Rebekah Brooks: Embodying Lilith

Rebekah Brooks: she made it up the greasy pole

Oh, the irony. The woman who made a living dragging people's good names through the mire is being dragged through it herself.

Yesterday, she was arrested (again) at her home near Oxford.

Rebekah Brooks was until last July the chief sewage operative in the UK branch of Rupert Murdoch's gutter empire. As editor of The Sun and then The News of the World (closed last year in a cloud of opprobrium), she is the woman who "allegedly" authorised the phone hacking of murder victim's families, oversaw the hounding of teenage celebrities such as Charlotte Church and Amy Winehouse and seemed happy for her journalists to stick their heads right down in the effluent – bugging, lying, thieving, cheating, bribing, and bullying in search of a mediocre story.



Her papers spread misery through this country, feeding the mob maw with prurient details of the lives of celebrities, politicians and quite ordinary people who never sought the limelight. For a long time, the political power of the Murdoch empire was simply accepted. If you wanted to win an election, you had to get them on side. If you said anything bad about them, your private life would be splashed all over the papers – and if you were purity itself, something could always be twisted or made up. If you happened to be a celebrity – or the mother of a missing child - and you didn't want to give the Sun the story, you could expect to be hounded, "exposed", shamed, demeaned. Ms Brooks was in the thick of this – and she did a great job, until last year, of keeping her own face off the front pages of the papers.

I'd give her Leo Rising but that's a guess.

The birth time for Brooks is unknown but there's still a lot to see in this chart. She has a strong stellium in the journalist's sign, Gemini, including both the Sun and the Moon, identity and nature. Journalism, in other words, is a comfortable milieu for her; it nurtures her identity.

Mars in that stellium gives her energy and drive. Reddish colouring is also associated with a Mars-Sun conjunction. Mars in Gemini is debilitated though, verbally aggressive sometimes, using words like a knife, erratic, quick to fly off the handle, inclined to speak without thinking first.

Venus, on the other hand, is domiciled in Taurus – very comfortable. Venus in Taurus is usually charming and artistic, but also pleasure-seeking, money-loving and sometimes with a sense of entitlement. I've been looking at pictures of Brooks and in an amazing number, she is clutching a glass of champagne. A lot of her drive to succeed must have been because she desired luxury.

Brooks' Mercury is also in its own sign, Gemini. Mercury is the communicator, of course, and you'd expect to see a strong Mercury in a journalist's chart. Mercury in Gemini is speedy, inquisitive, clever – but this one is not part of the stellium around the Sun, instead it aspects the Jupiter in Leo – how perfect.

Have you ever seen a hair-do that is more Jupiter in Leo than hers. It's big, it's fiery – it is a lion's mane. It shouts, "Look at me." A massive sense of self-importance, or of being a star.

Jupiter, the publisher, expands Mercury's communications. She not writing poetry in the attic, she is shouting words to the world. Everyone knows that if you tell a Gemini secret, the next thing you know the whole neighbourhood knows about it. So when Jupiter in Leo is involved, the whole world knows.

Jupiter and Mercury hook up to Saturn forming a mini-grand trine (two sextiles and a trine) in air and fire.

A fine way to make a living

She probably works incredibly hard with that Saturn in Aries – and she plays hard too. She has both stamina and short bursts of energy too, a very exhausting person to keep up with. Saturn is conjunct the North Node – very ambitious. And she has made it to the very top of the British establishment. The current PM David Cameron is a friend and country neighbour of Ms Brooks and her husband Charlie, who also went to the school for establishment contacts, Eton Colllege, with Cameron and his brother Alexander.

Brooks career seems to follow the Nodes transits to her Sun and Moon. The South Node is currently at 9° Gemini and going backward of course, and frankly, things are taking a bit of a nosedive. In contrast, when the North Node was at this point in 2003, she had a huge career boost when she became the first female editor of The Sun.


Saturn, the planet of retribution, opposed her natal Saturn-North Node conjunction last year, and right now it's travelling backwards towards that point again. It will miss the exact conjunction by 1° this summer before turning around and going forwards again.

As you'd expect from someone with apparently so little empathy or compassion, Brooks has no personal planets in water. She just has the generational Neptune in Scorpio, naturally. Neptune rules, among so many other things, scandal, gossip and rumour, a fog of lies, glamour. I would expect Neptune to be important in her chart and it may indeed be on one of the angles. Scorpio rules sewage and effluent.

Neptune's strongest aspect is to Jupiter, so it's expanded again, but here's an interesting point. If you put in the Black Moon Lilith, you get a strong t-square between the three points. I have read that Lilith seems to be involved with false accusations and slander.

Lady Lilith - Rossetti. Note the hair.

For much of the public, Brooks herself has become an embodiment of the dark side of womanhood. Some of the things that have been written about her are obscenely misogynistic. After all, she hardly acted alone. She was one of the leaders of a team of malefactors. Lilith, the dark moon, is the opening shot in her stellium, pretty closely conjunct Venus. She's a good-looking woman, but boy does she look mean despite the fluffy hair. Her darkness is very evident and I would think in person, rather compelling.

Lilith can also be associated with childlessness.  Brooks own childlessness fitted in with the archetype of the cruel, barren woman that she seemed to embody. She had a baby via a surrogate mother this spring. When this scandal started to unravel last year, Neptune was squaring her Lilith, making her the perfect target for public outrage. Neptune is the planet of the scapegoat.

Since we don't know her birth time, her Moon could be 16° either way, but I suspect it might well be at 9° Gemini which would put her in the grip of the Grand Trine in earth today. Mars-Pluto (police) and Jupiter-Venus (justice) arrested her yesterday on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. And where is Lilith today? At 9° Taurus conjuncting Jupiter and Venus – notorious.

Looking at her chart, I'm not sure she'd know the difference between pervert and justice. But hey, I hear that there's this really good barrister who's an old school friend of her husband Charlie. His name's Alexander Cameron. He's got this little brother called Dave...