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Episode: The First House in Astrology: Planets in the Rising Sign
Author: Chris Brennan
Duration: 03:30:43
Episode Shownotes
In episode 454 astrologers Chris Brennan and Nick Dagan Best explain the meaning of the first house in astrology, and explore its significations by looking at different planets in the rising sign and Ascendant. We open the episode by talking about the general meaning of the first house, and then
we transition into discussing each of the planets in the 1st house, starting with the Moon and then working our way through the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. We also spend some time talking about the ruler of the Ascendant in the houses, the rulers of other houses in the 1st house, and planets transiting the first house. This is the start of a new series where we will do a deep dive into the significations of each of the 12 houses of the birth chart, explaining what each house means and showing how different placements in that house have manifested in the lives of individuals. Astronomically the 1st house is the rising sign in the whole sign house system, which is the zodiac sign that was rising over the eastern horizon at the moment a person was born. The first house is associated with the degree of the Ascendant, which represents the dividing line between sky and earth, and acts as a particularly powerful and personal point within the first house. Here are some of the significations of the first house: Self Body Health Appearance Spirit Character Helm Life direction The which arises from you This episode is meant to act as a foundation for the rest of the houses series, which will be made over the course of the next year. This episode is available in both audio and video versions below. Chris's Course on Ancient Astrology https://courses.theastrologyschool.com/courses/hellenistic-astrology-course Nick's Website https://www.nickdaganbestastrologer.com Timestamps 00:00:00 Introduction 00:02:59 Meaning of the first house 00:36:08 Moon in the 1st house 00:53:40 Sun in the 1st house 01:05:42 Mercury in the 1st house 01:25:35 Venus in the 1st house 01:40:42 Mars in the 1st house 02:05:44 Jupiter in the 1st house 02:25:06 Saturn in the 1st house 02:35:42 Uranus in the 1st house 02:51:09 Neptune in the 1st house 03:01:45 Pluto in the 1st house 03:21:37 Concluding remarks 03:29:05 Credits Watch the Video Version of This Episode Watch the video version of this episode on the 1st house on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR2fBFQT9wY - Transcript A full transcript of this episode is available: Episode 454 transcript Listen to the Audio Version of This Episode Listen to the audio version of this episode or download it as an MP3:
Full Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker_03
Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you're listening to The Astrology Podcast.
00:00:03 Speaker_03
Joining me today is astrologer Nick Dagan-Best, and we're going to be talking about the meaning of the first house in astrology, and especially looking at a bunch of example charts to get an idea of what it means when different planets are placed in the first house in a birth chart.
00:00:17 Speaker_03
So hey, Nick, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me back, Chris. Yeah, this is a big topic. I've been meaning to do this series for a while.
00:00:24 Speaker_03
I already did a full series a few years ago on the meaning of each of the planets in astrology, and then I followed that up with a year-long series on the meaning of each of the signs of the zodiac.
00:00:34 Speaker_03
So now I'm going to be doing this as the first episode in a new series where I do a deep dive into the meaning of each of the 12 houses in astrology, and we're going to start here with the very first house, which is the first house itself.
00:00:49 Speaker_03
So thanks a lot for joining me. big topic, but it's probably one of the most important in astrology because the houses are so crucial to birth chart interpretation.
00:01:01 Speaker_01
Yeah, absolutely.
00:01:02 Speaker_01
And they are the most confounding part of horoscopic astrology, I'd say, because they're clearly the part of astrology that was designed by people as opposed to, you know, the study of planets, which is just a sort of an observation of nature.
00:01:16 Speaker_01
So their origin is mysterious to us. There's a sort of inherent logic to them, but at the same time, they're sort of almost out of reach in terms of trying to understand them fully.
00:01:30 Speaker_01
So, yeah, they require a lot more sort of investigation and thought and contemplation even, I think, for that very reason.
00:01:37 Speaker_03
definitely. So we're going to talk a little bit conceptually about what the first house means in terms of the astrological tradition and some of those inherited meanings.
00:01:48 Speaker_03
But then we're also going to focus a lot on looking at example charts because it's really when you start looking at a bunch of different charts of the lives of individuals and seeing how their life has played out within the context of the first house that you really understand what that house is all about.
00:02:03 Speaker_03
So a large part of our approach here today is going to be empirical by looking at chart examples.
00:02:09 Speaker_03
And I've already done a previous series talking about the 12 houses, a two-part series on the houses and the significations of the houses as part of the astrology podcast where I outlined some of the conceptual structure of things underlying the houses.
00:02:23 Speaker_03
But here, I'm going to focus on different things like planets in the first house, the ruler of the Ascendant, or planets sometimes aspecting the first house or transits to the first house showing activations of those first house themes.
00:02:40 Speaker_03
And that's going to be part of our plan of attack for how we're going to understand the first house by looking at it from a bunch of different angles to eventually get a more well-rounded picture of what the first house means. Right. Cool. All right.
00:02:57 Speaker_03
So let's jump into it. So first things first, here's a diagram that shows the significations of the houses. And the first house is the rising sign, and it signifies the self, the body, the character, and the appearance.
00:03:17 Speaker_03
The first house in terms of the planetary joys is the house that's associated with Mercury, which we'll get into more later. But that's sort of our core starting point. And I wanted to start by talking about what the first house is astronomically.
00:03:33 Speaker_03
So astronomically, the first house is the rising sign using whole sign houses. So it's the zodiac sign, the sign of the zodiac that was rising over the eastern horizon at the moment that you were born.
00:03:47 Speaker_03
And the eastern horizon is where the Sun rises and emerges from underneath the Earth each day, each morning. And in a way, the Sun is symbolically reborn each day when it rises over that eastern horizon.
00:04:05 Speaker_03
And each day, other planets and stars also emerge over the Eastern horizon, and they emerge from under the Earth and come into view. So in the same way that the Sun emerges and is almost like born each day, you at that moment that you were born
00:04:24 Speaker_03
emerged into the world at that time and began your life as an individual that was separate from your mother, basically.
00:04:33 Speaker_03
And that's part of the underlying core symbolism of the first house and the rising sign is that notion of emergence and what was born in that moment. And the thing that was born in that moment, when you're looking at a birth chart, was you.
00:04:51 Speaker_03
So you actually and sense of self and other things surrounding that becomes the primary focus and meaning of the 1st house and the rising sign.
00:05:00 Speaker_00
Correct?
00:05:05 Speaker_03
Yeah. So the 1st house is also associated with the Ascendant and it's the dividing line between the sky and the Earth.
00:05:18 Speaker_03
And so part of what that means is that part of the rising sign is always above the Earth in the area that has to do with the stars and the sky, and part of the first whole sign house is always below the Earth in the area that has to do with the physical manifestation of the individual.
00:05:41 Speaker_03
So this division sets up an important distinction with the 1st house between the sky and the earth and the coming together of those two realms. But it also means that the degree of the Ascendant is especially important
00:05:58 Speaker_03
degree or sensitive point or degree of power in the chart that is one of the most personally relevant points to the individual that was born at that specific moment in time.
00:06:11 Speaker_03
It's also highly specific because the Ascendant degree moves, it changes every few minutes and moves into another degree And then every hour or two, the Ascendant moves into a new sign of the Zodiac.
00:06:24 Speaker_03
So that's one of the reasons that the birth time, having a birth time is so important, because it allows you to calculate the Ascendant, the rising sign, and then you know that the rising sign becomes the first house.
00:06:37 Speaker_03
So, that sets up the most personal point in the chart, because it's one of the things that's moving the most quickly and changing the most quickly from hour to hour and minute to minute compared to the planets, which take a lot longer to change signs or change degrees.
00:06:54 Speaker_01
Yeah, and the Ascendant is a point that relies absolutely on the local space. So it really has to do, it ties the individual being born to the location that they're born.
00:07:12 Speaker_01
Because you could be born in the exact same moment in a different part of the planet and your rising sign would be completely different. and you would therefore have a completely different chart and ostensibly be a very different person.
00:07:26 Speaker_01
So while the Sun and the Ascendant are both points in astrology that point to the self, to the individual, I tend to think of the Sun being more
00:07:36 Speaker_01
fundamental, the part of us that is unchangeable, whereas the Ascendant, because it is so reliant on the local environment and the local space, the Ascendant has a lot more to do with who you are because of where you were born and when you were born.
00:07:53 Speaker_01
It into some degree in a broad sense, I would think of the ascendant sun divide to address the old nature versus nurture element to what makes a person, you know, whereas the sun might the sun is the nature just who you are regardless of where you turned up, so to speak.
00:08:14 Speaker_01
And then the ascendant being the nurture, you know, were you loved, were you not loved, were you well-fed, not well-fed, educated, not educated, any of those things that contribute to shaping who you become over the course of your growth.
00:08:28 Speaker_01
So that's one way that I think of the difference between the two, even though they do both apply to the self, to the individual.
00:08:36 Speaker_03
Definitely, that makes sense. And that's a really good point that it takes into account the Ascendant is based not just on the birth time, but also the location of birth on Earth.
00:08:46 Speaker_03
So it makes it more highly specific, both in terms of time, but also in terms of place. So taking into account those two frames of reference is really what's important about the moment of birth.
00:09:01 Speaker_03
And it's what's most important about setting up the Ascendant degree and establishing the rising sign.
00:09:07 Speaker_03
And the rising sign becomes the first house in the whole sign house system, which is the system of house division that the concept of 12 houses was originally based on probably that was most prevalent in ancient astrology.
00:09:22 Speaker_03
So that's what we'll be using for the purpose of this series while also paying attention to the exact degrees of the houses as particularly important and powerful sensitive points in this instance within the context of the first house.
00:09:38 Speaker_03
All right, so let's transition to talking about some of the significations of the first house and some of the basic meanings. One of the core meanings of the first house is it represents self.
00:09:51 Speaker_03
That's a tricky one because at first, when you read that on paper, you hear that the first house represents self. It sounds kind of abstract. But what I mean by that is it represents you in the chart.
00:10:03 Speaker_03
And the reason why that's important is because when you look at the 12 houses and the significations of the 12 houses, they often refer to different people in your life.
00:10:14 Speaker_03
like the 4th house can signify your parents, the 7th house can signify relationships, the 11th house is friends, the 5th house is children, the 3rd house is siblings. The 1st house, though, is the house that represents you in the chart.
00:10:32 Speaker_03
So that's why it's important because it's where you show up in the chart. And oftentimes with the first house, this becomes the most clear.
00:10:41 Speaker_03
When a person's getting transits like eclipses to the first house and the seventh house, you'll see this major contrast become up between the native and their sense of self and who they are versus other people that the native is in close, personal, one-on relationships in their life.
00:11:01 Speaker_03
and sometimes the tension between balancing needs for what's important to them and for their sense of self versus for other people in their life.
00:11:11 Speaker_01
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Very fine line there.
00:11:15 Speaker_03
Yeah. What do you think about that?
00:11:16 Speaker_01
How would you expand on that?
00:11:19 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, the first house being the individual, I mean, it translates not just to natal horoscopic astrology, but even in other forms of astrology, where it's just sort of the essential point from which all the other houses refer to, you know.
00:11:38 Speaker_01
I mean, it's not just the first house Yeah, it's not number one for any old reason. It's the central house of the chart, around which the other 11 houses are adjacent. They're connected to it. It's the fundamental house. That's a good plan.
00:12:01 Speaker_01
Yeah, and therefore that, you know, and the seventh being the opposite, that just sort of that gives you that view of the horizon, the first and the seventh.
00:12:09 Speaker_01
And so when you're in a sort of a one-to-one kind of, you know, be it a relationship or any kind of situation where there's two individuals facing each other in love and combat and discourse, whatever the case may be, it represents the me and the other.
00:12:27 Speaker_01
whatever the context is.
00:12:29 Speaker_03
Yeah. And you get that opposition there, that aspect of the opposition between the first house and the seventh house.
00:12:35 Speaker_03
And just the realization that everybody probably has his babies and I haven't studied this much, but they say that babies go through that process of realization of
00:12:45 Speaker_03
themself, and recognizing themself, and then recognizing something other than themselves, like initially the parents, for example, as other entities in their life.
00:12:58 Speaker_03
So, the first house also represents things that you control or things that you bring about in your life.
00:13:06 Speaker_03
And that's the other area that's really important when it comes to the first house and the concept of self is that there's some things in our life that happen to us as a result of other people or as a result of external circumstances.
00:13:20 Speaker_03
But there are other things in our life that come about as a result of our own personal actions and choices, as well as character traits or other things that arise from within us.
00:13:34 Speaker_03
And that becomes a really crucial point that we're going to talk about more is the first house really represents that which arises from you or as a result of you.
00:13:45 Speaker_03
in your life as opposed to that which happens in your life or arises as a result of external factors including people or events or other things like that.
00:13:56 Speaker_03
So that's a really important distinction and it sounds very basic, but it allows us to answer some basic questions when looking at a birth chart such as, does this event that is signified by this planetary alignment in the chart, is this going to come up as a result of other people in the person's life?
00:14:14 Speaker_03
is this something that the native, a circumstance that they will actually create for themselves as a result of their own actions? And being able to make distinctions like that is actually very powerful in terms of predictive astrology.
00:14:28 Speaker_01
Absolutely. That was another sort of analogy that was used for the Ascendant, is that it's the helm, it's, if you will, the steering wheel for the ship of life, if you will.
00:14:42 Speaker_01
So yeah, the Ascendant is reflective also of how the individual steers their course through life.
00:14:51 Speaker_03
CB Yeah, and we'll get to that more in a second. So self is one of the fundamental foundational blocks.
00:14:59 Speaker_03
And then in ancient astrology, like Paulus Alexandrinus in the 4th century says that the first house represents the basis and foundation of the chart because all of the other houses are derived from it.
00:15:13 Speaker_03
You have to establish the rising sign and then the rest of the chart is then established in terms of the other houses. So 1st house represents self.
00:15:22 Speaker_03
One of the other core meanings of the 1st house is that it represents the body and the physical health and physical vitality of the native or the owner of the birth chart, the person who was born at that moment in time.
00:15:37 Speaker_03
So part of this is that part of the first house is below the horizon under the Earth, which is associated with the realm of physical manifestation.
00:15:49 Speaker_03
And above the Ascendant is associated with the sky and with almost the realm of spirit, so that the Ascendant and the first house are like
00:16:02 Speaker_03
the uniting of those two things when the spirit and the body come together and form this unique mixture, which is us, the human being who was born at that specific moment in time with all of our physical as well as mental and character things that are associated with us.
00:16:24 Speaker_03
So part of that is both good things as well as bad things that happen to the body are indicated by the first house.
00:16:34 Speaker_03
So challenging placements in the first house can indicate health issues or accidents, for example, that affect the body and the physical constitution, whereas positive things
00:16:47 Speaker_03
placed in the first house can indicate healthiness or having good health or even recovering from health issues.
00:16:58 Speaker_03
That's part of the distinction that we'll get into in terms of thinking about really basic things of like, is there a positive placement there that indicates something good with respect to that signification?
00:17:11 Speaker_03
If there's a challenging placement there, that then indicates something challenging with respect to that. So physical health and physical constitution is a major thing.
00:17:22 Speaker_03
And one of the things that goes along with that as our next signification, our third signification of the first house in connection with the body, is that the first house has to do with a person's physical appearance, which is a sort of aspect or manifestation of the body, like how your body looks or how your body appears to other people.
00:17:41 Speaker_03
So Especially if there's something distinctive or unique about your appearance, then that will often show up in the first house or will show up through placements in the first house.
00:17:56 Speaker_03
So positive indications with this can indicate that there's something beautiful or something striking about a person's physical appearance, like people that are sometimes viewed as particularly strikingly beautiful for some reason or physically attractive or like conventionally attractive.
00:18:13 Speaker_03
Negative indications can indicate things like scars, unwanted blemishes, or other things like that that somehow affect the appearance or that the native themselves struggle with in some ways that impact either their appearance or their physical body.
00:18:31 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, again, it's like you said, that merging of body and spirit, how one feels about their physical presence in the body. I mean, that's where those two points merge.
00:18:46 Speaker_01
You're conscious of your physical embodiment and then aware of its place in this greater space. And of course, other people are reacting to it.
00:18:59 Speaker_01
If you're very attractive, they respond in one way, and if you're not, they may fail to respond in ways that you would expect. So yeah, it's where all those things, all those important different parts of living experience merge and meet.
00:19:20 Speaker_03
Right, and just think about how that impacts people. For some of us, it's a non-issue, but in some instances, let's say a person is particularly strikingly physically seen as beautiful, sometimes that means that people treat them differently.
00:19:38 Speaker_03
So sometimes that can unlock certain things in a good way. It can give them certain advantages or certain benefits in life that might not come about for others, whereas sometimes there are disadvantages that come along with that as well.
00:19:56 Speaker_03
Similarly, if there's some sort of physical issue, sometimes that can be something that causes challenges for the person in their life that other people don't have to deal with.
00:20:09 Speaker_01
Yeah, exactly. It, it gives us an idea of whatever that kind of baggage is going to be, you know, let's say someone is born, particularly sort of in a, in a small body and people are always commenting on that and the person grows up.
00:20:28 Speaker_01
responding to how they're being treated because of their physical appearance.
00:20:31 Speaker_01
And it shapes, again, that going back to that point between the Ascendant and the Sun being these two factors of an individual, you know, the Sun of that given individual is not connected to that physical appearance.
00:20:47 Speaker_01
It's who they are besides the fact that they were born in that particular body.
00:20:51 Speaker_01
Whereas the Ascendant has everything to do with them being born in that body and how they feel about it and how people make them feel about it and, and, and how it, how it affects their, their ability to maneuver in the world. Right.
00:21:05 Speaker_01
I mean, again, it's the, the steering ship of, you know, the steering wheel of the ship of life. So if, if, you know,
00:21:12 Speaker_01
you know, if your ship can drive through anything and nobody gets in its way, or are people always sort of throwing up obstacles that get in the way of life that have to do with whatever the physical realities of that body are.
00:21:29 Speaker_01
So yeah, I mean, again, it comes back to that nature-nurture thing.
00:21:33 Speaker_03
Yeah, I saw a TikTok account recently of this guy that went viral and his whole TikTok account is about how he's abnormally tall and how that impacts his life.
00:21:44 Speaker_03
So to kind of go to your earlier example and your earlier point, that's the other side of the spectrum.
00:21:50 Speaker_03
And sometimes when somebody has something distinctive about them that makes them stand out in some ways, that'll be indicated in the birth chart and often indicated in the first house.
00:22:02 Speaker_03
And so not everybody has stuff like that, so you may not have planets there, so that may not be something then that comes up as a major distinctive feature in your life.
00:22:13 Speaker_03
But that's some of the things that we'll be paying attention to when planets are in the 1st house, is something distinctive about the physical body. All right, so the body, the appearance.
00:22:22 Speaker_03
The other thing about the first house that I meant to mention is that in the scheme of planetary joys where each of the seven traditional planets were originally assigned to one of the houses, basically.
00:22:39 Speaker_03
Here's a diagram for those watching the video version. In the planetary joys scheme, the first house is associated with Mercury. the planet Mercury is said to have its joy there.
00:22:51 Speaker_03
And this is because Mercury has this dual nature where it always straddles the line between two things. And if there's a choice between two different things, then it's like it has a bit of both essentially. we have that here with the 1st house.
00:23:10 Speaker_03
Like I said, because the Ascendant is the dividing line between the horizon, anything below the Ascendant is under the Earth and anything above the Ascendant is in the sky.
00:23:22 Speaker_03
So in whole sign houses, the 1st house then, part of the 1st whole sign house or the rising sign is above the Earth in the realm of the sky, and part of it is below the the horizon in the realm of the Earth.
00:23:37 Speaker_03
So the realm below the Earth is like the physical realm, so that's like the physical body, but the realm in the sky is associated with the spirit.
00:23:48 Speaker_03
And so as a result of that, the first house is also associated with the spirit of the native, which includes their life, their life breath, and in some ways the animating force of the native's life to some extent.
00:24:03 Speaker_03
This is probably part of the source of the notion of the first breath that you take after being born being important and potentially being connected with the moment of birth, because taking the breath of life was seen as animating the Native in some sense in ancient astrology.
00:24:22 Speaker_03
So have to think about this as the area where the sky meets the earth and where the soul or the spirit unites with the body.
00:24:33 Speaker_03
So as a result of that, the first house is not just the physical incarnation of the native, but it also has to do with their spirit. And by extension with that, the first house has to do with the native's character.
00:24:46 Speaker_03
So the first house is closely associated with the character. Go ahead.
00:24:52 Speaker_01
Oh, I was just going to say that there's another thing about Mercury rejoicing in the first that strikes me. Mercury has to do with adaptability.
00:25:02 Speaker_01
So there's almost something Darwinian or quasi-Darwinian about Mercury rejoicing in the first house because it's the ability to to adapt in life.
00:25:13 Speaker_01
And, you know, and so it's like it's having, it's, it's the steering wheel of your vehicle can go off road if it needs to, or it can become a helicopter if it needs to, or a submarine if it needs, you know, like there's more, there's more ability, there's more room to move with Mercury in the first house.
00:25:30 Speaker_01
if one is stuck in some situation that would be an obstacle for others, it can be turned into an opportunity of some kind, or you can sort of twist things around, adapt to circumstances. So I think that's another element to that that really works.
00:25:49 Speaker_03
Sure. So maybe the adaptability of our character and the way that that can mold and change over time based on different things that arise both from within us as well as external circumstances.
00:26:03 Speaker_03
So that's really important that the character of the native is a core first house trait. So in the way in which their mind and body form a unique unit that creates a unique individual, So- It's manifest.
00:26:22 Speaker_01
It's manifest. It's almost like the sun and moon are the parts of you that would be you even if you didn't have an actual body.
00:26:30 Speaker_01
Whereas the ascendant is where it's manifest, is where this personality of yours that exists in the abstract is brought to life in an actual body.
00:26:45 Speaker_03
Definitely. So that means that in terms of character traits, the rising sign, the zodiac sign that's rising over the eastern horizon at the moment of birth has a major impact on character as well as planets in the first house.
00:27:01 Speaker_03
the planet that rules the Ascendant or the 1st house, as well as aspects to the exact degree of the Ascendant, especially close aspects, all have a very dominant role in influencing character traits that are going to be more prominent in terms of the person's life.
00:27:17 Speaker_03
All right, so that leads me to my next signification, which is that the first house in ancient astrology, as you already said, Nick, is referred to as the helm, which is like the steering wheel of the ship.
00:27:31 Speaker_03
The first house is kind of like the driver's seat of a car. You have a car, which is kind of like the entire birth chart in some sense. The first house is where you are driving it from.
00:27:44 Speaker_03
And as a result of that, planets in the first house kind of help to steer the ship of the native's life for better or worse.
00:27:52 Speaker_03
So one of the questions is, are the planets that are at the steering wheel of your ship, are they steering the car well, or are they steering it poorly in some ways?
00:28:03 Speaker_03
There can be different types of drivers, let's say, that do a better or worse job, or maybe
00:28:09 Speaker_03
they're better or worse at driving, or maybe there's things that are hampering them in terms of driving in some ways and making it more challenging or more difficult than it could be other ways.
00:28:18 Speaker_03
Let's say you're trying to drive, but you forgot your glasses and you need to wear glasses in order to see things clearly. That could be problematic. So planets in the 1st really help to steer the ship of the native's life.
00:28:33 Speaker_03
And then also the 1st house, because it's called the Helm, is also associated with the native's life direction, and especially the ruler of this, Ascendant.
00:28:43 Speaker_03
So the planet that rules the rising sign will steer a course towards a certain destination that's going to be important for some reason in terms of the native's life.
00:28:54 Speaker_03
So this especially comes up by looking at what house is the ruler of the Ascendant placed in, and whatever house that is, the topics associated with that house are going to be much more important in terms of steering the native's overall life direction and focus than other topics in the native's life, all other things aside.
00:29:16 Speaker_03
So as a result of that, ruler of the Ascendant becomes associated with the native's life focus to some extent, where their attention is directed and major topics of the life will be directed towards at certain points.
00:29:32 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, again, it comes down to choices, which is another way of, you know, talking about the helm or talking about the steering wheel. If you're driving your vehicle, your body through life, you're making choices.
00:29:45 Speaker_01
Do I wanna go to this or that school? Do I wanna date this or that person?
00:29:49 Speaker_01
Or whatever the, you know, this is how we steer our ship through life as we make a series of choices that, you know, take us through door A, door B, or door C, whatever the case may be.
00:30:02 Speaker_03
Yeah. It's another one of those things that arises from within you as well, because sometimes people, for example, I know one person who sort of grew up
00:30:17 Speaker_03
interested in foreign countries and wanting to move to a foreign country, and that was just something that naturally arose from within them. They had a fascination with foreign cultures, and they had the ruler of the Ascendant, the Ninth House.
00:30:30 Speaker_03
So sometimes it's just that thing that arises from within you for some reason as a result of inherent traits that either you're born with or that you develop at some point in your life that cause you to put your attention more towards
00:30:46 Speaker_03
one area of your life or another as a result of the ruler of the Ascendant and its power to sort of set, to chart a course in terms of your overall life direction, since it's sort of like the captain or the steersman of your ship. Exactly, exactly.
00:31:01 Speaker_03
So we'll look at some examples of that. I did a more extended take on the rulers of the houses in a recent episode earlier this year that people can check out.
00:31:10 Speaker_03
And I kind of avoided going into the ruler of the Ascendant too much because I wanted to deal with it more in this episode to some extent on the first house. So we'll go into some examples of that later on and show exactly what we mean.
00:31:27 Speaker_03
So the very last thing in terms of this initial section of talking about the significations, and I've already stated this one, but I just want to restate it again. One of the core things the first house has to do with is that which arises from you.
00:31:42 Speaker_03
So it's things that you bring about in your life, and things that arise from you in your life, sometimes deliberately and other times inadvertently. So we've talked about, for example, that ninth house example I just gave.
00:31:55 Speaker_03
That would be something that in some ways is deliberate, like if a person is deliberately striving towards a specific topic so that they grow up and they end up manifesting that thing as a result of a desire to, but sometimes those topics are also just things where
00:32:14 Speaker_03
they happen inadvertently. So we talked about physical traits that arise from within a person, but they don't necessarily have control over.
00:32:23 Speaker_03
But even if they don't have control over it, it's still something that's coming from them rather than from an external source in their life. And anytime you have a distinction like that, it usually has to do with the first house. Yeah, exactly.
00:32:38 Speaker_03
So some things come about just based on who you are, and also it's how you tend to act in the world as a result of character traits.
00:32:48 Speaker_03
How do you approach the world based on things that are inherent parts of your character is one of the questions that we'll get to in the first house a lot. Yeah, so I think that's it for like just the basic significations of the first house.
00:33:04 Speaker_03
And a lot of that sounds like very abstract, but what we're going to do now is we're going to talk about especially planets in the first house and look at some example charts.
00:33:13 Speaker_03
And then it will start to become more clear what each of these sort of abstract significations means in very concrete terms, in terms of how it plays out in people's lives. Are there any other preliminary things or is that good? No, that's good.
00:33:27 Speaker_03
That covers it. All right. Awesome. All right. So we're going to transition now. We're going to talk about especially planets located in the first house in a birth chart.
00:33:38 Speaker_03
And it's really important because this sets up a signature from the moment of birth in the birth chart when a person has a planet in the first house. And what will happen is that
00:33:48 Speaker_03
the signature will get activated repeatedly at different points in the life, which will then awaken it. That's one of the reasons why we look at placements in the first house, because we know that not only are they sometimes going to indicate inborn
00:34:05 Speaker_03
traits that arise from the native, but also at certain periods in the life when certain transits or time lords activate that first house placement, there'll be certain circumstances that will lead to the awakening of that placement in different ways, either due to internal things or external things that are swirling around and causing that to become awakened.
00:34:30 Speaker_03
So the other thing I want to say as a preliminary to this is that major themes in a person's life are often repeated in multiple indications.
00:34:39 Speaker_03
So we're going to be looking at planets in the first house and how that matches up with major themes that arise in a person's life, but there are often other indications in the chart that also indicate the same or similar or overlapping themes.
00:34:56 Speaker_03
So even though we're going to focus on and say, this thing in the person's life arose as a result of this first house placement, and that's true.
00:35:05 Speaker_03
In some of the most distinctive examples, there's also often other placements that indicate or give you additional information about why that thing arose in the person's life.
00:35:15 Speaker_03
So I just wanted to make that distinction clear as we focus on first house placements, that obviously there's other stuff going on as well.
00:35:24 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, that's always a hazard in this kind of exercise because an astrology chart is always this combination of factors contributing to a unique outcome.
00:35:39 Speaker_01
So there's always some risk when you're just talking about one feature of a horoscope that you can risk giving the impression or overemphasizing the isolation of that one factor.
00:35:53 Speaker_01
Whereas, of course, it's always interacting with everything else that contributes to a given astrological chart being what it is and representing the unique individual that it does.
00:36:06 Speaker_03
Totally, for sure. Yeah. All right, so I want to start with the Moon in the First House placements and let's talk about the Moon and what it means in the First House.
00:36:16 Speaker_03
One of the ones I wanted to start with was just an interesting theme that you and I found just going through our chart files was the theme of memory being really important to people with the Moon in the First House and how sometimes having a really strong memory becomes a distinctive, not just
00:36:36 Speaker_03
almost like physical trait that the person has, like an advantage or a gift, but also sometimes it becomes tied in with their character and their actions as well. So the first one that we found for this actually was the American writer Jack Kerouac.
00:36:55 Speaker_03
So I'll pull his chart up. You want to introduce this one? CB
00:37:02 Speaker_01
Yeah, he was a great favorite of mine when I was a young teenager. And he's a writer who wrote, you know, I mean, certainly memory is a huge factor in what he did.
00:37:18 Speaker_01
His most famous work is On the Road, which is an account of a sort of a long hitchhiking journey he took through the United States in the early 1950s, and about some of the people who, you know, his circle of friends and what they were up to.
00:37:32 Speaker_03
I think also because the Moon in ancient astrology has these significations of having to do with wandering and travel to some extent.
00:37:41 Speaker_03
So in his chart, the Ascendant is at 15 degrees of Virgo and the Moon is conjunct the Ascendant at 13 degrees of Virgo. And he was actually born just a day before a lunar eclipse in Virgo, the day after he was born.
00:37:55 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah. So it's a very powerful moon. And that was, you know, he would hitchhike across the country. Sometimes he does try riding the boxcars.
00:38:06 Speaker_01
He has a sort of romantic notion about it, but he does do a lot of hitchhiking, picks up odd jobs here and there. Works as a brakeman on railroads. I think he does some, you know, picking in the fields of food or something.
00:38:21 Speaker_01
You know, various sort of like, you know, just sort of labor type jobs as he roams the country and makes observations about it.
00:38:31 Speaker_01
And it's very much, you know, like he wrote On the Road, the other thing about him was he wanted to write this sort of stream of consciousness style. The original draft of On the Road was written on a long,
00:38:44 Speaker_01
role of teletype paper you know the kind of thing that they use for telegraphs in our day with word processing this wouldn't mean very much you can open up a Word document and write it, write a book that's five times longer than the original on the road, but in the days of typewriters and paper and ink.
00:39:02 Speaker_01
This was quite a feat, you know, he basically fit this this role of teletype paper into his typewriter, and just wrote this very long stream of consciousness work, the eventual final product of on the road was was more sort of edited and pared down although in recent years the original scroll version has been
00:39:22 Speaker_01
I actually just read it not long ago myself. So yeah, I think that's another sort of lunar thing.
00:39:27 Speaker_01
It's not just memory, but maybe this sort of the stream of consciousness style is part of what allowed him to channel his memories and his thoughts in a way that was uninterrupted and unfiltered and raw and true.
00:39:43 Speaker_01
Like a lot of romantics, he was looking for a kind of a truth that's almost sort of unattainable.
00:39:50 Speaker_01
And his wanderings around the world, it's like he was, or around the country rather, it's like he was searching for a world that didn't really exist or only existed in his imagination.
00:40:01 Speaker_03
Yeah. So this is a really great one just because a lot of his work has to do with memory, with processing memory, and the Moon itself.
00:40:10 Speaker_03
We have that idea of when we're recalling memories from the past, we talk about reflecting on our past experiences and having reflections. And the Moon is kind of unique because
00:40:22 Speaker_03
the Moon itself doesn't generate light, it reflects the light from the Sun. So it's like receiving an impression. And in the same way, astrologers associate the Moon with the impressions that we receive that leave an imprint on us.
00:40:38 Speaker_03
So sometimes that's experiences, like physical experiences, but it can also be memories. And it's some of the ways memory becomes
00:40:48 Speaker_03
In some ways, we associate with the mind, but also with the body, because sometimes it can be a physical trait where there's some people that have these incredible photographic memories where they can just retain and remember everything perfectly, whereas there's other people where their memory might be more fuzzy.
00:41:06 Speaker_03
So Kerouac was one who memory and the processing of memory were central themes in his work, and his writing often delves into personal experiences, recollections, and reflections, capturing the essence of specific moments and also specific emotions.
00:41:26 Speaker_03
So he tried to translate his memories into vivid and evocative prose, often blurring the lines between fact and fiction because that subjective element was a little bit more important for him, as well as being one of the central figures of the beat generation, the notion of embracing spontaneity as well.
00:41:49 Speaker_01
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And interestingly, like with his rising sign and his moon being Virgo, On the Road was published in September of 1957, if I recall the very month Pluto was making its ingress to Virgo.
00:42:02 Speaker_01
I tend to think of the On the Road being the work that sort of ushered in Pluto and Virgo and everything that would follow. Kerouac was hugely influential on the, you know, the artists that followed in the 60s.
00:42:18 Speaker_01
In fact, the reason I started reading him when I was 12 or 13 was because I read that Jim Morrison loved Jack Kerouac. And so I was like, well, you know, if Jim Morrison liked him, then I should read him. And so, yeah, there was that sort of
00:42:32 Speaker_01
The fact that On the Road is published when it is, it immediately becomes a huge sensation. It's only a second novel. He had published one a few years earlier, but On the Road really just sort of, yeah, it channels the zeitgeist.
00:42:46 Speaker_01
It touches on something that was just sort of surfacing in America at the time.
00:42:54 Speaker_01
And yeah, I think it's really, it's the signature work of Pluto's ingress into Virgo and everything that followed, even though it was the late 50s, it's really about what would follow in the 60s.
00:43:05 Speaker_03
Yeah. All right. And the last thing is just, there's also a theme of like nostalgia and longing where many of his works are infused with a sort of sense of nostalgia and a longing for the past. And he often reflects on his childhood, his friendships,
00:43:21 Speaker_03
past loves, exploring the bittersweet nature of memory and the passage of time. We'll see a little bit of that again with Saturn.
00:43:32 Speaker_01
The other thing I was going to say is it occurs to me, this thought just came back to me, Kerouac spent the last few years of his life living with his mother. They were basically like roommates and friends.
00:43:45 Speaker_01
He had an older brother who died when he was very young. His work is very much haunted by the ghost of his dead brother, if you will. And I think that's part of his close connection to his mother.
00:43:58 Speaker_01
Ironically, this is one of these, I'll just tell this as a little aside. I do want to keep moving. Oh, okay. All right.
00:44:06 Speaker_03
But if it's relevant, then go for it.
00:44:08 Speaker_01
I just want to make sure we keep moving here. Yeah, yeah. It's hugely relevant. Kerouac's brother died in June of 1926, when he was just four years old.
00:44:18 Speaker_01
Years later, his friend and editor, and really the champion, the guy who helped him get On the Road published, Allen Ginsberg, was born on the very day that Kerouac's brother Gerard had died in June of 1926. So there's this weird sort of
00:44:35 Speaker_01
yeah, connection between his dead brother and then this friend who's largely responsible for him becoming a known writer, a celebrated writer.
00:44:46 Speaker_03
Okay. That's interesting. I don't know if this is relevant, but in ancient astrology and some of the earliest Hellenistic authors, they associate the first house with siblings. Later astrologers tended to associate the third house with siblings more.
00:44:58 Speaker_03
But some of the early authors, for some reason, also associated the first house with siblings, probably because of Mercury having its joy there.
00:45:06 Speaker_03
So not sure if relevant, but just going to mention that in passing, and then let's keep it moving because we got a lot of other examples to go through. All right, so next example is Garry Kasparov.
00:45:18 Speaker_03
Garry Kasparov has Sagittarius rising at 17 Sagittarius with the Moon conjunct the Ascendant at 15 degrees of Sagittarius.
00:45:26 Speaker_03
And he's a chess champion with the ruler of the Ascendant in the fifth house of games, and he literally became the world master at what is essentially just a game, but he's the best person at that game in the world for a point of time. And I guess
00:45:43 Speaker_03
That'll actually be our first example of a ruler of the Ascendant placement and how the ruler of the Ascendant can sometimes direct you towards a specific topic or a specific area in life that then will tend to stand out or become distinctive for you in some way.
00:45:59 Speaker_03
So for him, it became part of his life's work, playing chess. But for him, one of the things that's cool is that
00:46:08 Speaker_03
he was renowned for his exceptionally strong memory, particularly in the context of chess, and his ability to recall past games, positions, and strategies is considered to be legendary within the chess world.
00:46:23 Speaker_03
That's another really striking example of how memory can become really core and really important theme for a person.
00:46:31 Speaker_03
In some ways, it's like an inborn bodily trait, but then for him, he actively, as a result of his deliberate choices and volition, also tried to cultivate that trait of having a good memory and trained himself by studying the games of lots of other people in order to become a chess champion.
00:46:59 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, it's a very special skill. I mean, Garry Kasparov is the chess player, of course, who played a computer. They had to find an adversary who was his match, and that's what they could come up with. So it's some indication.
00:47:18 Speaker_01
Yeah, he's that good.
00:47:20 Speaker_03
Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting that it's like it's ruling the eighth house in his chart. And a lot of what he did was studying the games that other people had played in order to learn from them.
00:47:30 Speaker_03
And that might be relevant in that context with the Moon ruling the eighth house. So another example is Warren Buffett, who has Sagittarius Rising and
00:47:42 Speaker_03
the Moon in Sagittarius in the first whole sign house, and the ruler of the Ascendant is Jupiter in the eighth house of other people's money. And he, of course, is a very famous American investor. He's one of the most famous investors of all time.
00:47:56 Speaker_03
And one of the things that's distinctive about him is that he also is known for having an exceptionally strong memory, particularly when it comes to numbers and financial data.
00:48:07 Speaker_03
and he is renowned for his ability to recall financial figures like company revenues, profit margins, and stock prices, often from years past. So he attributes this to his extensive reading and deep understanding of business.
00:48:22 Speaker_03
But I think there's also another indication here, like our previous two examples, that there's almost like this inborn trait that he has that he was able to cultivate of having a good memory.
00:48:34 Speaker_01
Yeah, I don't know as much about Warren Buffett, but that is something even I know about him is that he's supposed to have that special sort of ability to track where everything has been and where he thinks it's going. Yeah.
00:48:53 Speaker_01
That's what's allowed him to stand out from the crowd.
00:48:57 Speaker_03
All right, so I only have two other examples of Moon in the first house, then we'll move on. One of them is Adrian Brody, who is a famous actor who's especially known for his portrayal.
00:49:13 Speaker_03
He was in the 2002 film, The Pianist, and he, in that film, went through a radical body transformation where he lost 30 pounds to achieve this emaciated look in order to portray the suffering of his character during the Holocaust.
00:49:34 Speaker_03
So this notion of going through major bodily transformations sometimes comes up in the first house, and we'll see that a lot. In his case, it was interesting.
00:49:46 Speaker_03
because his appearance and his weight can kind of wax and wane like the Moon, depending on the role that he has. In another role for predators, for example, he got really buff and buffed up.
00:49:58 Speaker_03
So it's interesting seeing the ability to have that change or that almost shape-shifting.
00:50:04 Speaker_01
Yeah, and I think there's also something about Adrian Brody's face that has a tremendous sort of, I mean, obviously any good actor can emote in very subtle ways with their face, film actors, but he's got a kind of a special pathos to his face.
00:50:20 Speaker_01
He's got a very sort of special face and the way he can convey sadness is, you know, yeah, on par with some of the great sort of sad faces of cinema. So yeah, I think of them as someone who could have been in Fellini movies and what have you.
00:50:39 Speaker_01
It's a very special look, I think.
00:50:41 Speaker_03
Yeah, well, he has very expressive eyes. And he also uses his body expressively in his performance by incorporating physical gestures and movements to convey his character's emotion and inner lives.
00:50:54 Speaker_03
And I think that's part of it as well, the physicality that adds this additional layer of depth and nuance to his acting. So that's one. My last example of the first house one, this is when I... It's just a...
00:51:11 Speaker_03
A person I know who is a healer, who has cancer rising and the moon in cancer, and they run a clinic, an Ayurvedic medicine clinic, as well as an ashram.
00:51:26 Speaker_03
So it's a woman who had a background in training as a doctor, but then at one point decided to seek out and embrace more holistic, traditional healing methods using ancient Indian medicine, which is known as Ayurveda.
00:51:46 Speaker_03
So she actually heals people and takes care of people at the place that she actually lives, which is also an ashram, and also focuses not just on medicine, but also things like food and how you take care of yourself and your overall diet and things like that as part of achieving holistic health.
00:52:08 Speaker_03
So I thought that was a really good example of just what the Moon in the first house can do as well, especially when it's in its own domicile in Cancer and the Ascendant itself is also in Cancer, that you get a lot of those themes.
00:52:24 Speaker_03
So I also have the Moon in the 1st house in Aquarius, but because it's in Aquarius, it comes off as a little distant.
00:52:33 Speaker_03
But I also sometimes have that impulse to take care of myself, to take care of people that I know, or take care of friends or things like that. And sometimes I recognize that as part of
00:52:44 Speaker_03
you know, my own character traits sometimes, and can also be kind of like an emotional, a person that's deeply affected by my emotions, even though it doesn't come off that way, because I also have Saturn squared the Moon, so I get more of the Saturn part of that.
00:53:02 Speaker_03
And then also with the Moon in the first house, one of the previous ones you mentioned with Jack Kerouac, you talked about his mother being prominent in his life, My mother has been really prominent in my life since I was raised by a single mother.
00:53:13 Speaker_03
And yeah, so you just think about some of the basic significations of the planet, in this case, the Moon.
00:53:21 Speaker_03
Whatever the most basic significations are, if that planet's in the first house, you will see some of those significations manifest in strikingly literal ways. And that's the takeaway here.
00:53:31 Speaker_03
And that's what we're going to be demonstrating repeatedly as we go through all of the planets in this series. Yeah. All right. So let's move on to the sun in the first house.
00:53:44 Speaker_03
So this is what I struggled with a little bit more in terms of seeing things that made sense. But some of the themes that we found as we were going through chart examples, you said people who are not changed by their environment.
00:54:01 Speaker_03
And one of the ones that was connected with that was people who are what they are. You said wherever they put them, so they're not... chameleons or adaptable, because that's one of the things that the sun does, is the sun just radiates light.
00:54:15 Speaker_03
And that's one of the things we learned, especially in the Zodiac series about Leo, is it tend to be people who are authentic and people who just radiate whatever their light is out into the world and just are who they are.
00:54:29 Speaker_03
It's the doing my thing placement, I am who I am. Yeah, so that's how you describe it. And you have the sun in the first house, right?
00:54:41 Speaker_01
I do have the sun in the first house, and I am what I am. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I certainly, I recognize in that way.
00:54:51 Speaker_01
When I was studying astrology, it made it more complicated to have the sun and the ascendant in the same sign, because I had to find different ways to learn what the difference is, because there really isn't in my particular chart.
00:55:05 Speaker_01
But aside from that, I certainly, I recognize. And all the different examples we're going to be talking about today of other people who have the sun in the first house, I recognize
00:55:17 Speaker_01
the same theme that I see in myself, this sort of unchangeability relative to your environment. You are who you are and you just, you stay who you are even if you're put in an entirely different sort of setting.
00:55:30 Speaker_03
Yeah, I think that's important in that it ties back.
00:55:32 Speaker_03
Actually, there's a theme in the last one I forgot to mention, which is when the Moon is in the first, the body and physical vitality becomes a more central theme in the person's life in directing their life direction and impacting their life direction than in other lives.
00:55:47 Speaker_03
I've had that with the body having the Moon in the first house, the body is more sensitive to things.
00:55:53 Speaker_03
So for example, I've always been more sensitive to medicines or drugs or other things or had the ability to get sick easier and then have more recently dealt with health issues, more like chronic health since the Moon rules the sixth house in my chart.
00:56:08 Speaker_03
So it's sort of like importing illness there. So the body physical vitality being even more important in the first house and dictating things.
00:56:17 Speaker_03
With the Sun in the first house though, it's people whose personality drives their direction in life for better or worse, where their spirit and what they radiate from that internal part of who they are tends then to also direct their life in different ways so that they can't be anyone other than who they are.
00:56:42 Speaker_01
Right. Now, I mean this is the interesting thing we were talking a minute ago about how Mercury in the first house is about adaptability.
00:56:49 Speaker_01
And, and, but the sun in the first house is really sort of the reverse of that like you, you're not adapting you're, you're, you know, you're going to be a square peg in a round hole if that's if that's how you know you came out.
00:57:01 Speaker_01
What does get interesting is some people have both the Sun and Mercury in the first house, like myself for instance. And so there, you know, there can be some weird sort of fusion of these two seemingly contradictory principles.
00:57:12 Speaker_01
But yeah, the Sun on its own, in the first house, I see it being the sort of the counterweight to Mercury in the first house. It's not adaptable, it's just, it is what it is, you know, whether it's in the right place or not.
00:57:24 Speaker_03
Yeah.
00:57:24 Speaker_03
Some of the things I was seeing were in the chart examples were leaders, people who stand out or people who want to stand out or want to be or are unique in some way, people who want to be recognized or are recognized for their uniqueness, the uniqueness of their personality, like radiating what it radiates.
00:57:46 Speaker_03
but also people who lead or become central in some ways, like people who become in charge of something or become the center through which other things revolve in the same way that the planets revolve around the sun.
00:58:02 Speaker_03
So some of the ones that I saw as I was going through chart examples was there were leading filmmakers like George Lucas, for example, who set a trend for – we'll come back to George Lucas because he also has Venus and Mercury in the first house.
00:58:19 Speaker_03
But George Lucas sort of setting a standard for film, for example, like Star Wars and special effects and things like that. So there's leaders in filmmaking. There's leading actors like Val Kilmer was one with the first house.
00:58:35 Speaker_03
Bruce Lee was another one with the first house Sun and Sagittarius conjunct the Ascendant. There's leading comedians like Dave Chappelle as somebody with the Sun in the first house, for example, that I noticed.
00:58:50 Speaker_03
There's leading musicians like Dave Grohl, Doja Cat, and Miles Davis are all first house Suns or the Sun conjunct the Ascendant.
00:59:03 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah. We have some good examples here that we got to talk about.
00:59:07 Speaker_03
Yeah. Even like leading businessmen, like Elon Musk, for example, has the sun in the first house.
00:59:15 Speaker_03
So there's quite a few examples of that, of just like people that stand out as like leaders in their respective fields in some way, or people that stand out as unique or like stand out above the crowd. Yeah. Yeah. All right.
00:59:33 Speaker_03
I'm ready to move on unless there's anything else you want to say about those.
00:59:38 Speaker_01
Were we going to look at their charts? No, I was just going to like... Okay. Okay. Oh, okay. I thought we were, but all right, that's fine. No, well, the one thing I was going to say that if we're not looking at the charts,
00:59:50 Speaker_01
There is something about like Dave Grohl, Miles Davis, people who started off being sort of backup musicians to other very famous musicians but sort of outlived them and in some ways sort of
01:00:07 Speaker_01
Not necessarily totally outshine that but but had careers that are far longer and more successful than the icons they started off with Dave Grohl of course started off in Nirvana as Kurt Cobain's drummer, but then when Kurt Cobain died he started his own band and he's been going strong for decades now.
01:00:24 Speaker_01
whereas Cobain really had a career of just a few years. And Miles Davis got his start playing with Charlie Parker, who was also, you know, as important to jazz, you might say, as Kurt Cobain was to rock in the 90s.
01:00:37 Speaker_01
And just sort of similar story, he played with Charlie Parker, Charlie Parker died, and Miles Davis went on to have a career of some four or five decades and, you know, huge success, pretty much the most successful jazz musician ever.
01:00:51 Speaker_01
So yeah, there's some element of that, of the sun in the first house, that you sort of, you outshine, you outlive, even though they started off in the background playing for these other, you know, really outstanding musical icons, somehow they sort of, they found their own way, that the light shines so brightly that they're able to match and even outdo the people who, you know, brought them their first success.
01:01:20 Speaker_03
Here's Miles Davis chart with the Ascendant around eight degrees of Gemini and the Sun around four degrees of Gemini. So it's right there rising over the eastern horizon.
01:01:30 Speaker_03
And maybe then that astronomically is part of what you're describing because the Sun is just like emerging. emerging into view at that point.
01:01:39 Speaker_03
So maybe part of the symbolism of the first house Sun is that thing of emergence of starting out with humble origins in some way, or starting out living almost in the shadow of somebody else, but then eventually, as life progresses, emerging into view and emerging out into being your own central authority that stands out, or in some instances, even outshines your mentor.
01:02:06 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah. And it's funny about Miles because, you know, it's the son in Ascendant in Gemini. And we've been talking about like, I mean, typically the son is not adaptable, not changeable. We were saying like, this is someone who isn't a chameleon.
01:02:21 Speaker_01
Well, Miles was a chameleon, but on his own terms. And it was always, Like he moved very well with this.
01:02:28 Speaker_01
I mean, to have a career that spanned that many decades, he always changed with the times and yet it was always him and he always had his trumpet always sounded the same. It was just all the stuff happening around him that was updated.
01:02:39 Speaker_01
So it's an interesting sort of combination of the two. Yeah, I wouldn't say he was so much adaptable. It's just that he forced adaptation around him. And like he said himself, he changed music four or five times. He set the course.
01:02:56 Speaker_01
Definitely, absolutely a leader.
01:02:59 Speaker_03
Well, I mean, it's Gemini, which is a mutable sign. So there's a certain amount of adaptability in that inherently. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. As opposed to, let's say, a fixed sign rising where it is a little bit less adaptability.
01:03:13 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, there are musical decisions he made that in some ways, you know, you could give him credit for inspiring what eventually became, say, like, for instance, dance music, you know.
01:03:24 Speaker_01
I won't go into the whole musicology of it, but he really sort of, he changed things in some fundamental ways that, you know, like virtually all the music that you hear today in some way goes back to him and things that he instigated.
01:03:37 Speaker_03
Yeah, he was constantly pushing the boundaries of jazz and exploring different styles throughout his career. Like some of the different styles were like bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, jazz fusion and funk.
01:03:52 Speaker_03
So he definitely wasn't afraid to experiment and challenge the status quo, which I think has a lot to do with the rising sign being a Gemini.
01:04:00 Speaker_03
And we'll touch upon that occasionally as we go through things that the quality of the sign really impacts things and really imports a lot of its own significations into things as well.
01:04:10 Speaker_03
In this case, a lot of his adaptability, his willingness to try new things, try new styles, I think is a large part of that. And yet with the sun there still shining out as distinctive in his own right, whatever new style he was trying.
01:04:27 Speaker_01
Yeah, his trumpet always sounded like him. That's the thing. He might have synthesizers in the 80s or just a piano in the 50s, but his trumpet always sounded like his trumpet.
01:04:38 Speaker_01
So yeah, there was something fundamentally unchangeable despite all the changes around him. Definitely.
01:04:45 Speaker_03
All right, cool. Well, I think that's good for this section. I want to take a brief break and then we'll transition into the other planets.
01:04:53 Speaker_03
If you're enjoying this episode and you want to go into more depth with some of the concepts that we're talking about, then you should check out my Hellenistic Astrology course, which is an online course in ancient astrology.
01:05:04 Speaker_03
The course is perfect for beginner and intermediate students because I take people from basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts.
01:05:13 Speaker_03
There's over 100 hours of video lectures where I go into much greater detail and I use a lot more example charts to go through different concepts like the 12 houses and what they mean, the ruler of the ascendant, the ruler of different houses in other houses, and even advanced timing techniques.
01:05:31 Speaker_03
So there's also a monthly webinar where I read the charts of students in order to demonstrate how the concepts work in practice. You can find out more information at theastrologyschool.com. All right, we're back from break.
01:05:44 Speaker_03
Let's transition to talking about Mercury in the 1st house.
01:05:48 Speaker_03
One of the things that was really cool when I was going through examples for this is there was a string of unique ones that were Mercury in the 1st house, especially ones conjunct the Ascendant closely, people that had iconic or unique voices in some ways.
01:06:04 Speaker_03
So one of the first ones we started seeing in this series was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was born with cancer rising. He has 19 degrees of cancer rising, and Mercury pretty much exactly conjunct the degree of the Ascendant at 18 degrees of cancer.
01:06:20 Speaker_03
And then he also has Venus in the 1st house at 26 degrees of cancer. So it's kind of mixed because you have both Venus and Mercury in the 1st house, and both of those are relevant in different ways.
01:06:34 Speaker_03
So, but in terms of the Mercury placement, the main thing is that he has this iconic Australian accent. So he was an Austrian, not an Australian. That'd be really funny if it was. I'll be back, mate.
01:06:54 Speaker_03
So he was a bodybuilder from Austria, and then he immigrated to the US first for bodybuilding, and then he got into acting. At first, they had him in roles where he didn't speak at all, like in Conan.
01:07:12 Speaker_01
Yeah, Conan the Barbarian, really.
01:07:15 Speaker_03
He didn't really have any speaking. And then eventually he started speaking a little bit, but then he had
01:07:24 Speaker_03
Eventually, because he had a choice at a certain point, I think I saw in a documentary not long ago that he could have started training his voice to get rid of the accent, but then he ended up making a deliberate decision not to because his Austrian accent started becoming an iconic part of just his persona in American film and media and everything else.
01:07:49 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, it's really quite the twist. I mean, talk about adaptability because, yeah, I mean, he first became famous in cinema because he played Conan and then he's the Terminator, which of course was huge. And so that made him a really big name.
01:08:04 Speaker_01
I mean, if he had only made Conan, he probably would have been a forgotten commodity within a few years, but he makes the Terminator, which is huge. And he says, I'll be back.
01:08:14 Speaker_03
I mean, that's a good point that that was a catch line, like literally everyone. that there was from that movie, because not everybody has an iconic sentence that just becomes associated with it, but he did from that movie.
01:08:28 Speaker_01
Yeah, exactly. Even though it's almost all that he says in the movie. But in order for him to keep making movies, he couldn't just play these, he couldn't just keep playing the Terminator and Conan over and over.
01:08:40 Speaker_01
So yeah, movies like Predator or all the other things that followed, He had to have dialogue. And he had this seemingly awkward Austrian accent that one would think that the common wisdom at the time would have been, well, that's a non-starter.
01:08:57 Speaker_01
You can't be playing some American GI if you've got this sort of seemingly clumsy Austrian accent. But it really worked for him. It didn't matter.
01:09:10 Speaker_01
He was just, you know, he was, he had his own appeal, he had his own charisma and the accent, you know, might have been a liability for just about anyone else but it just didn't seem to work for him.
01:09:23 Speaker_01
So yeah, whether he would have had it in his power to change or not. It came to sort of, it's more, we think of it more even than the muscles. I mean, it's true.
01:09:35 Speaker_01
When he first came on the scene, it was the body, the physique that defined him as a movie performer. The Venus. Yeah, yeah, it was why he was hired to star in the movies that he was.
01:09:52 Speaker_01
But then as time went on, like, okay, he still had the body, you know, largely, but it was that voice that, you know, really came to define him. So it's, yeah, it really is something.
01:10:05 Speaker_03
Yeah. And I was going to save his Venus for later, but maybe we might as well just do it now because that's the other thing he has in the first house is that Venus. And his initial thing was doing bodybuilding and having this physique
01:10:22 Speaker_03
that I don't know how to describe it, but he just has a very good physique.
01:10:27 Speaker_03
His body is very symmetrical when he worked on it and stuff, so that he eventually won a lot of bodybuilding competitions early in his career before he became an actor, where he just kept winning over and over again.
01:10:42 Speaker_01
Mr. Universe and all that stuff, yeah.
01:10:46 Speaker_03
Yeah, and I think that's so interesting as a manifestation then when we're talking about the first house having to do with the body and that he's literally somebody that initially that was his early success in life was having a physical body that he had worked on.
01:11:02 Speaker_03
It was part inherited, so some of it was outside of his control in terms of having good genes, but then also
01:11:10 Speaker_03
he put an incredible amount of work and effort into developing his body further and then having the positive benefits as a result of that or having success in his life that resulted from him working on his body and crafting it in different ways.
01:11:26 Speaker_03
And then later, of course, one of the things that we'll see with Venus in the first and associating the first house with the appearance is that sometimes when you have positive placements in the first house, it can mean that you're
01:11:38 Speaker_03
attractive or regarded as attractive or physically appealing in some way. And of course, as a handsome, charismatic leading man, that also became one of the reasons why he was able to become a leading man in Hollywood.
01:11:52 Speaker_01
Yeah, exactly. You can see how having more than one planet in the first house, they each have a role to play in how the individual turns out. Exactly.
01:12:04 Speaker_03
Yeah, so that's a great, that's our first example. So other examples though, another iconic voice, and this has always been one of my favorite examples, is the actor James Earl Jones. Dark Vader, but also for my generation, Mufasa.
01:12:24 Speaker_03
So another iconic voice, but for him, he has Capricorn rising and Mercury, the Moon, Saturn, and the Sun in the first house. So the interesting thing about him is Mercury is actually stationary in his chart, and this is a night chart.
01:12:44 Speaker_03
The Sun is below the horizon, so that Saturn placement in the 1st house is actually more challenging. So it's introducing an element of there's some challenging things that have to do with the body.
01:12:55 Speaker_03
And in his instance, because it's a Saturn-Mercury conjunction, sometimes a Mercury-Saturn conjunction can hamper communication in some way. So he actually had speech issues very early in his life, right?
01:13:09 Speaker_01
Right, right. Yeah, I've heard that. I've forgotten the story. It's been a while.
01:13:13 Speaker_01
But it's not an uncommon story that someone has a speech impediment, maybe a stammer or something of that nature, and they take courses or guidance to correct it, and it somehow leads them into acting. I've heard that story a few times.
01:13:32 Speaker_03
For him, he struggled with a severe stutter as a child, and the stutter was so debilitating that he was essentially mute for nearly the first eight years of his life, only speaking to his family and to animals.
01:13:46 Speaker_03
But then Jones eventually overcame his silence with the help of a high school teacher who encouraged him to recite poetry in class.
01:13:55 Speaker_03
So this practice of speaking out loud, even with a stutter, helped him to eventually gain confidence and eventually overcome his speech impediment. So that eventually when he grew up, he did some of the most iconic voice acting roles of
01:14:12 Speaker_03
you know, Hollywood cinema of like all time. First with, he was the voice, he wasn't the actor. There was like another actor who was in the... David Prowse, who was in the Darth Vader suit. Right.
01:14:25 Speaker_03
But then James Earl Jones actually voiced Darth Vader and Darth Vader had this deep, powerful, scary voice.
01:14:36 Speaker_01
How would you describe it? Yeah. I mean, it's deep bassy resonance. Of course, there was that sound effect in the background, the breathing, but I mean, come on, in cinema, I mean, what voice is more sort of identifiable and iconic than Darth Vader?
01:14:57 Speaker_01
Even more so than Arnold Schwarzenegger. And it might be literally the only voice I can think of that really does sort of top Arnold Schwarzenegger in terms of that identifiable quality, something so memorable. Yeah, Darth Vader is terrifying.
01:15:14 Speaker_03
Yeah, so that, and then later he also played the voice of Mufasa, who's like the father lion in The Lion King, the original animated Lion King in the 1990s, which was one of the most successful Disney animated movies of all time, and he gave the voice.
01:15:31 Speaker_03
And again, this was more of a positive one because he was playing a positive character instead of a bad guy like with Darth Vader. But in that, he had this deep, rich voice that was just very iconic.
01:15:45 Speaker_03
So this is an interesting case because we have Mercury and Saturn. And so we can see how Saturn in the first house initially lended some obstacles and some difficulties
01:15:55 Speaker_03
terms of his body and some physical thing that he was kind of born with, with a stutter that was hampering his ability to speak and how he experienced challenges and struggles, but eventually was able to overcome that and his difficulties eventually became a source of strength and a source of power.
01:16:15 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah. And a great actor altogether. I mean, you can see him in his younger years, he was in Dr. Strangelove, you know? So he's, yeah, he's all over the place. He's a fine, fine actor.
01:16:27 Speaker_03
And I forgot to mention, I always think of him in Field of Dreams. That was my favorite actor-actor one that he did. But for the audio listeners, his Ascendant is at nine degrees of Capricorn and his Mercury is at six degrees of Capricorn.
01:16:40 Speaker_03
So his Mercury is very close to his Ascendant. And that's something I meant to mention that any planet in the rising sign
01:16:48 Speaker_03
using whole sign houses is in the 1st house and is going to lend some of its significations to the 1st house or will manifest some of the significations of the 1st house.
01:16:58 Speaker_03
But planets that are close to and especially within a few degrees of the actual Ascendant will be even more powerful or will be particularly prominent in the person's life. CB All right, so that was another one.
01:17:15 Speaker_03
And then a third example is the musician Tom Waits. So he has Sagittarius rising at 23 degrees and Mercury conjunct the Ascendant at 23 Sagittarius exactly.
01:17:33 Speaker_03
The Sun is also in the 1st house at 15 Sag, but his Mercury interestingly at 23 Sag is squaring Mars at 21 degrees of Virgo in the 10th house and squaring Saturn at 18 degrees of Virgo in the 10th house. So there's some challenges to his Mercury
01:17:51 Speaker_03
And it's also partially in the context of his career. And what's amazing is that he is a musician and a singer who's known for his distinctive, deep, gravelly, raspy singing voice that's super, super distinctive.
01:18:10 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, his voice is so distinctive. I remember back in the 80s, I think it was Doritos or one of those potato chip companies used a Tom Waits sound alike for one of their commercials and he sued them.
01:18:25 Speaker_01
You know, his voice is so unique and identifiable. that he was able to prove in a court of law that an imitator was imitating him specifically. So that's when you know you really do have a distinctive voice.
01:18:41 Speaker_01
And he's also an interesting example because, like you saw, he's got the sun and Mercury in the first house.
01:18:47 Speaker_01
And so we're also seeing someone like he's very much also a sun in the first house guy in that Tom Waits is Tom Waits no matter where you put him. You're not going to be able to dress him up in any way that is not sort of authentic to who he is.
01:19:05 Speaker_01
You know, he's got a very sort of distinct sort of, yeah, going back to Jack Kerouac, a sort of, I don't want to, what's the right word? Like a sort of, sort of, he embodies a sort of a vagrant persona as a performing artist.
01:19:22 Speaker_01
He's supposed to be someone from, you know, like some, you know, sleazy bar down the alley of some, you know, port town, if you will. Like there's supposed to be something underworld about that persona.
01:19:38 Speaker_01
And you really can't put him in, you know, a tuxedo and have him performing at Carnegie Hall. That's just not who Tom Waits is. I hope I'm getting that across, but that's a real sort of son in the first house. Like he is who he is.
01:19:54 Speaker_01
But at the same time, he's got that Mercury, which is just a very distinctive voice.
01:19:59 Speaker_03
Yeah. His voice is actually so distinctive that Heath Ledger later, for his role of the Joker, imitated Tom Waits voice.
01:20:10 Speaker_00
I didn't know that, but I get it immediately. I know what you mean. Yeah.
01:20:14 Speaker_03
So if anybody watches, what was the second Batman movie that Christopher Nolan directed, the iconic one?
01:20:18 Speaker_00
The Dark Knight. The Dark Knight.
01:20:21 Speaker_03
Yeah. The Dark Knight, Heath Rager's Joker has this like raspy gravelly voice in that. And there's some comparisons you can watch.
01:20:31 Speaker_01
But also a bit of a sing song quality to it. Yeah. And Tom Waits is actually, he's acted in some movies as well, really. Stranger than Paradise, a great Jim Jarmusch movie. He's good at acting himself. Francis Ford Copley, he's been in some of his stuff.
01:20:45 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah.
01:20:47 Speaker_03
Very distinct voice. So that was another one. And he also made his voice worse by smoking and drinking. So it actually made it even more gravelly and challenging. But anyway, so that's another example.
01:21:00 Speaker_03
Other Mercury in the first house ones that are iconic voices, well, There's other ones, but we don't have to keep on that. There's other ones that display other themes, and I have keywords for some of them.
01:21:16 Speaker_03
Johnny Carson, for example, had Mercury conjunct Saturn and Scorpio on the Ascendant. He was the talk show host.
01:21:24 Speaker_03
He was originally a radio DJ host, a radio personality with his voice, but then later he hosted what became an iconic The Tonight Show, basically.
01:21:38 Speaker_03
Other Mercury conjunct Ascendant people, Edward Snowden has Mercury conjunct the Ascendant in Gemini with Mars and the Sun rising there as well, and he was the whistleblower.
01:21:50 Speaker_03
Other ones, Donald Glover, who has Virgo rising and Mercury in Virgo conjunct the Ascendant. He's talented in many different areas. He's excelled as being a rapper, a comedian, as well as an actor.
01:22:04 Speaker_03
And I like his because it shows sort of like the Miles Davis example with Gemini rising.
01:22:11 Speaker_03
with mutable signs, especially Mercury ruled mutable signs, you get people that can be good at lots of different things or who do lots of different things, have great versatility.
01:22:25 Speaker_03
Others are Steve Wozniak, who has Virgo Rising with Mercury conjunct Saturn in Virgo in the first house, and he was the tech whiz.
01:22:32 Speaker_03
So he was one of the founders of Apple Computer with Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak programmed and physically constructed some of the first personal computers.
01:22:43 Speaker_00
Yeah. Smart, smart man.
01:22:46 Speaker_03
With Virgo, you get this technical facility sometimes. Others, there's Chuck Berry, who was Scorpio rising with Mercury and Saturn in Scorpio, and he was a guitarist and songwriter who pioneered rock and roll.
01:23:00 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah. And a fantastic lyricist he's a Chuck Berry songwriting, I mean he's a great storyteller, it's just amazing. The, the quality of his writing. When you think that he was writing pop songs for teenagers, it's, it's.
01:23:18 Speaker_01
really top shelf storytelling, but very economic. It's funny that it's Mercury-Saturn. It doesn't have to be verbose or really elaborate, but just telling really well-told, concise little stories. Listen to the song that he has in Pulp Fiction.
01:23:37 Speaker_01
You never can tell. It's a little story and it's so well-told and everything rhymes and it's just, it's fantastic. Absolutely fantastic writing.
01:23:47 Speaker_03
And then the last one I had was Jimi Hendrix who had Mercury, Venus and the Sun in Sagittarius. And he was like the guitarist.
01:23:54 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah. One of my all time favorites. Again, he's got those three planets there. So you do have someone who's got the adaptability of Mercury in the first house, but also he is who he is with the Sun in the first house and very much.
01:24:12 Speaker_01
He's an African-American guy from Seattle, but he became a rock star in England. Literally, he's discovered in some bar in New York City by a British impresario.
01:24:24 Speaker_01
He's brought to England and becomes a rock star virtually overnight, while still being himself. Even though you drop him off in a different country with a different culture and all this stuff. Within weeks, he runs the place.
01:24:39 Speaker_01
Within weeks, he has all the British rock stars that, you know, are ruling England at the time, be it Eric Clapton or The Who or The Beatles.
01:24:49 Speaker_01
And he just, he moves to England in 1966 and he just, you know, changes everything and totally by, you know, being who he is. And certainly, you know, the Venus there as well, he was incredibly appealing. I mean, you know, one of the top sort of
01:25:07 Speaker_01
sex symbols in rock history as well. And just a phenomenal musician, a great writer as well. So yeah, it's all there in his chart.
01:25:17 Speaker_03
All right. So we'll come back to Mercury. That's it for Mercury examples for now, but we'll see other examples combined with other planets later on.
01:25:26 Speaker_03
But those are some of the purest expression of some Mercury significations that I could find, especially with the iconic voices. Yeah. All right, so let's move on to talking about Venus in the 1st house.
01:25:39 Speaker_03
So one of the ones that I've always used and that many people think of for Venus in the 1st house is Angelina Jolie, who has Cancer rising and Venus exactly conjunct the degree of the Ascendant in Cancer.
01:25:59 Speaker_03
So here is her chart where we can see for those listening to the audio version, we see the Ascendant at 28 degrees of Cancer and we see Venus right on top of the Ascendant at 28 degrees of Cancer.
01:26:13 Speaker_03
So we've talked about how the first house can represent the physical body and also the appearance and sometimes natural traits or inborn traits that arise from you.
01:26:24 Speaker_03
And for her, especially in the 2000s, in the early 2000s, she would frequently appear on lists of
01:26:33 Speaker_03
the top 10 most beautiful people in the world or sexiest people in the world or whatever in the tabloids and different things like that and was just widely regarded for her beauty or her physical appearance, whatever that was exactly that people considered to be beautiful or have good appearance at the time, that was it at the time.
01:26:57 Speaker_01
Yeah, and her last name even means pretty in French. So it's even there in the name.
01:27:05 Speaker_03
Yeah, for sure. So what's interesting about hers, though, is that it's not just Venus. People often cite her. Venus.
01:27:13 Speaker_03
Astrologers often say her Venus right on the Ascendant because it's so prominent and because everyone that was around in the 2000s just remembers that period where she was one of the most beautiful people in Hollywood.
01:27:25 Speaker_03
But she also has Saturn in Cancer in the first house. And so, we would also expect there to be some challenges when it comes to the body or the physical manifestation of the native.
01:27:37 Speaker_03
And for her, that manifested in 2013 when she made headlines when she publicly announced her decision to undergo a preventative double mastectomy after learning that she carried a gene mutation which significantly increased her risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer.
01:27:56 Speaker_03
So her mother had actually died of ovarian cancer at the age of 56. and her maternal grandmother also died of cancer.
01:28:05 Speaker_03
So she was very much like thinking of them as well as thinking of her children after genetic testing revealed that she had an 87% chance of developing breast cancer.
01:28:16 Speaker_03
So her decision to go public with her experience was a watershed moment for breast cancer awareness and sparked a global conversation about genetic testing and preventative surgery.
01:28:29 Speaker_03
So many women were inspired by her bravery and her openness, and some chose to undergo genetic testing and preventative surgeries themselves after hearing about what she did. And this phenomenon became known as the Angelina Jolie effect.
01:28:44 Speaker_03
So I wanted to mention that because when you have multiple planets in the first house, oftentimes, sometimes they impact each other. Like in the previous ones, we had
01:28:56 Speaker_03
James Earl Jones, Mercury-Saturn was impacting his voice, or you mentioned Chuck Berry having shorter or more concise songs. So it's like Saturn was limiting or making his Mercury communication more concise.
01:29:11 Speaker_03
But sometimes what happens is you also can have each planet activated at different times in the person's life somewhat independently. So in her case, it's like that Saturn was getting activated at that point, and she was going through that.
01:29:29 Speaker_01
Yeah, and it's Saturn in Cancer of all things. It's almost too literal to be believed.
01:29:38 Speaker_03
Just because Cancer with the body parts is a sissy with the breast and the chest?
01:29:42 Speaker_01
Exactly, exactly. Just as an aside, it occurs to me that her father, John Voight, also was born with Saturn close to the Ascendant.
01:29:54 Speaker_01
an aside, but you do sometimes see this kind of thing in family heritage, that parent and children have the same planets and the same angles. So that's something there as well.
01:30:05 Speaker_03
Yeah.
01:30:06 Speaker_03
And it's interesting also that she was thinking of her mother, that she had died of ovarian cancer as well as her grandmother, so that with Saturn and Cancer ruled by the Moon, there may have been some thoughts of the mother or memory of the family heritage.
01:30:23 Speaker_03
And in that instance, the inheritance of a genetic heritage, of a predisposition to this that was influencing part of her decision. So that's relevant as well.
01:30:34 Speaker_03
So sometimes we're going to be talking about these planets in isolation, but oftentimes there's a whole set of factors involving the placements that are interconnected that are really the reason why the specific scenario comes about, even if we don't always get into all those details.
01:30:51 Speaker_01
Exactly.
01:30:51 Speaker_03
Yeah. Yeah. All right. So that was one. Another example that I've always used of Venus in the first house is the actor Paul Newman who had Capricorn rising and Venus exactly conjunct the degree of the Ascendant within a degree. So let me put his chart up.
01:31:19 Speaker_03
we go. So he had 13 degrees of Capricorn rising and Venus at 14 degrees of Capricorn conjunct the Ascendant within a degree. And as an actor, he was viewed sort of like Angelina Jolie was in the 2000s,
01:31:35 Speaker_03
Paul Newman was in what, like the 1950s and 60s, as this leading man in Hollywood who was just regarded as being particularly handsome and to have these really striking blue eyes were often commented on in terms of his film and part of his success.
01:31:54 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah, he was, you know, a serious actor, but at the same time, he could, yeah, he was taken seriously. He wasn't simply regarded as a pretty face, but that certainly was part of his appeal in a huge, huge way.
01:32:09 Speaker_01
And he's absolutely one of the major cinema sex symbols of the 50s, 60s, and I would even say 70s, because even as he was in his 40s, he still had it, if you will. And some of his most successful movies were in the seventies.
01:32:25 Speaker_01
So yeah, he did get better with age in a way.
01:32:28 Speaker_03
we'll talk about him more later when we come to Jupiter, and he's a good example of Jupiter in the first as well.
01:32:33 Speaker_03
So other famously handsome Hollywood people that have Venus on the Ascendant are people like Ben Affleck, Cameron Diaz, more recently Olivia Munn has Gemini rising and Venus in Gemini, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who we talked about earlier, Patrick Swayze, and so on and so forth.
01:32:57 Speaker_03
So that's one aspect of Venus in the first is just sometimes there can be that element of things in terms of a person's looks or appearance standing out in some way as being particularly beautiful. CB
01:33:11 Speaker_03
Other examples of Venus in the First House, one of them is George Lucas, who was the creator of Star Wars. George Lucas has Taurus rising with the Sun and Mercury and Venus in Taurus in the First House.
01:33:29 Speaker_03
His is interesting because one of the aspects of this that I think is relevant is his focus on visuals as a director, and especially his innovative use of special effects. With Star Wars,
01:33:47 Speaker_03
George Lucas founded his own digital special effects house, which ended up being really pioneering and really paving the way for digital special effects and film with a number of his films, especially the Star Wars ones, and setting a new standard and really pushing things forward artistically in Hollywood in terms of big Hollywood movies.
01:34:13 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, not just for his own Star Wars series, but his effects house, for instance, was responsible for, you know, doing things like Jurassic Park.
01:34:22 Speaker_01
I mean, you mentioned digital effects, that was the movie where, you know, part of his special effects house was doing stop action animation, you know, sort of old school.
01:34:33 Speaker_01
Harryhausen type of filmmaking, but then he had another department that was developing digital filmmaking and it was in the making of Jurassic Park.
01:34:40 Speaker_01
Like there were sections that were already done using stop-action animation that they wound up redoing using digital because it was, yeah, it was that very moment where everything took over.
01:34:50 Speaker_01
And that's all, that all comes from this company that he started just so he could make Star Wars.
01:34:56 Speaker_03
Yeah. So I think that's important that sometimes Venus in the first can have good aesthetic sense. There can be an artistic orientation in terms of the person and in terms of their life and an artistic flair in different ways.
01:35:16 Speaker_03
So that's one of the ones that comes out with Venus in the first house. That's more their ability to create things that are Venusian and to take that into their power rather than it just being some trait of the body.
01:35:33 Speaker_01
Right, right. That Venus of his gets this very strong square from the moon and the chance. And I think that has a lot more to do with that sort of the fact that his Venus is more is emphasized more in the conception area.
01:35:52 Speaker_01
Like he's not, you know, I'm not trying to disparage George Lucas, but he's not like a pretty face, so to speak. You know, that's not the way that Venus works, but that configuration of the moon to Venus.
01:36:04 Speaker_01
Yeah, the Venus is all sort of, it's coming out of his memory, if you will, it's coming out of his imagination. It's something that he conjures as opposed to embodies.
01:36:14 Speaker_03
Well, that's a good point because so many of his films were about... He watched so many films and television shows early in his life, and then a lot of what he did later on was remixing and reimagining things from earlier in his later career.
01:36:32 Speaker_01
Yeah, Akira Kurosawa all over the place. Yeah. Yeah.
01:36:37 Speaker_03
Yeah. So, all right. And then the last thing, he also has Mercury in the First House, and he's not just a director, but also a writer-director. So he wrote all the Star Wars movies, so you get that element as well.
01:36:49 Speaker_01
Yeah, and then he's got the sun in the first house and yet again, you know, he made Star Wars in England and the stories of him making Star Wars in England like he's very much the stubborn American working with a British craft like you know, with a British crew rather like the British crew would take their tea break or, you know, they're heavily unionized and so they would stop work at five.
01:37:11 Speaker_01
And he found it really difficult to adapt to that. He was very much the son in the first house, like, no, this is, you know, we do things the way I want to do them.
01:37:20 Speaker_01
And, you know, he was bashing heads with the people he was working with on that movie because of that.
01:37:25 Speaker_02
Yeah.
01:37:26 Speaker_03
Well, and more broadly, he eventually became just the central leading person surrounding his whole production studio and everything else for many, many decades. Yeah. All right, so that's good for Venus.
01:37:42 Speaker_03
There was one other one, which is Judith Butler, actually, who has Aries rising and Venus in the first house. And Mars, the ruler of the Ascendant, is up in the ninth house of education and learning and philosophy.
01:38:02 Speaker_03
So this one was interesting because it shows mixture of things, but Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has been highly influential in fields of feminist theory, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics.
01:38:19 Speaker_03
One of the things they're known for is they're best known for their theory of gender performativity outlined in their groundbreaking book, Gender Trouble, from 1990.
01:38:30 Speaker_03
So in the book, they argue that gender is not an inherent or fixed identity, but rather a social construct that's produced through repeated acts and behaviors over time.
01:38:41 Speaker_03
So this theory challenges traditional notions of gender and sexuality and has been highly influential in queer theory and feminist activism.
01:38:50 Speaker_03
So I wanted to mention that because with Venus prominent in the chart, sometimes what can become more prominent is issues related to Venus. So one of the ancient significations of Venus is things related to women.
01:39:03 Speaker_03
Venus is said to be one of the primary significators of women in as a general significator. So sometimes women or women's issues can be more front and center in the life if Venus is prominent in some ways, such as being in the first house.
01:39:17 Speaker_03
But it's interesting that with the ruler of the Ascendant in the ninth house, it's directed towards philosophy and philosophizing and thinking about ethics and morality and different things like that.
01:39:29 Speaker_01
And the Venus is in Aries too.
01:39:31 Speaker_01
So it's very much about sort of, yeah, flipping things, you know, taking a conventional sort of position or what we might consider to have been conventional wisdom and flipping it around, you know, giving it a twist, if you will, or presenting a new sort of,
01:39:57 Speaker_01
position with regard to Venus. It's not Venus in Pisces. Diamonds are a girl's best friend. It's Venus in Aries. It's like, what is this? What are you trying to impose? And so on and so forth. So yeah, it's a very distinct Venus when it's in Aries.
01:40:17 Speaker_03
Definitely. And I just remembered Judas Butler used to go by she, her pronouns, but more recently it started using they, them. So I meant to correct that. That should be they, them. And I forgot about that. So anyway, so that's another example.
01:40:32 Speaker_03
And again, that ties in how there's often this important connection between planets in the first house and what the ruler of the first house is doing, but that there's this important interchange between them. All right. I think that's good.
01:40:48 Speaker_03
There was one other example, but I'll save it. Why don't we move on and talk about Mars in the first house? All right. Mars in the first house is tricky because the first house has to do with the body and the physical vitality.
01:41:08 Speaker_03
Sometimes when you have Mars in the first house, it can relate to the character, but other times it can also relate to the physical body and vitality.
01:41:17 Speaker_03
Since Mars is traditionally the planet that has to do with things like war and violence and cutting or severing or separation, sometimes when you import Mars-related significations into the first house, it can mean
01:41:33 Speaker_03
injuries or accidents or cuts or other things related to the body. So sometimes this can indicate accidents.
01:41:45 Speaker_03
One of the traditional things about Mars in the first house is it can indicate that the native has a scar or scars, but usually that's as a result of having some sort of cut or injury at some point. So let's look through some examples of that.
01:42:04 Speaker_03
Who do we have for examples of that again? Oh, I don't have my sheet in front of me, but I can put it up. Okay, let me Okay, here it is. So Ernest Hemingway is one because Ernest Hemingway had Mars in the first house in a day chart.
01:42:25 Speaker_03
And during the course of his life, he just had a series of different accidents and injuries and unfortunate events that had to do with the body.
01:42:36 Speaker_03
So here's his chart with, let's say, seven degrees of Virgo rising and Mars at 20 degrees of Virgo in a day chart. And so, yeah, he had a number of accidents and injuries during the course of his life, right?
01:42:52 Speaker_01
Yeah, something like four brain injuries just in the last 10 years of his life. And then there was a plane crash in Africa that he was badly injured in. And that wasn't even the only time in that year that he was injured.
01:43:06 Speaker_01
Earlier in his life, he had fallen through a skylight and hurt himself really badly. So yeah, he was prone to getting sort of you know, bashed up.
01:43:16 Speaker_01
And yeah, apparently four brain injuries just in the last decade of his life, which considering how things ended for him, they tend to sort of cite that as something that contributed.
01:43:27 Speaker_03
Right. Part of it was accidents that were external, but part of it was also reflecting he had a very adventurous spirit and a risk-taking personality, which is also something that can happen with Mars in the first house.
01:43:40 Speaker_03
A person can be more adventurous, but sometimes they can be more prone to taking risks that put themselves in harm's way more than other people who are more risk-adverse.
01:43:55 Speaker_01
Yeah, I don't think the term macho was coined in his lifetime, but he was macho. It was like the man's man's world kind of thing, bullfighting and prize fishing and all this stuff.
01:44:10 Speaker_01
So yeah, and being a war correspondent obviously was a very risky business. So yeah, he was into that showing what he's made of kind of thing.
01:44:22 Speaker_01
If we're going to talk about Venus and women, then Mars has that sort of, insofar as gender is a social construct, Mars is going to play into all of that stuff. He was Mr. Man of the 20th century in that sense.
01:44:41 Speaker_01
He's the first guy you think of from that century when you think of that kind of macho personality.
01:44:48 Speaker_03
CB Got it. Yeah.
01:44:50 Speaker_03
And that can manifest in either gender and it's hard because I don't know what the term is for that, but it's like manliness or whatever that we associate with that energy tends to come through with the Mars in different ways regardless of what the person's actual gender is.
01:45:06 Speaker_03
So some of the injuries were like in World War I, he was an ambulance driver in Italy and he was severely wounded by mortar fire. sustaining injuries to his legs and leaving him with hundreds of shrapnel fragments in his body.
01:45:21 Speaker_03
He was also an avid outdoorsman, and his passion for hunting and fishing led to several accidents. So he was once gored by a bull while participating in the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain.
01:45:34 Speaker_03
So that's actually an important one that I see sometimes is Mars has to do with piercing sometimes, and sometimes piercing or stabbing things can become prominent.
01:45:45 Speaker_03
He also suffered various injuries from fishing mishaps, including a hook lodged in his eye and a deep cut from a stingray barb. Okay. Oh, wow. Other things. I got a whole list here, so hold on a sec. So plane crashes.
01:46:03 Speaker_03
In 1954, Hemingway and his wife survived two consecutive plane crashes. All right, hold on until... I want to try to avoid crosstalk because I can't edit it out. Yeah.
01:46:16 Speaker_03
The first crash caused serious injuries, including burns, a ruptured kidney, and a concussion, while the second crash further exacerbated his injuries, leading to long-term health problems.
01:46:29 Speaker_03
So that one of burns is also important because Mars is associated with fires and burns, and sometimes that can become prominent with Mars in the first as well.
01:46:39 Speaker_03
So he also had car accidents, so he was involved in several car accidents throughout his life, often resulting in minor injuries. And finally, self-inflicted injuries.
01:46:48 Speaker_03
His struggles with physical and mental health also led to self-inflicted injuries, and he suffered from chronic pain and depression, which he tried to alleviate through alcohol and medication, but then eventually he ended up taking his own life by shooting himself at the very end.
01:47:05 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, his faculties are diminished and again it comes down in part to, you know, the vitality that he had had when he was young like once he found it was, you know, slipping through his fingers that he just he didn't want to.
01:47:22 Speaker_01
live without it.
01:47:23 Speaker_03
That's the point about vitality, because having a huge amount of energy and enthusiasm and the ability to do tons of stuff is also like a Mars in the first house signification.
01:47:36 Speaker_01
Exactly, exactly. So to have that sort of slipping away from him was too much for him to bear, it seems.
01:47:43 Speaker_03
Yeah. Okay. So that was one example. That's one more depressing example. Let me look at my other more constructive Mars in the first house examples. One of them character-wise is our friend Alan White, who had Aries rising with Mars in the first house.
01:48:07 Speaker_03
And he was an astrologer, but he was also like an ex. He was like a gruff you know, hard talking, former military veteran.
01:48:19 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah. With a sort of Kaiser Wilhelm twisty mustache even, he really looked the part. And yeah, you know, he wasn't what you think of when you think of astrologer, and yet he was one of the best I've ever known. But yeah, very sort of martial
01:48:42 Speaker_01
looking guy, a martial sounding guy. When he was teaching astrology, he would use a lot of military type of jargon in terms of getting his points across and his ideas across.
01:49:00 Speaker_03
He could be sometimes direct, but also sometimes crass is something that comes up with Mars, for example, like people that don't have a filter.
01:49:09 Speaker_01
Yeah, I also have Mars in the first house and I can also sometimes be unfiltered and crass myself, but not when I'm appearing on the astrology podcast, thankfully. Never. But yes, never. But yeah, no, Alan could be that.
01:49:23 Speaker_01
He was very funny, but yes, he had some great astrological phrases that I cannot repeat here because they did include profanity, although they were wise in their own way, despite their crassness.
01:49:39 Speaker_03
Yeah. And I released several years ago a lecture of his that he did on Hellenistic astrology as an episode of The Astrology Podcast. You can search for it. The title is Hellenistic Astrology Introduction with Alan White on YouTube.
01:49:52 Speaker_03
It was towards the end of his life when he was dealing with cancer. But even despite, so he was not quite as like... Yeah, he's not 100%, but he's still there.
01:50:06 Speaker_01
He's still him.
01:50:07 Speaker_03
Yeah, you can still get a strong sense of it. So that brings up some themes about Mars in the first house that are very relevant, especially if it's also in its own domicile, like in Aries. Anytime a planet is also in its own domicile, in its own sign,
01:50:23 Speaker_03
and it's in the rising sign, you're going to get a more pure expression of what that planet means.
01:50:28 Speaker_03
Whereas if the planet is in a sign that it doesn't rule, then the manifestation is partially filtered through that sign and through the quality of its ruler.
01:50:37 Speaker_01
Yeah, his Mars was conjunct my Saturn. Two of my greatest astrology teachers had Mars at 25 Aries, Axel Harvey and Alan White. Easily two of the most influential teachers on me and their, yeah, their natal Mars were on my Saturn.
01:50:52 Speaker_01
So that's synastry for you. Nice.
01:50:57 Speaker_03
Yeah. All right, so other ones. Agatha Christie is a good one. with Mars in the first house. So let me show her chart. Actually, why is it showing a different? Do I have that right or do I have that in the wrong section?
01:51:22 Speaker_01
I don't know. I didn't add Agatha. Let me put her up here and see. I got the Christie. No, she did not have, she had Saturn in the Sun in the first house.
01:51:38 Speaker_03
I got a bad piece of data somewhere.
01:51:41 Speaker_00
Okay.
01:51:43 Speaker_03
Wait, AA. No, the data's changed from, that's what it was. The data changed from some old file that you and I were using, but the time has since been updated to a AA time of 2.14 PM. So that's what it is.
01:51:57 Speaker_01
Okay, I see. Yeah, I've been adding corrections lately and I will change that as well.
01:52:04 Speaker_03
Okay. All right. So here's her chart. So Agatha Christie was born with 23 degrees of Sagittarius rising and Mars in Sagittarius at 24 degrees conjunct the Ascendant.
01:52:16 Speaker_03
And the ruler of the Ascendant is Jupiter, which is located in Aquarius in the third house of communication. I love this chart because Agatha Christie wrote detective fiction.
01:52:30 Speaker_03
She was the author of a bunch of novels, and she wrote murder mystery books. Her most famous novels include Murder on the Orient Express, Another one is Death on the Nile, and another one is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
01:52:45 Speaker_03
So she's often referred to as the Queen of Crime or the Queen of Mystery, and her works have been adapted into numerous films, television shows, and stage productions.
01:52:56 Speaker_03
So I love this one because you get both and it's a good demonstration because you see this commonly with actors where an actor will have a prominent placement, but instead of manifesting literally in the life or the body of the native, sometimes they'll take on roles that manifest that placement and then that becomes the role that they're most known for.
01:53:20 Speaker_03
She kind of has something similar here, which she has Mars, which is the planet of violence and murder
01:53:26 Speaker_03
conjunct the Ascendant, but the ruler of the Ascendant in the third house of communication and writing, and she would basically write about murders without that necessarily being something directly impacting her.
01:53:39 Speaker_01
Right. And she had two main characters, two detectives that she used in her books. One was Miss Marple, which is sort of like a cover for her, if you will, like she's Miss Marple.
01:53:50 Speaker_01
But then her other character is Hercule Poirot, the Belgian genius detective. So I love that it's Mars and Sagittarius, and she gets this very peculiar Belgian guy who comes in and solves mysteries kind of out of left field, if you will.
01:54:07 Speaker_01
I think something sort of Sagittarius about that character.
01:54:11 Speaker_03
Yeah, that's really good. Yeah.
01:54:16 Speaker_03
So I think that's a good example of that, both of the placement of Mars and how it can manifest in sometimes more symbolic ways in the life, but also another example of the ruler of the Ascendant and how it can direct a person towards certain topics.
01:54:33 Speaker_03
And in her case, it was writing or communication with the ruler of the Ascendant in the third. Yeah. All right, let's see other examples. So we've talked about some of the character ones and people tending to be more direct and stuff. There's other like
01:54:53 Speaker_03
difficult first house ones. For example, Archduke Franz Ferdinand had Mars and Sagittarius in the first house in a day chart, and they were famously assassinated by a revolutionary, and that's what started World War I basically. So here's their chart.
01:55:16 Speaker_03
So we see Sagittarius rising, the Sun ascendant at 18 Sagittarius, the Sun at 25 Sagittarius, and Mars in the first whole sign house at zero degrees of Sagittarius.
01:55:30 Speaker_03
And yeah, there was just that famous story of their unfortunate assassination and being shot and ending their life and then starting a war that took over the entire world for a period of time.
01:55:44 Speaker_01
Right. And funny enough, you saw the son is in the first house as well. And that's part of the story. This is another one of these great sort of like, you know, it doesn't matter where you put the person, they're going to be who they are.
01:55:55 Speaker_01
He's an Austrian Archduke. He's the heir to the throne, just because the actual emperor's son had ended his life a few decades earlier. And so he had no heir. So
01:56:07 Speaker_01
Archduke Franz Ferdinand was not popular in the Austrian court, particularly because he married a woman who wasn't considered his social equal. So he was kind of an outsider at the same time, even though he was the heir to the throne.
01:56:22 Speaker_01
And he goes to Sarajevo on a day that's like an important nationalistic holiday, you know, for the Serbians.
01:56:33 Speaker_01
And so it was seen as a kind of provocation and he's, you know, on this sort of military parade in Sarajevo on a day that's kind of inappropriate. And, you know, just being himself like for better, for worse, you know, doing his Archduke thing.
01:56:48 Speaker_01
And that has as much to do with him being shot as anything else. And funny enough, he was so unpopular in the Austrian court that his death itself wasn't seen as that much of a tragedy.
01:56:59 Speaker_01
They just, they felt they had to respond, you know, on political grounds to the assassination. That's what led to the war.
01:57:05 Speaker_01
So there really is, like you can see in this chart, that same kind of sun in the first house thing where, yeah, it doesn't matter if you're in a country that's hostile to you, that doesn't want you there.
01:57:14 Speaker_01
You're still gonna like get in your sort of parade car and go around the city and wave at everyone no matter what.
01:57:22 Speaker_03
Yeah, totally. All right. Other examples, Edward Snowden is one where Edward Snowden has Gemini rising and Mercury's conjunct the Ascendant, but also Mars and the Sun and the North Node are also all in the first house.
01:57:42 Speaker_03
And for this, I used the phrase earlier of the whistleblower where One of the things in ancient astrology, sometimes they talk about oath-breaking and things like that. And for him, that was part of what he had to do in order to
01:57:59 Speaker_03
tell people is he was a contractor for the NSA, and then he ended up becoming a whistleblower who alerted the world to the United States spying on people's internet traffic and things like that.
01:58:14 Speaker_03
So I think there's an element of that there with the Mercury-Mars conjunction that becomes a little bit relevant.
01:58:21 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, Mars can be the dissident and Mars can also be, quote unquote, the trader, if you will, you know, the turncoat or the, you know, to sort of, yeah, break from the fold, if you will, if it's in the appropriate house, like the first.
01:58:37 Speaker_03
CB Right. Well, it's like sometimes people like Mars, especially in the first house, or Mars individuals can do or say things that some people are going to be mad at or some people are going to be angry about or that can be off-putting or divisive.
01:58:54 Speaker_03
But I was thinking about this recently, because Pride Month in the United States just finished, and I saw somebody post something about that saying that we're celebrating this now because of many, many gay activists who were very aggressively pushing for gay rights in the 1980s and 1990s and other things like that, sometimes doing it
01:59:17 Speaker_03
I remember early in Obama's first term, when he would give speeches sometimes, there were gay rights activists that would interrupt his speeches in order to try to push him to be more embracing of the issue of gay rights, because during his first presidential campaign, he was officially
01:59:35 Speaker_03
supposedly against gay marriage. And it wasn't until his second term that he came out in support of gay marriage, and then eventually it was legalized by the Supreme Court of the United States.
01:59:46 Speaker_03
But there was this period where there were people, sometimes that's the positive function of Mars, is doing or saying the thing that's uncomfortable that other people might be offended by or not want to hear, but it being necessary to break the silence in order to accomplish something.
02:00:05 Speaker_03
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
02:00:07 Speaker_01
Yeah, you know, a dissident or someone who's, yeah, someone who's not afraid to interrupt things, to disrupt things, you know.
02:00:16 Speaker_03
That's, that's the challenge, though, sometimes with Mars in the first house is like, sometimes the question, it can be a fine line between like, are you the person that's saying what everything's thinking, what everyone's thinking, but not saying, and that's a good thing, because it needs to be said, or are you the person who's like saying,
02:00:33 Speaker_03
the thing that shouldn't be said that's actually really offensive and unnecessary, where you're just creating unnecessary drama by being overly brusque or rude or other things like that?
02:00:46 Speaker_01
Yeah, it can run the gamut. When you're a hammer, everything's a nail.
02:00:51 Speaker_03
Sure. So speaking of that, that's actually my next example, which is Rush Limbaugh had Aquarius rising with Mars and Aquarius in the first house. He also had Venus there. But that Mars placement, especially in a day chart, came out very prominently.
02:01:06 Speaker_03
So he was an influential and controversial American conservative political commentator and radio talk show host.
02:01:14 Speaker_03
He was a very polarizing figure who was often criticized for his inflammatory rhetoric, his bombastic style, his insensitive remarks, his attacks on liberals, and he faced accusations of racism, sexism, and homophobia.
02:01:32 Speaker_03
So, you know, he was in like the 1990s and 2000s was sort of like the iconic kind of like, what do you say, like blowhard, angry sort of radio comment, commenter guy.
02:01:46 Speaker_01
He's Alex Jones before Alex Jones, you know, amongst other things. And yeah, you know, he would have loved the world today. You know, he contributed to shaping it. But yeah, he wasn't happy in his own time, but he would have loved today.
02:02:04 Speaker_03
Yeah, so that's the other example. And then of course, it's like today, the contemporary version of that to some extent, who everyone's familiar with is just Donald Trump has lately a rising and Mars conjunct the Ascendant.
02:02:21 Speaker_03
And that's also very much part of his personality or that Mars element is very much part of his personality in terms of similar things.
02:02:30 Speaker_03
And in terms of, let's say, divisiveness, that's actually a really good keyword that sometimes divisiveness is a core keyword. And sometimes that divisiveness, as I explained earlier with the protest, is sometimes necessary.
02:02:45 Speaker_03
Other times the divisiveness can be not necessary, but it can just be something that happens or arises from the person for different reasons.
02:02:55 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, I think whatever your opinion of the guy is, you can tell that that's what he does. He says these things and doesn't care who gets hurt or what have you.
02:03:09 Speaker_01
There's definitely a whole direct lineage from Rush Limbaugh's data to where we are now with Trump. It's that same approach. It's that same approach. It's sort of that attack dog mentality.
02:03:25 Speaker_03
Okay. Yeah. So those are some of the Mars examples. So I think we'll keep moving. There's a lot of other more constructive examples we could have gone through and different things like that.
02:03:34 Speaker_03
But I think for this sake, we sort of demonstrated the point in terms of some just very stark clear examples of how Mars can show up in the first house either as a physical thing or as a character or like spirit thing.
02:03:50 Speaker_03
And sometimes at different points in the life, each of those can be relevant in different ways.
02:03:54 Speaker_03
And depending on how Mars is situated, if it's really well-situated and if there's benefics configured to it, can make the manifestation much more positive and much more constructive and lead towards the more constructive end of the spectrum. Yeah.
02:04:10 Speaker_03
Yeah. All right. So I want to take a little bit of a break since it's been another hour and get a drink and then we'll come back.
02:04:19 Speaker_03
The software we use to show birth charts in this episode is called Solar Fire for Windows, which is astrology software for the PC.
02:04:27 Speaker_03
It's a really great program, and one of the things that it can do in addition to calculating birth charts is you can set up a whole database in Solar Fire and save all of your files to it, and then it has a search feature where you can search your entire database for charts that have certain placements when you're doing different research.
02:04:48 Speaker_03
So for me, it was very useful to search my entire database for this episode to look at, show me every birth chart I have that has Mercury in the first house, or show me every chart I have that has Venus in the first house, and so on and so forth.
02:05:02 Speaker_03
It's a huge advantage just in terms of doing astrological research and looking at charts. So you can get Solar Fire for Windows through the website alabe.com, and you can actually get a 15% discount with the promo code AP15.
02:05:20 Speaker_03
For Mac users, we recommend the program called Astro Gold for Mac OS, which is astrology software for the Macintosh computer. It's from the creators of Solar Fire for PC, and it includes many modern as well as traditional techniques.
02:05:35 Speaker_03
You can get a 15% discount by using the promo code astropodcast15 when you purchase the program through astrogold.io. Alright, so we're back.
02:05:45 Speaker_03
Let's jump into Jupiter in the 1st house and let's start zooming through these examples so we can get through the rest of the planets.
02:05:51 Speaker_03
So first example, I want to go back to Paul Newman, who we talked about before, who had Venus in the 1st house and was strikingly attractive or handsome. He also had Jupiter in the 1st house as well as Mercury. And one of the things that he did
02:06:08 Speaker_03
after his success as an actor, is he also became very much focused on philanthropic work. In 1982, he founded Newman's Own, which is a food company that produces a variety of products, including salad dressing, pasta sauce, popcorn, and lemonade.
02:06:27 Speaker_03
The unique aspect of his company is that 100% of its profits are donated to charity through a foundation he set up called Newman's Own Foundation.
02:06:37 Speaker_03
The company has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for various causes, especially focusing on children's health and education.
02:06:45 Speaker_03
His foundation focused on supporting children who face adversity, with a particular emphasis on those with serious illnesses. And he provides free medically subsidized summer camps and programs for children with serious illnesses.
02:07:02 Speaker_03
And I think this is really interesting because that Venus that we were focused on so much as having to do in some positive ways with his appearance, that Venus is also the ruler of his fifth house of children and his 10th house of career.
02:07:16 Speaker_03
In some ways, this is an even more important or enduring part of his legacy through his philanthropic work and through his contributions to helping out children.
02:07:28 Speaker_03
This is a good demonstration that sometimes there's multiple different things coming into effect when it comes to different placements.
02:07:37 Speaker_01
Yeah, you know, Newman wasn't a square or anything like that, but at the same time, he wasn't some sort of Hollywood wild man.
02:07:44 Speaker_01
He was happily married, you know, quite a stable guy, quite a stable personality, despite the fact that he's this, you know, glamorous, famous movie star, really grounded in a rooted personality.
02:07:58 Speaker_01
And obviously he had priorities that weren't, that didn't revolve merely around himself and his career.
02:08:05 Speaker_03
Yeah. A lot of the biographies and stuff I was reading of him, it just talks about his enduring legacy of generosity and compassion. This is really important because that was the original term for benefic and malefic.
02:08:20 Speaker_03
Benefic in ancient astrology means good-doers or good-doing, whereas malefic means bad-doers or evil-doers. Sometimes when benefics are in the first, you just see them doing good things like generosity,
02:08:37 Speaker_03
charity work or other things like that, where they're helping or improving the lives of other people, and that becomes core to their identity in some way.
02:08:49 Speaker_03
Another example of that is actually Barack Obama, who has Aquarius rising and Jupiter in the first house in Aquarius, in the first whole sign house. This one's important, I think, because in 2010, he passed the Affordable Care Act,
02:09:06 Speaker_03
which is also sometimes referred to as Obamacare, which gave millions and millions of people who were uninsured and didn't have health insurance in the United States, access to health insurance with estimates ranging from
02:09:22 Speaker_03
basically saying that the number of people that were uninsured in the United States was cut in half within two years after it went into effect in 2014, and the estimates range that it helped to cover 20 to 24 million people.
02:09:37 Speaker_03
One of the things that it did is it made it so that companies could no longer deny people for health coverage who had pre-existing conditions.
02:09:46 Speaker_03
This is really important just in terms of that aspect because that's probably one of the most important things that he did in his presidency, and it helped a lot of people who
02:09:55 Speaker_03
would have died without health insurance prior to that to get health insurance.
02:09:59 Speaker_03
I remember back when I was a young, struggling, up-and-coming astrologer and I didn't have health insurance, that was the only reason I was able to get covered for a number of years because of that, because I was making so little that I qualified for it.
02:10:12 Speaker_01
Right. And then on a different level, thinking about Newman and Obama. They're both men who have a really easy going way about them like even though they're, they're charismatic and attractive. There's kind of at the same time this.
02:10:31 Speaker_01
not necessarily humble, but sort of down to earth, you know, folksiness about them at the same time that seems to blend in with the glamor and the charisma. You know, very just sort of easygoing guys.
02:10:44 Speaker_01
They never give you the impression that they're trying hard. You know what I mean? Like they're just, or at least trying too hard. They might be working hard, but they're not trying hard. It's sort of natural. Yeah. Easy flow.
02:11:03 Speaker_03
That's like the contrast that I remember. One of the nicknames for Obama was No Drama Obama versus Paul Newman was Cool Hand Luke. Right. One of his movies. Yeah, exactly. Kind of funny.
02:11:17 Speaker_03
So going back to the healthcare thing though, you found one of the transits that occurred where transiting Jupiter was conjunct his natal Ascendant when he gave the joint address to Congress on healthcare.
02:11:31 Speaker_03
So that was actually a crucial, important turning point where he was having a Jupiter return, not just through Aquarius, but also directly on his Ascendant that was activating that placement.
02:11:42 Speaker_01
Right. And was he still 48 at that point? That might've been a first house perfection here even. I'm trying to remember. Yeah.
02:11:50 Speaker_03
That would be important. Yeah. So, yeah. So that shows the activation of that.
02:11:55 Speaker_03
Originally, we were going to do more with timing the activation of some of these placements, which we didn't go into as much, but we'll see if we have some other examples later on.
02:12:02 Speaker_03
Because that's sometimes when it really clenches it in terms of seeing what the placement is doing and why.
02:12:10 Speaker_01
Yeah. This is first level stuff, but we do have a second level element of the research as well.
02:12:20 Speaker_03
Alright, so moving on. Next one, Martin Luther King Jr. was reportedly born around noon with Taurus rising, Jupiter in Taurus in the first whole sign house.
02:12:32 Speaker_03
So he was a Baptist minister and a powerful advocate for nonviolent resistance against racial segregation and discrimination, and he led numerous peaceful protests and marches
02:12:44 Speaker_03
And when you read biographies and stuff, just some of the keywords they use, it says, he believed in the power of love, forgiveness, and reconciliation to achieve social justice.
02:12:54 Speaker_03
And I think that's a really crucial keyword for Jupiter in the first house, in some instances, is trying to achieve social justice of some sort.
02:13:03 Speaker_03
And he was, of course, instrumental in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965. that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
02:13:15 Speaker_03
And then eventually he won a Nobel Peace Prize. So with Jupiter, themes of justice, equality, peace are all just very core Jupiter keywords.
02:13:27 Speaker_03
And sometimes when it's in the first house, it manifests very literally where there's a core part of the person's personality that's trying to bring those things about in the world in some way.
02:13:38 Speaker_01
Yeah, absolutely. And Jupiter was in Taurus in 1965 when that second Civil Rights Act was passed, which is arguably the more far sweeping one. And that's kind of the pinnacle of his achievement. After 1965, his campaigns are a bit more of a struggle.
02:14:00 Speaker_01
And of course, it ended tragically three years later.
02:14:05 Speaker_03
Yeah, okay. So let's see, moving on. Another good-doing one that is kind of a random one, I just wanted to mention it briefly.
02:14:16 Speaker_03
Demetra always tells a story of how she was in her early 20s or something and she was a hippie and she went to her first astrology conference and she didn't know anyone there and felt very isolated because everyone was older and not into her flower child, hippie getup.
02:14:33 Speaker_03
But there was this one astrologer that came up to Demetra and struck up a conversation with her. And it was an astrologer named Eleanor Bach. And Eleanor had just published one of the first ephemerises of planetary positions for asteroids.
02:14:49 Speaker_03
And she gave one to Demetra as a gift, as just like an act of generosity. And that, of course, started Demetra's entire career doing work in asteroids and becoming one of the foremost astrologers in the world.
02:15:03 Speaker_03
pioneering work on the asteroids in the late 20th and early 21st century. And Eleanor Bach had 17 Libra rising and Jupiter at 18 degrees of Libra.
02:15:14 Speaker_03
So sometimes those little acts of generosity, we were using big, huge examples with some of those worldwide famous people.
02:15:22 Speaker_03
Sometimes with Jupiter in the first, the little acts of generosity can have a huge impact that they maybe don't realize at the time, but it just comes from that.
02:15:33 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, Eleanor Buck was born in 1922. So in the late 60s, she's gotta be in her late 40s. And people of that generation weren't typically, you know, hippie friendly, if you will.
02:15:46 Speaker_01
But yeah, it takes a special kind of personality to, you know, just be that affable and easy going. Again, you know, it's that same kind of easy goingness that you see with the likes of Paul Newman or Barack Obama, you know, they can talk to anyone.
02:16:03 Speaker_03
for sure. So another more recent example is Margot Robey who has Cancer Rising and Jupiter in Cancer in the first whole sign house, as well as the Sun and Mercury. And this kind of ties in with the previous themes
02:16:22 Speaker_03
where I think for her, the core theme is that she's known for her commitment to championing female-driven stories especially, and she's a strong advocate for gender equality in the film industry.
02:16:34 Speaker_03
She ended up creating her own production house in Hollywood, and this is eventually what led to her
02:16:43 Speaker_03
producing the Barbie movie, which she not only starred in last year in 2023, but she also produced and basically was the architect behind in many ways.
02:16:56 Speaker_03
So this ended up making it eventually, it was highly successful and it became the highest grossing film of 2023.
02:17:01 Speaker_03
It became the biggest release for a female director, both domestically in the United States, as well as the largest global opening for a female directed movie.
02:17:12 Speaker_03
So I think this is really part of it when it comes to her as well, and some of those themes of justice or equality coming through in different ways.
02:17:22 Speaker_01
Yeah. I couldn't decide it better myself.
02:17:26 Speaker_03
Yeah. All right. There's a side note there, but I'll skip it. Tycho Brahe was another one. That was one that you had, right?
02:17:36 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah. This is, this is less about generosity and more about sort of being the recipient of generosity. A quick version. Yeah, well, Tycho Brahe was a great astronomer and scientist. And he was originally from Denmark.
02:18:02 Speaker_01
And the king of Denmark heard that Tycho was going to leave the country to be sort of sponsored by some other monarch. And so the king, in order to
02:18:12 Speaker_01
Kiptyko in Denmark gave him a whole island where he could build his own observatory and laboratory, which he did. And did you want to put up the transits for what he was having when that happened?
02:18:27 Speaker_03
I won't put up the transits, but I'll put up the chart. So we should describe the chart, which is it has 16 degrees of Aquarius rising with Venus at 18 Aquarius and then Pluto and also Jupiter in Aquarius.
02:18:40 Speaker_01
Right. So yeah, he was gifted this whole observatory and transcending Mercury, I think was the planet that was transcending through the first house when this was gifted to him.
02:18:53 Speaker_01
But natally with that Jupiter, Venus and Pluto there, I think with the Venus rising, yeah, he's more sort of like, while he did also have Jupiter in the first house, since Venus is the planet that's closest to the ascendant,
02:19:08 Speaker_01
He's more the recipient of generosity or of appreciation, as opposed to someone who offers it, if you will. Okay.
02:19:22 Speaker_03
All right. So,
02:19:25 Speaker_03
Then Kepler, one of the things I noticed is it's ruling the 11th house as well as the 10th house, and Kepler benefited from Tycho Brahe's observatory and stuff, and then eventually was able to build on that observational work in order to craft his theories and his discovery about the planets moving in ellipses rather than in perfect circles.
02:19:47 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's actually kind of funny.
02:19:49 Speaker_01
The bra he met Kepler 24 years after he was gifted this this island in Denmark, and yet both instances when he was gifted the island in Denmark, transiting mercury was in Aquarius in his first house, and when he met Johannes Kepler.
02:20:05 Speaker_01
Mercury again was was in Aquarius transiting right over Brahe's Ascendant. And yeah, Kepler benefited greatly from Brahe's work, in part because he kind of ran off with some of it without permission, Brahe died and
02:20:21 Speaker_01
I think Brahe's family had to pursue Kepler to get the material back and Kepler kept some of it so he could do more work on his studies of Mars and what have you.
02:20:31 Speaker_01
But yeah, one way or the other, it's kind of a collaboration, even if it wasn't by Brahe's design.
02:20:39 Speaker_03
Yeah. All right. So let's move on. Another one you had was King Charles I who had Virgo rising and Jupiter in Virgo in the first house.
02:20:50 Speaker_03
And you said that he was having a transiting Jupiter return through Virgo through his first house when his older brother died and he suddenly became heir to the throne.
02:21:00 Speaker_01
That's right.
02:21:01 Speaker_01
This happens over and over in royal history, where the oldest son who's considered the favorite, who everyone is sure is going to make a great king because he was born for it and he's just got the perfect personality, and then he died at 18 and Charles has to be the king instead.
02:21:23 Speaker_01
Spoiler alert, he's the king who would later be executed in the English Civil War. So it's kind of like this whole thing falls on him, and it's not something he wanted or was prepared for. And when he does get it, it ends in disaster.
02:21:40 Speaker_03
And you pointed out that transiting Mars was retrograde and conjoining his natal ascendant degree when he was executed by decapitation during the English Civil War in 1649, right?
02:21:51 Speaker_01
Yeah, that's right. And his son, Charles II was also Virgo rising. So they're having very similar transits to the angles when this happens.
02:21:59 Speaker_01
And Charles II, well, he's not called Charles II yet, but he's off in France, escaping this execution and his father is executed. So that Mars retrograde in Virgo crossing the Ascendant sort of applies to both of them in different ways.
02:22:14 Speaker_03
All right. So that's a great example then. So this is showing the Jupiter natal placement in the first house and he's elevated to the kingship basically when transiting Jupiter goes through his first house.
02:22:30 Speaker_03
But then when transiting Mars goes retrograde in his first house and conjoins his Ascendant, he's decapitated.
02:22:36 Speaker_03
So it's like we get extremes of good and bad and that's sometimes how you can see what the first house means is by looking at a transit through the first house. Exactly, exactly. Good. All right. So,
02:22:54 Speaker_03
There's a few others, but did we kind of make the point here in terms of this?
02:22:59 Speaker_03
I mean, the only other one I had was Ram Dass had Cancer Rising with Jupiter and Pluto conjunct the Ascendant and Jupiter ruling the ninth house of foreign travel and religion and education.
02:23:09 Speaker_03
And he traveled to India and then went through a transformation where he became a spiritual guru and converted to Hinduism. So that's kind of an interesting one.
02:23:19 Speaker_01
Yeah, he came out of academia. He was, you know, sort of Timothy Leary's accomplice in the whole sort of LSD thing going on at Harvard in the early 60s.
02:23:29 Speaker_01
But then, you know, like a number of people from that crowd, he traded in LSD for more natural non-chemical forms of enlightenment. So he yeah he parted ways with Leary in that regard, and, you know, went his own way.
02:23:47 Speaker_01
But it's quite a profound transformation where he goes from this, you know, buttoned up clean shaven academic guy, you know at Harvard.
02:23:57 Speaker_01
And thanks to a few LSD experiences, he becomes this sort of bearded, quasi-Indian or pseudo-Indian, or I don't know what the correct term would be.
02:24:11 Speaker_01
Yeah, he goes through a big transformation, becomes this sort of proto-hippie, if you will, big beard, meditating, talking about sort of spiritual matters. So he goes through a tremendous transformation over the course of the decade.
02:24:24 Speaker_03
That's just a good example that sometimes
02:24:26 Speaker_03
When the ruler of one house in the chart is in the first house, there's something about that that can impact and inform or change the native sense of self and who they are in the world and how they're showing up in the world and different things like that.
02:24:43 Speaker_03
And sometimes that seems really abstract to attempt to describe or teach to somebody, but then when you have an example like that, it can be very literal, especially for the person who's experiencing and having that happen in their own chart.
02:24:56 Speaker_01
Yeah, exactly.
02:24:58 Speaker_03
Those transformations of self. All right. I think that's good for Jupiter, yeah? Yeah. All right. So let's transition into talking about Saturn in the first house. One of the themes that kept coming up in the Saturn in the first house examples.
02:25:16 Speaker_03
Of course, just like with Mars, there can be health issues, and we'll get into that. But one of the things that comes up is Saturn has to do with time.
02:25:24 Speaker_03
And when Saturn's in the first house, one of the themes that often comes up is issues having to do with age. And sometimes it can be like the person can appear older than they actually are, or sometimes they can appear younger than they actually are.
02:25:41 Speaker_03
Sean Connery, for example, Mikel on Twitter pointed out that he was somebody who got his role relatively late in James Bond, his breakout role. He was in his early 30s, but he always appeared as if he was 10 years older.
02:25:55 Speaker_03
Then later in life, he was commonly playing these different roles where he's acting as an older mentor to a younger person. Another example is Shirley Temple Black. She was a child actress who started acting at the age of three, right?
02:26:14 Speaker_01
Yeah, this is one of my classic interpretations. Well, not merely mine, but whenever I see a chart with Saturn in the first house, my first presumption is that this is someone who was a precocious child.
02:26:30 Speaker_01
I really think of Saturn in the first house being, oh, I can imagine you as a kid, you would have been sort of more serious, more grown up than the other kids. Shirley Temple is obviously a sort of, an exaggerated version of that.
02:26:45 Speaker_01
I mean, she was one of the most successful cinema performer of 1934, 35, a huge, huge movie star. And she was, yeah, she was a small kid, preschool, elementary school age.
02:27:02 Speaker_03
And she had five Sagittarius rising and Saturn at 18 degrees of Sagittarius in a night chart. Yeah.
02:27:14 Speaker_03
So she found great success as a child actor, but then she struggled to transition into adult roles because her childlike image was really deeply ingrained in the public consciousness, and audiences had difficulty seeing her in adult roles.
02:27:30 Speaker_03
So her acting career actually declined in her teens.
02:27:34 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah. And then much later, Gerald Ford made her the ambassador to Ghana, I believe, and just after Nixon resigned in 1974 so for a little while she had a political career as well.
02:27:48 Speaker_03
She had a very extensive political career as a diplomat, as an ambassador under several different presidents. She later reinvented herself by making the transition to being an ambassador and a diplomat.
02:28:01 Speaker_03
Her story is really interesting because she's actually appointed the first female chief of protocol of the United States.
02:28:08 Speaker_03
And that's an officer of the State Department that's responsible for advising the president on matters of national and international diplomatic protocol, which I think is very Saturn-coded, like Saturn in Sagittarius and diplomatic protocol for foreign countries, as well as just Sagittarius in general and foreign travel and foreign things.
02:28:31 Speaker_03
And then she actually ended up becoming a diplomat for the US in foreign countries and reinventing herself later in life. Yeah, so that's a good one. Other Saturn ones. Sometimes Saturn can have to do with old things.
02:28:52 Speaker_03
One example of that is Marsilio Ficino, who had Aquarius rising with Saturn in the 1st house by day, and he was a translator of ancient texts during the Renaissance. For example, he translated the entire works of Plato.
02:29:06 Speaker_03
And then he also translated the entire works of the Corpus Hermeticum, which led to a revival of some of these then ancient philosophies that helped contribute to the Renaissance. Sometimes Saturn brings just a focus on old or ancient things.
02:29:23 Speaker_03
Yeah, antiquarian. Which is another aspect of the time thing. That came up, a number of listeners submitted the singer Lena Del Rey, whose Ascendant is at 15 and Saturn at 22 Scorpio.
02:29:39 Speaker_03
So she has Saturn in the first house and her music and persona are very heavily influenced by nostalgia for past eras, particularly of the 1950s and 60s.
02:29:50 Speaker_03
So her lyrics often reference vintage imagery and themes, creating a sense of longing for a bygone era. And this evokes a sense of timelessness as well as blurring the lines between past and present with her work.
02:30:04 Speaker_03
She's actually referred to sometimes as having a reputation as the queen of melancholy, which is another Saturn theme of melancholy or sometimes depression can be a major Saturn theme. Yeah.
02:30:18 Speaker_03
Some of her songs explore themes of sadness, heartbreak, loss, disillusionment. Her music is also characterized by slow tempos. Slowness is a Saturn thing, which is opposite to Mars, which is quickness or things that are fast.
02:30:38 Speaker_03
All right, so that's one with her. There's more we could go into there, but I think that's good. Similar to her with another musician is Elliot Smith, who had a moon-saturn whole sign conjunction in the first house.
02:30:54 Speaker_03
He was an American singer-songwriter known for his distinctive melancholic style and introspective lyrics. He also similarly explored themes of love, loss, addiction, and isolation.
02:31:08 Speaker_03
He personally struggled with mental health issues and battled depression, anxiety, and addiction throughout his life. These struggles often permeated his music.
02:31:20 Speaker_03
Then eventually, he passed away, potentially, I think officially from suicide at the end of his life at a pretty young age of 34.
02:31:33 Speaker_01
Yeah, it was, I mean, it wasn't merely that. I mean, it was, you know, he was stabbed in the chest. So like to do that to yourself is, yeah, not an easy thing to do.
02:31:47 Speaker_01
I met him, I once played pool with him at the Knitting Factory in New York City in 1995. He was a nice guy, he made really great records and it's sad that he went the way he did.
02:32:02 Speaker_03
Yeah. All right, other ones quickly. This one's kind of funny, but Al Gore has Saturn, Pluto, and Mars in the first house.
02:32:08 Speaker_03
I thought it was interesting just because I remember growing up in the 90s and there were so many jokes about Al Gore being regarded as stiff and boring, and that's very connected with Saturn.
02:32:18 Speaker_01
Yeah. You remember that awkward kiss he gave his wife on stage? No, it's cringeworthy. Anyway, yeah, that's accurate.
02:32:30 Speaker_03
Just remember the Simpsons kind of like parroting him. All right. This one's like James Earl Jones with Saturn-Mercury in the first house, but the actor Christopher Lee had Libra rising with Saturn on the Ascendant.
02:32:46 Speaker_03
And he also had this big, booming, deep voice. So he played Saruman in the Lord of the Rings, for example, towards the end of his career. And he just had this very deep, rich voice.
02:32:59 Speaker_01
He had also played Dracula. He had played Sherlock Holmes. And unlike anyone else in the Lord of the Rings movie, he had actually known Tolkien.
02:33:08 Speaker_03
Nice. Another one, Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect, a very hugely famous and influential architect with Scorpio Rising and Saturn conjunct the Ascendant. And he designed over a thousand structures and completed 532 different works.
02:33:24 Speaker_03
So that's interesting, like architects and Saturn has to do with structure of things.
02:33:30 Speaker_01
Yeah. And the second time you and I ever hung out was in one of his buildings. Remember that hotel in Chicago where the conference was? Oh, yeah. That was his.
02:33:41 Speaker_03
Masonic sort of conference that the NCGR had or something?
02:33:46 Speaker_01
Exactly. Yeah. The weird staircases that went places that you didn't expect them to and what have you.
02:33:51 Speaker_03
Right. All right. Then you had one last one with Percy Shelley, right?
02:33:57 Speaker_01
Yeah, Percy Shelley, I mean, this is just kind of simple. He died at the age of 29, he had Saturn rising. He's part of this circle of very glamorous rockstar poets, Lord Byron, Yates, Keats. Heats, not Yeats. I'm getting my Smith songs confused. Yeah.
02:34:20 Speaker_01
You know, just this circle of young poets. But he died. He was, you know, off on a ship and drowned. And then his body was cremated on the beach. But apparently he had had tuberculosis and his heart had calcified. So his heart didn't burn in the fire.
02:34:37 Speaker_01
And so Mary Shelley, his wife, author of Frankenstein, kept the heart with her. And it was buried with her when she eventually died decades later. Very, very romantic.
02:34:47 Speaker_01
But I just think of dying at the age of 29 when you've already got this huge corpus of work and you've dazzled the world with your poetry. It's something in and of itself.
02:35:00 Speaker_03
Right. So Saturn was in the rising sign and he had lifelong health issues and then eventually died at the age of 29 when Saturn came back to that sign? Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty striking.
02:35:12 Speaker_03
All right, one last example I accidentally almost skipped over, I thought was good is Ralph Nader has Aquarius Rising with Saturn, Venus, and the North Node in Aquarius.
02:35:25 Speaker_03
And he has this lifelong career pushing for government rules and regulations, which is very Saturn-themed. The most important one though that I wanted to point out was
02:35:37 Speaker_03
published this book titled Unsafe at Any Speed, which played a significant role in raising public awareness about lack of safety features in American cars, including seatbelts.
02:35:50 Speaker_03
Although seatbelts were invented a long time before his book, his work actually helped to highlight the automotive industry's resistance to incorporating them as standard equipment,
02:35:59 Speaker_03
So eventually, the publication of his book led to increased pressure on the American government to regulate automobile safety, eventually resulting in the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966, which mandated the installation of seatbelts in all new cars, making them a standard feature and contributing to a significant decline in car-related fatalities.
02:36:28 Speaker_03
So I thought that was really interesting in terms of rules and regulations and sometimes positive manifestations of that as a Saturn archetype. Yeah, absolutely. Safety first. Safety first. All right, let's move on to Uranus in the first house.
02:36:46 Speaker_03
Two of the keywords I have for that is the rebel and the eccentric. So one of them is the actor James Dean had Uranus conjunct his Ascendant, and rebelliousness was part of his persona both on and off the screen.
02:37:05 Speaker_03
His most famous movie was Rebel Without a Cause.
02:37:09 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, he kind of embodies that 1950s adolescent rebellion motif, you know, perhaps even more than Elvis or Brando did, you know, just sort of the troubled teenager, the kid who's going against the grain in some way.
02:37:29 Speaker_01
And yeah, in real life, he was kind of a wild card as well, you know, drove fast. I mean, that's how he died. know, driving too fast in his car, racing someone, I think.
02:37:40 Speaker_03
Yeah. And that was actually at the age of 20. He died at the age of 24 in a car accident, which also would have been a first house perfection year. So it would have been activating that Uranus placement conjunct the Ascendant.
02:37:51 Speaker_03
And there's like this freak accident. Yeah. Yeah. So another rebel one or revolutionary is Che Guevara, who has Aries rising with Uranus conjunct the degree of the Ascendant, and he's the revolutionary basically.
02:38:09 Speaker_01
Yeah, and quite the sort of adventurer, you know, when he was a young man he went on this, he was from Argentina, that's why he's called Che, because Argentinians apparently they say Che as a sort of, you know, verbal tick.
02:38:25 Speaker_01
And so then when he's hanging out with Mexicans and Cubans of course they notice that He speaks Spanish differently than they do, and they call him Che. It's kind of like they're making fun of his Argentinian dialect and tics.
02:38:37 Speaker_01
But yeah, when he was a young man, he rode on a motorcycle with his friend throughout South America and saw a lot of the sort of the poverty and the consequences of how sort of global politics had played out in Latin America.
02:38:52 Speaker_01
And then he was in Guatemala when Arbenz was overthrown in 1954. So we saw firsthand how the US government would handle troublesome Latin American governments. So then a year later, he meets Fidel Castro and all the other
02:39:13 Speaker_01
Cuban revolutionaries who are sort of exiled from Cuba because they had already tried, you know, to overthrow the government once there and gotten caught. And together they sail over back to Cuba on a boat in late 1956, the Grandma.
02:39:29 Speaker_01
and begin the Cuban Revolution. And they're fighting in the hills. He was a trained doctor. So when they're, you know, they were in the mountains for over two years, yeah, over two years.
02:39:41 Speaker_01
And, or, yeah, just over two years until the end of the revolution. And, you know, not only was he in the jungle with the revolutionaries fighting and shooting and getting shot at and having some of their compadres, you know, killed and what have you.
02:39:56 Speaker_01
But as a trained doctor, he was the guy who was putting people back together and looking after them so that they could keep fighting.
02:40:04 Speaker_03
He also had Jupiter in the first house in Aries also.
02:40:09 Speaker_01
Right. Yeah. And very much the kind of guy who would sort of... you know, give his last drop of water to a thirsty person. And yeah, you know, he, and, but he was just like forever a revolutionary because of course he was Argentinian.
02:40:25 Speaker_01
All the other revolutionaries were actually Cuban. They were just trying to fix Cuba. But then once he was done in Cuba, he, you know, went off to Africa and he tried to fight in a revolution in Congo that didn't go so well.
02:40:36 Speaker_01
And then he went back to South America and he tried to do one there and that's when he got caught. So yeah, he was sort of like he was born to be a revolutionary, it seems. And he was really like serious about it.
02:40:49 Speaker_01
Whatever side one takes with him, he was the real deal. He was really trying to do what he was trying to do.
02:40:57 Speaker_03
Yeah, for sure. So that's a good example. And then another one that's along similar lines actually is Hitler had Libra rising with Uranus in Libra. And this one's interesting because he was also actually a revolutionary.
02:41:16 Speaker_03
And one of his earliest things in life was he attempted to have a coup basically. Yeah.
02:41:26 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, the other thing is, you know, famously, he's an Austrian who wants to be German, much like, you know, Che is an Argentinian who's, you know, kind of being Cuban, if you will.
02:41:41 Speaker_01
There is an element of the outsider to that Uranus in the first house as well. Yeah. But yeah, he did. He did try to orchestrate a coup that the famous Beer Hall Putsch Which, even though it failed, it's kind of what made him famous.
02:41:55 Speaker_01
It's what made his book Mein Kampf sell and ultimately led to him having the political power he did.
02:42:03 Speaker_03
Yeah. And I think that's important because usually we don't think of him in that sense as a revolutionary because he was successful, but it was that he attempted the first time and then later he was able to gain power through more official means.
02:42:19 Speaker_03
But yeah, having a failed coup attempt is kind of striking. All right, so moving on to other examples.
02:42:25 Speaker_03
Another one in a completely different vein is Philip K. Dick was a science fiction writer who had Aries rising and Uranus conjunct the degree of the Ascendant.
02:42:36 Speaker_01
Yeah, he's, he's one of my all time favorites. I've studied his chart quite a bit. And, yeah, very, you know, he was, he had an amazing imagination. He wrote sort of pulp science fiction science fiction didn't have much respect.
02:42:54 Speaker_01
So a lot of his books were edited by people who weren't him, who didn't see the value in his work. But even the works of his that are sort of watered down that way have some just fantastic ideas and really, really insightful.
02:43:11 Speaker_01
view into the future in a way. Most people will be familiar with movies that have been made from his books, like Blade Runner. The Man in the High Castle was a recent series on one of the streaming services.
02:43:25 Speaker_01
Total Recall, speaking of Arnold Schwarzenegger, that was based on one of his short stories. Blade Runner is probably the most famous of things that have been turned into cinema. Oh, and Richard Licklater's Scanner Darkly was really great.
02:43:40 Speaker_03
that's one of the things with Uranus is sometimes it's very forward-looking, and sometimes in its time it can seem out of place because they're living in the future in some ways.
02:43:50 Speaker_03
But sometimes they can be really good at anticipating things that are going to happen or that are coming up in the future, but it leaves them almost seemingly out of place in their own time occasionally.
02:44:02 Speaker_01
Yeah, and he's another one of these guys, maybe not unlike Eleanor Bach in a way, in the sense that he's born in the 20s, but he really fits in well with the hippie culture of the 60s and 70s, even though technically he should have been too old for that.
02:44:17 Speaker_01
He's such a Uranian that he really fit in that world very, very well.
02:44:22 Speaker_03
Definitely. All right, moving to other areas. Comedy, it was coming up a few times. Conan O'Brien is Virgo rising with Uranus and Pluto conjunct the Ascendant, and he's sort of like the eccentric comedian.
02:44:37 Speaker_03
But it's interesting because with Virgo rising, his humor is also often somewhat self-deprecating at the same time.
02:44:45 Speaker_01
Yeah, self-deprecating, but there was also, you know, there was something revolutionary about him at the time too, back in the early 90s.
02:44:51 Speaker_01
It's kind of hard to fathom now, but he really, you know, his show was the late night show and he would push the envelope a bit in terms of, you know, things that might consider indecent today.
02:45:05 Speaker_01
But yeah, he was definitely, you know, something of the revolutionary, but yeah, self-deprecating, very Virgo rising in that way. I mean, he's hilarious. There's nothing funnier than him being humiliated in some way. He plays it perfectly.
02:45:19 Speaker_03
That's one of the themes that would come up is sometimes the character traits of the signs, both the positive ones and the negative ones becoming most prominent when the person has that rising sign. I agree. Yeah. All right. That was a good one.
02:45:38 Speaker_03
Another one is Franklin Roosevelt had Uranus conjunct the Ascendant in Virgo. And for him, the main thing is that he was unexpectedly afflicted with polio
02:45:51 Speaker_03
where he was vacationing with his family and suddenly fell ill while vacationing and then was diagnosed with polio.
02:45:58 Speaker_03
The polio virus attacked his nervous system, causing paralysis that affected his legs and limited his mobility for the rest of his life.
02:46:08 Speaker_01
Yeah, it was always thought to be polio. More recent things have suggested it might have been something called Huntington Bar, I believe is the condition. But anyway, he was paralyzed.
02:46:18 Speaker_01
I believe Jupiter and Saturn in Virgo were transiting over his ascendant when he was paralyzed in August of 1921, touching on that Uranus. So it's almost like he was robbed of the the freedom he had had as someone who could walk on his own two feet.
02:46:35 Speaker_01
But he was quite defiant. I mean, he did manage to fool the American public into thinking that he could walk with the use of leg braces and having one of his sons stand next to him so he could sort of hold him upright.
02:46:49 Speaker_01
So yeah, quite defiant and determined to do things his own way.
02:46:53 Speaker_01
But it's another, like having that Uranus conjunct the Ascendant, when you see the transits of Jupiter and Saturn crossing his Ascendant, when it's all taken from him, when he loses the power in his legs, it's a really powerful astrology chart to look at.
02:47:08 Speaker_03
Yeah, and I always use him as an example because he also had the ruler of the Ascendant in the sixth house, and he was really profoundly affected by his experience with polio.
02:47:18 Speaker_03
And as a result of that, he ended up setting up a foundation both to treat polio patients, but also to search for a cure.
02:47:26 Speaker_03
And eventually, through the efforts of that foundation and others, they were eventually able to find a cure for polio and to be able to you know, pretty much eliminate that as a thing that was afflicting people by the end of the 20th century.
02:47:41 Speaker_03
So I think that's one of the ways in which you can see the ruler of the Ascendant and the Sixth directing him in some ways towards that area with the Sixth House having to do with illness, but also meaning that his life had this greater impact and legacy related to that illness that ended up positively impacting many other people.
02:48:00 Speaker_01
Yeah, absolutely.
02:48:02 Speaker_03
Yeah. All right. So that's a good one. The last one, this one's a little uncertain, but Nikola Tesla was probably born at midnight, probably with Taurus rising and Uranus and Pluto in the rising sign.
02:48:19 Speaker_03
And I thought that was kind of interesting, the scientist who worked with electricity having Uranus rising.
02:48:25 Speaker_01
Well, the story, the reason we have his birth time is that the legend is that he was born at the clap of thunder. Like that's why they know, like it's at midnight sharp, there was this big clap of thunder and that's when he was born.
02:48:39 Speaker_01
So that even makes that Uranus rising even just a little more on the nose, if you will. Yeah, but I mean, he was a special, special, special person. And yeah, you know, it's all right there.
02:48:58 Speaker_03
Definitely. And then, all right, I think that might be good for Uranus. Yeah.
02:49:05 Speaker_01
Yeah. I mean, you know, we have so many examples for all of these. And obviously, we had to trim them down just to make this episode manageable. But yeah.
02:49:13 Speaker_03
Yeah. All right, let's pause. This episode was literally only made possible through the generous contributions of a group of patrons who signed up to support my work through my page on Patreon.
02:49:25 Speaker_03
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02:49:45 Speaker_03
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02:49:53 Speaker_03
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02:50:12 Speaker_03
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02:50:19 Speaker_03
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02:50:36 Speaker_03
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02:51:10 Speaker_03
Let's jump into Neptune in the 1st house. One of my first examples of this is the actor and comedian Jim Carrey, who has Scorpio rising and Neptune conjunct the degree of the Ascendant within two degrees.
02:51:23 Speaker_03
So Ascendant's at 15 Scorpio and Neptune is at 13 Scorpio. My keyword for this is the shapeshifter.
02:51:31 Speaker_03
So he has all these different roles where his form, especially of physical comedy, to completely change his appearance and to become a different person and to morph into this completely different person,
02:51:47 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, his facility with physical comedy is at a totally different level from anyone else. He doesn't have any peers in that way. He can do really amazing stuff.
02:52:00 Speaker_01
And then another element of that whole Neptune thing, I mean, when he's not actually sort of contorting his body in all these strange ways, when he played Andy Kaufman and he just sort of became Andy Kaufman,
02:52:13 Speaker_01
you know, like method acting, you know, taken to the extreme. So yeah, I mean, he's just, he's a very, very, very special kind of performer, you know. I get that he's not everyone's cup of tea, but I'm always impressed by the things he can do.
02:52:29 Speaker_03
Yeah, even contorting his face and stuff like that in some of his early roles.
02:52:35 Speaker_03
More recently in the past few years, he's gone through this whole, there is no me thing a few years back where he was saying these obscure things about there not being a personality or something like that in interviews for a while.
02:52:52 Speaker_01
Yeah. And that sounds like a very Neptune rising kind of thing to say as well. I would beg to differ. There's clearly a person there, but that's how he seems to see himself these days.
02:53:06 Speaker_03
Right. He says, and it pushed me towards the realization that there is no individual here. There are only energies. There is no me. Yeah. You can
02:53:18 Speaker_03
he has this quote, understanding suffering is the way to salvation because once you understand it, you have compassion and the next thing you know, you're free.
02:53:26 Speaker_03
He has a lot of really interesting interviews like that from a few years ago where he was going off on a lot of stuff that was very Neptune, but his keyword for at least the early part of his career is the shape shifter, I think is a good one.
02:53:40 Speaker_03
Oh, yeah. So another one in another area is Salvador Dali had Cancer Rising with Neptune in Cancer in the first house, and he was the surrealist artist. And I think that's a good one.
02:54:00 Speaker_01
Yeah, great painter. Everyone knows the melting clocks, the persistence of memory, it's called. Yeah, really special vision and imagination and just a real character as well.
02:54:16 Speaker_01
I mean, anyone who's seen him in film clips or interviews knows he was another sort of unique personality and an incredible painter.
02:54:29 Speaker_03
Right. His physical appearance and stuff became almost part of his artistic persona.
02:54:36 Speaker_01
Yeah. He had a good sort of… there was a performer like quality to him. When he first made a sensation in the States in the thirties, he did things like, I think he jumped through a shop window, like he did stunts.
02:54:56 Speaker_01
He wasn't above stunts and doing publicity things, but since his work was so great, it wouldn't really matter if you considered some of these things to be cheap or unnecessary because he could walk the walk.
02:55:11 Speaker_03
Okay. Let's see, moving on. Another one is Maya Angelou, who had Ascendant and Leo conjunct Neptune, and hers is, she's the poet.
02:55:26 Speaker_01
the sort of a poet who documented, you know, her times. You know, she writes the, I mean, look at that sun Jupiter in Aries, Martin Luther King is, when he was assassinated, Saturn was right on that sun Jupiter.
02:55:41 Speaker_01
And she really writes the defining summary of the, you know, the impact that had on everyone at the time. So she is sort of like the, you know, she's a poet. Yes, she's sort of like a poet who speaks for the masses in a way.
02:56:01 Speaker_01
And whenever I see her chart, I always think of that powerful Saturn transit, you know, to that sun Jupiter when Dr. King was murdered.
02:56:11 Speaker_03
Definitely. Let's see, moving on. This actually kind of almost ties with Jim Carrey, but Kim Kardashian has Sagittarius rising and Neptune conjunct the Ascendant in Sagittarius, and just different
02:56:27 Speaker_03
ways that she's changed her body or her appearance over the years has been commented on, even so much so that sometimes the way that she's changed or modified her appearance has then influenced other people who then follow her style or follow her different body appearance things, setting trends, I guess.
02:56:50 Speaker_01
Right. Yeah. I'm only tangentially aware of her. I never watched her show, but I know her name. I know who she is. But yeah.
02:57:00 Speaker_03
Okay. Got it. All right. And then the last ones are like David Icke, who is like a crazy conspiracy theorist has Neptune. Wizard people. Yeah, I remember when I was a teenager, I was really into conspiracy theories. Nostradamus. Yeah, Nostradamus.
02:57:26 Speaker_03
I got really into conspiracy theories and stuff like that, but then I came across his books and then I was just like, this is just wild. He's just making up crazy random stuff.
02:57:37 Speaker_03
That was actually one of the first things that really woke me up and made me realize that a lot of the conspiracy theory things I was into and reading about
02:57:45 Speaker_03
people were just lying or making stuff up out of their imagination, was seeing his books and just how far and how far out there and just obviously illusionary they were.
02:57:58 Speaker_03
But he has Libra rising and Neptune in Libra as well as Saturn in Libra in the first house.
02:58:08 Speaker_01
Yeah, he's quite a piece of work.
02:58:11 Speaker_03
Yeah, so I thought that was one and then it led me to another one and that was a reason why I thought it was a good example because the books that actually got me into conspiracy theories and stuff were by an author named Dolores Cannon.
02:58:25 Speaker_03
And I found out years later that her birth time was out there and she has Virgo Rising with Neptune on the Ascendant and Virgo. And it was kind of like a similar thing where her books were this
02:58:38 Speaker_03
She wrote these books where she claimed that she was doing past life regression and that she was putting people into past life regression. And through that, she met a student of Nostradamus's.
02:58:48 Speaker_03
And then through that student, she began communicating with him and decoding his prophecies or something like that. And then it turned into this really wild thing, which as a teenager, when I discovered it, I was like, wow, this is amazing.
02:59:03 Speaker_03
And I was like, there's no way somebody would lie about this or just make this up. But then it's like,
02:59:08 Speaker_03
As I got older, I realized, no, this is somebody with a very active imagination that's putting this forward as if it is true, but it's actually probably not true.
02:59:21 Speaker_03
So I thought that was really interesting, just seeing Neptune right on the Ascendant there. Yeah, sounds like it.
02:59:27 Speaker_03
CB And it's like, I don't know from the subjective standpoint, because I think for Neptune, sometimes when you're experiencing it and you're in the middle of it, you may not be able to tell the difference between what's real and what's not real, or there may be this ambiguity surrounding reality.
02:59:45 Speaker_03
I remember going through Neptune transit over my Ascendant at one point, and actually you were in the car with me. I was driving back from picking up at the airport, and I was driving and said, I don't know what this Neptune transit is about.
03:00:00 Speaker_03
And then you burst out laughing and you were pointing out that we were literally driving through fog at that exact moment and could hardly see in front of us.
03:00:08 Speaker_00
I remember that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's really funny. I was like, see, Chris, the astrology is right in front of you.
03:00:17 Speaker_03
Yeah. So I think sometimes as a transit, we can go through transits like that or sometimes natal placements, but it can be hard to distinguish between what's imaginary and what's not.
03:00:29 Speaker_03
And sometimes you can use that to your benefit because people that use Neptune constructively can create these beautiful fantasy worlds that are very you can really experience it and it feels really in-depth and really well worked out.
03:00:45 Speaker_03
It's like those fantasy authors that construct really elaborate fantasy worlds that seem real, but then on the downside, sometimes when Neptune goes overboard, it can create something where it's not real, even though you think it is.
03:01:02 Speaker_01
or intended to deceive, or like you said, you know, sometimes the best liars, you know, believe their own lies or the best deceivers have deceived themselves first. So yeah, who knows with Ms.
03:01:18 Speaker_01
Cannon, but yeah, it can be any number of those permutations. But yeah, going back to Jim Carrey, I mean, that's a great example of, I mean, he, you know, the way he creates characters is very, detailed and thorough too.
03:01:34 Speaker_01
So yeah, it doesn't always have to be channeling Nostradamus.
03:01:39 Speaker_03
CB All right. I think that's good with Neptune.
03:01:43 Speaker_01
Yeah.
03:01:45 Speaker_03
All right. So let's move on to Pluto in the first house or conjunct the Ascendant. So one of the ones I want to bring up, we've gone through a few sort of Pluto in the first house ones already, but one I wanted to bring up that's new is Alan Turing.
03:02:04 Speaker_03
So here's Alan Turing's chart, Gemini rising with Pluto conjunct Venus in the 1st house in Gemini. So part of it is Pluto is the investigator that gets to the bottom of something or can uncover something. And Alan Turing
03:02:26 Speaker_03
during World War II, was involved in cracking the German codes by creating mechanical computers that could code break, basically. They were eventually successful in breaking the German codes, which helped in the war effort.
03:02:41 Speaker_01
It helped enormously. I mean, you know, next to Winston Churchill, England probably owed Turing the greatest debt, you know, for saving them in that hour. So it's, considering what happened to him later, it's just, it's a absolute travesty of justice.
03:02:59 Speaker_01
But yeah, he did what was considered, you know, the undoable was, you know, these very sophisticated codes he had to crack and he did it.
03:03:10 Speaker_03
Yeah, so that's the positive side. The negative side was that with Venus conjunct Pluto in the first house that he was a gay man, and this was uncovered during the course of things after World War II.
03:03:26 Speaker_03
He ended up being persecuted for that, and they ended up forcing him to… He was chemically castrated as a result of that, I think, right?
03:03:36 Speaker_01
Yeah, homosexuality was illegal in England until 1967. Same for Canada, actually, ironically. So yeah, I mean, he died. He took his own life, I think, in 1953 as a result of that whole debacle.
03:03:53 Speaker_01
I think what happened was, as happened in those days, he was caught. He was arrested in some public men's room. in the middle of something and, yeah, prosecuted and forced to go through this process.
03:04:10 Speaker_01
And he wound up taking his own life, you know, this guy who had really saved Britain. So, yeah, it's a travesty, but you have a point. It's also there in that chart, you know. That was the way gay men, you know, could find,
03:04:28 Speaker_01
you know, could find their way around in those days were in these, you know, public spaces, men's rooms and things like that.
03:04:34 Speaker_01
I mean, it was all very surreptitious because, you know, just to, you know, have a little pleasure in life that they had to be, you know, breaking the law and acting on the DL as it were, you know, being as discreet as possible.
03:04:51 Speaker_01
So yeah, there is an element of Venus Pluto there.
03:04:54 Speaker_03
So we get all these different elements with Pluto where it can be the investigator getting to the bottom of things, but also there can be components with Pluto in the first of things which are hidden, the illicit, but also themes of life and death can be major themes with Pluto in the first when it's prominent in a chart as well.
03:05:17 Speaker_03
So that's one that came up. It's actually kind of tricky when going through some of my Pluto examples. A lot of them, as I was pulling stuff up, sometimes you had that element there. So another one, for example, was Kurt Cobain.
03:05:33 Speaker_03
So let me pull up his chart. So here's Kurt Cobain. So he had 19 degrees of Virgo rising and he had Pluto at 19 degrees of Virgo conjunct the Ascendant and Uranus at 23 degrees of Virgo.
03:05:51 Speaker_03
So on the one hand, it's like he's a good example of Uranus conjunct the Ascendant because he was very rebellious. He was very eccentric and unique. He rejected social convention and things that were seen as
03:06:08 Speaker_03
common at the time and didn't want to be held back by anything.
03:06:17 Speaker_01
you know, very pro-counterculture, really ahead of his time, you know. He would have fit perfectly in the zeitgeist of today in terms of his politics, you know. MTV used to have a heavy metal hour show called The Headbanger's Ball.
03:06:35 Speaker_01
So what Kurt did was he showed up in a ball gown, which, like I promised you, was not something that was done in those days, especially not by heavy metal musicians. No, he was, you know, really, really special in that way.
03:06:51 Speaker_01
He played the part of the reluctant rock star. I think some of that was, you know, a put on. I think, you know, obviously you don't make an album like Nevermind by accident. But he didn't handle rock stardom well. He wasn't made for that part of it.
03:07:07 Speaker_01
I think he was, you know, just very serious about the music. But then there's the Pluto rising. And yeah, you know, he was someone who could go to some very sort of dark places, who had been to dark places and sang about being in dark places.
03:07:26 Speaker_01
Never Mind was this smash album, but you know, there's heavy duty topics on there. You know, there's one song about
03:07:33 Speaker_01
There's sexual assault, there's the first three songs on the album all mention guns, you know, and of course, that was, you know, what eventually he used to leave us.
03:07:44 Speaker_01
So, yeah, it was, to have an album that was that ubiquitous, it's hard to even explain at this point. I mean, that album was just huge. Huge, and it changed things.
03:07:57 Speaker_01
It changed things like no record in the 80s had, not even, I mean, Madonna and Michael Jackson and Prince had been huge pop stars, but they hadn't really changed the culture in the way he did in a way.
03:08:09 Speaker_01
Like, you know, they found their place and they kind of, you know, changed fashion and things like that. But Kurt Cobain and Nirvana kind of changed the music industry in a way that you still feel now, I think.
03:08:23 Speaker_03
And that's part of the reason I wanted to mention this example because he has those two outer planets which are so slow-moving right on the Ascendant.
03:08:32 Speaker_03
Sometimes when you have those slow-moving outer planets right on the degree of the Ascendant or the angles, the person can become almost like the avatar for a generation. And for him, he ended up influencing an entire generation of people
03:08:50 Speaker_03
in a very personal way and became the spokesperson for that generation. And there's something about that with having those two outer planets, those generational planets there that Uranus-Pluto conjunction right on the degrees of his Ascendant.
03:09:05 Speaker_01
Yeah, absolutely. He really did. He felt familiar to all of us. I was only a year younger than him. So many of the attitudes and tastes that he had, he really was saying things that I'd been thinking for a long time. So that was kind of amazing.
03:09:23 Speaker_01
So I certainly felt that. And I know a lot of my peers did too.
03:09:27 Speaker_03
Then also with Uranus on the Ascendant, his fame happened suddenly and rapidly and unexpectedly.
03:09:32 Speaker_03
It's just one minute they're driving around as a band in their van, scraping by, and another minute they're playing and influencing millions and millions of people.
03:09:44 Speaker_01
August 25th, 1991, on a Sunday, I was at a rock festival in Hesselt, Belgium. The headliners were the Ramones. Before them were the Pogues, and one of their last shows was Shane McGowan. Before them were Sonic Youth.
03:09:58 Speaker_01
Before them was a surprise solo show by Black Francis of the Pixies, during which show someone came out and sprayed him with a fire extinguisher, and I'll get to who that was in a second. Before that, it was Dinosaur Jr. And that at 11 in the morning,
03:10:13 Speaker_01
There was this opening band, this three-piece, Nirvana, whose I'd heard their first record and I kind of knew who they were. And it was Kurt Cobain who later sprayed Black Francis from Pixies on stage with a fire extinguisher.
03:10:25 Speaker_01
So I saw him twice that day. But this was August 25th. This is like three weeks before Nevermind comes out. And they were, you know, the first band at 11 in the morning on a Sunday morning at a rock festival.
03:10:37 Speaker_01
And within three, four weeks, they would just be the biggest thing on the planet. So yeah, it was fast. It was very, very fast.
03:10:43 Speaker_03
CB And that's partially the Pluto component as well. Because Pluto, our friend astrologer we mentioned earlier in the episode, Alan White, always said that Pluto makes small things big and big things small, and it'll tend to take things to extremes.
03:10:57 Speaker_03
So if Pluto's conjunct something in the chart, it'll just magnify it. And I think it's really magnifying that
03:11:03 Speaker_03
Uranus energy there that happens so rapidly and just blowing it up and making it even bigger and causing this generational shift in music and everything virtually overnight.
03:11:16 Speaker_01
Yeah. There's a whole school of musicians who, the heavy metal before Nirvana, all these people who were selling a lot of records, or at least they appeared to, they were running things, they were crushed overnight.
03:11:35 Speaker_01
That's another thing Pluto can do is just sort of like, destroy and bury, as well as revive and bring to life again. But yeah, there's a whole sort of generation of musicians who talk about how like Nirvana ended it all for them.
03:11:49 Speaker_01
You know, for me, it was a beautiful thing. But obviously, for some people, it was like the end of everything. So yeah, that's real Pluto. I mean, it, you know, it destroyed, it created, it reconfigured, it did everything.
03:12:07 Speaker_03
Yeah. And then of course, as you said, in his music from early on, there were themes of guns or suicide or death or other really difficult themes. And then at the end of his life, he ended up taking his own life.
03:12:24 Speaker_03
And that's one of the things that he was known for. Yeah, unfortunately. Yeah. All right. So going back to another one, I already mentioned this one, but Ram Dass, we talked about his Jupiter in the 1st house and that
03:12:48 Speaker_03
of spiritual transformation, but it's like he went through a whole transformation also at Pluto right at the Ascendant.
03:12:53 Speaker_03
And I think that's important because sometimes going through some sort of transformation of the self at some point in the life and both how you perceive yourself as well as how other people perceive you is a major theme of having Pluto in the first house.
03:13:09 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, I think he had a lot to overcome. I don't know that much about him. I know he wrote Be Here Now, and I know he was Leary's accomplice in the whole Harvard LSD thing. But if I'm not mistaken, he was gay and really struggling with it.
03:13:27 Speaker_01
I don't want to add things to his biography that aren't there, but that's my recollection that that also played into a sort of identity crisis. I think he's someone who's sort of, stripped his identity away and then sort of recreated it.
03:13:43 Speaker_01
I mean, he did become a very different person, it seems.
03:13:46 Speaker_03
Okay.
03:13:48 Speaker_03
And then another one along those lines just in terms of transformations of the self, but Eddie Izzard or the comedian who is known sometimes as Eddie Izzard and sometimes more recently referred to as Susie Izzard has Virgo rising at 10 degrees of Virgo and Pluto at nine degrees of Virgo.
03:14:09 Speaker_03
And in the 90s and 2000s was known for being one of the only comedians who openly did cross-dressing, and even though he was born as a man, he was dressing sometimes as a woman, and that was part of his identity.
03:14:31 Speaker_03
And then later in recent years has come out as being gender fluid and transgender, and is now known as Susie Izard, although they alternate pronouns sometimes between he, him pronouns and she, her, or sometimes between names.
03:14:50 Speaker_03
So you're getting this with a mutable sign with Virgo, you often get
03:14:55 Speaker_03
things that are fluid, things that are holding two different things at once, especially in the Mercury-ruled signs, and having that transformational aspect sometimes of the first house can come through with Pluto on the Ascendant.
03:15:10 Speaker_01
Ishii-de has one of my all-time favorite comedy routines ever, the whole bit about flags, which is something I'd be happy to have written on my tombstone. It's just pure genius, amazing comedian.
03:15:25 Speaker_03
Yeah, that entire set is just legendary from the early 2000s that was done in San Francisco for our generation. It was just an epic stand-up set.
03:15:37 Speaker_01
Yeah. Thoroughly funny and revolutionary and just so many cuts above most stand-up comedy.
03:15:46 Speaker_03
Yeah. I've noticed that comes up though sometimes. I had a listener on Twitter send in who said that they realized that they were transgender when Uranus passed over their Ascendant degree.
03:16:00 Speaker_03
So there's different people depending on the placements involved, but that can be something that happens sometimes since that can be a fundamental
03:16:09 Speaker_03
realization of having either a realization or having an actual shift in terms of the gender that one identifies as can sometimes come up with either first house placements or first house transits.
03:16:22 Speaker_01
That makes perfect sense, don't you think?
03:16:24 Speaker_03
Yeah, just in terms of both things having to do with the body, things having to do with the self, things having to do in Susie Izzard's case with how you dress and how you present yourself to the world.
03:16:36 Speaker_03
Sometimes with trans, it's actually that can be a first house thing as a person. We'll go through
03:16:41 Speaker_03
Venus transit or something, and they'll go through a makeover and they'll start doing their hair differently or start dressing differently, whatever that means to them.
03:16:50 Speaker_03
Sometimes that can actually be a huge shift for people to do something really differently with your appearance can be a major change. Other times it can be like,
03:17:01 Speaker_03
health issue that causes a change, like a Saturn transit goes through a person's first house, they commonly can lose weight or sometimes even get sick and appear emaciated or tired or slow or something like that.
03:17:15 Speaker_03
So those themes having to do with appearance can sometimes manifest in very literal and very important ways. All right.
03:17:26 Speaker_03
Other ones in terms of transformations also, then sometimes with Pluto on the Ascendant, there can be issues that happen which cause a transformation in terms of a person's body and self and autonomy.
03:17:43 Speaker_03
Christopher Reeve was a famous one who had 19 degrees of Leo rising and Pluto at 22 degrees of Leo. And the ruler of the Ascendant is the Sun, which is in
03:17:55 Speaker_03
Libra in the third house of short-distance travel conjoining Saturn in a night chart and Mercury.
03:18:02 Speaker_03
And Christopher Reeve was famously in the 1970s played Superman, but later was involved in a horse riding accident where he fell off a horse and it damaged his spine and he became a quadriplegic. So he was unable to move his limbs from the neck down.
03:18:21 Speaker_01
So tragic. So tragic. I was the biggest Superman fan in 1978. And yeah, and he's apparently like a really great guy. He and Robin Williams had been college roommates, so they were best friends. And yeah, they're these two very special personalities.
03:18:38 Speaker_01
And apparently like he's the real deal. He really was like a real standup guy, just like what a terrible thing to happen to him. But yeah, that's Pluto rising for sure.
03:18:52 Speaker_03
Yeah, just going through a physical transformation in his case. It was a challenging one, a really difficult one. But it's also interesting that it's linked to the third house with the ruler of the Ascendant there.
03:19:03 Speaker_03
But his case reminds me of Roosevelt, where
03:19:10 Speaker_03
Uranus on the Ascendant, the ruler of the Ascendant was in the sixth house of Illness, and then he got polio probably, and then ended up founding an institute for polio research that eventually found the cure. Christopher Reeves similarly ended up
03:19:28 Speaker_03
founding and creating a lot of charities to try to help people who are quadriplegic or had similar issues in terms of movement. That ended up being part of his legacy in the end, was promoting that as a cause and as an issue.
03:19:44 Speaker_03
So often with many of these celebrity examples,
03:19:47 Speaker_03
That ends up actually being, you get this dual thing where you have their personal subjective experience of what happens that's indicated in the chart, but then they end up leaving a legacy that sometimes positively impacts the world in general with respect to that issue at the same time.
03:20:06 Speaker_01
And, you know, come to think of it, he had even, when he got the role of Superman, he wasn't physically buff, but they just, they liked him and his look, so they had him work out.
03:20:16 Speaker_01
So there was even a physical transformation just for him to play Superman before we even get to, you know, the accident and everything that followed.
03:20:24 Speaker_01
So yeah, the theme of physical transformation sort of, you know, came up a few times in his lifetime, it seems.
03:20:32 Speaker_03
Yeah.
03:20:34 Speaker_03
So that actually might be a good example to end on, honestly, because on the one hand, that's both a tragic and difficult example, but then also that sometimes from tragedy or difficulties that an individual experiences, they sometimes find a way to persevere and to overcome, and then also to turn around and help other people with similar issues.
03:20:56 Speaker_03
And I think that's one of the greatest lessons
03:20:58 Speaker_03
even of difficult placements when it's experienced as a subjective tragedy or something like that, is that sometimes a person can learn and grow from it and help other people who are in similar situations to not experience that as bad or to help them out.
03:21:15 Speaker_03
And there's something very positive or optimistic about that.
03:21:19 Speaker_01
Yeah, absolutely.
03:21:21 Speaker_03
Yeah.
03:21:23 Speaker_01
Yeah. I mean, that's the thing about going through the planets is, you know, you end on Pluto and there's going to be some darkness. As Leonard Cohen would say, you want it darker.
03:21:33 Speaker_03
There's darkness, but also some light. Yes. All right. We're back from break. And speaking of Pluto and going to extremes, we have finished going through all of the planets in the first house, my friend. Congratulations.
03:21:47 Speaker_01
Yeah. That's quite an achievement. Thank you. Likewise.
03:21:50 Speaker_03
Yeah.
03:21:50 Speaker_03
So just to summarize, I think we've seen now at this point that the first house and how at the beginning we said that it signifies the self, the body, physical vitality, appearance, spirit, character, life direction, focus, and that which arises from you.
03:22:07 Speaker_03
I think we can see now how some of those keywords have very tangible and very specific manifestations
03:22:13 Speaker_03
based on things like what planets are in the 1st house, what the rising sign actually is, and also what the ruler of the Ascendant is doing in the chart and what house it's placed in.
03:22:25 Speaker_01
Yep, that's it. That's the checklist and we covered it all. There's nothing else anyone ever needs to look up in order to understand the first house. This has been a thorough job.
03:22:36 Speaker_03
Case closed. Case closed. Well, yeah, so this is brilliant. Thank you for helping me to set this foundation for this series. Obviously, I'm going to continue on with the other houses.
03:22:47 Speaker_03
I am going to linger with the first house a little bit because I've already recorded a workshop
03:22:53 Speaker_03
where I talked with patrons and did some interviews with patrons of The Astrology Podcast who had stories about their first house placements, where I actually talked with them in order to get a more intimate understanding of what the first house means up close by hearing it directly from individuals.
03:23:11 Speaker_03
So
03:23:12 Speaker_03
In this episode, we've mainly focused on celebrity charts, which I like on the one hand because it gives you an objective thing that you can point to where you can look up information about these people and publicly available information so that there's agreed points of things that everybody knows about certain celebrities or what have you.
03:23:31 Speaker_03
which is good for a certain type of research. But then there's another type of research that only happens when you sit down and talk to a person about their chart.
03:23:38 Speaker_03
And that's what I'm going to talk about in that other episode, which is already available for early access to patrons of The Astrology Podcast.
03:23:47 Speaker_03
But I basically recorded that episode, then I realized I wanted to put together a more detailed and thorough treatment of the first house. So that's what we did here today. CB So I've also done other episodes.
03:24:00 Speaker_03
One of the things we didn't get into very much is transits and eclipses. We did mention some transits to the 1st house, but we didn't go into eclipses as much as we could have.
03:24:09 Speaker_03
I do have other episodes that I've done on eclipses because eclipses are important because when eclipses start happening in the 1st house, they're also happening in the 6th house over a year and a half time period.
03:24:21 Speaker_03
You'll see eclipses bounce back and forth between the 1st and 7th houses, there will be major beginnings and major endings when it comes to topics of self versus relationships in the person's chart.
03:24:33 Speaker_03
Sometimes during those periods, you can get a much greater sense of what the 1st house signifies.
03:24:38 Speaker_03
I've done a few different episodes on that that have been workshops where I shared examples and I talked to attendees about their 1st house eclipse transits. You can search for that on the Astrology Podcast.
03:24:50 Speaker_03
One of the episodes is titled, Interpreting Solar and Lunar Eclipses in Your Birth Chart. On YouTube, it has the current title of, Eclipses as Transits in Astrology. There's another one titled, Eclipses in the 12 Houses in Astrology Workshop.
03:25:07 Speaker_03
Yeah, so check those out because eclipses can be important, and I know that's something you focus on as well, right?
03:25:13 Speaker_01
Yeah, certainly. Lately, I've been doing a lot of research on them. And yeah, that's the thing about today's episode. We went quite long, but we actually put together a lot more material than we were able to present.
03:25:24 Speaker_01
So that's why I was joking earlier about the whole case closed thing. We could have gone on and on and on and on. And there's some really great stuff we had to leave out.
03:25:33 Speaker_01
But yes, eclipses are indeed, those eclipses that can fall on the ankles can be very powerful and very revealing. So yeah, that's the kind of thing that you could conceivably do a whole episode just on that, but that's for some other day.
03:25:49 Speaker_01
Definitely, definitely. In the meantime, check out Chris's episodes on eclipses.
03:25:54 Speaker_03
Yeah, check those out. So let's see, I'll continue with the second house in the future as I continue this series, and those will be available to early access to patrons as soon as they're available.
03:26:06 Speaker_03
If you'd like more on the ruler of the Ascendant, I go into the ruler of the Ascendant and its house placement with lots more examples in my online course on ancient astrology called the Hellenistic Astrology course.
03:26:18 Speaker_03
which you can find at theastrologyschool.com.
03:26:20 Speaker_03
I think it's a whole 10-hour lecture where I go through each of the 12 houses and show different manifestations of the ruler of the Ascendant placed in each of the 12 houses just to get into much more detail about what the ruler of the Ascendant does and what it looks like depending on what its condition is in the chart.
03:26:38 Speaker_03
So if you like some of those examples that I have here in this talk, you'll like that in the Hellenistic course. I also have a
03:26:46 Speaker_03
whole chapter on the significations of the houses, as well as a separate chapter on the ruler of the Ascendant and the houses in my book titled Hellenistic Astrology, the Study of Fate and Fortune.
03:26:57 Speaker_03
So if you want to learn more about that, you can get a hold of that. And yeah, that's where you can learn more about this topic. What about you, Nick? What are you working on right now? What do you have coming up? And you actually do consultations.
03:27:10 Speaker_03
So if people want to get a reading with you to look at their chart, they could, right?
03:27:14 Speaker_01
Yeah, I have been on hiatus but I've opened up my bookings for mid-August for a few weeks on a part-time basis while I'm working on other projects.
03:27:26 Speaker_01
We're developing a software, an astrology software called Nechepso that we hope to have out in September.
03:27:33 Speaker_01
We've recently launched an astrology-themed social media network that's just sort of, you know, getting debugged as we speak, called Third House Social, and that'll be something exciting as we tune it up.
03:27:49 Speaker_01
And yeah, I'm back at consultations as of the second half of August for at least a month on a part-time basis. You can book me at nickdagombestastrologer.com. I'm having a ball so far.
03:28:06 Speaker_03
Brilliant. Awesome. Well, yeah, people should check out your website. I'll put a link to it in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website. Otherwise, thanks a lot for joining me for this.
03:28:16 Speaker_03
I've been putting this off for, I think I finished the Zodiac series like a year ago and I've been meaning to do this series and I've been putting it off for a year because it just seemed too big and too
03:28:25 Speaker_03
insurmountable to really do a good job with it. But I'm glad that you and I ended up doing it together and that we ended up giving it the proper treatment that it really, really deserves.
03:28:36 Speaker_03
So thanks a lot for contributing and for helping collaborate with me on this research and put this episode together.
03:28:42 Speaker_01
It's been my pleasure. Every time I work with you on one of these episodes, I grow as an astrologer. It always gives back. So it's an absolute pleasure. Thank you, Chris.
03:28:54 Speaker_03
I feel the same way. Cool. All right, buddy. Well, I guess that's it for this episode. So thank you everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we'll see you again next time.
03:29:07 Speaker_03
Special thanks to all the patrons that help to support the production of this episode of the podcast through our page on patreon.com.
03:29:13 Speaker_03
In particular, shoutout to the patrons on our Producers tier including Christy Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandy Ray, Angelique Nambo, Issa Sabah, Jake Otero, Jeannie Marie Kaplan, Melissa Delano, Sunny Bazbaz, and Kwatsi Alibarohu.
03:29:29 Speaker_03
If you're looking for a reliable astrologer to get an astrological consultation with, then we have a new list of astrologers on the podcast website that we recommend for readings.
03:29:38 Speaker_03
Most of the astrologers specialize in birth chart readings, although some also offer synastry, rectification, electional astrology, horary questions, and more. Find out more information at theastrologypodcast.com slash consultations.
03:29:53 Speaker_03
If you'd like to learn more about my approach to astrology, then I'd recommend checking out my book titled Hellenistic Astrology, The Study of Fate and Fortune, where I go over the history, philosophy, and techniques of ancient astrology, taking people from beginner up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts.
03:30:11 Speaker_03
And finally, thanks to our sponsors, including The Mountain Astrologer magazine, which is a quarterly astrology magazine which you can read in print or online at mountainastrologer.com.