Mahatma Gandhi Birth Chart Reading: Complex Layers

Mahatma Gandhi Birth Chart Reading. The Peaceful Protestor Who Abstained From The Pleasures of Life. But at What Cost?

A revolutionary force of nature, Mahatma Gandhi protested in non-violent civil disobedience, a stance which advocated against British rule and South Africa and the civil rights of India. By rigorous forms of fasting and taking a 40 year long vow of celibacy, he sacrificed his own health and body for political and spiritual change. Recently, a new biography called “India, After Gandhi”, written by Ramachandra Guha, has been added to the compendium of books about Gandhi. However, unlike what has been previously written about him, the information is laced with much controversy, which chronicles events about his private life and the intimate relationships he maintained with other women, including his teenage grand-niece. A question which urged me to look into his natal chart to see how the revered spiritual leader’s sacrifice, self-control consequently impacted his own carnal desires.

Similar to the transcended Gautama Buddha, Gandhi was born in wealth. With the urgings of his Chief of Minister father, he studied law in London, England and later practiced law in South Africa. A road paved with much difficulties, it was the treatment he received and the inequalities he witnessed abroad that set him towards his journey of compassionate, steady and peaceful resistance.

Libra Ascendent and Sun

The words we associate with the man named Gandhi are equality, justice, harmony, resilience, attributes which can also describe the Libra energy, the sign that falls on his Ascendent and where the Sun had been when he was born. With his Libra Sun in the spiritual 12th house, and his Moon in Leo in the 10th house the combination outlines both a political and spiritual leader.

The rising sign shows a persons approach, the mouthpiece or lens of the personal chart. This is how we see the world and the impressions we get are through the qualities of the sign. Having a Libra Ascendent the view is above, objective, seeing both sides. Naturally possessed with initiative force and an advocate of justice and equality, the Libra rising will fight for just causes in graceful, non-invasive ways. Gandhi showed his own persuasive powers through peaceful, cooperative methods.

He formed the Natal Indian Congress and drew international attention to the plight of Indians in South Africa. In 1906, the Transvaal government sought to further restrict the rights of Indians, and Gandhi organized his first campaign of satyagraha, or mass civil disobedience. After seven years of protest, he negotiated a compromise agreement with the South African government. 

Spiritual leader

What he paved from his outlook, from a negotiable Libra approach, was nourished from his spiritual purpose, the outer desires coming from his Sun in Libra. Sitting in the higher realm of the 12th house, opposing Neptune in the 6th, indicates his soul mission to serve others, develop compassion through everyday rituals (6th house routines) and in meditation and prayer. Anywhere Neptune sits tends to dissolve and inspire. As the house of nutritional health, this area of life became the sacrifice for Gandhi when he went on a hunger strike. With a 12th house Sun, he was in touch with something higher. Wherever our Sun sits is where we thrive.

Moon in Leo in the 10th house

Ego, the outer world syncs with his internal needs and expression. His moon in Leo expresses his Sun’s spiritual purpose, his mission in life. In the 10th house it is an expression for the world to hear and thus be inspired by. His inner being, what he is nourished by, is witnessed at large.

Gandhi drew no distinction between his private and public life. He made his own body a symbol, mortifying it through fasting or marching for political and spiritual change. He even went public with his sexual life — and the negation of it through brahmacharya, or chastity.

Uranus in Cancer in the 9th house

Radical Uranus happens to be in Cancer (moon ruled) in the 9th(grand beliefs, culture, teachings), inherently separating his beliefs from what he has known, the comforts of the past, his place of origins. There’s a strong rebellious need to express, reform wherever Uranus sits natally,  After being under British rule for almost 200 years, with the help of peaceful protesting lead by Gandhi, India finally gained independence in 1947.

Jupiter in Taurus in the 7th house

The ruler of the 9th house is expansive Jupiter. His natal Jupiter in Taurus in the 7th house (Libra house) blends with Uranus revolutionary beliefs and ideas. The Libra theme is strong, as it continues in its own house of sharing, relating and expressing his views and values to others about injustices and changes needed to balance out the inequality of his homeland(4th house Aquarius). Revolutionary life teachings were an inspiration(Jupiter) to others, including other prominent leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela.

Pluto in Taurus

The conjunction to Pluto enforces his beliefs on deep and extreme levels. Giving him strong convictions, ambition and passion, Pluto in Taurus also adds tenacity, determination, a transformative energy, indicating renewed and lasting energy of belief in his values (Taurus) and his causes(Libra). An energy that can create, attract extremely loving and intensely hateful relationships. Gandhi was loved by many, but he also developed enemies. Hindu extremists openly criticized him for sympathizing with Muslims, which eventually became his demise. He was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic named Nathuram Godse on January 30, 1948.

Venus and Mars in Scorpio

If there’s anything we all know about Scorpios it is their intense energy and fiery passion. Being of a fixed nature also, their resistance and resilience is unprecedented, even if it means sacrificing their own desires to prove a point. Gandhi’s Pluto and Jupiter in Taurus opposes Venus and Mars in Scorpio, which creates tension between personal needs and the needs of others. The powerhouse of his 7th trumps that of his 1st house of personal desires. This is where the self sacrifice of his body is activated, the constancy (Taurus) and resilient power of Scorpio, equated to his intense fasting and chastity vows for most of his life.

Saturn Sagittarius in the 2nd house

His Saturn placement gives him the belief(Sag), that it is his duty to limit himself of the pleasures of life. Natal Saturn in our personal chart is where we feel most inadequate, where we continually strive to gain mastery. Saturn in Gandhi’s 2nd house shows a serious and cold tone to his values. Constricting self-abundance and gifts of the earth, a discipline he was able to carry through to his death.

Sun sextile Saturn —natural responsibility to take this duty, as it serves his higher purpose, his higher calling.

Moon trine Saturn —emotional stability to further carry it out and can give him the innate belief of what is right.

Mars, Aries, Lilith and Chiron

What can cause awry is the inconjunction from the planets in his 1st house of self to Neptune, Lilith and Chiron in Aries in the 6th house.

In “India After Gandhi”, Guha chronicles the years of Gandhi’s apparent celibacy, self-control and the control he had on others. Some of the most interesting parts of this book concern another group Gandhi sought to instruct: women. 

Which mainly include his wife, and a singer, writer Saraladevi Chaudhurani for which he had intimate yearnings, according to letters found. He called her his spiritual wife.

Yet their letters speak openly of desire — “You still continue to haunt me even in my sleep,” he wrote to her — and he told friends, “I call her my spiritual wife.” He signed his letters to her Law Giver, which, as Guha observes, was “a self-regarding appellation that reveals his desire to have Sarala conform to his ways.”

With the advise of political allies, he ended the relationship, as it would create adverse reactions.

After the death of his wife, he maintained intimate relationships with two of his teenage grandnieces. It was no secret he kept them as companions, walking with him during his marches.

However, according the New York Times, Guha reveals Muha Gandhi, then a teenager, shared a bed with a 77 year old Gandhi, sleeping naked together in the name of his brahmachyara experiments(testing his vows of celibacy). “Muha was a vulnerable girl who grew up in an ashram where the followers were devotees of the spiritual leader, was adopted by Gandhi and his wife.”

Mars, Venus in Scorpio

Mars action in the sign of Scorpio isn’t forward or aggressive, rather, is strategic and tactful, while the energy can also add a layer of secrecy. Venus and Mars inconjunction to Neptune can be a blind side to the person’s own motives. It is a dynamic which involve different modalities and elements. Foreign energy at work that can compartmentalize a persons behaviour and action and in Gandhi’s case, his needs, beliefs, obligations of a higher calling. The compartmentalizing can be done consciously or unconsciously.

Lilith and Chiron in Aries in 6th house.

The sacrifice is contained by Lilith in Aries. Lilith was the exile in the Catholic bible for her raw, unabashedly wild ways, mostly sexual in nature. In astrology, she represents that wild side in us, that refuses to oblige to any sort of imbalanced governing. Lilith is all about equality. However, if suppressed, our wild ways come out distorted. When we ignore the raw nature of our Lilith, it can fester in the shadows, expressing itself in displaced ways. In Aries, it is about the raw individuated self and the need to release such raw force.

Chiron shows our perpetual wounding. One that we must transform by healing others in order to heal ourselves. In Aries, it has to do with self-identity, raw desires, individual action. The blended energy expressed Gandhi’s sex wound. When his father was on his deathbed, he decided to leave his side momentarily to go see his wife. When he was making love to his wife, shortly after his father had died. The overwhelming guilt he felt, lead him to connect his innate desires and actions to his fathers passing.

His raw nature had turned into his wound.

His Mercury in Scorpio inconjunct Lilith and Chiron can divert his mind into thinking his action appropriate, or to become oblivious about the consequences of his actions at all.

When Lilith is hiding in the shadows, she comes out in other ways. Disrespecting what she truly represents, which is the equality of women and men and the god-given right of expressing a women’s wild nature. Combine the inconjunction, its effect to compartmentalize, along with Libra’s shadow side—pushing their own agenda in a relationship, without seeing the consequences, Gandhi may not have been conscious in the ways he had use his vows of chastity—its greater good—to feed the suppressed hunger of his internal, innate desires.

Both Gandhi and Manu may have wanted to go through this experiment, or ordeal. To be sure, there was a certain amount of imposition — from his side.”

That caveat is important, for, as Guha allows, there was an enormous power differential between Gandhi and Manu. It is not clear that the letter from Alexander changes how we view the “experiments”: He spoke only to Gandhi, not Manu. In the wake of #MeToo, we know that the powerful may delude themselves about the willingness of those they manipulate, and that their less powerful victims may go along with things they do not want because they are overwhelmed by the status of their abuser.

Guha does as much as any reasonable biographer could to explain the “experiments” with reference to Gandhi’s 40-year obsession with celibacy. Ultimately, though, the reader is left feeling that Gandhi’s own defenses of his behavior are riddled with self-justification.

When we go back to his North Node in Leo, in the 10th house of legacy, it not only shows his destiny to shine his beliefs, express and fight for the inequalities his people faced, it also extracts his individual ideas, a shift of personal philosophy from the collective mind of his South Node in Aquarius in the 4th house. An intense battle he fought and won with conviction and compassion, in the while, it seems, simultaneously trying to fight another, more personal battle, his carnal needs.