Some Pisces notes (Garth Allen)

[Jim Eshelman]

(from American Astrology, February 1963)

Years back, faithful readers of Powwow will remember, 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. Fair 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 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 most take 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]

These are amazing! Please do more sign notes by Garth Allen.

[Jim Eshelman]

These are amazing! Please do more sign notes by Garth Allen.

Did you see the Aries articles I posted? http://solunars.net/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=5107 I thought that more extensive treatment would have especially caught your eye. (The Aries pieces, and one on Cancer, are the only things approaching "full length" analyses he did. I'll unearth the Cancer piece one of these days.)

[Jim Eshelman]

Yes, I saw those. I guess what I should have said was, "Could you find Garth Allen notes on all the signs?"

[Jim Eshelman]

Yes, I saw those. I guess what I should have said was, "Could you find Garth Allen notes on all the signs?"

No. He didn't write on all the signs. Just dribs and drabs (and the longer dribs and drabs on Aries and Cancer). As I find meaningful bits, I'll post them, but they will usually just be a few lines here and there.

That's why it was such a big deal that, just before his death, we got him to write out his notes and basic findings. That's what I've given in the GA sign notes thread. Those 12 typed sheets of paper (here represented as 12 posts on a thread) are so important: These, and nothing else, represent his views on all the signs, and they were written down in the last months of his life when his views were most mature.

[Jim Eshelman]

On the way home, I was thinking about another Pisces detail I hadn't every thought through. I've been on an informal "project" of rethinking-through how each sign is substantially defined by its ruling and exalted planets and those that are home or exalted in the opposite sign. BTW, one of the things that has precipitated from this is remembering that the Rims are the most complex of all the signs when it comes to dignities - each of the four Rim constellations has at least two signified planets, meaning that every one of them has at least four planets defining it (e.g., Cancer is like Moon and Jupiter, unlike Mars and Saturn - that's four). It is then even more interesting to me that the only two Bradley ever wrote about extensively are Aries and Cancer. Most of the others are far simpler in concept.

Anyway, back to Pisces...

I realized I'd never thought through the ways that Pisces is defined by Mercury being double-debilitated there. Pisces should be the least mercurial zodiacal constellation of all. "Exactly how is this so?", I thought? Aha! There goes my Virgo. It's in that word exactly or, rather, inexactly. We're used to recognizing that Piscians are malleable, able (at their best) to be anything. Part of what makes that possible, though, is that they are noting specific. They are the antithesis of the Virgo-Mercury idea of "pin it down, label, identify exactly what it is." They are freed to be anything by being nothing in particular.

I think that is their distinctly mercurial element.

Now, there are several things about Pisces that seem mercurial. (Polarities are interesting that way. They pretty routinely have their opposites inherent in them, but after another fashion.) For example, Pisces can seem to have abundant curiosity, but the motive is starkly different than for Virgo. Pisces isn't really interested in learning a fact or pinning down what's so. Rather, they thrive on solving a mystery! And I'm not entirely sure that solving it is their thing, so much as living in the presence of mystery and navigating (unintentional but appropriate mariner term) its byways.

So, Virgo wants to know what's so; Pisces is especially attracted by the unknown and vague. Outwardly, these may look similar. Fundamentally, they are antithetical.

Also, one might thinking that conning is a mercurial trait, arising from the God of Liars and Thieves. I've often wondered why Gemini is known for being a cheat, and Virgo for not being a cheat. I tend to think Gemini has more of that because they are un-Jupiter, disinterested in "being good," a trait Virgo doesn't have. Now I'm thinking there is another side, too, which is that Virgo is in-Neptune and, therefore, polarizes itself against the planet of deception.

But the main point of this post is that Piscians are variable specifically because of avoiding specificity.

[Jim Eshelman]

(from American Astrology June 1955, in an article on Sir Richard Burton)

Only a man of scalawag caliber, born under the constellation Pisces, could have been such a master of disguise, such a genius at adaptability, so completely at home in a foreign environment. Love of distant shores, of exploring the mystical and the mysterious, is an essential instinct. Ancient astrologists [sic] continually referred to The Fishes as the patron sign of those with a wanderlust. The names of many notable travelers who were natives of sidereal Pisces, and fulfilled their innate longing to cross exotic horizons, come into our minds: Henry the Navigator, Amerigo Vespucci, Dr. David Livingston, Osa Johnson, Frank Buck, Lowell Thomas - and Burton the prize example of all!

Only a Pisces could tell tales so fascinatingly as did Burton in his books, and we think unerringly of those other spinners of mystical romance like Hans Christian Anderson, Algernon Blackwood, and yes, Manly Palmer Hall, who also born in this constellation of fluid imaginations and silver-tipped tongues, were keepers of a true gift of narration quite unexcelled. Little wonder is it that Pisces is the special birth constellation of America's most popular governors and university presidents.

Only a Piscian of the sidereal zodiac could revel so deliciously in the theatrical and effect-creating as Richard Burton, for his birth-constellation endows a native love of acting and masquerade. The great Harry Houdini, Lee Shubert, Florenz Ziegfield, Tennessee Williams, Mark hellinger, Paul Green, Michael Redgrave, twinkle-toed Robert Helpman, and william Booth, the man who gave evangelism its show business flavor, were all Piscians of the first water! Piscians are reliable bets to cop first prize at a Halloween party or Beaux Arte ball. More Academy Awards have been handed to offspring of the Neptune-ruled constellatkon than to thespians of any other zodiacal group: Joan Crawford, Walter Huston, Mary Pickford, Warner Baxter, Robert Donat, those two-time winners Bette Davis and Spencer Tracy, and that will-be, Marlon Brando - sidereal Piscians all. If you consider these basic drives of the constellation Pisces as a whole, you cannot help believing that Richard Burton could hardly have been born under any other sector of the zodiac. He was the greatest world roamer of them all, the exquisite storyteller, the adept dramatist.