Any decent astrology book will cover the big four – Signs, Planets, Houses and Aspects – usually in that order.
A common way of explaining these features would be to say the planets are people going out on a Saturday night, the signs are how they are feeling and what they are wearing, the houses are where they are headed ( ie the pub, cinema, disco, restaurant etc ) and the aspects are how they will get on with each other when they are there.
Given the average attention span of most people drawn to astrology, its highly likely they won’t even get as far as the last group.
Which is a shame because while aspects can indeed explain how you might get on with other Saturday night revellers, we are talking about a whole spectrum of experience that runs from being pulled onto the dance floor and put through a series of manoeuvres that would put Patrick Swayzee to shame to being taken round the back of the club and stabbed to death with your body thrown into a skip.
Because while signs might be a good basic guide to character, it’s aspects that point to the direction a life takes.
To develop the night club analogy, meeting someone with the Sun in Capricorn could be the nerdy guy sitting in the corner.
If he had the Sun in Capricorn in the 8th house, his chat up line might be telling you how much money he had.
It’s true that the 8th house rules death, but at this stage you wouldn’t be thinking of that, unless it was of the ” being bored to ” variety.
If as well as this he had the Moon in Cancer in the 2nd house, he might be bragging to you about the size of his house, and you might be getting a bit of a control freak vibe, but we are still talking about an encounter with the chance of 1 in 1728, so there would still be no need to fear for your life.
If, however, this was a Sun / Moon opposition ( with a chance ratio of around 1 in 5000 ) you might be forgiven for thinking that he could be seriously possessive and if you did agree to head back to his mansion, you might have a hard time making your escape later.
But if we added to this an extremely close Venus / Pluto opposition, we are now operating at about a one in a million chance and you would be advised to be seriously in fear of your life, no matter how much money he had and how intensely creative he was.
Record producer and murderer Phil Spector had all this and much more too.
The Sun / Moon opposition focused by T Square onto Jupiter which made his mansion even bigger
The Venus / Pluto opposition focused onto an apex Saturn which made your chances of escaping said mansion a lot smaller.
On top of this Spector had a very close Mars in Pisces / Neptune opposition which probably accounted for his musical genius but also fed, by a wide T square to his 8th house Sun.
Three T Squares in one chart is extremely unusual. The only other one that I can remember offhand is that of another Sun Capricorn who was right at the top of his own profession but at the same time had a problematic private life and that is golfer Tiger Woods. For more on this see Tiger Woods – An Open And Shut Case
Phil Spector is someone to whom the words ” troubled genius ” have no doubt been applied many times.
On February 3rd 2003, actress Lana Clarkson met Phil Spector at the House of Blues club in Los Angeles.
Tragically Clarkson did not have access to Spector’s chart so she travelled to his mansion in his limousine. One hour later she was dead, having according to Spector ” kissed the gun “.
Spector was found guilty of 2nd degree murder in 2009 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
With charts that include multiple aspect patterns like this you will often find that major serious events occur when the heavyweight planets of one of them hit one of the others.
This was to be the case as the murder occurred when Saturn ( the apex planet of the murderous Venus / Pluto T Square ) reached the Mars / Neptune / Sun T Square in February 2003.
Spector was found guilty and sentenced at the absolute turning point of his life when Pluto was conjunct his 8th house Capricorn Sun in April 2009.
As if to emphasise this, Uranus was also conjunct his Mars.
So if you are going out to a club on a Saturday night its best to go armed with an astrology book, and preferably one which reads Planets, Aspects, Houses and Signs in that order.
If you do and you meet a character like the above the best advice is ” Da Doo Run Run “
Posted Jan 21st 2021