The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 311, titled:
Stelliums in Astrology: Interpreting Planetary Clusters
With Chris Brennan and Patrick Watson
Episode originally released on July 21, 2021
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Mary Sharon
Transcription released July 30, 2021
Copyright © 2021 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Today is Monday, July 12th, 2021, starting at 5:43 PM in Denver, Colorado. And this is the 311th episode of the show. In this episode we will be talking with astrologer Patrick Watson about the concept of stelliums in astrology and what it means to have a cluster of planets in a specific sign or a specific house in your chart. Hey Patrick, welcome back to the podcast.
PATRICK WATSON: Thank you so much for having me again.
CB: It’s been, what? A couple months since our episode on ephemeris, ephemerides? Whatever it is.
PW: Yeah, yes.
CB: Yes. June or May? Okay. So, we’re back. This is a big episode I’ve been threatening to do for years and I have been very serious about doing since the beginning of this year. But I think it’s finally time and I’m excited to do this episode because this is a topic that lots of people are curious about, lots of people have questions about and have asked me to cover. But I think I needed the right combination of two astrologers with Scorpio stelliums to really pull off this episode. So I’m excited that you’ve decided to join me.
PW: Me too.
CB: Okay. All right. Let’s jump right into it. For those watching, especially the YouTube version, this is going to be a deep dive into the concept of stelliums. Obviously this is going to be a quick video as you can tell by the length of the time reading in the bottom corner. But what going to make up for in the length is by going into depth and looking at a bunch of example charts. We’re going to first start by talking about the concept of stelliums, what it means, how it’s defined, some of the different debates amongst astrologers about what constitutes a stellium. And then we’re going to get into looking at some example charts, actually a bunch of example charts. So you can actually see how this technique works out in practice. So that is the plan. Why don’t we get into it first by defining what a stellium is? And stelliums, to me, are typically defined as a cluster of three or four or more planets that are in the same sign of the zodiac or in the same house. So for example, let me share a little graphic that my friend, Paula Belluomini made for me. This is an example, let’s say, for example, you’ve got Cancer rising and let’s say you’ve got three planets that are in the zodiacal sign of Cancer. So let’s say Venus, Saturn and Mars are in the sign of Cancer, so some astrologers define a stellium as three or more planets, so if you have any three planets in a sign, then you’ve got a stellium. Some astrologers though define it as four or more planets. Let’s say instead that you had the Sun, Venus, Saturn and Mars in the sign of Cancer, in that case, that would be a stellium or a cluster of planets in the sign of Cancer. And if that was your first house, then that would also be a first house stellium showing an emphasis basically on that sign and that house in your birth chart. So I think in terms of getting started, those are two main starting points. Just one emphasizing that a stellium is three or four or more planets in one part of the chart, and then secondarily that it primarily… What we’re going to see during the course of this discussion is that it primarily just shows an emphasis on a certain part of the chart, especially on a certain sign of the zodiac and the qualities of that sign, as well as on a certain house and the qualities and topics associated with that house in terms of each of the 12 houses of the birth chart. So let’s start by the debate, the important all encompassing debate about three or four-planet stelliums. We just learned last night that we actually had a disagreement about this. I didn’t realize it until the day before. I’ve always leaned towards being more of four or more planet definition person. Just because like the Sun and or Mercury and the Sun and Venus are often within a few signs of each other, one to two signs of each other. So it’s not super uncommon to see somebody with one or two or three of those planets in the same sign. And if you throw one other planet in there, then you’ve got stellium of three planets. So that’s not super, super rare, but a four-planet stellium is a bit more rare depending on which planets or bodies you’re using, right?
PW: Right. I mean, my thoughts on it at least is that a conjunction requires at least two bodies. So if a stellium is defined as four or more bodies within a sign then that sort of creates this strange gap in sort of stratas or levels of categorization where what is a three-planet conjunction?
CB: What is a three, yeah.
PW: Chopped liver, only four or more matters.
CB: If you do have three, that’s obviously concentration. So to defend… I was originally much more stringent years ago about my four-planet stellium superiority. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more lax about it and I can see three planets being a stellium. Because if you have three planets in any sign or any house, then you’ve got a concentration of and an emphasis on that sign or house. So yeah.
PW: Not to mention at least or at most six houses having the ruler of those houses being imported into that sign potentially. I don’t know how absolutely dire this disagreement is. I would probably say you can just categorize stelliums as three-point stellium versus a four-point stellium. And obviously the more planets involved in that stellium is going to be less common and sort of more impressive.
CB: So this isn’t the house division debate where astrologers are strapping bombs to their chest and suicide bombing each other over this. It’s a like lower level debate in astrology.
PW: However, and I don’t know if you want to go into this a little later or you’re comfortable going into it now, but I would think that another potential point of contention is whether or not the planets which are within a sign should be close enough to be considered in degree-based conjunctions versus whether it matters that they are further apart in a given sign. If those kinds of stelliums might be considered as maybe a little different than ones which are closer by degree.
CB: Yeah. So I didn’t even think about this as an issue because I’ve always classified stelliums as things that happen anytime you have like three or four or more planets in the same sign, anywhere in the same sign or anywhere in the same house. And because I use whole sign houses as well as because I use, according to Hellenistic astrology, I recognize both degree-based aspects as well as sign-based aspects, so that two planets anywhere in the same sign, even if one is really early in the sign and one is really late, are considered to be co-present and their energies are thought to rub off on each other a little bit. Just like two people living in the same house, you have some influence from your roommate, even if you’re living on the other side of the house from each other. Obviously, that’s more intense if you’re actually living in the same room together, but there’s still some sort of relationship if you’re living in the same house. So that’s how I define stelliums is by sign. But I could see… I did an episode a year ago last summer with Carole Taylor on aspect patterns, and stelliums are often grouped into the different aspect patterns like the t-square or the grand cross or the yod or different things like that. And stellium was one that we put off to address later but didn’t get to, but I could see how if you’re treating the stellium like an aspect pattern, that aspect patterns usually do have to be a little bit closer in degree because of the orbs of like the degree-based aspects involved. So I can see some merit to that approach.
PW: Right. I guess the way I see it is a co-presence is that’s the broadest net that you could throw, that’s kind of a catch-all term. Co-presence just means they could be anywhere. I feel like a stellium–
CB: Anywhere in the same sign.
PW: Right. Yeah, as long as they are in the same sign it’s a co-presence. I kind of use it interchangeably. But I think I would… Since we using different words for these different things, then I guess I would consider if co-presences could capture the idea of planets being anywhere on the sign together, then a stellium might be three or four or more planets which are more closely lumped together by degree within the signs. So maybe there’s different grades of co-presences where some may be a further apart and have a more general sort of influence, whereas stelliums which are more tightly packed by degree might just be seen as more dynamic or energetic co-presences.
CB: Yeah. I mean, maybe. I don’t know. I’m going to go ahead and continue to define a stellium as just like planets co-present in a sign or in a whole sign house. Different people are free to do whatever. And there’s something to be said for a close alignment or a triple conjunction or quadruple conjunction of planets all in the same degree or something like that. Because that’s actually, if you think about it, the classic thing that people think about or think that astrologers pay attention to if we’re talking about like mundane astrology, and we actually had a good example of this last year when we had that huge pile up of planets that all aligned in the sign of Capricorn and actually got pretty close by degree, although they didn’t line up by degree around March of 2020. And that was when, especially in the west in like the US, that’s when COVID hit and that’s when the lockdowns happened and the entire world sort of went to hell. So it was much easier. I liked that about last year when people were like, “What’s going on astrologically?” And I can just say, “Look, all the planets are lined up in the same sign of the zodiac right now, and that’s what’s going on.” And that was kind of pretty simple and straightforward.
PW: Yeah. And I think it’s funny and interesting too, because Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto were already kind of in range in January and February, but it really wasn’t until Mars entered the picture. It wasn’t until Mars entered the sign, made that ingress into Capricorn that it really… That was sort of when the panic set in. It acted as a trigger almost, an agitating trigger to this alignment that was already pretty fearsome just by itself. So yeah, I mean, it will probably remain one of the absolute all time greatest examples of this kind of thing, but we have a few more examples like that from other periods of history with interesting alignments, maybe we’ll get to sharing those.
CB: Yeah. And the other thing that was interesting about that is that it continued, the most intense part of that during that initial lockdown phase and stuff continued because it started really when Mars ingressed into Capricorn and joined Jupiter and Saturn and Pluto, but then Mars and Saturn got close but they didn’t complete their conjunction until they both changed signs and moved into Aquarius. And then the conjunction was at zero Aquarius. And then we had this interesting phenomenon then where as the conjunction started separating, they stayed in the same signs for the next month or two, which really drew out this extended period of the Mars Saturn conjunction, which otherwise would have just lasted for a month or a month and a half or something as Mars is going through the same sign as Saturn, but it accidentally exacerbated it and drew it out or stretched it out into this much longer several month period.
PW: And I think that’s a really good real world example of the fact that it doesn’t necessarily matter that the planets were not together exactly by degree. That it was really Mars’s ingress at the beginning of Capricorn that seemed to almost be the instigator or trigger of the developments that kept intensifying as Mars approached by degree that Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto conjunction. I don’t want to get too off track here. There’s a couple of other issues we need to figure out about stelliums which is, okay, if they don’t need to be necessarily close by degree, what other points could you potentially include? For myself, I tend to be someone who restricts myself to the traditional seven in the outers. I would include the nodes or points like the Ascendant or Descendant or fortune more sort of secondarily. I wouldn’t give the nodes quite as much weight as a planet, but I generally restrict my observation of stelliums to the planets themselves, Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune Pluto.
CB: Yeah. And just to wrap up the previous discussion, I would just say, if you have four planets in the same sign, you have a stellium. And if they’re closer by degree, then that stellium is going to be even more intense as a conjunction. So it’s the same concept that we apply to any other sign-based versus degree-based aspect, which is that planets the aspect starts as soon as they’re configured by sign and it gets more intense and acute the closer they get by degree.
PW: I think of sign-based aspects as providing kind of a general atmospheric type of relevance like, “Oh, they’re co-present, we have a storm,” but when the aspect actually happens by degree, that might be the lightning strikes that hits the person, I don’t know, playing a yo-yo or something. That’s like the pivotal moment of the storm is the damage it causes. But the overall atmosphere will be kind of in the air leading up to it.
CB: Definitely. And then of course, when it comes to stelliums one of the things that’s interesting about them or one of the reasons they’re important when it comes to timing and transits and things like that is that when let’s say a planet transits through that sign in your chart, it’s going to always hit the same planets in order in relative quick succession. So it’s like if you have planets at the beginning of Scorpio, four planets starting at the beginning of Scorpio going through the end of Scorpio, anytime a planet goes through Scorpio, it’s going to hit all four of those planets. Or if you’re doing annual profections where you jump and you count one sign per year from the rising sign, anytime that profection gets to that sign where you have a stellium like, let’s say, Scorpio, that’s going to be a big year for you because all four of those planets are activated at the same time. So the last thing was just with a transit, of course, it’s always going to happen in the same succession if you have, let’s say, I have Pluto at two, maybe I should just show my chart because it’s better as a visual instead of attempting to explain it. Here is my chart where I have Pluto at two, Scorpio Sun at nine, Saturn at 17, Mercury at 23 and South Node at 27. So any time let’s say Mars goes into Scorpio, which is going to do later this year which I’m not looking forward to, it will conjoin Pluto first, then the Sun, then Saturn, then Mars or then Mercury, then the South Node in relative quick succession for Mars over the course of weeks. If it was Saturn, it’s over the course of two or three years. But if those were closer, if those were all within a few degrees, then it would hit them in much even quicker succession. So that’s another reason in terms of when we’re talking about the intensity of something, it’s almost like a musical instrument in terms of like hitting a string on a harp and how close after one string the next string is hit or whether there’s a little bit of space between them. Did you like that as a musical analogy as my musically trained friend? Was there a better way to put that since you have actual musical training?
PW: No. No. I think that’s wonderful. By the way, everyone, Chris is going to be dropping his album pretty soon. It’s going to be great.
CB: My EP?
PW: Yeah.
CB: The Scorpio Stellium EP.
PW: Yeah. I just wanted to give a really, really quick anecdote about a guy who has a stellium in the second house. Mars is first in the sign, Jupiter’s next in the sign, and then Saturn is just after that. And I worked with this gentleman in his financial trading, giving astrological advice for trading. It was really interesting because there was a period of time we were working fairly long hours together in sort of tracking astrology in real time. And I thought it was really interesting because on the particular day that we were working together, the Moon went over his Mars in the second house, and that was when he had this terrible loss in his stock options. And then later on in the day, Jupiter was contacted by the Moon and he had this great experience. He managed to have some… So this all happened within one day. He finally had some stocks go up in value that he was able to make a good profit on. And then finally close to the end of the day, the Moon approached his Saturn in the second and it kind of ended on a sad note. So it was really interesting to see just even within one day and the progress of the Moon making this conjunction to this gentleman’s planets in a second house that it corresponded so straightforwardly with this pattern. And then we also noticed that even with the Sun and its transit over those same points, he would have a good financial day when Sun was on his Jupiter, but when his Sun was on his Mars and Saturn those represent days of losses. So it’s real seeing the pattern of how a planet’s contact when you have them in a stellium in the same house like that.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right. So circling back to the point that you were starting to segue into which is the other big debate which is what points can you use or should you use to calculate basically whether you have a stellium, and different astrologers will do it different ways. So just to illustrate that, again, going back to my chart to keep talking about my stellium, which is very important. So if we use, let’s say, all the modern planets, including Pluto and the South Node, and it’s like I’ve got Pluto, the Sun, Saturn, Mercury, and the South Node all in Scorpio in the 10th whole sign house. So that would be a Scorpio stellium or a 10th house stellium if you’re using all those points.
PW: Yeah, that doesn’t fit you at all, Chris.
CB: Yeah. However, if you take away the outer planets, you get rid of the modern planets, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, then it’s like I only have the Sun, Saturn, Mercury and South Node there. So it’s goes from a five-planet stellium to a four-planet stellium. However, the South Node is not a planet, it’s just a mathematical point. So it’s like if you took that away, then it drops me down to three planets, which is just the Sun, Saturn and Mercury. So I say that just to belabor the point about depending on what points and what planets you’re using, that can either give you a stellium or take away stellium status for you. And there’s a lot of different factors that go into that that different astrologers are going to approach in different ways. One of the other questions is whether the Ascendant degree or whether the Midheaven or even the Descendant or IC should be used as points that are taken into the calculation of whether you have a stellium. If you have, let’s say, two planets in Aquarius and your Ascendant is also an Aquarius, does that count as a stellium having three points there or does it not because it’s only two actual planets? So that’s an issue. Asteroids are an issue, whether to use the nodes or whether to use the lot of fortune, for example, as a point in calculating a stellium. There’s a lot of variables involved. Outer planets, that’s another one, right? Because there’s an issue where some of our newer friends who joined the astrological community over the past decade, they were born in the late 1980s or early ’90s have some outer planets like Uranus and Neptune in Capricorn. So they’ve already got two planets that are generational in that sign. And then if you throw one other planet in there, then all of a sudden you’ve got three planets and the question of whether then you have a stellium or whether because that’s a generational thing that that’s not going to show up as personally. So that’s kind of an issue. Where do you fall on that?
PW: I think you should still consider outer planets as part of stelliums. When they’re more generational then we just have to assume that that’s something which is going to be more true of that group, and that if you have more personal planets which are in a stellium with an outer planetary configuration, then you may just come to be a particular exemplar of the potential of that conjunction on the more generational level. Maybe someone with a Sun Mercury conjunction on top of Uranus and Pluto, those might be people who kind of whose words carry the weight of the generation they come from or the people who will listen to more or something like that. So yeah, I wouldn’t dismiss it. Yeah, if you have outer planets in a house, I think that probably has a significance. I don’t know if it would be a daily recognizable significance, but I certainly think if you have Uranus in a given house, then the things that seem to really bring out the meaning of that placement is when Uranus makes angular aspects to that original natal position. So I think it tends to be more relevant at certain times in one’s life as opposed to being a constant daily sort of thing. Like, “Oh, my whole life is Neptune in the eighth.” Well, I’m not so sure about that.
CB: Right. Yeah. I mean, I also take into account the outer planets for calculations of stelliums, especially when they’re mixed together with personal planets or inner planets. Yeah, especially because to whatever extent it’s just showing an emphasis on a certain sign or a certain house, those are going to have a major impact on that sign or house if they’re present there, especially if they’re together with other personal bodies like the Moon or the Sun or Mercury or even Venus or Mars. So that’s one thing. Ascendant, Midheaven, I’m a little mixed on. I could see it going either way. I do think we’ll have some examples of some people that clearly have first house stelliums and having them in the Ascendant or the Midheaven just emphasizes that even further. Normally, I view it as more of a planetary thing, so that’s something that we were looking for planets to be placed in a sign to emphasize it. So I’m primarily waiting those in terms of determining whether a person has a stellium. But ultimately, what is or isn’t a stellium is so subjective because the actual interpretive principle is just there’s an emphasis on that sign or there’s an emphasis on that house and that’s it. So really any astrologer can adapt that to their own astrology in terms of what they think is important in order to determine what is a stellium to them, and that’s perfectly sufficient and fine.
PW: Totally.
CB: All right. So we solved that debate, that debate is done. What do we got to move on to next?
PW: Oh, well, now we have the real debate is, what’s the plural form?
CB: Oh, that is the most important debate. Well, this got settled recently because you… Did you correct me? I don’t know if you corrected me in private, but you said stellia? So stellium obviously is the primary word for the singular when a person has the singular a stellium in Scorpio or in the 10th house or what have you. But then there’s sometimes the question of astrologers know what to say when you’re talking about the plural of multiple stelliums, in which case, what is the plural and what did you say originally it was?
PW: Well, I think some people said stellia, but that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me because according to Latin, from my D+ grade in advanced Latin, I remember the plural form should be stelle. But I mean, I think we don’t need to use the grammatical rules from a different language to be able to use the English pluralization conventions like adding an S to the end of the word. I don’t think there’s necessarily anything really wrong with that. I think someone on Twitter actually who knew what they were talking about said the same thing.
CB: Yeah. That was like an actual English professor. So I want to give a shout out to them where they said, they were responding to some tweet of mine where I said, I tend to prefer to say stelliums instead, even if that’s not grammatically correct. And they said, this is @Cuchlann on Twitter. They said, “If you’re interested in the opinion of an English professor, it is always correct in English to use the S suffix to make something plural.” So this isn’t even a prescriptive versus descriptive grammar thing, it’s a thing where people insist on lone words adhering to the original grammar.
Patrick Watson : That’s it. I’m saying sheeps, I’m saying deers. It’s always correct.
CB: Yeah. Well, I don’t know. I’m going to take that anonymous person’s–
PW: Yeah. Stellium is just fine.
CB: statement to heart and I somehow–
PW: If you want to be snooty though, stelle is the way to go.
CB: Stelle or stellia. Maybe. Okay. So I’m going to say stelliums because I think I’m just doing that partially because I think that’s what people are going to search for on Google in searching for this episode.
PW: Yeah, not many Romans out there using Google.
CB: Right. I got to go with the crowd. All right. Is that all of the debates or are there any more stellium-related debates that we have to address?
PW: No, I think we’re bloodied up enough, Chris.
CB: All right. That was tough, but we had to do it. There’s no other 10-minute podcast episode that’s going to have dealt with this as efficiently as we have. So let’s move on to one of the things we were going to mention in passing is, this goes back pretty far Vettius Valens, for example, in the second century, at the end of Book One of the Anthology, he actually has delineations where he goes through and he delineates two and three planet combinations when they’re in the same sign. So there are some traditional astrologers that do interpret planets when they’re in the same sign as mixing together, and they sometimes use a painting analogy of paint when you mix paint together how it produces different colors just through the presence of one color with another and how different colors interact. And Valens actually has this extended discussion at one point, I think, in book five or six of The Anthology where he says that’s why the malefics tend to stand out so much because it’s like a really dark paint and adding it to a white or a translucent paint where it kind of tends to overwhelm some of the other colors or something like that. So I liked that painting analogy when we’re talking about this idea of co-presence or co-mixture of planets in the same sign. And I think that’s one good way to approach interpreting stelliums when you have three or four or more planets in the same sign is understanding that they’re all mixing together by their presence in the same sign, by virtue of that, they are influencing and changing the other in subtle and sometimes very important ways.
PW: And it should be noted too for those Valens delineations that he’s only considering them as co-presences. So no matter where they are on the sign, his interpretation apply. But he’s not taking into account zodiacal sign, he’s not taking into account the house. It’s just for our general co-presence of those two or three planets in a sign. But still quite interesting. You can sometimes extract some interesting insights from some of his delineations.
CB: Yeah. So here’s one he gives, he says, “Jupiter, Mars and Venus when they’re in the same sign,” he’s saying implicitly, “cause men to have many friends, to be easy to associate with, to be thought worthy of association with and help from the great, to be successful and to progress with the help of women, these stars make some men high priests, prize winners, athletes, or supervisors of temples, or of the masses. They cater to their own pleasures and at times live on steadily subject to ups and downs.” And then he keeps going, he gives kind of like negative stuff.
PW: “These men are blameworthy and indiscriminate about sexual matters, experiencing public exposure and betrayal grieved with respect to children.” It’s funny. It comes to mind. Valens probably would’ve said, Bill Clinton has a Mars, Venus, Jupiter stellium in the first. Which is kind of funny how that sort of matches up pretty well of him. He didn’t know about Neptune, but…
CB: Did not know about Neptune when it came to what was his [unintelligible 31.04]
PW: Yeah. Something like that, yeah, just reading that interpretation just made me realize that he has that stellium in his first house, Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and he seems to typify some of the things that Valens described in that. Again, he didn’t take into account sign or house, but the general delineation works pretty well.
CB: Yeah. And that’s the thing, is that in a full interpretation we would actually take into account some of the various things in order to break down what planets in the stellium are more important or what role certain planets are playing or what role other planets are playing. His is actually interesting because using the modern planets, he actually has two stelliums. So this is an example of somebody that has the Ascendant, Mars, Neptune, Venus and Jupiter in Libra. So all in the same sign, so Libra stellium. And then also in the first whole sign house, I guess even using quadrant houses, this would be in the first house because they’re all below the degree of the Ascendant. And then he’s got Saturn, Mercury, Pluto and the Sun up there in Leo in the 11th house. So heavy first house and 11th house emphasis and heavy Libra and Leo emphasis, which is pretty good descriptor.
PW: Pretty appropriate for a charmer. These often can associate with being wonderful talents.
CB: Yeah, with Libra rising and Venus in Libra in the first house conjuct Neptune with Jupiter. The thing that I always read, especially about him in his early political career and in his first run for president, because I was too young at the time, but they always talked about just how engaging and charming he was. And a lot of those key words that I hear really remind me of that Venus ruled Libra stellium in the first house. Yeah. All right. So that’s our first sort of quick glimpse into a example chart, which we’re going to get into more. Before we get into other example charts–
PW: Have there been any other astrologists other than Valens who’ve written about these kind of combinations prior to the 20th century?
CB: Yeah. So you were saying Abu Ma’shar may have in The Great Introduction and I pulled it up and I wasn’t sure. It looked like there was a section where it was delineating some planets, but I don’t know if it delineated all possible combinations which you said there might be a text out there somewhere that does.
PW: Yeah, it was based on a comment by Rob Hand. Robert Hand made a statement in the notes of one of the preliminary Project Hindsight translations of Valens, where he mentions that there’s a text that Abu Ma’shar wrote where he delineates the combination of all seven planets and the Sun at the time, the traditional seven, but we haven’t been able to figure out which book that is. So if anyone out there knows, feel free to let us know.
CB: Yeah. So if anyone finds out, let us know on the comments. I know the Yavanajataka and some of the Indian texts definitely go to great lengths to provide delineations for different combinations. And I think there may be one in there that does produce delineations for a lot of different combinations like that and conjunctions in the same sign. Yeah, so we don’t have to get into that very much. There is a weird derivation, when you look up dictionaries, I think somebody asked the question of… Because I put out a call for questions, then I got swamped with way too many, so sorry to everybody, but I’m not going to get through all of them in this episode. But on Twitter, SJ Anderson did ask, “Any ideas on the history of the usage of the term stellium and where it originates, who it originates with in the tradition.” And there’s actually an interesting thing. I haven’t done a lot of work on this, but in some dictionaries it says that the word stellium is connected to some non-astrological dictionaries or written by non-astrologers, but professional word researchers connect it to the word satelliteium. And they say that it’s a grouping of several planets in a sign or what have you. And I thought that was really interesting because if that’s true, then this term satelliteium might be connected to the Hellenistic concept of spear bearing, which is known as dorophoria in Hellenistic astrology, which almost kind of makes sense because the basic version of spear bearing is just when the luminaries are surrounded by planets that act as bodyguards for the luminaries. So literally you can think about the modern concept of the president of the United States or some high ranking politician who’s just surrounded by bodyguards when they move through a crowd who are protecting them by staying in close proximity to that person. And so we have this older concept of like a satellite and the modern term of a satellite, which for example, the Moon is a satellite of the Earth and it’s a body that orbits in pretty close proximity to the Earth. So I haven’t researched this enough. Nobody should take this as definitive. But if that derivation is correct, then the modern concept of stellium or at least the modern term stellium may have been derived in that indirect way from the concept of spear bearing. But even if that’s not correct, it probably just developed conceptually or practically as the idea of what happens when there’s more than two planets that are in a conjunction or in the same sign, what happens when there’s three or four or more?
PW: I think that’s possible. There would probably have to have been some change somewhere because I know that at least in Antiochus of Athens, he defines spear bearers in a day chart, any planets which are within a trine of the Sun in a day chart, whereas in a nocturnal chart, it’s where any planets which are falling within a sextile of the Moon.
CB: Yeah, he gives three different definitions of spear bearing. I think that’s the second or third one. But the first one is planets that are rising before the Sun and that clear the way for the Sun–
PW: In the same sign?
CB: It’s not really clear because it doesn’t give ranges, but it just says if they’re rising before the Sun and it’s implied that they’re close enough to it, that they’ve risen relatively recently. So they’re probably within if not the same sign they are within a sign or two?
PW: Potentially, yeah.
CB: Yeah, or the Moon. It says if they set after the Moon, then they’re acting as spear bears for the Moon in the first definition of spear bearing. But then it later elaborates on that with those other ones that have to do with aspects and says that planets can cast aspects into the sign to protect the Sun or Moon without being present there themselves bodily. Yeah. So Demetra has a whole breakdown of spear bearing I think in her first book, Ancient Astrology volume one. All right. I think we’ve done a pretty good job of breaking down some of the basics. Is it time to start getting into some chart examples so we can get into the details?
PW: Yeah, I think so. I think people would probably like to see how does it actually in practice. What does it mean for a house be emphasized in someone’s life with a stellium?
CB: We could start with the first house, but I don’t think I want to start with first house ones. I think I want to start with the other ones because I want to right away demonstrate that concept. And I want to jump through some different house examples of what it actually looks like if somebody has a stellium in a house, and what will happen is that house will tend to stand out and the topics associated with that house will tend to stand out in the natives life as being distinctive in some way more so compared to the average or more so compared to like some other average person’s life who doesn’t have four or more planets in that sign. So let’s take a look at some examples of that, where I did a search through my database using Solar Fire and asked it to return four-planet stelliums for me. So one of the first ones I wanted to highlight that I love is… This is actually an example that Leisa pointed out to me first, I believe. So this is the children’s book author, Judy Blume, who has won a bunch of the highest awards for children’s books. And she’s written like a ton of children’s books, which I think she actually got started writing at first when her children were really young. So she was born with Libra rising and she has four planets in the sign of Aquarius which are in the fifth whole sign house, which is the house, of course, traditionally associated with children for the past 2000 years. So that’s a pretty straightforward example, where if somebody walked into your, let’s say, astrology business, let’s say you have an astrology business that’s on the street and this person just walks in and sits down and they slam their chart down on the table and they say, “Tell me about my life.” And the first thing that you see is, “Wow, you have four planets in the sign of Aquarius in the fifth house of children,” and the most simple, basic statement you could make about that person’s life is for some reason, it seems like a decent amount of focus in your life will be on the topic of children. And you could say something as simple as that, and it would actually turn out to be stunningly true for this person because indeed she has devoted and spent a great deal of time in her life, perhaps more time in her life than other people by average focusing on the topic of children. So pretty good. What do you think? Straightforward?
PW: Yeah, pretty straightforward. The ruler of first in the fifth. You can get Mercury and Jupiter in that which have those connotations with writing, publishing.
CB: Yeah. So you’re getting into other pieces and that’s an important piece. And maybe we should break that down because I think that was one of the other questions that did come in through Twitter that I picked up on, which is how do you deal with and how do you weight some of the other planets when they come into play when you’re talking about the specific planets that are involved in the stellium? Because there’s some part of this, which is just… If you have four planets in any house, that house is going to be more important, end of sentence. And you can stop there, and that’s one of the things that’s nice about stellium, is you can make a strikingly accurate statement and just stop at that point and that statement will sort of hold up on its own without having to go into further details about, well, how does that topic go? And do things go well in that person’s life or do they go in a more challenging way? Or other details like that, which really gets into what is the composition of the stellium, what planets are involved. But one weighting factor that really weights things that we’re going to see come up over and over again is, is one of the planets the ruler of the Ascendant? So in her case, she has Libra rising. So the planet that rules the Ascendant, which is a very important planet in the chart, is going to be Venus. And Venus is actually one of the planets that’s in that stellium in the fifth whole sign house in Aquarius. So that’s a little tricky because that then weights things differently where it puts even more emphasis on the fifth house if one of the planets is also the ruler of the Ascendant, and I would say gives even more weight to the stellium that stellium is going to be even heavier or going to have an even larger impact or influence on the life than it might if none of those planets, for example, was the ruler of the Ascendant.
PW: Well, it would be more personal to her because she is represented by Venus in that chart. So if she didn’t have Venus in the fifth house but she still had the Sun, Mercury, and Jupiter, then we might think that those planets in the fifth house would be more relevant to her experiences with children or youths or if she was a mother and dealing with her own children. But the fact that her Ascendant ruler is actually in there as well shows she’s actually partaking in these fifth house themes and topics of creative works and play, recreation and youth and children, etc. So yeah. I think it’s cool.
CB: So that’s an important thing because the ruler of the Ascendant and the house placement of it tends to show a topic that the natives life tends to be directed towards or where there tends to be more focus on that topic in the natives life than normal compared to just the average or compared to other people. So it gets a little tricky then because when there’s overlap, because the stellium kind of the same thing because the stellium is almost… There’s pictures of a black hole where in space, it’s just you put a bunch of weight and then it just drags down or weighs down the space in that area. Stelliums are kind of the same thing, where they just put so much weight and so much gravity in that area that it almost becomes a distortion field that drags your attention to it in some way. So the stellium in some way is almost overlapping a little bit what the ruler of the Ascendant does indirectly. So it’s a little bit tricky then because if the ruler of the Ascendant is in the stellium, then it’s going to put more weight on that stellium but also vice versa, the stellium will put more weight on the ruler of the Ascendant placement by sign in the house and will make that sign in the house stand out even more than it would have if it was just the ruler of the Ascendant there.
PW: Correct.
CB: Yeah, so that’s a factor. Other factors in terms of interpreting stelliums and how well the topic goes is the stellium composed of benefic planets or malefic planets. And also you need to take into account factors like sect and whether the most positive planet in the chart is in the stellium according to the concept of sect which is going to be Jupiter in a day chart or Venus in a night chart, or conversely is the most challenging or negative planet according to sect in the stellium which is going to be Mars in a day chart or Saturn in a night chart that’s going to create a little bit more tension or a little bit more difficulties surrounding that area in the person’s life. So with Judy Blume it’s a little bit mixed, but it’s like for the most part, she’s got relatively nice planets placed there which are Mercury, Jupiter, the Sun and Venus. It gets a little bit complicated because it’s all ruled by Saturn in a night chart in the seventh, but that actually ends up relating more to some relationship struggles that she had that she was very open about having Mars and Saturn in the seventh whole sign house. So what planets are composing the stellium? Is the ruler of the Ascendant in the stellium? These are different factors that will weigh things differently. Another weighing factor that we could take into account is the big three and just the concept of the big three of your Sun and Moon being so important, and especially the Sun in a day chart or the Moon in a night chart. If your stellium is partially composed of one of those, that’s also going to add additional weight and it’s going to tie it in more with your personality and certain types of personality characteristics than it might otherwise.
PW: Absolutely. And then you can also throw in rulerships in there as well. That each of those planets also serves as the ruler of a house or houses and sort of further doesn’t just import its natural significations, but also the topics of the houses that it rules. So it can get pretty complicated, but when you write it all out, so it’s giving you all of that information about that stellium–
CB: Yeah. And the fact that each of those planets rules one or two houses and it’s like importing significations. That’s the other reason why it’s like this, black hole maybe isn’t the best analogy, I’m struggling to come up with a better one. But just the idea of that being like this displacement field that just draws so much energy into it and has so much energy because it has so much weight in it due to the preponderance basically of planets in the chart being in one sector of the chart rather than being spread out evenly so that they’re more, not balanced because balanced isn’t the right term, but certainly there is a concentration or an intensification of the energy of just one sign or one house which is somewhat unusual compared to most people just have like one or two or zero planets in a specific sign rather than having all of them in the same sign. And I guess that’s maybe we should mention the extreme version of the stellium because we did actually have some of those, for example, in what was February of 1962, there was a big pile up of planets in Aquarius and there were some Aquarius stellium people, right?
PW: Yeah.
CB: We don’t have a lot to say about them but one of them was, and this one was found by Claire Moon, I wanted to give her a shout out for finding this one. So like Garth Brooks, for example, the country singer, has a stellium in Aquarius where it’s Saturn, Mars, Mercury, South Node, Sun, Jupiter, Venus and the Midheaven degree all in Aquarius. So just a ton of planets in that same sign and in that same house, and the only ones that he doesn’t have in there are the Moon which is in Pisces, so just actually barely got out of Aquarius a couple days earlier, and then the North Node’s in Leo and Uranus is in Leo, Pluto is in Virgo and Neptune is in Scorpio. So you actually found one other big celebrity who was that same Aquarius stellium, right?
PW: Would that be Eddie Izzard?
CB: Yeah.
PW: I can’t claim I discovered, I know of him as an example.
CB: You personally discovered, yeah.
PW: But yeah, Eddie Izzard has that same stellium. Now we’re not exactly sure whether or not to trust the birth time. Apparently, on his website they said that Pluto was rising the time they were born, but they could have been joking, too.
CB: So yeah, so it could be either Virgo rising or it could even be late Leo rising if they were using quadrant houses like Placidus that would also indicate they would interpret that as Pluto rising as well.
PW: Yeah, the only thing that I would be able to sort of connect to sixth house themes about Eddie Izzard is the fact that, I guess, for charity he did multiple marathons consecutively, did this sort of huge long distance runs to raise money, and Eddie Izzard had never done any professional running before. But it was some ridiculous length that he ran over a small period of time and sort of connects to those sixth house themes of effort theme that makes me think of Mars, Saturn. This is someone who has a lot of energy and a lot of grit to be able to work hard and stuff like that.
CB: Yeah, it could be, but I still don’t know, thinking about some of their early specials, it would be really interesting if they did have late Leo rising and that Uranus would be close to the Ascendant in the first and then the ruler of the Ascendant would be that Jupiter in Aquarius which would then be in the seventh house applying to conjunction with Jupiter.
PW: It’s true. Yeah. So I’m not going to know.
CB: Sure. And hopefully this is one of those… You know we have probably like hundreds of these in our mind which are just like, “I hope before I die at some point I find out Eddie Izzard’s birth time,” or many other celebrities who that will probably go to the grave not knowing what the correct birth time is. But every once in a while you find out celebrity birth time, and it’s always nice to have that confirmed one way or another. Yeah, so that actually brings up a rectification course that you and I are working on where we’re thinking about doing a rectification course and teaching people some of the factors that you would take into account if you’re trying to figure out your Ascendant or rising sign and you’re trying to narrow it down, for example in that one. That was just a very quick thing. And obviously we don’t know a lot about his life aside from some a few public things. But when you do have somebody that will tell you about your life and give you all the information you need or if you’re trying to figure out your own birth chart and narrow down the correct rising sign or the correct Ascendant. So yeah, if people would be interested in a class on that, let us know because we’re considering very strongly about developing one.
PW: We’re excited about that.
CB: Yeah. All right. So let’s go back to some other house examples. Which one did we just do?
PW: We just did Eddie Izzard.
CB: Right. We did Eddie Izzard. Oh yeah, I did Judy Blume. You actually had another one that was a nice one to put together with the Judy Blume one which was another fifth house example, right?
PW: Yeah.
CB: Okay, so here’s the chart. So this is the chart for Thomas Beatie.
PW: Yeah, so this is the chart of Thomas Beatie, and so you can see just like Judy Blume, he was born with Libra rising with the ruler of the Ascendant Venus placed in the fifth whole sign house much like Judy Blume, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter. And Thomas Beatie is a trans man who is an advocate for trans fertility and reproductive justice and reproductive matters. And he received a lot of media attention back in 2008 through 2010 for being sort of the “first trans pregnant man”. And so it’s really interesting to see how the ruler of the Ascendant connects this person to the topic of fertility, sexuality, reproduction, children. And so he had three children. And it’s interesting as well because similar to Judy Blume, the ruler of the fifth house is ruled by this night time Saturn. And so a little later on, unfortunately, things didn’t go so well with the partner and there was some controversies or problems with the partner in dealing with the children and sort of custody battles and things like that. So I think that’s a really interesting way we can see the commonality between Judy Blume and Thomas Beatie in that they both had lives which have this special connection to these fifth house topics of creativity, not just creative arts like for Judy Blume but even relating to this notion of reproduction is creativity or creation.
CB: Yeah, totally. So and it’s a four-planets stellium. So it’s four definite planets, and then also one of them is the ruler of the Ascendant, which is that Venus ruling the Libra rising. So it’s a great example. And that’s another example of how we’re seeing archetypes with the astrology of fifth house placement. But then obviously there’s a lot of different ways that can work out. And then there’s a lot of different specifics based on the planets involved and the rest of the configurations in the person’s chart as well as just their life context of what is the context that this person is bringing to the table which then is infused in and helps give life to this chart. And then they manifest some version of that that fits their life in an archetypal sense. Yeah, so good example. Okay, so those are a couple of fifth house examples. I don’t think we have any other fifth house examples, do we? Are we missing any?
PW: I mean, I went through bunches, but I tried to find ones that people might be able to more sort of easily understand. A lot of them require a lot of explanation.
CB: Yeah. I actually have one. I forgot that I have one more. This is more of a depressing example. It’s more personal to me, and it allows me to connect a synastry thing that’s actually kind of nice. So one of my fifth house examples that I’ve used in the past is actually my dad’s chart who I didn’t slip this chart in my book, I think I alluded to it. This is the actual chart and he had Cancer rising and then a almost quasi-Cancer stellium with the Moon, Uranus, Jupiter, Ascendant and South node and Cancer. But more importantly and more relevantly, a Scorpio stellium with Mercury, Saturn, the Sun and Venus in Scorpio in the fifth whole sign house in a night chart, the lot of fortune’s also there in Scorpio in the fifth house. So during in the early to mid-1980s, he and my mom got together and he was the one that was actually interested in having children or more interested in having children than my mom was. And unfortunately, part of it is they started having children during his Saturn return when Saturn went through Scorpio and went through his fifth house and activated that fifth house stellium. But the Sun is there in the fifth house, so this is actually a night chart. So Saturn is contrary to the sect and it’s the most difficult planet in the chart. So unfortunately, the first part of that was that a year before me, I had an older brother who was born but he actually died as an infant within his first year of life of sudden infant death syndrome. So they left the baby with a babysitter and went out and came back, and the baby had died really tragically. And at some point during that grieving process at some point, I then was conceived and came along later when Saturn was at 15 degrees of Scorpio. And then what’s funny about that, of course, with him having that Scorpio stellium which doesn’t just include Saturn but also includes Venus which is consequently the most positive planet in the chart, so there’s a weird sort of dual thing that comes into play where the most positive and most negative planets in the chart so you get both. So one of the things that’s funny then, of course, is if he has a fifth house stellium in Scorpio who comes along then at his Saturn return, which is me who has a also a Scorpio stellium which happens to fall in his fifth house, so that’s kind of an interesting synastry thing where sometimes you have to think about when somebody has a stellium that that stellium is going to fall in a house in somebody’s chart and is going to activate that in different ways. So sometimes that could be the seventh house and they could be an important relationship partner for you if they have a stellium that falls in your seventh house. Or if your stellium falls in their seventh house, it could be in your, let’s say, ninth house or third house or something, and they could be an important teacher for you. Your 11th house and they could be an important friend. Or maybe even, let’s say, 12th house or sixth house that could be an important enemy of your greatest enemy or something like that. There’s lots of different ways that stelliums also come into play through synastry which is another interesting thing to think about.
PW: That was the saddest and sweetest story, Chris.
CB: Thank you. That is me, that’s what I’m good at.
PW: And it’s interesting too. Something I’ve noticed when people are having children that sometimes the relevant fifth house transit seems to be happening around the time of birth. And there have been some cases where there haven’t been any kind of fifth house transit and I always kind of wondered what is that about, but then if I scroll back nine months prior to the birth, then that’s when you see the big fifth house thing. So it’s interesting to see how sometimes the fifth house activation or transit for someone when they’re becoming a parent doesn’t always correspond with the birth but sometimes with the conception or something just after birth. So yeah, really interesting example, Chris.
CB: Yeah. Well, we talked about that actually at one point. I think it was in episode 15, you and I talked about the ethics of using electional astrology at a time of birth. But that wasn’t the main reason I’m bringing that up. The main reason I’m bringing it up is because you were having a Saturn return when you had your last child in the fifth house.
PW: In my fifth, yeah. Luckily, it’s gone better than your father’s.
CB: Right. Yeah, well and that’s astrology as you said. What did you say? You said it’s the sweetest and the most depressing. That’s astrology and that’s something you have to get used to. But it’s also the part that’s really amazing to me that’s underlying everything which is the underlying sense of meaning and purpose and destiny and fate that interweaves throughout people’s lives and sometimes has really tragic things, but also sometimes has really beautiful things in the same sentence. And that’s something I still ultimately appreciate about the astrology and I see as a value and as something that’s beautiful rather than just always something that’s overwhelming or depressing or what have you.
PW: Right. Yeah, bittersweet.
CB: Yeah, yeah.
PW: It’s definitely, yeah, amazing.
CB: For sure. All right, so those are my fifth house examples. Let’s move on to some other houses. How about seventh house? We have one depressing seventh house example. Let me see if I have some positive ones. What do you got for seventh house again?
PW: I mean, it’s a little tiny bit depressing. But, I have Zack Snyder, who we have an A-rated time for, and he was born at a Sun, Mercury, Mars, Saturn stellium in the Pisces seventh.
CB: Okay. So Virgo rising Pisces stellium.
PW: Yeah, so the ruler of the first is in the seventh. So you know that this is going to be a more personal experience for him. And so essentially, Zack Snyder is obviously he’s very private about his personal life. But just from the basic facts, we can tell that he has had a complicated history with relationships. He has eight children with three different wives or three different women. And so that in itself is sort of interesting. I think he met his current wife at his Saturn return, but he was married at the time that he first met her. And I think one of the other really interesting things about Zack Snyder’s seventh house is the fact that Mercury in the doesn’t just rule the first house himself but it also rules the 10th house of bosses and authorities, and he also has the ruler of the seventh house in the 10th. And so you usually when you see a 10th house seventh house interaction, it can indicate that one’s partnerships have a connection to one’s professional activities. So it’s really interesting because the woman he eventually would be married for the longest amount of time he was currently married to, he first met her at his Saturn return, and she hired him to work on a commercial. And then they met up a few years later when he was divorced, and she hired him again. So and now they work together on producing his movies, they founded a production company, so they have this professional relationship that is also a personal and romantic one in marriage. So maybe the fact that it’s ruled by a benefic is helping out his seventh house, but we also know that the presence of these other planets shows that he’s endured several separations and obviously with high consequences, high stakes with that many children being involved in these partnerships. And it’s also worth mentioning that he’s technically a night chart because the Sun has gone below the horizon. And one of the really tragic things that happened to Zack Snyder is that one of his children died from suicide which caused him to have to leave the production of a film and he has the ruler of the fifth in the seventh in proximity to Mars, and so we just know that there’s some tragedy potentially associated with his Saturn and his placement in the houses that it rules, and so yeah, a bit heavy. And we don’t have all the details because obviously it’s his personal life, but we can tell that not if we didn’t know anything about this person, we would still be able to make some of these statements about his life just based on the placement of this stellium and its rulers.
CB: Yeah, that’s really good and really interesting. This is good because there’s a crossover, he was married three times and he has a stellium in the seventh house of relationships and marriage. I actually have another one of my seventh house examples is like that and was also married three times and that is the birth chart of Carl Sagan. So Carl Sagan was born with Taurus rising and he had Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and the Sun all in Scorpio in the seventh whole sign house. So they’re actually below the horizon. So it’s in the sixth quadrant house. But that’s why I don’t use quadrant houses because it’s clearly in his seventh house. And he also was married three times. He had three major relationships during the course of his life. And interestingly like your example, his last relationship he was married to a woman who they ended up partnering up together and doing a lot of work together and I think part of the Cosmos series and they ended up collaborating on that, and they also ended up collaborating on that last book that he did which was the book Contact. And then I think she helped after he died to see some of his projects through to completion afterwards including eventually making a movie out of Contact that ended up starring Jodie Foster. So this is somebody who– Huh?
PW: Oh, I said I love that movie.
CB: Yeah, it’s a great movie. That’s one of my favorite movies as well. I rewatch it every once in a while. Really, Matthew McConaughey movie too, actually.
PW: Yes. Yeah, true. He’s, still shirtless.
CB: Right. Yeah, thankfully. But so this is another one where marriage was obviously important or he’s married three different times, so at least relationship and marriage was an important part of this person’s life. And then towards the end, it actually became tied up not just with his love life but even with his career and with the actions and contributions that he ended up making to the world in general. And it’s interesting with him again, it’s like ruler of the Ascendant as well which is kind of overlap with the one you just used, where he’s Taurus rising and has Venus there, so there’s something about the focus or the overall direction of the life that gets caught in the stellium at the same time. All right, so those are seventh house examples. My only other seventh house example I use some time it’s a little bit more depressing, but it’s like the classic the Kurt Cobain example which actually looks very similar to your Zack Snyder chart. I think we discovered that they were actually born a year apart, but they have some overlap with some of their placements. So Kurt Cobain was Virgo rising with Mercury and Pisces in the seventh whole sign house along with the Sun and Venus and Saturn. And the main thing that’s relevant and interesting and remarkable about this is just that he did have this major relationship towards the end of his life. I mean, there were relevant relationship things like I think Smells Like Teen Spirit, for example, I think it was named after some comments that one of his ex-girlfriends made at one point. So there’s little bits from earlier in his life where relationships were important. But he has Venus there in a night chart, the most positive planet, but also Saturn there in a night chart is the most negative planet. And he both had some very positive things as a result of relationships, but also some very challenging things and in the last few years of his life, of course, he famously died during his Saturn return, he died young. But he got together with Courtney Love, who on the one hand was the love of his life, but then on the other hand and in some respects towards the end of his life tried to save him when he had a suicide attempt in Italy, she was the one that called the police. And even though it’s commonly there’s a lot of conspiracy theories that Courtney supposedly killed Kurt, there’s a lot of contrary things where it seems like she actually tried some things to get to try to save him including doing an intervention with his friends. But then on the other hand, there were some bad things like the fact that both of them bonded over their mutual heroin usage. And that ended up contributing in some ways to his eventual spiral that eventually led to his death after he broke out of a rehab facility that all of his friends and family had urged him to go to just a few weeks earlier after a suicide attempt. So it’s really complicated, but knowing that Kurt Cobain had a Pisces stellium and that was all in his seventh house of relationships and marriage. And then the famous even still lasting impact, the fact that they’re still making movies and conspiracy theories about whether his wife was involved in his death is just interesting and ironic even just at that, you know?
PW: Totally.
CB: So that is Kurt. And he of course famously signed in his suicide note, he referred to himself in passing as a sad little Pisces as he was apologizing to his daughter and his wife for leaving them. And that’s always sort of also stuck with me just in terms of that in some ways he identified with some of the character traits that people associate with Pisces, but partially because it has that heavy Saturn placement there in the night chart in Pisces. It was kind of dragging down the stellium to some extent or at least some of the more challenging aspects of it were coming to the forefront. All right, so that’s my depressing seventh house example. Let’s lighten this up a little bit. We’re going to keep alternating between like–
PW: Bumers and uppers.
CB: Yeah, I’m trying to pull out some good ones. So help me find some good ones really quickly. Turn this around. I mean, for just sign-based ones, I don’t know that the birth time for this one is good. But somebody, Claire Moon, pointed out to me that Beyoncé has a Libra stellium, a really powerful Libra stellium. And I think that’s really interesting of Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, and Pluto. And I think that’s just a great example of somebody that’s using a Venus-based stellium in a very powerful and very effective way to be one of the most notable and highest earning creative artists in the world as a singer, but also in the way that she’s not just a singer, but really has full artistic control over and has gone in various artistic directions with her career.
PW: Yeah, absolutely. And I think what’s so interesting too about Beyoncé and quite a few of the pop artists from that generation is that they were all born in the same year that MTV first aired, 1981. So you get like Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and a lot of these other sort of pop stars that came of age or came to prominence in that period in the late 90s, early 2000s along with Beyoncé as part of Destiny’s Child who were all born with this Jupiter Saturn conjunction in Libra and varying degrees of interaction with that, and they seem to be kind of the exemplars, but obviously Beyoncé has risen above all of them. She’s still performing, still active, never really had a hiatus and seems to she’s really the top I feel of what that generation is able to produce. So yeah, she’s got this incredible stellium.
CB: And it brings up two points. One of them is just is the planet that owns the sign there, as in this instance where it’s Venus which is the ruler of the stellium is actually in that sign in its own domicile and therefore able to provide kind of a pure expression of that sign or of the archetypal energy of both that sign and that planet. But then two, what’s the condition of the other planets? And we find Jupiter there, we find Saturn there which is in the sign of its exaltation. Even Mercury there which I don’t focus on triplicity dignity very much, but it’s kind of interesting Mercury possibly having dignity by triplicity. So that situation of Venus, the ruler of the stellium, and maybe that should be stated that the ruler of the stellium is really important. And if it’s there in its own sign, in some instances, that’s going to be a more well situated stellium versus in most cases the ruler of the sign is probably not going to be there, but that’s going to alter the quality of the stellium to some extent. So for example, if Venus was next door in Scorpio, then all of those Libra planets in the stellium would be ruled by Venus and Scorpio which is going to change things substantially in terms of the interpretation.
PW: Right, she might have been a rock musician if that had happened or something. She would have been sort of more punk, whereas Venus is in Libra, so it’s sort of more just pop instead of more sort of classic sound or something like that with Venus in its own sign, classically popular styles pop music.
CB: Right. So that’s one factor. Other factor is just this an example because this is a speculative time, it’s like 10:00 a.m. So this would give her Libra rising with that stellium in the first house, but we can’t rely on it. So the other thing I want to emphasize about this one is just the other things stelliums do is they just place a huge emphasis not just on the house but on the sign. And so there’s something about the archetype of that zodiacal sign that’s going to be more prominent in the person’s life in general. And this is one of the reasons why I think some people resonate more with, for example, their Sun sign or things like that because some people your Sun sign there’s a not infrequent occurrence of the Sun being one of the components of the stellium. So I think you and I have that, for example, where one of the planets in my Scorpio stellium is my Sun, and so I always identify to some extent with my Scorpio Sun. And when I’d read delineations in the newspaper of what Scorpios are supposed to be like, for the most part that was relatively accurate albeit not always flattering. So there’s different people where if you have something like that, a stellium with a Sun sign, then that might lead you to identify more with that or to those traits to stand up more with your life. And therefore, yeah, to resonate more with if it was your Sun sign although the reverse is also true. So there’s some people who they might have a Sun sign that’s different than their stellium. And in some of those instances, the stellium actually is going to make much more sense for that person as a dominant theme in their life than the Sun necessarily was. So that doesn’t mean that the Sun won’t represent them at all or isn’t relevant in any way, but sometimes the stellium can really draw a lot of attention in the chart, especially when it is composed of personal planets.
PW: Totally.
CB: Yeah, all right. So let’s go through some other examples. I know one of them that you liked was Katy Perry, who’s my time twin, right?
PW: Yeah, it’s been my long running joke is that Katy Perry is Chris Brennan’s time twin. They were born somewhat close to each other and obviously striking resemblance but–
CB: I know I could have gone that career route as well. I had two choices. It was either astrologer or pop star and for whatever reason I chose astrologer.
PW: Yeah, so I think what’s kind of interesting about Katy Perry’s chart is obviously, yeah, she has this massive Sun, Pluto, Mercury, Saturn, Moon stellium in the first place. I think what’s interesting about this example is that you can really see how each of the planets are incorporating or importing the topics of the house they rule. So on a very basic level, she has the Moon in Scorpio in the first house. So Cancer is ruled by the Moon, Cancer in the ninth, so the Moon is importing and making more focal making more personal the topic of the ninth house of religious matters is one of the ninth house topics. And so she was raised by very strict religious parents, and her residence changed a lot because her parents set up new churches and she was put in religious schools and religious camps. And even when she first debuted as a musician, she was originally a gospel religious artist before transitioning to pop. So we can see how having the Moon in Scorpio rising is always going to import some of those ninth house themes of religion to the forefront of their life. And in her particular case, she has the Moon closely conjunct Saturn, and Saturn rules the fourth house so that’s how we know it sort of connects her life not just to the topic of religion, it was more through the strict rules placed upon her by her parents. They didn’t even allow her to eat cereal. They didn’t like her eating Lucky Charms because it reminded them too much of Lucifer. They thought it was a satanic cereal. So I think she could probably relate to someone who’s had strict parents. She has Moon, Saturn in the first house in Scorpio. Scorpio is also not a fantastic sign for the Moon either. So I think it’s interesting you can see how the Moon’s rulership of the ninth makes its presence in the first house sort of more angular or focal and same thing with Saturn. And then you could also go into the fact that Sun rules the 10th house, obviously, she is a very prominent person in the entertainment world. Her Sun is even empowered by that close conjunction to Pluto and Scorpio. So she has this obviously very kind of bubbly public persona, this sort of pop star charisma with the Sun and Moon in the first place. And there was one other thing I was going to say about her, but I can’t remember what it was. Oh, one of the interesting thing is you can apply stelliums to the profections. And I know we don’t have a whole lot of examples of that but just a quick one for Katy Perry when she was 24 years old in a first house annual profection when all those planets in the first house were activated, that was the year that she did her first headlining world tour. So she was traveling, importing topics of the ninth house. And it was really a showcase the first global showcase of her act. She had come to prominence during the 12th house profection, but the first house year was really when she was actually performing all around the world for the first time. So I thought it was kind of an interesting example. And one other thing about Katy Perry that is cool too is the minor period of the Sun is 19 years. So in the 19th year when you’re age 18, that’s when the Sun comes to completion, and it was when she turned 18 that she chose her new name because her original name is, I think, is something like Katheryn Hudson, but she renamed herself Katy Perry. So she takes on this new moniker as she reached a legal adulthood and as the Sun is reaching its period of completion.
CB: Nice. Okay. Yeah, that’s a great example. And so yeah, so that’s an example of somebody again with a heavy focus on a specific sign in her instance Scorpio. And let me see if we have any, I mean, one of the others… Now this is a really good one. This is only three planets but also includes the Ascendant, but just like George Lucas, for example, has Mercury, Venus, Sun in the rising sign in the first whole sign house and just his… Even though he became known for Star Wars and Indiana Jones, had more of an artistic approach to film and film as an art, and I always think about that when it comes to his chart and his even continuing issues with like creative control about who controls his art and does he control it and can he go back and change it as he sees and update it periodically? Because he’s never happy with it. It’s never finished. Or does it belong to the audience and to the public once it’s been put out there? And should people, for example, be able to have the original Star Wars cut from the theatrical release which he’s kind of refused to put out there? Anyway, there’s lots of ones where it’s just emphasizing that house, and especially when it’s in the first house, the person having more direct control or apprehension of that stellium as opposed to it manifesting through some other part of their life or through somebody else if it’s in one of the other 12 houses.
PW: Yeah, and you can even draw a few Taurus associations to George Lucas as well. He loved working with, at least in the originals, the physical puppets and physical effects and practical effects to achieve his vision and so he designed all these crazy looking aliens of these original movies and, yeah, just had a really strong sense of creating a whole world which we’d associate with, yeah, the archetype of the artist.
CB: That’s a good point.
PW: There are that’s a bunch of really good examples.
CB: And also the creation of industrial-like magic because once there was a lot of stuff they were doing with Star Wars that they there was no company set up to do those kind of graphic or design things in terms of props or even eventually computer technology and then especially ones with the prequel trilogy that started coming out in the 1990s really pushing forward with technological advancements in order to design new worlds and new aesthetics and make them look real in the first three Star Wars movies.
PW: Yeah, that was that was when Neptune was square his Venus that he was doing all that stuff right from Aquarius. Yeah, that’s why he got more into digital and synthetic representations of his creative ideas.
CB: That makes sense. All right, let’s bang out some other house examples I just want to get through so we get them in. So I’m just going to go through in order, and this is just going to jump around. But here’s Richard Tarnas who has Gemini rising and he has Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and the degree of the Midheaven in Aquarius in the ninth whole sign house. And he famously is a university trained and university professor who wanted to write this sweeping book on astrology that would cover all the historical correlations with astrology and show that it’s a legitimate phenomenon from a historical standpoint. But in order to do that he felt he had to write this little blow-off book that was supposed to be an overview of western thought so you could establish the parameters of what western intellectual history was. And so he wrote that book as a precursor, and it’s called The Passion of the Western Mind. But then ended up being wildly successful and assigned in many university courses like core reading material but little did many people know that then 10 or 15 years later, he wrote this big magistral work on astrology which was Cosmos and Psyche. So he’s one of my favorite ninth house quasi-stellium examples. Let me see my next one. Oh yeah, Christopher Reeve is a third house stellium example the house of short distance travel, and he had Leo rising with the Sun, Mercury, Saturn, Neptune and Venus in the third whole sign house. And he was earlier in his life very sporty and he liked to engage in many athletic stuff like boat racing and horse racing and all sorts of other stuff. He famously played Superman in the 1970s in the Superman movies. But then also because Saturn is there in a night chart, he was involved tragically in a accident with a horse when he was out riding his horse one day and jumping over something where he was thrown from the horse and then it severed his spine and then he became a paraplegic. So his mobility which is a third house thing was severely limited and restricted. But then as a result of that, he ended up becoming somebody who promoted research into stem cell therapy and things like that in order to help people in similar conditions like his.
PW: That’s Saturn importing its topics of the sixth of injury illness, yeah.
CB: Okay, sixth in the seventh. Yeah, and then also his wife involvement and her help which was super important and instrumental in terms of keeping going, but also then founding the foundation that they put together. So that’s a interesting example again with the most positive but also the most negative planets in the same house, as well as the ruler of the Ascendant in that house just drawing like a huge amount of attention and focus eventually. Let’s see, other examples, oh yeah, Meghan Markle has a fourth house Libra stellium, so she was born with Cancer rising and she has the Moon and Saturn and Jupiter and the IC and Pluto in the fourth house. This is a night chart, so it’s a little tricky that Saturn again is kind of problematic there. And I know there were some problems with her father and I think when she married Prince Harry, her father wasn’t invited or was kept out of the wedding or something, right?
PW: Honestly, I haven’t been keeping up with all of that drama, but it’s funny though because it occurs to me I’ve seen cases where people have difficult planets in the fourth house, and it’s not just difficult situations with their own parents but also the parents of the spouse, problems with parents. And I don’t think anyone has had a worse experience with in-laws than Meghan Markle. I mean, poor thing.
CB: Yeah. Things have not been going well since she married into the British royal family, marrying Prince Harry, who is one of Princess Diana’s sons. And there’s been all sorts of weirdness and controversy there. I think it’s interesting because it’s like Saturn’s in its exaltation, and this chart has really made me think of what exaltation is in sometimes literally representing things that are raised up or elevated in some way like the royal family that she literally is.
PW: So the fact that the ruler of her seventh then is that Saturn in Libra in its exaltation in close proximity with Jupiter show, yeah, the royal family but also…
CB: Yeah, but then it’s tough in the fourth, it didn’t go super well and the royal family wasn’t super receptive to her or somehow, we don’t have to get into all the details because we don’t even know all the details, but we do know that Harry and Meghan Markle in the past few years, actually I think in the past 2 years when Saturn was transiting through her seventh house through Capricorn…
PW: They finally got out.
CB: They bailed and left the UK and moved to, where are they living? Canada or something.
PW: I think so. Yeah, they escaped, and I’d say good for them.
CB: They did an Oprah interview at some point, and Harry’s said something about just seeing what was happening to his wife and feeling like he was going to lose her if he didn’t take her out of this situation. So that’s what they did. So I just think that’s really interesting terms of very simple symbolism of like fourth house as family and sometimes parents, but then having some challenges there, but also a lot of activity there, having a stellium there. And somehow again, if you were just like at some point, the concept of family is going to be incredibly important to you. There will be some major challenges, but it will also draw a major part of your life focus and attention since the ruler of the Ascendant is the Moon and is also placed there. And yeah, that became strikingly true or abnormally true we might say in her case. That’s kind of almost a good stellium keyword, abnormally true that that will draw…
PW: Especially so.
CB: Yeah, especially so. All right, so it’s Meghan Markle, let me see. Yeah. The kind of tricky one is Mac Miller, both you and I came across this one. So he was born with Aquarius rising and a stellium in Capricorn in the 12th house. So it’s like Mars, North Node, Mercury, Uranus, Neptune, and the Sun. So that Uranus Neptune conjunction, which is more generational, is drawing a lot more attention, but there would already be Mars, North Node, Mercury and the sun there even without that. So what was his story?
PW: Well, I mean, I don’t want to sound reductive of his story down to his sort of worst moments. Obviously, he was a very beloved and successful rapper. But the 12th house has to do with sometimes spiritual suffering. We might even interpret that in modern terms as mental health issues, challenges. And so he spoke a lot about his issues with depression and his struggles with substance abuse. Well, there’s another kind of funny story with the 12th and as far as enemies, but unfortunately he is someone who eventually sort of succumbed to the mental pressures of fame and his own feelings about himself. And he passed away due to suicide and–
CB: Well, I thought it was just accidental drug overdose.
PW: Oh, it was? Oh, pardon me. I guess I didn’t read as deeply as that. I just sort of working off what I saw in the headlines. But one other sort of interesting 12th house story with Mac Miller that I think is interesting is that the 12th house also has to do with rivals or enemies or nemeses. And so one kind of interesting thing about Mac Miller is that he had made a song back in 2010 or 2011 called Donald Trump. And it was kind of glorifying the sort of life of luxury or excess of a successful businessman. And first Trump was okay with this song, but eventually they got into some sort of legal standoff about his inability to use the song or being able to profit from it. And so eventually they kind of became enemies, and there was this big public feud or dispute between Donald Trump and this 20 something rapper. And then of course Mac Miller made very sort of public and funny rebukes of Donald Trump. This is all before he even became president or anything. But just the fact that he was involved in such a kind of public and bitter dispute over a song that he had become kind of associated with, it’s interesting when you consider the ruler of the 12th was in the first and that the focus of this stellium is happening in the 12th house. So it had to do with not just his own enemies, his own set of personal demons as it were, but also externally a nemesis like Donald Trump.
CB: Right. And the other thing relevant about his 12th house stellium and just the end was that Mac Miller died in September of 2018. And this was during that first year of Saturn, Saturn went into Capricorn back in December of 2017, so he was a year into Saturn transiting, not just through his 12th house but over that 12th house stellium, which can be kind of a tough transit when any malefic is going over your stellium, it’s sort of hitting everything in your chart at the same time. So if that’s a good transit, sometimes all the good stuff happens at the same time. But when it’s a heavy transit, sometimes all the really heavy stuff kind of clusters up on you at the same time as well.
PW: A confrontation with his 12th house enemies in a sense, his own personal demons.
CB: Yeah. All right, so let’s go on to some other examples really quick of just stellium so I can get through the rest of mine. Let’s see. So TS Eliot is a time chart who had a Libra stellium with Mercury and Venus very closely conjunct the Ascendant at 25 Libra, but also the Sun and Uranus in that Libra stellium and first whole sign house as well. And he was of course, a famous award-winning poet. James Earl Jones had a Capricorn or has a Capricorn stellium with Mercury, the Ascendant, the Moon, Saturn, the lot of fortune and the Sun all in Capricorn, which is really interesting and cool. That Mercury Saturn conjunction, of course, I’ve talked about in different episodes. I think we talked about it in the Mercury episode I did with Jo Gleason last month. And he had–
PW: And then the Saturn and Capricorn set as well, I believe.
CB: Okay. Yeah. And he had speech impediment early in life, but he was later able to overcome it. And then of course, ironically becomes famous for his voice, his deep booming voice later in life, including being the voice actor of Darth Vader. So yeah.
PW: Mufasa and other ones.
CB: Are you a Lion King fan or Aladdin fan? We had a debate about this. I’m more of an Aladdin guy. What’s your Disney Renaissance movie preference if you had to pick one during the Disney…
PW: Yikes, I don’t know.
CB: You’re too young?
CB: I was probably a Lion King kid. I remember my mom told me she got the VHS of Lion King, and I remember just like I was never more happy than that moment, I think.
CB: So as an Aladdin guy, I don’t know if we can be friends anymore. I’m sorry.
PW: But I do think that Alan Menken’s songs for Aladdin, and especially the Broadway version with some of the other songs, I think that’s in some ways the superior one musically, but I mean, this is hard. You’re asking me to choose between my left and right arm.
CB: Yeah, that’s true. I mean, and you’re probably also more up to date with the recent ones, although they’ve been doing the live-action ones of everything now. On paper the live-action Lion King sounded like it was going to be a lot better than it was, and I wish that was like better somehow. Did you see that?
PW: Yeah, I did see it.
CB: It wasn’t bad. I mean, it wasn’t bad in any way, I still liked it.
PW: It wasn’t bad, I just was thinking the whole time why. I enjoyed the live-action Aladdin though. It was better that I thought it would be.
CB: Will Smith as the genie casting that was genius.
PW: That was a good choice.
CB: All right, that’s enough Disney digression for this episode. Let me switch back to, let me see. Oh yeah, Michael Bloomberg is another one. Both of us found he has an eighth house stellium with Cancer rising and Venus, Mercury, the Moon and Saturn in Aquarius in the eighth house. And the eighth house, of course, traditionally is like other people’s money, but there’s been interesting ways in which that sometimes works out in the charts of like financial people or people that deal in finance. He actually, I think made his millions or his billions initially through developing a tracker, which helped to track the stock market and helped to track the market and different things like that. So yeah, billionaire with an eighth house stellium is pretty interesting and appropriate. Paul McCartney is a 10th house Gemini stellium. So one of the Beatles who then also went on to have a successful solo career. But I always liked how he was a Virgo rising ruled by Mercury up there in Gemini and with Virgo rising and the Uranus, Saturn, Mercury, the Midheaven and the Sun all in the tenth whole sign house in Gemini. And he’s of course, one of the most famous songwriters, I think, of the past century. Would that be an accurate statement?
PW: Yeah. I mean, yeah, absolutely. I think you really see the sort of cleverness in his songwriting and his lyrics and his sort of inventiveness. And it’s funny too because when you compare all the Beatles charts together, you can really see how the differences between them really are expressed in the charts. Lennon was this really sort of Mars type of guy with Mars ruling his Ascendant, whereas Paul McCartney is just Merc and Gemini. One of the big differences between McCartney and Lennon is that John Lennon preferred to sort of just do one raw take. He didn’t want to plan things out too much, he just wanted to hash it out as fast as possible, whereas Paul McCartney was always getting hung up on making sure that all the… Is this the right chord? Is this the right way we should do this? So you have this more sort of mechanical or technical sort of approach to songwriting, sort of a much more particular and making sure that every little part is right, whereas Lennon was more about raw passion and energy in his recording style. So I think that’s a way I kind of understand Paul McCartney as a songwriter is that he’s like an engineer of sounds and has kind of got this mercurial approach that’s done well for him.
CB: Nice, okay. All right. So moving on, Harrison Ford is Libra rising with a Cancer stellium, Mercury, Jupiter, the Sun and the Moon all in Cancer in the 10th whole sign house. And he famously kind of lucked out. He was getting into acting, but he was actually working as a carpenter, I think, for George Lucas when he was cast in one of George Lucas’s movies. And then later went on to star in Star Wars as Han Solo and then eventually Indiana Jones and so on and so forth. So George Lucas, Cancer stellium. Oh yeah. So there’s some tricky 12th house examples. There’s like Bruce Lee who had Sagittarius rising, and he had this kind of tricky 12th house stellium of Venus Mars, the Moon, the lot of fortune and Mercury. And all of those were kind of tightly opposite to the ruler of his Ascendant, which was Jupiter at seven degrees of Taurus conjunct Saturn at nine Taurus and then–
PW: And with a T-square at Pluto.
CB: Yeah. So his whole thing was tricky. But as far as I understand, it was just kind of tricky. And he ended up dying of an accidental drug complication, they think, of taking something at the wrong time and then passing away. So other 12th house example, interestingly another Sagittarius rising is Joe Biden, current US president three degrees-ish of early Sag rising. He has a Scorpio stellium with Mars, Mercury, the Sun and Venus in Scorpio in the 12th house. Of course, this is kind of a tricky one because Mars is there in a day chart. And he of course famously during his Saturn return, he has Saturn conjunct Uranus on the Descendant in the seventh whole sign house of relationships, and famously during his Saturn return he had just gotten elected to public office for the first time. And then like a month later, his wife and children were involved in a horrific car accident where his wife passed away and his daughter passed away and I think his son was seriously injured. So his is tricky because he has so much 12th house and eighth house emphasis with even Sagittarius rising and Jupiter, the rule of the Ascendant, in the eighth house. And he’s had to deal with the concept broadly speaking, let’s say, of loss or mortality or suffering quite a bit in his life with these different losses, later including his son. I think it was his oldest son died just a few years ago, right?
PW: Yeah. Well, I was going to say Mars rules is fifth house of children. So he’s seen the deaths of a couple of his children, and of course Mercury rules his seventh house, so that’s when he saw the passing of his wife is up there at the start of his Saturn return. I can’t remember when he met his current wife, but yeah, you can see how some of the houses that each of those planets rules we could see as being somehow placed in the 12th house showing that there was topics, whether it’s his children or his wife would be in a sort of more perilous sort of position or imperiled kind of position in the 12th house in a place of weakness or potential for tragedy. But at certain points, this could be activated with the right profection and transit.
CB: Yeah. So when I was researching this episode and I was looking for my stellium examples, I don’t know how I never saw this before, but I happened to come across one of the pieces of data in my file. It turns out Jimi Hendrix was born a week after Joe Biden with the same rising sign so that they end up having some of the same house placements. But it’s interesting because a good chunk of Biden’s Scorpio stellium by a week later has shifted into the first house so that it’s in Sagittarius with Sagittarius rising and Mercury and the Sun and Venus being in the first house in Jimi Hendrix’s chart, which is really interesting because he was much more of a free-spirited Sagittarian character.
PW: Lighting his guitar on fire.
CB: All of that is very closely because Mercury is at two, the Sun is at four, Venus is at seven Sagittarius. It’s all closely opposing that Saturn Uranus conjunction at Uranus is at two, Gemini and Saturn is at nine Gemini. So what’s unfortunate about that is that it seems like that’s putting some of that intensity more towards the concept of self and to the body and physical vitality of Hendrix instead of… With Biden, it’s affecting other people in his life that are around him that he’s experiencing the loss of. But then famously with Hendrix, he actually died during his Saturn return, during the early part of Saturn and Gemini. So he was part of like the 27 club of all the famous musicians that have died at 27, and that was when Saturn was in early Gemini. So it’s really weird how Jimi Hendrix died during the early part of his Saturn return, and then during the later part of Saturn and Gemini when Biden had his Saturn return was when he was both elected to public office for the first time but also suffered that major loss of his family members, of his wife and daughter. So I thought it was an interesting bit of trivia. If everyone asks you like what celebrity birth chart is the closest to Joe Biden, the answer is evidently Jimi Hendrix. Let me see, I’m going to skip that example. We did Meghan Markle. Edward Snowden is our Gemini rising first house stellium example with Mercury, the Ascendant, Mars, the North Node and the Sun in Gemini in the first whole sign house. And he was famous whistleblower who announced or disclosed this government program of the US spying on communications around the world. For some reason I have two sixth house stellium examples that are both famous tennis players. So one of them is Serena Williams who had Taurus rising and a Libra stellium with the Sun, Saturn, Jupiter, Pluto and Mercury there. And the other was a more, I think, recent one, Danielle Collins, who had Cancer rising and the North Node, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars and the Moon all in Sagittarius, so super Sagittarius stellium. Not entirely sure what the connection is there, but I think that’s interesting. Are there any others that you really wanted to touch on? I think you only had one other that you gave me to calculate and that was Van Jones, and you thought that it was a good Virgo example, right?
PW: Yeah. Basically, so Van Jones you might’ve seen him if you watch CNN. He’s an author and political commentator. And it’s interesting because a lot of his areas of expertise have to do with the green economy, environmental capitalism and economic justice, human rights. His first book I think was about green jobs and he was actually an advisor to President Obama on green jobs. And so it’s interesting just because we tend to associate Virgo, some of the qualities of Virgo is being relevant to some of these ideas of sustainability, practicality. And then in his specific chart, it’s in the sixth house of work and service, and he seems to be just constantly coming up with a new thing or partnering with a new advocacy group or charity to promote whether it’s job skills for underprivileged youths or a new environmental justice campaign or efforts. He seems to be right there. So we can kind of see some of the sixth house themes of service and labor and the Mercurial themes related to Virgo having to do with service and employment and some of those Virgo themes that kind of connect to this idea of him being this kind of expert on sustainability and green jobs and green economies, etc.
CB: Yeah, and environmentalism and just focus on things like plants or the earth in general is an interesting sometimes overlooked Virgo archetype that’s sort of built in there. So and for those listening to the audio version, he has Aries rising and he has the Moon, Jupiter, Pluto, the Sun and Uranus all in Virgo in the sixth house.
PW: I was also going to say that I think the book the Silent Spring was released during the Uranus Pluto conjunction in Virgo, and Van Jones has talked about before about how that book, the Silent Spring, influenced him and is seen as kind of the foundational text of the modern environmentalist movement. So I think it was kind of interesting that he was actually born in the approximate timeframe when environmentalism was sort of really becoming a discrete force in the world.
CB: Right. Okay, excellent. Well, why don’t we bring it full circle and talk about just what we’ve learned today and what the main points are that we want to leave people with? I think the main thing I just want to leave people with is just a stellium is one of those things, an aspect pattern or a chart pattern that will sometimes draw your attention when you’re first looking at a new birth chart. And that can be really good thing because sometimes if you spot a stellium, you know that that’s going to be a sign of the zodiac or it’s going to be a house that’s going to stand out in that person’s life in some way for better or worse. So it can be a very useful interpretive tool from that standpoint just in terms of reading charts just like other aspect patterns. Because it’s one of those things where you can just see it visually and recognize it and immediately have a jumping off point for starting to interpret the chart and understanding something that’s going to be important in some global sense for that person’s life. Is that how you feel as well?
PW: I mean, that’s good. I mean, yeah, it’s an emphasis in someone’s life. Quality of the sign and the particular house that it occupies, that’s going to be a particular emphasis. And I would also say that if you wanted to do a full tally of how to analyze a given stellium, then you need to consider the nature of the planets and what they contribute to that sign, as well as the conditions of those planets according to sect and aspect and dignity, as well as the houses that the planets rule. I think that’s probably one of the most useful… I mean, this is all useful, but I think one of the most illuminating things to me about analyzing a stellium is acknowledging the planet’s role as a ruler of another house because for some people they might go, “Well, I have this great emphasis in this one house. I do have other parts of my life, what does my chart have to say about that?” And it’s like, “Well, you should look at the rulers of those houses and see how they connect to the house they were present in. And we’ve given a few examples of that already, but you can really see how a stellium doesn’t just say something about itself in that house, it also says things about the houses that those planets rule as well.
CB: Yeah. And sometimes that can feel really complicated and can overcomplicate things. But yeah, just at least as long as you have that initial starting point of what house is this in, what area of life should this relate to in the person’s life and what people in the natives life are represented by that house, then you’ve at least got a starting point for delineation, and then you can get into the finer details and the other specifics from there. All right. Stelliums, I think we covered a lot of examples. I’m pretty impressed. I feel pretty good about it. How do you feel?
PW: I mean, I have a couple of handful more of just mundane ones to just sort of throw out there that are kind of funny or interesting if you want to hear.
CB: Sure. Oh yeah, there are some. Are you looking at this one?
PW: This one?
CB: Okay, yeah, go with that one.
PW: Well, yeah. So I think one thing that’s really interesting about–
CB: Just do them quick.
PW: Yeah, sure. So one thing I think is kind of interesting is that the United Nations was founded on October 24th, 1945, which just happens to be at a Venus, Jupiter, Neptune stellium in Libra. And of course, Libra is the sign of Venus which has to do with balance and peacekeeping, and the entire point of the United Nations is to act as a way to cooperate as a force for global cooperation in peacekeeping efforts. So we have the two benefics aligned with this more generational planet Neptune, that sort of stuff. Now that also happened to the Mars Saturn conjunction, but that’s a conjunction of a stellium. Another one that I thought was kind of eerie is the fact that the first demonstration of the weapon the AK 47 was on November 13th, 1947, first demonstrated for Soviet officials. This is the weapon that is most commonly used in a lot of mass shootings, this is a notorious weapon. And on that day that it was first debuted, that was at a Mars, Saturn, Pluto conjunction stellium in Leo. So we have both malefics and Mars the planet that traditionally represents weapons, and then is further empowered by its conjunction to Pluto. That’s a pretty uncanny combination of planets for the debut of this notorious weapon. And then one of the ones that just really blows my mind is the fact that… Oh, there it is, yeah, the Mars Saturn conjunction in proximity to Pluto. Obviously, there’s a couple of other stelliums happening at the same time. But I think the one that blows my mind the most is probably the fact that, and you may know this already if you’ve looked at it before, but the fact that the Moon Landing itself on July 20th, 1969, if you look at the exact chart, I have the link to the exact chart of the Moon Landing, the Moon itself was exactly conjunct Jupiter and Uranus. So there was a Moon, Jupiter, Uranus stellium at the Moon landing itself. And so I think for any conspiracy theorists out there, I think that we never landed. I don’t know.
CB: You mean when the government pretended and set up a set that made it look like we landed on the Moon?
PW: The Moon itself was conjunct Jupiter and Uranus at the… And of course, the Jupiter Uranus cycle itself is often connected to great voyages and amazing steps forward in technological accomplishments and space travel generally. So I think that’s kind of an amazing confluence of the Moon itself is involved in the transit. And then there were a couple of other weird stellium connections. I know you don’t necessarily want me to go into those, but it’s just kind of another way to get kind of a shorthand way of understanding important historical events like the fall of the Berlin Wall, that was the Saturn Neptune conjunction 1989 or oh yeah, the Moon Landing, that was the Moon, Jupiter, Uranus conjuction Libra or the fall of the Berlin Wall, that was the Saturn, Neptune and other planets in a stellium in Capricorn or the Coronavirus is a Saturn, Jupiter, Pluto, Mars stellium in Capricorn. It’s a really amazing way to kind of look at time.
CB: Yeah. Let me show that because I didn’t show earlier. That’s actually what’s funny ultimately to wrap this up, is that there’s long been in the astrological tradition historically conceptualization of great events taking place in the world when there is an alignment of planets in the sky and when all of the wandering stars somehow cluster together and line up in a straight line. And there’s this famous legend attributed to Berossus from the second century, third century BCE, the Babylonian astrologer Berossus, who supposedly said that there was a periodic creation and destruction of the world and that the world would be destroyed by a fire when all of the planets aligned in Cancer. And it would be destroyed by a flood when all the planets aligned in Capricorn. So some of that’s kind of mythological or legendary, but at least it puts the idea of great conjunctions of planets or clusterings of planets as signifying great worldwide or sometimes momentous events. And we’ve been focused on this, of course, in terms of what it means for the individual in terms of their birth charts and sometimes it indicating a notable or momentous area of a person’s life. But what’s weird is, as you were saying, it also applies to worldwide events and sometimes important stuff happens when the planets cluster together in a certain spot in the sky like it did last year when all of the planets lined up in Capricorn or at least a lot of planets did. So here’s the chart for that. Here’s mid-February when Mars went into Capricorn and stuff started to hit the fan, and we’ve got like Mars, South Node, the Moon, Jupiter, Pluto, and Saturn all going through Capricorn. And then eventually they just keep getting closer and closer as you go through March until they all met up pretty closely right around here. Here’s like March 17th. That was basically it, it was Moon at 17 Capricorn, Mars at 21, Jupiter at 22, Pluto at 24 and Saturn at 29. So during the great pandemic, and especially during the lockdowns that we all experienced by this point in the third week of March, what was funny is in the year ahead forecast for 2020 if you go back, Kelly had come up with… We were joking about no hugs March, and we said there would be no hugs in the third week of March because we were trying to interpret what does a stellium in Capricorn feel like? And we’re trying to interpret that back in like November of 2019. And Kelly was like, “It’s very dry, it’s not very open, there’s no connection. There’s a closing off and a pulling back into oneself.” And we were joking about no hugs happening as our attempt to grapple with and sort of describe that energy archetypically and that ended up working out pretty, pretty well.
PW: I mean, back in 2017, I was looking at the Saturn Pluto conjunction saying that it relates to this theme of imprisonment or… And really the word I was looking for was, I guess, quarantining, to self isolate.
CB: Yeah. That was in the Saturn and Capricorn episode that we did in 2017. Yeah. Yeah. So stelliums also are relevant sometimes in terms of mundane and world events not just in personal lives. So I think that’s been a pretty good overview of the concept and the technique of stelliums and some of the different variations and different debates about stelliums and the different approaches, but also just looking at charts and giving a bunch of examples. I think we’ve been able to give a pretty good overview here today. So thanks for joining me for this, this was fun.
PW: Thank you. Yeah, no, it’s been great. I think you had some great really uplifting examples, Chris, as always.
CB: Thank you. As usual, that is my job here on The Astrology Podcast is to brighten everyone’s life with my lovely example charts. I mean, I’ve tried to balance it. I slipped some positive ones in there, right?
PW: Yeah, no, yeah. Yeah, sure.
CB: Yeah, no. Okay. You’re going to go home and you’re going to start crying immediately after this recording is over.
PW: You know what though, I’m now much better though. I got to go get finding small positive chart examples.
CB: I have to say the invention of the AK 47 during Leo conjunction, that was not the most rosy example.
PW: Right, yeah. Well, I have Mars and Leo on my Ascendant right now.
CB: You haven’t shared your stellium. I’ve been throwing my stellium all over the place. Is that something you want to put out there?
PW: Well, your stellium’s in the 10th house, so that’s why everyone’s seen it, Chris. Mine’s in the fourth, that’s why keep it hidden.
CB: All right, my apologies. I didn’t mean to…
PW: Oh, no, no. I wouldn’t… Yeah, mine’s in the fourth. So I have the Moon, Venus, Mercury retrograde and Pluto all within about eight degrees of each other. No, 13 degrees of each other.
CB: Do you want me to show it?
PW: Sure, I guess.
CB: I don’t have to. I’m peer pressuring you.
PW: You can share my chart, it’s fine. I’ll sling it out. I guess this is our final example then. For whatever reason, we’re going to do this. So you can see my Moon is conjunct my IC, I have Pluto, Mercury and Venus in my fourth house. And so of course the fourth house is supposed to relate to one’s origins, one’s home, one’s pets.
CB: I always forget that you just barely missed out on the luxury of being a Scorpio with your Sun being at 29 degrees of Libra. So I always think of you as a Scorpio, but you’re actually a Libra.
PW: Yeah, there’s a lot of different things you could say about that. But I think one of the interesting things I’ve sort of seen for myself if I’m was looking at my chart just like a client’s chart, I see that the ruler of the 10th is this Venus in the fourth house. And what’s kind of interesting about that is that aside from being an astrologer, I’ve also done a lot of music. And the only reason I’ve really pursued music is because my father is a sort of semi-famous musician in the classical music world. And for a long time in my teens and in my early twenties, I went to school for music and I was kind of going down the path, going down a similar path as he was to be a musician in the classical music world. And so in a sense, my career direction was almost going in the direction of my father, the ruler of the 10th being in the fourth house, joining the family business as it were through Venus, through music. And my Venus just happens to be on the degree of my father’s Ascendant. So this kind of is a synastry confirmation of that kind of placement. But I think the other thing that really seems to make sense for my child though as well is that while I have these sort of dual passions, I guess, so I have music as one chart, but the other chart obviously is astrology. And it was through my mother and her collection of astrology books and her knowledge of astrology that I was able to pursue astrology and I kind of see that through the fact that the ruler of the ninth is ruled by the star which is a mutual reception with Venus again in the fourth house. So it shows benefits through one’s parents. Our home was always full of books, full of music books and full of astrology books. So that has been a major kind of point of emphasis in my life, the sort of fundamental foundational things to myself come from my parents.
CB: Yeah. I like that. So the ruler of the fourth and the ninth and the third and some of your first astrology books were like your mom’s astrology books.
PW: Yeah. Well, and actually, I only have my birth time because my mom, otherwise I wouldn’t have my birth time. My mom’s into astrology, and she made sure that I had my right time. So yeah, that’s kind of how it’s been. I also think that the fourth house because it’s supposed to be a house of hidden or obscure things, I didn’t always put that stuff on display. In some ways, I guess, I’m unexpectedly private. But anyway, that’s that.
CB: All right. Well, thank you for sharing that with us, my fourth house friend.
PW: Our charts are really opposite of each other in that way.
CB: Yeah. That’s really funny. Although it’s funny with your dad’s Ascendant being at 15 Scorpio conjunct your Venus. What I’ve learned from this episode is that Scorpios beget Scorpios, and that’s part of what happens, I guess, the propagation of our zodiacal species. All right. Thanks for joining me for this. Thanks everyone for watching this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Thanks especially to all the patrons that supported this episode because we’re getting some equipment for Patrick so we can record everything in HD with lovely audio and videos, so we could do a high quality episode. And so all of our patrons that support us basically make this possible to keep doing episodes like this and basically teaching free astrology classes. So if you enjoyed it and you listen to the podcast regularly, think about becoming a patron to support us and get access to some bonus content like early access to new episodes or other bonus materials that I don’t need to itemize right here. Patrick and I are thinking about doing that rectification course. So if you’d like to see that or you’d be interested in signing up for that, then please let us know in the comment section below this video on YouTube or on The Astrology Podcast website for this page. Also be sure to like this video and subscribe to our YouTube channel if you like it. Patrick, you’ve got a YouTube channel that you’ve got actually a lot of really good videos.
PW: It’s under construction, but I have a lot of videos on there, yeah.
CB: Do you remember what your URL is? Did you set a custom URL?
PW: I think it’s just patrickwatsonastrologer. It’s been such a long time.
CB: Okay. What’s your main website at this point?
PW: patrickwatsonastrology.com.
CB: Okay, and you’re doing consultations?
PW: I do natal consultations, I do horary consultations, I do electional consultations and I also do rectification consultations and tutoring.
CB: Excellent. Well, if anybody needs any of that, then they should check out your website which is patrickwatsonastrology.com.
PW: Yeah, patrickwatsonastrology.com.
CB: And then your YouTube channel looks it’s youtube.com/patrickwatsonastrologer. And I’ll put links to that in the description below this video or on The Astrology Podcast website for this episode. So that’s it. So thanks everybody for watching this episode of The Astrology Podcast or listening, and we’ll see you again next time.
PW: Thank you. Bye.
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