May 21: Jeffrey Dahmer & Lisa Edelstein

[Jim Eshelman]

Dahmer, Jeffrey. May 21, 1960, 4:34 PM CDT, Milwaukee, WI (AA).
Edelstein, Lisa. May 21, 1968, 12:22 PM EDT, Boston, MA (AA).


A runner-up was Albrecht Durer, who would have been the example except Dahmer is just too good of a "catch" to pass up to diversify the catalog. If you look at Durer's chart (May 21, 1471, 11:00 AM LAT, Nurnberg, Germany), don't miss that Pluto is (mundanely) in the exact degree of Ascendant.

Dahmer is one of the great examples of the Taurus type of serial killer. Taurus' marks (and, as a supplement, Taurus connected to Pisces) are all over his character and motives. I'm most taken, though, with he very dominant Moon-Saturn square (consider the fact that the departure of his mother and then his grandmother opened the way for his aberrant behavior). It is a worthy question to look at what his basic, underlying character was - as if he were a healthy individual (I think the chart shows it very well) - and then to address the question of what, exactly, "cracked" him. (Lisa Edelstein is also Taurus-Pisces, but the main focus of her chart is entirely different from Dahmer's. Most of her body of work deals either with doctors or sex.)

[Jim Eshelman]

I just noticed something particularly interesting (and hard to see) about Dahmer's chart. He has an aspect that we have solidly, confidently confirmed works in mundane astrology but I have filed under "likely but unproven" in natal astrology - we don't have enough examples yet.

I speak of the aspects I call PVP aspects ("prime vertical parans"). Any planet exactly on the prime vertical is square any planet exactly on the meridian or the horizon.

Dahmer's Moon was 0°25' past Dsc in altitude. His Neptune was 2°05' past Antivertex in azimuth or (more important at the moment) 2°00' off the prime vertical in PV amplitude. We can get very close to their orb by subtracting 0°25' from 2°00': the Moon-Neptune square is 1°35' from exact.

I don't know how much this matters since Moon is already in Pisces, but (especially given that Moon is within 2° of square Saturn) introduces a level of pathology we don't see elsewhere in the chart: Moon exactly angular in Class 1 hard aspect to both Saturn and Neptune.

We might get the same effect from Saturn square a Pisces Moon, but it's not as distinctive.