Copernicus: Mind-Expanding Magus
There’s a lovely little google doodle today of the planets moving around the our star, the Sun. It’s there in celebration of Nikolaus Copernicus’ 500th birthday. Copernicus’ book, On The Revolution of the Celestial Spheres, in which he posited that the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun, is said to have launched the scientific age in which we are still living.
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| This chart is from Astrodatabank and gets an AA rating |
We have his natal chart, because of course he was a practicing astrologer and he cast it. But he was using the Julian calendar, so you can see that his Sun is in fact at 10° Pisces, which today is around March 1st.
With his Sun in Pisces (on an “astrologer’s degree”) and his Moon in Sagittarius, it’s no wonder his mind was on higher things. And with Moon conjunct Jupiter in it’s own sign, we get a very big mind indeed. He was a real Renaissance Man – a philosopher, doctor, diplomat, priest, artist, mathematician, linguist and jurist. Clearly, he was interested in everything. This Sagittarius-Pisces combination belongs to spiritual seekers, people who are looking for meaning.
The chart ruler, with critical Virgo Rising is Mercury. In Pisces, the winged messenger has a reputation for irrational thinking, but clearly that’s not really right. I’ve put in the asteroid Pallas, because she rules pattern recognition, which pretty much describes the essence of what Copernicus did. He realised that the patterns of planetary orbits only made sense if they were revolving around the Sun. Pallas is at the very end of Pisces, in the last few minutes of the last sign, conjuncting Mercury, the mind. It was not until after his death that the Copernican Revolution began, just as Pallas was conjuncting his Midheaven.
The Saturn in the Tenth and Pluto in his First, in hard aspects to his Sun, might have given some indication of how his life work would be received…
It looks like Pallas is about to start something in Aries (if that’s not too much of a redundancy) … he really was just a bit ahead of his time, but the time would not have leapt ahead so crisply if not for him.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Copernicus. He wasn’t as dim as he made himself green-looking. A canny but disciplined survivor, I always thought.
I learn so much from you 🙂 I was thinking how his career was somewhat constricted in his lifetime, especially with established powers standing on his 1st and kicking his Sun up the tailpipe. Saturn’s placement here has a LOT more depth for me now…
Saturn in the tenth in Gemini – long-lasting, widely disseminated ideas! Canny but disciplined = Saturn in Gemini! 🙂
‘The astrologer’s degree’. I’ve heard this before, where a degree of a sign is related to a profession, etc. I have no idea where to find more info about that sort of thing, though. Help!
Maybe feel free to tell me something about my chart… I might be intrigued 😀
February 3rd 1995 6:53PM @ Harlem Hospital New York
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