Pisces & Actors (Garth Allen)

[Jim Eshelman]

Pisces Watermark!
(by Garth Allen from American Astrology 7/58)

Alec Guinness' snatching of an Oscar as the year's best actor for The Bridge on the River Kwai represented the seventh time a sidereal Piscian has won that supreme trophy in the thirty-year history of the film industry's Academy awards. Born April 2nd, 1914 in West London, Alec Guinness accepted his Oscar at a show-biz luncheon in London's Savoy Hotel, while still in the make-up and costume of the bewhiskered, dirty old tramp he is portraying in his newest motion picture! Guinness is usually unrecognizable from one picture to the next because of his superbly realistic disguises. This mastery of disguise is most intriguing, for Pisces in the natural constellation of theatrical effect and mimicry. Piscian actors do their best work in roles calling for dramatic visual effect and this calls to mind Guinness' fellow Piscians of the past, like Lon Chaney and George Arliss, and his double-Pisces contemporary Marlon Brando -all "men of a thousand faces." One journalist described Guinness as a "jack-pudding genius of hilarious disguise."

Astrologically, the outstanding earmarks of the Piscian complex are masquerade, distant travel and plasticity of affiliation. Shades of Sir Richard Burton, the nineteenth-century master masquerader, traveler and religions changer of all time! Alec Guinness, who completes the Neptunian circuit by nurturing superstitions and a belief in the supernatural went so far as to become a Roman Catholic convert three years ago. No matter what department of his life you scrutinize, you come face to face with telltale signatures of the constellation Pisces.

[Jim Eshelman]

Natal Potpourri
(by Garth Allen from American Astrology 2/63)

Years back, we pointed out that Piscian film actors and actresses have a corner on the Oscar market. Neptune-ruled Pisces is the constellation par excellence of the make-up artist, the grimace-and-gesture master, the other-worldly dramatist. Pisces is the zodiacal sector that sired such specialists of the weird and woozy as Hans Christian Anderson, Sir Richard Burton, Algernon Blackwood, Washington Irving, Charles Jackson, Mark Hellinger and Tennessee Williams. Fairy tales, Arabian nights, ghost stories, headless horsemen, lost weekends, green pastures and glass menageries - these are the sorts of imagery in which the Neptunian imagination loves to revel. The expert in special-effect hokum is apt to be a Piscian, as witness Harry Houdini, Lee Shubert, Hendrik Ibsen, Florenz Ziegfeld, and Robert Helpman. Even as scientists, Piscians are prone to come up with dazzling, logic defying concepts as did Einstein, Priestley, LaPlace, Steinmetz, and Millikan. There is a special aura of mystery and dramatic flare to whatever the Piscian imagination touches.

And when it comes to acting itself, whew! Make-up laid on by the pound. Alec Guinness and the late Lon Chaney, both thespians of a thousand faces, are the prize examples, these men being virtually unrecognizable from one production to the next. The reason we reminisce now about the mask and disguise motif of Pisces is that at this writing we are just recovering from two hours spent finding out What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? The two old cinematic pros who made the picture, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, are both sidereal Piscians. For sheer Neptune-Pisces symbology, this film must taken historic histrionic honors: imprisonment of an invalid, alcoholic delusion, psychic anguish, and the final scene at the ocean's edge. Name a Neptunism and Baby Jane included it somewhere in its footage. Best of all, though, were the fascinating projections of the Piscian celluloid queens themselves, and we made special note of the claim that both ladies tended personally to their own make-up jobs.

Let's not leave this subject without mentioning another interesting pair of actors. What two roles in motion picture history were centered around the unique theme of a character's spiritual and physical battle with a denizen of the ocean? Why, Gregory Peck's Moby Dick and Spencer Tracy's Old Man and the Sea, of course! Both Peck and Tracy, oddly enough, celebrate the very same birthday, which is April 5th. April 5th, both of them? Tropical Aries, sidereal Pisces; take your pick. There's something fishy about the tropical situation.

[Jim Eshelman]

Astro-Semantics
(by Garth Allen, American Astrology 1/63)

We did a double take at the sentence which gave his birthdate, for it stated, "Mr. Parks was born in Los Angeles, on April 1, 1922, the son of a petroleum engineer." It was clearly another of those instances of what we call living symbolism - the literal expression in modern times of classical astrological symbology.

The sentence was in the special press-release biography of Robert Joseph Parks, the director of the Mariner Project which had just dispatched a space probe in the direction of the planet Venus. It is only fitting that a sidereal Piscian should have been the brains behind the greatest navigation feat in history, that the vessel itself should bear the name Mariner II and that the distant port should be the spatial ocean around Venus, the planet exalted in Pisces. Not germane, but of unique interest, is the fact that the constellation Pisces had been on the Midheaven of Cape Canaveral at launching time, when the great rocket lifted zenith-ward from its pad.

Only a few days earlier, while contemplating possible items for this article, we had made a note to sometime talk about having gleefully discovered that Nathaniel Bowditch had been a sidereal Piscian. The opening sentence prefacing the encyclopedic volume Bowditch's Practical Navigator, now in its 88th edition under U.S. auspices, says: "Nathaniel Bowditch was born on March 26, 1773, at Salem, Mass., fourth of seven children of shipmaster Habakkuk Bowditch and his wife, Mary." Not long before reading that choice sentence, we had enjoyed the revival on television of an old Shirley Temple movie in which Shirley had darlinged her way through the role of a light-house dweller whose virtues and skills were accredited to her having been raised on "Bowditch and the Bible."

Students of astrology, take note of which side of the vernal equinoctial point the birthdates of these mariners, both ancient and modern, fell. Then ponder that the constellation Pisces held the natal Suns of such famed seagoing explorers as Henry the Navigator himself and Amerigo Vespucci, the man whose very name came to identify the New World.

Also mull over the strange statistical tabulation reported some time back which showed that when the birthdates of noted Americans in Who's Who who were born in other countries than the United States are compared with the birthdates of native-born notables, sidereal Pisces is significantly overrepresented! It does no good incidentally, to try to explain away such statistics as reflecting the pioneering instinct of Aries, because the clear-cut date distinctions just cannot be made to work out that way. Besides, the "pioneer" keyword came to be assigned to Aries only in very recent times and plainly originated from the observation that so many explorers, world travelers and globe-trotters (Dr. David Livingston of "presume" fame, Sir Richard Burton, Osa Johnson, Lowell Thomas, Admiral Denfield, and Frank Buck, for several examples) were born under tropical Aries sponsorship in most instances.

Sidereal Piscians are so constructed psychologically that they find it easier than others to pull up their domestic anchors to mosey around in foreign parts; their lack of ethnic loyalties is oftimes flamboyant. Piscians are born immigrants, in both literal and figurative senses. Little wonder is it than any group of religious converts to drastically different creeds than they were born into is apt to be loaded with sidereal Piscians. The same goes for nationality changelings. Ditto, political spies and defectors as shown by FBI case-history publications.

[Jim Eshelman]

When I saw the following headline about Piscian Lady Gaga, I instantly thought of the two articles posted at the top of this thread. Enjoy.

With "A Star is Born," Lady Gaga, forever a shape-shifter, now steps into the role of movie star...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... -born.html