Mark Twain: heroes, villains and dreams.

Many people, especially when they are younger, can enjoy a ripping adventure yarn in some shape or form. Often, the format is quite simple: there is a hero, set off either willingly or unwillingly, on some kind of a quest; usually has some kind of an ally to aid him (or maybe her) along the way, often encountering a few choice villains along the route to whatever their goal may be, and hopefully emerging victoriously after encountering a few dangerous situations before being able to tell the tale.

Children's adventure stories may involve a search for lost treasure and outwitting the bad guys – usually either stupid, bumbling, or less-than well-intentioned adults.

Mark Twain may be better-known for the popular children's novel Tom Sawyer, which certainly seems to be a children's tale for children. Treasure does indeed get to be discovered and claimed and a large part of the enjoyment readers might derive from Tom Sawyer is the way the young scamp outwits both the bad-guy adults and the more well-meaning, but dull, moralising adults who only seem to want to make sure that he washes behind his ears and goes to church on Sunday.

Huckleberry Finn, on the other hand, seems to more a story for adults, where the main character or hero happens to be a child. The protagonist of this tale by no means paints its prequel main character, Tom Sawyer, in an especially flattering light – Tom's fantasies can entail a disturbing cruelty and most of his understanding of life seems to be informed by – well, children's fantasy adventure stories. The 'bang-bang you're dead I'm not' approach to play, often incorporating 'do you wanna be in my gang' politics that may children play is often depicted as being less-than a million miles away from the guiding morals where adults maintain feuds that involve real bullets.

Twain's hero Huckleberry Finn slips through the safety nets of those institutions that are supposed to aid children such as himself. In the story his father is an abusive skid-row alcoholic who kidnaps him from his guardians, because he wants to get his hands on his money to keep on feeding his habit. He explicitly states that he does not want his son to receive education, to dress more finely than he does, to be in any way better than he is.

After he is nearly killed by his father during a fit of delirium tremens, Finn fakes his own death and travels to a nearby island to escape him. On the island, he finds an ally, a Black slave who deserts his owners after overhearing that he may be sold and separated from his family.

A significant part of the tale involves the relationship between Finn and this ex-slave, though the latter is unaware that Finn struggles with his moral conscience: he feels that it is his duty to turn him in – their benefactor is one and the same. Huckleberry Finn struggles with those prejudices, according to which Black slaves are less human than their White counterparts, up to and including the end, where he has to choose loyalty to a friend over what Society states is the correct thing to do.

They travel along the Mississippi and encounter many strange individuals and villains along the way, with the adventures taking more of a sinister turn as their progress along the river continues.

There is humour in Huckleberry Finn even where dead bodies and murders abound. Some of this humour involves circus burlesque and farce, but there is a great deal of satire too, of certain kinds of human short-sightedness. Huckleberry Finn frequently bluffs and lies his way through any number of dodgy situations, but as a child with relative childlike innocence, he can perceive the world as an outsider. The adult world therefore gets to be treated in a Lilliputian way, rendered in turns enchanting and grotesque, through the eyes of a bemused Gulliver (and I was intrigued to discover that Twain and Swift share the same birthday. In fact, Twain certainly claimed de Cervantes, creator of Don Quixote as an influence, there are some basic astrological similarities there too – Cervantes shares an Aries Moon ad a Sagittarius Ascendant, as opposed to Sun-sign.) as an influence. In this short piece, I shall be looking at Twain's work, particularly Huckleberry Finn and the moral dilemmas it raises in connection to the main themes, that show up in Twain's natal chart.

Mark Twain, aka Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was born on the 30th November 1835. According to the most reliable sources, his birth time is given as 4.45 am LMT, Florida, MO. He was born during the visit of Halley's comet, and died during its second return, at the age of 74.

Clemens did not just concern himself with adventure stories for children. In a less-well known work, he turns to detective fiction with an adult Tom Sawyer turned sleuth and also experimented with science-fiction - in one story he has a contemporary time-traveller take a modern invention to the times of King Arthur. He was in fact an inventor himself, being a friend of Nicholas Tesla and patented several inventions himself - but in this he was not always successful. The failure of an improved printing machine, along with a few other ill-conceived business ventures, brought about his bankruptcy in later life.

He was no stranger to tragedy, losing his father at the age of 11 along with more than one sibling, then the loss of a brother in early adulthood to an explosion on one of the river steamships he worked on. Apparently he had dreamt the incident a month before and so always blamed himself for this loss. In later life he was to suffer the loss of a daughter and his wife.

So here we see the portrait of an individual with an adventurous approach towards life and a preoccupation both with the creative communication and its means, who remained buoyant, no matter what life threw at him.

A lot of this can be seen straight away by the predominance of the element of Fire in his tropical chart, with Sun, Mars and Venus in Sagittarius trining a Moon/Pluto conjunction in headstrong Aries, the Sun meanwhile ruling a Leo Midheaven.

Perhaps this is why Twain was able to write for children in the first place - there was probably an innate zest for life that lent him a certain child-like enthusiasm that saw Twain through many, otherwise painful life situations where more sensitive souls might have been more easily overwhelmed or defeated – and the same may be said for the protagonists in his tales. Fire tends to be forward-thinking, always looking for the potential in a new situation and where it is headed – hence the propensity to seek adventure.

The hero, or protagonist of any typical tale can certainly be shown by the position of the Sun in the chart, and a Sagittarius Sun certainly seems to fit for someone who declares that 'there is nothing better than living on a raft.' Where there is neglect there may also be some compensatory freedom and a generally dislike of being overly-domesticated. Huckleberry Finn, whom Tom Sawyer looks up to, does not want to be 'civilised.' In fact, after running away, his life with Jim on the island seems almost idyllic, consisting of nothing but huntin, shooting' and fishing' - the envy of almost any boy in desire for the self-sufficient life, out of reach of interventionalists who might tie the young spirit down with those suffocating rules. Indeed at the end of the novel, Finn moves on, refusing to remain chained to either locale or guardian.

The Aries Moon trining his Sun and Mars: Twain's hero does not lack in can-do, so at 13 huntin' and shooting already spell a happy ability to feed and maintain himself in the wild. In fact, Sun|Mars training a Moon|Pluto conjunction where Pluto rules a Scorpio Ascendant may hint at a formidable survivor with enormous powers of resources indeed. The Sun trining the Moon may also hint at another dimension of the special relationship between the boy and the runaway slave: the latter, whilst apparently superstitious and ignorant, possesses a deep wisdom and instinctive understanding of Nature.

Returning to the Fire element, there can be a negative side to living in a world where fantasy predominates, unchallenged. Sometimes, the world of fantasy may be more appalling than the more mundane one in which bullets do hurt and even kill.

Many of the characters in Huckleberry Finn are larger-than-life, with larger-than-life egos. Tom Sawyer manipulates the facts where Jim is to be rescued later on in the novel, for the sake of a little more exciting intrigue. Finn and his escaped-slave companion are preyed upon my two sociopathic confidence tricksters who claim royal titles for themselves and expect the child and the Black slave to wait on them. Finn recounts the tale of the family feudsters, whose concept of honour seems to be derived from Gothic novels, and each family wipes the other out – a severe case of mutually assured destruction. Huckleberry Finn also witnesses the murder of a drunk, simply because he yells out an insult at someone, though the perpetrator manages to ward off the cowardice of the subsequent lynch mob with a few choice words.

What other, better-known astrological factors in Twain's chart might have allowed him to examine such questionable social norms, though the mouthpiece of Huckleberry Finn, to the extent that he did?

As we have already seen - and in typical hero fashion - Huckleberry Finn has a father who is worse than useless at providing a kind of role model to base himself on and no moral code to fall on. He is therefore driven very much to his own resources in making sense of his experiences. Without the guidance of a viable adult role model he was unable to fall back on the kind of mental laziness that can make it so easy for so many people to generalise in literally black-and-white terms about who are the heroes, who are the villains.

The ruler of Twain's heroic Sun is Jupiter, which in turn squares both his Moon and Pluto.

There is a certain sense of excess implied in these factors, possibly an inability to recognise boundaries. As an aside observation, it certainly seems to be the case that Mark Twain was a dangerously-poor speculator, in view of the business patents he supported that lost him so much money. To return to the story of Huckleberry Finn, these squares might certainly, well describe the character of Huckleberry Finn's father.

Jupiter is also, and to a lesser degree the Sun too, is also, all about looking for the bigger picture, the larger meaning that helps provide a unifying picture of what life is all about. This may take the form of myth-making. Perhaps, however, Twain recognised that that there can be a negative side to jumping to meanings and interpretations too, for any false sense of certainty this may bring: an escape into meaning that may have unfortunate social consequences as far as certain kinds of black-and-white labelling may go.

Negative Jupiterian qualities may certainly manifest as empty moralising – there can certainly be no doubt that Twain loathed moralisers – the stuffy Sunday-school conventions of Tom Sawyer's guardians, for example, are not painted in any flattering light, either. Neither are the foolish pretensions held by some of the communities and individuals Finn encounters on his travels with Jim. Even where these pretensions lead to murder in the name of honour, Twain has as little patience with the then-contemporary equivalents of emo kids whose romanticism leads them to somehow invite an early death.

Social prejudices may also masquerade as divinely-inspired canons. Perhaps, Twain knew that about himself, where his Jupiter was squared by the best-possible candidates for the Usual Suspects in any prejudice-inclined spotting contest among the planets - that Moon/Pluto conjunction.

It is interesting that Uranus in this chart does not appear to play any truly significant role in this chart, other than being fairly close to the nadir of his chart (Eris is at 23 degrees Aquarius in this chart, 3 degrees away from Uranus) yet Twain was an inventor too and his books could be read as tracts supporting greater equality for Blacks. There was, for example, the throwaway comment made by one of the 'nicer' ladies in the book, Sally Phelps, where she does not really count 'niggers' as tragic fatalities in any kind of disaster.

Twain, however, may have believed that slavery was wrong and not recognising Backs as full human beings was also wrong, but he could never by a long way, ever be called 'politically correct.' Most likely too, he would have deplored such ideals as representing yet another form of mental tyranny, engraving rather than liberating. His books were banned from many school library because he insisted on using the word 'nigger' and he is more than capable of having his character make some fairly crass generalisations about Blacks.

His way of challenging social inequalities does not appear to have been Uranian in any abstract, reasoning way at all. It was instead based on emotional considerations, perhaps of a thoroughly Moon/Pluto way: Huckleberry Finn spent a great deal of time in the company of someone whose integrity he was able to recognise and appreciate many times over, on an intimate day-to-day basis. Perhaps too, there was nothing like sharing a few life-and-death situations for an unbreakable loyalty to be forged. It would then certainly be to his credit if he was able to see beyond one or two special relationships to not labelling a whole class of people as being inferior in any way.

Another major factor in Twain's desire to look for what was real in terms of ethics and values was the fact that his Scorpio Ascendant shows Saturn rising in his Twelth House. Saturn is 9 degrees away from his Ascendant, a strange planet possibly in terms of Gauquelin's research on writers, where we might normally have expected to find the Moon. Mercury, however, is 9 degrees away from the Ascendant in the First House. In other words, Twain's Ascendant is both flanked and on the midpoint of Mercury and Saturn.

As far as looking for villains goes, Saturn at 9 degrees of the Ascendant might or might not have 'made' Twain somewhat Saurnine – that is, serious and conscientious and generally sadder and wiser by nature. Huckleberry Finn's father the beater could be seen in the Moon/Pluto trine Mars, but it could also maybe, only a strong Saturn that might declare to its children that they are not allowed in any way to be 'better' than he is. Need there be any reminder of what the mythological Saturn did to his offspring, for example? - well in Huckleberry Finn, the father was happy just to kidnap his son and keep him nder lock and key, of course.

Perhaps the fact that Mercury and Saturn are linked to this Ascendant is why Clemens was so keen to look for truths that lay beyond either fantasy or reality: Mercury/Saturn can sometimes doubt its own perceptions. Furthermore, Mercury in this chart squares Neptune, meaning possibly that distinguishing fact from fantasy or deception may have presented even more of a challenge for the writer. In Huckleberry Finn, we met both professional liars, bluffers and hypocrites, as we have seen, who lie mainly to themselves. However, yet again, we are not allowed to draw the black-and-white conclusion that lying is always wrong: Finn bluffs his way out of siuations where harm might otherwise have come to both him and his friend, where both were vulnerable. Similarly, the confidence tricksters take advantage of a garrulous fellow-traveller when they later pretend to be the relatives of a recently-dead villager.

In terms of Mark Twain's career as a whole, it should be remembered that Twain had a special interest in printing shops and printing machines and got to know the Mississippi rivers with the thoroughness of a London cabby – this, also seems to speak of a Mercury/Saturn theme.

Finally, there is the fact that Twain's birth coincided with the arrival of a well-known comet.

Twain himself felt that being born so soon after Halley's comet's perihelion was significant and it was his wish to go out with its second perihelion. There is not much writen material around on the astrology of comets such as these, though Chiron is classed as one: it might therefore be classed as some kind of a centaur and therefore with the role of bridging the transpersonal with more mundane affairs – and therefore, perhaps with long-ranging vision, if its perihelion occurs for what is roughly the traditional lifetime of a human being.

One possible interpretation I encountered for Halley's comets states that the task of this body 'is to drive mankind deeper into materiality.' However, where this is consciously resisted, this may bestow the willpower to overcome the tendency to make excuses for mental laziness, teaching 'an organic holism' and that anyway, 'going further into materiality may even be beneficial for further for certain kinds of 'historic evolution.'

Other less modern interpretations are more straightforward about it: Halley's Comet is a Malefic and brings pestilences in its wake – plagues (according to the BBC it is 'blamed' for the diseases, starvation and hostile injuns that afflicted the Colonialist settlers to the New World in 1605) and for bringing about both the French Revolution and World War One.

Perhaps for Twain the Halley's comet factor was as much as an inconvenient benefic as other, more well-known Centaur-like planetary bodies, emphasising on the one hand the prophetic far-sightedness of the Fiery Sagittarius Sun and Aries Moon in his chart, on the other, the unsuccessful inventor for whom speculating brought its own liabilities (as with the Saturn/Ascendant factor, it is less-easy to judge whether or not the wide conjunction of Uranus in its own sign to Twain's IC might have been enough to 'make' him particularly Uranian.) The significance of his literary work may certainly be that he wrote about the problems inherent in certain kinds of human evolution and counteracting the mental laziness that may well result in drawing ungenerous conclusions about the roles of specific groups of human beings in society.

Greater minds than mine might be able to plot the exact position of Halley's comet in Mark Twain's chart. Wherever it may prove to lie, the suggested interpretations above may add another dimension to the apparent drive in Twain's writing to look for truths beyond prejudicial or 'lazy' thinking.

Comets, Centaurs, plutoids, dwarf planets – the solar system has swelled to enormous proportions in recent years, introducing us to planetary bodies that possess orbits whose yearly revolutions take us to aeons of times beyond the 'generation' influences of the so-called 'transpersonal' planets. The roots of such a thing may well be obscure, but wherever a factor as troubling as racism for example may originate may be down to historical movements whose cycles have hitherto been very difficult to map.

These far-flung bodies may have a role to play beyond whatever, more well-known usual suspects might hint at. Melanie Rheinhart, for example, draws attention in her book on Chiron to the role its position play in the mundane chart of South Africa (Twain's Chiron is close to his North Node, so again, here might be the message that one of Twain's missions in life was to examine certain wounds within the collective psyche).

Overall then, it can be seen that Twain had a message to pass on in his books and he passed that on according to his own, carefully-forged sense of what was true.