A book starts with a feeling, an emotion. It’s not a rational process. So says the Pisces Brett Easton Ellis born March 7th, 1964 in California. He said as a teenager he was a ‘liar’ but now he is 58, he has mellowed and is more truthful. He has shifted and changed so much he barely recognises the person he was 20 or 30 years ago. So we can guess he is a chameleon Pisces. He has let the labels roll off like water- shifting from straight, to bi to gay over the years- the only unchanging certainty is that he is a writer and his books keep on getting attention.
Take a scene from his novel Rules of Attraction (1987): one character called Paul Denton, who is obsessed with Sean Bateman says ‘I just want to know you” and Sean replies, “no one will ever know anyone.” It is the cold wet blanket to the unrequited desire. Patrick Bateman a.k.a. American Psycho himself says you can see his face but “it is only illusory. I am simply not there.” The dedication in Ellis’s latest novel The Shards (2023) is ‘to no one’ and in the first chapters, he quotes the refrain from the song Vienna ‘this means nothing to me‘. And Ellis himself, the author says he is ‘not’ the guy that wrote these earlier novels any more.
All this negation of self holds a mirror up to the world as if to say what you see in these characters reflects our own feral nature: the emptiness, vacuity and rage is cultural embedded. It is very Piscean to be there one minute and not the next- perhaps Pisceans know how to retreat into their own hall of mirrors where the space creates multiple reflections. But what this does is to blur the boundary between the Easton Ellis and his readers. Pisces is watery, reflective, and somewhat slippery; and late February-early March is the best time to indulge in this deep reflection as the Sun is at the end of the zodiac cycle, you can finally see what parts are too heavy for your new lighter self, so it is time to just leave it behind. There could be an accumulation of insights and understanding if you are in touch with your deeper feelings.
He has Mercury in Pisces too where it is right now. Natally, this can sometimes mean that the native’s thoughts are ‘not’ their own as well as it is labelled as being in ‘exile’ there. That is because it is opposite its peak strength in Virgo. Mercury here is also very intuitive, less rational and the struggle to be clear may make the native work harder? He is not a trickster for nothing. He can wriggle out of any trap. They are likely to overcompensate for any weakness in talking or writing. With this position, if you have to slip in and out of different modes of consciousness, fishing for intuitions, it would not be a surprise if ideas and images just slide into your head but that they can pack a punch too.
On his website his portrait shows only the back of his head- he is faceless- so it is easier to project your views upon him which may not be his views.
Consider the Piscean themes in the opening lines of Ellis’s new novel The Shards set in L.A.:
We can feel romance, seduction, the dream-like nature of reality and how it interfaces with fiction, immersion into another world, parallel to this one, the fact of being hurt by going too far. But nostalgia is prominent as the whole inspiration for this novel was triggered by Easton-Ellis’s nostalgia to return to 1981 and relive that era’s music and mayhem through the eyes of a group of youths in Los Angeles.
Drugs, suicide, unrequited love and lost illusions are all additional threads interwoven into Ellis’ stories as they are populated with people who, like Patrick Bateman, the Wall Street killer, seem inch deep, repeating obsessive patterns, focussed on irrelevant details, stuck relentlessly to the surface of life, unable to find the depth that might be there. They are people who lack empathy even for themselves, but are prepared to dismember, mutilate, murder people and then say casually ‘so now what’s for dinner?’
As Hannah Arendt said ‘the banality of evil’ is what characterises how evil works itself seamlessly into everyday experience and becomes invisible – you only see it if your conscience is aware. This could be what is happening to many people as all the trusted sources of stability crumble and find they have zero inner world to fall back on. Their moral compass has been dampened down. The world envelops the mind with the fog of disorientation and large-scale cognitive dissonance- Neptune with Jupiter in 2022– and the mingling of truth with lies pollutes the rest. Pluto conjunct Saturn in January 2020 kicked off this era of abuse and these two heavyweights are both on the move in March so the story is no longer subtle, but about monumental shifts.
Neptune, the modern ruler of Pisces, creates profound confusion, but it is also about glamour and one of his novels is dedicated to just that – Glamorama (1998). This is a satire about fashion models, consumerism and celebrity culture- not surprising too that Ellis has Venus is on the MC at 0° of Taurus – Less than zero? He then became known for this Venusian topic. It shows how malignant narcissism is rife and not just in the fashion world. Neptune is strong in the charts of musicians and artists, particularly if Neptune is square to the Sun. That tension is grist for creators to do their best work.
Venus and Jupiter also run directly through California on his astro-location chart. His Moon in the fifth house helps increases the fertility of mind, even if it is in Capricorn and is undernourished and might need plenty of watering there, more nourishment. The Moon is also in a testing square to his personal asteroid Eros in Aries, so some friction between his boisterous sex style and his need for withdrawal and emotional sensitivities. His lot of Eros, on the other hand, operates more in his relationship area at 17° of Aquarius in the 7th House, and he seems to operate best in long term relationships. The Moon is trine to asteroid Sappho revealing his need to make is personal intimate life a kind of public act as Sappho did.
In Easton-Ellis’s chart Neptune has a lot more space and less tension to play with as it is trine – so he could rest on his laurels more- but it is in this easy aspect the stellium of Mercury, Mars, the Sun. However, Neptune rests rock solid in the 4th house of his home life and his true image of himself somewhat confused. It is opposed to Uranus-Pluto which adds insight and depth to the scenes of sex and jealousy. The style can be dark like a gothic horror writer.
He says he always wanted to be a ‘film maker’ and music figures at every corner in his stories- the soundtrack to his life. Neptune stands out as the signature planet for film makers. Stanley Kubrick, for example, has Neptune in Leo. Ellis has a Leo Ascendant so naturally seems to capture all the attention and to know how to make a story of his life. He has often said that he wanted to be a film maker and has made several attempts. His books lend themselves well to filmic treatment and he is planning to direct a film which will be a horror film.
Easton-Ellis has Mars conjunct Mercury in Pisces which gives his writing that added twist of biting sarcasm. Some might use the word ‘exile’ as Mercury here is not in Virgo its opposite sign where it is both the ruler and exalted. So we might ask where all the sex, murder and mutilation in American Psycho comes from. He has Uranus conjunct Pluto in Virgo in the 2nd house so the coldness, clarity and detachment is there along with the surgical detail that unearths the hidden layers – all that is dark that lurks underneath. This is opposite to Mars and Mercury so that sharpens the wit even further knowing when brevity and minimalism works best. And Mercury in mythology in his role as psychopomp, which is a ‘guide of souls’, perfect for Pisceans, was able to enter the underworld talk to Hades and return unscathed and unharmed.
Saturn moves into Pisces
Brett has matured well it seems. If you believe the natal chart is a set of musical notes, he has come to a climactic motif in his personal symphony. He has just passed through his second Saturn return the last two weeks of January 2023 around the time of his latest book publication. Saturn symbolises this matured approach. Some are saying The Shards is a return to his earlier mastery of the novel and it emphasises how music entrains into memory. It’s getting good reviews. So he’s still around with something to say. He did not fade away as some definitely hoped he would. It is also the exact same story as Less Than Zero just told very differently, from the point of view of an older, wiser narrator.
Saturn at 28° of Aquarius is back to its natal point second second time around- and he is stronger than ever. He was part of the so-called ‘brat pack’ – a derogatory label for a bunch of young writers whose tone was more modern but who were in fact very different temperaments. Ellis enjoyed success while very young. He started writing at age 17 having written two novels before his first one Less Than Zero published when he was 21. He published American Psycho when he was 27 – Saturn was at 28° of Aquarius which was his first Saturn return. Age 21 is both the first quarter of the natal position of Uranus and the third quarter mark towards the Saturn return, so it is a hugely significant time of contrasts and adapting to adult life.
But Saturn moves into Pisces this year- next week in fact -we should all pay attention- and it’s on March 7th– Brett’s birthday, so it’s the signature of his Solar Return for 2023 which is very interesting. He’s someone we can look to for clues as to what’s happening in the greater collective
Looking at this chart, just when he thought his graduation was over, that Saturn will transit his Mercury, his Mars, his Chiron and then his Sun. This period will hit from 18th March to 18th May 2024, so we may see him in the news yet again, or he may find that his reputation is again on the block.
On the other hand, it could just as easily firm up his standing in the world as well- as Saturn has a tendency to do that. If he’s been doing all the necessary inner work, he will receive more accolades as the Sun on Saturn especially – a tough aspect to have in a natal chart- confers the mastery and maturity of a job well done in spite of all the doubts and struggles to get there. Saturn is moving through Pisces so when it conjoins Mercury and Mars, in 2024, it will also oppose his natal Pluto in Virgo, so this will be an intense period for him where vital changes may have to be made or forced upon him.
Interesting too is that his progressed Saturn is also now in Pisces, and the progressed Moon has come full circle back reach the same position as his natal Saturn in Aquarius. The link between Saturn and the Moon is numeric – it takes 27 years for Saturn to return, but 27 days for the Moon to complete its cycle through all the signs returning to the same point 27 days after birth. So the predictive power of the lunar ‘progressed’ point adds an additional reset function. This coincides with the Saturn return for all of us. Easton-Ellis’s was extremely powerful as he said he wrote American Psycho from a position of deep alienation in his life.
Anyone with Saturn in late Aquarius or in Pisces should take note too as this will be a similar experience for them. If you have Saturn at 0°of Pisces especially as it goes over that point a few times this year. It reaches 7° in July, and returns to 0° in mid-October and stays there all of November. So there will be a re-run of the same issue. Similarly when it reaches 7° of Pisces again in early February 2024, we might get a reprise of what was happening when it stationed there in July 2023.
But then also keep an eye on Saturn as it crosses your Sun in Pisces whatever that degree is, and most likely your Mercury too, as it stays close to the sun- some mastery of words and communications is indicated. But it could be that Saturn over the next two years crosses your Venus as well, and if you have a stellium in Pisces, Saturn will bring gravity of tone to each planet in turn as in the case of Bret Easton-Ellis.
Anyone in fact who was born in that era – the mid sixties-from 1964-1967 with Saturn in Pisces opposing Uranus-Pluto in Virgo will find this whole period of Saturn here hugely pivotal and important. Plenty of clearing out work to do especially for psychosomatic issues as Pisces represents the psyche or soul, and Virgo the body or soma; and Pluto roots emotional roots while Uranus is the nervous system that entangles with the body, so profound healing can take place.
Easton-Ellis will also have a Jupiter return at 21° of Aries in April that also comes across his MC- that hints that he might be doing a book tour, promoting or that he explores some new territory or that his novel sells film rights and gains a whole new round of promotion.
My guess is that this opposition of Mercury/Mars to Pluto/Uranus in the natal chart has not made him an easy person to know. Perhaps he is persnickety, irascible, contentious, and manages to elude being pigeonholed just as Zeus was let out of the playpen on Mount Olympus a bit of a rascal. Jupiter in the pioneer sign Aries wants to be the first but also to go the distance. Uranus with Pluto is also explosive, a trickster-demon kind of energy, and it could bring sudden corrosive outbursts of speech, that while they may be insightful, most probably lances the boil too and clears something away that will never come back.
Brett Plays the Bad Boy
Writers should be opinionated or they are not appropriate channels for the natural zeitgeist, but Easton-Ellis does speak his mind. There’s a feeling that he’s playing up to his role as so called ‘bad boy’ and having fun with that. In a recent interview for Times Radio he challenged the notion that liberals are good and that everyone else is bad. He thinks that it is not good for writers to walk on eggshells. That today as a male you cannot create a novel whose protagonist is a woman. You would be hounded out of publication.
Long gone are the days when James Baldwin as a young black man wrote a novel Giovanni’s Room populated only with white people. Writers would be hounded by the cancellation brigade today he says: “Identity politics is a truly dreadful thing for the Arts. Hollywood is Nuts. That progressivism is reverse racism. It’s woke in reverse which is really an authoritarian conservatism that goes back to the 1950s.” Saturn in Aquarius can go both ways, be stern and rigid or truly liberating- it depends.
He goes on to say that book American Psycho (1991) would not be published any more due to cancel culture. “Only if a ‘woman’ wrote it” he says, so it would be a daring statement about so-called ‘toxic’ masculinity that fits the model and he says that only independent publishers can dare to publish stuff that does not ‘conform’ to the new ‘woke’ standards.
It’s interesting that it took a woman, director Mary Harron (a Capricorn), to see that American Psycho is in the tradition of pure black comedy like Waugh’s Vile Bodies, that Christian Bale (an Aquarius), among all the other actors vying for that role, was the one who understood that Patrick Bateman was a cypher and not a real human, and the murders can be seen as metaphors for each man kills the thing he loves. The novel was of its time -1991 -tapping into some perversions of the zeitgeist back then heralded as it was by the first Gulf War. All the excesses of consumer culture and status and showiness are encapsulated in killing or even carving up the authentic self.
There was little outrage when the serial killer was a woman, Mila Kunis, in American Psycho 2 two years later. But this was a pastiche of the original film American Psycho that Harron directed in 2000. She said it had to be done ‘right’ to reveal this pure ‘satirical’ intent or it would be misread. But still a lot of people mis-read it, taking the satire as literally true, and reacting with shock and repulsion, and Easton-Ellis was personally hurt and surprised by the extreme response. Mystery, scandal and gossip are all par for the course for a Pisces and he says he really does not care. Water off the back.
People who say they don’t like his novels because the characters are shallow may have missed the point- that satire must show them as empty, vacuous and without any internal processing in order to make its deeper moral message as satire can be ultimately conservative. It just comes across in a twisted way as that Mars with Mercury opposite Pluto makes it radically sharp and incisive. “People are a ‘mess’ and that’s the reality” Ellis says.
He regrets that when he was young that he thought it a good idea to hurt people by adopting the ‘cool’ boy stance of disdain for others. He says “Being a middle-aged white man is not as desirable as it once was. “ Back in 1981 “We wanted to be confronted by Art – there was no ‘ideology’ then… so there was a sense of freedom that we have lost today.” The Shards was motivated by nostalgia for the year 1981 the time when Blondie, Ultravox and Duran Duran was the soundtrack to a hectic hedonistic life and teenagers drove around LA in BMWs dropping quaaludes and snorting cocaine.
That probably was not what happened to most of us, those times might have been tough, but no doubt full of friends, and fun and life so with a similar flavour just without the BMWs. He was in a privileged group and the ‘old man’ writing from 2020-21 triggered by the boredom of lockdowns found a way through memory back to a time of freedom and space that has now vanished.
What Memory can do for you
It seems to sum up that what Brett Easton Ellis stands for is a kind of authenticity missing in today’s climate of instant cancellation and consensus thinking. But one thing that can revive your personal power is to do what he’s done here with the Shards– use memory as the antidote to our current ailments. This could have been done by a sun-sign Cancer, such as Proust, as the moon in that sign memorialises but since he’s a Pisces, it is the level of emotion that matter. He emphasises repeatedly that his writing is not a rational process but all to do with feeling, the deepest feelings that arise from a time lost and like Proust creates a time capsule.
Also, not to be missed since he is a writer after all, is the noticeable placement of asteroid Klio conjunct his Midheaven at 26° of Aries. Klio is mistress of memory and conserving the historical perspective for all that it can teach us, she relates to the meaning of museums, memory and meditation.
Go back to the time when you were most alive whenever that was, use music, photographs and testimonies to activate your memory and to fill in any gaps. Then find old friends online, and contact them to share memories, to bring it all back to life. It could well complete that process of healing and restore if not more fun, then at least a revival of the music.
When all the energy shifts into Aries from March 20th, we can leave this tactic behind and step on the accelerator, go out in the world with a less muddied vigour.
© Kieron Devlin, March 4th, 2023, All Rights Reserved
Kieron is a London-based and trained astrologer at Proteus Astrology on Facebook and his home page:
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