It’s been seven
months since David Bowie’s death - 11 January 2016 - and the outpouring of
feeling is ongoing. It’s
difficult to pigeonhole Bowie as an artist and as an individual. His astrology reflects his multi-faceted
and contradictory nature, where layers of personality and talent seemingly
clash, causing internal frustration but materialising sometimes
brilliantly, sometimes not.
The element of Air dominates Bowie's chart. In the early
stages of his career at least, this quality overshadowed his traditional Capricorn Sun. Bowie’s story reflects what some astrologers call
‘growing into our Sun signs’, the mythology for which late blooming Capricorn is noted for.
Outwardly, David Bowie
embodied the qualities normally associated with the air sign Aquarius –
scientific, futuristic, progressive, prophetic. With Aquarius rising and planet Uranus as chart ruler, Bowie possessed an alternative edge that some would say he was born with. Uranus’ glyph resembles a satellite designed
to explore the far reaches of time and space, a theme often repeated in Bowie’s
earlier 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 and Loving
the Alien, we learn of the visions and possibilities beyond the earthly
plane.
Bowie's chart ruler, Uranus in
Gemini, in the fifth house of romance, sextile Pluto in the seventh house of
relationships, alludes to his experimental and transformative sex life. He was
magnetised by New York's gay scene, which was still underground in the early 1970s. Bowie became a camp icon in an era when homosexuals lived in fear of discovery. Critics
such as the queer writer John Gill condemned him 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 went on to become 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.
‘… 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’
His twelfth house stellium (Sun, Mars, Mercury) indicates a rich inner world and psychic possibilities. The Sun and
Mercury function as mediums for the expression of
mythic or archetypal images in the collective unconscious through art or esoteric practise. Bowie had the capacity to bridge the conscious and unconscious,
and could 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 (#13), copies of which I will be flogging at Manly Zine Fair in September. See you there.
