A warning: today’s subject matter is not particularly pleasant. If you’re easily upset by the terrible things that human sometimes do, please feel free to drop by tomorrow. Tomorrow will be a happier day here.
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A menu can tell you what’s being served at the restaurant, but can’t tell you if the chef is having a good day or a bad day. The floor plans of the Titanic could tell you which of the state rooms were the largest, but it couldn’t tell you which ones flooded first. A layout of Disneyland can show you where the rides are, but can’t tell you which ones you’ll enjoy the most.
Likewise: the birth chart can show you the perils and potentials of an individual, but it can’t show you their soul. It displays the hand a person is dealt at birth, but it tells us nothing about how well that hand will be played. The menu is not the meal. The map is not the territory.
Above you will find the birth chart for Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old man who last Saturday night took it upon himself to take seven lives including his own. I’m sorry… “allegedly took those lives.” For legal reasons if nothing else, I should not stand in judgment over a person’s life… even a person who would obviously rain deadly judgment down on others, and who left a long public trail of YouTube videos and web site comments and a “manifesto” telling us exactly where he was coming from.
The natural (if unfortunate) human instinct is to project our judgments on others based on appearances. Many saw Elliot’s YouTube videos after the news broke and thought him to be a spoiled rich kid whose mommy and daddy showered him with material things rather than paying attention to him. According to the 137 page manifesto Elliot wrote shortly before his death, this is not the case. His parents were plenty aware something was wrong with him, and did what they could. Elliot simply refused to co-operate. He exercised his free will and would not play along. As a result of that exercise of free will, the world now has an extra seven corpses that it didn’t have on Saturday afternoon.
The time of birth in the birth chart I’ve supplied is approximate. On page one of his manifesto, Elliot tells us that he was born in the morning. And to most astrologers, it would be a no-brainer to the pick a time of birth that would put Elliott’s Sun, Mercury, and Jupiter all in the 12th House. The 12th house has a great deal to do with both psychic damage and darkness. Of course, the 12th House can be an incredible source of personal strength and spirituality, but in a case like Elliott’s, who can see that?
We can look at Elliott’s birth chart and spot the warning signs. Yes, he had Sun opposite Saturn. This would tend to indicate self-esteem issues. But Lord Louis Mountbatten had the same aspect in his chart. He climbed Mount Everest, he didn’t slaughter strangers. Elliott had a close Venus-Mars conjunction, which often indicate a high sex drive. We know that Elliott’s frustrated sex drive was a major contributing factor to his rampage. Hitler had a Venus-Mars conjunction too. But so does Richard Bach, the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It’s been a while since I’ve read that book, but I don’t recall any mass murders in it.
Imagine a world where every obstetrician is also a trained astrologer and can predict a date and time of birth months in advance with perfect accuracy. Couldn’t an obstetrician have read Elliott’s mother’s file and warned her that she should give birth on a different continent, or should induce labor early, in order to prevent the birth of a monster? No. The birth chart is like a genetic test for factors related to alcoholism or depression: it shows potentials but not guaranteed results.
We can look at the transits Elliot was having at the time of the shooting, and those tell a story too… but again, without knowledge of the individual, we couldn’t say for sure that this was the birth chart of a person who was going to pick up a gun and work out his personality issues on innocent strangers that evening. The Uranus-Pluto square and Saturn were both playing hell with his chart… as it is doing now with millions of other people who are less homicide-inclined. And yes, as was the case with Michael Jace and his wife recently, Mars in Libra was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
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I’ve seen Elliot Rodger’s YouTube videos, and I’ve read his manifesto… all 137 pages of it. Had I not known who he was or why I was reading that manifesto, I would say that for the most part it was a technically competent but ultimately dull piece of writing… perhaps the work of a self-absorbed rich kid who somehow fancied himself to be a 21st-century Californian Marcel Proust. Or maybe it was a stiff piece of fantasy written to help work out some psychological problems, the same way one might write (but not send) a resignation letter for a job you hate but still need. I admit though: the bit about the murderous hate and the planned rampage and the slaughter of innocents and getting revenge on womanhood in general and making a public spectacle of it all at got my attention.
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It turns out that human minds… or souls, if you prefer… are a lot more complex than either psychology or genetics or socioeconomics or astrology alone can describe. Elliot Rodger’s birth chart certainly bore the marks of a potential maniac more so than the average birth chart, but that was still no guarantee. Had his parents approached me a few months ago and discussed his case with me, I could certainly have pointed out the very real dangers… but in the end, it was Elliot alone who chose what course to take with his life. You put the Soul into your birth chart; it doesn’t put the Soul into you.
Hindsight always, by definition, has the last word. We all have choice. And usually… that’s a good thing.
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