Just A Little Broken: RIP George Michael

Tuesday December 27th 2016

george-michael

Fragile, strong, sweet, sharp — a little broken. George Michael was a superstar with a seemingly boundless musical gift, but it was his vulnerability that made him special. Something, somewhere, had been cracked (one felt), and, like a “golden repair” on a Japanese pot, it made George Michael beautiful.

Michael’s soul seeped out gradually into his stage persona. At first, he just seemed like a pretty, talented teenager eager to have fun and make money with his schoolfriend. But then there was Careless Whisper: we heard that sweet, strong voice deliver the wistful, hurting lyrics, and it was clear his talent was bigger than Wham!

This is such a sensitive chart. You need to have real grit to make it in the world with Cancer Rising and the Cancer Sun in the 12th house. Cancer Rising needs to learn how to create a protective shell because they easily sponge up atmosphere and energy — good or bad. It’s a Rising sign with allure though, drawing people in — and that Sun in the 12th might create a home for the masses.

This chart gets an A rating on astro.com.

This chart gets an A rating on astro.com.

The chart ruler is the Moon in the 2nd house of talent. You’d think that the Leo Moon might fight with a Cancer Sun — but in fact they are in “mutual reception”. Even though they are in such different signs, they work together. This gave Michael a core strength and resilience that helped him survive for so long.

All that Cancer: here’s a person driven by emotions, he is tossed on a stormy sea inside, but he has to act them out — and he has a route to do that. The Moon connects also to a very talented pattern Moon in Leo-Mercury-Venus in Gemini-Jupiter in Aries. This is quite driven. Jupiter in the 10th wants recognition and Aries can give that a one-pointedness, very helpful if you want to get to the top of your profession. Mercury-Venus in Gemini is a great poet’s combination, which connects with his strongly placed Mars.

That Mars is critical to the whole functioning of the man. It’s in Virgo — perfectionist, critical, sharp — and it kicks the Mercury-Venus into action. There’s the wordsmith and craftsman. Virgo is not a butch placement for Mars, but it can be gracile. (Michael was a great dancer — and appeared to really enjoy his body when he was performing as a young man.) And libidinous — by his own account he liked plenty of sex.

However, Mars in Virgo opposes Chiron on the MC. The Mars drives the Chiron. He said that he was driven to succeed by his toxic relationship with his father, who thought his singing ambitions were ludicrous. The MC is our ambition and also the way we’re viewed by the world. And Chiron is the damaged person driven there by the angry Mars right on the angle of childhood. So the story Michael told of ambition driven by a need to prove himself to his father was exactly true. Perhaps it felt like his father saw him as a damaged person.

Back to that dominating Moon. That’s an extrovert hidden in an introvert — and it’s opposite a very strong Saturn in Aquarius. Again, that might be a dominating, oppressive father squashing his creative, expressive, shining Leo Moon. Moon-Saturn oppositions can be tough, even depressing to cope with — and sometimes they can also be self-sabotaging. A Moon-Saturn opposition might stay in the closet for the sake of ambition. Michael said he felt that his career might not have gone as far as it did in the early 90s if he had been openly gay.

George Michael had a weird relationship with cars. He was in no fewer than five serious crashes — and those are only the ones we know about. This was clearly partly due to his straightforward relationship with drugs: he liked being high. Apparently he managed to cut down to seven joints a day, but every interviewer tells a different story. What’s clear from all of them is that he liked to toke — a lot. But back to the cars. These are a third house thing — and look at the Uranus right there in Virgo exactly sextile his Sun. Indeed his Sun would be unaspected if it were not for the Uranus contact.

And that is very interesting.

His ego (the Sun) is floating around in that strange 12th house, untethered. He’s experiencing huge emotions all the time. It’s a sea in there. I bet he liked driving because he connected him more to himself somehow, but because the connection was to Uranus, he was accident prone.

OK, back to the pot-smoking. This is also to do with the almost unaspected 12th house Sun. That’s the house of oblivion and self-undoing. Frankly, it is the stoner’s house. It’s a house of the loss of ego — so to have the Sun here is hard. You feel connected to everyone — and that’s a pretty lonely feeling. It might make you inclined to look for some connection in a Los Angeles public toilet. But it might also mean that you can feel other people’s pain.

It turns out that what George Michael did in secret was work in a soup kitchen, give tons of money to charity, hand out cash to strangers in need. He hung his dirty linen out for all to see and kept his generosity quiet. What a gent.

And then there’s Michael’s North Node on the Ascendant in Cancer. His life’s journey was about coming home to himself, of course. He did that best perhaps through his close partnerships. These may not have been monogamous, but so what, they were long-lasting and deeply-felt, for sure. When Chiron hit that NN, George Michael fell in love with a man for the first time, and a few months later found out that man was dying. Chiron broke him open and the songs poured out — including the beautiful Jesus to A Child in the clip above.

When he was forced out of the closet in April 1998, Chiron, transiting the 5th house of fun and games, was exactly trining his MC (public image), where Jupiter (fame) was by transit. Although far from damaging his reputation, the outing enhanced it — and he was able to embrace life as a gay man at last. Of course, his hilarious response,  Outside, to being caught cottaging by the Los Angeles police, helped endear him to his fans even more. In fact, a sense of humour must have helped his through the rough patches often. Cancer can be a funny sign and that Lilith-Neptune conjunction trines his Sun, so he must have enjoyed breaking the odd taboo and stirring up the occasional hornet’s nest.

He died too young. Uranus and Jupiter were both exactly squaring his NN, Venus opposed his Moon — all at 20°. (By progression, Venus had reached his Moon too.) So many of his songs are about love lost or unrequited, it’s sweet to think that he left this life in the embrace of the goddess of love herself.

I think this is the best version of Long And Winding Road I’ve heard. He gives the words a depth and sadness that come straight from the soul.

 

 

 

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  1. mm says:

    Thanks for this Christina, very informative. It’s not surprising either with that huge Cancer influence that he was by all accounts extremely close to his mother, even though his relationship with his father was so difficult (though arguably the latter spurred him on to greatness). And that 2nd house Moon – such a beautiful voice.

    Thanks too for introducing me to his version of Long and Winding Road which I hadn’t heard before. I have to say that it is not normally my favourite song – other versions set my teeth on edge a lot of the time! But you are right, George brings such beauty and depth to it.

  2. Dunya says:

    My 13th year old self was completely in love with him. I’m 43. I’ve been a fan forever. Just checked his draconic chart (the soul’s chart). His draco sun is in Pisces and draco moon in taurus. A great, creative soul he was.

  3. Thank you for yet another beautiful tribute. We have lost too many of the good ones this year.

  4. Gina says:

    Thank you for the lovely analysis. I was born in 1966 so George was really hitting his stride during my music listening youth. He had so much beauty, depth and was so sexy with a great sense of humor to boot! I also loved George and Aretha’s, “I Knew You Were Waiting”.

  5. Vesta says:

    My scorpio sun trines his, and my moon/saturn are square. He was only a few years older than me, so he’s a contemporary. I wonder if that’s why his loss has hit me so hard. I thought Wham was just good fun, but really took notice when he went solo. I would never hear a word against him, I just loved him. I loved how funny he was, I must have sensed his great compassion and empathy. I am only learning now about not just his generosity but what brought him pain. Experience brings insight. When he went through something, it gave him a deeper understanding of others. Almost makes sense that he and Princess Diana were friends, she was very similar. I think he wasn’t just a good man, he was a great one.

  6. IsyAweigh says:

    I have 12th house Sun and 1st house NN too.. your comments give me close-to-home food for thought. Of course, with a(nother) ’66 birthdate, I also have the Neptune in Scorp and Chiron in Pisces.

    With the subsequent death of Carrie Fisher (most famous as Princess Leia, but who also came within a hair’s breadth of stealing the scenes from John Belushi in the original Blues Brothers movie) and of Richard Adams, most famous for writing Watership Down, those of us born in the 60’s and coming of age in the 80’s are fast running out of cultural anchors to our own time.

    I can’t help wondering about that in a larger sense. What does the chart (if one could draw one) of the 60’s generation look like in progression, I wonder? How do you suppose it ties into the godawful mess in politics and the devastating failures of protect-the-rich-at-any-costs economic policies? After all, it is our generation that’s running things now.

    I have no idea how you’d do a chart for a decade. Jan 1 of 1960? A composite of each Jan 1? I’m sure some clever astrologers have figured that out.

    WTH is it with this year and all these extraordinarily gifted people going to their deaths? It seems so much more than their personal charts hitting the point — it seems like a greater shift.

    Perhaps that’s just the aching human need to make a story of others’ deaths, to make them seem more finite and bearable, to turn them into something other than the roaring of the vacuum of space and the terrifying silence where there used to be such glorious sounds.

    Or perhaps this cold is acting up and I’m getting feverish again! Sigh.

    I’d forgotten how incredibly supple and velvety his (George Michael’s) voice was. So much strength but so delicately controlled.

    • Christina says:

      The childhood and teen idols of that generation are disappearing… I think you need look no further than the Uranus-Pluto square plus Chiron in Pisces, since the Uranus-Pluto conjunction is the defining feature of the 1960s — and Chiron has returned to Pisces. Add to that Neptune’s transit through Pisces and you’re getting an end of an artistic era…

  7. soab says:

    I have to admit, I was surprised by this event.

    But of course the big thing for me is drumroll……Saturn at 22 degrees. With transiting Saturn and Jupiter forming tight aspects to that natal Saturn. Doesn’t rain when it pours when Saturn and Jupiter are involved with each other.

  8. Sabrina says:

    So many memories…
    who else is going to disappear before this year ends?!
    Vera Rubin is also very interesting and the transits as well. I couldn’t look too much (visiting DC before another change of era…).
    Dark matter sounds Plutonian at first but my feeling is there’s also Neptune…

  9. Laure says:

    I’ve seen mention elsewhere about 20 degrees having some great significance but cannot find any writings about it. Is there any further insight to this, starting with George Michael hopefully. I am a huge fan and some of his chart factors are very close to mine.

    • Christina says:

      I wrote about this in the December horoscopes

      “This will be very important in this final 10 days of December as the planets come into a rather lovely configuration. They seem to be helping each other, holding hands in a semi-circle around the Zodiac. Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Uranus and Chiron are all at 20°, strung out from Libra to Aries.”

      The emphasis on 20-23° continues into January with the upcoming Cancer Full Moon at 22° Cancer triggering the same pattern again.

  10. Hanna says:

    Thank you for this beautiful article.

    I would assume, transiting Neptun right opposite his Mars pretty much all of last year might also have weakened his vitality.

  11. Mendelssohn says:

    A very beautiful article, thank you!