Michael Jackson: The curses and blessings of opposing sun and moon

June 29, 2:53 AMAstrology ExaminerMaria Barron

Previous Next

7 comments Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Astrology Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

By the end, Michael Jackson might as well have been singing, “I’m weird, I’m weird, you know it,” because he really hadn’t been acting all black-leather-jacket and buckle-boots Bad in a while. A gentle soul who was both stretched and hexed by opposing internal energies, he had become an oddity to many, yet he was also undeniably a true artist of song and dance who painted large on the shared canvas of a generation’s lives.

Replaying the video of “Scream,” his edgy duet with his sister Janet, or watching his moon-walking Motown 25 performance of “Billie Jean” – now with hindsight – reveals anew his command of his natural talents, which he had developed into artistry in his young adult years. Here the gauzy texture of expansive imagination and other-worldliness was rendered with rhythmic precision into the tactile physical world. The result was music and dance so catchy and yet somehow so different that literally hundreds of millions of people caught on and had to admire it. How in the world does a person accomplish a thing like that?

The astrological explanation ties into Michael Jackson’s essential duality as represented by his Virgo sun and Pisces moon. Everyone has essential duality – a set of conscious ways and subconscious ways, a male and female side – which are represented by the position of the sun and moon in a birth chart. Sometimes the luminaries (sun and moon) are linked through compatible relationships with one another in the chart, leading to a sense of internal harmony. But luminaries in opposition, like Michael Jackson had, create internal conflict.

Readers who have been following the series on the six major issues of life might recognize that Virgo and Pisces are opposite signs. They are locked in conflict over materialism and idealism. They stand for the yang and yin perspectives on the issue of how one best serves and is best served. Because of their inherent conflict, sun-moon oppositions can be tough to deal with. But they also shed a certain light on a subject, because together in their opposition they are the full moon. Michael Jackson was born under a Pisces full moon on Aug. 29, 1958.

This particular opposition pits the practical Virgo priority for creating deeply disciplined and grounded works on Earth against the emotional Piscean yearning for deeply dreamy explorations of the unbounded, unearthly oceans of spirit and imagination. While the Virgo energy is highly self-conscious and self-reliant, the self in the Piscean depths becomes exquisitely sensitive to and nearly indistinguishable from the All. These are two diametrically opposed senses of self wrapped into the same personality.

The blessing of a sun-moon opposition is that tension creates movement. Hard angles in a chart often reflect the impetus to accomplish something noteworthy or extraordinary as one strives to accommodate the opposing forces pulling him in opposite directions. A person is required to stretch his view of everything as he learns to accept himself.

The curse of the opposition comes from the experience of sliding or slamming first one way and then another on the axis as various triggers arise. For Jackson, this would mean sometimes appearing as a highly disciplined performer and shrewd materialist and, at the other extreme, sometimes appearing to be lost in the fog, adrift at sea, gone to Neverland and unable to lay claim to a clear sense of self. Slamming around like that psychologically while in the vacuum created by never having had a normal life, and doing it all within the spotlight of lifelong fame, a person could get weird.

Death investigation and a second significant axis

The investigation into Michael Jackson’s death Thursday at age 50 is calling attention to the stress of a planned series of comeback concerts in London as well as his allegedly extensive use of prescription drugs for pain and anxiety. These issues are part of the same astrological axis highlighted by his opposing sun and moon. Physical health is a Virgo issue, which is also called a sixth-house issue, while medications, intoxicants and mental health are Piscean issues, or issues of the twelfth house.

But another axis comes strongly into play when it comes to the star’s issues with health and medication – the axis of home and career as represented by Cancer and Capricorn, which is also known as the fourth-to-tenth-house axis. As a child star, Michael took on issues of home versus career at an early age and was said to have dealt with them then with great maturity. But he was also subject to the will and whims of his father, Joe Jackson, in these issues of home and career. Joe apparently ruled both the home life of his nine children and the childhood careers of the Jackson 5 with rage and violence, through the invocation of fear.

Dr. Deepak Chopra, who was a friend of Michael’s, referred to Michael’s background as an abused child on the news show “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” Friday. A physician of both eastern and western medicine, Chopra linked that abuse to a number of health conditions the singer suffered from and for which he sought relief through medication. Jackson’s health complaints included at least two autoimmune conditions in which the body essentially attacks itself. Victims of childhood abuse tend to develop such conditions, Chopra said.

Obviously, issues of the home-career axis were huge in Michael Jackson’s life, and that shows in his chart as well. While the time of his birth is not authoritatively known, musician Basil Fearrington, who played in Michael Jackson’s concerts and who is also an astrologer and author, said Michael told him he believed he was born late in the evening, after 10:30 p.m. If so, his natal opposition of Virgo sun and Pisces moon falls squarely in his fourth-to-tenth-house axis of home and career, with his Virgo sun in the fourth house of home and Pisces moon in the tenth house of career.

If instead one uses a solar chart set for noon, as is routine when birth time is unknown, Jackson’s sun and moon still fall on the fourth-to-tenth-house axis, but reversed, with his moon in the fourth and sun in the tenth. In either case, the tension and the extremity of his Virgo-Pisces duality were played out in the context of home and career, within the opposition that pits the realms of the nurturing mother archetype, the maternal moon of Cancer, against a relatively harsh Saturnine father archetype in the cold and rocky realms of Capricorn.

Dreams made tangibly real

Michael Jackson’s unusual home life in childhood emphasized the practical, harsh and earthy ends of both those oppositions where they are grounded in Virgo and Capricorn, but it also linked into the dreamy emotional musicality of Pisces and Cancer. His childhood became a springboard through which he was able, in young adulthood, to shift the balance of energy over into the dreamier end of the axis. After catapulting himself into a dream career with his album, Thriller, which sold in record-breaking numbers for two years, he even created for himself a new dreamy Neverland home in clear contrast to the home of his youth.

The complicity of potent Pluto right next to Michael Jackson’s sun, in conjunction, gave all that oppositional tension and energy an explosive power of the sort associated with both creation and destruction. With a balance of Pluto-powered Piscean imagination and similarly Pluto-powered Virgo hard work, Michael Jackson did far better in what turned out to be the middle of his short life than most people ever do when it came to bringing his dreams to life. He pulled the creative waters of Pisces through and into the earth of Virgo and he molded his own reality, sculpting his public image, building his theme-park home, even going so far as to drastically reshape his face and overall appearance.

But as he lost balance in later years he slid further into Piscean formlessness and the Cancerian quest for comfort. Abandoning Virgo’s conventions of shared reality in favor of his own Piscean visions and perhaps delusions, he lost it all, Pluto style. Publicly, he became known as an unreliable oddball, with possibly sinister sexual appetites, or maybe just an easy mark for a conman. Certainly he was seen as someone who liked his medications. Eventually, all his dreams of the ideal world gave way to the realities of the material world and he even lost his home.

Could it have all gone down another way with those same astrological energies and tendencies at play? Absolutely. Our birth charts are the hands we’re dealt, reflecting some of the tendencies we’ll find natural and the issues we’ll have to face in our lives and times. How we play our hands is up to us but also dependent, to one extent or another, on how others in the game are playing their hands.

Probably, in his conflicted loneliness, Michael Jackson missed a few tricks as he played the game or felt that sometimes he just didn’t want to play. But at other times, he played so magnificently it was easy to love him, to feel uplifted by his artistry and to cheer him on. With the sudden finality of his untimely death, that shining greatness he once created out of the merged energies of his own contradictions rises again out of the shambles of a life that eventually grew too strange to comprehend. We may feel like we’ll never understand the weirdness of his ways, but it’s still oddly difficult to say goodbye.

Scream

Scream lyrics:

Tired of injustice
Tired of the schemes
The lies are disgusting
So what does it mean
You’re kicking me down
I got to get up
As jacked as it sounds
The whole system sucks

You peek in the shadow
Come into the light
You tell me I’m wrong
Then you better prove you're right
You’re selling out souls but
I care about mine
I’ve got to get stronger
And I won’t give up the fight

With such confusions don’t it make you wanna scream
You’re bashed, abused and victimized within the scheme
You try to cope with every lie they scrutinize
Somebody please have mercy ’cause I just can’t take it

Chorus:
Stop pressuring me
Just stop pressuring me
Stop pressuring me
Make me wanna scream
I mean stop pressuring me
Just stop pressuring me
Stop pressuring me
Make me wanna scream

Tired of your telling
The story your way
It’s causing confusion
You think it’s OK
You keep changing the rules
While I keep playing the game
I can’t take it much longer
I think I might go insane

With such confusions don’t it make you wanna scream
You’re bashed, abused and victimized within the scheme
You find your pleasure scandalizing every lie
Oh father, please have mercy ’cause I just can’t take it

Chorus

Oh my God, can’t believe what I saw
As I turned on the TV this evening
I was disgusted by all the injustice
All the injustice

With such collusions don’t it make you wanna scream
You’re bashed, abused and victimized within the scheme
You try to cope with every lie they scrutinize
Oh brother, please have mercy ’cause I just can’t take it

Chorus

Billie Jean (with moonwalk)