“It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.”
-Matthew Currie (or maybe George Washington)

In Jewish culture, there is a concept called a shanda (pronounced “shonda”). All people have a concept of “shame” of course, but a shanda is a very specific kind of disgrace. If a Jewish person does something shameful to another Jewish person, sure… that’s a shame. But for that Jewish person to do something shameful in front of non-Jews? Well, that just makes the whole Tribe look bad. It’s a shanda, I tell you!

Shia LaBeouof is a shanda for the Geminis. Or maybe he’s brilliant. Or maybe in terribly cliched Gemini terms, he’s both. Read on and decide for yourself.

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Shia LaBeouf (Born June 11, 1986, 12:14 AM, Los Angeles California) is a Gemini with Moon in Leo, who is perhaps best known for his role in the Transformers movies. Lately, his greatest claim to fame has been as a plagiarist: writing and directing a short film that was lifted almost entirely from a graphic novel by Daniel Clowes, best known for creating “Ghost World.” This story broke in December, when transiting Pluto was exactly opposite his natal Mercury. More on the role of Mercury in a bit, but keep that in mind.

When confronted with his plagiarism, Shia apologized publicly. Here’s the punchline though: he plagiarized his apology. So he apologized again… and plagiarised again. Then he did it again. At this point, people started digging through his past statements and found other creative thefts. Those who kept digging not only found that this was not the first time Shia creatively swiped someone else’s material, but that he had defended these actions before, about two years ago. At this point, the only defense Shia could possibly present for himself is utter stupidity, psychological pathology, or the more socially-acceptable cousin of those two: artistic statement. Yes, that’s right: it appears that Shia LaBeouf may be trolling us all — um, I mean, making a clever artistic statement about the nature of intellectual property.

Or heck, maybe he’s doing both. It’s a terrible cliche about Geminis — the ability to be simultaneously on all five sides of an issue that really only has one side — but sometimes cliches contain the truth.

“Authorship is censorship. Should God sue me if I paint a river?”

-Matthew Currie (or was it Shia LeBeouf?)

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When looking at the birth chart of any Gemini, Mercury takes on particular significance, as it is the ruler of Gemini. Geminis have a reputation for being great communicators and for being generally bright. Like any human quality though, that can be used for either good or ill. And as any Gemini (with their reputation for being able to embrace two or more sides of an issue at once) would point out, good and ill are often in the eye of the beholder — especially when it comes to The Arts. A strong Mercury can give a person the “gift of gab,” and the ability to create words and images that inspire and elevate. Of course, a strong Mercury can also help you get away with a lie or a half-truth. A birth chart can delineate a person’s basic attributes, but there’s no astrological ruler for “moral superiority.”  Smart cave-dwellers learned how to make fire to keep warm at night, and other smart cave-dwellers used it to terrorize the neighbors. Shia has a very strong Mercury: trine his Pluto (which strengthens it) and opposite his Neptune (which gives him the ability to explore the realms of the imagination, either as an artist or a liar (your decision).

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As an astrologer, all I can really tell you is that as transiting Uranus approaches the conjunction to Shia’s Part Of Fortune and trine to his Midheaven (career), and Jupiter rolls ack to being stationary exactly on top of his Mercury, this is all likely to get bigger rather than to go away, and will likely — somehow — be a personal net gain for him. These are all transits that point to the fulfillment of some major karmic life-purpose, one way or another. Whether or not this will involve something fairly brilliant, or more copying and pasting, or some combination of the two remains to be seen. Sure, Shia has been art-thieving for years now… but it’s only with the transits to his Midheaven that anyone is really paying attention.

Perhaps Daniel Clowes will make his own artistic statement, delivered through his lawyers.

“The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.”
-Matthew Currie (or was it Friedrich Nietzche?)