Mahatma Gandhi and the Birth of Passive Resistance
In a dusty, district courthouse in Western Indian at the turn of the century, a young lawyer was representing his first client in small claims court. He had meticulously prepared for the case, but when he got up to speak he was tongue-tied. “My heart sank into my boots,” he said. “My head was reeling and I felt as though the whole court was doing likewise. I could think of no question to ask. The judge must have laughed, and the vakils no doubt enjoyed the spectacle.” The lawyer sat down without having uttered a word, handing the case over to a colleague for whom the case was “child’s play.” (1)
Twenty years later, though, this same painfully shy attorney was leading massive political rallies. The man was Mohandas K. Gandhi, and these images provide a window into the extraordinary transformation he underwent during his 72 years on earth. By the time of his death in 1948, Gandhi was known throughout the world as one of the main architects of India’s independence, one lone man “marching dusty roads armed only with honesty and a bamboo staff, doing battle with the British Empire.” (2)
Transformation does not come easy. Nor, for Gandhi, was it only a matter of an inexperienced lawyer learning his trade and acquiring confidence and expertise. Gandhi’s metamorphosis from small town lawyer to world-renowned peace activist involved more profound changes. Although he started his career as one of the biggest admirers of the British Empire, he ultimately became one of its staunchest critics. It wouldn’t be until he left India for South Africa at age 24 (at a time when solar arc Descendent was hitting his Jupiter) that he would be awakened to the ills of colonization.
An even deeper change took place. Unbeknownst to many of his biggest admirers (and largely unexamined in Lord Richard Attenborough’s excellent film), Gandhi was very much a bully in the early years of his life, lording it over an illiterate wife and ordering other family members about. Before we consider the process by which this shy and paradoxically brutish man earned the respect and love of millions of people around the world, let’s take a moment to look at Gandhi’s natal chart.
One could embark on an examination of Gandhi’s chart by citing his Venus-ruled Sun and Ascendant in Libra. Venus, with her love of beauty and harmony, was crucial to his lifelong work as a public advocate. It was also the cornerstone of a deeper commitment: his passion for nonviolence, one that surfaced early with his adherence to a strict vegetarian diet and a concomitant philosophy of self-restraint. We could also mention his Leo Moon, prominently placed in the 10th House and ruling the Midheaven, as the motive force behind the way in which he dramatized the demand for Indian independence.
However, there’s another dimension to his chart that compels us to view his peace-loving Sun and Ascendant in a totally different light. It’s a powerhouse configuration that influences nearly every aspect of the horoscope and provides the engine that propelled him to worldwide fame: a T-Square linking up a Mars-Venus conjunction in Scorpio and a Pluto-Jupiter conjunction in Taurus; the Leo Moon is at the focal point. It’s impossible to do justice to the power (and potential terror) of this configuration in a sentence or two. Because it’s so integral to understanding Gandhi’s character, we are going to look at it in depth.
Hard aspects between Mars and Pluto are a common feature in the charts of serial killers. This may sound like a sensational statement, but I’m not trying to make a case for this combination always expressing itself violently. Of course it doesn’t, as Gandhi’s chart demonstrates. But the potential for explosive, unmodulated energy is there. Eric Harris, one of the Columbine killers, had Mars-Sun in Aries opposing Pluto in Libra. Angel Resendez, a suspected serial killer wanted in connection with seven murders, had Mars conjunct Pluto in Virgo. Yet another serial killer had Pluto conjunct Saturn squaring Venus in Scorpio. Suffice it to say that there are monumental energies packed into this configuration
What makes this aspect so powerful? It’s easy to understand when we consider the fact that Mars, the Roman God of war, symbolizes aggression and self-assertion. Mars describes our capacity for going after what we want and, further more, being in touch with our deepest needs, desires and impulses. Whether we in the West admit it or not, the way we get what we want, as symbolized by Mars, has a lot to do with our sense of self worth. To the extent that Mars is thwarted our ego-based sense of worthiness is often compromised as well.
Pluto in many ways echoes the needs of Mars. The main difference is that while Mars is concerned with outer manifestations of power, and particularly with one’s status in society, Pluto is concerned with inner power: the marshalling of those forces needed to insure survival.
Pluto is also intimately connected with the unconscious. Discovered in 1930, just three decades after the publication of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Pluto symbolizes the unearthing of that which is hidden. Pluto is not content with how things appear; he is not happy taking reality at face value. Just as Freud emphasized the importance of unconscious drives, so too does Pluto insist on making the unseen seen and the hidden known. It’s Pluto that compels us to look at the shadow side of life.
Thus, we see a conflict between these two planets: Mars acts on the assumption that people and circumstances are as they appear. Pluto refuses to act until it has blasted through the artifice of appearances. When these two planets are in hard aspect, Pluto often responds quite ruthlessly to Mar’s naivete. “You think you know what’s going on but you don’t,” says Pluto. At which point he does everything in his power to rein in the untrammeled energies of his planetary cousin.
The irony is that true power depends on an accurate assessment of reality. Until we understand things in their essence, what good is action anyway? So what at first seems to be a conflict is in fact a golden opportunity to act from a much deeper level. But until this has been worked through, there’s often a battle of wills between these two planetary archetypes.
The Plutonian urge to drill down to the core is very Freudian indeed. It’s no mistake, given the emphasis of Pluto and Mars in Freud’s natal chart, that he postulated human beings as being driven by forces, fantasies and passions beyond their control. According to Freud, most psychological problems occur when these drives are thwarted or denied full expression – usually by societal demands for conformity. As one of his biographers noted, psychoanalysis, Freud’s brainchild, “presents itself as the nemesis of concealment, hypocrisy, the polite evasions of bourgeois society.” The Viennese physician “took considerable pride in being the destroyer of illusions.” (3) According to Freud, it is only through acknowledging and becoming aware of these primal drives that we learn the truth about ourselves.
These Freudian drives found powerful expression in Gandhi’s life in the guise of his Mars-Pluto complex. The presence of Jupiter in his T-Square amplifies the intensity of this already combustible mix. The largest planet in the zodiac, Jupiter represents the principle of expansion. To understand the extent to which Jupiter magnifies these energies, imagine renting a video about a tempestuous romance and watching it in your living room on a 12-inch TV screen – that’s the T-square sans Jupiter. Add Jupiter and it’s like watching the same story in a movie theater complete with Dolby wrap-around sound: it multiples the energies tenfold. The fact that Venus, ruler of Gandhi’s Sun and Ascendant is involved is akin to chaining the moviegoer to his front row seat. For Gandhi, there was no escaping this configuration -- it was hard wired into his system.
We will examine how the broiling energies of this configuration manifested in Gandhi’s life in two ways: 1.) Through his inner experience; and 2.) Through the circumstances of his life. In particular, we will look at how Gandhi came to terms with India being under foreign control. Before we broach that topic, though, let’s take a look at Gandhi’s inner landscape and how he learned to deal with his mighty T-Square.
Gandhi was married at age 13 in a traditional Hindu ceremony. Although he later denounced the practice of child marriages, Gandhi gained a valuable opportunity to confront his powerful instinctual nature, which he called his “lustful cruelty”, early in life . (4) He recounts many instances of how he struggled with this in his autobiography. One, which occurred the night Gandhi’s father died, is particularly memorable.
His father had been bedridden for weeks, and it was Gandhi’s duty to message his legs every night. Despite his deep love for his father, Gandhi confessed that throughout the time he was nursing him, he was torn with sexual desire for his wife. “Every night whilst my hands were busy massaging my father’s legs, my mind was hovering about the bedroom —and that at a time when religion, medical science and common sense forbade sexual intercourse” (his wife was pregnant at the time.) On the night of his father’s death, just after Gandhi had finished the message, he ran to the bedroom. He and his wife were making love when his brother knocked on the door to say their father had passed away.
“It was a blot I have never been able to efface or forget…because my mind was at the same moment in the grip of lust. I have therefore always regarded myself as a lustful, though faithful, husband. It took me a long time to get out from the shackles of lust, and I had to pass through many ordeals before I could overcome it.” (5)
It’s important to note that Gandhi’s T-Square involved two sensual, passionate sings: Scorpio and Taurus. Taurus is a fixed earth sign, ruled by Venus, which endows it with a love of beauty. Scorpio, ruled by our friend Pluto, is deeply passionate and symbolizes a need to dissolve into the Other. In addition, Venus and Pluto are in mutual reception in Gandhi’s chart, which further accentuate these energies.
Despite the shame Gandhi felt about this episode, it makes complete sense given his chart: his father was slipping into oblivion, igniting deep Scorpionic fears about being abandoned. The mystery and terror of death were descending upon him as well -- yet more Scorpionic issues. It’s no coincidence that Pluto and Scorpio are associated with death and sexuality.
For someone with both Sun and Ascendant in Libra, a cardinal air sign not inclined to dealing with such weighty matters, confronting the energies of his T-Square must have been unnerving, to say the least. As fate would have it, Gandhi was to enjoy a short respite from these ponderous Scorpionic matters: At age 18 he traveled to England, without his wife, in order to study law. The trip served to give Gandhi much needed distance and perspective on his “intense carnal appetite” by plunging him into the rigors of learning English and mastering arcane legal texts.
As it turned out, his time in London proved an imperfect buffer from the intensity of the Mars-Pluto energies. So inescapable was this planetary duo in Gandhi’s psyche that he found himself coming up against it in his desire for food and drink. This might seem a bit ironic because Gandhi’s eating habits were never anything but austere, but from this point on he would scrutinize every morsel he put into his mouth. Thus began a lifelong commitment to vegetarianism, one that began with the elimination of meat, fish and eggs from his diet. This process culminated, years later, in a diet consisting only of fruits and nuts. Ultimately even milk – considered one of the holiest foods by Hindus – was eliminated. (Gandhi rejected it, citing the callous treatment of cows.)
Gandhi was so burdened by his intense appetite for life that he was driven to take a vow of celibacy or in Hindi, ‘bramacharya’, at age 36. “Life without brahmacharya, he said, “appears to me to be insipid and animal-like. The brute by nature knows no self-restraint. Man is man because he is capable of, and only in so far as he exercises self-restraint.” (6)
As unlikely an expression of Gandhi’s combustible Mars-Pluto energies as such self-restraint appears to be, it is merely the flip side of his capacity for violence. To understand this we need only examine the charts of people who were not able to master these formidable energies. Eric Harris is one example. Shortly before the Columbine massacre he posted the following message on his web site. “I’m coming for EVERYONE soon and I WILL be armed to the fucking teeth and I WILL shoot to kill.” He expressed intense anger and hatred for the people of Littleton “with their rich snobby attitudes thinkin’ they are all high and mighty. I don’t care if I live or die in the shoot-out. All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you as I can.” (7)
Now listen once again to Gandhi: “If I had failed to develop restraint to the extent that I have, I should have descended lower than the beasts and met my doom long ago.” (8). In many ways, the charts of these two are remarkably similar: Gandhi with Venus-Mars in Scorpio opposing Pluto in Taurus; Harris with Mars (and Sun) in Aries opposing Pluto. Gandhi battled the injustice of foreign occupation; Harris railed against the snobbery of the Littleton elite. So many of the outer circumstances are the same. The intra-psychic process of dealing with these outer circumstances made all the difference.
The practice of self-restraint, started so simply in Gandhi’s vegetarian lifestyle, was the bedrock of his later political practice of nonviolent resistance. This process in turn hinged on his need to come to terms with the cauldron of Plutonic energies inside him. How did he find the strength needed to wrestle with these conflicts? I want to take a moment to examine the mechanisms in his chart that paved the way for deep change.
In Gandhi’s experiments with vegetarianism and self-restraint we begin to discern the means through which he was to transform his life. The first is Uranus in the 9th House, five degrees from the Midheaven and trining/sextiling both legs of the Mars-Pluto opposition. Discovered in 1781, five years after the American revolutionary war and 11 years after the discovery of electricity, Uranus rules the unpredictable and the untried: in short, anything that seeks to break out of old, static modes. As the most elevated planet in Gandhi’s chart, Uranus had considerable clout. It’s no coincidence that Gandhi subtitled his autobiography: ’The Story of my Experiments with Truth.’ Indeed, his entire life was an exercise in experimentation: from food to religion to politics, no facet of his existence was untouched by the pioneering Uranian spirit.
Uranus proved to be a useful outlet for the disruptive energies of the Mars-Pluto-Jupiter opposition. The easy, flowing aspects between Uranus and the planets of his T-Square provided a kind of steam control that released energy in a non-explosive way. His experiment with ‘dietetics’ was only the first among many. In his early years in London, he played at becoming the ‘English gentleman’, purchasing a double watch chain of gold and a chimney pot hat. Needless to say, this particular experiment gave way in later years to a more simple demeanor – one in which he wore nothing more than a shawl and loincloth.
Probably one of his lengthiest experiments, besides diet, involved his many years of communal living. Like everything else in the Mahatma’s life, this experiment started small, with Gandhi and his wife opening their home in South Africa to workers from Gandhi’s law office. This experiment flowered into full-scale, self-sufficient communities in later years, with residents growing their own food, building their own homes and following a variety of religious traditions.
There is a sort of transpersonal outlook that is denoted by the accentuation of Uranus and/or Aquarius in natal charts, one that is far more concerned with the well-being of the collective than with any personal comfort or happiness. Thanks to this Uranian orientation, Gandhi could always see beyond his own needs to those of the greater whole. “I knew no distinction between relatives and strangers, countrymen and foreigners, white and colored, Hindus and Indians of other faiths,” Gandhi wrote. “I was incapable of making such distinctions.” This is the voice of Uranus, loud and clear! (9)
This magnanimity toward his fellow beings not only served to transform the more volatile energies of the T-Square but led to a profound personal philosophy. “I hold that a believer who has to see the same God in others that they see in themselves, must be able to live among all with sufficient detachment.” (10) “A man who is swayed by passions may have good enough intentions, may be truthful in word, but he will never find the truth. A successful search for truth means complete deliverance from the dual throngs such as of love and hate, happiness and misery.” (11)
What we ultimately see in Gandhi’s Uranus is the making of a personal religion. With Uranus so prominently placed in his chart we wouldn’t expect him to adhere to the dictates of any one faith, and he never did. He derided the narrow-mindedness of Christian churchgoers as well as the hypocrisies of Hindus who condemned the cruelties of meat eating while ostracizing untouchables. We are now going to look at another facet of Gandhi’s chart that was instrumental in transmuting the intense energies of his T-square.
It wasn’t until he went to South Africa to work as a lawyer – at a time when transiting Saturn was conjoining his Sun and transiting Jupiter approaching his T-Square – that a fuller picture of the Mars-Pluto dynamic was revealed. Before this trip, his experience of these two planets was largely vis-a-vis his robust appetite for food and sex. But in South Africa another manifestation of this planetary duo surfaced: The tension and pull between power and powerlessness, between the fear of becoming a victim and the temptation of falling into the role of perpetrator.
Prior to South Africa, Gandhi primarily experienced himself as a person of power. He was male, after all, and men in traditional Indian society were clearly in a privileged position, one that often expressed itself through the exploitation of women. Gandhi acknowledged his own culpability in this regard when reflecting on his relationship with his wife. For most of his younger years, his wife was little more to him than “an object of lust, born to do her husband’s behest.” (12) He wrote of her not so much as a partner and helpmate but a student, and a subservient one at that.
But with his move to South Africa he had to confront the flip side of this coin: his own powerlessness in the context of widespread discrimination. It was a confrontation that led to a full-scale battle with the South African authorities and finally the British Empire. On another level, though, he was struggling with the perpetrator within, one that prompted him to confront his own potential for exploitation and oppression.
Since it was his trip to South Africa that sparked these energies, we must ask what it was, astrologically, that predisposed him to such an international, multi-cultural existence. When Gandhi was born, just after 7 a.m. on October 2nd, Mercury was in the 1st House just seven degrees from the Ascendant. It was not making any major (Ptolemaic) aspects. One might think this lack of contact with other planets would weaken a planet’s motive force, but just the opposite is true. Like a child on a school playground cut off and isolated from his playmates, that planet makes a lot of noise to get heard.
This is precisely how Mercury functioned in Gandhi’s life. Mercury rules the 9th House in Gandhi’s chart—the field of internationalism, metaphysics, law and cross-cultural endeavors. As we have seen, the domain of the 9th was instrumental in the metamorphosis that Gandhi underwent in England, during which time he became a lawyer and embraced vegetarianism. It was in London, after all, where the legal groundwork was laid for his later public advocacy work.
We can see the central role played by the international 9th even more dramatically through Gandhi’s life in South Africa. Gandhi was only in the country for a week when he had to make a business trip to Pretoria. Still ignorant of the ways of South African culture, he booked a first-class ticket. It was on this fateful that he was so rudely thrown off the train for refusing to vacate a first-class compartment.
Had Gandhi never left India we can only speculate as to whether such an incident would have occurred in his native land. What we know for certain is how strongly he desired to transcend his cultural roots. “I wanted somehow to leave India,” he said upon hearing of the job opening in Durban. The atmosphere in India “appeared to me to be poisonous” he said citing petty politics and intrigues between states. (13) The job in South Africa was his passport out of that morass. The environment of backbiting, bribery and corruption that he so detested was yet another shadow manifestation of the Mars-Venus-Pluto energies in his chart – all the more unbearable given the needs of his Libran Sun and Ascendant.
It would be simplistic to think that the South African train episode was in and of itself the spur for this first major period of transformation in Gandhi’s life. It is true that Gandhi was humiliated as a result, and that such humiliation can often be the goad for deep change. But the overarching pattern of his life clearly shows that his real power came from acting on behalf of other people. One of Gandhi’s biographers says as much when recounting an incident in the South African Transvaal in which the Mahatma was out walking after dark without a proper pass and a policeman kicked him into the street. A Quaker friend urged him to file charges against the policeman, but Gandhi had made it a rule not to go to court to redress personal grievances. (14) All this ultimately leads us back to Gandhi’s 12th House Sun, opposing Neptune and ruled by peace-loving Venus: a life dedicated to the welfare of others.
The path of service, one that was in large part responsible for transforming the volatile energies of the Mars-Pluto T-Square, sustained Gandhi throughout his life. We see it in his early work on behalf of Indian indentured servants in South Africa. We see it again in his crusade against unjust landlords in India, as well as in the bigger fight against discrimination in South Africa. And we see it in his efforts to free the untouchables in India from the stigma of interiority. Finally, we see it in his drive for Indian independence.
The train incident sparked the humiliation intrinsic in the Venus-Mars-Pluto configuration, igniting the archetypal shame experienced by the victim at the hands of the perpetrator. Gandhi never could have tackled these formidable energies by working on his own behalf – to do so would have been to evoke the shadow aspects of rage and revenge, turning him into the very oppressor that he was acting against.
Alchemical Gold
Transformation is possible when we embrace our complexity as human beings and acknowledge all the disparate parts of ourselves, without identifying with any single aspect. Astrology’s gift is that it provides a language through which we can communicate with each of these different parts.
Gandhi’s chart provides a vivid illustration of how disparate these various psychic elements can be, as well as a powerful demonstration of how even the most antagonistic elements can be harmonized. Mohandas Gandhi was a peace-loving soul at heart, but one with a terrifying bundle of energy at his core, one that has devastated many a lesser person.
What was the way out of this? As we’ve seen, his elevated Uranus was crucial, a force which endowed him with the ability to break out of old, stagnant ways of being and look objectively at self and others. An unaspected Mercury ruling the 9th was also instrumental in jump-starting the profound transformative processes that unfolded in foreign lands.
But there is a process even more powerful than either of these: Gandhi’s awareness of his intense energies, and his ability to view them from a distance.
This sounds like a simple thing. In fact, it is a simple thing, but it is one that many are unwilling or unable to do. There is an expanding body of work on this topic. In yogic traditions, it is known as witness consciousness: the ability “to be present for experience.”
“In the yogic view, it is the witness that makes unitive experience possible; the witness stands as the still point at the center of the storms of life, those primitive drives of which Freud spoke – the whirlwind of impulses, reactions, thoughts, feelings, and fantasies in which we live.” (15)
Liz Greene gives a wonderful description of how this can be utilized in astrological contexts:
“If I am having a Mars transit today, and you say the wrong thing and I get really angry, then if I am unconscious of that anger, I just become angry. Out come the abusive words, or I take a swipe at you, or I pour my water over you. There’s nobody home in the sense of a conscious individual. I have no idea of what I am about to do, what I am about to say, what I feel. I just act and then I say, ‘Oh, I am terribly sorry. I just lost my temper, I didn’t mean to.’ However, if I am aware, then I hear what you said, and I know I am angry, and at that moment I may even know why I am angry. I may feel the anger, but I am not the anger, which means that I can say to myself: ‘Did he really mean that? What has he triggered in me?’ I can then work on it.” (16)
Now listen to Gandhi describe his experience of “witnessing” the Mars-Venus-Pluto energies in his chart. He was 36 and had recently taken the brahmacharya vow of lifelong celibacy. Not surprisingly, friends and acquaintances thought the vow an unduly severe course of action. In his autobiography, he explained that what others viewed as “restraint” he saw only as appropriate behavior -- a counterbalance to his shortcomings. “Being conscious of my weakness,” he said, “was what saved me in the end.” (17)
There’s a great scene in Richard Attenborough’s film that captures how Gandhi used this exquisite self-awareness to promote his nonviolent philosophy. It takes place at a time when the movement for Indian independence was in full steam and various political figures in India were jockeying for power. In the scene, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who would become the first president of Pakistan, was advocating violence as the only effective strategy against British repression. In response, Gandhi was making a case for nonviolent resistance:
Jinnah:
There is only one answer to that: direct action on a scale they cannot handle.
Nehru:
I don’t think so. Terrorism would only justify their repression.
Jinnah:
I too have read Mr. Gandhi’s writings. But I would rather be ruled by an Indian terrorist than an English one. And I don’t intend to submit to that kind of law.
Man:
I must say, it seems to me it’s gone beyond remedies like passive resistance.
Gandhi:
If I may, I for one have never advocated passive anything. I’m with Mr. Jinnah. We must never submit to such laws. Ever. And I think our resistance must be active and provocative.
At this point, Gandhi gets up and walks over to a lowly Indian servant who has just entered the room carrying a tray full of food and drink. “May I?” Gandhi says to the servant, and takes the tray from him. “I want to embarrass all those who wish to treat us as slaves,” he says to the other men, who look on in shock as Gandhi proceeds to serve them tea. “All of them. I want to change their minds – not kill them for possessing weaknesses we all possess.”
Gandhi then proposes a day of prayer and fasting as an alternative to the violence advocated by Jinnah. “No work, no buses, no trains, no factories, no administration. The country would stop. 350 million people at prayer. Even the English newspapers…would write about it.” (18)
All the men except Jinnah enthusiastically agree to Gandhi’s plan. At the end of the scene Jinnah is sitting in a corner of the room all by himself. All the other members of the meeting are in avid conversation.
But it’s not just Jinnah the political leader who has been isolated, but Gandhi’s inner “Jinnah”, AKA Mars-Pluto: The Mahatma’s own potential and capacity for violence.
******
There’s one final alchemizing element in Gandhi’s chart which we have not yet examined but which cries out for attention: Gandhi’s Leo Moon, prominently placed in the 10th House, ruling the Midheaven and the focal point of the all-powerful T-Square.
The Moon symbolizes our deepest instincts and impulses; it is one of the places in the chart where we feel safest and most secure. It indicates how we nurture and would like to be nurtured. It also shows the ways in which we best communicate with the public.
Moon in Leo indicates a love of theater. Eva Person, another political figure expert at communicating with the masses, also had a Leo Moon. Both Gandhi and Peron were mythic, larger-than-life figures known for upstaging many a lesser mortal.
Gandhi’s Leo Moon came into its own in South Africa: we see this in his drive to convince Indians to burn their travel passes – documents that European residents never had to carry. Later in his life it manifested through the Indian campaign to give each person a spinning wheel, demanding that Indians stop buying imports of British clothing and relay on Indian homespun. And we see it in the famous “salt march” in which Gandhi led millions of Indians to the Indian Ocean to protest the British monopoly of salt. In its political drama and power this event was unsurpassed in recent history, evoking images of the Boston tea party two centuries earlier.
But the most powerful – and paradoxically simple – of all Gandhi’s theatrics was his attire: the donning of shawl and loincloth. “My God,” said a British official on seeing Gandhi disembark from a steamer. “He’s dressed like a coolie.” (19)
What Gandhi accomplished through his theatrics was no less than an overhauling of the concept of power.
In the beginning of his life, the British were omnipotent: They ruled the land and dictated how things would be. Their concomitant psychological supremacy was captured in a popular rhyme of Gandhi’s native Gujarat:
Behold the mighty English man, he rules the Indian small Because being a meat-eater, he is five cubits tallWhat did Gandhi do? He made being small and keeping a vegetarian lifestyle not only a virtue but a hallmark of power. He transformed “powerlessness” – the lack of guns and technology, the refusal to strike back – into an expression of profound strength. In the beginning, most educated Indians thought it shameful to wear traditional Indian clothes; Gandhi made it a symbol of pride.
There is another way in which this revamping of power was accomplished: Through the quiet but irrevocable presence of Venus. At age 28, when solar arc Uranus was hitting his Moon, Gandhi was attacked by an angry mob in South Africa who had read erroneous newspaper reports about him. “They pelted me with stones, brick bats and rotten eggs,” Gandhi recalled in his autobiography. “Someone snatched away my turban, whilst others began to batter and kick me. I fainted and caught hold of the front railing of a house and stood there to get my breath. They came upon me boxing and battering.” (20) Gandhi was finally rescued by the wife of a police superintendent who happened to be passing by.
Later, when friends urged him to prosecute, Gandhi refused. “They are sure to quiet down when they realize their mistake. I have trust in their sense of fairness.” He added: “I do not want to prosecute anyone. It is possible that I may be able to identify one or two of them, but what is the use of getting them punished?”
Reading this account 100 years later, it is impossible not to be moved. How vividly we hear the voice of peace-loving Venus speaking through the tempest of the Mars-Pluto energies. This incident was not an isolated one. Gandhi repeatedly “turned the other cheek” and showed kindness to his perpetrators.
In this and other instances, Venus acted as a conduit to the compassion of Gandhi’s 12th House Sun: “The life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being,” he once said. “I hold that the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man.” But always mindful of the intense Scorpionic energies within, he added: “I must go through more self-purification and sacrifice” to save the meek and the helpless from “unholy sacrifice.” (21)
His entire life was an exercise in such purification and sacrifice, and always in the service of helping those less fortunate than himself. “What barrier is there that love cannot break?” he asked in his autobiography. (22)
***
In ancient Greece, criminals and outcasts were taken to local temples; there were no prisons as we know of them today. Rather the violent and the deranged were cradled within the womb of the sacred. It was thought that this was the only way angry aspects of soul could be placated and healed.
This is a fitting metaphor for Gandhi’s chart, where the potentially “criminal” elements of the Mars-Pluto complex were nestled in the sacred space of Gandhi’s 12th House Sun and Libra Ascendant. Instead of locking away or punishing violent aspects of self, Gandhi transformed them. Even more important than his role in the winning of Indian independence was his popularization of non-violent resistance. Through this process, Gandhi empowered the weak and exhorted the powerful to look more deeply at themselves.
NOTES
1. Gandhi, M.K. (1927). “An Autobiography.” Ahmedabad, India: Navajivan Trust, p. 21
2. Attenborough, R. “Gandhi” (video)
3. Gay, P. (1998). "Freud: A Life for our Time." New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. xvii
4. Gandhi, 21
5. _____, 26
6. _____, 175
7. Gibbs, N. & Roche, T. Time Magazine, Dec. 20, 1999, p. 46.
8. Gandhi, 265
9. _____, 206
10. _____, 265
11. _____, 231
12. _____, 235
13. _____, 288
14. _____, 21
15. Cope, S. Standing Psychotherapy on its Head, Yoga Journal, May/June, 2001, p. 105
16. Greene, L. Interview, The Mountain Astrologer, Feb/March, 2002, p. 39.
17. Gandhi, 267
18. Attenborough, Video
19. Attenborough, Video
20. Gandhi, 160
21. ______, 267
22. _____, 268
23. Gandhi, 160
