Frederick Woodruff’s blog Astro Inquiry is always fascinating and today he dissects the enigma of Michael Jackson through his Jungian lens:
Michael Jackson, as I’ve noted earlier, was a Sun conjunct Pluto Virgo. Unless given almost shamanic-like life training, Sun Pluto individuals approach existence from an impetus that most of us can barely fathom. And if we can’t understand it, imagine what it must be like for them to actually live it.
When Pluto’s aura veils any of the personal planets, especially by conjunction or opposition, the individual becomes an accessory to deviant dreams and obsessional compulsions. Phobic of death, covetous of power, and awed by the sort of concentrated mega-wealth that’s usually associated with organized crime (Plutocrats anyone?), society just doesn’t know what to do when Pluto rears his head and begins infecting what should be, in the Sun’s case, the direct expression of one’s being-ness, one’s existence and the search for his or her vocation. With Pluto riding the Sun’s beams we have — well — Michael Jackson was a larger than life example of a Virgo Sun gone Pluto-maniacal.
Levy, in his essay, calls this the “great contamination of things.” When Virgo short circuits the surrounding world, the very realm that Virgo tries to purify and then differentiate from, becomes a threat. Levy writes: “Not only, as has been said, was it viruses, germs, and bacteria. But life itself as a germ. The living as a bacterium. Matter, objects, and the very air he breathed as soon as he ventured beyond his dear Neverland became a source of infection, pestilence, a macabre obsession…”
Levy describes the hyperbaric chamber (remember when those photos of Jackson surfaced?) where Michael would ‘recharge’ as a kind of gizmo that ultimately became a “preparatory part of a funeral ritual.” A literal Pluto-Sun-Virgo-like sarcophagus.
‘Other’ ultimately becomes a problem for the hyper-hybrid Virgo. As the sign preceeding Libra, Virgo has an attraction-repulsion reaction to the notion of relationship. Within their bubble of self-monitored and categorized reactions to life, Virgo longs for human intervention. A metamorphosis arrives, fully complete, in Libra. But not without trepidation and hyper-anxiety for Virgo.
All of the mutable signs struggle with this magnetic but ambivalent pull towards the sign they proceed. But no sign seems to suffer as much turmoil as Virgo. This back and forth ambiguity can be taxing and often reaches a demarcating distancing, as in Greta Garbo‘s famous: “I want to be alone.” Garbo radiated Virgo’s beguiling sphinx-like aura to the maximum. In fact, hermetic autonomy is the virgin’s idee fixe. A system utterly complete unto itself. Virgos don’t really need others but they’re infected by Libra’s notion of others as a life path. And so life, as other — as people, comes leaking in.
As the purest expression of the Virgo myth, take Jesus’s mother Mary. She accomplished the miracle of all miracles via the immaculate conception. She maintained her virgin state and yet bore a child. Michael Jackson attempted something similar. No one really knows who the father of his children are. Or for that matter the mother. Or rather, where the eggs came from that his ‘wife’ Debbie Rowe incubated.
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