Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep?
An Astrological Analysis of the Face Behind
Bladerunner
This article first appeared in the Astrological
Association newlestter, more moons ago than I care to recount. Here, I have
tidied it up a little, but otherwise this does not deviate much from the original. You can view a copy of the chart here.
It is always fascinating to
see the chart of a writer whose stories have been read and re-read by many,
with great pleasure and interest. Here, I will examine the natal chart of
science-fiction writer, Philip K. Dick. I shall be looking at this in
connection with one or two of his best-known novels. One of these - Do
Androids Dream Electric Sheep?, was
the inspiration for the film, BladeRunner.
According to his biography,
Divine Invasions, Philip K. Dick was born at noon, in Chicago on
14.12.1928, although this is corrected elsewhere to 12.15. He died at the age
of 53, but not before producing a staggering proliferation of stories, some of
which he completed in one go, working from day into night. It is well known
that he abused many drugs throughout the 60's. His emotional life was stormy,
and he divorced several times. He is considered by some to have been a literary
genius.
The main plot of Do
Androids Dream Electric Sheep, is this. Rick Deckard, the
protagonist of the tale, is a bounty hunter. He is employed to track down and
eliminate renegade humanoid robots who have escaped from Mars' colonies, and
now masquerade as human beings. He is befriended by a young girl, Rachael
Rosen. She turns out to be an android, whose mission is specifically to seduce
bounty hunters, in order to neutralise them. Once able to empathise with
androids, most bounty hunters are unable to kill them. (Here, the film deviates
from the hook, by turning the story into a Hollywood romance; none is intended
in Dick's novel, as we shall see).
In fact, the only way to
distinguish androids from humans is through the administration on each suspect
of a series of psychological tests, which look for the capacity for empathy.
However intelligent the androids, they are unable to empathise, and this is
contrasted with some of earth's inhabitants. Many of these are brain damaged in
this future world because of the effects of dust from radiation, of a future
war. The dust has killed off most of the animals, so that they now have a
disproportionate value for most humans. Deckard, in fact, has to make do with a
pet electric sheep, as he cannot afford an authentic one.
Dick in the novel rather than
in the film, makes it clear that whilst some androids may engender our
sympathy, they are evil because they have no soul. Thus, the readers can easily
feel revulsion towards the androids in the chapter where they pull the legs off
a spider, just to see if the creature can still move without them. And again,
when Rachael kills Deckard's authentic new pet.
In a typical Dickian
manoeuvre, however (many of Dick's novels are called 'reality games'), Deckard
has his own humanity called into question when one of his own quarry makes him
fear that he too, may be an android. There is real poignance at the end when
Deckard discovers in the dust-ridden desert, what he believes to be a real
toad. This is only for his wife to show him that it, like his electric sheep,
is a fake.
Brian Aldiss, in Trillion-Year-Spree,
suggests that robots as a fictional device symbolise in modern, fragmented
20th-Century life, depersonalisation, or the fear of this. Dick is very clear
on this.
In one of his non-fiction
essays, 'the Human and the Android', he explicitly states that 'android' is
synonymous with 'schizoid,' a condition for which Dick tells us he has no
sympathy. He suggests that the state of depersonalisation is close to being the
root of all evil, because it tempts us to see the organic and fragile as
ultimately replaceable, just like his electric sheep. That perhaps is why the
need to defend the authentic from the mechanical becomes a personal crusade
forDick's protagonist, Deckard, as the latter states in the novel; 'as long as
the humanoid robot is there to kill its masters/make love/sing in operas as a
counterfeit, the more my (killing) skills will be needed.'
Deckard, like Dick himself,
appears to be a champion for truth and authenticity, qualities that clearly
seem to be somehow under threat in his novel. How are these themes reflected in
Dick's chart?
It comes as no surprise to
find a strong Uranian theme in his natal chart, with that planet rising in
Aries in his 1st House - making an almost irresistible pun through the title, electric
sheep! The Moon and Venus are in Aquarius. Uranus and Aquarius seem to
appear frequently in the charts of science-fiction writers H. G. Wells is the first to come to mind
with his Moon rising in Aquarius, Jules Verne, Aquarius Sun Sign, and Arthur C.
Clarke, of 2001 fame, who also has Uranus on his ascendant.
This all makes sense, as
science-fiction might be defined as that branch of literature which speculates
on how the future might turn out, extrapolating on trends in society already
happening. Uranus in astrology is traditionally about the future, as well as
those discoveries and inventions which might either raise the consciousness of
humanity in readiness for better things, or which might also, like Prometheus's
gift of fire, be misused by a collective awareness not ready for it. This
latter fear that our creature inventions might rise up and destroy us, is what
Asimov called the 'Frankenstein complex'. Clearly, Dick does not share Asimov's
more sanguine belief in the benefits that more technology might ultimately
bring us.
Frankenstein apart, this is perhaps because it can also be recognised that Uranian progress and technology can also have the effect of sundering us from our roots and connections with nature - or perhaps the fully organic. In this light, Dick's novels can be seen to anticipate the world of future shock where everything comes to have its inbuilt obsolescence and disposability. Thus in Dick's novel, androids, whilst capable of replacing both animals and humans, only have a lifespan of four years, whilst better models are created all the time.
Liz Greene in her book Relating,
suggests that the Uranian principle can not only sunder us from our roots,
but may also 'rip away the fabric of what he (the individual) has previously
identified as his reality, often in a highly painful way.' Indeed, Dick's novel
could be seen to be about the terror experienced when reality for his
protagonist can be pulled from under his feet, like the proverbial carpet. This
terror is to do with the threat which comes from the encroaching loss of
authentic being, and depersonalisation, which the android represents.
The grimness in Dick,
however, cannot simply be attributed to the uranian theme in his chart. He also
has a 9th House Sun/Mercuryl/Saturn stellium in Sagittarius, close to his MC.
If we take the Sun to
represent the main protagonist - the hero - of any novel, then it seems to
describe Rick Deckard well enough. Sagittarius is a truth seeker, and has no
time for a counterfeit. Neither is he afraid to use violent action in order to
eliminate the counterfeit: here, this seems to give him the crusading spirit,
whilst the chart ruler, Mars, on his IC square Uranus, does not make him afraid
to kill. What seems to make Deckard's heroic quest that much more urgent,
however, is the Sun's proximity to Saturn. The Sun and Saturn are
tradiditionally adversaries, so that the will to be, the Sun, now has to fight
against that is leaden and entropic in Saturn and many of his stories repeat
the idea of an ever-encroaching kipple of dust.
In fact, most of his main
characters are very definitely highly fallible and non-heroic – more like anti-heroes
in so far that they are no strangers to failure. One of his books, ’A Scanner –
Darkly’ is actually a paeon to all the contemporaries he knew, who paid for
their desire for fun with drugs in full, with their health and sanity. It is
also worth bearing in mind that Dick’s life was also, far from easy: he
suffered the usual artist’s dilemma between being true to his own vision and
having to conform to current ideas about what sold. At various points in his
life he suffered dire poverty and was fond of recounting of the times he was
forced to live on dog food to survive.
It is for this reason that
Dick is often seen as a pessimist. Yet these heroes are given a certain
dignity with Dick, even when their actions seem to be most futile, as with
Deckard, where he is seen to be scrabbling in the dust which to engulf
everything in a ruined world, for whatever crumbs of authenticity he can find.
In this later novels, such as in the Valis series, Dick
takes this Sagittarian search for some kind of saving knowledge further, where
he seeks God (but with tongue-in-cheek humour), and flirts with Gnostic ideas.
If Saturn is pitted against
the Sun in Dick's chart, so it also appears to challenge Mercury. Mercury, to a
large degree representing perception, seems for Dick, to provide only the
flimsiest of reality constructs. Deckard, for instance, is not always free from
the fear that he might not be an android himself. With these observations in
mind, I now want to look at another of Dick's short stories, in order to
demonstrate how this 9th House Mercury-Saturn link appears to underline Dick's
desire to discover an inner truth which might lie beyond the usual powers of
perception.
In The Electric Ant,
a man wakes up in hospital, only to be told that he has been discovered he
is not a man, but a humanoid robot. He is told that instead of a heart, there
is a kind of cassette spool in his chest instead that programmes his reality
for him. Not liking the idea of this, our hero decides to tamper with this
spool. His tampering achieves a few hallucinations and a period of nothingness,
after which he is brought round along with a ticking oft, by a mechanic. The
second time he tries this, he succeeds in killing himself along with his
personal secretary. She, like Tinkerbell, only existed - it turns out- as long
as the spool of her boss was working. This rather Kafka-esque, or Laingian
ontological security, seems to be catching in a lot of Dick's novels as far as
his other characters go.
If Mercury and Saturn are at loggerheads in Dick's chart, then so does the latter seem to be with Uranus. Dick in real life is known to have been fairly radical in his thinking, with little time for Establishment. Nevertheless, in keeping with Sun and Saturn together at his MC, powerful father figures will keep emerging in his novels - father figures who seem to need to be destroyed if his besieged and puny solar hero figures are to free themselves.
This process seems to be at
work in his novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Palmer
Eldritch is an evil character who succeeds in ensnaring all the main characters
of the story, into a solipsistic loop of self-deception through his drug,
Chew-Z. This is so he might immortalise himself and become a god at his
victim's expense. He appears again and again through his stigmata, which, as
Palmer Eldritch is a cyborg, include a steel hand, steel teeth and false eyes,
within the hallucinations of his subjects.
This story especially seems
to reflect Dick's interest in Gnosticism. He seems to have felt himself to be
engaged with an inner struggle against a tyrannical, demiurgic god-figure, who
is derived from earlier experiences with his father. The Sagittarian stellium
in the 9th with Saturn surely can't speak louder than that, although Uranus, as
a technological monster in Palmer Eldritch, may yet prove to be the bigger
archon. Saturn and Uranus are both tyrants in mythology -Uranus the father is
castrated by Saturn, who is only to produce in turn, the equally oppressive
system of the Establishment. Mythologically-minded astrologers suggest that the
potentially violent conflict between these planets can only be reconciled
through the Feminine, namely through Aphrodite or Venus, who is created out of
Uranus's semen, after his castration. Perhaps the trouble with this is that
Venus here only forms a sextile with Uranus, but not with Saturn. It is in wide
conjunction with the Moon, and all this seems to do for Dick is to make the
Enemy, the android, seductive: Deckard, remember, finds it most difficult to
kill the females, especially the attractive ones. In another non-fiction essay,
The Dark-Haired Girl, Dick confesses to have frequently
been drawn to a very streetwise kind of young woman, who is every bit as cold,
detached and schizoid as his heartless female androids. In fact, in one of
hisnovels, ’We can build you,’ one of his android characters, Abraham Lincoln’s
double, is given a good deal more sympathetic qualities than the girl who
masterminded his design.
Neither do we now have to
look very far for the nature of the seemingly Uranian nature of the terror,
which can be perceived in Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep. The
depersonalisation of Brian Aldiss's robots seems to be the same as that of the
existential angst to be found in the characters described in R. D. Laing's
books, which also have a lot to say on the schizoid condition, with its
struggle against encroaching unrealness and the loss of a sense of personal
authenticity. Again, it seems to be no accident that R. D. Laing's chart also
revealed the presence of Uranus on the Ascendant and an Aquarian Moon. It may
be worth noting here that Dick's natal chart - judging it without the benefits
of a real working knowledge of either midpoints or harmonics - does not appear
to be an especially well-integrated one. His Moon, save a wide 135 aspect, is
almost unaspected, and only the Sun of his Sagittarian planets has some wide
aspects from Mars and Neptune.
Perhaps his worlds are so
threatened by the evil of his androids, entropic wastelands and archon figures,
just because he was, at some level, aware of his own android qualities. Perhaps
this is why he emphasises the importance of our own human capacities to be able
to care for ourselves and for animals. This is why originally I believed that
the time taken from Divine Invasions was correct, as this
gives him a Pisces ascendant (which also goes a long way to describe Dick as a
drug user), whereas a later one could give him an Aries Ascendant. Perhaps,
however, the sextiles from Jupiter and Neptune to his Cancer Mars, along with
the trine from Jupiter to his 6th House Neptune, in themselves provide the
necessary balance to his chillier, Uranian/Saturnine qualities. They also
provide a happier solution to the violence advocated by the Mars Uranus square
- that the ills of this world can be rectiffied by warmth and kindness.
Whatever conclusions may be
drawn from looking at this chart, it does seem to remain true that Dick was
able to find a voice for all his preoccupations within Ilis novels, that he had
something valid to say to us, both for now - and for the future.
