slovenksy Čuvac, a breed of mountain dog that in terms of temperment and looks is similar to a Great Pyrhenees.    I wrote about her nine years ago, when she was not much more than a year old.  Now she’s ten, and entering her golden years.  Here’s the chart:

As you can see Čuvi has her Sun in Sagittarius, conjunct Mars.  On the face of it, this is perfect for a dog.  Bouncy and tactless, and ready to bolt at the slightest opportunity.  This Sagittarian nature wasn’t restrained by surgical alteration, in the sense that she wasn’t spayed.  I remember during her first heat, she ran through two sets of doors, out onto a busy intersection.  I chased her in my socks, and had to run through cars and tram tracks in a desperate attempt to get hold of her.

However, the Sun is square Saturn in Virgo.  This aspect, shared by Stalin, makes Čuvi more serious, and takes away some of her Sagittarian light-heartedness.  My mother-in-law, who knows a lot more about dogs than me, remarked that Čuvi doesn’t have a sense of humour and isn’t playful.  This may be a trait of the breed, but Čuvi  certainly seems to have a serious view of the world.  She is always on her guard and hates playing games.

The Sun-Saturn aspect might have a psychological dimension.  Čuvi has always had food issues, and this might be because she was the runt of the litter, and always in competition with old and stronger dogs.  She has to be pretty hungry to eat regular dog food, and she has never been overweight.

Now it may be that the Sun-Saturn aspect could have manifested differently for the other members of the litter – I think it was a litter of five.  There could have been constraints on their freedom, though I think it unlikely that any of them were caged.  This is a serious point.  In Eastern Slovakia it is common to keep your dog in a six by six cage, all day long.  The idea being that the dog is contained, but is also able to warn off intruders.

Yet the Sun may not be the most important point in a dog’s chart.  It may be the Moon.  After all, the Moon is the natural ruler of dogs.  We don’t know what sign Čuvi’s Moon is in, though she was born shortly after a Full Moon.  Her Moon is probably opposition Pluto, and this supports the idea that she has an obsessive streak when it comes to food.

On the other hand, it could be argued that dogs should only be seen in terms of their relationship to their owners.  This is not a view that I subscribe to – I like PETA’s opinion, that dogs are companions not pets.  Nonetheless, there are two points in my chart that should be considered.  I have Mercury at 19 degrees 53 minutes Gemini, and the North Node at 11 degrees 6 minutes Leo,

My Mercury is therefore opposite Čuvi’s Sun, and square her Saturn and Uranus.  This means that her Sun-Saturn-Uranus T-Square is damaging my Mercury.  Well, Mercury rules the lungs, and I suffer from mild asthma.  Half an hour after buying Čuvi, when we were driving home with her in the back, I felt my lungs tightening.  I was indeed completely allergic to her, and when she was around me I had to take steroid inhalers.  It got to the stage where I tried wearing surgical masks, though this didn’t work.  I had to suffer for 18 months, until my immune system finally kicked in.  Though I should point out that a Slovenksy Čuvac is as bad as it gets when it comes to allergies.  The breed has a thick white coat, full of dander, and it’s a major shedder.

The North Node is perhaps of a cosmic nature.  Čuvi’s North Node is at 11 degrees 57 minutes Aquarius, meaning my North Node is conjunct her South Node.  Was she my dog in a previous incarnation?  Or is there just some fated connection between us?

We now move to forecasts.  If you can forecast for a human, you should be able to forecast for an animal.  Though it does help to have the time of birth.  You will notice from Čuvi’s chart that in 2017 she had Saturn making a conjunction with her Sun.  Around August 26 2017 Saturn went stationary direct at  21 degrees 11 minutes Sagittarius and over the next month made exact aspects to her Sun-Saturn square.

It was indeed a difficult time for Čuvi.  Firstly I was away in England for the whole summer, meaning that she didn’t get regular walks.  Secondly, and most seriously, my wife made the reckless decision to buy three guinea pigs.  In fact, she bought six guinea pigs, because one of the guinea pigs was pregnant.  Straight away Čuvi’s freedom of manoeuvre was restricted – there were rooms in the house she could no longer enter.  At times the guinea pigs drove her crazy, and in one fit of running and barking she sprained her hip, and for the next few weeks was limping.  This is a classic Sun in Sagittarius injury.  Sagittarius rules the hips, and Saturn causes the damage.

Fast forward a year.  September 12 2018.  Čuvi had her teeth cleaned.  I told the vet to check her nipples, because there seemed to be a lump on one of them.  The vet told me that there was nothing to worry about.   A few months pass.  The lump gets bigger, and there is something to worry about.  On January 15 2019 Čuvi has surgery.  Here’s the approximate chart for the operation:

I didn’t choose the timing – given that Čuvi probably had cancer, I had to take the first appointment that was available.  The chart of the operation has the Moon in Taurus, moving to a trine with Mercury.  For an operation chart, the Moon should not be in a sign connected with the location of the sickness, and this was certainly the case – Taurus is connected with the throat and the neck, not the breast.  In terms of identifying Čuvi in the chart, I would take her as being Venus in Sagittarius.  Venus is ruler of the Sixth House, and traditionally this house is linked with smaller animals, such as dogs.  If Čuvi  had been a horse or a whale, she would have been covered by the Twelfth House.

The vet is Jupiter, ruler of the Seventh, in its own sign of Sagittarius.  The vet is therefore well placed, and knows what he is doing.  Furthermore, Venus is moving to a conjunction with Jupiter.  This is fortunate.  On the down side, Mars is making a square to Saturn – an aspect that Čuvi has in her own chart.  Very often, when a pattern in one’s own chart is repeated in the sky, one feels the effects, even if there are no transiting aspects.

The operation went smoothly, and everything was taken out.  A few days later we got the biopsy results, and it was early stage cancer.  However, the vet was optimistic that the cancer hadn’t spread.  The story goes to show that dogs, like humans, need to be checked for suspicious lumps at regular intervals.  And I’m hoping that the Venus-Jupiter conjunction at the time of the operation will be enough to protect Čuvi from going under the knife again.

My overall message, as an astrologer, is that you can do your dog’s horoscope.  You might also be able to pinpoint periods of a dog’s life when they might be under stress or even in danger.  And maybe, if you’re commercially minded, you can even charge money to do a dog’s horoscope.  Good luck with that, but make sure you’re ethical about it.

I’m rather late to the party, but I quickly want to have my say on the horoscope of Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, who has recently been accused of sexual assault.  I don’t have a time of birth for the chart, but I’ll proceed anyway.  See above for the horoscope.

The first thing to note about the chart is that there are three planets in Aquarius: the Sun, Mercury and Venus.  Aquarius is a sign that is widely misunderstood.  It is common to describe it as being ideallistic and future-oriented, and this is because some astrologers have erroneously associated it with the planet Uranus.  You also have the hype about the Age of Aquarius, that’s created an overly optimistic view.  The reality of Aquarius is that it’s ruled by the planet Saturn.  It’s about the positive aspects of limitation – creating structures to enshrine a rigid world-view.  Such structure may be useful, as in the case of Aquarian Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, or it can be downright evil, as was seen by Nazi Germany, an Aquarian organization which came into being on January 30 1933.

Brett Kavanaugh has a view of the world, and he’s not going to change it.  This doesn’t mean that he can’t be a good judge.  Aquarius, for all its faults, is an Air sign.  The Air signs know that other opinions exist, and that your own opinions won’t stand without good arguments.  Yet I am not convinced that the three Aquarian planets are the engine of Kevanaugh’s horoscope.  I am more interested in the Moon and Jupiter.   His Moon is in its own sign in Cancer, and it is also in mutual respection by exalation with Jupiter in Taurus.  This is because the Moon is exalted in Taurus and Jupiter is exalted in Cancer.

The Moon in Cancer provides a powerful contrast to his Aquarian Sun.  It is emotional and subjective, valuing family and tradition.  Then you have Jupiter.  It is the natural planet of law, and the reception with the Moon makes it strong.  Yet it’s also the planet of religion and morality, and this gives further evidence of subjectivity – or should I say political bias?  But I doubt Kavanaugh believes that he is biased, because Jupiter makes an 180-degree aspect to Neptune, the planet of confusion and subterfuge.  Additionally, Mercury in Aquarius makes 90-degree aspects to both Jupiter and Neptune.  The rational mind is confounded by the porous boundaries of philosphical bias.  It should be noted, by the way, that Jupiter aspects the Mercury-Neptune midpoint.  Kavanaugh may be a brilliant lawyer, but somewhere along the line there is a lack of a clarity – a lack of clarity that wins him favour in certain quarters.  And at the moment transiting Saturn is making a 135-degree aspect to his Jupiter, and therefore to his Mercury-Neptune midpoint.  Something’s coming down to earth.

Never trust a politician whose birth time is unavailable.  There is no accurate birth time for Hillary Clinton or Theresa May.  Then there is Jeremy Corbyn, who could be Britain’s next Prime Minister.  He is a hard left politician, who is a vociferous supporter of Palestine.  He also seems excited by revolutionary South American politics.

Jeremy Corbyn was born on May 26 1949, in Chippenham, England.  As we don’t know his birth time we’ll set it for noon.  We straight away notice that he has four planets in Gemini: the Sun, Mercury, Venus and Uranus.  This is a huge concentration, and we can therefore use the sign Gemini to facilitate our understanding of his personality.  Here is his chart, by the way:

However there are other things to consider.  Corbyn has a conjunction been the Moon and Mars in Taurus.  This suggests that he has a slow-burning anger, and the things that upset him don’t change from day to day, from decade to decade.  The struggle goes on, the oppressors remain the same.  In this light, the sign Taurus has a strong connection with Communism.  Karl Marx was born with the Sun and Moon in Taurus, and Lenin and Pol Pot were born under this sign.

Unfortunately for Corbyn, the Moon is not the Sun.  He reflects revolution rather than embodies it, and with all his Gemini, he lacks the single-minded intensity of Lenin and Marx. Gemini is a sign of ideas and talk, and with the Sun making an 120-degree aspect to Jupiter in the solar ninth house of travel, it’s easy for Corbyn to fantasize about far-off revolutions.  And being a Gemini, he can split the fantasy from the grinding realty.  Socialist ideology in Cuba and Venezuela, with its Spanish glamour, can be stripped away from the economic stagnation of the systems, and in the case of Venezuela, utter poverty.  The word-machine of Gemini can justify anything, can make the unacceptable seem half reasonable.  We also shouldn’t forget Palestine, where Corbyn’s Taurus Moon meets his Gemini Sun.  For him it’s an embedded cause, and the Moon-Mars conjunction will support it on many levels.  And if that means having meetings with terrorists, and laying wreaths on the graves of murders, then Taurus and Gemini can come together and argue that the ends justify the means.

On perhaps a more positive note, Jeremy Corbyn has Saturn in the last degree of Leo.  It is therefore conjunct Regulus, the star of kings and rulership.   This gives Corbyn a natural antipathy to rulers, empires, and elites – particularly those he has most experience of.  Naturally he has little time for the monarchy and any last vestiges of the British Empire.  This is further emphasized by the fact that Saturn is making a 60-degree aspect to Uranus, the planet of revolution.

Going back to the sign Gemini, in my experience Geminis don’t take kindly to getting old, and they often take their childishness to the grave.  From the perspective of Jungian psychology, the archetype connected with Gemini is the <em>puer aeternus</em>, the eternal boy.  Or its female equivalent, the <em>puella aeterna</em>.  We can perhaps see this with other Gemini populists, such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.  Their bodies are ageing, but their impulses are those of twenty-year olds.  Jeremy Corbyn continues as if he’s a 20-year old student, glamourizing the same old causes, with little sense of responsibility.  He gets the youth vote, but keeps his party out of power.

I was recently re-reading a monograph by Robert Hand titled Day & Night: Planetary Sect in Astrology.  Robert Hand takes us back to Greek astrology, and asks how a chart might have been interpreted say 1600 years ago, perhaps by a practitioner in ancient Alexandria.  Alexandrine astrology is not really my thing – I am more familiar with William Lilly’s Seventeenth Century approach.  However, Robert Hand makes some important points.

Hand suggests that the most important consideration when looking at a horoscope is whether a person is born by day or by night.  This leads to the first generalization to make, when judging a chart – is someone a night person or a day person?  Donald Trump was born in the hours of daylight, Barack Obama at night.  Trump is positive and outward going, but shows little in the way of reflection.  Obama, by contrast, is more thoughtful, and possibly more of an introvert.  Yet there are limits to this kind of generalization – using such a simple method of chart interpretation, you’d soon make a mistake.

The system comes into its own when you consider the individual planets.  Each one has a diurnal or nocturnal nature.  The diurnal planets, which function best during the hours of daylight, are the Sun, Jupiter and Saturn.  The nocturnal planets are the Moon, Venus and Mars.  Mercury can be either, depending on whether it is a morning or evening star.  Mercury is a morning star when it rises before the Sun, an evening star when it rises after.  Donald Trump’s Mercury is in Cancer, his Sun in Gemini – in other words in later degrees.  He therefore has a nocturnal Mercury, in a diurnal chart.  This means, all things being equal, that it won’t function particularly well.  Obama’s Mercury is in earlier degrees of Leo than his Sun, making it a morning star, and a diurnal planet.  It would function best in the hours of daylight, but Obama is born at night.

Let’s take some other examples.  Robert Hand looked at the charts of Adolf Hitler and Bill Clinton.  Both were born in the hours of daylight and both had Saturn high in the chart in Leo.  Saturn, as a diurnal planet, is strengthened by the very fact that it is a daylight chart.  This is in spite of the fact that Leo is the sign of Saturn’s detriment.  Saturn is the planet of authority, and it is happiest when the Sun is above the horizon.  In the case of Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayipp Erdogan, he was born at night, and he has Saturn conjunct the MC in Scorpio.  The night time birth will weaken Saturn, and perhaps ensure that he doesn’t get the total control for which he craves.

There is then the issue about whether a planet is above or below the horizon.  According to Hand’s system, a diurnal planet is best placed above the horizon during the hours of daylight, below the horizon during the hours of night.  For a nocturnal planet, it is best placed above the horizon at night, below the horizon during the day.  This is why Erdogan’s Mars is so strong – it is a nocturnal planet, above the horizon in a nocturnal chart.  Iconic boxer Muhammed Ali also had Mars in this position.

The final piece of the jigsaw is sign.  The diurnal, masculine signs are Aries, Gemini, Leo, Libra, Sagittarius and Aquarius.  The nocturnal, feminine signs are Taurus, Cancer, Virgo, Scorpio, Capricorn and Pisces.  The diurnal planets work best in diurnal signs, the nocturnal planets in nocturnal signs.  However Hand upoints out that there is a difference of opinion when it comes to Mars.  It is a nocturnal planet, but it is masculine.  Greek sources suggest that ideally it should be in a nocturnal sign, while Arab sources suggest that a diurnal sign is best.  My own view is that one should go with the Arab view.

At the top of this article is the horoscope of Aretha Franklin, who has recently died.  She was born at night, on March 25 1942 at 10.30 pm in Memphis, Tennessee.  This means that all her nocturnal planets, namely the Moon, Venus and Mars, are strengthened.  Likewise her diurnal planets, the Sun, Jupiter, Saturn and Mercury, are weakened.  Of course it should be pointed out that by most standards, her Sun is in a great position.  It is ruler of her Tenth House of career, and it is in Aries, the sign of its exaltation, in the Fifth House of creative expression.  Her Venus, as a nocturnal planet in a nocturnal chart, should ideally be above the horizon in a feminine sign.  It is not – it is below the horizon in Aquarius.  Not surprisingly, her two marriages didn’t work well.

Her Moon, by contrast, was wonderful.  From a diurnal-nocturnal perspective, it benefits in all three ways.  It is a night time birth, it is above the horizon in the Ninth House, and it is in Cancer, a feminine sign.  The Moon is about the public, and about being able to express emotion – helped by the fact that it trines her Scorpio Ascendant.  The dominance of the Moon is further emphasized by its rulership of the planetary hour.

There are many ways to evaluate planetary strength, and one sometimes has to deal with contradictory information.  However, the nocturnal-diurnal distinction is not something that should be ignored.