There's a lovely little google doodle today of the planets moving around the our star, the Sun. It's there in celebration of Nikolaus Copernicus' 500th birthday. Copernicus' book, On The Revolution of the Celestial Spheres, in which he posited that the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun, is said to have launched the scientific age in which we are still living.
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| This chart is from Astrodatabank and gets an AA rating |
With his Sun in Pisces (on an "astrologer's degree") and his Moon in Sagittarius, it's no wonder his mind was on higher things. And with Moon conjunct Jupiter in it's own sign, we get a very big mind indeed. He was a real Renaissance Man – a philosopher, doctor, diplomat, priest, artist, mathematician, linguist and jurist. Clearly, he was interested in everything. This Sagittarius-Pisces combination belongs to spiritual seekers, people who are looking for meaning.
The chart ruler, with critical Virgo Rising is Mercury. In Pisces, the winged messenger has a reputation for irrational thinking, but clearly that's not really right. I've put in the asteroid Pallas, because she rules pattern recognition, which pretty much describes the essence of what Copernicus did. He realised that the patterns of planetary orbits only made sense if they were revolving around the Sun. Pallas is at the very end of Pisces, in the last few minutes of the last sign, conjuncting Mercury, the mind. It was not until after his death that the Copernican Revolution began, just as Pallas was conjuncting his Midheaven.
