I could not let the 50th birthday of Madonna pass without a mention. We all love the girl who made it okay for other girls to wear their undies in public.
I’m one of those people who always “liked Madonna but not necessarily her music,” but looking back with an extra 15 years experience studying sexuality, I wonder if she has contributed something to sex, or exploited it like so many people before her. Maybe she’s done both. That particular assessment aside, anyone who studies astrology needs to know something about her chart. Here it is. I consider it prophetic that she was born 11 years to the day before the Woodstock festival.
Imagine what an impression witnessing that event (even if by TV) on one’s birthday at the verge of womanhood; what a statement of what is possible. Look at all those people who are into music. If I had to hazard a brilliant guess, that was her defining moment. (And Janis stole the show.)
See all those planets on the left? They are clustered in the 12th house, which is the house that represents 1. fantasy and 2. things too large to understand. Madonna counts for both.
She is a Leo, with several planets joining the Sun — Venus (in the 11th house, her public image), then Uranus and Pallas Athene (if you follow Greek myth, and if you count Uranus as Prometheus, you know they were partners in the creation of the human race). So there is something about Madonna that is trying to offer fire to humanity, or at least to the marketing department of her record company.
She is a Virgo by ascendant and Moon and these girls always give you visions of the Goddess. She has a boatload of Virgo planets as well — an asteroid called Juno, then Pluto, Mercury, Ceres and the Moon. Those last two, close to the ascendant (which represents one’s name) are pretty funny. She has Ceres and the Moon rising (two points specifically addressing motherhood) and she is called Madonna; that is her actual name, on her birth certificate.
This is the astrology chart of someone who was destined to become either a very, very large phenomenon, or go insane. Those are two of the most likely choices when you have most of your planets in the 12th house. You might just have dreams so intense that you think you live in two worlds at once.
Note Madonna’s 9th house Mars in Taurus. That’s a nice symbol both for someone who mocks religion using sex, who has turned sex into a religion, and who like a lot of people worth $400 million, fancies herself spiritual. She feels the passion of God in some direct and literal ways, of that you can be sure.
Anyway, Madonna is experiencing some big transits — Saturn over the ascendant (this one will get you to reinvent yourself, which seems to be her specialty) and her Chiron return. You might ask, what is the woman who has already been everything going to become next?
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. Maybe she will give birth to the Second Coming.
Note, I’ve expanded this piece a bit since the original post…adding a Woodstock theory…that witnessing Woodstock on her 11th birthday was a kind of revelationary moment…
I share this birthday with the Material Girl. However, I was born 3 years before her, and have 6 planets (not just asteroids) in the 12th House, with my Ascendant and Pluto also both in Leo, though of course in the 1st House. If we were to count the asteroids, they might either expand the House out of proportion, or cause it to explode, lol.
Two of your comments caught my attention:
1) “This is the astrology chart of someone who was destined to become either a very, very large phenomenon, or go insane.” There have been times when I thought I was going to lose my mind, but have managed to come out of all my childhood trauma fairly well unscathed, regardless. I’m now on the verge of something huge, and can only hope that it will be as large a ‘phenomenon’ as you indicate. (Is it possible that there might be some middle ground here? From the looks of my own 12th House, I fear that there isn’t.)
2) “You might just have dreams so intense that you think you live in two worlds at once.” Yes, I do. I have huge dreams, that to others seem to be illusory (by-product of all that 12th House/Neptune influence), and I often feel as though I’m living … UP THERE somewhere. But as you know, the 12th House is also the House of Higher Consciousness not just dreams and illusions. I meditate on a regular basis, and am magnetized to the ‘spiritual’ life (versus ‘religious’). It took me many years to understand my I was so pulled to this life of spiritual questing, but I’ve finally understood it…through the application of astrology more than anything else.
Thank you so much for posting this article.
Blessings,
Kat Starwolf