Genius and the birth chart of Neil Gaiman

On Friday night I had the joy of hearing author Neil Gaiman speak at MIT. Hearing this accomplished, much-lauded writer speak so articulately about writing, imagination, and even – credibly – the connection between pornography and musicals, I sat in wonder at how one lifetime can be so relentlessly prolific, to the level of genius. I have his birth data, self-reported on his own blog, and a few thoughts about some of the genius in his own nativity.

(10 November 1960, 6:30pm GMT, Portchester, England. Click to enlarge the chart.)

This is a man who turns everything he touches into the weirdest literary gold. The critically acclaimed Sandman comic, now a series of graphic novels, which tells the tale of the King of Dreams and originally established Gaiman’s reputation as a master storyteller. Best-sellers for adults, like American Gods and Anansi Boys, in which the gods sort out their problems in modern-day America; and for children, titles like Coraline, The Wolves in the Walls, and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish. This, I promise, is only the tip of a very profound iceberg-oeuvre that can’t merely be summed up as science fiction/fantasy/horror. You must, you must go to the library or the bookstore and treat yourself at the earliest opportunity to his tricksy, wonderful, masterful storytelling.

Which planet would you expect to be strongest in the life of such an accomplished writer? Mercury, right? Especially as ruler of his Gemini ascendant (and yes, I think it must be a Gemini ascendant, though if he was born even a minute later it would be Cancer instead). And yet it isn’t strong at all, not traditionally. Have a look: it’s peregrine, retrograde, combust, and cadent. At least it is separating from combustion, escaping the heat of the Sun. But for someone listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as being among the top ten living post-modern writers, Neil Gaiman certainly doesn’t have what you’d call a picture-perfect Mercury running the show.

No, the most dignified planet in Gaiman’s natal chart is someone else entirely, and points to what I think is the true reason Gaiman makes himself successful. It is Saturn in its rulership in Capricorn: the lord of time, discipline, and hard work. It speaks to a remarkable commitment to responsibility and doing things the old-fashioned way: no shortcuts, just earning your chops on a daily basis by showing up to do what must be done, to tell what must be told.

A planet in its rulership is its own master, a king in his castle, with all his resources at his beck and call. In Neil Gaiman’s birth chart, using traditional planetary rulerships, Saturn rules the 8th, 9th, and 10th houses: the realms of death, dream, and fame. The Sandman comics which brought Gaiman to fame tell the story of Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming, and the conflict he experiences over feeling responsible to his kingdom on the one hand and wanting to abandon his responsibility on the other: engineering a way he, one of seven immortal siblings known as the Endless, can die.

Lecturing at MIT, Gaiman said something about Sandman that I found simply incredible – and a marvelous illustration of Saturn at work. The series ended up being more than 70 issues in length over several years; but in its first year, Gaiman was perfectly aware that his publisher might cancel the series after just 12 issues. He knew he had at least a year’s worth of comics in which to say something interesting; but even with no guarantees about Sandman’s future, he planned for there to be one. In those first 12 issues, Gaiman intentionally planted the seeds of a much larger, overarching storyline that he knew he’d be able to develop if given the chance. With Saturn in its rulership in Capricorn, he paced himself, planned ahead, and eventually found that time was indeed on his side when the series was renewed and continued. In the end, he was able to tell Dream’s story just the way he had planned from Sandman’s very earliest days.

Gaiman said at his talk at MIT that one of the wonders of science fiction is that it invites us to ask the question, “What if?” It’s the question that leads to every creation. Something must be imagined before it can be made real, whether it’s a story or a skyscraper. Capricorn, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, is the sign of the seed buried in the earth at the winter solstice. It is a little piece of potential, a little bit of “what if” that, if it is fortunate enough to land on sufficiently fertile ground, might one day become “what is.”

There is so much more to say about Neil Gaiman’s birth chart. The star Menkalinan rises, which is the shoulder of the charioteer Auriga, he who steers the horses of our desire nature. That strange Mercury in fertile Scorpio (conjunct Acrux in the Southern Cross) applies to sextile the North Node in Mercury’s other sign, Virgo, so Mercury does have his say in the weirdest and most Scorpionic of ways. Saturn itself is on Wega, Vultur Cadens, who brings the wisdom of the heavens back down to earth.

Am I saying that his planets cause his genius? That Saturn on Wega drives him to dive down from lofty heights with stories from the sky? It is more complicated than that, and also more simple. There is no causation – it is not synchronicity either – but the Hermetic principle of “as above, so below” that so many cite and do not understand is, I think, literally true. The life echoes the symbolism of the heavens because we are the same. In Gaiman’s case, it is a life of genius: his birth chart reflects his lifetime’s direction, to create and create and create – at genius level.

Neil Gaiman’s blog: http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal. His bio for the Julius Schwartz Lecture at MIT: http://cms.mit.edu/juliusschwartz/speakers.html. Bookmark that web site, by the way; they’ll be posting information on how to buy the DVD of the lecture, and you really don’t want to miss the part about the connection between porn and musicals. (I can try to explain, but it’s much funnier coming from him, and I definitely don’t want the search engine traffic for porn.)