Heath Ledger Chart Analysis

Whenever I see a chart with a very round birth time, it makes me skeptical. There are so many public charts out there on various websites such as AstroTheme and AstroDienst and it is often not clear where they are from. Many of them have birth times at an exakt full hour or half hour, so that whenever I see yet another chart with a round birth time I figure that the chances of it being the correct birth time are pretty low.

With this caveat in mind, I still want to have a brief look at the chart of Heath Ledger. He was supposedly born at 6:30 AM, but even if he were actually born 15 minutes before or later, there is very little that would change house and the evolutionary axis would not be affected at all. So here goes: my own analysis of his chart, respectfully intended - may his spirit finally find the much-needed rest that eluded him during life.

Heath Ledger was an Australian actor, most famous for playing the role of a gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain (2005) and the archvillain Joker in The Dark Knight (2008). If you are not familiar with him, you can of course look him up at Wikipedia. You can also watch the documentary I Am Heath Ledger, which gives a fair portrait of his personality and the path he took in life. I will be relying primarily on this documentary as well as a few complementary sources.

Chart Overview

Heath was the most alive human. And if it wasn't on the edge, it didn't interest him. If there wasn't some kind of risk involved, he had no time for it. He went all the way out in the time he had. He went all the way to the edge.

I Am Heath Ledger (2017)

Ledger's chart is an interesting one, for sure. Mars, Venus and Mercury are all more or less conjunct the South Node, all in Pisces, all except Venus in the twelfth house. While these conjunctions are weak, Ceres is exactly conjunct the South Node - it is less than a degree away. As if the Pisces 12H emphasis was not enough, Neptune is also a skipped step. Finally, the conjunction between the Sun and the Aries Ascendant should tell us something about Heath's extraordinary energy, even though we don't know the exact house position of the Sun.

Due to the Aries ascendant, most chart points are in overlapping houses and signs (i.e. 12H Pisces, 7H Libra). This might make it easier to some people, but I almost feel the opposite - what is the house and what is the sign in the South Node placement? How do I filter it? The South Node is simply "all Pisces" and Pluto is simply "all Libra"! How do I build a sentence out of that? A strange problem to have - I'll give it a try!

Pluto 7H

With Pluto in 7H Libra, Ledger's soul issue is in the house of relationships, the house of listening. What was he listening to? While I'm sure that this placement holds many things for him, let's focus on Heath Ledger as actor - he was listening to other people (Libra) in the form of characters that he wanted to play, to embody. In fact, he listened so much to them that he would lose himself along the way, if only for a short time, while he was playing the role (7H opposite the first house of identity).

The technique of immersing yourself so completely in your character's role that you understand them from the inside, their emotions and deeply held motivations, even has a name: it is called method acting, and Ledger was surely one of its masters. Before he played the role of the Joker, he reportedly

locked himself away for weeks, keeping a diary which was subsequently shared with the documentary-makers behind 2012's Too Young to Die.
       The diary contained a wide array of manic musings, depicting hyenas, clowns, comic strips and Alex DeLearge from Stanley Kubrick's cult classic, A Clockwork Orange.
       In the documentary, his dad Kim said Ledger isolated himself to get into the deranged psyche of the character.
       He said: "He pretty well locked himself up in a hotel room for weeks. He galvanised the upcoming character. That was typical of Heath. He would do that. He liked to dive into his characters, but this time he really took it up a notch."
       Ledger also went all out physically, encouraging co-star Christian Bale [Batman] to actually hit him during an interrogation scene.

Notice that Ledger does not have anything else but Pluto in the 7H or Libra. Perhaps this will convince some of you about the power of Pluto!

South Node in 12H Pisces

From the abyss of Pluto, we approach the more personal domain of the South Node of the Moon: How did Ledger's soul explore these Plutonian issues of immersing oneself completely in the other? Short answer: by entering a fantasy world. The Pluto placement in itself does not tell us how the immersion in the other was played out, how it was expressed, where it was expressed. Had the South Node not been in 12H Pisces, it would have pointed to a different past life dynamic and Ledger might not have gone into film at all.

Screens, whether at the cinema or in a smartphone, fall well inside the Pisces archetype. Whatever you see on a screen is illusory, not really there; a screen is something to be immersed in, to drown in, to temporarily forget the mundane "real" world. If you manage to drown yourself in it enough, the screen can even temporarily seem like a totality of all there is. These are all expressions of Pisces or 12H.

As becomes clear from the documentary I Am Heath Ledger, Ledger loved the camera. He loved being in front of it and he loved being behind it. On any random walk outside, he would film everything around him, interacting with the world through the camera lens rather than directly through his own eyes.

South Node ruler in 9H Sagittarius

Jupiter, Sagittarius and 9H all describe the archetype of the lens and of perspective. With the South Node ruler in 9H Sagittarius, Ledger's used his constant filming to capture different perspectives (9H) through the lens (Sagittarius) of the camera. Once captured, the perspective becomes an entire story, an adventure, a world of meaning (9H).

In summary, Ledger escaped (Pisces) into fantasy worlds (12H) through the meaningful perspectives (9H) he captured from the lens of the camera (Sagittarius). This is but one way to understand his South Node, but I believe it is a central one.

Adding to the picture: Planets conjunct the South Node

It is a common EA understanding that a planet conjunct the South Node can indicate a repeat assignment, a state of fruition, or sometimes a mix of both. It is not difficult to see why it should be so: a planet conjunct the South Node has had a major influence in prior lives to the point where it could have been highly developed. The soul intention is still, ultimately, to move beyond the South Node, but it may need to culminate old patterns before it is ready to let go of them. That is why the repeat assignment can at the same time seem like a state of ultimate fruition (sometimes, but far from always).

Was this the case in Ledger's life? The question is complicated by the fact that Mercury, Venus and Mars are far from a close conjunction with the South Node. But we have an ace up our sleeve: biographical facts from the life lived.

Drawing again from the documentary I Am Heath Ledger, you get the impression that this was a boy who knew very early on what he wanted to do in life. He had tremendous gifts and a skyrocketing acting career - which he began pursuing at age 16. Many of his friends describe him as a larger-than-life character. Let's have a closer look at Mars, Mercury and Venus:

• With Mars conjunct Mercury, Ledger had an intellect that was both combative and strongly pioneering. His ability to visualize (12H Pisces) was apparently so impressive that Christopher Nolan, the director of The Dark Knight, allowed him direct several of his own scenes. What is less known is that Ledger was a chess prodigy, winning an Australian junior chess championship at ten years of age. Outside of his acting career, he was aspiring to one day be a Chess Grand Master. He could plan many moves ahead, which is also an example of visualization. To be great at chess, you have to be able to see that which isn't there yet - and imagine it becoming real.
• Ledger loved parties and he partied a lot. Here we get a glimpse of Venus at work, also in Pisces but in 11H: being at home in the crowd, whether that crowd is a film team (literally Pisces 11H) or the intoxicated crowd of a party (Pisces 11H again).

Out of these placements, it seems to me that at least the Mars-Mercury conjunction speaks of fruition. It may be just outside of our arbitrary 10 degree orb, but the biographical facts speak for themselves.

Yet the closest conjunction is neither of these planets, but Ceres. And this seems to have been experiences by Ledger as decidedly negative.

Ceres and the Logic of the Soul

I have only studied Ceres for a time but as it is the largest of the asteroid goddesses I think it so important that I will start integrating it into my chart analysis in general. My working hypothesis for this dwarf planet is that it speaks of nourishment and the lack thereof, that aspect of Taurean needs that have a strong emotional component, like the breastfeeding need of a new-born baby. When this nourishment is taken away from us, we wander the world (like the mythical Ceres/Demeter) in search of a substitute that can make us feel nourished again. Yet no substitute in the world can fully replace the original loss we suffered. Thus Ceres points both to the question of loss and how we cope with it, as well as a possible way to retrieve that which we lost and find true nourishment again.

(For details on the story of Ceres/Demeter and the abduction of her daughter Persephone by Hades, see this article)

So, a lack of nourishment in 12H Pisces - something to do with film again, or artistry or...? The answer is much simpler than that: Heath Ledger couldn't sleep.

Heath Ledger had a long history of sleep troubles, reportedly struggling with a racing mind for years before portraying the Joker. However, his chronic insomnia became much more prevalent and aggressive after filming The Dark Knight. His difficulty sleeping was summed up in a New York Times profile in 2007, while the film was in production: "It is a physically and mentally draining role — his Joker is a 'psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy,' he said cheerfully — and, as often happens when he throws himself into a part, he is not sleeping much."
       During this interview, Ledger reported that he had slept an average of two hours per day over the previous week. He even mentioned taking one Ambien to no effect, and after taking another, he was only able to stay asleep for an hour. This interview, which took place several months before Ledger's death, shed light onto how sleep deprivation changed the young actor — and an offhand remark about his resistance to sleeping medications even eerily foreshadowed his imminent fatal overdose on prescription drugs.

To try to compensate for his lack of sleep (Ceres in 12H Pisces), Ledger took sleeping pills (Ceres in 12H Pisces). It didn't solve the problem. One night when he combined it with pain medication and anti-anxiety drugs, he never woke up again.

Now, this sheds light not only on Ceres but also on something Michael de Baker has termed the logic of the Soul. In order to explore its Pluto issues, the soul creates a kind of tension between the Pluto placement and the South Node. The point of this tension (in my understanding) is to create a kind of dissatisfaction that encourages the Moon to reach for its north node, thus activating the Pluto Polarity Point. As you can read above, the more he went into his Pluto issue of wholesale identification with the other, the less he would sleep. This is literally the tension between the soul issue and the South Node conjunct Ceres. This is the soul logic (at least in part).

Evolutionary Potential

Ledger died at 28 years of age, which makes it hard to know what his life could have entailed in terms of evolution if he had kept on living. There is hardly anyone who would have reached their full evolutionary potential at this age - most of us are just getting started! So what we are doing here is simply looking for clues about an evolutionary potential that wasn't given time to unfold.

To help us unpack the riddle, we turn again to some accounts from I Am Heath Ledger. Consider the following statement by his agent Stexe Alexander:

He was looking, always looking for something that was going to be truly challenging, to try to figure out ways that he could absolutely disappear into a character and almost be unrecognizable. That's what really drove him.

In this testimony, we recognize the Pluto issue we covered earlier. But this is somewhat at odds with how a childhood friend of Ledger describes him:

He was always a director. Acting was just a way to get there.

The same friend describes how, when deciding which movie he wanted to do, Ledger based most of his decision on who was directing it. He wanted to work with brilliant directors and he wanted to become one himself.

Thus we have two somewhat opposing views of what "really drove" Ledger. Was it acting or directing? I would say both: the South Node linked back to Pluto represents the "acting" desire, whereas the North Node linked to the PPP is connected to "directing":

• The North Node is in 6H Virgo - a signature of craftsmanship, with its ruler in 12H Pisces again - crafting film. Ledger may have felt the need to scale down his somewhat boundless, adventurous approach to life (South Node 12H Pisces with South Node ruler in 9H Sagittarius) and become a real craftsman instead, with all the sobriety of the sixth house, while still creating beautiful works of art (North Node ruler 12H Pisces), thereby forging his own path (PPP 1H Aries).
• With the North Node ruler conjunct the South Node, I also think there was a kind of "eternal return" going on where Ledger was forced to revisit old dynamics whenever he tried to reach for his North Node. Rephrasing what his friend said about him, he wanted to be a director (NN)... but then he had to be an actor (SN). The conjunction may be weak, but the biographical data seems to back it up.
• Transiting Saturn was also in 5H Virgo for the last 1½ years of Ledger's life, approaching his natal Saturn in the same house and sign. During these years, he did become more active in the meticulous work (Virgo) of directing (5H). Perhaps Saturn was trying to make its very own contribution to his PPP?

We may actually have a glimpse here of both Saturn's old and new response. The old response is an ally of the Pluto complex while the new response comes to the aid of the PPP. Let's see:

• Saturn 5H Virgo, old response: being extremely meticulous (Virgo) in the way he approached the creative process (5H). He wanted to become his character as much as it was humanly possible (Pluto 7H Libra), changing the way he spoke, moved and talked. In Lords of Dogtown, he even (on his own initiative) wore prosthetic teeth.
• Saturn 5H Virgo, new response: applying the same meticulousness to the creative process by actively taking charge and directing, thus breaking the Pluto complex of identification with the other, instead forging a new path where he takes charge himself as himself (PPP 1H Aries).

Evolutionary State

At this point, I also want to say something about Ledger's evolutionary state. While it seems to me that he did not quite "get there" in terms of his own evolution, there is no doubt that he was a highly evolved being. He was clearly a very lovable person, full of energy, generous, very hospitable, sensitive and kind. I Am Heath Ledger makes it clear how much people liked him and how highly they thought of him. He succeeded at practically everything he put his mind to. When he died, he had already led a life that would have left many people feeling fulfillment beyond their wildest dreams. So why am I saying then that he, in some sense, "did not evolve"?

This is connected to the EA idea of evolutionary states of the soul. To put it simply, there are older, more evolved souls and younger, less evolved ones. Jeffrey Green developed a model of evolutionary states divided into consensus, individuated and spiritual souls. Each of these was further divided into three sub-stages. Evolution then proceeds in the following way, from top to bottom:

The Consensus State (c. 75% of people)

• 1st stage Consensus
• 2nd stage Consensus
• 3rd stage Consensus

The Individuated State (c. 20% of people)

• 1st stage Individuated
• 2nd stage Individuated
• 3rd stage Individuated

The Spiritual State (3-4% of people)

• 1st stage Spiritual
• 2nd stage Spiritual
• 3rd stage Spiritual

(There is also a "dimly evolved state" making up the remaining 1-2%, a transitional state between animal and human consciousness which Green thought was characteristic of mentally challenged people.)

This evolution takes lifetimes upon lifetimes. Without delving into the specifics, I believe Ledger's soul was in the 3rd stage individuated evolutionary state. This is a condition characterized by the full blossoming of individuation; individuals in this state are often highly intelligent and original. Ledger wasn't bothered by what anyone else thought of him, he just did his own thing, while being no less friendly for it. But for all his brilliance and his successes, this still wasn't quite "it" for him. His evolution demanded something else from him now - starting with some sort of reconnection with his own being (PPP 1H Aries).

The Sun

I started by saying that the time of birth and therefore the position of the Sun was in doubt. Yet here we are - how could I not say something about the Sun in 1H Aries conjunct the Ascendant?

Whether the Sun is in 1H or 12H it seems to speak of how Ledger sought to actualize his life purpose through creating or directing something bold, pioneering and new (Aries). It is not difficult to see how that Sun would also have aided the PPP in 1H Aries.

Ledger was uncomfortable with stardom: with the Sun conjunct the Ascendant, he was forced to become conscious of himself in a way that he was not prepared for. He sought to avoid the biggest roles that would have easily propelled him to superstardom, even when he could have got them. The Sun placement had a function of forcing him to become more and more self-aware, undercutting his drive to disappear into a role.

Some astrologers might add that the placement of Ledger's Sun had something to do with Ledger's death. His extraordinary energy and therefore his inability to sleep - is it not captured by this Sun?

I don't think so, because I think the Soul chose to place the Sun in this position for evolutionary reasons - not to kill him, but perhaps to help him survive.

The night before Ledger took his fatal overdose, he talked on the phone with his sister. She warned him not to mix up sleeping pills with his other prescription drugs such as pain medication. "Don't worry," he told her, "I know what I'm doing."

He did not die until sometime in the afternoon the next day (22 January, 2008). His masseuse and housekeeper heard him snoring as late as 1PM. Due to my admittedly wild imagination, I can almost hear Ledger's Sun, literally in a "Sunrise placement", shouting to him during all those hours of slow intoxication: "Wake up, Heath, wake up! You are about to die!"

This Aries Sun was not just "bold and charismatic" or what-have-you, it was meant to instill in Ledger a sort of waking consciousness to shake him out of his heavy 12th house South Node predicament. (And even if the Sun itself were in the 12th, it would still kind of fit.)

This will be all for now, though I realize I didn't look at the Moon or the Neptune skipped step. I'll leave these two for you, dear readers, to figure out.

References

I Am Heath Ledger (2017). Adrian Buitenhuis and Derik Murray (directors).