Sorry to report on another death, but in the UK it’s a big story. Jade Goody was an ordinary, working class girl, whose appearance on Big Brother transformed her into a celebrity. She was known for her forthright language as well as her apparent ignorance of well-known facts. For example, she thought that Saddam Hussein was a boxer.
While appearing on the Indian version of Big Brother last year, she found out that she had cervical cancer. The disease had already spread, and it soon became clear that she was dying. Even then, she was not afraid of cameras and publicity, and in her final months the media circus continued. She got married with a morphine drip attached to her wedding dress, and she and her two young children were baptised in a hospital chapel.
Jade Goody died yesterday, at the age of twenty-seven, and whatever one thought of her, there can be no doubt about her bravery. How many people could have handled that level of publicity, with death staring them in the face?
Jade Goody was born on June 5 1981, which makes her a Gemini. The sign Gemini can manifest in two, very different ways. Some Geminis can be deep thinkers, who take the world they live in very seriously. For example Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist philosopher.
Yet other Geminis are apparently quite superficial, and they often do very well in the media. They flit from one thing to another, not taking anything too seriously. They’ll have lots to say, about lots of subjects, but there isn’t a great deal of in-depth knowledge. This aspect of Gemini seems to best fit Jade Goody, though of course one has to be careful about making generalisations.
As for Jade Goody’s horoscope, I haven’t got a birth time, so it’s difficult to make sense of it – especially as both Venus and Mars changed sign on her birthday, so I don’t know which sign either planet is in.
However if we want to understand the real importance of Jade Goody, we don’t have to worry about all this. Because we’re looking at things from a collective rather than individual point of view.
Jade Goody was born at the time of a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction, which took place in Libra. The sign Libra is very sociable, and she was an exemplar of her generation, marked for fame.
As an aside, only a few months before her birth, on the other side of the Atlantic, Paris Hilton was born, with this same Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Libra. The two women might have been born into completely different worlds, but they shared the same astrological signature. And it’s interesting that both of them, fairly or not, have been labelled as being famous for being famous, the two shock-troops of celebrity culture.
Jupiter and Saturn have a twenty-year cycle – so there’s approximately 20 years between successive conjunctions. On May 28 2000 these planets formed a conjunction, and less than two months later, on July 14 2000, the first UK series of Big Brother started. The stage was being set for Jade Goody’s success, and in the summer of 2002 she was a contestant in the third series, and her ascent to stardom began.
So what’s really going on? Over the last decade and more there’s been something in the cosmos that’s been pushing and promoting celebrity culture. And this has created the tantalising possibility that by being ourselves, without having any obvious talents, we can be famous.
One manifestation of this trend was reality TV, and in particular Big Brother. We then saw particular individuals being caught up in this cosmic trend, and Jade Goody became its personification. She didn’t win Big Brother in 2002, but she caught the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, and she become incredibly successful.
Unfortunately Jade Goody’s position had its disadvantages. She was arguably a pawn of the cosmos, and part of her role was to reflect the ebb and flow of reality TV. And on the day she died Jupiter and Saturn were exactly 150 degree apart – according to the BBC her death was at 3.14 am, on March 22 2009, and thirteen and a half hours later, at 4.46 pm, the 150 degree angle was formed. This angle is unfortunate, and it represents two things that on the surface have little or no connection. On one hand the triviality of reality TV and the frantic search for fame, and on the other hand the absolute seriousness of death and dying.