Stellar Astrology, Vol. 3

In the decades that have passed since I found that first paperback in a New Age bookstore in Ottawa, Canada, the pursuit of learning astrology has expanded my horizons. I started a formal correspondence course with the British Faculty of Astrological Studies while I was employed as an underground surveyor in a silver mine on the Arctic Circle, where I witnessed nightly displays of the aurora borealis as wolves howled from the treeline.

I spent a school year in Exeter, England, wrapping up my western astrology studies with 16 hours of exams to receive my Diploma. Back in Canada, I settled in Montreal where I began seeing clients, teaching astrology and building a local organization. I spoke at national conferences and hosted lecture events for big-name astrologers, forming many significant relationships.

When a friend gave me a Vedic astrology book for my birthday one year, I started the cycle all over again. I attended a conference in California, bought a whole new library of books, and began to accumulate study credits toward certification with the American College of Vedic Astrology. Along the way, I met Hart DeFouw, and that’s when everything really changed.

I attended his Trilogy courses in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and then many other specialty courses in the San Francisco area for almost a decade. I went to Rishikesh, India, for a course on the nakshatras, where Hart lectured at the Dayananda ashram on the banks of the Ganges.

I uprooted myself from a comfortable life in Montreal and moved to Toronto for more regular contact with Hart’s guru, Mantriji. Although those were difficult years of transition, it paid off in ways too numerous and personal to mention. But I’m grateful that my pursuit of astrology opened the door to a larger world of which I’d otherwise have been unaware.

I had the privilege of learning from many people, not only gurus and tutors, but also classmates who became friends, clients who shared their stories with me, and students whose dedication coaxed the best from me. I thank them all for contributing to my knowledge, and for encouraging me to keep writing. This book is just another offering to them, and to every other devotee of jyotish.

~ Toronto, September 2020

Arts & Entertainment

Aretha Franklin: R-E-S-P-E-C-T

At first glance, there seems to be so little of significance in Aretha Franklin’s chart that we’re tempted to think, this can’t be right. If she was the Queen of Soul, where are the signs of royalty, soul, and awesome voice? In fact, there are so few yogas in her chart that you can count them on the fingers of one hand. And yet, sometimes, all you need is one hand to seize the crown.

For Aretha, her ascendant lord Venus is the planet that commands the stage. Venus is the karaka for the arts and entertainment, and because it’s the only occupant of a kendra, it becomes the most likely significator of her career. Venus is strong because it has dig bala in the 4th house, and it’s stable because it receives only an aspect from Jupiter. Venus is also in Parivartana yoga with Saturn in the 8th, a combination that strengthens both planets and the houses they occupy.

Among other things, the 4th house represents one’s tribe, congregation, constituency or fan base. From her earliest performance, standing on a chair in front of her preacher father’s congregation, Aretha has stood head and shoulders above the crowd.

In the 8th house, the association of 2nd lord Mars and 5th lord Saturn forms Dhana yoga. From there, they each aspect and thereby strengthen their own houses – Mars protecting the 2nd, Saturn protecting the 5th. Other than family and wealth, the 2nd house also rules the voice. And aside from children, the 5th also rules performance.

Her 8th house is a locus of exchange activity. In addition to the Parivartana between Venus and Saturn linking the 4th and 8th, there are two different Nadi yogas involving exchanges of star lords in the 8th. The Sun and Saturn occupy each other’s nakshatra, thus creating a symbiosis between the 6th and 8th houses. Furthermore, the Moon and Jupiter also occupy each other’s nakshatra, thus creating a link between the 8th and 9th houses.

Thus, we have three different houses – the 4th, the 6th and the 9th – whose occupants are in sambandha with an occupant of the 8th. As a consequence, she has had more than her share of trials and tribulations.

Her parents (4th house & 9th house) separated when she was six, and her mother (4th house) died just weeks before Aretha turned 10. Her father (9th house) was shot point-blank in the chest during a home robbery and remained five years in a coma before he died. She lost a $1.4M house (4th house) to a devastating fire. And in the last decade of her life, she was plagued with health (6th house) problems, ranging from hypertension to pancreatic cancer.

Aretha grew up in a lively household with three siblings. Her father was one of the country’s most influential ministers whose circle of friends included civil rights activist Martin Luther King, as well as popular performers of the day like Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke. But his constant philandering became too much for Aretha’s mother, who left the marriage when Aretha was just six years old, leaving the young girl in her father’s care.

The Moon occupies the 9th house, showing the powerful emotional connection she had with her father. Her 9th lord Mercury is in the 5th house of ministry, amped up by the presence of mokshakaraka Ketu, and solidified by the aspect of its dispositor Saturn. In acknowledgement of Reverend Franklin’s oratorical skills, people called him the man with the million-dollar voice.

Early in the dasha of Saturn, lord of her 5th house, Aretha became an unwed mother – her first child born when she was just 12 years old, the second when she was 14, in Saturn-Saturn and Saturn-Mercury, respectively. With 7th lord Mars in the 8th, she was not lucky in love. One of her sisters referred to her first husband as a smooth gentleman pimp. She married twice, the first in Saturn-Venus, and the second in Mercury-Sun, neither of which lasted the test of time. She later went on to have two more children.

She signed with Columbia Records in 1960, and released her first single in September of that year, both during her Saturn-Venus period. Note that Saturn participates in the only two yogas of significance in her chart, while Venus as lagnesh was instrumental in her establishing herself.

The high-water mark of her career was in Saturn-Rahu, during which period she scored nine Top Ten hits on Billboard, among them the famous Respect of February 1967. Coming as it did on the heels of the civil rights movement, in the middle of the women’s liberation era, and at the height of the anti-Vietnam war protests, it became a virtual protest anthem for a generation.

Aretha enjoyed a career that spanned over six decades. She mixed and mingled with religious and civil rights leaders, and earned widespread respect in a society that typically withheld it from Afro-Americans. When she was inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 2012, Franklin was described as the voice of the civil rights movement, the voice of black America and a symbol of black equality. When she sang at Barack Obama’s inauguration, she brought tears to the eyes of President Obama, Reverend Jesse Jackson, and half of America.

When she died of pancreatic cancer on August 16, 2018, music lovers around the world cried all over again. The Queen of Soul is dead. Long live the Queen.

Audrey Hepburn: Tiny waif with a big heart

Audrey Hepburn remains one of only a dozen people who’ve won all four of the entertainment industry’s most prestigious honors – the Academy, Emmy, Grammy and Tony Awards. Yet for someone with such a successful career, she has a relatively unremarkable chart. Nonetheless, on closer inspection we realize it illustrates one of the key concepts of Vedic astrology – nothing truly momentous happens in a person’s life until they run the major planetary period of their first or tenth house lord.

Audrey Hepburn was born the daughter of an English-Irish banker father and a Dutch baroness mother, whose parents divorced when she was nine. She had an idyllic early childhood in Brussels prior to Nazi occupation, but during WW2 she had her share of harrowing experiences, which included carrying messages for the Resistance hidden in her ballet shoes.

After the war, she and her mother moved to London, where she landed a part as a chorus girl in a stage production. Three years later, playing a movie bit, she was spotted by the novelist Colette who instantly realized she’d found the girl to play Gigi on Broadway. The role won her a Theatre World Award in 1952. The following year she played a princess in Roman Holliday, and captured the world’s affection.

Her career went on from success to success, including such famous movies as Sabrina and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Thanks to her friendship with Givenchy, who designed all of the outfits for her entire movie career, she became a fashion icon whose signature style was copied world-wide.

Hepburn has three strong planets in her chart. The Sun is exalted in Aries in the 3rd, a house associated with the performing arts. Venus is exalted in the 2nd, indicative of a well-to-do family, the world of fashion, and her own subsequent financial success. Her ascendant lord Saturn, the only visible planet above the horizon, is retrograde and therefore brighter than normal.

Meanwhile, two planets are weak. The Moon in her 1st house is dark and waning, just five days prior to the new moon. Mars is debilitated in Cancer in the 6th house. These two, one the lord of the 6th and the other its occupant, reflected her rail-thin physique and, ultimately, her death from cancer of the appendix.

She was married three times. Her 7th lord Sun, although exalted, was associated with the malefic Rahu, which also acts as a proxy for its dispositor Mars. Since Mars is debilitated in the 6th house, it plays the role of undoing marriage, since it is 12th from the 7th. She had two children but suffered multiple miscarriages. Her 5th lord Mercury was in the 4th house and, thus being 12 houses removed from its own house, reflected the loss of children. Jupiter, the karaka or generic significator of children, is associated with two malefics, the Sun and Rahu.

In the dasha scheme of major planetary periods, Hepburn ran her Saturn dasha from the last days of 1953 to the end of 1972, a 19-year period that saw her catapult to world-wide fame through her many movies. Note that Saturn is her ascendant lord, and thus activates the principle stated in the opening paragraph of this article. During this planetary period, her performances garnered both popular and critical acclaim, and she won every major industry award.

When her Saturn dasha was over, she quietly withdrew from show business for eight years, returning only intermittently for a few movies. Her Mercury dasha was notable mostly for her absence from the world stage. In 1988, she became a special Ambassador to UNICEF, working actively in Ethiopia to combat world hunger. She made grueling trips to the Sudan, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bangladesh and Vietnam. I do my best, she said simply, I wish I could do more.

Note that her ascendant lord Saturn, aside from ruling the 1st house of name and fame, also ruled her 12th house, which is associated with charity and foreign travel. And in the latter part of her life, it was her work with UNICEF that transformed her reputation in life, from that of a renowned actress to a tireless advocate in the selfless cause to end world hunger.

Alexander McQueen: L’enfant terrible of fashion

A fashion show by Alexander McQueen was never anything less than a spectacle. Whether it was just his innate sense of drama, or the perverse delight he took in shocking his audience of fashionistas, he pulled out all the stops. His half-naked models, their scarcely-concealed buttocks or breasts leaving little to the imagination, would stride or stagger up and down the runway, their make-up lending them the look of feral animals, aliens or escapees from a lunatic asylum. In the days and weeks that followed a show, the buzz became a roar. Little wonder that the great houses of couture wooed him to lend a frisson to their lines, while movie stars and royalty commissioned bespoke designs.

On first glance, his chart doesn’t appear that remarkable. Lagnesh Venus joins Saturn (lord of 4th and 5th houses) in the 7th house to form two Dharma Karma Adhipati yogas. Venus is ordinary and Saturn is mixed, being debilitated with dig bala. But they are the only two planets in kendras, so they wield an appropriate influence.

Although Saturn is debilitated, it enjoys partial relief by two out of the four possible means: (1) Venus, lord of Libra in which Saturn would be exalted, is in a kendra, and (2) Mars, Saturn’s dispositor, is strong in a kendra from the Moon. Thus, Neecha Bhanga Raja yoga is formed, albeit with moderate power.

In this context, we should be reminded that a crippled limb stabilized by a prosthetic device is still a crippled limb, and will therefore hamper the native. Partnerships, whether personal or professional, were bound to suffer. McQueen was sexually abused in his youth by his elder sister’s husband. Elder siblings are seen through the 11th house, their partners through the 5th. Thus, the perpetrator in this case is debilitated Saturn imposing himself upon Venus, the ascendant lord of victim McQueen.

Another Dharma Karma Adhipati yoga is formed by 9th lord Mercury with 10th lord Moon in the 5th. With a pair of vaishya planets working in concert, this alludes to McQueen’s successful application of his creativity to commercial enterprises, as seen via his prominent roles at both Givenchy and Gucci, the famous fashion houses of France and Italy.

His chart reveals a Papakartari yoga formed by malefics flanking the lagna – a powerful Mars in the 2nd house, and Ketu in the 12th. Substance abuse became a problem in his later years, contributing to deterioration of his primary relationships.

Shakata yoga, formed when Moon and Jupiter are in a 6/8 relationship, evokes irregularities in life, sometimes financial, social or emotional, the latter of which seemed to be McQueen’s lot.

The indications for a career in fashion are two-fold: the Raja yoga with Venus/Saturn in the 7th house whereby Venus aspects back into the lagna, and a powerful Mars in the 2nd house that rules fashion, clothing, accessories, etc.

If we regard his chart from the perspective of Chandralagna, we get similar indications. Ascendant lord Saturn would occupy the 3rd house of skills with artistic Venus, forming two Raja yogas. Mars would form Ruchaka yoga in the 10th house, reflecting his role as creative director in his field. Jupiter would aspect its own 2nd house, its close alignment with the Rahu/Ketu axis suggesting his inventiveness, rule-breaking tendencies, and substance abuse. And on a personal level, 7th lord Sun on the Rahu/Ketu axis would imply unconventional relationships, which played out in his openly gay lifestyle.

In both the rashi and chandralagna charts, the 7th lord is eight houses away – Mars in the first instance, the Sun in the second – which is some indication of turbulent relationships. In his natal chart he had two distinct passion combinations – a strong Mars aspecting the 5th house Moon, and a debilitated Saturn conjoined Venus in the 7th house. These patterns, wherein the good girl planets Moon and Venus are afflicted by the bad boy planets Mars and Saturn, are further evidence of an active sex life.

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