The astrology of a biography

Charles Dickens, according to his birth chart

Charles Dickens, the scribe

Carolina Sawney, Astrologer

La Tundra, Number 4, June 2012, London

A new life carries the marks of the astronomical conditions that generated it, because time and space are not abstract categories, but are filled with energy, according to astrologers. Quantum physics takes on board what ancient philosopher-astronomers thought and moves in that direction.

The scribe

The novelist Charles Dickens, born two hundred years ago, has the placements related to Mercury all very emphasised in his birth chart, that means that the main archetype in his life would be that of the scribe, who perceptively registers daily life stories, getting interested and inventing characters in the immediate environment, with the intention of redefining common sense, and with the practicality of the craftsman, give its integrity back to something that was no longer working. His first novel, Pickwick Papers, was firs publish as series in a newspaper.

Mercury is placed in the fourth house, that describe his father, the family and his country of origin. In the most autobiographic of his novels, David Copperfield, Dickens immortalised his father in the character of Mr. Micawber, who ended up in prison for unpaid debts. In the fiction, the man denounced the laws that preventing him from working, perpetuated him in his condition.

Being a very sensitive child, as Neptune, the planet that dissolves limites, suggests in the third house of perception, Dickens never forgot the feeling of abandonment that he suffered when he saw his father destitute and had to go to work to a factory in the conditions created after the English British Revolution, portrayed in Oliver Twist and Hard Times.

With the Sun, that symbolises the identity, in the fifth house, that governs the potential associated with childhood and creativity, most of his novels started with the birth of the main characters, that during his first years is left at at mercy of major events that make him lose his security, but thanks to the intervention of kind characters, education and willpower, he recovers his place and becomes successful as a popular and prolific writer.

Charles Dickens's astrological birth chart

The social reformer

Motivated by ideals of social progress, as the Sun in Aquarius indicates, but recognising the limits of human nature and having developed compassion, as Chiron, that represents a wound, in conjunction to the Sun, suggests, Dickens confessed that he chose writing to politics, so that his message would reach not only his supporters but the wider possible public.

Two years after publishing Nicholas Nickleby, a novel in which Dickens denounced the treatment received in boarding schools in Yorkshire, several of those institutions had to close their doors. With Mercury in Capricorn, the sign of structures and social hierarchies, the criticism to the class system was another of his constant references, as in Little Dorrit. The author was called the most English of writers.

The creator of illusions

Neptune, the planet associated with dreams, the collective unconscious and what connects us with the source, is in the third house, that represents modes of perceiving and thinking, that means that Dickens had a very active imagination. In fact, he was a pioneer in recovering the ancient technique of dream interpretation, with several of his characters attuned to the sign of the times through images that where prophetic, as in Barnaby Rouge.

His works, created to be represented - Dickens recited his drafts in front of a mirror, where unendingly adapted to theatre, television and cinema, and so they where embodied forever in the collective imaginary.

References

The planets

Sun: ☉; Moon: ☽; Mercury: ☿; Venus: ♀; Mars: ♂; Jupiter: ♃; Saturn: ♄; Uranus: ♅; Neptune: ♆; Pluto: ♇.

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