Kurt Cobain: 15 years later we still 'eye him like a Pisces'

April 5, 1:46 PMAstrology ExaminerMaria Barron

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Kurt Cobain, young and younger  

Palm Sunday 2009 marks the 15th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death April 5, 1994. The grunge songwriter and musician, leader of the band Nirvana, lived his 27 short years with a personality so utterly saturated in the dissolving waters of Pisces that it left him with nothing firm to hold onto, in terms of a life of his own.

“She eyes me like a Pisces when I am weak,” Cobain sings in the opening line of his final haunting hit, “Heart-Shaped Box.” And in the note found with his body three days after his death, he ridicules himself as “The sad little, sensitive, unappreciative, Pisces, Jesus man.” Yet his music ranged from haunting to ferocious. What was up with all the anger from the “weak” Pisces? From the sad little, sensitive, unappreciative, Pisces, Jesus man?

This isn’t a cautionary tale about everyone born under the sign of the Fish. Rather, Cobain’s expression of his Piscean dilemma shows the importance of a person’s whole birth chart, not just his sun sign. Just as some people are born missing limbs, so some are born lacking some of the usual array of personality traits that together encourage us psychologically to endure. Cobain’s highly concentrated, extraordinarily Piscean chart probably helped him become a superstar of music. But he also used its astrological symbolism to express his enduring pain.

Cobain’s birthday Feb. 20, 1967, didn’t just make him a sun sign Pisces. His sun, Mercury, Venus and Saturn were all in Pisces. Spiritually, the sign is associated with the idea of “individuality” disintegrating into the All – perhaps into Nirvana. Even Chiron, an important asteroid representing the wounded healer, is there in Pisces.

Beyond that, Cobain’s moon and Jupiter are in a fellow water sign, Cancer. His Mars and Neptune are in the third water sign, Scorpio. That’s all the planets and lights that the ancients knew of, plus two more. Every one of the personality planets and planets of fortune was positioned at his birth to boost the sensitive, watery Piscean quality of his natal chart.

The only planets not caught in the net of the deep, moody, emotional, compassionate, dissolving Piscean vibe are Uranus and Pluto, the “outer” planets of shock and power, which stand directly opposite the Piscean stellium. These two were positioned to oppose Cobain’s Piscean personality with the sort of tone represented in nature by lightning and volcanic eruptions.

This is the “I hate myself and I want to die” axis in Cobain’s chart. He had joked that “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die” was the working title of one of his albums. But his hatred of himself was also intricately tied in with his Piscean sense of empathy, and he made that clear in his note.

He died of a shotgun blast while simultaneously having a potentially lethal amount of heroin in his system. The death was ruled a suicide, although some people still question how it would be possible for him to shoot the gun after injecting an incapacitating amount of the drug. The scientific evidence is at issue. However, the private investigator and authors who promote the theory of skullduggery and murder try to use the note to back up their theory. That’s where understanding the central psychic issue for an artist with a chart soaked in Piscean sensitivity and empathy could be helpful.

“I have it good, very good, and I'm grateful,” Cobain wrote in the note. “But since the age of seven, I've become hateful towards all humans in general. Only because it seems so easy for people to get along that have empathy. Only because I love and feel sorry for people too much I guess.”

The conspiracy theorists say those aren’t the words of a suicide; they’re the words of a performer retiring from the music business.

No. Those words are not about business. They’re far deeper and more contradictory, like fish swimming both ways. They’re the words of a dissolving soul who seeks return to some form of blessed All or entry into some complete Nothing. The pond here, in which Cobain felt so empathetically connected with everyone, was hateful to him and had been since he was a very small, open, loving, artistic, compassionate kid. Why? Because people don’t love each other and have empathy for each other and get along, although it should be so easy to do.

Most of our Piscean friends might remember times of similar agony. But most of them also have a variety of characteristics through which they can pull themselves back easily enough from the urge to thoroughly dissipate. Most natal charts, unlike Cobain’s, tend to reflect a balance of different qualities of the mind, spirit and body.

Cobain obviously spent some effort writing his full-page note, trying to explain his sense of himself and how the very Piscean essence of his being – empathy – could become intolerable. Many of his fans “got it” the very first time they heard his widow, Courtney Love, read the note, pausing from time to time to sob and scream back at the ghost of his words.

In a very real way, according to his words and the astrological symbols he chose, he saw himself as one with “us.” He wanted so badly to love “us” that the evil he saw made him hate the “us” he saw, which he considered no different from himself. It may be hard to understand how that could feel so horrible unless you have important planets in Pisces.

Of course, there are potential ways through any crisis. Suicide is not the answer. But trying to get a person who was so entirely Piscean to detach enough to grasp that perspective – particularly when he was living in fame’s spotlight – might have taken a genuine miracle.