FAMOUS
Fench singer Edith Piaf's life was sad, dramatic and valiant. By her early teens, she was living rough as a prostitute and street singer; by her mid-20s she had buried her own child, battled starvation, survived a murder attempt by a pimp, been discovered and signed up for a record contract, and witnessed her newfound fame crash in the scandal of becoming a suspect in the murder of her agent, (if for no other reason than her association with the seedier side of Parisian life). Her life continued in a cycle of tragedy rotating with success, passionate love affairs that trailed disappointment, and battles with alcohol and drug abuse, all of which play out the theme of 7th-ruler Venus opposed and disposited by debilitated Saturn in the 8th.
During her heyday, Piaf became the highest-paid show business personality in the world, and yet she suffered prolonged periods of poverty and was never able to free herself from the shadow of disaster. According to her sisterâs biography, Piaf underwent âfour automobile accidents, attempted suicides, four drug cures, ... seven operations, three hepatic comas, spells of madness, two bouts with bronchial pneumonia and one with pulmonary edemaâ. The happiness she finally encountered in her mid-forties, in her marriage to a loving husband in 1962, was cut short by her untimely death from liver cancer the following year.
The retrograding trine of 8th house Saturn to the 4th house cusp, and the square of the Sun to the 4th-ruler, Jupiter, show Piafâs emergence from roots set in rejection, tension, squalor and poverty; yet Jupiter is strong and dignified, and in adding its expansive mutable virtue to her already mutable, fiery Sun, Piaf quickly learned to adapt to circumstance and build her strengths on communicating raw emotion. Such heightened mutability also fostered her immoderate and unbalanced lifestyle, where she found it almost impossible to feel a sense of âbelongingâ to any one person or place. Jupiter aptly signifies her father, an acrobat by profession and â it seems â by nature. Abandoning Piaf to the care of a brothel owner after the desertion of her mother, he reappeared for brief periods but generally had little time for his child. Piaf spent much of her young life pursuing relationships with older men, looking for father figures who could offer support to her ambitions.
Scorpio on the ascendant allows ruthless determination to arise from exposure to the darker elements of society. Its ruler, Mars, is elevated on the trine of the Sun, bringing courage, an instinct to fight oppression, and the promise of glory through refusal to submit. Those who have the Sun favoured by Mars rarely experience easy, contented lifestyles, but the buoyancy of Piafâs Sagittarian Sun allows humour and hopefulness to surface, with an extended vision that sees beyond the here and now. Piaf was rough and ready, fiery by temperament but also prone to the erratic and dissipating moods created by the emphasis on fire and water.
Piaf means âsparrowâ, the little sparrow being the nickname Edith gained on account of her tiny frame and generally nervous disposition. We see the signature here of Mercury, weak in dignity but strong in significance: ruling the Virgo midheaven, dispositing the Gemini Moon and joined to Sun. With Mercury combust and in detriment, ruling the 8th house as well as the MC, Piaf remained emotionally insecure and tied to a sense of loss and trauma despite her professional success. In fact, that was probably the fundamental reason for her great success â her incredible voice was truly unique in the way she could communicate all this deep, dark emotion yet still generate the passion, ferocity, and hopeful bravado implicit in her Sunâs trine to Mars.
All the extremes by which she lived her life: joy and pain, hope and grief, romance and heartbreak, defiance and vulnerability, laughter and tears, combined to create the unrelenting spirit captured in her famous song Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (âNo, I Have No Regretsâ) which made her loved, not in spite of her flaws, but for the honest openness by which she exposed them to the world, as part of her creative melody.
Mary Queen of Scots is one of the most colourful, dramatic figures in history. Reputedly very tall and beautiful, she was marked by a fiery temperament that caused her to act on impulse and brought criticisms of tactlessness. Depictions of Mary readily register the 9th house Sagittarian Sun: she travelled widely, led an extremely active life, loved horse riding and all sport (first woman to play golf publicly in Scotland), revelled in the open air, was a keen student of philosophy and was proficient in French, Latin, Greek, Spanish and Italian as well as English and her native Old Scot. She was said to be generous, forgiving and sociable, too trusting for the good of any queen and remarkable for her outgoing humour. She held her âsmiling cheerâ for the 44 years she held her head, proclaiming at her execution that âshe never had such grooms to make her unready, and she never put off her clothes before such a companyâ. Emotionally, however, Mary suffered from her restlessness and found it hard to accept the limiting responsibilities that came with the weight of monarchy.
The Moon conjunct 3rd-ruler Mercury in the midheaven reflects Maryâs dexterity and talent for language, but the debilitated Moonâs translation between Saturn on the descendant and descendant-ruler Mars activates the hostile square between those two malefics, forewarning of downfall, danger through enemies and ill-conceived relationships. Those planets play a key role in the many occasions Mary faced peril, and the Moon and Sun joined on her nodal Mars as she was beheaded, while MC-ruler Saturn transited in direct opposition to natal 8th-ruler, Jupiter. (A dramatic configuration lined up on 9th March 1566, when pregnant Mary was threatened by a group of conspirators who stabbed her close friend and secretary to death in front of her at Holyrood: among other telling testimonies, transiting Mars opposed her natal Sun / transiting Saturn opposed her natal Mars on the nodal axis).
The illnesses Mary suffered from arose from her choleric-melancholy disposition and included ulcers and violent fits of depression. By her own admission, her faults lay in her willingness to follow her own heart too eagerly and, in so doing, throw caution to the wind. With the Sun square Mars, her passions were too intense for the politically sensitive position she held. The sextile between the Sun and Jupiter only served to underline this â though it added to her intellectual capacity and benevolent, trusting outlook, Jupiter is ruler of the oppressive 8th and 12th houses, indicating damage from an overflow of liberality in situations that call for subtlety and discretion.
Sir Winston Churchill is best known for his stubborn yet courageous leadership of Great Britain during World War II, when he led his nation from the brink of defeat to ultimate victory. His defining qualities are aptly illustrated by the dissociate square between the luminaries, demonstrating a theme of needing to combine energies that don't naturally support each other. Fixity of mind, shown by the Moon in Leo conjunct the âroyalâ fixed star Regulus, can often conflict with the Sagittarian will to experiment and take risk; but when these qualities are successfully brought together, a resilient and clearly defined sense of purpose will help to anchor the mutable trait of remoulding visions according to circumstances. Churchill is a good example of how flexibility and fiery eagerness can be combined with long term planning and the realisation that even failures are necessary steps on the road to success. He was no stranger to failure himself, and in true Sagittarian style defined âsuccessâ as âthe ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasmâ.
With his Sagittarius Sun sextile Mars and trine Uranus, Churchill actively sought out challenges and refused to give up on a fight. As a young war correspondent, he was captured during the Boer War but escaped to become a national hero. A chart with changing signs on all angles proposes a life of many variations, and Churchill had an undulating career in politics, which saw him rise to the position of First Lord of the Admiralty, before being forced to resign following the disgrace of the unsuccessful Gallipoli campaign in World War I. He later re-entered Government when he joined the Coalition Party, but its collapse in 1922 left him out of Parliament for two years. He returned via the Conservative party but was denied cabinet office until 1939, when his ability to rouse public support against the German invasion of Poland regained him the position of First Lord of the Admiralty, after which he succeeded Chamberlain as Prime Minister in 1940.
Although he had aptly demonstrated physical courage in his youth, it was through the 3rd house influences of his Sun - writing, reporting and public oration - that Churchill left his mark to become an icon for hopeful vision (Moon in 11th) and courage in the face of adversity. Political defeat followed the war, but Churchill once again used the experience of failure as an opportunity for renewed success: âHistory will be kind to meâ, he stated on his retirement, âfor I intend to write itâ. He did â and emerged to recognition again when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, on account of his Historical Studies of English-speaking Peoples.
SAGITTARIUS
by Deborah Houlding
How does the Sun in Sagittarius play out in the charts of famous people?
For the deep-dive into 
see the Sign Symbolism of Sagittarius
see the Sign Symbolism of Sagittarius
Edith Piaf
Fench singer Edith Piaf's life was sad, dramatic and valiant. By her early teens, she was living rough as a prostitute and street singer; by her mid-20s she had buried her own child, battled starvation, survived a murder attempt by a pimp, been discovered and signed up for a record contract, and witnessed her newfound fame crash in the scandal of becoming a suspect in the murder of her agent, (if for no other reason than her association with the seedier side of Parisian life). Her life continued in a cycle of tragedy rotating with success, passionate love affairs that trailed disappointment, and battles with alcohol and drug abuse, all of which play out the theme of 7th-ruler Venus opposed and disposited by debilitated Saturn in the 8th.
During her heyday, Piaf became the highest-paid show business personality in the world, and yet she suffered prolonged periods of poverty and was never able to free herself from the shadow of disaster. According to her sisterâs biography, Piaf underwent âfour automobile accidents, attempted suicides, four drug cures, ... seven operations, three hepatic comas, spells of madness, two bouts with bronchial pneumonia and one with pulmonary edemaâ. The happiness she finally encountered in her mid-forties, in her marriage to a loving husband in 1962, was cut short by her untimely death from liver cancer the following year.
The retrograding trine of 8th house Saturn to the 4th house cusp, and the square of the Sun to the 4th-ruler, Jupiter, show Piafâs emergence from roots set in rejection, tension, squalor and poverty; yet Jupiter is strong and dignified, and in adding its expansive mutable virtue to her already mutable, fiery Sun, Piaf quickly learned to adapt to circumstance and build her strengths on communicating raw emotion. Such heightened mutability also fostered her immoderate and unbalanced lifestyle, where she found it almost impossible to feel a sense of âbelongingâ to any one person or place. Jupiter aptly signifies her father, an acrobat by profession and â it seems â by nature. Abandoning Piaf to the care of a brothel owner after the desertion of her mother, he reappeared for brief periods but generally had little time for his child. Piaf spent much of her young life pursuing relationships with older men, looking for father figures who could offer support to her ambitions.
Scorpio on the ascendant allows ruthless determination to arise from exposure to the darker elements of society. Its ruler, Mars, is elevated on the trine of the Sun, bringing courage, an instinct to fight oppression, and the promise of glory through refusal to submit. Those who have the Sun favoured by Mars rarely experience easy, contented lifestyles, but the buoyancy of Piafâs Sagittarian Sun allows humour and hopefulness to surface, with an extended vision that sees beyond the here and now. Piaf was rough and ready, fiery by temperament but also prone to the erratic and dissipating moods created by the emphasis on fire and water.
All the extremes by which she lived her life: joy and pain, hope and grief, romance and heartbreak, defiance and vulnerability, laughter and tears, combined to create the unrelenting spirit captured in her famous song Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (âNo, I Have No Regretsâ) which made her loved, not in spite of her flaws, but for the honest openness by which she exposed them to the world, as part of her creative melody.
Mary Stuart â âQueen of Scotsâ
Mary Queen of Scots is one of the most colourful, dramatic figures in history. Reputedly very tall and beautiful, she was marked by a fiery temperament that caused her to act on impulse and brought criticisms of tactlessness. Depictions of Mary readily register the 9th house Sagittarian Sun: she travelled widely, led an extremely active life, loved horse riding and all sport (first woman to play golf publicly in Scotland), revelled in the open air, was a keen student of philosophy and was proficient in French, Latin, Greek, Spanish and Italian as well as English and her native Old Scot. She was said to be generous, forgiving and sociable, too trusting for the good of any queen and remarkable for her outgoing humour. She held her âsmiling cheerâ for the 44 years she held her head, proclaiming at her execution that âshe never had such grooms to make her unready, and she never put off her clothes before such a companyâ. Emotionally, however, Mary suffered from her restlessness and found it hard to accept the limiting responsibilities that came with the weight of monarchy.
The Moon conjunct 3rd-ruler Mercury in the midheaven reflects Maryâs dexterity and talent for language, but the debilitated Moonâs translation between Saturn on the descendant and descendant-ruler Mars activates the hostile square between those two malefics, forewarning of downfall, danger through enemies and ill-conceived relationships. Those planets play a key role in the many occasions Mary faced peril, and the Moon and Sun joined on her nodal Mars as she was beheaded, while MC-ruler Saturn transited in direct opposition to natal 8th-ruler, Jupiter. (A dramatic configuration lined up on 9th March 1566, when pregnant Mary was threatened by a group of conspirators who stabbed her close friend and secretary to death in front of her at Holyrood: among other telling testimonies, transiting Mars opposed her natal Sun / transiting Saturn opposed her natal Mars on the nodal axis).
The illnesses Mary suffered from arose from her choleric-melancholy disposition and included ulcers and violent fits of depression. By her own admission, her faults lay in her willingness to follow her own heart too eagerly and, in so doing, throw caution to the wind. With the Sun square Mars, her passions were too intense for the politically sensitive position she held. The sextile between the Sun and Jupiter only served to underline this â though it added to her intellectual capacity and benevolent, trusting outlook, Jupiter is ruler of the oppressive 8th and 12th houses, indicating damage from an overflow of liberality in situations that call for subtlety and discretion.
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Churchill is best known for his stubborn yet courageous leadership of Great Britain during World War II, when he led his nation from the brink of defeat to ultimate victory. His defining qualities are aptly illustrated by the dissociate square between the luminaries, demonstrating a theme of needing to combine energies that don't naturally support each other. Fixity of mind, shown by the Moon in Leo conjunct the âroyalâ fixed star Regulus, can often conflict with the Sagittarian will to experiment and take risk; but when these qualities are successfully brought together, a resilient and clearly defined sense of purpose will help to anchor the mutable trait of remoulding visions according to circumstances. Churchill is a good example of how flexibility and fiery eagerness can be combined with long term planning and the realisation that even failures are necessary steps on the road to success. He was no stranger to failure himself, and in true Sagittarian style defined âsuccessâ as âthe ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasmâ.
With his Sagittarius Sun sextile Mars and trine Uranus, Churchill actively sought out challenges and refused to give up on a fight. As a young war correspondent, he was captured during the Boer War but escaped to become a national hero. A chart with changing signs on all angles proposes a life of many variations, and Churchill had an undulating career in politics, which saw him rise to the position of First Lord of the Admiralty, before being forced to resign following the disgrace of the unsuccessful Gallipoli campaign in World War I. He later re-entered Government when he joined the Coalition Party, but its collapse in 1922 left him out of Parliament for two years. He returned via the Conservative party but was denied cabinet office until 1939, when his ability to rouse public support against the German invasion of Poland regained him the position of First Lord of the Admiralty, after which he succeeded Chamberlain as Prime Minister in 1940.
Although he had aptly demonstrated physical courage in his youth, it was through the 3rd house influences of his Sun - writing, reporting and public oration - that Churchill left his mark to become an icon for hopeful vision (Moon in 11th) and courage in the face of adversity. Political defeat followed the war, but Churchill once again used the experience of failure as an opportunity for renewed success: âHistory will be kind to meâ, he stated on his retirement, âfor I intend to write itâ. He did â and emerged to recognition again when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, on account of his Historical Studies of English-speaking Peoples.
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