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"If
you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly
imagine."
With those
words, uttered at the climax of Star Wars, Obi Wan Kenobi
lowered his light saber and dissolved into the Force.
On
August 5, Sir Alec Guinness, the British actor who became a new age icon
as a result of his role as the Jedi master in George Lucas' Star
Wars saga, passed away in the King Edward VII Hospital, south
of London. Interestingly, at the time of his demise, transiting Pluto,
the planet of transformations, and ruler of his Eighth House of death,
was in an exact sextile aspect with his Uranus, indicating that the end
came quickly and perhaps easily. Pluto also made a trine (120 degree)
aspect to his Sun, indicating that when the final moment came it was probably
peaceful and in the nature of a release.
Sir Alec was born with the Moon in the cerebral, verbal sign of Gemini,
a powerful indicator that he was a man with fluency of language, and the
ability to use words powerfully, as he did during a lifetime spent on
stage and before movie cameras. The Gemini Moon is also an indicator of
intelligence and literacy, and may account for why, in real life, Guinness
detested his role in Star Wars.
Sad as it
may be for Star Wars fans, in recent years Guinness had
few kind words for the Star Wars phenomenon and his part
in it. Nevertheless, a glance at Sir Alec's chart shows that despite his
own personal viewpoint on the subject, he was destined to become best
remembered and best loved as the hooded Jedi master of the Force.
The
Self-Effacing Sir Alec
Alec Guinness'
Aries Sun is located in the Twelfth House of his chart—the house of behind-the-scenes
activities. Even though he had won an Academy Award for his role in Bridge
Over the River Kwai, performed Shakespeare on the London stage
and become a pop culture hero, Sir Alec was a humble, unassuming individual,
prone to downplaying even his best accomplishments.
This self-effacing
attitude is often found with people born with the Sun in the Twelfth House.
His Sun is joined there in the Twelfth by Mercury in Pisces—the planet
of thinking and communications in the sign of self-sacrifice and imagination.
Individuals with planets here are reluctant to boast or seek credit for
what they do. Other factors in his chart, such as Neptune in his Fifth
House of acting ability, gave him the drive to become an actor. But his
core self (Sun) and the way he thought (Mercury) shied away from fame
and notoriety.
A
Blank Slate
"I always
thought of myself—not my personal self, but my professional self—as a
kind of blank," Guinness once said. "I try to get inside a character
and project him—one of my private rules of thumb is that I have not got
a character until I have mastered exactly how he walks."
Guinness's
ability to become other characters is another trait of the Twelfth House
planets. Aspects of personality (the planets) located in the Twelfth House
are rather amorphous and it is as easy for them to pretend to be one thing
as it is another. Linked to this is the chameleon-like Gemini Moon, which
is a master of mimicry. Gemini Moon people can sometimes find it difficult
to simply be themselves—the mannerisms and traits of stronger personalities
often rub off on them.
In Guinness's
case he put that part of his psychological makeup to good use. In Kind
Hearts and Coronets, one of the earliest films to gain him recognition,
Guinness played eight characters, all of them members of an eccentric
English family.
Guinness'
performance as Colonel Nicholson in Bridge Over the River Kwai
was another tour de force, a nearly seamless performance. Rent the home
video and watch as Sir Alec doesn't just play the English colonel obsessed
with building a bridge, but actually becomes him in every subtle
detail. Playing the role of a by-the-book English army officer may have
been easy for Guinness, with his Sun in Aries, the sign of the soldier.
But true
to form, he was characteristically humble about the Oscar he won for Kwai,
saying, "I don't look back on it as a great performance."
A
Reluctant Hero
In
recent years, Guinness publicly denounced his role as Obi Wan Kenobi in
the Star Wars series. "I shrivel up every time someone
mentions Star Wars to me," he said in 1997. In an interview
given that year, he said it was he who suggested to George Lucas that
Obi Wan should die at the end of the first film. He said he convinced
Lucas it would add something to the film if he were to appear as a ghost,
but he said actually he was tired of the "mumbo jumbo" concocted
by Lucas and just "wanted to get out of saying those awful lines."
This serious attitude probably stems from the conjunction of his intellectual
Gemini Moon with Pluto, the astrological lord of the underworld, which
might have made him more at home playing Hamlet or Macbeth than a character
in a space opera.
Nevertheless,
Alec Guinness' horoscope clearly shows that despite his protestations,
he was destined to become a pop culture hero, if not an actual icon of
the new age.
In the Eleventh House of Sir Alec's chart, sitting high in
the horoscope, the planets Jupiter and Uranus appear joined together in
the sign of Aquarius. Jupiter is the priest, the philosopher, the spiritual
guru, the very archetype of the Obi Wan Kenobi character. In Aquarius,
the religion or philosophy Jupiter teaches is a new age creed—a belief
in the brotherhood of man, the equality of all beings as emanations of
a mysterious Force.
Joined to
Jupiter is Uranus, the ruling planet of Aquarius. Uranus is known as the
liberator, the awakener. In the film, it is through Obi Wan that the teachings
of the Force are revived and taught to Luke Skywalker, leading to the
eventual destruction of the Empire, led by the half-human, half-machine
Darth Vader. The image of Sir Alec as Obi Wan, a real life English knight,
in the role of a knight of a cinematic spiritual brotherhood, is a lasting
one.
In the coming
years, Neptune in Aquarius will transit over the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction
in Alec Guinness’ chart. Neptune represents the energy that creates images,
builds icons and raises mundane things to a higher level. Now that time
and fate have struck Sir Alec down, with Neptune's passage, it is possible
that his image as the warrior/priest in a galaxy far, far away, may become
more powerful than we can possibly imagine.
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