Nikola Tesla, with that piercing, Pluto rising gaze.
The moon is in Libra, days past its recent lucky conjunction with Jupiter in Leo and Venus in the harvest maiden’s early degrees. Venus recently entered Virgo, a week prior to her upcoming retrograde back through Leo. A confluence of Cancer and Virgo energies might raise consciousness of health and fertility — of self, home and planet. On this last day of the sun’s movement through Cancer, I will convey some facets of the sign’s energy through the life of one particularly brilliant Tesla and the celestial symbolism at his birth — also under a Cancer sun and Libra moon.
Twelve days ago marked the birthday of Nikola Tesla, a widely admired genius often lauded on the internet as the world’s ‘greatest geek.’ Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor, engineer, physicist and an unsung creator of the electric age. He discovered the rotating magnetic field, the basis of most alternating-current machinery, and held over 700 patents. Although this busy visionary’s work fell into relative obscurity after his death in 1943, his popularity has resurged since the 1990’s.
Talk of Tesla sometimes reaches into esoterica with the implications of his life’s work for free energy technologies. Many of Tesla’s inventions were diluted for patent by J.P. Morgan, Westinghouse, Edison and others — sometimes due to his indifference as to whether or not he received credit. In other cases, such business tycoons were not happy with Tesla’s impetus to give these technologies away to the public without much monetary concern.
Tesla was born under the sun sign of Cancer, the cardinal water sign and one which symbolizes ultimate receptivity to the Logos — the psychological principle of energy, active images and the languages derived from them. As wisps and wands of intuitive signals and creative fire move through the air, Cancer is like the cup catching them, a chalice of soulful instinct and careful listening.
With Saturn and a Venus-Sun conjunction in Cancer across the 3rd and 4th houses, Tesla was very sensitive to his immediate environment, coursing with innate receptivity growing through him from the roots — and a deepening discipline towards turning the messages received into working manifestations. Yet another side of this saturnine effort was a feeling of mental imprisonment that can accompany Saturn in the 3rd — an inertia and confinement to the letters of one’s calling, before and beyond connection to others. Famously celibate and hermitic, Tesla's lone wolf status was at once the seat of his genius — and perhaps also the quality of isolation that finally stopped his heart after a long and creatively fruitful life.
Twelve days ago marked the birthday of Nikola Tesla, a widely admired genius often lauded on the internet as the world’s ‘greatest geek.’ Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor, engineer, physicist and an unsung creator of the electric age. He discovered the rotating magnetic field, the basis of most alternating-current machinery, and held over 700 patents. Although this busy visionary’s work fell into relative obscurity after his death in 1943, his popularity has resurged since the 1990’s.
Talk of Tesla sometimes reaches into esoterica with the implications of his life’s work for free energy technologies. Many of Tesla’s inventions were diluted for patent by J.P. Morgan, Westinghouse, Edison and others — sometimes due to his indifference as to whether or not he received credit. In other cases, such business tycoons were not happy with Tesla’s impetus to give these technologies away to the public without much monetary concern.
Tesla was born under the sun sign of Cancer, the cardinal water sign and one which symbolizes ultimate receptivity to the Logos — the psychological principle of energy, active images and the languages derived from them. As wisps and wands of intuitive signals and creative fire move through the air, Cancer is like the cup catching them, a chalice of soulful instinct and careful listening.
With Saturn and a Venus-Sun conjunction in Cancer across the 3rd and 4th houses, Tesla was very sensitive to his immediate environment, coursing with innate receptivity growing through him from the roots — and a deepening discipline towards turning the messages received into working manifestations. Yet another side of this saturnine effort was a feeling of mental imprisonment that can accompany Saturn in the 3rd — an inertia and confinement to the letters of one’s calling, before and beyond connection to others. Famously celibate and hermitic, Tesla's lone wolf status was at once the seat of his genius — and perhaps also the quality of isolation that finally stopped his heart after a long and creatively fruitful life.
While the Imum Coeli or 4th house represents our roots and the space directly ‘below us,' self-assertive rising planets move up from the 1st into the 12th — from a house of 'how you interface with the world' to a house of inner life. For example, if a person is born anywhere from a few minutes to a couple hours after sunrise, the sun will be in the 12th house — filling up that individual with its suchness. 1st house planets bear a kind of martial quality as a planet moves to cross the eastern horizon, into the 12th house where they beam their valences effortlessly, striking chords in our souls. Whichever sign is on our 12th house, or whatever confluence of planet and sign is in our 12th, we are filled to the brim with their messages — perhaps even undone by them.
from Astrograph.com ::
“In his autobiography, Tesla tells of the early workings of his mind in a description that we can only regard with wonder: he saw flashes of light that interfered with his physical vision; when a word was spoken, he would see the object so clearly that he had trouble distinguishing between the imagined and the real; in later years he would build a machine in his mind, run it to see where the wear was flawed and make whatever repairs and adjustments were needed — before he ever began his construction. At night in solitude, Tesla had an inner world of personal vision where he made journeys and studies, carried on conversations and met people that seemed as real to him as his outer world.”
Tesla had Jupiter in Aries in the 12th house, squaring his Cancer stellium. Jupiter, a planet of swelling grandeur; in Aries, a fiery (intuitive, electromagnetic) sign associated with electric charge; in the 12th house of inner life, dreams, self-undoing. These living, breathing symbols aflame, squaring off with the watery openness of cancerian energy, point directly at Tesla’s reception of illustrious visions.
Jupiter in Aries in the 12th — a dream fed by inner impetus and imagination, opposing the Moon and Mars in Libra in the 6th — a heart flying with dreams of serving the people, society at large; the grand gesture of giving inventions freely for public good. The service of one’s mind, one’s hands, and the humility in not primarily valuing personal acclaim.
A telling one-two is the position of Capricorn on Tesla's Midheaven (Medium Coeli or 10th house) with Chiron in Aquarius in the 10th house. Just as the IC or 4th house is one's roots, home and inner ease, the 10th house is conversely the house of becoming, of career, the 'star directly above you.' Tesla made his first million by the age of 40, but gave up the royalties on his most profitable invention as a humanitarian gesture. Chiron, the sacrifice, in Aquarius, the novel breakthrough.
The unsung creator of the electric age, it’s fitting that Tesla was born with Pluto and Uranus in the 1st house — Pluto, the planet of transformation (life/death/rebirth motifs) and Uranus, the planet most fundamentally associated with electricity! In Taurus, a sign of building and manifestation, no less.
Interestingly, the modern engineer, inventor and investor Elon Musk — founder of SpaceX and CEO / product architect of Tesla Motors — is a Cancer sun, Virgo moon whose grand air trine is more tightly aspected than Tesla’s. Both of them display a fusion of these fertility signs’ earth-oriented sensibility for planetary health, with airy, humanitarian oomph. ‘Do it big’ global visionaries of sylph-like genius.
Tesla’s lifelong habit of living in hotels suggests his stacked 3rd house, and perhaps part of his spirit succumbed to the mental weight of Saturn in the 3rd — at the end of his life acting out numerological obsessions to the extent of circling hotel blocks specific numbers of times before entering. Curiously, it was the number 3 and multiples thereof that fascinated him. Lasting quirks of a visionary iconoclast. A dark, mysterious blend of vision and neuroticism characterizing a man who was perhaps the most elegant of history’s mad scientists.
from Astrograph.com ::
“In his autobiography, Tesla tells of the early workings of his mind in a description that we can only regard with wonder: he saw flashes of light that interfered with his physical vision; when a word was spoken, he would see the object so clearly that he had trouble distinguishing between the imagined and the real; in later years he would build a machine in his mind, run it to see where the wear was flawed and make whatever repairs and adjustments were needed — before he ever began his construction. At night in solitude, Tesla had an inner world of personal vision where he made journeys and studies, carried on conversations and met people that seemed as real to him as his outer world.”
Tesla had Jupiter in Aries in the 12th house, squaring his Cancer stellium. Jupiter, a planet of swelling grandeur; in Aries, a fiery (intuitive, electromagnetic) sign associated with electric charge; in the 12th house of inner life, dreams, self-undoing. These living, breathing symbols aflame, squaring off with the watery openness of cancerian energy, point directly at Tesla’s reception of illustrious visions.
Jupiter in Aries in the 12th — a dream fed by inner impetus and imagination, opposing the Moon and Mars in Libra in the 6th — a heart flying with dreams of serving the people, society at large; the grand gesture of giving inventions freely for public good. The service of one’s mind, one’s hands, and the humility in not primarily valuing personal acclaim.
A telling one-two is the position of Capricorn on Tesla's Midheaven (Medium Coeli or 10th house) with Chiron in Aquarius in the 10th house. Just as the IC or 4th house is one's roots, home and inner ease, the 10th house is conversely the house of becoming, of career, the 'star directly above you.' Tesla made his first million by the age of 40, but gave up the royalties on his most profitable invention as a humanitarian gesture. Chiron, the sacrifice, in Aquarius, the novel breakthrough.
The unsung creator of the electric age, it’s fitting that Tesla was born with Pluto and Uranus in the 1st house — Pluto, the planet of transformation (life/death/rebirth motifs) and Uranus, the planet most fundamentally associated with electricity! In Taurus, a sign of building and manifestation, no less.
Interestingly, the modern engineer, inventor and investor Elon Musk — founder of SpaceX and CEO / product architect of Tesla Motors — is a Cancer sun, Virgo moon whose grand air trine is more tightly aspected than Tesla’s. Both of them display a fusion of these fertility signs’ earth-oriented sensibility for planetary health, with airy, humanitarian oomph. ‘Do it big’ global visionaries of sylph-like genius.
Tesla’s lifelong habit of living in hotels suggests his stacked 3rd house, and perhaps part of his spirit succumbed to the mental weight of Saturn in the 3rd — at the end of his life acting out numerological obsessions to the extent of circling hotel blocks specific numbers of times before entering. Curiously, it was the number 3 and multiples thereof that fascinated him. Lasting quirks of a visionary iconoclast. A dark, mysterious blend of vision and neuroticism characterizing a man who was perhaps the most elegant of history’s mad scientists.