By Neo Pachisia, D. Psych.Astrol; D.F Astrol.S;Published on 27th March, 2023
Bad news. Painful images have become a regular part of our daily lives thanks to all media. So when the news of Hollywood superstar Bruce Willis being diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) feels heartbreaking and haunts you for weeks, it makes you wonder why. I’ll be using this example throughout this article to help explain what astrology is and its uses.
Like many astrologers, I looked at Bruce’s birth chart to see what was going on – what were the transits that indicated his mental health condition?
What’s shocking and distressing about Bruce’s illness is it’s incurable. This mega world-famous, successful and endearing star, with an amazing career, with all the money in the world, cannot, despite all his resources, stop his descent into what Carl Jung called the ‘collective unconscious’.
I know illnesses happen to thousands of people on a daily basis, but for some reason, we feel these rich and famous are especially blessed – immune to tragedies that befall average people.
What is astrology?
Astrology is not fate or destiny. It is a method of divination via the study of cycles of time. An astrologer can study your natal chart and come up with a description of your life pattern, like in a blueprint.
She can predict times which will be beneficial, and abundant, milestones and she can predict periods that may be constricting or challenging, or sometimes even traumatic.
Astrologers, barring occasionally, can’t predict exact events. They can give an idea of the circumstances, the environment, and the conditions that are likely to come up with a fair degree of accuracy. But what exactly might be the source or event could only be good guesswork.
Astrology branches
Astrology has existed for at least 5,000 years and was developed by all ancient cultures – Greeks (which is what we in Western astrology practice now), Vedic, Chinese, and Egyptian. So over the years, this tree has grown many branches, schools and ways of interpreting charts.
Natal astrology, for example, is interpreted via a birth chart – created for the date, time and place of birth of a person. There are various traditions and branches of astrology for interpreting various events or conditions. A few are:
- Electional: Used for planning events, finding the most auspicious time and date for such events, like a marriage.
- Horary: Whereby you get answers to specific questions, such as, “where is my missing sweater?”, “Should I move to Florence?”
- Relocation or astrocartography: This shows how a place may affect you.
There is also medical astrology, and mundane astrology, dealing with countries and governments, as well as karmic astrology, relationship astrology, and so on. Psychological astrology is what I primarily practice.
The basics
There are four basic pillars of an astrological chart.
- Planets and asteroids – even the sun, and moon are considered planets – and no matter what astronomers have to say about Pluto, no western astrologer in her right mind would consider Him anything but fearsome and life-changing.
- The 12 houses in a chart, representing various areas of your life.
- The 12 zodiacal signs.
- The fourth pillar is an ‘aspect’, which is the ‘relationship’ that the planets in a chart have with one another.
So you start learning astrology by learning the meaning of each planet, sign, house and the aspects.
That is just the natal astrology or birth chart, which is often seen as a picture of the heavens. ‘As above, so below; as within, so without’ is the maxim we follow.
As above, so below; as within, so without.
And we often repeat the metaphor that a birth chart is like the picture of a plant on a packet of seeds. The plant shows what the seed could grow into in an ideal environment. But in our lives, we do the best we can with the circumstances we’re born into – the plant image shows the potential, it’s not a promise.
To tell you about your future, the astrologer can use various techniques like transits, progressions, solar returns and so on, which show where a certain planet was or will be in your chart at a given time and how it will affect you.
And if you think this is not quite enough you can study medieval predictive techniques like the Firdaria.
What are transits and what can they tell us?
A ‘transit’ is the name given when a planet meets or moves across a planet in your birth chart – your ‘natal planet’.
Bruce Willis retired from acting in March 2022 due to a speech disorder called aphasia, and in February 2023 his family announced that he has been diagnosed with FTD, a rare form of dementia. Looking at just his transits, one can glean very hard times going on and coming up for Bruce and, therefore, his family.
Some very simplistic, pared-down interpretations of a few transits show the kind of dramatic, irrevocable transformation coming into Bruce’s world in the next two-three years.
Transiting Saturn conjuncts his natal Mercury for all of 202. Saturn is the god of constrictions, restrictions, and a hard taskmaster, but also, in order for you to manifest anything, like a successful career, you need a powerful Saturn on your side.
Mercury is the god of speech, memory, the mind, travel and so forth. Mercury, under stress from Saturn, will make it more difficult for Bruce to speak clearly, and to remember, impairing his cognitive abilities.
In 2024, transiting Neptune, the god of artists, delusions, inspiration, spirituality, oceans, and even movies, crosses his descendent and conjuncts his natal Sun.
Bruce will begin to ‘lose’ his relationships, followed by a loss of “self”. Almost as if he is drowning in the infinite, oceanic collective unconscious. The barrier between Bruce the individual and everything outside of that will dissolve, making it difficult for him to relate to others as he knows them now. At the best of times, Pisceans have leaky boundaries but with this transit, it feels like Bruce will be engulfed by the world outside himself.
Not everyone who goes through this transit – Neptune aspecting sun – experiences mental illness but everyone experiences a dream-like state, there’s a strong and often unconscious need to escape and can therefore be drawn to excessive drugs and alcohol use. Or in the best case they could learn to paint or play the flute. Neptune breaks down any sense of solidity, of structure and can therefore generate much anxiety, a sense of grief and loss.
In 2025, Bruce has transiting Pluto in conjunction with his natal moon, along with transiting Saturn opposite his ascendant and conjunct with his natal Sun.
Pluto is the god of the underworld and in Greek mythology, known as Hades. The gist of one of the most famous Hades myths is how once when he was out in the upper world on an errand, saw the beautiful girl Persephone/Kore and abducted her. He took her with him to the underworld and made her his queen, where she lived for six months in a year, coming up every spring and going back down in autumn.
So any Pluto transit in any chart is a trip to the underworld – when it happens, and usually lasts at least two-three years, it feels like the dark night of the soul. The person feels severe anxiety, crippling paranoia, fear, rage, helplessness, and/or shame. The part of Bruce which still retains its grip on reality is likely to break down further.
By 2024-25 when he has his Saturn transits, having dissolved and broken up and transformed in mind and spirit, Bruce may crystallise into an entirely new identity.
My understanding of this or explaining what’s happening to Bruce won’t change the process, but it will help you and me to have more compassion with which to look at the universe and hang on to our faith.
Without astrology, I would have seen his condition simply as FTD, as a mental illness as diagnosed by his doctors. Now I want to believe that Bruce the spirit has chosen to opt out of the conscious world, to descend into and continue to have a conversation with his unconscious – a thought that terrifies most of us as the unconscious is not precise, not rational.
Why would anyone choose this? If you believe he did not choose this future but it just happened to him, then you believe he is the victim of fate and not the driver of his destiny. And John McClane would not be best pleased with that opinion!
“My birthday wish for Bruce is that you continue to keep him in your prayers and highest vibrations because his sensitive Pisces soul will feel it. Thank you so much for loving and caring for him too.” Bruce’s wife, Emma Heming Willis, said this on his birthday on the 19th of March. I agree wholeheartedly.