Jan Morris, America, and Astrology

Jan Morris, a remarkable woman, British, historian, novelist, and traveller. She is the author of some 40 books, and has written a piece about America in The Guardian this week. A brief extract from the article is quoted below, but first a look at Jan Morris and her natal chart.

Born a male, "James", on 2 October 1926 in Clevedon, Somerset, England. In 1949 James Morris married and over the next years fathered five children. In 1972 he underwent a sex change operation in Casablanca and became Jan.

Jan Morris has led an amazingly eventful life, both before and after her transformation - see BBC profile

Her natal chart ( no time of birth available) shows a Grand Fixed Cross , involving Saturn/Mars in Scorpio/Taurus, and Jupiter/Moon in Aquarius/Leo. There's another opposition between Uranus in Pisces and Venus in Virgo. All these aspects point to challenge - fairly intense challenge too as it turned out! The chart does contain some good aspects for an author. Mercury(communication) in Libra is trine Jupiter(publishing planet) in Aquarius, and semisextile disciplined Saturn in Scorpio.

The period around her sex change operation, say between 1970 and 1974, must have been an extraordinarily difficult few years of radical transformation. Uranus conjoined her Sun, and Pluto conjoined her Venus in 1970. Pluto conjoined her Sun in 1974. It would be interesting to know her ascendant.

From her profile, it appears that Jan Morris has certainly lived a life eventful enough for two characters! On the subject of gender she has said:
"To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music. . . "

This is a brief extract of her current article, which particularly appealed to me:

"The Great Republic(USA) is great still, full still of decent clever people trying to be good. Even now, it is as free as can be expected, and its democracy is fundamentally honest and robust. It laughs at itself, criticises itself and dislikes itself just as much as we do.

All it needs is someone with a key to unlock that Idea again, and I hope it will be that next president, whoever it is, even now gearing up for the election. Please God, may it be a poetic president. Inspiration has been the true engine of American success, and all its greatest presidents have been people with a divine spark. The dullards may have been efficient, respected or influential, but the Jeffersons and the Roosevelts, the Lincolns and the Kennedys have all been, in their different ways, artists.

So may it be a president with the key of original inspiration who can release the Idea from its occlusion. All the ingredients are still there, after all - the kindness, the imagination, the merriment, the will, the talent, the energy, the goddam orneriness, the plain goodness - all there waiting to burst out once more and bring us back our America, blessed and blessing too. "