Ariel Sharon: Simultaneously Complex And Simple

Monday January 13th 2014
Ariel Sharon aged 19
wikimedia commons

Ariel Sharon lived a life of mythological proportions. Villain, hero, warrior; farmer, politican, bully; killer, peacemaker; and in every role “the bulldozer”.

And those were just his public faces.

So how come the unstoppable bulldozer juddered to a halt for the last eight years of his life?
The chart of this man is as controversial as the rest of his life. If you scan the internet, you will find several different birth days for him, let alone birth times. However, I am taking the New York Times over The Guardian, which states February 27, 1928. The current chart on Astrodatabank has been changed and is now a rectified chart with a C-rating.* Instead, the previous chart – used by Robert Hand and Michael Wolfstar – looks much more on the mark and tallies with what Sharon’s mother said: her son was born “an hour or so after dawn”.

And if anyone ever had Jupiter in Aries rising, Ariel Sharon did!

Jupiter magnifies. On the Ascendant, it can literally add girth; in Aries, the sign of Mars, we get a great big bruiser: Ariel Sharon. Combine that with Uranus and we get a risk-taking, magnetic, impulsive, independent, larger than life ram.

Sharon always presented himself as a soldier-farmer. This story is perfectly told by Aries Rising and Moon in Taurus, the farmer’s Moon.

“The strength that I have comes from irrigating the citrus plantation, ploughing in the vineyard, guarding the melon fields at night. I believe that’s what gave me the strength.” In an interview with Time magazine.

Mars rules the chart, so no wonder he actually called his autobiography Warrior. What is more, Sharon’s supporters nicknamed him “Arik, King of Israel” from early in his career, and one of the signs of kingship is to have Jupiter and/or Saturn on the MC or Ascendant. Sharon has both. They recognised him.

Sharon started soldiering young, joining the Haganah at 14. The army must have suited him down to the ground with that Mars-Venus conjunction in the 11th house of comrades. Venus in the 11th: he loved groups and eventually he would love politics.

“As one who participated in all the wars of the state of Israel, I saw the horror of wars. I saw the fear of wars. I saw my best friends being killed in battles. I was seriously injured twice.”

Mars is exalted in Capricorn: the bulldozer, the earthmover, unstoppable. Notice that it is conjunct Pallas, the goddess of war, strategy and decisions. You might expect this for someone who was described as “a great general”, and whose military daring spearheaded the sweeping victory in 1973.

But the person who called him that, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, described him in the same sentence as a “vicious man”.

Jupiter Rising

The qualities that make an outstanding soldier – bravery, daring, decisiveness, charisma – can work to different ends in another context. In fact, they translate as ruthlessness, cruelty, recklessness.

The Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Aries on the Ascendant would make him a natural risk-taker. And Jupiter brings the luck that risk takers need to keep on doing it. Mars, as action and aggression, sextiles electric Uranus too.

“A bellicose man who seemed to be chomping at the bit to start a war.” — US President Ronald Reagan describing Ariel Sharon in his autobiography An American Life.

Sharon is accused of more than one massacre. He was forced to resign from the government in 1983 after being held responsible for the killing of 1500 civilians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon. But his record was tarnished long before then. On 15 October 1953, the village of Qibya was razed and 69 civilians were murdered in their homes. The major in charge of the operation was Ariel Sharon.

Astrologers will note a 30-year gap here and indeed Saturn is involved. On both occasions Saturn

Palestinian 
Poster Project.

was in the last decanate of Libra – the sign where Mars is in fall, but also in Sharon’s seventh house of enemies. Since this only happens every 30 years, it’s noteworthy. In 1953, Saturn was at 21° and in 1982 at the time of Sabra and Shatila at 29°, exactly squaring Sharon’s natal Mars. In this decanate, is the fixed star Spica, called the “defenceless” by some Medieval arabic sources.

Qibya was the first time Israel was condemned by the international community. With this kind of impact on the world, you might look for a fixed star aspecting a personal planet, and you’d be right. Algol, the Demon Star, is conjunct the Sharon’s Moon in Taurus (if his birth time is close to correct). The Chinese name for this star, which is easy to spot with the naked eye, translates as “Piled Up Corpses”. Vivian Robson suggests that Algol conjunct the Moon relates to violent death and extreme illness.

(So what happened the third time that Saturn came to the last decanate of Libra? Sharon was already in a coma.)

Qibya and later Sabra and Shatila might have finished the career of a different kind of man or in a different part of the world. But Sharon was able to survive and thrive in the Israeli army and later in politics after both scandals.

He always seemed to be the centre of a tornado of rumours, lies and myth, sometimes these were of his own making but just as often stories were invented by others. His critics say that Sharon lied to the Israeli cabinet and prime minister about the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 — telling them it was a quickie operation while telling the army to go full steam ahead into Lebanon. He’s also accused of bigging up his own part in various operations during the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War. There is more than one fake interview with Sharon that’s still quoted as if it were the truth, which make him paint himself as a sort of psychopathic anti-semitic baby-killer.

Rumour, gossip, lies and half-truths: this is the world of Pisces at its bottom feeding level.

“… if he were to surmount his weakness of not telling the truth in his reports he could be an exemplary military leader.”David Ben Gurion on the young Sharon.

But despite all this, we have a man who was able to swim out of trouble repeatedly, and indeed create a political career at the top of Israeli politics, and eventually become Prime Minister of Israel.

His Sun in the 12th house is highly political — George W Bush, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown share this placement. Like fellow Pisces British PM Gordon Brown, Sharon has been described as a “mega-intriguer”, someone who loved the behind the scenes deal-making of political life. Pisces bends and warps the truth, reflecting and refracting it like light on a rippling pond. The Sun in Pisces is at home in the waters of the 12th house.

Wailing Wall 1891

Planets in the 12th also often carry a burden of inheritance.

“As a Jew, it is my historic responsibility to defend the Jewish people. I feel responsibility for the survival of the Jewish people.” Ariel Sharon

Part of that duty in his mind was the expansion of Israeli territory. Saturn, the planet of responsibility, is in the sign of Sagittarius for Sharon. This is the sign of expansion and it is into foreign territory in the ninth house. He was called bulldozer because the mass destruction of so many Palestinian homes took place under his watch throughout the 1970s. He had the same policy into the 1990s.

“Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours… Everything we don’t grab will go to them.” at a meeting of the  Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.

There’s actually a yod, which is not drawn here, that runs from earthy Saturn to Pluto in Cancer to agricultural Ceres in Aquarius. From the 9th house of foreign to the 4th house of home and nation, to the 11th house of groups. The two arms of the yod point at to Pluto. Cancer is homeland, mother in her natural fourth house, roots. In Sharon’s case that surely is Israel. He identifies with the very earth of Israel with powerful, obsessive intensity.

His family asked for Ima Adama (Mother Earth) by Miki Gavrielov to be played at his funeral.

She will look at me, a good wise look
Like a son who has come in from the road.
She will hug me to her with a warm breath.
Mother Earth.

She will say: “You are tired from the journey.
Don’t be afraid, I will bandage your wounds.”
She will take me to her when I call her name:
Mother Earth.

She will look at me, a good wise look
So quiet, and always forgiving.
She will hug me to her with a warm breath,
Mother Earth.

This is Ceres. He loved his farm, his animals. This is what he imagined he was protecting with all that Aries aggression and bloodshed.

What drove Sharon was not personal ambition, but vision. This man had a Pisces Sun. And with his Mercury, also in the sign of the fishes, he thought in terms of myth and poetry. His thinking was feeling, impression, intuition — prejudice. He believed he was seeing a bigger picture, a larger truth.
Before the catastrophic brain haemorrhage that sent him into a coma, he had apparently done a volte face, forcing settlers out of Gaza and making noises about re-opening the peace process — for real this time.

But actually this fits in with his one real goal: to make Israel safe for the Jews. He realised, as is obvious to any outsider, that there will never be any peace for the Jews in the Middle East without a fair settlement for the Palestinians. As usual, with Jupiter Rising and Pallas at his shoulder, he had a bigger strategy.

Jupiter on the ascendant: he was lucky. Jupiter is Pisces own ruler too, so his Jupiter is super-strong, just look at the size he grew to. But he pushed his Jupiter too far: eight years in a coma, two serious injuries.

The beginning and the end of his story mirror each other. His childhood he described so: “I felt isolated, lonely.” His last years were spent in a coma — alone again.

The chart above shows the transits of December 15, 2005, the day of his massive stroke.

• Uranus, the planet of accident or shock, conjuncts his Sun.
• Chiron, injury, and Venus, luck conjunct his Mars

 
Also from the PPP.

Now it’s interesting that a transit of Venus is so clearly involved here because sharp-eyed astrologers will have noted that he was in a coma for eight years and we are currently in a Venus retrograde period. 

Yes, in 2005, Venus went retrograde on December 25 and slid back into Capricorn on January 1. On January 5, when his medical coma was induced, Libra was at 28° Capricorn Rx. The violence, which for most of Sharon’s life had been directed outward, turned inwards.

Today, as he is buried in the ground, Venus is again in Capricorn and Rx. She’s at 20° come back to pick up what she dropped last time she was here, eight years ago. But this time she has Jupiter across the way in Cancer, ready to lend a hand. Uranus, which initiated the stroke, spent the following eight years in the 12th house of retreat in Sharon’s chart. He started to fail as Uranus went back and forth over his ascendant, but now the planet of the unexpected is moving decisively forward and will not be coming back to that point for another 84 years. Uranus has come full circle.

With Uranus in the right place at last, Venus could take pity on an old man in a coma and bring him the blessing of peace at last.

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  1. Isy Aweigh says:

    Wow.

    Once again, you take a person or event too vast and irritatingly muddled for me to make sense of, and make it all make sense.

    I’ve loathed Sharon for his mindless bloodiness and insatiable hatefulness since childhood, but as an Aries with a twelfth house Sun and activated Taurus myself, I see that I didn’t understand his motivations before. I can see that.

    I’m reminded of that actor’s remark, “Everybody thinks they’re righteous.” It’s only too bad that it takes some of us so long to learn to see outside our own prejudices well enough to understand the larger context we’re a part of.

  2. Anonymous says:

    What do you mean by the burden of inheritance re: the 12th house?

    • Christina says:

      Good question.

      Partly this depends on your belief system and how you want to phrase it. But here is how I find planets in the 12th often work out. The 12th is less about you as an individual and more about you as part of a tribe. And your tribe has a history, so you carry that history into the present. In other words, you have life tasks to perform that are as much for your tribe as they are for you as an individual — more so. Some would call this karma, or karmic debt from past lives.

      So for example, what does Sharon have in the 12th? The Sun, identity, in Pisces. Jewish identity as victims, the sacrifice of the Jews. Literally, his parents were refugees from pogroms. This is Piscean. I am thinking of the Tarot card of the Hanged Man.

      But then Sharon has Uranus Rising in the 12th in Aries. The revolutionary first move had happened – his parents had moved to Palestine. His destiny was to carry that revolution – Uranus in Aries, pioneer spirit – into the future.

      I have written elsewhere about how Uranus acts as a time machine moving us backwards and forwards in time – connecting us to past and future selves. Someone with Uranus on the Ascendant reshapes the future for his descendants.

      Sun or Moon in the 12th often goes with spending some periods in retreat, in bed, ill or in Sharon’s case comatose. This is partly because sometime outer planetary energy is too much for one small human to take, so you need to rest.

      I hope that helps.

  3. C. King says:

    Wow, amazing! You really know your stuff and how to say it!