The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 454, titled:
The First House in Astrology
With Chris Brennan and Nick Dagan Best
Episode originally released on July 7, 2024
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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 Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released July 10th, 2024
Copyright © 2024 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is astrologer Nick Dagan Best, and we’re gonna be talking about the meaning of the first house in astrology and especially looking at a bunch of example charts to get an idea of what it means when different planets are placed in the first house in a birth chart.
So hey, Nick. Thanks for joining me.
NICK DAGAN BEST: Thanks for having me back, Chris!
CB: Yeah, this is a big topic. I’ve been meaning to do this series for a while. I already did a full series a few years ago on the meaning of each of the planets in astrology, and then I followed that up with a year-long series on the meaning of each of the signs of the zodiac. So now I’m gonna be doing this as the first episode in a new series where I do a deep dive into the meaning of each of the 12 houses in astrology, and we’re gonna start here with the very first house, which is the first house itself. So thanks a lot for joining me. This is a big topic, but it’s one that’s probably one of the most important in astrology, because the houses are so crucial to birth chart interpretation.
NDB: Yeah, absolutely. And they are the most confounding part of horoscopic astrology, I’d say, because they’re clearly the part of astrology that was designed by people as opposed to, you know, the study of planets, which is just a sort of an observation of nature. So their origin is mysterious to us. There’s a sort of inherent logic to them, but at the same time, they’re sort of almost out of reach in terms of trying to understand them fully. So yeah, they require a lot more sort of investigation and thought and contemplation I think for that very reason.
CB: Definitely. So we’re going to talk a little bit conceptually about what the first house means in terms of the astrological tradition and some of those inherited meanings. But then we’re also gonna focus a lot on looking at example charts, because it’s really when you start looking at a bunch of different charts of the lives of individuals and seeing how their life has played out within the context of the first house that you really understand what that house is all about. So a large part of our approach here today is gonna be empirical by looking at chart examples. And I’ve already done a previous series talking about the 12 houses, a two-part series on the houses and the significations of the houses, as part of The Astrology Podcast where I outlined some of the conceptual structure of things underlying the houses. But here I’m gonna focus on different things like planets in the first house, the ruler of the Ascendant, or planets sometimes aspecting the first house, or transits to the first house showing activations of those first house themes. And that’s gonna be part of our, like, plan of attack for how we’re gonna understand the first house by looking at it from a bunch of different angles to eventually get a more well-rounded picture of what the first house means.
NDB: Right.
CB: Cool. All right. So let’s jump into it. So first things first, here’s a diagram that shows the significations of the houses. And the first house is the rising sign, and it signifies the self, the body, the character, and the appearance. The first house in terms of the planetary joys is the house that’s associated with Mercury, which we’ll get into more later. But that’s sort of our core starting point. And I wanted to start by talking about what the first house is astronomically.
So astronomically, the first house is the rising sign using whole sign houses. So it’s the sign of the zodiac that was rising over the eastern horizon at the moment that you were born. And the eastern horizon is where the Sun rises and emerges from underneath the earth each day, each morning. And in a way, the Sun is sort of like, symbolically reborn each day when it rises over that eastern horizon. And each day, other planets and stars also emerge over the eastern horizon, and they emerge from under the earth and come into view.
So in the same way that the Sun emerges and is almost like, born each day, you at that moment that you were born emerged into the world at that time and began your life as an individual that was separate from your mother, basically. And that’s part of the underlying core symbolism of the first house and the rising sign is that notion of emergence and what was born in that moment. And the thing that was born in that moment when you’re looking at a birth chart was you. So you actually, and sense of self and other things surrounding that, becomes the primary focus and meaning of the first house and the rising sign.
NDB: Corect.
CB: Yeah. So the first house is also associated with the Ascendant, and it’s the dividing line between the sky and the earth. And so part of what that means is that part of the rising sign is always above the earth in the area that has to do with the stars and the sky, and part of the first whole sign house is always below the earth in the area that has to do with the physical manifestation of the individual. So this division sets up an important distinction with the first house between the sky and the earth and the coming together of those two realms. But it also means that the degree of the Ascendant is especially important degree, sensitive point or degree of power in the chart that is one of the most personally relevant points to the individual that was born at that specific moment in time. And it’s also highly specific because the Ascendant degree moves – it changes every few minutes and moves into another degree. And then every hour or two, the Ascendant moves into a new sign of the zodiac. So that’s one of the reasons that the birth time, having a birth time, is so important because it allows you to calculate the Ascendant, the rising sign, and then you know that the rising sign becomes the first house. So that sets up the most personal point in the chart, because it’s one of the things that’s moving the most quickly and changing the most quickly from hour to hour and minute to minute compared to the planets, which take a lot longer to change signs or change degrees.
NDB: Yeah. And the Ascendant is very – it’s a point that relies absolutely on sort of the local space. So it really has to do, it ties the individual being born to the location that they’re born, because you could be born in the exact same moment in a different part of the planet, and your rising sign would be completely different. And you would therefore have a completely different chart and ostensibly be a very different person. So while the Sun and the Ascendant are both points in astrology that point to the self, to the individual, I tend to think of the Sun being more fundamental. The part of us that is unchangeable. Whereas the Ascendant, because it is so reliant on the local environment and the local space, the Ascendant has a lot more to do with who you are because of, you know, where you were born and when you were born. And to some degree in a broad sense, I would think of the Ascendant-Sun divide to address the old nature versus nurture element to what makes a person, you know, whereas the Sun is the nature, just who you are regardless of where you turned up so to speak, and then the Ascendant being the nurture. You know, were you loved? Were you not loved? Were you well fed, not well fed? Educated, not educated? Any of those things that contribute to shaping who you become over the course of your growth. So that’s one way that I think of the difference between the two, even though they do both apply to the self, to the individual.
CB: Definitely. That makes sense, and that’s a really good point that it takes into account – the Ascendant is based not just on the birth time, but also the location of birth on earth. So it makes it more highly specific both in terms of time, but also in terms of place. So taking into account those two frames of reference is really what’s important about the moment of birth, and it’s what’s most important about setting up the Ascendant degree and establishing the rising sign. And the rising sign becomes the first house in the whole sign house system, which is the system of house division that the concept of 12 houses was originally based on probably that was most prevalent in ancient astrology. So that’s what we’ll be using for the purpose of this series while also paying attention to the exact degrees of the houses as particularly important and powerful sensitive points in this instance within the context of the first house.
All right. So let’s transition to talking about some of the significations of the first house and some of the basic meanings. So one of the core meanings of the first house is it represents self, and that’s a tricky one because at first it’s like, when you read that on paper or you hear that the first house represents self, it sounds kind of abstract. But what I mean by that is it represents you in the chart. And the reason why that’s important is because when you look at the 12 houses and the significations of the 12 houses, they often refer to different people in your life. Like the 4th house can signify your parents. The 7th house can signify relationships. The 11th house is like, friends. The 5th house is children. The 3rd house is siblings. The first house, though, is the house that represents you in the chart. So that’s why it’s important, because it’s where you show up in the chart. And oftentimes with the first house, this becomes the most clear when a person’s getting transits. Like eclipses to the first house and the 7th house – you’ll see this major contrast come up between the native and their sense of self and who they are versus other people that the native is in close, personal, one-on relationships in their life. And sometimes the tension between balancing needs for what’s important to them and for their sense of self versus for other people in their life.
NDB: Yeah, exactly. Very fine line with that.
CB: Yeah. What do you think about that? How would you expand on that?
NDB: Yeah, the first house being the individual – I mean, it translates not just to natal horoscopic astrology but even in other forms of astrology where it’s just sort of the essential point from which all the other houses refer to. You know, I mean, it’s not just the first house… Yeah, it’s not number one for any old reason. It’s the central house of the chart, around which the other 11 houses are adjacent. You know, they’re connected to it; it’s the fundamental house.
CB: That’s a good point.
NDB: Yeah. And therefore, you know, and the 7th being the opposite, that just sort of gives you that view of the horizon, the first and the 7th. And so when you’re in a sort of a one-to-one kind of, you know, be it a relationship or any kind of situation whether it’s two individuals facing each other in love, in combat, in discourse, whatever the case may be, it represents the me and the other. Whatever the context is.
CB: Yeah, and you get that opposition there, that aspect of the opposition between the first house and the 7th house, and just the realization, you know, that everybody probably has as babies – and I haven’t like, studied this much, but – you know, they say that babies go through that process of realization of themself and like, recognizing themself and then recognizing something other than themself. Like, you know, initially, like, the parents, for example, as like, other entities in their life.
NDB: Right.
CB: So the first house also represents things that you control or things that you bring about in your life, and that’s the other area that’s really important when it comes to the first house and the concept of self is that there’s some things in our life that happen to us as a result of other people or as a result of external circumstances. But there are other things in our life that come about as a result of our own personal actions and choices as well as character traits or other things that arise from within us. And that becomes a really crucial point that we’re gonna talk about more is the first house really represents that which arises from you or as a result of you in your life as opposed to that which happens in your life or arises as a result of external factors, including people or events or other things like that. So that’s a really important distinction and it sounds very basic, but it allows us to answer some basic questions when looking at a birth chart, such as, you know, does this event that is signified by this planetary alignment in the chart – is this gonna come up as a result of other people in the person’s life, or is this something that the native, a circumstance that they will actual create for themself as a result of their own actions? And being able to make distinctions like that is actually very powerful in terms of predictive astrology.
NDB: Absolutely. That was another sort of analogy that was used for the Ascendant is that it’s the helm, it’s – if you will – the steering wheel for, you know, the ship of life, if you will. So yeah, the Ascendant is reflective also of how the individual steers their course through life.
CB: Yeah. We’ll get to that more in a second. The last thing is that it signifies the part of an individual that is shaped by their environment as opposed to… Actually, I’m gonna skip that point. I’ll skip that point; we’ll come back to that. So —
NDB: Okay.
CB: — self is one of the fundamental like, foundational blocks. And then in ancient astrology, like Paulus Alexandrinus in the 4th century says that the first house represents the basis and foundation of the chart because all of the other houses are derived from it. You have to establish the rising sign and then the rest of the chart is then established in terms of the other houses.
So first house represents self. One of the other core meanings of the first house is that it represents the body and the physical health and physical vitality of the native or the owner of the birth chart, the person who was born at that moment in time. So part of this is that part of the first house is below the horizon under the earth, which is associated with like, the realm of physical manifestation. And above the Ascendant is associated with the sky and with almost like, the realm of spirit, so that the Ascendant and the first house are like, the uniting of those two things when like, the spirit and the body come together and form this like, unique mixture which is us, the human being who is born at that specific moment in time with all of our physical as well as mental and character things that are associated with us. So part of that is both good things as well as bad things that happen to the body are indicated by the first house. So challenging placements in the first house can indicate health issues or accidents, for example, that affect the body and the physical constitution. Whereas positive things placed in the first house can indicate healthiness or having good health or even recovering from health issues. So that’s part of the distinction that we’ll get into in terms of thinking about really basic things of like, is there a positive placement there that indicates something good with respect to that signification? If there’s a challenging placement there, then it indicates something challenging with respect to that.
So body, physical health, and physical constitution is a major thing. And one of the things that goes along with that as our next signification, our third signification of the first house in connection with the body is that the first house has to do with a person’s physical appearance, which is a sort of aspect or manifestation of the body. Like, how your body looks or how your body appears to other people. So especially if there’s something distinctive or unique about your appearance, then that will often show up in the first house or will show up through placements in the first house. So positive indiciates with this can indicate that there’s something beautiful or something striking about a person’s physical appearance. Like people that are sometimes viewed as particularly strikingly beautiful for some reason or physically attractive or like, conventionally attractive. Negative indications can indicate things like scars, unwanted blemishes, or other things like that that somehow affect the appearance or that the native themself struggles with in some ways that impact either their appearance or their physical body.
NDB: Yeah. Exactly. I mean, again, it’s like you said, that merging of body and spirit – how one feels about their physical presence in the body. I mean, that’s where those two points merge. You’re conscious of your physical embodiment and then aware of its place in this greater space and of course other people are reacting to it. You know, if you’re very attractive, they respond in one way, and if you’re not, they may fail to respond in ways that you would expect. So yeah. It’s where all those things, all those important different sort of parts of living experience merge and meet.
CB: Right. And just think about how, you know, that impacts people. Like, sometimes for some of us, it’s like, a non-issue, but like, in some instances – let’s say a person is particularly strikingly physically seen as beautiful. Sometimes that means that people treat them differently. So sometimes that can —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — like, unlock certain things in a good way. It can give them certain advantages or certain benefits in life that, you know, might not come about for others. Whereas sometimes there are disadvantages that come along with that as well. Similarly, like, if there’s some sort of physical issue, sometimes that can be something that causes challenges for the person in their life that other people don’t have to deal with.
NDB: Yeah, exactly. It gives us an idea of whatever that kind of baggage is gonna be. You know, let’s say someone is born particularly sort of in a small body and people are always commenting on that, and the person grows up responding to how they’re being treated because of their physical appearance. And it shapes, again – going back to that point between the Ascendant and the Sun being these two factors of an individual. You know, the Sun of that given individual is not connected to that physical appearance; it’s who they are besides the fact that they were born in that particular body. Whereas the Ascendant has everything to do with them being born in that body and how they feel about it and how people make them feel about it, and how it affects their ability to maneuver in the world. Right? I mean, again, it’s the steering ship of, you know, it’s the steering wheel of the ship of life. So if, you know, if your ship can drive through anything and nobody gets in its way, or are people always sort of throwing up obstacles that get in the way of life that have to do with whatever the physical realities of that body are? So yeah —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — I mean, again, that comes back to that nature/nurture thing.
CB: Yeah. I saw a Tik Tok account recently of this guy that went viral, and his whole Tik Tok account is about how he’s abnormally tall and how that impacts his life. So to like, kind of go to your earlier example and your earlier point, that’s the other side of the spectrum. And you know, sometimes when somebody has something distinctive about them that makes them stand out in some ways, that’ll be indicated in the birth chart and often indicated in the first house. So, you know, not everybody has stuff like that, so you may not have planets there, so that may not be something then that comes up as like, a major distinctive feature in your life. But that’s some of the things that we’ll be paying attention to when planets are in the first house is something distinctive about the physical body.
Alright —
NDB: Yeah, exactly.
CB: So the body, the appearance. The other thing about the first house that I meant to mention is that in the scheme of planetary joys, where each of the seven traditional planets were originally assigned to one of the houses, basically. Here’s a diagram for those watching the video version. In the planetary joys scheme, the first house is associated with Mercury. And the planet Mercury is said to have its joy there. And this is because Mercury has this dual nature where it always like, straddles the line between two things, and if there’s like, a choice between two different things, then it’s like, it has a bit of both essentially. And we have that here with the first house, because like I said, because the Ascendant is the dividing line between the horizon, anything below the Ascendant is under the earth, and anything above the Ascendant is in the sky. So in whole sign houses, the first house then part of the first whole sign house or the rising sign is above the earth in the realm of the sky, and part of it is below the horizon in the realm of the earth. So the realm below the earth is like, the physical realm, so that’s like, the physical body. But the realm in the sky is associated with the spirit. And so as a result of that, the first house is also associated with the spirit of the native, which includes their life, their life breath, and in some ways the animating force of the native’s life to some extent. So this is probably part of the source of the notion of the first breath that you take after being born being important and potentially being connected with the moment of birth, because taking the breath of life was seen as like, animating the native in some sense in ancient astrology.
So we have to think about this as the area where the sky meets the earth and where the soul or the spirit unites with the body. So as a result of that, the first house is not just the physical incarnation of the native, but it also has to do with their spirit and by extension with that, the first house has to do with the native’s character. So the first house is closely associated with the character. Go ahead.
NDB: Oh, I was just gonna say. There’s another thing about Mercury rejoicing in the first that strikes me. Mercury has to do with adaptability, so there’s almost something Darwinian or quasi-Darwinian about Mercury rejoicing in the first house, because it’s the ability to adapt in life. You know, so it’s like, it’s having the steering wheel of your vehicle can go off road if it needs to, or it can become a helicopter if it needs to or a submarine. You know, like, there’s more ability, there’s more room to move with Mercury in the first house. If one is stuck in some situation that, you know, would be an obstacle for others, it can be turned into an opportunity of some kind or you can sort of, yeah, twist things around, adapt to circumstances. So I think that’s another element to that that really works.
CB: Sure. So maybe the adaptability of our character and the way that that can mold and change over time based on different things that arise both from within us as well as external circumstances. So that’s really important, though, the character of the native is a core first house trait, and the way in which their mind and body form a unique unit that creates a unique individual. So —
NDB: Yeah. It’s manifest. Like, it’s almost like, the Sun and Moon are the parts of you that would be you even if you didn’t have an actual body, whereas the Ascendant that, you know, is where it’s manifest, is where the personality of yours that exists in the abstract is brought to life in an actual body.
CB: Definitely. So that means that the, in terms of character traits, the rising sign, the zodiac sign that’s rising over the eastern horizon at the moment of birth, has a major impact on character as well as planets in the first house, the planet that rules the Ascendant or the first house, as well as aspects to the exact degree of the Ascendant, especially close aspects, all have a very dominant role in influencing character traits that are gonna be more prominent in terms of the person’s life.
All right so that leads me to my next signification, which is that the first house in ancient astrology, as Nick already referred to – as you already said, Nick – is referred to as the helm, which is like, the steering wheel of the ship, so that it’s kind of like, the first house is kind of like the driver’s seat of a car. You know, you have a car, which is kind of like, the entire birth chart in some sense. The first house is where you are driving it from. And as a result of that, planets in the first house kind of help to steer the ship of the native’s life for better or worse. So one of the questions is are the planets that are at the steering wheel of your ship, are they steering the car well, or are they steering it poorly in some ways? You know, there can be different types of drivers, let’s say, that do a better or a worse job, or maybe they’re better or worse at driving or maybe there’s things that are hampering them in terms of driving in some ways and making it more challenging or more difficult than it could be otherwise. Like, let’s say you’re trying to drive, but you like, forgot your glasses and you need to wear glasses in order to like, see things clearly. That could be problematic.
So planets in the first really help to steer the ship of the native’s life. And then also, the first house – because it’s called the helm – is also associated with the native’s life direction. And especially the ruler of the Ascendant, so the planet that rules the rising sign will steer a course towards a certain destination that’s gonna be important for some reason in terms of the native’s life. So this especially comes up by looking at what house is the ruler of the Ascendant placed in, and whatever house that is, the topics associated with that house are going to be much more important in terms of steering the native’s overall life direction and focus than other topics in the native’s life, all other things aside. So as a result of that, the ruler of the Ascendant becomes associated with the native’s life focus to some extent, where their attention is directed, and major topics of the life will be directed towards at certain points.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, again, it comes down to choices, which is another way of talking about the helm or talking about the steering wheel. If you’re driving your vehicle, your body, through life, you’re making choices. Do I wanna go to this or that school? Do I wanna date this or that person? Or whatever, you know, this is how we steer our ship through life as we make a series of choices that, you know, take us through Door A, Door B, or Door C, whatever the case may be.
CB: Right, so it’s another one of those —
NDB: That’s where these – I was just gonna say that’s where those different analogies merge, yeah. Sorry, go ahead.
CB: It’s another one of those things that arises from within you as well, because sometimes it’s like, sometimes people, like for example I know one person who sort of like, grew up interested in foreign countries and like, wanting to move to a foreign country, and that was just something that naturally arise from within them that they had a fascination with foreign cultures, and they had the ruler of the Ascendant in the 9th house. So sometimes it’s just like, that thing that arises from within you for some reason as a result of inherent traits that either you’re born with or that you develop at some point in your life that cause you to put your attention more towards one area of your life or another as a result of the ruler of the Ascendant and its power to sort of set, to chart a course in terms of your overall life direction since it’s sort of like, the captain or the steersman of your ship.
NDB: Exactly.
CB: So we’ll look at some examples of that. You know, I did a more extended take on the rulers of the houses in a recent episode earlier this year that people can check out, and I kind of avoided going into the ruler of the Ascendant too much because I wanted to deal with it more in this episode to some extent on the first house. So we’ll go into some examples of that later on and show exactly what we mean.
So the very last thing in terms of this initial section of talking about the significations, and I’ve already stated this one but I just wanna restate it again – one of the core things the first house has to do with is that which arises from you. So it’s things that you bring about in your life and things that arise from you in your life, sometimes deliberately and other times inadvertently. So you know, we’ve talked about for example that 9th house example I just gave – that would be something that in some ways is deliberate. Like, if a person is deliberately striving towards a specific topic so that they grow up and they end up manifesting that thing as a result of a desire to. But sometimes those topics are also just things where they happen inadvertently. Like, so we talked about physical traits that like, arise from within a person, but they don’t necessarily have control over. But even if they don’t have control over it, it’s still something that’s coming from them rather than from an external source in their life. And any time you have a distinction like that, it usually has to do with the first house.
NDB: Yeah. Exactly.
CB: So some things come about just based on who you are and also it’s how you tend to act in the world as a result of character traits. Like, how do you approach the world based on things that are inherent parts of your character is one of the questions that we’ll get to in the first house a lot.
Yeah. So I think that’s it for like, just the basic significations of the first house, and a lot of that sounds like, very abstract. But what we’re gonna do now is we’re gonna talk about especially planets in the first house and look at some example charts, and then it will start to become more clear what each of these sort of abstract significations means in very concrete terms in terms of how it plays out in people’s lives. Are there any other preliminary things, or is that good?
NDB: No, that’s good. That covers it.
CB: All right. Awesome.
All right. So we’re gonna transition now; we’re gonna talk about especially planets located in the first house in a birth chart. And it’s really important because this sets up a signature from the moment of birth in the birth chart when a person has a planet in the first house. And what will happen is that the signature will get activated repeatedly at different points in the life, which will then awaken it. So that’s one of the reasons why we look at placements in the first house, because we know that not only are they sometimes gonna indicate inborn traits that arise from the native, but also at certain periods in the life when certain transits or time lords activate that first house placement, there’ll be certain circumstances that will lead to the awakening of that placement in different ways, either due to internal things or external things that are sort of swirling around it and causing that to become awakened.
So the other thing I want to say as a preliminary to this is that major themes in a person’s life are often repeated in multiple indications. So we’re gonna be looking at planets in the first house and how that matches up with major themes that arise in a person’s life. But there are often other indications in the chart that also indicate the same or similar or overlapping themes. So even though we’re gonna focus on and say, you know, this thing in the person’s life arose as a result of this first house placement, and that’s true, in some of the most distinctive examples, there’s also often like, other placements that indicate or give you additional information about why that thing arose in the person’s life. So I just wanted to make that distinction clear as we focus on first house placements that obviously there’s like, other stuff going on as well.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, that’s always the hazard in this kind of exercise, because you know, an astrology chart is always this combination of factors contributing to a unique outcome. So there’s always some risk when you’re just talking about one feature of a horoscope that you can risk giving the impression or overemphasizing the isolation of that one factor, whereas of course it’s always interacting with everything else that contributes to a given, you know, astrological chart being what it is and representing the unique individual that it does.
CB: Totally. For sure.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. So I wanna start with the Moon in the first house placements and let’s talk about the Moon and what it means in the first house. One of the ones I wanted to started with was just an interesting theme that you and I found just going through our chart files was the theme of memory being really important to people with the Moon in the first house, and how sometimes having like, a really strong memory becomes like, a distinctive, not just almost like physical trait that the person has, like an advantage or a gift, but also sometimes it becomes tied in with their character and their actions as well.
So the first one that we found for this actually was the American writer Jack Kerouac. So I’ll pull his chart up.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Why – you wanna introduce this one?
NDB: Sure. Yeah. He was a great favorite of mine when I was a young teenager. And he’s a writer who wrote – you know, I mean, certainly memory is a huge factor in what he did. His most famous is On the Road, which is an account of a sort of a long hitchhiking journey he took through the United States in the early 1950s about some of the people who, you know, his circle of friends and what they were up to.
CB: Which I like also because the Moon in ancient astrology has these like, significations of having to do with like, wandering and —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — travel to some extent. So in his chart, the Ascendant is at 15 degrees of Virgo and the Moon is conjunct the Ascendant at 13 degrees of Virgo, and he was actually born just a day before a lunar eclipse in Virgo the day after he was born.
NDB: Yeah. So it’s a very powerful Moon. And that was, you know, he would go on these long, he would hitchhike across the country. Sometimes he does try riding the boxcars; he has a sort of romantic notion about it, but he does do a lot of hitchhiking. Picks up odd jobs here and there. Works as a brakeman on railroads. I think he does some, you know, picking in the fields of food or something. You know, a very sort of like, you know, just sort of labor type jobs as he roams the country and makes observations about it. And it’s very much, you know, like, he wrote On the Road. The other thing about him was he wanted to write this sort of stream of consciousness style. The original draft of On the Road was written on a long roll of teletype paper, you know, the kind of thing that they use for telegraphs. In our day with word processing, this wouldn’t mean very much; you could open up a word document and write a book that’s five times longer than the original On the Road. But in the days of typewriters and paper and ink, this was quite a feat. You know, he basically fit this roll of teletype paper into his typewriter and just wrote this very long stream of consciousness work. The eventual final product of On the Road was more sort of edited and pared down, although in recent years, the original scroll version has been released. I actually just read it not long ago myself. So yeah, I think that’s another sort of lunar thing. It’s not just memory, or maybe this sort of stream of consciousness style is part of what allowed him to channel his memories and his thoughts in a way that was, yeah, uninterrupted and unfiltered and raw and true. You know, like a lot of romantics, he was looking for a kind of truth that’s almost sort of unattainable. And his wanderings around the world, it’s like he was – or around the country, rather, it’s like he was searching for a world that didn’t really exist or only existed in his imagination.
CB: Yeah. So this is a really great one, just because a lot of his work has to do with memory, with processing memory, and the Moon itself – you know, we have that idea of when we’re recalling memories from the past, we talk about like, reflecting on our past experiences and having reflections. And the Moon is kind of unique because the Moon itself doesn’t generate light; it reflects the light from the Sun. So it’s like, receiving an impression, and in the same way astrologers associate the Moon with the impressions that we receive that leave an imprint on us. So sometimes that’s experiences, like, physical experiences, but it can also be memories. And in some of the ways, you know, memory becomes in some ways like, we associate with the mind but also the body because sometimes it can be a physical trait where there’s some people that have these incredibly photographic memories where they can just retain and remember like, everything perfectly, whereas there’s other people where their memory might be more fuzzy. So —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — Kerouac was one who memory and the processing of memory were central themes in his work, and his writing often delves into personal experiences, recollections, and reflections capturing the essence of specific moments and also specific emotions. So he tried to translate his memories into vivid and evocative prose, often blurring the lines between fact and fiction because that subjective element was a little bit more important for him, as well as being one of the central figures of the Beat generation, the notion of embracing spontaneity as well.
NDB: Yeah, exactly. And interestingly, like, with his rising sign and his Moon being Virgo, On the Road was published in September of 1957 – if I recall, the very month Pluto was making its ingress to Virgo. I tend to think of On the Road being the work that sort of ushered in Pluto in Virgo and everything that would follow. Kerouac was hugely influential on, you know, the artists that followed in the ‘60s. In fact, the reason I started reading him when I was 12 or 13 was because I read that Jim Morrison loved Jack Kerouac, and so I was like, well, you know, if Jim Morrison liked him, then I should read him. And so yeah, there was that sort of the fact that On the Road is published when it is – it immediately becomes a huge sensation. It’s only a second novel. He had published one a few years earlier, but On the Road really just sort of… Yeah, it channels the zeitgeist. It touches on something that was just sort of surfacing in America at the time. And yeah, I think it’s really, it’s the signature work of Pluto’s ingress into Virgo and everything that followed. Even though it’s the late ‘50s, it’s really about the, you know, what would follow in the ‘60s.
CB: Yeah. All right. And the last thing is just there’s also a theme of like, nostalgia and longing where many of his works are infused with sort of a sense of nostalgia and a longing for the past. And he often reflects on his childhood, his friendships, past loves, exploring the bittersweet nature of memory and the passage of time. So we’ll see —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — a little bit of that again with Saturn, but I just wanted to…
NDB: The other thing I was gonna say is it occurs to me – this thought just came back to me – Kerouac spent the last few years of his life living with his mother. You know, they were basically like, roommates and friends. He had an older brother who died when he was very young, so his work is very much haunted by the ghost of his dead brother, if you will. And I think that’s part of his close connection to his mother. Ironically, this is one of these – I’ll just tell this as a little aside —
CB: I do wanna keep moving.
NDB: Oh, okay. Alright.
CB: But if it’s relevant, then go for it —
NDB: It’s very —
CB: — I just wanna make sure we keep moving.
NDB: Yeah, yeah. It’s hugely relevant. Kerouac’s brother died in June of 1926 when he was just four years old. Years later, his friend and editor and really the champion – the guy who helped him get On the Road published – Allen Ginsberg was born on the very day that Kerouac’s brother Gerard had died in June of 1926. So there’s this weird sort of, yeah, connection between his dead brother and then this friend who’s largely responsible for him becoming, you know, a known writer, a celebrated writer.
CB: Okay. That’s interesting. I don’t know if this is relevant, but in ancient astrology in some of the earliest Hellenistic authors, they associated the first house with siblings. Later astrologers tended to associate the 3rd house with siblings more, but some of the early authors for some reason also associated the first house with siblings probably because of Mercury having its joy there. So not sure if relevant, but just gonna mention that in passing. And then let’s keep it moving because we got like, a lot of other —
NDB: Sure.
CB: — examples to go through.
NDB: You bet.
CB: All right. So next example is Garry Kasparov. Garry Kasparov has Sagittarius rising at 17 Sagittarius with the Moon conjunct the Ascendant at 15 degrees of Sagittarius, and he’s a chess champion with the ruler of the Ascendant in the 5th house of games. And he literally became like, the world master at what is essentially just a game. But he’s like, the best person at that game in the world for a point of time. And I guess it’ll actually be our first example of a ruler of the Ascendant placement and how the ruler of the Ascendant can sometimes direct you towards a specific topic or a specific area in life that then will tend to stand out or become distinctive for you in some way. So for him, it became part of his life’s work, you know, playing chess.
But for him, one of the things that’s cool is that he was renowned for his exceptionally strong memory, particularly in the context of chess and his ability to recall past games, positions, and strategies is considered to be legendary within the chess world. So that’s another really striking example of how memory can become really core and really important theme for a person, and in some ways, it’s like, an inborn bodily trait. But then for him, he actively as a result of his deliberate choices and volition also tried to cultivate that trait of his of having a good memory and trained himself by studying the games of like, lots of other people in order to become a chess champion.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, it’s a very special skill. I mean, Garry Kasparov is the chess player, of course, who played a computer. You know, they had to find an adversary who was his match, and that’s what they could come up with, so it’s some indication of yeah, he’s that good.
CB: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s interesting that it’s like, it’s ruling the 8th house in his chart and a lot of what he did was studying the games that other people had played in order to learn from them, and that might be relevant in that context with the Moon ruling the 8th house. So another example is Warren Buffet who has Sagittarius rising and the Moon in Sagittarius in the first whole sign house, and the ruler of the Ascendant is Jupiter in the 8th house of other people’s money. And he of course is a very famous American investor. He’s one of the most famous investors of all time. And one of the things that’s distinctive about him is that he also is known for having an exceptionally strong memory, particularly when it comes to numbers and financial data. And he is renowned for his ability to recall financial figures like company revenues, profit margins, and stock prices, often from years past. So he attributes this to his extensive reading and deep understanding of business, but I think there’s also another indication here like our previous two examples that there’s almost like, this inborn trait that he has that he was able to cultivate of having a good memory.
NDB: Yeah. I don’t know as much about Warren Buffet, but that is something even I know about him is that he’s supposed to have that, you know, that special sort of, you know, ability to track where everything’s been and, you know, where he thinks it’s going.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: It’s what’s allowed him to stand out from the crowd.
CB: All right. So I only have two other examples of Moon in the first house, and then we’ll move on. One of them is Adrien Brody, who is a famous actor, who is especially known for his portrayal – he was in the 2002 film The Pianist, and he in that film went through like, a radical body transformation where he lost 30 pounds to achieve this emaciated look in order to portray the suffering of his character during the Holocaust. So this notion of like, going through major bodily transformations sometimes comes up in the first house, and we’ll see that a lot. In his case, it was interesting because his appearance and his weight can kind of like, wax and wane like the Moon depending on the role that he has, and like, another role for Predators, for example, he got really buff and like, buffed up. So it’s interesting seeing the ability to have that change or that like, almost like, shape-shifting.
NDB: Yeah. And I think there’s also something about Adrien Brody’s face that has a tremendous sort of… I mean, obviously, any good actor can emote in very subtle ways with their face – film actors – but he’s got a kind of a special pathos to his face. He’s got a very sort of special face, and the way he can convey sadness is, you know, on par with some of the great sort of sad faces of cinema. So yeah, I think of him as someone who could have been in Fellini movies and what have you. It’s a very special look.
CB: Yeah. Well, he has very expressive eyes. And he also like, uses his body expressively in his performance by incorporating physical gestures and movements to convey his character’s emotion and inner lives. And I think that’s part of it as well. Like, the physicality that adds this additional layer of like, depth and nuance to his acting.
NDB: Right.
CB: So that’s one. My last example of a first house one – this is one, it’s just a person I know who is a healer who has Cancer rising and the Moon in Cancer. And they run a clinic, an ayurvedic medicine clinic, as well as an ashram. So it’s a woman who had a background in training as a doctor, but then at one point decided to seek out and embrace more holistic traditional healing methods using ancient Indian medicine, which is known as ayurveda. So she actually heals people and takes care of people at the place that she actually lives, which is also an ashram. And also focuses not just on medicine, but also things like food and how you take care of yourself and your overall diet and things like that as part of achieving like, holistic health. So I thought that was a really good example of just what the Moon in the first house can do as well, especially when it’s in its own domicile in Cancer, and the Ascendant itself is also in Cancer that you get a lot of those themes.
NDB: Yeah, that’s a good one.
CB: So I also have the Moon in the first house in Aquarius, but because it’s in Aquarius, it comes off as a little distant. But I also sometimes have that impulse to like, take care of myself, to take care of people that I know or take care of friends or things like that, and sometimes I recognize that as part of, you know, my own character traits sometimes, and can also be kind of like, a personal that’s deeply affected by the emotions, even though it doesn’t come off that way because I also have Saturn square the Moon. So I get more of the Saturn part of that. And then also with the Moon in the first house, one of the previous ones you mentioned with like, Jack Kerouac, you talked about his mother being prominent in his life. My mother has been really prominent in my life since I was raised by, like, a single mother. And yeah, so you just think about some of the basic significations of the planet – in this case, the Moon. Whatever the most basic significations are, if that planet’s in the first house, you will see some of those significations manifest in striking literal ways, and that’s the takeaway here and that’s what we’re gonna be demonstrating repeatedly as we go through all of the planets in this series.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So let’s move onto the Sun in the first house. So this is one I struggled with a little bit more in terms of seeing things that made sense, but some of the themes that we found as we were going through chart examples – you said people who are not changed by their environment. And one of the ones that was connected with that was like, people who are what they are. You said wherever they put them, so they’re not —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — chameleons or adaptable, because that’s one of the things that the Sun does, is the Sun just like, radiates light. And that’s one of the things we learned especially in the zodiac series about Leo is it tend to be people who are authentic and people who just radiate whatever their light is out into the world and just sort of like, are who they are. So we saw —
NDB: It’s the doing my thing placement. I am who I am, yeah.
CB: Yeah. So that’s how you describe it. And you have the Sun in the first house, right?
NDB: I do have the Sun in the first house, and I am what I am. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I certainly, I recognize – when I was studying astrology, it made it more complicated to have the Sun and the Ascendant in the same sign because I had to find different ways to learn what the difference is because there really isn’t in my particular chart. But aside from that, I certainly I recognize – and when we’re all the different examples we’re gonna be talking about today of other people who have the Sun in the first house, I recognize the same theme that I see in myself, this sort of unchangeability relative to your environment. You know, you are who you are, and you just, you stay who you are even if you’re put in an entirely different sort of setting.
CB: Yeah. I think that’s important and that ties back, actually – there’s a theme in the last one I forgot to mention, which is like, the body, when the Moon is in the first, becomes – the body and physical vitality becomes more central theme in the person’s life and directing their life direction and impacting their life direction than in other lives. I’ve had that with the body. Having the Moon in the first house, the body is more sensitive to things. So for example, I’ve always been more sensitive to like, medicines or drugs or other things or have the ability to get sick easier and then have more recently dealt with health issues more, like, chronic health since the Moon rules the 6th house in my chart. So it’s sort of like, importing illness there. So the body and physical vitality being even more important in the first house and dictating things. With the Sun in the first house, though, it’s people whose personality drives their direction in life for better or worse, where their spirit and what they radiate from that internal part of who they are tends then to also direct their life in different ways so that they can’t be anyone other than who they are.
NDB: Right. Now I mean, this is the interesting thing. We were talking a minute ago about how Mercury in the first house is about adaptability, but the Sun in the first house is really sort of the reverse of that. Like, you’re not adapting. You’re gonna be a square peg in a round hole if that’s how, you know, you came out. What does get interesting is some people have both the Sun and Mercury in the first house, like myself for instance, and so you know, there can be some weird sort of fusion of these two seemingly contradictory principles. But yeah, the Sun on its own in the first house – I see it being the sort of the counterweight to Mercury in the first house. It’s not adaptable, it just is what it is, you know, whether it’s in the right place or not.
CB: Yeah. Some of the things I was thinking were in the chart examples were like, leaders, people who stand out or people who want to stand out or want to be or are unique in some way. People would want to be recognized or are recognized for the uniqueness of their personality like, radiating what it radiates. But also people who lead or become central in some ways. Like people who become in charge of something or become the center through which other things revolve in the same way that the planets revolve around the Sun.
So some of the ones that I saw as I was going through chart examples was like, there were leading filmmakers like George Lucas, for example, who sort of set a trend for… We’ll come back to George Lucas because he also has Venus and Mercury in the first house. But George Lucas sort of setting a standard for film, for example, with like, Star Wars and special effects and things like that. So there’s leaders in filmmaking. There’s leading actors, like Val Kilmer was one with the first house. Bruce Lee was another one with like, the first house Sun in Sagittarius conjunct the Ascendant. There’s leading comedians, like Dave Chappelle is somebody with the Sun in the first house, for example, that I noticed. There’s leading musicians, like Dave Grohl, Doja Cat, and Miles Davis are all first house Suns or the Sun conjunct the Ascendant.
NDB: Yeah. We have some good examples here that we gotta talk about.
CB: Yeah. Even like, leading businessmen, so like, Elon Musk for example has the Sun in the first house. So there’s quite a few examples of that, of just like, people that stand out as like, leaders in their respective fields in some way or people that stand out as unique or like, stand out above the crowd.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. I’m ready to move on unless there’s anything else you wanna saw about those.
NDB: Were we gonna look at their charts? Or did you just —
CB: No, I was just gonna like —
NDB: Okay. I thought we were, but all right, that’s fine. No, well, the one thing I was gonna say then if we’re not looking at their charts – there is something about like, Dave Grohl, Miles Davis – people who started off being sort of backup musicians to other very famous musicians, but sort of outlived them and in some ways sort of not necessarily totally outshined them but had careers that are far longer and more successful than the icons they started off with. Dave Grohl, of course, started off in Nirvana as Kurt Cobain’s drummer, but then when Kurt Cobain died, he started his own band and he’s been going strong for decades now, whereas Cobain really had a career of just a few years. And Miles Davis got his start playing with Charlie Parker, who was also, you know, as important to jazz you might say as Kurt Cobain was to rock in the ‘90s. And this sort of similar story – he played with Charlie Parker; Charlie Parker died, and Miles Davis went on to have a career of some four or five decades, and you know, huge success pretty much – the most successful jazz musician ever. So yeah, there’s some element of that of the Sun in the first house that you sort of, you outshine, you outlive, even though they started off in the background playing for these other really outstanding musical icons, somehow they sort of found their own way. But the light shines so brightly that they’re able to match and even outdo the people who, you know, brought them their first success.
CB: Here’s Miles Davis’s chart with the Ascendant around eight degrees of Gemini and the Sun around four degrees of Gemini. So it’s right there rising over the eastern horizon. And maybe then that astronomically is part of what you’re describing, because the Sun is just like, emerging – it’s just like, emerging into view at that point. So maybe part of the symbolism of the first house Sun is that thing of emergence, of like, starting out with humble origins in some way or starting out living —
NDB: Right.
CB: — almost in the shadow of somebody else, but then eventually as life progresses, like, emerging into view and emerging out into being your own central authority that stands out or in some instances even outshines your mentor.
NDB: Yeah. And it’s funny about Miles, because you know, it’s the Sun and Ascendant in Gemini. And we’ve been talking about like, I mean, typically the Sun is not adaptable, not changeable. We were saying like, this is someone who isn’t a chameleon. Well, Miles was a chameleon, but on his own terms. And it was always him. Like, he moved very well with this – I mean, to have a career that spanned that many decades, he always changed with the times. And yet, it was always him and he always had – his trumpet always sounded the same. It was just all the stuff happening around him that was updated. So it’s an interesting sort of combination of the two. Yeah, I wouldn’t say he was so much adaptable. It’s just that he sort of forced adaptation around him. And like he said himself, he sort of changed music four or five times. You know, he set the course. Definitely —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — absolutely a leader.
CB: Well, I mean, it’s Gemini, which is a mutable sign, so there’s a certain amount of adaptability in that inherently —
NDB: Inherent. Yeah, exactly.
CB: As opposed to like, let’s say, a fixed sign rising where it is more a little bit less adaptability.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, there are musical decisions he made that in some ways, you know, you could give him credit for inspiring what eventually became say, like, for instance, dance music, you know. I won’t go into the whole musicology of it, but he really sort of – he changed things in some fundamental ways that, you know, virtually all the music that you hear today in some way goes back to him and things that he instigated.
CB: Yeah. He was constantly pushing the boundaries of jazz and exploring different styles throughout his career. Like, some of the different styles were like, bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, jazz fusion, and funk – so he definitely wasn’t afraid to experiment and challenge the status quo, which I think has a lot to do with the rising sign being in Gemini. And we’ll touch upon that occasionally as we go through things that the quality of the sign really impacts things and really imports a lot of its own significations into things as well. In this case, you know, a lot of his adaptability, his willingness to try new things, try new styles, I think is a large part of that. And yeah, with the Sun there still shining out as distinctive in his own right, whatever new style he was trying.
NDB: Yeah. His trumpet always sounded like him, that’s the thing. You know, he might have synthesizers in the ‘80s or just, you know, a piano in the ‘50s, but his trumpet always sounded like his trumpet. So yeah, there was something fundamentally unchangeable despite all the changes around him.
CB: Definitely.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. Cool. Well, I think that’s good for this section. I wanna take a brief break, and then we’ll transition —
NDB: Okay.
CB: — into the other planets.
If you’re enjoying this episode and you wanna go into more depth with some of the concepts that we’re talking about, then you should check out my Hellenistic astrology course, which is an online course in ancient astrology. The course is perfect for beginning and intermediate students because I take people from basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over a hundred hours of video lectures, where I go into much greater detail and I use a lot more example charts to go through different concepts like the 12 houses and what they mean, the ruler of the Ascendant, the ruler of different houses in other houses, and even advanced timing techniques.
So there’s also a monthly webinar where I read the charts of students in order to demonstrate how the concepts work in practice. You can find out more information at TheAstrologySchool.com.
All right, we’re back from break. Let’s transition to talking about Mercury in the first house. So one of the things that was really cool when I was going through examples for this is there was a string of unique ones that were Mercury in the first house, especially ones conjunct the Ascendant closely – people that had iconic or unique voices in some ways. So one of the first ones we started seeing in this series was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was born with Cancer rising. He has 19 degrees of Cancer rising, and Mercury pretty much exactly conjunct the degree of the Ascendant at 18 degrees of Cancer. And then he also has Venus in the first house at 26 degrees of Cancer. So it’s kind of mixed because you have both Venus and Mercury in the first house, and both of those are relevant in different ways. So but in terms of the Mercury placement, the main thing is that he has this iconic Australian accent. So he —
NDB: Austrian.
CB: Austrian, not Australia. That would be really funny if it was —
NDB: G’day, mate!
CB: Yeah.
NDB: I’ll be back, ay.
CB: I’ll be back, mate. So he was a bodybuilder from Austria, and then he immigrated to the US first for bodybuilding and then he got into acting. And he had – at first they had him in roles where he didn’t speak at all, like, in Conan he didn’t —
NDB: Yeah, Conan the Barbarian, really, yeah.
CB: He didn’t really have any speaking – and then eventually he started speaking a little bit, but then he had eventually like, because he had a choice at a certain point. I think I saw in a documentary not long ago that he could have started like, training his voice to like, get rid of the accent, but then he ended up making like, a deliberate decision not to because his Austrian accent started becoming like, an iconic part of just his persona in American film and media and everything else.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, it’s really quite the twist. I mean, talk about adaptability! Because yeah, I mean, he first became famous in cinema because he played Conan. And then he’s the Terminator, which of course was huge. And so that made him a really big name. I mean, if he had only made Conan, he probably would have been a forgotten commodity within a few years. But he makes The Terminator, which is huge, and he says a few – he says, “I’ll be back.” You know?
CB: That’s a good point, though, that that was a catch line. Like, literally —
NDB: Oh yeah.
CB: — everyone, that there was like, from that movie, because not everybody has like, an iconic sentence that just becomes associated, but he did from that movie.
NDB: Yeah, exactly, even though he, you know, it’s almost all that he says in the movie.
CB: Right.
NDB: But in order for him to keep making movies, you know, he couldn’t just keep playing the Terminator and Conan over and over. So yeah, movies like Predator or, you know, all the other things that followed. He had to have dialogue. And he had this seemingly awkward Austrian accent that one would think that, you know, the common wisdom at the time would have been well, that’s a non-starter. You can’t be playing some, you know, American GI if you’ve got this seemingly clumsy Austrian accent. But it really worked for him; it didn’t matter. He was just, you know, he had his own appeal. He had his own charisma. And the accent, you know, might have been a liability for just about anyone else, but it seemed to work for him. So yeah, whether he would have had it in his power to change it or not, it came to sort of, it’s more – we think of it more even than the muscles. I mean, it’s true – you know, when he first came on the scene, it was the body, the physique that defined him as a movie performer —
CB: The Venus.
NDB: — that’s why he was hired. Yeah, it was why he was hired to star in the movies that he was. But then as time went on, like, okay, he still had the body, you know, largely. But it was that voice that really came to define him. So it’s, yeah, it really is something.
CB: Yeah. So and I was gonna save his Venus for later, but maybe we might as well just do it now, because that’s the other thing —
NDB: Sure.
CB: — he has in the first house is that Venus. And you know, his initial thing was having this, doing bodybuilding and having this physique that I don’t know how to describe it, but he just has a very good physique. His body is very symmetrical when he like, worked on it and stuff, so that he eventually won a lot of bodybuilding competitions like, early in his career before he became an actor where he just kept winning like, over and over again. And —
NDB: Mr. Universe and all that stuff, yeah.
CB: Yeah. And I think that’s so interesting as a manifestation, then, when we’re talking about the first house having to do with the body and that he’s literally somebody that initially that was his early success in life was having a physical body that he had worked on. It was part inherited, so some of it was like, outside of his control in terms of having good genes. But then also that he put an incredible amount of like, work and effort into like, developing his body further and then sort of having the positive benefits as a result of that or having success in his life that resulted from him working on his body and crafting it in different ways. And then later, of course, you know, one of the things that we’ll see with Venus in the first in associating the first house with appearance is that sometimes when you have positive placements in the first house, it can mean that you’re attractive or regarded as attractive or physically appealing in some way. And of course, as a handsome, like, charismatic leading man, that also became one of the reasons why he was able to become a leading man in Hollywood.
NDB: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You can see how having more than one planet in the first house, they each have a role to play in how the individual turns out.
CB: Exactly. Yeah. So that’s a great, that’s our first example. So other examples though – another iconic voice, and this has always been one of my favorite examples, is the actor James Earl Jones who has —
NDB: Darth Vader, man. Yeah.
CB: Darth Vader, but also for my generation Mufasa. So another —
NDB: Right.
CB: — iconic voice, but for him, he has Capricorn rising and Mercury, the Moon, Saturn, and the Sun in the first house. So the interesting thing about him is Mercury is actually stationary in his chart. And this is a night chart; the Sun is like, below the horizon, so that Saturn placement in the first house is actually more challenging, so it’s introducing an element of there’s some challenging things that have to do with the body. And in his instance, because it’s a Saturn-Mercury conjunction, sometimes a Mercury-Saturn conjunction can hamper communication in some way. So he actually had speech issues like, very early in his life, right?
NDB: Right, right. Yeah, I’ve heard that. I’ve forgotten the story; it’s been a while. But it’s not an uncommon story that someone has like, a speech impediment, maybe a stammer or something of that nature, and they take, you know, courses or guidance to correct it, and it somehow leads them into acting.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: I’ve heard that story a few times, yeah.
CB: For him, he struggled with a severe stutter as a child, and the stutter was so debilitating that he was essentially mute for nearly the first eight years of his life, only speaking to his family and to animals. But then Jones eventually overcame his silence with the help of a high school teacher who encouraged him to recite poetry in class. So this practice of speaking out loud, even with a stutter, helped him to eventually gain confidence and eventually overcome his speech impediment so that eventually when he grew up, you know, he did some of the most iconic voice acting roles of, you know, Hollywood cinema of like, all time. First he was the voice – he wasn’t the actor. There was like, another actor who —
NDB: Right.
CB: — was in the —
NDB: David Prowse, yeah, who was in the Darth Vader suit.
CB: Right. But then James Earl Jones actually voiced Darth Vader, and Darth Vader had this like, deep kind of powerful kind of like, scary voice. Is that how you —
NDB: What a voice!
CB: How would you describe it?
NDB: Yeah, I mean, it’s deep, bassy resonance – of course there was that sound effect in the background with the breathing, but I mean, come on. In cinema, I mean, what voice is more sort of identifiable and iconic than Darth Vader? Even more so than Arnold Schwarzenegger, and it might be literally the only voice I can think of that really does sort of top Arnold Schwarzenegger in terms of that identifiable, you know, quality. Something so memorable. Yeah. Darth Vader’s terrifying.
CB: Yeah. So that, and then later, he also played the voice of Mufasa, who was like, the father lion in The Lion King, the original animated Lion King in the 1990s, which was one of the most successful Disney, like, animated movies of all time, and he gave the voice. And again, this was more of a positive one because he was playing like, a positive character instead of like, a bad guy like with Darth Vader. But in that, he had this like, deep, rich voice that was just very iconic. So his is an interesting case because we have Mercury and Saturn, and so we can see how Saturn in the first house initially lended some obstacles and some difficulties in terms of his body and some physical thing that he was kind of born with a stutter that was hampering his ability to speak and how he experienced challenges and struggles but eventually was able to overcome that and his difficulties eventually became a source of strength and a source of power.
NDB: Yeah. Great actor altogether. I mean, you can see him in his younger years, he was in Doctor Strangelove. So he’s, yeah, he’s all over the place. He’s a fine, fine actor.
CB: Yeah. And I forgot to mention – well, I always think of him in Field of Dreams; that was my favorite like, actor-actor one that he did. But for the audio listeners, his Ascendant is at nine degrees of Capricorn, and his Mercury is at six degrees of Capricorn. So his Mercury is like, very close to his Ascendant, and that’s something I meant to mention that any planet in the rising sign using whole sign houses is in the first house and is gonna lend some of its significations to the first house or will manifest some of the significations of the first house. But planets that are close to and especially within a few degrees of the actual Ascendant will be even more powerful or will be particularly prominent in the person’s life.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. So that was another one. And then a third example is the musician Tom Waits. So —
NDB: Yeah, there you go.
CB: He has Sagittarius rising at 23 degrees and Mercury conjunct the Ascendant at 23 Sagittarius exactly. The Sun is also in the first house at 15 Sag, but his Mercury interestingly at 23 Sag is squaring Mars at 21 degrees of Virgo in the 10th house and squaring Saturn at 18 degrees of Virgo in the 10th house. So there’s some challenges to his Mercury, and it’s also partially in the context of his career. And what’s amazing is that he is a musician and a singer who’s known for his distinctive deep, gravelly, raspy singing voice that’s super distinctive.
NDB: Yeah, I mean, his voice is so distinctive. I remember back in the ‘80s, I think it was Doritos or one of those potato chip companies used a Tom Waits sound-alike for one of their commercials, and he sued them. You know, his voice is so unique and identifiable that he was able to prove in a court of law that, you know, an imitator was imitating him specifically. So that, you know, that’s when you know you really do have a distinctive voice. And he’s an also interesting example because like you saw, he’s got the Sun and Mercury in the first house. And so we’re also seeing someone like, he’s very much also a Sun in the first house guy in that Tom Waits is Tom Waits no matter you put him. You know, like, he’s – you’re not gonna be able to dress him up in any way that is not sort of authentic to who he is. You know, he’s got a very sort of distinct sort of… Yeah, going back to Jack Keruoac, I sort of, I don’t want – what’s the right word? Like, a sort of, he embodies a sort of a vagrant persona as a performing artist. He’s supposed to be someone from, you know, like, some sleazy bar down the alley of some, you know, port town, if you will. Like, there’s supposed to be something underworld about that persona, and you really can’t put him in, you know, a tuxedo and have him performing at Carnegie Hall. That’s just not who Tom Waits is.
CB: Sure.
NDB: I hope I’m getting that across. But that’s a real sort of Sun in the first house like, he is who he is. But —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — at the same time, he’s got that Mercury, which is just yeah, a very distinctive voice.
CB: Yeah. His voice is actually so distinctive that Heath Ledger later, for his role of the Joker, imitated like, Tom Waits’s voice, and there’s some videos you can —
NDB: I didn’t know that, but I get it immediately.
CB: Yeah. So if anybody watches – what was the second Batman movie that Christopher Nolan directed? The like, iconic one?
NDB: The Dark Knight.
CB: The Dark Knight. Yeah. The Dark Knight.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Heath Ledger’s Joker has this like, raspy, gravely voice in that, and there’s some comparisons you can watch —
NDB: But also with a bit of, yeah, a bit of a sing-song quality to it. Yeah.
CB: Right.
NDB: And Tom Waits is actually – he’s acted in some movies as well. Stranger Than Paradise, great Jim Jarmusch movie. He’s good at acting himself. You know, Francis Ford Coppola —
CB: Okay.
NDB: — he’s been in some of his stuff, you know.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So anyways, so that was another one. And then he also made his voice worse by like, smoking and drinking so it actually made it even more gravelly and —
NDB: Right.
CB: — sort of challenging, but. Anyway —
NDB: Exactly.
CB: That’s another example. Other Mercury in the first house ones that are like, iconic voices… Well, yeah, there’s other ones, but we don’t have to keep on that. There’s other ones that display other themes. So and I have like, keywords for some of them. Johnny Carson, for example, had Mercury conjunct Saturn in Scorpio on the Ascendant. He was the talk show host. So he was originally like, a radio DJ host, a radio personality with his voice, but then later he hosted what became an iconic, The Tonight Show basically.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Other Mercury conjunct Ascendant people – Edward Snowden has Mercury conjunct the Ascendant in Gemini with Mars and the Sun rising there as well, and he was the whistleblower. Other ones – Donald Glover, who has Virgo rising and Mercury in Virgo conjunct the Ascendant. He’s talented in like, many different areas. He’s excelled as being like, a rapper, a comedian, as well as an actor. And I like his because it shows sort of like the Miles Davis example with Gemini rising – with mutable signs, especially Mercury-ruled mutable signs, you get people that do, you know, can be good at lots of different things or who do lots of different things. Have great versatility.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Others are Steve Wozniak, who has Virgo rising with Mercury conjunct Saturn in Virgo in the first house, and he was the tech whiz. So he was one of the founders of Apple Computer with Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak programmed and physically constructed some of the first personal computers.
NDB: Yeah. Smart, smart man.
CB: So with Virgo, you get this technical facility sometimes.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Others – there’s Chuck Berry, who is Scorpio rising with Mercury and Saturn in Scorpio, and he was a guitarist and songwriter who pioneered rock’n’roll.
NDB: Yeah. And a fantastic lyricist. Chuck Berry’s songwriting – I mean, he’s a great storyteller. It’s just amazing, the quality of his writing. When you think that he was writing pop songs for teenagers, it’s really top shelf storytelling, but very economic. Like, it’s funny that it’s Mercury-Saturn. Like, it doesn’t have to be verbose or really elaborate, but just telling really well-told concise little stories, you know. Listen to the song that he has in Pulp Fiction – “You Never Can Tell.” It’s a little story, and it’s so well told and everything rhymes, and it’s just fantastic, absolutely fantastic.
CB: And then the last one I had was Jimi Hendrix, who had Mercury, Venus, and the Sun in Sagittarius, and he was like, the guitarist.
NDB: Yeah. One of my all-time favorites. Again, he’s got those three planets there, so you do have someone who’s got the adaptability of Mercury in the first house, but also he is who he is with the Sun in the first house, and very much – I mean, he’s, you know, he’s an African-American guy from Seattle, but he became a rockstar in England. And he just like, literally he’s discovered in some bar in New York City by a British impresario. He’s brought to England and becomes a rockstar virtually overnight, while still being himself. Like, even though you drop him off in a different country with a different culture and all this stuff, and within weeks, he runs the place. Within weeks, he has all the British rock stars that are ruling England at the time, be it Eric Clapton or The Who or The Beatles, and he just, he moves to England in 1966 and he just, you know, changes everything. And totally by, you know, being who he is. And certainly, you know, the Venus there as well – he was incredibly appealing. I mean, you know, one of the top sort of sex symbols in rock history as well, and just a phenomenal musician, a great writer as well. So yeah, it’s all there in his chart.
CB: Totally. All right. So we’ll come back to Mercury. That’s it for Mercury examples for now, but we’ll see other examples combined with other planets later on, but those are some of the purest expression of some Mercury significations that I could find, especially with the iconic voices.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right, so let’s move on to talking about Venus in the first house. So one of the ones that I’ve always used and that many people think of for Venus in the first house is Angelina Jolie, who has Cancer rising and Venus exactly conjunct the degree of the Ascendant in Cancer.
So here is her chart where we can see – for those listening to the audio version, we see the Ascendant at 28 degrees of Cancer and we see Venus right on top of the Ascendant at 28 degrees of Cancer. So we’ve talked about how the first house can represent the physical body and also the appearance and sometimes like, natural traits or inborn traits that arise from you. And for her, especially in like, in the early 2000s, she would frequently appear on lists of like, you know, the top 10 most beautiful people in the world or, you know, sexiest people in the world or whatever in the tabloids and different things like that, and was just widely regarded for her beauty or her physical appearance, whatever that was exactly that, you know, people considered to be beautiful or have good appearance at the time. Like, that was it at the time.
NDB: Yeah. And her last name even means “pretty” in French. Jolie. So it’s even —
CB: Right.
NDB: It’s even there in the name.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So what’s interesting about hers, though, is that it’s not just Venus. Like, people often cite her Venus, astrologers often cite her Venus right on the Ascendant because it’s so prominent and because everyone that was around in the 2000s just like, remembers that period where she was one of the most beautiful like, people in Hollywood. But she also has Saturn in Cancer in the first house, and so we would also expect there to be some challenges when it comes to the body or the physical manifestation of the native. And for her, that manifested in 2013 when she made headlines when she publicly announced her decision to undergo a preventative double mastectomy after learning that she carried a gene mutation which significantly increased her risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. So her mother had actually died of ovarian cancer at the age of 56, and her maternal grandmother also died of cancer. So she was very much like, thinking of them as well as thinking of her children after genetic testing revealed that she had an 87% chance of developing breast cancer. So her decision to go public with her experience was a watershed moment for breast cancer awareness and sparked a global conversation about genetic testing and preventative surgery. So many women were inspired by her bravery and her openness, and some chose to undergo genetic testing and preventative surgeries themselves after hearing about what she did. And this phenomenon became known as the Angelina Jolie effect.
NDB: Right.
CB: So I wanted to mention that, because you know, when you have multiple planets in the first house, oftentimes, you know, sometimes they impact each other. Like in the previous ones, we had, you know, James Earl Jones – Mercury-Saturn was impacting his voice. Or you mentioned Chuck Berry having shorter or more concise songs —
NDB: Yes.
CB: So it’s like, Saturn was limiting or making his Mercury communication more concise. But sometimes what happens is you also can have each planet activated at different times in the person’s life somewhat independently. So in her case, it’s like, that Saturn was getting activated at that point, and —
NDB: Right.
CB: — she was, you know, going through that.
NDB: Yeah, and it’s Saturn in Cancer of all things. Like, it’s almost too literal to, you know, be believed.
CB: Just because Cancer with the body parts is associated with the breast and the chest?
NDB: Exactly. Just as an aside, it occurs to me that her father, Jon Voight, also was born with Saturn close to the Ascendant. So you sometimes see – this is, you know, an aside, but you do sometimes see this kind of thing in family heritage, that parent and children have the same planets in the same angles, so that’s something there as well.
CB: Yeah, and it’s interesting also that she was like, she was thinking of her mother that she had died of ovarian cancer as well as her grandmother so that, you know, with Saturn in Cancer ruled by the Moon, there may have been some thoughts of like, the mother, or memory of like, the family heritage and in that instance like, the inheritance of a genetic heritage of a predisposition to this that was influencing, you know, part of her decision. So that’s relevant as well.
So you know, sometimes we’re gonna be talking about these planets in isolation, but oftentimes there’s a whole set of factors involving the placements that are interconnected that are really the reason why the specific scenario comes about even if we don’t always get into all those details.
NDB: Exactly, yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So that was one. Another example that I’ve always used of Venus in the first house is the actor Paul Newman, who had Capricorn rising and Venus exactly conjunct the degree of the Ascendant within a degree. So let me put his chart up.
There we go. So he had 13 degrees of Capricorn rising and Venus at 14 degrees of Capricorn conjunct the Ascendant within a degree. And as an actor, he was viewed sort of like Angelina Jolie was in the 2000s Paul Newman was in, what, like, the 1950s and ‘60s as this leading man in Hollywood who was just regarded as being particularly handsome and to have these really striking blue eyes were often commented on in terms of his film and part of his success.
NDB: Yeah, he was, you know, a serious actor, but at the same time, he could – yeah, he was taken seriously. He wasn’t simply regarded as a pretty face, but that certainly was part of his appeal in a huge, huge way, and he’s absolutely one of the major cinema sex symbols of the ‘50s, ‘60s, and I would even say ‘70s because even as he was in his 40s, he still had it, if you will.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: And some of his most successful movies were in the ‘70s, so.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Yeah, he did get better with age in a way.
CB: And we’ll talk about him more later when we come to Jupiter, and he’s a good example of Jupiter in the first as well. So other like, you know, famously handsome kind of like, Hollywood people that have Venus on the Ascendant are people like Ben Affleck, Cameron Diaz, more recently Olivia Munn has Gemini rising and Venus in Gemini. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who we talked about earlier. Patrick Swayze, and so on and so forth. So that’s one aspect of Venus in the first is just sometimes there can be, you know, that element of thing in terms of a person’s looks or appearance standing out in some way as being particularly beautiful.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Other examples of Venus in the first house – one of them is George Lucas, who was the creator of Star Wars. George Lucas has Taurus rising with the Sun and Mercury and Venus in Taurus in the first house. So his is interesting because one of the aspects of this that I think is relevant is his focus on visuals as a director, and especially his innovative use of special effects where with Star Wars, George Lucas founded his own digital special effects house, which ended up being really pioneering and really paving the way for digital special effects in film with a number of his films especially the Star Wars ones and setting a new standard and really like, pushing things forward artistically in terms of big Hollywood movies.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, not just for his own Star Wars series, but his effects house, for instance, was responsible for, you know, doing things like Jurassic Park. I mean, you mentioned digital effects – that was the movie where, you know, part of his special effects house was doing stop action animation, you know, sort of old school Harryhausen type of filmmaking. But then he had another department that was developing digital filmmaking and it was in the making of Jurassic Park. Like, there were sections that were already done using stop action animation that they wound up redoing using digital because it was, yeah, it was that very moment where everything took over, and that all comes from this company that he started just so he could make Star Wars.
CB: Yeah. So I think that’s important that sometimes Venus in the first can have good aesthetic sense. There can be an artistic orientation in terms of the person and in terms of their life and artistic flair in different ways, so —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, so that’s one of the ones that comes out with Venus in the first house that’s more their ability to create things that are Venusian and to like, take that into their power rather than it just being some trait, you know, of the body.
NDB: Right. I mean, that Venus of his gets this very strong square from the Moon in the 10th, and I think that has a lot more to do with yeah, that sort of fact that his Venus is emphasized more in the conception area. Like, he’s not, you know, I’m not trying to disparage George Lucas, but he’s not like, a pretty face so to speak. You know, that’s not the way that Venus works. But that configuration of the Moon to Venus – yeah, the Venus is all sort of, it’s coming out of his memory if you will. It’s coming out of his imagination; it’s something that he conjures as opposed to embodies.
CB: Yeah, well, that’s a good point because so many of his films were about, you know, he watched so many films and television shows early in his life, and then a lot of what he did later on was remixing and reimagining things from earlier in his later career.
NDB: Yeah, Akira Kurosawa all over the place, yeah.
CB: Yeah. So alright, and then the last thing – he also has like, Mercury in the first house, and he’s not just a director but also like, a writer-director, so he wrote all the Star Wars movies. So you get that element as well.
NDB: Yeah. And then he’s got the Sun in the first house, and yet again, you know, he made Star Wars in England, and the stories of him making Star Wars in England, like, he’s very much the stubborn American working with a British craft. Like, you know, with a British crew, rather. Like, the British crew would take their tea break or, you know, they’re heavily unionized and so they would stop work at five. And he found it really difficult to adapt to that. He was very much the Sun in the first house, like, no, this is, you know, we do things the way I wanna do them. And he was bashing heads with the people he was working with on that movie because of that.
CB: Yeah. Well, and more broadly, he eventually became just this central leading person surrounding his whole production studio and everything else for many decades.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right, so that’s good for Venus. I mean, the only other ones… There was one other one which is like, Judith Butler, actually, who has Aries rising and Venus in the first house. And Mars, the ruler of the Ascendant, is up in the 9th house of education and learning and philosophy. So this one was interesting because it shows a mixture of things, but Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has been highly influential of fields of feminist theory, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. And one of the things they’re known for is they’re best known for their theory of gender performativity, outlined in their groundbreaking book Gender Trouble from 1990. So in the book, they argue that gender is not an inherent or fixed identity, but rather a social construct that’s produced through repeated acts and behaviors over time. So this theory challenges traditional notions of gender and sexuality and has been highly influential in queer theory and feminist activism.
So I wanted to mention that because with Venus prominent in the chart, sometimes what can become more prominent is issues related to Venus. So one of the ancient significations of Venus is things related to women; like, Venus is said to be one of the primary significators of women as a general significator, so sometimes women or women’s issues can be more front and center in the life if Venus is prominent in some way, such as being in the first house. But it’s interesting that with the ruler of the Ascendant in the 9th house, it’s like, directed towards philosophy and philosophizing and like, thinking about ethics and morality and different things like that.
NDB: Sure. And the Venus is in Aries, too, so it’s very much about sort of, yeah, flipping things. You know, taking a conventional sort of position or what we might consider to have been conventional wisdom and flipping it around. You know, giving it a twist if you will or presenting a new sort of position.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: With regard to Venus. You know, it’s not Venus in Pisces. It’s not sort of, you know, “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend.” It’s Venus in Aries. It’s like, you know, what is this? What are you trying to impose? And so on and so forth. So yeah, it’s a very distinct Venus when it’s in Aries.
CB: Definitely. And I just remembered Judith Butler used to go by she/her pronouns but more recently started using they/them, so I meant to correct that —
NDB: Oh, okay.
CB: — that should be they/them, and I forgot about that. So anyway, so that’s another example, and again that ties in how there’s often this important connection between planets in the first house and what the ruler of the first house is doing, but that there’s this important interchange between them.
All right. So I think that’s good. There was one other example, but I’ll save it. Why don’t we move on and talk about Mars in the first house?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right so Mars in the first house is tricky because the first house has to do with the body and the physical vitality, and sometimes when you have Mars in the first house, it can relate to like, the character, but other times it can also relate to the physical body and vitality. And since Mars is traditionally the planet that has to do with things like war and violence and cutting or severing or separation, sometimes when you import Mars-related significations into the first house, it can mean injuries or accidents or cuts or other things related to the body. So sometimes this can indicate like, accidents. One of the traditional things about Mars in the first house is it can indicate that the native has like, a scar or scars. But usually, you know, that’s as a result of having some sort of cut or injury at some point.
So let’s look through some examples of that. Who do we have for examples of that again?
NDB: Oh. I don’t have my sheet in front of me, but I can put it up.
CB: Okay, let me… Finding it. Okay, here it is. So —
NDB: Here we are.
CB: Ernest Hemingway is one, because Ernest Hemingway had Mars in the first house in a day chart, and during the course of his life, he just had like, a series of different accidents and injuries and unfortunate events that had to do with the body. So here’s his chart with let’s say seven degrees of Virgo rising and Mars at 28 degrees of Virgo in a day chart. And so yeah, he had a number of accidents and injuries during the course of his life, right?
NDB: Yeah, something like four brain injuries just in the last 10 years of his life. And then, you know, there was a plane crash in Africa that he was badly injured in, and that wasn’t even the only time in that year that he was injured. Earlier in his life, he had fallen through a skylight and hurt himself really badly. So yeah, he was prone to getting sort of, you know, bashed up. And yeah, apparently four brain injuries just in the last decade of his life, which considering how things ended for him, they tend to sort of cite that as something that contributed.
CB: Right. And it’s like, part of it was accidents that were external, but part of it was also reflecting he had a very adventurous spirit and a risk-taking personality, which is also something that can happen with Mars in the first house is a person can be, you know, more adventurous. But sometimes they can be more prone to taking risks that put themself in the potential harm’s way more than like, other people who are more risk adverse.
NDB: Yeah. I don’t think the term “macho” was coined when, you know, in his lifetime, but he was macho. Like, it was like, the man’s man’s world kind of thing. Bull fighting and you know, prize fishing and all this stuff. So yeah, and you know, being a war correspondent obviously was very risky business. So yeah, he was into that, you know, showing what he’s made of kind of thing.
CB: Got it.
NDB: If we’re gonna talk about Venus and women, then Mars has that sort of, you know, insofar as gender is a social construct, Mars is gonna play into all of that stuff.
CB: Yeah, for sure, whatever…
NDB: Yeah. He was Mister Man of the 20th century in that sense. Like, you know, he’s the first guy you think of from that century when you think of that kind of macho personality.
CB: Got it. Yeah. And that can manifest in like, either gender, and it’s hard because I don’t know what the term is for that, but whatever it’s like, manliness or whatever that we associate with that energy tends to come through with Mars in different ways regardless of what the person’s actual gender is.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So some of the injuries were like, in World War One, he was an ambulance driver in Italy, and he was severely wounded by mortar fire —
NDB: Right.
CB: — sustaining injuries to his legs and leaving him with hundreds of shrapnel fragments in his body. He was an avid outdoorsman, and his passion for hunting and fishing led to several accidents. So he was once gored by a bull while participating in the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. So that’s actually an important one that I see sometimes is Mars has to do with like, piercing sometimes. And sometimes piercing —
NDB: Right.
CB: — or like, stabbing things can become prominent.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: He also suffered various injuries from fishing mishaps, including a hook lodged in his eye, and a deep cut from a stingray barb.
NDB: Okay. Wow.
CB: Other things – I got a whole list here, so hold on a sec.
NDB: Okay. Geez.
CB: Plane crashes – in 1954, Hemingway and his wife survived two consecutive —
NDB: That’s right, yeah.
CB: — plane crashes.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right, hold on until – I wanna try to avoid crosstalk because I can’t get it out.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: The first crash caused serious injuries, including burns, a ruptured kidney, and a concussion, while the second crash further exacerbated his injuries, leading to long term health problems. So that one of burns is also important because Mars is associated with fires and burns, and sometimes that can become prominent with Mars in the first as well.
So he also had car accidents. So he was involved in several car accidents throughout his life, often resulting in minor injuries. And finally, self-inflicted injuries – his struggles with physical and mental health also led to self-inflicted injuries and he suffered from chronic pain and depression, which he tried to alleviate through alcohol and medication but then eventually he ended up taking his own life by shooting himself at the very end.
NDB: Yeah. His faculties had diminished and again, it comes down in part to, you know, the vitality that he had had when he was young. Like, once you found it was, you know, slipping through his fingers, that he just didn’t wanna live without it. You know, he didn’t…
CB: That’s a good point about vitality. Because like, having —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — a huge amount of like, energy and like, enthusiasm and the ability to do tons of stuff is also like, a Mars in the first house signification.
NDB: Exactly. So to have that sort of slipping away from him was too much for him to bear, it seems.
CB: Yeah. Okay. So that was one example. That’s one more depressing example. Let me look at my other more like, constructive Mars in the first house examples. You know, one of them character-wise is our friend Alan White, who had Aries rising with Mars in the first house. And he was an astrologer, but he was also like, an – he was like, a gruff, you know, hard-talking former military veteran.
NDB: Yeah. With a sort of Kaiser Wilhelm twisty mustache even. You know, he really looked the part. And yeah, you know, he wasn’t what you think of when you think of astrologer, and yet he was one of the best I’ve ever known. But yeah, very sort of martial looking guy, a martial sounding guy. He would, you know, when he was teaching astrology, he would use a lot of sort of military type of jargon in terms of getting his points across and his ideas across.
CB: Right.
NDB: And —
CB: He could be like, sometimes direct but also sometimes like, crass is something that comes up —
NDB: Yes.
CB: — with Mars. For example, like, people that don’t have like, a filter.
NDB: Yeah. I also have Mars in the first house, and I can also sometimes be unfiltered and crass myself, but not when I’m appearing on The Astrology Podcast, thankfully!
CB: Never.
NDB: But yes, he – never. But yeah, no. Alan could be that. He was very funny. But yes. He had some great astrological phrases that I cannot repeat here because they did include profanity, although they were wise in their own way despite their crassness.
CB: Yeah. And I released several years ago a lecture of his that he did on Hellenistic astrology as an episode of The Astrology Podcast, so you can search for it. The title is “Hellenistic Astrology Introduction with Alan White” on YouTube. It was towards the end of his life when he was dealing with cancer, so, but even despite – so he was not quite as like…
NDB: Yeah, he’s not a hundred percent, but he’s still there. He’s still him.
CB: Yeah. You can still get a strong sense of it. So that’s, you know, that brings up some themes about Mars in the first house that are very relevant, especially if it’s also in its own domicile like in Aries. Any time a planet is also in its own domicile in its own sign and it’s in the rising sign, you’re gonna get a more pure expression of what that planet means, whereas if the planet is in a sign that it doesn’t rule, then the manifestation is partially filtered through that sign and through the quality of its ruler.
NDB: Yeah. His Mars was conjunct my Saturn. Two of my greatest astrology teachers had Mars at 25 Aries – Axel Harvey and Alan White, easily two of the most influential teachers on me and yeah, their natal Mars were on my Saturn. That’s synastry for you.
CB: Nice.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. So other ones – Agatha Christie is a good one with Mars in the first house. So let me show her chart. Actually, why is it showing a different… Do I have that right or do I have that in the wrong section?
NDB: I don’t know. I didn’t add Agatha. Let me put her up here and see. Agatha Christie. No, she did not have – she had Saturn and the Sun in the first house.
CB: I got a bad piece of data somewhere.
NDB: Okay.
CB: Wait, E A – no, the data’s changed from… That’s what it was —
NDB: Oh.
CB: — the data changed from some old file that you and I were using, but the time —
NDB: Okay.
CB: — has since been updated to a AA time of 2:14 PM, so that’s what it is.
NDB: Okay. I see. Yeah, I’ve been adding corrections lately, and I will change that as well. Okay. Yeah.
CB: All right. So here’s her chart. So Agatha Christie was born with 23 Sagittarius rising and Mars in Sagittarius at 24 degrees conjunct the Ascendant. And the ruler of the Ascendant is Jupiter, which is located in Aquarius in the 3rd house of communication. So I love this chart because Agatha Christie wrote detective fiction; she was the author of a bunch of novels, and she wrote murder mystery books. So her most famous novels include Murder on the Orient Express. Another one is Death on the Nile. And another one is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. So she’s often referred to as “the queen of crime” or “the queen of mystery,” and her works have been adapted into numerous films, television shows, and stage productions.
So I love this one because you get both and it’s a good demonstration, because you see this commonly with actors, where like, an actor will have a prominent placement, but instead of manifesting like, literally in the life or the body of the native, sometimes they’ll take on roles that manifest that placement, and then that becomes like, the role that they’re most known for. She kind of has something similar here, which like, she has Mars, which the planet of like, violence and murder, conjunct the Ascendant, but the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd house of communication and writing. And she would basically like, write about murders without that necessarily being, you know, something directly impacting her.
NDB: Right. And she had two main characters, two detectives, that she used in her books. One was Miss Marple, which is sort of like, you know, a cover for her if you will – like, she’s Miss Marple. But then her other character is Hercule Poirot, the Belgian genius detective. So I love that it’s Mars in Sagittarius, and she gets this very like, peculiar Belgian guy who, you know, comes in and solves mysteries kind of out of left field, if you will. There was, I think, something sort of Sagittarius about that character.
CB: Yeah, that’s really good.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So yeah, so I think that’s a good example of that, both of the placement, you know, of Mars and how it can manifest in sometimes more symbolic ways in the life, but also another example of the ruler of the Ascendant and how it can direct a person towards certain topics. And in her case, it was writing or communication with the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. Let’s see. Other examples… So we’ve talked about some of the character ones, and people tending to be more direct and stuff. There’s other like, difficult first house ones. Like, for example, Archduke Franz Ferdinand had Mars in Sagittarius in the first house in a day chart, and they were famously assassinated by like, a revolutionary, and that’s what started World War One, basically. So —
NDB: Yep.
CB: — here’s their chart. So we see Sagittarius rising, the Sun – Ascendant at 18 Sagittarius, the Sun at 25 Sagittarius, and Mars in the first whole sign house at zero degrees of Sagittarius. And yeah, there was just that famous story of their unfortunate assassination and being shot, and that ending their life and then starting a war that took over like, the entire world for a period of time.
NDB: Right. And funny enough, you saw the Sun is in the first house as well, and that’s part of the story. This is another one of these great sort of like, you know, it doesn’t matter where you put the person, they’re gonna be who they are. He’s an Austrian archduke; he’s the heir to the throne just because the actual emperor’s son had ended his life a few decades earlier, and so he had no heir. So Archduke Franz Ferdinand was not popular in the Austrian court, particularly because married a woman who wasn’t considered his social equal. So he was kind of an outsider at the same time even though he was the heir to the throne. And he goes to Sarajevo on a day that’s like, an important nationalistic holiday, you know, for the Serbians. And so it was seen as a kind of provocation, and he’s, you know, on this sort of military parade in Sarajevo on a day that’s kind of inappropriate and just being himself, like, for better, for worse, you know, doing his archduke thing. And that has as much to do with him being shot as anything else.
Now, funny enough, he was so unpopular in the Austrian court that his death itself wasn’t seen as that much of a tragedy; they just felt they had to respond, you know, on political grounds to the assassination. That’s what led to the war. So there really is like, you can see in his chart that same kind of Sun in the first house thing where… Yeah, it doesn’t matter if you’re in a country that’s hostile to you that doesn’t want you there. You’re still gonna like, get in your sort of parade car and go around the city and wave at everyone no matter what.
CB: Yeah. Totally. All right. Other examples – Edward Snowden is one where Edward Snowden has Gemini rising and Mercury is conjunct the Ascendant, but also Mars and the Sun and the North Node are also all in the first house. And for this, it’s like, I used the phrase earlier of like, the whistleblower where one of the things in ancient astrology sometimes they talk about like, oath breaking and things like that. And for him, that was part of, you know, what he had to do in order to tell people is like, he was a contractor for the NSA, and then he ended up becoming a whistleblower who alerted the world to the United States like, spying on people’s internet traffic and things like that. So I think there’s like, an element of that there with the Mercury-Mars conjunction that becomes a little bit relevant.
NDB: Yeah, I mean, Mars can be the dissident, and Mars can also be “the traitor,” if you will. You know, the turncoat, or the, you know, to sort of… Yeah. Break from the fold if you will. If it’s in the appropriate house like the first.
CB: Right. Well, it’s like, sometimes people, like Mars especially in the first house, Mars individuals can do or say things that some people are gonna be mad at or some people are gonna be angry about or that can be off putting or divisive. But I was thinking about this recently, like, because pride month in the United States just finished, and I saw somebody post something about that saying that we’re celebrating this now because of many, many gay activists who were very like, aggressively, you know, pushing for gay rights in like, the 1980s and 1990s and other things like that, sometimes doing it… Like, I remember early in Obama’s first term, when he would give speeches sometimes there were gay rights activists that would interupt his speeches in order to try to push him to be more embracing of the issue of gay rights, because during his first presidential campaign, he was officially supposedly against gay marriage. And it wasn’t until his second term that he came out in support of gay marriage and then eventually it was legalized by the Supreme Court in the United States. But there was this period where there were people – you know, sometimes that’s the positive function of Mars is like, doing or saying the thing that’s uncomfortable that other people might be offended by or not wanna hear, but it being necessary to sort of like, break the silence in order to accomplish something.
NDB: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you know, a dissident or someone who’s not afraid to interrupt things, to disrupt things, you know.
CB: That’s the challenge, though, sometimes with Mars in the first house is like, sometimes the question – it can be a fine line between like, are you the person that’s saying what everyone’s thinking but not saying, and that’s a good thing because it needs to be said, or are you the person who’s like, saying the thing that shouldn’t be said that’s actually really offensive and unnecessary where you’re just creating unnecessary drama by being overly, you know, brusk or rude or other —
NDB: Right.
CB: — things like that.
NDB: Yeah, it can run the gamut. When you’re a hammer, everything’s a nail.
CB: Sure. So speaking of that, that’s actually my next example, which is Rush Limbaugh had Aquarius rising with Mars in Aquarius in the first house. He also had Venus there, but that Mars placement especially in a day chart came out very prominently. So he was an influential and controversial American conservative political commentator and radio talk show host, and he was a very polarizing figure who was often criticized for his inflammatory rhetoric, his bombastic style, his insensitive remarks, his attacks on liberals, and he faced accusations of racism, sexism, and homophobia. So, you know, he was —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — in like, the 1990s and 2000s was sort of like the iconic kind of like, how do you say it, like blowhard, angry sort of radio —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — commentator guy.
NDB: He’s Alex Jones before Alex Jones, you know, amongst other things. And yeah, you know, he would have loved the world today. You know, he contributed to shaping it. But yeah, he wasn’t happy in his own time, but he would’ve loved today.
CB: Yeah. So that’s like, the other example. And then of course it’s like, today the contemporary sort of version of that to some extent who everyone’s familiar with is just Donald Trump has late Leo rising and Mars conjunct the Ascendant, and that’s also very much part of his personality or that Mars element is very much part of his personality in terms of similar things and in terms of let’s say like, divisiveness. That’s actually a really good keyword that sometimes like, divisiveness is a core keyword. And like, sometimes that divisiveness as I explained earlier with like, the protests, is sometimes necessary. Other times, the divisiveness can be, you know, not necessary, but it can just be something that happens or arises from the person for different reasons.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, whatever your opinion of the guy is, you can tell that like, you know, that’s what he does. Like, he just, you know, he says these things and doesn’t care who gets hurt or what have you. There’s definitely a direct lineage from Rush Limbaugh’s day to where we are now with Trump. It’s that same approach. That sort of attack dog mentality.
CB: Okay. Yeah. So those are some of the Mars examples. So I think we’ll keep moving; there’s a lot of other like, more constructive examples we could have gone through and different things like that, but I think for this sake, we sort of demonstrated the point in terms of some just very stark, clear examples of how Mars can show up in the first house, either as a physical thing or as a character or sort of like spirit thing. And sometimes at different points in the life, like, each of those can be relevant in different ways. And depending on how Mars is situated, if it’s really well situated and if there’s benefics configured to it, can make the manifestation much more positive and much more constructive and lead towards the more constructive end of the spectrum.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So I wanna take a little bit of a break since it’s been another hour and —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — get a drink and then we’ll come back.
The software we use to show birth charts in this episode is called Solar Fire for Windows, which is astrology software for the PC. It’s a really great program, and one of the things that it can do in addition to calculating birth charts is you can set up a whole database in Solar Fire and save all of your files to it. And then it has a search feature where you can search your entire database for charts that have certain placements when you’re doing different research.
So for me it was very useful to search my entire database for this episode to look at, you know, show me every birth chart I have that has Mercury in the first house. Or show me every chart I have that has Venus in the first house, and so on and so forth. It’s a huge advantage just in terms of doing astrological research and looking at charts.
So you can get Solar Fire for Windows through the website alabe.com, and you can actually get a 15% discount with the promo code ‘AP15.’ For Mac users, we recommend the program called AstroGold for Mac OS, which is astrology software for the Macintosh computer. It’s from the creators of Solar Fire for PC, and it includes many modern as well as traditional techniques. You can get a 15% discount by using the promo code ‘ASTROPODCAST15’ when you purchase the program through astrogold.io.
All right, so we’re back. Let’s jump into Jupiter in the first house, and let’s start zooming through these examples so we can get through the rest of the planets.
So first example – I wanna go back to Paul Newman, who we talked about before who had Venus in the first house and was like, strikingly attractive or handsome. He also had Jupiter in the first house as well as Mercury, and one of the things that he did after his success as an actor is he also became very much focused on philanthropic work. And in 1982, he founded Newman’s Own, which is a food company that produces a variety of products including salad dressing, pasta sauce, popcorn, and lemonade. And the unique aspect of his company is that 100% of its profits are donated to charity through a foundation he set up called Newman’s Own Foundation. And the company has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for various causes, especially focusing on children’s health and education. So his foundation focuses on supporting children who face adversity with a particular emphasis on those with serious illnesses, and he provides free medically subsidized summer camps and programs for children with serious illnesses. And I think this is really interesting because that Venus that we were focused on so much is having to do in some positive ways with his appearance. That Venus is also the ruler of his 5th house of children and his 10th house of career. And in some ways, this is an even more perhaps important or enduring part of his legacy through his philanthropic work and through his contributions to helping out children. And so this is a good demonstration that sometimes there’s like, multiple different things coming into effect when it comes to different placements.
NDB: Yeah. Yeah, Newman wasn’t a square or anything like that, but at the same time, he wasn’t some sort of Hollywood wildman. He was happily married, you know, quite a stable guy. Quite a stable personality despite the fact that he’s this, you know, glamorous, famous movie star. Really grounded in a, you know, rooted personality, and obviously he had priorities that didn’t revolve merely around himself and his career.
CB: Yeah. So a lot of the biographies and stuff I was reading just talks about his enduring legacy of generosity and compassion, and this is really important because that was the original term for benefic and malefic – is benefic in ancient astrology, it means “good doers” or “good doing,” whereas malefic means like, bad doers or evildoers. And sometimes when benefics are in the first, you just see them doing good things, like generosity, philanthropy, charity work, or other things like that where they’re like, helping or improving the lives of other people, and that becomes core to their identity in some way.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So another example of that is actually Barack Obama, who has Aqarius rising and Jupiter in the first house in Aquarius in the first whole sign house. And this one’s important I think because in 2010, he passed the Affordable Care Act, which is also sometimes referred to as Obamacare, which gave millions and millions of people who were uninsured and didn’t have health insurance in the United States, it gave them access to health insurance basically, with estimates ranging from basically saying that the number of people that were uninsured in the United States was cut in half within two years after it went into effect in 2014. And the estimates range that it helped to cover 20 to 24 million people. And one of the things that it did is it made it so that companies could no longer deny people for health coverage who had preexisting conditions. So this is really important just in terms of that aspect, because that’s probably one of the most important things that he did in his presidency and it helped a lot of people who, you know, would have died without health insurance prior to that to get health insurance. And I remember back when I was a young, struggling, up-and-coming astrologer and I didn’t have health insurance, that was the only reason I was able to get covered for a number of years because of that and because I was making so little that I qualified for it.
NDB: Right. And then on a different level, thinking about Newman and Obama, they’re both men who have a really easy-going way about them. Like, even though they’re charismatic and attractive, there’s kind of at the same time this not necessarily humble, but sort of down-to-earth folksiness about them at the same time that seems to blend in with the glamor and the charisma. You know, very just, sort of easy-going guys. They never give you the impression that they’re trying hard, you know what I mean? Like, they’re just – or at least trying too hard. They might be —
CB: Right.
NDB: — working hard, but they’re not trying hard. It’s sort of natural and yeah, easy flow.
CB: That’s like the contrast then; I remember one of the nicknames for Obama was “No Drama Obama” versus Paul Newman was Cool Hand Luke.
NDB: Right.
CB: So it’s kind of —
NDB: It’s one of his movies. Yeah, exactly.
CB: Kind of funny.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So going back to the healthcare thing, though, you found one of the transits that occurred where transiting Jupiter was conjunct his natal Ascendant when he gave the joint address to Congress on healthcare, and then —
NDB: Right.
CB: So that was like, actually a crucial important turning point where he was having a Jupiter return not just through Aquarius but also directly on his Ascendant that was activating that placement.
NDB: Right. And was he still 48 at that point? That might have been a first house profection year, even.
CB: Okay.
NDB: Trying to remember. Yeah.
CB: That would be important.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So yeah, so that shows the activation of that. Originally, we were gonna do more with timing the activation of some of these placements which we didn’t go into as much, but we’ll see if we have some other examples later on. Because that’s sometimes when it really clenches it in terms of seeing —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — what the placement is doing and why.
NDB: Yeah. This is first level stuff, but we do have a second level element of the research as well.
CB: Yeah. All right, so moving on. Next one – Martin Luther King, Junior was reportedly born around noon with Taurus rising, Jupiter in Taurus in the first whole sign house. So he was a Baptist minister and a powerful advocate for nonviolent resistance against racial segregation and discrimination, and he led numerous peaceful protests and marches. And it’s just, when you read biographies and stuff, just some of the keywords they use – it talks about, it says, “He believed in the power of love, forgiveness, and reconciliation to achieve social justice.” And I think that’s a really crucial keyword for Jupiter in the first house in some instances is trying to achieve social justice of some sort. And he was, of course, instrumental in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. And then eventually he won a Nobel Peace Prize. So themes with Jupiter are themes of like, justice, equality, peace, are all just very core Jupiter keywords, and sometimes when it’s in the first house, it manifests very literally where there’s a core part of the person’s personality that’s trying to bring those things about in the world in some way.
NDB: Yeah, absolutely. And Jupiter was in Taurus in 1965 when that second Civil Rights Act was passed, which is arguably the more far sweeping one. So yeah, and that’s kind of the pinnacle of his achievement. After 1965, his campaigns are a bit more of a struggle, and of course it ended tragically three years later.
CB: Yeah. Okay. So let’s see. Moving on – another like, good-doing one that is kind of a random one; I also wanted to mention it briefly. Demetra always tells a story of how she was like, in her early 20s or something, and she was like, a hippie, and she went to her first astrology conference and she didn’t know anyone there and felt very isolated because everyone was like, older and like, not into her flower child, like, hippie, you know, getup. But there was this one astrologer that came up to Demetra and like, struck up a conversation with her, and it was an astrologer named Eleanor Bach. And Eleanor had just published one of the first ephemeris of planetary positions for asteroids, and she gave one to Demetra as a gift.
NDB: Wow.
CB: As just like, an act of generosity. And that, of course, started Demetra’s entire career doing work in asteroids and becoming one of the foremost astrologers in the world pioneering work on asteroids in the late 20th and early 21st century. And Eleanor Bach had 17 Libra rising and Jupiter at 18 degrees of Libra. So sometimes those like, little acts of generosity, you know, we were using like, big huge examples with some of those worldwide famous people. Sometimes with Jupiter in the first, the little acts of generosity can have a huge impact that they maybe don’t realize at the time, but it just comes from that.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, Eleanor Bach was born in 1922, so in the late ‘60s, she’s gotta be in her late 40s. And people of that generation weren’t typically, you know, hippie-friendly, if you will. But yeah, it takes a special kind of personality to just be that affable and easy-going. Again, you know, it’s that same kind of easy-goingness that you see with the likes of Paul Newman or Barack Obama. They can talk to anyone.
CB: For sure. So another more recent example is Margot Robbie, who has Cancer rising and Jupiter in Cancer in the first whole sign house as well as the Sun and Mercury. And this kind of ties in with the previous themes where I think for her, the core theme is that she’s known for her commitment to championing female-driven stories especially. And she’s a strong advocate for gender equality in the film industry. And she ended up creating her own production house in Hollywood, and this is eventually what led to her producing the Barbie movie, which she not only starred in last year in 2023, but she also produced and basically like, was the architect behind in many ways. So this ended up making it eventually it was like, highly successful, and it became the highest grossing film of 2023. It became the biggest release for a female director, both domestically in the United States as well as the largest global opening for a female-directed movie. So I think this is really, you know, part of it when it comes to her as well and some of those themes of like, justice or equality coming through in different ways.
NDB: Yeah. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
CB: Yeah. All right. There’s a side note there, but I’ll skip it. Tycho Brahe was another one; that was one that you had, right?
NDB: Yeah. This is less about generosity and more about sort of being the recipient of generosity.
CB: Quick version.
NDB: Yeah. Well, Tycho Brahe was a great astronomer and scientist, and he was originally from Denmark. Yeah, and the king of Denmark heard that Tycho was gonna leave the country to be sort of sponsored by some other monarch, and so the king in order to keep Tycho in Denmark gave him a whole island where he could build his own observatory and laboratory, which he did. And did you wanna put up the transits for what was happening when that happened?
CB: I won’t put up the transits, but I’ll put the chart. So —
NDB: Yeah —
CB: — we should describe the chart, which is it has 16 degrees of Aquarius rising with Venus at 18 Aquarius and then Pluto and also Jupiter in Aquarius.
NDB: Right. So yeah, he was gifted this whole observatory. And transiting Mercury, I think, was the planet that was transiting through the first house when this was gifted to him, but natally with that Jupiter, Venus, and Pluto there. I think with the Venus rising, yeah, he’s more sort of like, while he did also have Jupiter in the first house, since Venus is the planet that’s closest to the Ascendant, he’s more the sort of the recipient of generosity or of appreciation, as opposed to someone who offers it, if you will.
CB: Okay. All right. And then, you know, Kepler – you know, one of the things I noticed is it’s like, ruling the 11th house as well as the 10th house. And Kepler benefited from Tycho Brahe’s observatory —
NDB: Right.
CB: — and stuff and then eventually was able to build on that observational work in order to craft his theories and his discovery about the planets moving in ellipses rather than in perfect circles.
NDB: Yeah, it’s actually kind of funny. Brahe met Kepler 24 years after he was gifted this island in Denmark, and yet, both instances – when he was gifted the island in Denmark, transiting Mercury was in Aquarius in his first house – and when he met Johannes Kepler, Mercury again was in Aquarius transiting right over Brahe’s Ascendant. And yeah, Kepler benefited greatly from Brahe’s work, in part because he kind of ran off with some of it without permission. Brahe died, and I think Brahe’s family had to pursue Kepler to get the material back. And Kepler kept some of it so he could do more work on his studies of Mars and what have you, but yeah, one way or the other, it’s kind of a collaboration, even if it wasn’t by Brahe’s design.
CB: Yeah. All right. So let’s move on. Another one you had was King Charles I who had Virgo rising and Jupiter in Virgo in the first house. And you said that he was having a transiting Jupiter return through Virgo through his first house when his older brother died, and he suddenly —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — became heir to the throne?
NDB: That’s right. This happens, you know, over and over in royal history where the oldest son who’s considered the favorite, who everyone is sure is gonna make a great king because he was born for it and he’s just got the perfect personality, and then he died at 18, and Charles has to be the king instead. And you know, spoiler alert – he’s the king who would later be executed in the English Civil War. So you know, it’s kind of like, this whole thing falls on him, and it’s not something he wanted or was prepared for, and when he does get it, it ends in disaster.
CB: And you pointed out that transiting Mars was retrograde and conjoining his natal Ascendant degree when he was executed by decapitation during the English Civil War in 1649, right?
NDB: Yeah, that’s right. And his son, Charles II, was also Virgo rising. So they’re having very similar transits to the angles when this happens. Charles II – well, he’s not called Charles II yet, but he’s off in France, you know, escaping this execution and his father is executed. So that Mars retrograde in Virgo crossing the Ascendant sort of applies to both of them in different ways.
CB: Okay.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. So —
NDB: So it’s an interesting moment.
CB: That’s a great example then. So this is showing, you know, the Jupiter natal placement in the first house, and he’s elevated to the kingship, basically, when transiting Jupiter goes through his first house. But then when transiting Mars goes retrograde in his first house and conjoins his Ascendant, he’s decapitated. So it’s like, we get extremes of good and bad, and that’s sometimes how you can see what the first house means by looking at a transit through the first house.
NDB: Exactly.
CB: Good. All right. So there’s a few others, but did we kind of make the point here in terms of this? I mean, the only other one I had was like, Ram Dass had Cancer rising with Jupiter and Pluto conjunct the Ascendant, and Jupiter ruling the 9th house of foreign travel and religion and education, and he traveled to India and then went through a transformation where he became a spiritual guru and converted to Hinduism. So that’s kind of —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — an interesting one.
NDB: Yeah. He came out of academia. He was, you know, sort of Timothy Leary’s accomplice in the whole sort of LSD thing going on at Harvard in the early ‘60s. But then, you know, like a number of people from that crowd, he traded in LSD for more natural, nonchemical forms of enlightenment. So yeah, he parted ways with Leary in that regard, and you know, went his own way. But it’s quite a profound transformation where he goes from this, you know, buttoned-up, clean shaven academic guy at Harvard and thanks to a few LSD experiences, he becomes this sort of bearded, quasi Indian or pseudo Indian – I don’t know what the correct term would be. Yeah, he goes through a big transformation, becomes this sort of proto hippie, if you will. You know, big beard, meditating, talking about sort of spiritual matters. So but he goes through a tremendous transformation over the course of the decade.
CB: That’s just a good example that sometimes when the ruler of one house in the chart is in the first house, there’s something about that that can impact and inform or change the native’s sense of self and like, who they are in the world and how they’re showing up in the world and different things like that. And sometimes that seems really abstract to attempt to describe or, you know, teach to somebody. But then when you have an example like that, it can be very literal, especially for the person who’s experiencing and having that happen in their own chart.
NDB: Yeah. Exactly.
CB: Those transformations of self. All right. I think that’s good for Jupiter, yeah?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. So let’s transition into talking about Saturn in the first house. One of the themes that kept coming up in the Saturn in the first house examples, of course, just like with Mars, there can be health issues, and we’ll get into that. But one of the things that comes up is Saturn has to do with time, and when Saturn’s in the first house, one of the themes that often comes up is issues having to do with age. And sometimes it can be like, the person can appear older than they actually are, or sometimes they can appear younger than they actually are. Sean Connery, for example, Michel on Twitter pointed out that he was somebody who got his role relatively late in James Bond, his breakout role, and he was in his early 30s, but he kind of always appeared as if he was 10 years older. And then later in life, he was commonly playing these different roles where he was acting as an older mentor to like, a younger person. Another example is Shirley Temple Black, who started out – she was a child actress who started acting at the age of three, right?
NDB: Yeah. This is one of my classic interpretations – not merely mine, but whenever I see a chart with Saturn in the first house, my first presumption is that this is someone who was a precocious child. I really think of Saturn in the first house being, “Oh, I can imagine you as a kid.” You know, you would have been sort of more serious, more grownup than the other kids. Shirley Temple is obviously a sort of an exaggerated version of that. I mean, she was one of the most successful cinema performer of 1934, ‘35. A huge, huge movie star. And she was, yeah, she was a small kid – preschool, elementary school age.
CB: And she had five Sagittarius rising and Saturn at 18 degrees of Sagittarius in a night chart.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So —
NDB: Yeah, so… So she was —
CB: So she found great success as a child actor, but then she struggled to transition into adult roles because her childlike image was really deeply ingrained in the public consciousness, and audiences had difficulty seeing her in adult roles. So her acting career actually declined in her teens.
NDB: Yeah. And then much later, Gerald Ford made her the ambassador to Ghana, I believe, just after Nixon resigned in 1974. So for a little while, she had a political career as well.
CB: Yeah, she had a very extensive political career as a diplomat, as an ambassador under several different presidents. So she later reinvented herself by making the transition to being an ambassador and a diplomat, and her story’s really interesting because she was actually appointed the first female Chief of Protocol of the United States, and that’s an officer of the State Department that’s responsible for advising the president on matters of national and international diplomatic protocol, which I think is very Saturn-coded. Like, Saturn in Sagittarius and diplomatic protocol for like, foreign countries.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So as well as just Sagittarius in general and like, foreign travel and foreign things and that she actually ended up becoming a diplomat for the US in foreign countries and sort of reinventing herself later in life. Yeah. So that’s a good one.
Other Saturn ones… So sometimes Saturn can have to do with old things. So one example of that is Marsilio Ficino, who had Aquarius rising with Saturn in the first house by day. And he was a translator of ancient texts during the Renaissance. So for example, he translated the entire works of Plato, and then he also translated the entire works of the Corpus Hermeticum, which led to a revival of some of these then-ancient philosophies that helped to contribute to the Renaissance. Sometimes Saturn brings just a focus on old or ancient things.
NDB: Yeah. Antiquarian.
CB: Which is another aspect of the time thing. That came up – a number of listeners submitted the singer Lana Del Rey, whose Ascendant is at 15, and Saturn at 22 Scorpio, so she has Saturn in the first house. And her music and persona are very heavily influenced by nostalgia for past eras, particularly of the 1950s and ‘60s. So her lyrics often reference vintage imagery and themes, creating a sense of longing for a bygone era. And this evokes a sense of like, timelessness as well as blurring the lines between past and present with her work. She was actually referred to sometimes as having a reputation as the Queen of Melancholy, which is another Saturn theme of like, melancholy or sometimes depression can be a major like, Saturn theme.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So some of her songs explore themes of like, sadness, heartbreak, loss, disillusionment. And her music is also characterized by slow tempos, so slowness is a Saturn thing, which is opposite to Mars, which is quickness or things that are fast.
All right, so that’s one with her. There’s more we could go into there, but I think that’s good. Similar to her with another musician is Elliott Smith, who had a Moon-Saturn whole sign conjunction in the first house. And he was an American singer-songwriter known for his distinctive melancholic style and introspective lyrics. And he also similarly explored themes of like, love, loss, addiction, and isolation, and he personally struggled with mental health issues and battled depression, anxiety, and addiction throughout his life. And these struggles are often permeated his music, and then eventually he passed away – potentially, I think, officially from suicide at the end of his life at a pretty young age of like, 34.
NDB: Yeah. It was, I mean, it wasn’t merely that. I mean, it was, you know, he was stabbed in the chest. So like, to do that to yourself is… Yeah, not an easy thing to do. I met him; I once played pool with him at the Knitting Factory in New York City in 1995. He was a nice guy; he made really great records, and it’s sad that he went the way he did.
CB: Yeah. All right. Other ones quickly – this one is kind of funny, but Al Gore has Saturn, Pluto, and Mars in the first house. I thought it was interesting just because I remember growing up in the ‘90s and there were so many jokes about Al Gore being regarded as kind of like, stiff and boring, and that’s very like, connected with Saturn.
NDB: Yeah. You remember that awkward kiss he gave his wife on stage at – it’s cringeworthy. Anyway.
CB: Okay.
NDB: Yeah. He was, that’s accurate.
CB: I just remember The Simpsons kind of like, parodying him.
NDB: Right.
CB: All right. Other ones – this one’s like James Earl Jones with Saturn-Mercury in the first house, but the actor Christopher Lee had Libra rising with Saturn on the Ascendant. And he also had this like, big, booming, deep voice. So he played Saruman in The Lord of the Rings, for example, towards the end of his career, and he just had this very deep, like, rich voice.
NDB: Well, he had also played Dracula, he had played Sherlock Holmes. And unlike anyone else in The Lord of the Rings movie, he had actually known Tolkein.
CB: Nice. Another one – Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect, a very hugely famous and influential architect, with Scorpio rising and Saturn conjunct the Ascendant, and he designed over a thousand structures and completed 532 different works. So that’s interesting, like, architects and Saturn has to do with like, structure of things.
NDB: Yeah. And the second time you and I ever hung out was in one of his buildings. Remember that hotel in Chicago where the conference was?
CB: Oh yeah, that wild like —
NDB: In August of 2005, yeah, that was his. Do you remember?
CB: Like, masonic sort of conference that the NCGR had or something?
NDB: Exactly. Yeah. Weird staircases that went places that you didn’t expect them to and what have you.
CB: Right. All right. And then you had one last one with Percy Shelley, right?
NDB: Yeah. Percy Shelley – I mean, this is just kind of simple. He died at the age of 29; he had Saturn rising. He’s, you know, he’s part of this circle of very glamorous rockstar poets – Lord Byron, Yeats – Keats. Not Yeats. I’m getting my Smiths songs confused. Yeah. You know, just this circle of young poets. But he died. He was, you know, off on a ship and drowned, and then his body was cremated on the beach. But apparently, he had had tuberculosis, and his heart had calcified, so his heart didn’t burn in the fire, and so Mary Shelley, his wife, author of Frankenstein, kept the heart with her and then it was buried with her when she eventually died decades later. Very romantic. But I just think of, you know, dying at the age of 29 when you’ve already got this huge corpus of work and you’ve, you know, dazzled the world with your poetry. Yeah. That’s something in and of itself.
CB: Right. So Saturn was in the rising sign, and he had lifelong health issues and then eventually died at the age of 29 when Saturn came back to that sign?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. That’s pretty striking. All right, one last example I accidentally almost skipped over I thought was good is Ralph Nader has Aquarius rising with Saturn, Venus, and the North Node in Aquarius. And he has this lifelong career pushing for government rules and regulations, which is very Saturn-themed. The most important one, though, that I wanted to point out was he published this book titled Unsafe at Any Speed, which played a significant role in raising public awareness about lack of safety features in American cars, including seatbelts. And although seat belts were invented a long time before his book, his work actually helped to highlight the automotive industry’s resistance to incorporating them as standard equipment. So eventually, the publication of his book led to increased pressure on the American government to regulate automobile safety, eventually resulting in the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966, which mandated the installation of seatbelts in all new cars, making them a standard feature and contributing to a significant decline in car-related fatalities. So I thought that was really interesting in terms of like, rules and regulations and sometimes like, positive manifestations of that as a Saturn archetype.
NDB: Yeah, absolutely. Safety first!
CB: Safety first. All right, let’s move on to Uranus in the first house. Two of the keywords I have for that is like, the rebel and the eccentric. So one of them is the actor James Dean had Uranus conjunct his Ascendant, and rebelliousness was kind of part of his persona, both on and off the screen.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: One of his most famous movie was Rebel Without a Cause.
NDB: Yeah, I mean, he kind of embodies that 1950s adolescent rebellion motif, you know. Perhaps even more than Elvis or Brando did. You know, just sort of the troubled teenager, the kid who’s going against the grain in some way. And yeah, in real life, he was kind of a wild card as well. Drove fast. I mean, that’s how he died was, you know, driving too fast in his car – racing someone, I think.
CB: Yeah. And that was actually at the age of – he died at the age of 24 in a car accident, which also would have been a first house profection year, so it would have been activating that Uranus placement conjunct the Ascendant and there’s like, this freak accident.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So another sort of rebel one or revolutionary is Che Guevara, who has Aries rising with Uranus conjunct the degree of the Ascendant. And he’s sort of like, the revolutionary, basically.
NDB: Yeah. And quite the sort of adventurer, you know? When he was a young man, he went on this – he was from Argentina; that’s why he’s called Che, because Argentinians apparently they say “Che” as a sort of, you know, verbal tic. And so then when he’s hanging with Mexicans and Cubans, of course, they notice that he speaks Spanish differently than they do, and they call him Che – it’s kind of like they’re making fun of his Argentinian dialect and tics. But yeah, when he was a young man, he rode on a motorcycle with his friend throughout South America and saw a lot of the sort of poverty and the consequences of how sort of global politics have played out in Latin America. And then he was in Guatemala when Arbenz was overthrown in 1954, so he saw first hand how the US government would handle troublesome Latin American governments. So then a year later, he meets Fidel Castro and all the other Cuban revolutionaries who are sort of exiled from Cuba because they had already tried, you know, to overthrow the government once there and gotten caught. And together, they sail over back to Cuba on a boat in late 1956, the Granma, and begin the Cuban Revolution. And they’re fighting in the hills – he was a trained doctor, so when they were in the mountains for over two years. Yeah, over two years. And or yeah, just over two years until the end of the revolution. And you know, not only was he in the jungle with the revolutionaries fighting and shooting and getting shot at and having some of their compadres, you know, killed and what have you, but as a trained doctor, he was the guy who was putting people back together and looking after them so that they could keep fighting. So —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — yeah, he’s —
CB: He also had —
NDB: — quite the —
CB: — like, Jupiter in the first house in Aries also.
NDB: Right, yeah. And very much, you know, the kind of guy who would sort of, you know, give his last drop of water to a thirsty person. And yeah, you know, but he was just like, forever a revolutionary, because of course he was Argentinian; all the other revolutionaries were actually Cuban. They were just trying to fix Cuba. But then once he was done in Cuba, he went off to Africa, and he tried to fight in a revolution in Congo; that didn’t go so well. And then he went back to South America and he tried to do one there, and that’s when he got caught. So yeah, he was sort of like, he was born to be a revolutionary, it seems, and he was really like, serious about it. You know, whatever side one takes with him, he was the real deal. He was really trying to do what he was trying to do.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So that’s a good example, and then another one that’s along similar lines actually is Hitler had Libra rising with Uranus in Libra. And you know, this one’s interesting because he was also actually a revolutionary, and one of his earliest, you know, things in life was he attempted to have a coup, basically.
NDB: Yeah. And I mean, the other thing is, you know, famously, he’s an Austrian who wants to be German, much like, you know, Che’s an Argentinian who’s kind of being Cuban, if you will. There is an element of the outsider to that Uranus in the first house as well.
CB: Yeah, so —
NDB: But yeah, he did try to orchestrate a coup, the famous Beer Hall Putsch. Which, even though it failed, it’s kind of what made him famous. It’s what made his book Mein Kampf sell, and ultimately, you know, led to him having the political power he did.
CB: Yeah. And I think that’s important, because it’s like, usually we don’t think of him in that sense as like, a revolutionary, because he was successful. But it was that he attempted the first time and then later he was able to gain power through more official means. But yeah, having a failed coup attempt is kind of striking.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. So moving on to other examples. Another one in a completely different vein is Philip K. Dick was a science fiction writer who had Aries rising and Uranus conjunct the degree of the Ascendant.
NDB: Yeah, he’s one of my all-time favorites. I’ve studied his chart quite a bit, and yeah – very, you know, he had an amazing imagination. He wrote sort of pulp science fiction; science fiction didn’t have much respect. So a lot of his books were like, edited by people who weren’t him, who didn’t see the value in his work. But even the works of his that are sort of watered down that way have some just fantastic ideas and yeah, really insightful view into the future in a way. Most people would be familiar with movies that have been made from his books, like Blade Runner. The Man in the High Castle was a recent series on one of the streaming services. Total Recall, speaking of Arnold Schwarzenegger, that was based on one of his short stories. Blade Runner is probably the most famous of things that have been turned into cinema. Oh, and —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly was really great.
CB: I think that’s one of the things with Uranus is sometimes it’s very forward-looking, and sometimes in its time, it can seem out of place because they’re living sort of in the future in some ways. But sometimes they can be really good at anticipating things that are gonna happen or that are coming in the future, but it leaves them almost like, seemingly out of place in their own time occasionally.
NDB: Yeah. And you know, he’s another one of these guys, maybe not unlike Eleanor Bach in a way, in the sense that he’s born in the ‘20s, but he really fits in well with the hippie culture of the ‘60s and ‘70s. You know, even though technically he should have been “too old” for that, he’s such a Uranian that he really fit in that world very, very well.
CB: Definitely. All right, moving to other areas – comedy. It was coming up a few times. Like, Conan O’Brien is Virgo rising with Uranus and Pluto conjunct the Ascendant, and he’s sort of like, the eccentric comedian. But it’s interesting because with Virgo rising, his humor is also often somewhat self-deprecating at the same time.
NDB: Yeah. Self-deprecating, but there’s also, you know, there was something revolutionary about him at the time too back in the early ‘90s. It’s kind of hard to fathom now. But he really, you know, his show was The Late Night Show, and he would push the envelope a bit in terms of things that might considered indecent today. But yeah, he was definitely, you know, something of the revolutionary. But yeah, self-deprecating. Very Virgo rising that way. I mean, he’s hilarious; there’s nothing funnier than him being humiliated in some way, and he plays it perfectly.
CB: That’s one of the themes that would come up is sometimes the character traits of the signs, both like, the positive ones and the negative ones becoming most prominent when the person has that rising sign.
NDB: I agree.
CB: Yeah. All right. So that was a good one. Another one is Franklin Roosevelt had Uranus conjunct the Ascendant in Virgo, and for him, the main thing is that he was unexpectedly afflicted with polio, where he was vacationing with his family and suddenly fell ill while vacationing and then was diagnosed with polio. And the polio virus attacked his nervous system, causing paralysis that affected his legs and limited his mobility for the rest of his life.
NDB: Yeah. It was always thought to be polio. More recent things have suggested it might have been something called Huntington Barre, I believe is the condition. But anyway. He was paralyzed. I believe Jupiter and Saturn in Virgo were transiting over his Ascendant when he was paralyzed in August of 1921, touching on that Uranus. So it’s almost like he was robbed of the freedom he had had as someone who could, you know, walk on his own two feet. But he was quite defiant. I mean, he did manage to fool the American public into thinking that he could walk with the use of leg braces and having one of his sons stand next to him so he could sort of hold him upright. So yeah, quite defiant and determined to do things his own way. But it’s another – like, having that Uranus conjunct the Ascendant when you see the transits of Jupiter and Saturn crossing his Ascendant when it’s all taken from him, when he loses power in his legs, it’s a really powerful astrology chart to look at.
CB: Yeah. And I always use him as an example because he also had the ruler of the Ascendant in the 6th house, and it was through that – he was really profoundly affected by his experience with polio. And as a result of that, he ended up setting up a foundation both to treat polio patients but also to search for a cure. And eventually through the efforts of that foundation and others, they were eventually able to find a cure for polio and to be able to like, you know, pretty much eliminate that as a thing that was afflicting people by the end of the 20th century. So I think that’s one of the ways in which you can see the ruler of the Ascendant in the 6th directing him in some ways towards that area with the 6th house having to do with illness, but also meaning that his life had this greater impact and legacy related to that illness that it ended up positively impacting many other people.
NDB: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: Yeah. All right. So that’s a good one. The last one… This one’s a little uncertain, but Nikola Tesla was probably born at midnight, probably with Taurus rising and Uranus and Pluto in the rising sign. And I thought that was kind of interesting, like, the scientist who worked with electricity having Uranus rising.
NDB: Well, the story, the reason we have his birth time is the legend is that he was born at the clap of thunder. Like, that’s why they know like, it’s at midnight sharp – there was this big clap of thunder and that’s when he was born. So that even makes that Uranus rising even just a little more on the nose, if you will.
CB: Totally.
NDB: Yeah. But I mean, he was a special, special, special person. And yeah, you know, it’s all right there.
CB: Definitely. And then… All right, I think that might be good for Uranus, yeah?
NDB: Yeah. I mean, you know, we have so many examples for all of these, and obviously we have to trim them down just to make this episode manageable, but yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right, let’s pause.
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All right, we’re back. Let’s jump into Neptune in the first house. So one of my first examples of this is the actor and comedian Jim Carrey, who has Scorpio rising and Neptune conjunct the degree of the Ascendant within two degrees. So Ascendant’s at 15 Scorpio, and Neptune is at 13 Scorpio. And he’s kind of like, my keyword for this is the shapeshifter, so —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: You know, he has all these different roles where he just, his form, especially of like, physical comedy, to completely like, change his appearance and to become like, a different person and to morph into this completely different person.
NDB: Yeah, I mean, his facility with physical comedy is at a totally different level from anyone else. He doesn’t have any peers in that way. He can do really amazing stuff. And then another element to that whole Neptune thing – I mean, when he’s not actually sort of contorting his body in all these strange ways, when he played Andy Kaufman and he just sort of became Andy Kaufman. You know, like, method acting taken to the extreme. So yeah, I mean, he’s just, a very, very special kind of performer. I get that he’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I’m always impressed by the things he can do.
CB: Yeah. Even like, contorting his face and stuff like that in some of his early roles. More recently in the past few years, he’s gone through this whole “there is no me” thing like a few years back where he was saying these sort of like, obscure things about like, there not being a personality or something like that in interviews for a while.
NDB: Yeah. And I mean, that sounds like a very Neptune rising kind of thing to say as well. I would beg to differ; there’s clearly a person there. But you know, that’s how he seems to see himself these days.
CB: Right. He says, “And it pushed me towards the realization that there is no individual here. There are only energies. There is no me.” Yeah, you can… And then he has this quote, “Understanding suffering is the way to salvation because once you understand it, you have compassion, and the next thing you know, you are free.” He has a lot of really interesting like, interviews like that —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — from a few years ago where he was going off on a lot of stuff that was very Neptune. But his keyword for at least the early part of his career is like, the shapeshift I think is a good one.
NDB: Oh yeah.
CB: So another one in another area is Salvador Dali had Cancer rising with Neptune in Cancer in the first house. And he was the surrealist artist.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: And I think that’s a good one.
NDB: Yeah. Great painter. Everyone knows the melting clocks, The Persistence of Memory it’s called. Yeah, you know, really special vision and imagination and just a real character as well. I mean, anyone who’s seen him in film clips or interviews knows he was another sort of, you know, unique personality and an incredible painter.
CB: Right. Like, his physical like, appearance and stuff became almost part of his artistic persona.
NDB: Yeah. He had a good sort of… There was a performer-like quality to him. When he first made a sensation in the States in the ‘30s, he did things like, I think he jumped through a shop window. You know, like, he did stunts. He wasn’t above stunts and doing publicity things. You know, but since his work was so great, it wouldn’t really matter if you considered some of these things to be cheap or unnecessary, because he could walk the walk.
CB: Okay. Let’s see. Moving on – another one is Maya Angelou who had Ascendant in Leo conjunct Neptune, and hers is she’s the poet.
NDB: Yeah. She, you know, really the sort of a poet who documented, you know, her times. She writes – I mean, look at that Sun-Jupiter in Aries. Martin Luther King, when he was assassinated, Saturn was right on that Sun-Jupiter, and she really writes the defining summary of the impact that had on everyone at the time. So she is sort of like the, you know, she’s a poet, yes. But she’s sort of like a poet who speaks for the masses in a way. And whenever I see her chart, I always think of that and that powerful Saturn transit, you know, to that Sun-Jupiter when Dr. King was murdered.
CB: Definitely. Let’s see, moving on – actually kind of almost ties with Jim Carrey, but Kim Kardashian has Sagittarius rising and Neptune conjunct the Ascendant in Sagittarius. And just different ways that she’s changed like, her body or her appearance over the years has been like, commented on, even so much so that sometimes the way that she’s changed or modified her appearance has then influenced like, other people who then follow her style or follow her different like, body appearance things – like, setting trends, I guess.
NDB: Right. Yeah. I’m only tangentially aware of her; I never watched her show, but I know her name. I know who she is. But yeah, okay.
CB: Got it. All right. And then the last ones are like, David Icke, who is like, a crazy conspiracy theorist has Neptune —
NDB: Lizard people.
CB: Yeah. I remember like, when I was like, a teenager, I was like, really into conspiracy —
NDB: Nostradamus?
CB: Yeah, like Nostradamus and like, I got really into like, conspiracy theories and stuff like that. But then I came across his books, and then I was just like, this is just wild. Like, he’s just making up crazy random stuff, and like, that was actually one of the first things that really woke me up and made me realize that a lot of the conspiracy theory things I was into and like, reading about people were just like, lying or making stuff up sort of out of their imagination with seeing his books and just how far out there and just obviously illusionary they were. But he has Libra rising and Neptune in Libra as well as Saturn in Libra in the first house. So —
NDB: Yeah, he’s quite a piece of work.
CB: Yeah, so I thought that was one, and it led me to another one, and that was the reason why I thought it was a good example because the books that actually got me into conspiracy theories and stuff were by an author named Dolores Cannon, and I found out years later that her birth time was out there. And she has Virgo rising with Neptune on the Ascendant in Virgo, and it was kind of like, a similar thing where her books were this… Like, she wrote these books where she claimed that she was doing past life regression and that she was putting people into past life regression and through that, she met a student of Nostradamus’s, and then through that student she began communicating with him and like, decoding his prophecies or something like that. And then it turned into this really wild thing, which as a tenneager when I discovered it, I was like, wow, this is amazing, and I was like, there’s no way somebody would lie about this or just like, make this up. But then it’s like, as I got older, I realized like, no, this is somebody with a very active imagination that’s putting this forward as if it is true, but it’s actually probably not true. So I thought that was really interesting just seeing Neptune like, right on the Ascendant there.
NDB: Yeah. Sounds like it.
CB: So – and it’s like, I don’t know from the subjective standpoint, because I think for Neptune, sometimes when you’re experiencing it, there’s, and you’re in the middle of it, you may not be able to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not real, or there may be this ambiguity surrounding reality. I remember going through a Neptune transit, you know, over my Ascendant at one point. And actually, you were in the car with me – I was driving back from picking you up at the airport. And I was driving and said, you know, I don’t know what this Neptune transit is about, and then you burst out laughing and you were pointing out that we were literally like, driving through fog at that exact moment and could hardly see in front of us.
NDB: I remember that! Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: That’s really funny. I was like, see, Chris? The astrology’s right in front of you.
CB: Yeah. So I think sometimes as a transit, you know, we can go through transits like that or sometimes natal placements, but it can be hard to distinguish between what’s imaginary and what’s not. And sometimes you can use that to your benefit because people that use Neptune constructively can create these beautiful like, fantasy worlds that are very, where you can really experience it and it feels really in-depth and really well worked out. It’s like those fantasy authors that construct like, really elaborate fantasy worlds that seem real, but then on the downside, sometimes when Neptune goes overboard it can create something where it’s not real, even though you think it is.
NDB: Or intended to deceive. Or like you said, you know, sometimes the best liars believe their own lies or the best deceivers have deceived themselves first. So yeah. Who knows with Ms. Cannon, but yeah, it can be any number of those permutations. But yeah, going back to Jim Carrey, I mean, that’s a great example – I mean, he, the way he creates characters is very detailed and thorough too. So yeah, it doesn’t always have to be channeling Nostradmus.
CB: Sure. For sure. All right. I think that’s good with Neptune, yeah?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. So let’s move onto Pluto in the first house or conjunct the Ascendant. So one of the ones I wanted to bring up – we’ve gone through a few sort of Pluto in the first house ones already, but one I wanted to bring up that’s new is Alan Turing.
So here’s Alan Turing’s chart. Gemini rising with Pluto conjunct Venus in the first house in Gemini. So Alan Turing – part of it is like, Pluto is the investigator that like, gets to the bottom of something or can like, uncover something. And Alan Turing during World War Two was involved in cracking the German codes by creating like, mechanical computers that could code break, basically, and they were eventually successful in breaking the German codes, which helped in the war effort.
NDB: It helped enormously. I mean, next to Winston Churchill, England probably owned Turing the greatest debt, you know, for saving them in that hour. So it’s considering what happened to him later, it’s just an absolute travesty of justice. But yeah, he did what was considered, you know, the undoable was these very sophisticated codes he had to crack, and he did it.
CB: Yeah. So that’s the positive side. The negative side was that he, with Venus conjunct Pluto in the first house, that he was like, a gay man, and this was uncovered during the course of things after World War Two. And he ended up being persecuted for that, and they ended up forcing him to – he was like, chemically castrated as a result of that, I think, right?
NDB: Yeah. Homosexuality was illegal in England until 1967. Same for Canada, actually, ironically. So yeah. I mean, he died – he took his own life, I think, in 1953 as a result of that whole debacle. I think what happened was, you know, as happened in those days, he was caught, he was arrested in some public men’s room, you know, in the middle of something, and yeah, prosecuted and forced to go through this process and he wound up taking his own life, you know. This guy who had really saved Britain. So yeah, it’s a travesty. But you have a point; it’s also there in that chart. You know, that was the way gay men could find their way around in those days were in these, you know, public spaces, men’s rooms and things like that. I mean, it was all very surreptitious, because just to have a little pleasure in life, they had to be, you know, breaking the law and acting on the DL as it were. You know, being as discreet as possible. So yeah —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — there is an element of Venus-Pluto there.
CB: So we get all these different elements with Pluto where it’s like, it can be the investigator getting to the bottom of things, but also there can be components of like, with Pluto in the first, of things which are hidden. The illicit. But also themes of like, life and death can be major themes with Pluto in the first when it’s prominent in a chart as well. So that’s one that came up. It’s actually kind of tricky when going through some of my Pluto examples is a lot of them as I was pulling stuff up where sometimes you had that element there.
So another one, for example, was Kurt Cobain. So let me pull up his chart. All right. So here’s Kurt Cobain. So he had 19 degrees of Virgo rising, and he had Pluto at 19 degrees of Virgo conjunct the Ascendant, and Uranus at 23 degrees of Virgo. So on the one hand, it’s like, he’s a good example of Uranus conjunct the Ascendant because he was very rebellious, he was very like, eccentric and unique. He rejected like, social convention and things that were seen as like, common at the time and didn’t wanna be like, held back by anything.
NDB: Yeah. And very, you know, very pro-counterculture. Really ahead of his time, you know. He would have fit perfectly in the zeitgeist of today in terms of his politics, you know. MTV used to have a heavy metal hour show called The Headbanger’s Ball. So what Kurt did was he showed up in a ballgown, which – like, I promise you, was not something that was done in those days, especially not by heavy metal musicians. No, he was, you know, really, really special in that way. He played the part of the reluctant rockstar; I think some of that was, you know, a put on. I think, you know, obviously, you don’t make an album like Nevermind by accident. But he didn’t handle rock stardom well. He wasn’t made for that part of it. I think he was, you know, just very serious about the music. But then there’s the Pluto rising, and yeah, you know, he was someone who could go to some very sort of dark places, who had been to dark places, and sang about being in dark places. Nevermind was this smash album, but you know, there’s heavy duty topics on there, you know. There’s one song about sexual assault. The first three songs on the album all mention guns. You know, and of course, that was what eventually he used to leave us. So yeah, to have an album that was that ubiquitous – it’s hard to even explain at this point. I mean, that album was just huge. Huge. And it changed —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — things. It changed things like no record in the ‘80s had. Not even – I mean, Madonna and Michael Jackson and Prince had been huge popstars, but they hadn’t really changed the culture in the way he did in a way. Like, you know, they found their place and they kind of, you know, changed fashion and things like that. But Kurt Cobain and Nirvana kind of changed the music industry in a way that you still feel now, I think.
CB: And that’s why I wanted – that’s part of the reason I wanted to mention this example, because he has those two outer planets which are so slow-moving right on the Ascendant. Sometimes when you have those slow-moving outer planets like, right on the degree of the Ascendant or the angles, the person can become almost like the avatar for a generation. And for him, he ended up influencing like, an entire generation of people in a very personal way and became kind of like, the spokesperson for that generation. And there’s something about that with having those two outer planets, those generational planets, there – that Uranus-Pluto conjunction right on the degrees of his Ascendant.
NDB: Yeah, absolutely. He really did, like, he felt familiar to all of us. Like, he – I was only a year younger than him, so. So many of the attitudes and tastes that he had – he really was saying things that I’d been thinking for a long time, you know. So that was kind of amazing, so I certainly felt that. And I know a lot of my peers did too.
CB: And then also with Uranus on the Ascendant, it’s like, his fame happened suddenly and rapidly and unexpectedly. It’s just like, one minute they’re driving around like, as a band in their van, like, scraping by, and another minute, they’re playing to like, and influencing millions and millions of people.
NDB: August 25th, 1991 on a Sunday. I was at a rock festival in Hasselt, Belgium. The headliners were The Ramones, before them were The Pogues in one of their last shows with Shane MacGowan. Before them were Sonic Youth. Before them was a surprise solo show by Black Francis of The Pixies, during which show someone came out and sprayed him with a fire extinguisher, and I’ll get to who that was in a second. Before that, it was Dinosaur Jr. And at 11 in the morning, there was this opening band – this three-piece, Nirvana – who I had heard their first record and I kind of knew who they were. And it was Kurt Cobain who later sprayed Black Francis from Pixies onstage with a fire extinguisher, so I saw him twice that day. But this was August 25th – this is like, three weeks before Nevermind comes out. And they were, you know, the first band at 11 in the morning on a Sunday morning at a rock festival. And within three, four weeks, they would just be the biggest thing on the planet. So yeah, it was fast. It was very, very fast.
CB: And that’s partially the Pluto component as well, because Pluto – you know, our friend astrologer we mentioned earlier in the episode, Alan White, always said that Pluto makes small things big and big things small. And it’ll tend to take things to extremes. So if Pluto’s like, conjunct something in the chart, it’ll just magnify it. And I think it’s really magnifying that Uranus energy there that happens so rapidly and just blowing it up and making it even bigger and causing this generational shift in music and everything virtually overnight.
NDB: Yeah —
CB: But —
NDB: There’s a whole school of musicians who, you know, the sort of the heavy metal before Nirvana. All these people who were selling a lot of records or at least they appeared to, they were running things, they were crushed overnight. That’s another thing Pluto can do is just sort of like, destroy and bury as well as revive and bring to life again. But yeah, there’s a whole sort of generation of musicians who talk about how like, Nirvana ended it all for them. You know, for me, it was a beautiful thing. But obviously, for some people, it was like, the end of everything. So yeah, that’s real Pluto. I mean, you know, it destroyed. It created. It reconfigured. It did everything.
CB: Yeah. And then of course, as you said, like, in his music from early on, there were themes of like, guns or like, suicide or death or other really difficult themes. And then at the end of his life, he ended up taking his own life, and that’s one of the things that he was known for.
NDB: Yeah, unfortunately.
CB: All right. Yeah. All right. So there’s going back to another one – I already mentioned this one, but Ram Dass. We talked about, you know, his Jupiter in the first house and that sort of spiritual transformation, but it’s like, he went through a whole transformation also had Pluto right at the Ascendant, and I think that’s important because sometimes going through some sort of transformation of the self at some point in the life and both how —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — you perceive yourself as well as how other people perceive you is a major theme of having Pluto in the first house.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, I think he had a lot to overcome. I don’t know that much about him, you know, I know he wrote Be Here Now and I know he was Leary’s accomplice in the whole Harvard LSD thing. But if I’m not mistaken, he was gay and really struggling with it. I don’t wanna add things to his biography that aren’t there, but that’s my recollection that that also played into a sort of identity crisis. You know, I think he’s someone who sort of stripped his identity away and then sort of recreated it. I mean, he did become a very different person, it seems.
CB: Okay. And then another one along those lines just in terms of like, transformations of the self, but Eddie Izzard, or the comedian who is known sometimes as Eddie Izzard and sometimes more recently referred to as Suzy Izzard, has Virgo rising at 10 degrees of Virgo and Pluto at nine degrees of Virgo, and in like, the ‘90s and 2000s was known for being one of the only comedians who openly did like, crossdressing. And even though he was born as a man, he was dressing sometimes as a woman, and that was part of his identity. And then later in recent years, has come out as being genderfluid and transgender and is now known as Suzy Izzard, although they alternate pronouns sometimes between like, he/him pronouns and she/her or sometimes between names. So you’re getting this with a mutable sign, with Virgo, you often get things that are fluid, things that are holding two different things at once, especially in the Mercury-ruled signs, and having that transformational aspect sometimes of the first house can come through with Pluto on the Ascendant.
NDB: He/She/They has one of my all time favorite comedy routines ever – the whole bit about flags, which is, you know, something I’d be happy to have written on my tombstone. It’s just pure genius. Amazing comedian.
CB: Yeah, that entire set is just like, legendary from like —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — the early 2000s that was done in San Francisco. For our like, generation, it was just an epic, like, standup set.
NDB: Yeah. Thoroughly funny and revolutionary and just, yeah, so many cuts above most standup comedy.
CB: Yeah. And I had other people – I’ve noticed that comes up, though, sometimes. I had a listener on Twitter send in that they realized that they were transfgender when Uranus passed over their Ascendant degree. And so there’s different people depending on the placements involved, but that can be something that happens sometimes since that can be like, a fundamental realization of having either a realization or having an actual shift in terms of the gender that one identifies as can sometimes come out with either first house placements or first house transits.
NDB: That makes —
CB: Which also brings up —
NDB: — perfect sense, don’t you think? I mean, you know.
CB: Yeah, just in terms of both things having to do with the body, things having to do with the self, things having to do —
NDB: Identity, yeah.
CB: — in Suzy Izzard’s case with like, how you dress and how you present yourself to the world. Sometimes with transits, actually, that can be a first house thing is a person will go through like, a Venus transit or something and they’ll go through like, a makeover and they’ll like, start doing their hair differently or start dressing differently, whatever that means to them. And sometimes that can actually be a huge shift for people to like, do something really differently with your appearance can be a major change. Other times, it can be like, a health issue that causes a change, like a Saturn transit goes through a person’s first house, they commonly can like, lose weight or sometimes even get sick and appear emaciated or like, tired or slow or something like that. So there’s themes having to do with like, appearance can sometimes manifest in very literal and very important ways.
NDB: Absolutely.
CB: Yeah. All right. Other ones – in terms of transformations also then sometimes with Pluto on the Ascendant, there can be issues that happen which cause a transformation in terms of a person’s body and self and autonomy. Christopher Reeve was a famous one who had 19 degrees of Leo rising and Pluto at 22 degrees of Leo, and the ruler of the Ascendant is the Sun, which is in Libra in the 3rd house of short distance travel conjoining Saturn in a night chart and Mercury. And Christopher Reeve was famously in the like, 1970s played Superman, but later was involved in a horse-riding accident where he fell off a horse and it damaged his spine and he became a quadriplegic, so he was unable to move his limbs from like, the neck down.
NDB: So tragic. I was the biggest Superman fan in 1978, and yeah, and he’s apparently like, a really great guy. You know, he and Robin Williams had been college roommates, so they were best friends. And yeah, they’re these two very special personalities, and apparently like, he’s the real deal. He really was like, a real standup guy. Just like, what a terrible thing to happen to him.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Yeah, that’s Pluto rising for sure.
CB: Yeah, just going through a physical transformation. In his case, it was a challenging one, like, a really difficult one. And then but it’s also interesting that it’s like, linked to the 3rd house with the ruler of the Ascendant there. But his case reminds me of, you know, Roosevelt were Uranus on the Ascendant, the ruler of the Ascendant was in the 6th house of illness, and then he got polio probably and then ended up founding, you know, an institute for polio research that eventually found a cure. Christopher Reeves, similarly, you know, ended up founding and creating a lot of charities to try to help people who are quadriplegic or had similar issues in terms of movement, and that ended up being part of his legacy in the end was promoting that as a cause and as an issue. And so often with many of these celebrity examples, that ends up actually being – you get this dual thing where you have their personal, subjective experience of what happens that’s indicated in the chart, but then you also they end up leaving a legacy that sometimes positively impacts the world in general with respect to that issue at the same time.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: And you know, come to think of it, he had even – when he got the role of Superman, he wasn’t physically buff, but they just liked him and his look, so they had him work out. So there was even a physical transformation just for him to play Superman before we even get to, you know, the accident and everything that followed, so. Yeah, the theme of physical transformation sort of, you know, came up a few times in his lifetime, it seems.
CB: Yeah. So that actually might be a good example to end on, honestly, because on the one hand, that’s both, you know, tragic and difficult example, but then also that sometimes from tragedy or difficulties that an individual experiences, they sometimes find a way to persevere and to overcome and then also to turn around and help other people with similar issues. And I think that’s one of the greatest lessons even of difficult placements when it’s experienced as a subjective tragedy or something like that is that sometimes a person can learn and grow from it and help other people who are in similar situations to not experience that as bad or to help them out. And there’s something, you know, very positive or optimistic about that.
NDB: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Yeah, I mean, that’s the thing about going through the planets is, you know, you end on Pluto and there’s gonna be some darkness.
CB: For sure.
NDB: As Leonard Cohen would say, you want it darker.
CB: There’s darkness but also some light.
NDB: Yes.
CB: All right, we’re back from break, and speaking of Pluto and going to extremes, we have finished going through all of the planets in the first house, my friend. Congratulations.
NDB: Yeah —
CB: Good job.
NDB: — it’s quite an achievement. Oh, thank you. Likewise.
CB: Yeah. So just to summarize, I think we’ve seen now at this point that the first house and how at the beginning we said that it signifies the self, the body, physical vitality, appearance, spirit, character, life direction, focus, and that which arises from you – I think we can see now how some of those keywords have very tangible and very specific manifestations based on things like what planets are in the first house, what the rising sign actually is, and also what the ruler of the Ascendant is doing in the chart and what house it’s placed in.
NDB: Yeah, that’s it. That’s the checklist, and we covered it all. There’s nothing else anyone ever needs to look up in order to understand the first house. This has been a thorough job.
CB: Yeah, well —
NDB: Case closed.
CB: Case closed. Well, yeah. So this is brilliant. Thank you for helping me to set this foundation for this series. Obviously, I’m gonna continue on with the other houses. I am gonna linger with the first house a little bit, because I’ve already recorded a workshop where I talked with patrons and did some interviews with patrons of The Astrology Podcast who had stories about their first house placements where I actually talked with them in order to get sort of a more intimate understanding of what the first house means up close by hearing it directly from individuals. So in this episode, we’ve mainly focused on celebrity charts, which I like on the one hand because it gives you an objective thing that you can point to where you can like, look up information about these people and publicly available information so that there’s like, agreed points of things that like, everybody knows about certain celebrities or what have you, which is good for a certain type of research. But then there’s another type of research that only happens when you sit down and talk to a person about their chart, and that’s what I’m gonna talk about in that other episode which is already available for early access to patrons of The Astrology Podcast. But I basically recorded that episode, then I realized I wanted to put together a more detailed and thorough treatment of the first house, so that’s what we did here today.
NDB: Right.
CB: So I’ve also done other episodes. One of the things we didn’t get into very much is transits and eclipses. We did mention some transits to the first house, but we didn’t go into eclipses as much as we could have, and I do have other episodes that I’ve done on eclipses. Because eclipses are important because when eclipses start happening in the first house, they’re also happening in the 6th house. Over a like, a year and a half time period, you’ll see eclipses bounce back and forth between the first and the 7th houses, and there will be major beginnings and major endings when it comes to topics of self versus relationships in the person’s chart. And sometimes during those periods, you can get a much greater sense of what the first house signifies. So I’ve done a few different episodes on that that have been workshops where I shared examples and I talked to attendees about their first house eclipse transits. So you can search for that on The Astrology Podcast; one of the episodes is titled, “Interpreting Solar and Lunar Eclipses in Your Birth Chart.” On YouTube, it has the current title of “Eclipses as Transits in Astrology.” There’s another one titled, “Eclipses in the 12 Houses in Astrology Workshop.” And yeah, so check those out, because eclipses can be important and I know that’s something you focus on as well, right?
NDB: Yeah, certainly lately I’ve been doing a lot of research on them, and yeah. That’s the thing about today’s episode; we went quite long, but we actually put together a lot more material than we were able to present, so that’s why I was joking earlier about the whole case closed thing. We could have gone on and on and on and on, and there’s some really great stuff we had to leave out. But yes, eclipses are – indeed, those eclipses that can fall on the angles can be very powerful and very revealing. So yeah, you know, that’s the kind of thing that you could conceivably do a whole episode just on that, but that’s for some other day.
CB: Definitely.
NDB: In the meantime, check out Chris’s episodes on eclipses.
CB: Yeah, check those out. So let’s see – I’ll continue with the second house in the future as I continue this series, and those will be available to early access to patrons as soon as they’re available. If you’d like more on the ruler of the Ascendant, I go into the ruler of the Ascendant and its house placement with lots more examples in my online course on ancient astrology called the Hellenistic Astrology Course, which you can find at TheAstrologySchool.com. And I have I think it’s like, a whole 10-hour lecture where I go through each of the 12 houses and show different manifestations of the ruler of the Ascendant placed in each of the 12 houses just to get into much more detail about what the ruler of the Ascendant does and what it looks like depending on what its condition is in the chart. So if you liked some of those examples that I have here in this talk, you’ll like that in the Hellenistic course. I also have a whole chapter on the significations of the houses as well as a separate chapter on the ruler of the Ascendant in the houses in my book titled Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune. So if you wanna learn more about that, you can get a hold of that. And yeah, that’s where you can learn more about this topic. What about you, Nick? What are you working on right now? What do you have coming up? And you actually do consultations, so if people wanted to get a reading with you to look at their chart —
NDB: Yes.
CB: — they could, right?
NDB: Yeah. I have been on hiatus, but I’ve opened up my bookings for mid-August for a few weeks on a part-time basis while I’m working on other projects. We’re developing a software, an astrology software, called Nechepso that we hope to have out in September. We’ve recently launched an astrology-themed social media network that’s just sort of, you know, getting debugged as we speak called Third House Social, and that’ll be something exciting as we tune it up. And yeah, I’m back at consultations as of the second half of August for at least a month on a part-time basis. You can book me at NickDaganBestAstrologer.com. And yeah, I’m having a ball so far.
CB: Brilliant, awesome.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Well, yeah – people should check out your website. I’ll put a link to it in the description below this video on YouTube —
NDB: Thank you.
CB: — or on the podcast website. Otherwise, thanks a lot for joining me for this. I’ve been putting this off for, I think I finished the zodiac series like, a year ago, and I’ve been meaning to do this series, and I’ve been like, putting it off for a year because it just seemed too big and too insurmountable to really do a good job with it. But I’m glad that you and I ended up doing it together and that we ended up giving it the proper treatment that it really deserves. So thanks a lot for contributing and for helping collaborate with me on this research and put this episode together.
NDB: It’s been my pleasure. Every time I work with you on one of these episodes, I grow as an astrologer. It always gives back, so it’s an absolute pleasure. Thank you, Chris.
CB: Same. I feel the same way. Cool. All right, buddy. Well, I guess that’s it for this episode. So thank you everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time.
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