It’s been seven
months since David Bowie’s death - 11 January 2016 - and the outpouring of
feeling is ongoing, the evidence of which can be found on social media and in
the various cultural events held in his honour throughout the world. It’s
difficult to pigeonhole David Bowie as an artist and as an individual; he
represents many things to many people. His natal chart reflects his multi-faceted
and contradictory nature, where layers of personality and talent seemingly
clash, causing internal frustration but manifesting outwardly creatively, sometimes
brilliantly, sometimes not. Here, the Air element is powerful. In the early
stages of Bowie’s career at least, this airy quality overshadowed his more
subdued and traditional Sun in Capricorn, which hid away in the twelfth house,
the horoscope’s sanctuary. Bowie’s story reflects what some astrologers call
‘growing into our Sun signs’, the mythology for which Capricorn as tenacious goat
climbing the proverbial mountain to reach its pinnacle is noted for.
Outwardly, David Bowie
embodied the qualities normally associated with the air sign Aquarius –
scientific, futuristic, progressive, prophetic - despite his Sun’s placement in
pragmatic Capricorn. With Aquarius rising, the planet Uranus becomes chart ruler,
giving Bowie an alternative edge. Uranus’ glyph resembles a satellite designed
to explore the far reaches of time and space, a theme often repeated in Bowie’s
early work. His 1969 breakthrough single Space
Oddity, released close to the moon landing, covers cosmonaut Major Tom’s existential space journey.
Through classics such as Space Oddity,
Ziggy Stardust, Life on Mars, Starman, Moonage Daydream, and Loving
the Alien, we learn of the visions and possibilities forgotten on the earthly
plane.
His chart ruler, Uranus in
Gemini, in the fifth house of romance sextile Pluto in the seventh house of
relationships alludes to Bowie’s experimental and transformative sex life. He was
magnetised by the gay scene, which was still underground in the early 1970s,
and became a camp icon in an era when homosexuals lived in fear of discovery. Critics
such as the queer writer John Gill condemned Bowie for using and betraying gay
culture for his own commercial gain. Nevertheless, Bowie set a precedent that heralded
in a new generation of androgynous stars who were successful in the 1980s: Gary
Numan, Boy George (Culture Club),
Marilyn, Phil Oakey (Human League),
George Michael (Wham!), Morrissey (The Smiths), Pete Burns (Dead or Alive), and Steve Strange (Visage) who appears in the Ashes to Ashes promotional video:
Bowie was aware of his role
as an interpretative performer and the fact that his personas only had a short
life span (one or two albums). He found it easier to write for his
characters than for himself (twelfth house Mercury) and wasn’t sentimental
about them; he could move on (Aquarius rising). Bowie's image developed as time progressed, earning him the moniker of ‘pop chameleon’ (chart ruler
Uranus in Gemini):
‘… I
wanted to be the instigator of new ideas. I wanted to turn people on to new
things and new perspectives … I decided to use the easiest medium, which was
rock n roll, and then add bits and pieces … so that by the end of it I would be
my own medium’
Occultism flavoured Bowie’s
life and work up to his last recording. His twelfth house Stellium (Sun, Mars, and
Mercury) indicates a rich inner world and psychic possibilities. The Sun and
Mercury in this sector of the chart function as mediums for the expression of
mythic or archetypal images in the collective unconscious through art or some form
of psychic work. Bowie had the capacity to bridge the conscious and unconscious,
and communicate to an audience what was operating in the murky depths of the psyche:
‘All
I knew was that there was this otherness, this other world, an alternative
reality, and one that I wanted to embrace’
The above is a extract from the next issue of Astrobabble, copies of which I will be flogging at Manly Zine Fair in September. See you there.
