Profiles
I have singled out Georgia O'Keeffe and Carl Jung, because they both lived long lives, and, like most renowned people, they made strong responses to their birth charts in very powerful and public ways.
Georgia O'Keeffe's cycles are clearly defined, and, being a public figure, there is a great deal of information about her. Since no exact birth time is available, I've made a “solar chart” calculated for dawn on the day she was born.
Carl Jung was a brilliant psychiatrist and psychotherapist, whose interests and contributions embraced both the scientific and the mystical. His chart clearly expresses that.
Georgia O'Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, on November 15, 1887, on the New Moon in Scorpio. On that day, both the Sun (identity, self, willpower) and Moon (heart and soul), as well as Mercury (communication and information) and Jupiter (faith, confidence, wealth), were in Pluto-ruled Scorpio, the sign of birth, death, sex, and transformation. Boil Scorpio down to one word: intensity. Some other words are single-minded, driven, focused, jealous, controlling, and passionate.
Scorpios are not known for moderation; they love and hate with equal ardor. With so much energy in one area, O'Keeffe could climb any mountain—but it had to be the right one. Clearly it was! She decided she wanted to be an artist at age ten and never wavered. Not once did she take another job; everything she did was in the service of her art. Georgia O'Keeffe may have been born in 1887 in a farmhouse in the tiny town of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, but she seems to have given birth to herself.
A stellium is a cluster of four or more planets in a sign or house. With those planets in uncompromising Scorpio, O'Keeffe's life was not about balance; it was about passion, devotion, and an obsessive allegiance to her calling. She would naturally radiate a strong presence and confidence, especially with giant Jupiter involved, but in deep, dark Scorpio, that demeanor would have been severe, even intimidating.
With any stellium, the opposite sign becomes essential; a place to release and express the tremendous energy. Taurus (opposite Scorpio) is the sign associated with beauty and nature; it is lush, carnal, and erotic, as well as deeply healing. We see it expressed in O'Keeffe's paintings of giant flowers, in the lavish colors, and in the stark landscape of the desert. Throughout her life, nature provided inspiration, pleasure, and solace.
Mystical Neptune, in Taurus, is opposite her Mercury, and Sun and Moon emphasize this. Although not religious, she found her own form of spirituality in the sanctuary of the desert. She created a magical world with her paintings and drew us all into it.
Venus, goddess of love, beauty, and relationship, resides in its home sign, elegant Libra. It makes a wide conjunction to free-spirited Uranus (also in Libra), showing O'Keeffe's need for autonomy; she craved intimacy and intensity, but she was also a loner who was fiercely independent.
Her Saturn, in creative Leo, gives her a powerful need for self-expression, as well as recognition and control. With Saturn here, there is often a love/hate relationship with the public and fame. It makes sense; she was famous for being private and a loner.
From 1901 to 1902, O'Keeffe attended high school at Sacred Heart Academy as a boarder. Although her parents relocated to Williamsburg, Virginia, in late 1902, O'Keeffe remained with her aunt in Wisconsin. O'Keeffe joined her parents in 1903. In 1905, she moved to Chicago to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; she was eighteen at the time. In 1907, she relocated to New York City to study with William Merritt Chase at the Art Student League on 57th Street. O'Keeffe rented a room in a nearby rooming house. Mind you, this was 1907 and not 2007; it wasn't the custom for a young woman of twenty to arrive in New York City unchaperoned.
Uranus Square: When O'Keeffe was twenty-one, the time of her first Uranus square Uranus, she abandoned art—a radical move typical of Uranus. She decided that she couldn't express herself and did not paint for four years. So what did she do? She didn't get a job in a shop or as a nanny, nor did she marry. She returned to Chicago and worked as a commercial artist. She waited; she bided her time.
In 1912, O'Keeffe decided to go the University of Virginia's summer school and was re-inspired by Alon Bement, who introduced her to the work of Arthur Wesley Dow. From 1914 to 1915, she took classes from Dow at Columbia University; in the summer she served as his teaching assistant. In the fall of 1915, she took a job teaching at Columbia college in Columbia, South Carolina.
From 1916 to February of 1918, O'Keeffe worked as head of the art department at West Texas Normal College in the little town of Canyon, south of Amarillo. She was indifferent to the small town customs and made little effort to socialize. People thought her odd; she dressed in black, wore her hair pulled back in a tight knot, and when she wasn't teaching, she spent hours painting in the prairie or walking great distances—even at night.
Saturn Return: O'Keeffe had done some charcoal drawings in late 1915, which she sent to her friend Anita Pollitzer. It was Pollitzer who took them to Alfred Stieglitz at his 291 gallery in early 1916. He told Pollitzer that the drawings were “the purest, finest, sincerest things that had entered 291 in a long while.” Steiglitz exhibited them without O'Keeffe's permission.
When O'Keeffe found out, she went to New York and confronted him. This was the first time they had met in person. She was twenty-nine years old. In April 1917, Steiglitz organized O'Keeffe's first solo show. They fell madly in love and married in 1924, when O'Keeffe was thirty-seven, at her Saturn square. Stieglitz organized annual exhibitions of her work, and by the mid-1920s, O'Keeffe had become one of America's most important and well-known artists.
Midlife: O'Keeffe felt increasingly stifled by New York City, as well as Lake George, where she and Stieglitz spent the summers surrounded by his family and friends. By 1929, she needed to find a source of new inspiration. In May 1929, she traveled to Santa Fe by train with her friend Rebecca Strand. Shortly after they arrived, Mable Dodge Luhan (a patron of the arts) moved them to Taos and even provided them with studios. That summer, O'Keeffe explored the rugged mountains and deserts in the region, where she completed her famous oil painting, The Lawrence Tree. This was no ordinary trip, no ordinary land; this was a love affair—she had found her muse and her home. Between 1929 and 1949, she spent a part of every year working in New Mexico
Chiron Return: In 1939, O'Keeffe was given a commission from an advertising agency to create two paintings for Hawaiian Pineapple Company (now Dole Food Company) and was sent to Hawaii for nine weeks. After a year of constant travel (New York, New Mexico, California, and Hawaii), she returned exhausted and tense, and her doctors ordered her to remain in bed and advised her not to travel. By the end of the summer, she had begun to recover. During that same period, O'Keefe, along with achievers such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Hellen Keller, was named one of the twelve most outstanding women of the past fifty years.
In August 1934, she visited Ghost Ranch north of Abiqui, saw it, and decided immediately to buy it. In 1940, at the end of her Chiron Return, she moved in. It was this land that inspired her most important landscapes.
Second Saturn Return: Alfred Stieglitz died on July 13, 1946, when O'Keefe was fifty-nine, at the time of her Second Saturn Return. They had been together for thirty years—a full Saturn cycle. She spent the next three years mostly in New York, resolving his estate and preparing for the next chapter of her life.
The Closing Uranus Square: In 1949 (at age sixty-two), she returned to New Mexico permanently. It was at her Uranus opposition at age forty-two that she had discovered New Mexico; now she was going back at the closing square.
Uranus Return: In 1970 (at age eighty-three), O'Keefe had her Uranus return; Uranus returned to its natal position in Libra, the sign that rules beauty and art. It was fitting that the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted the Georgia O'Keefe Retrospective Exhibition. This was the first retrospective of her work in New York since 1946, the year Stieglitz died, and it did a great deal to revive her career.
The Story Doesn't End There: In 1973, a young potter named Juan Hamilton appeared at the ranch house looking for work. She hired him to do a few odd jobs; eventually, she employed him full time. Hamilton became her closest confidant, companion, and business manager. O'Keeffe's eyesight was failing (she had macular degeneration), but Hamilton taught her to work with clay; with assistance, she produced clay pots and a series of water colors. In 1976, she even wrote a book about her art; the following year, she allowed a film to be made about her. She died March 6, 1986, at the age of ninety-eight.
Georgia O'Keeffe lived fully, passionately, and intensely right up until the end. That doesn't mean it was always easy or smooth, but she followed her calling and manifested it unequivocally. “I have been absolutely terrified every moment of my life, but I never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do,” she said.
Carl Jung was born on July 26, 1875, at 7:32 p.m. in Kesswil, Switzerland. His Sun is in proud and charismatic Leo in the 6th house of work, health, service, and mentoring. His Moon is in sensual Taurus in the 3rd house, the area that rules communication, information, writing, and teaching. His rising sign is Aquarius, the rebel, the outsider, the nonconformist.
Both the Sun and the Moon are in their natural signs; the Sun rules Leo, the Moon rules Taurus. This gives him a strong and imposing physique and a powerful presence—magnetic, hearty, stubborn, and vigorous; someone with large appetites and a deep love of nature and the natural world.
There are two distinct themes in his chart. On one hand, he was a maverick, an eccentric, and a genius. We see that in the Aquarius ascendant and the fact that his earthy Taurus Moon makes a square to unconventional Uranus—the planet that rules Aquarius, the planet of freedom and individuation. No wonder he broke with Freud; he was a pioneer, not a follower.
On the other hand, he was conservative and down to earth; someone with a strong work ethic and tremendous staying power. That shows up in Saturn, the planet of responsibility and discipline, in Aquarius in the first house of the self. He may have given the impression of someone who was progressive, but at the same time, he radiated a powerful sense of duty and dependability. Plus, his Leo Sun is in the 6th house of work, competence, and skill. He was a serious rebel, an eccentric conservative; someone who moved freely in both worlds, equally at home in the psychoanalytical one in Switzerland, as well as in esoteric circles.
In addition, his Leo Sun makes a tight square to Neptune, the planet of spirituality and mysticism. Neptune dissolves the boundaries between the visible and invisible worlds; from an early age Jung was drawn to the occult and séances. Both Sun and Moon are connected to outer or transpersonal planets; it's no surprise that he studied alchemy, he was passionate about astrology in his practice, and he worked with mythology and dreams.
Pluto is in Taurus is in the third house of the mind. He had a deep and penetrating intellect and was a gifted speaker and prolific writer. We also see that in the conjunction of mental Mercury and lovely Venus (beautiful words). His Mars in the public tenth house brought a fierce ambition. Jupiter in the eighth house (the natural home of Scorpio) gave him a deep faith and a fascination for those parts of ourselves that we bury in our subconscious. Although he didn't invent the Shadow, he coined the term.
Carl Jung's life and his work can be seen clearly in his birth chart. He was someone who wasn't afraid to break boundaries, cut ties, and challenge the status quo. His ideas were revolutionary, yet those groundbreaking concepts were anchored in a solid framework, a psychological and spiritual system. His greatest contributions were the Jungian archetypes, the process of individuation, the collective unconscious, synchronicity, etc. He created a new language—one that we are still speaking today.