This is turning out to be longer than I thought so I’m going to serialize it. Here’s part One:

Barack Obama sprang seemingly from nowhere to become the winner of the Democratic primary run for President. Until he gave the keynote address at the Democratic convention in 2004 he was little known, but that speech propelled him into the limelight where he became the hook for the projection of the hopes and fears of Democrats.

The danger of analyzing charts for the famous is the lack of real personal knowledge that we have about them. It’s all too easy to skew the reading of the chart through the lens that colors our perception of the individual. If you don’t like Hillary Clinton, you read her Mars/Pluto square in Leo square to her Leo stellium as a desperate thirst for power. If you love her, you read in it tenacity and strength and an inability to give up.

Barack Obama has attracted an even more divergent chorus of reactions among the Democratic faithful. Some are swept up in his message of hope and inspiration; others are suspicious and worry that he is a liar. Even on the political astrology boards, many are suspicious of what they consider Obama’s Neptunian attraction and the overwhelming response of his followers, as well as the lack of specificity in Obama’s speeches during the primary season.

Without an accurate birthtime, astrologers “rectified” the chart to fit their image of the candidate. Some liked the Scorpio ascendant of the 1:06 am birthtime because they felt he was secretive about his real agenda. I liked a Libra ascendant because of Obama’s collaborative style. Now that we have an actual birth certificate released by the campaign (although the right-wing blogosphere is still claiming it’s a fake) and an actual birth time, we can get to work and see who Obama really is.

The 7:24 pm birthtime on the birth certificate gives an ascendant of 18 degrees Aquarius, which is interesting since the eclipse on Super Tuesday fell nearly exactly on his ascendant. The late Howard Sasportas writes of the Aquarius ascendant: “[T]hose with Aquarius on the Ascendant (the point of self-awareness) gain a clearer sense of their own unique and particular identity through standing back and taking an objective and impersonal look at life.” Aquarius is cool and rational, with a passion for social justice and equality. However, Obama’s Sun is in Leo, the sign that requires a full expression of a healthy ego. We would expect there to be some conflict here as Leo is opposite Aquarius and where Leo needs to express the ego Aquarius seeks to transcend it. But Obama’s Sun sits in the sixth house of humility and service which depicts his need to develop his ego in a way that serves others.

The square from Neptune to the Sun in Obama’s chart seems to alarm some anti-Obama astrologers who assume that the tendency of Neptune to create illusion shows that Obama is a liar. While it is true that the square of Neptune to the Sun often does show a facility to take on a variety of roles and can depict someone who is prone to deception, it can also reveal a confusion (Neptune) about identity (Sun) that we have certainly seen with Obama. We see this echoed in the placement of Chiron (the Wounded Healer) in the first house of identity and personality.

This Chiron is important as it forms a square to Obama’s Moon. This is a fourth house Moon that craves a home and sense of family, and it falls in Gemini which needs to talk about one’s feelings, to be understood. We know from Obama’s biographical information that his African father abandoned the family when he was two, and that for several years he lived in Indonesia with his mother and her new husband. At the age of ten he was sent back by his mother to live with his grandparents, a white family in a white community. We can clearly see here the wound (Chiron) to a deep need (Moon) for family and ancestral roots (fourth house).

Pluto is also involved in this dynamic, forming a “T-square” as it opposes Chiron and squares the Moon. The Pluto/Chiron opposition generally results in a life that can be rather painful on an emotional level as the individual is forced by Pluto to face the wounds of the soul and work through them. This dynamic creates a shamanic process in which there is tremendous potential for understanding and wisdom. The pressure of both Pluto and Chiron on the sensitive Moon illustrates the emotional difficulty that Obama has experienced, although with Aquarius on the ascendant he will never reveal his emotions to the public.

come back tomorrow for Part II.