1: Fellow Travellers of the Mind
2: The Return of the North Node
3: Burroughs, the Walking Pharmacologist
4: The Aquarian from Interzone
5: An Accidental Death in Mexico
6: The Wild Boys of Rock Music
1: Fellow Travellers of the Mind
“Love is the most natural pain killer there is” was the last journal entry before William Seward Burroughs exited the planet in 1997. People said it cost him a lot to be able to express that simple idea. He finally gave voice to an emotion after a lifetime of suppressed feelings. That pain was too great to allow human ‘love’ into his life, except for his cats, who probably controlled him in their own way. His was an alien kind of love that came from outside the boundaries set for human relationships. It’s a genuine Aquarian story where the human as individual is equated with the human as an ideal; individuality is prized and embraced but often in ways that reduce people to a societal demographic.
But Aquarians are often very good at cultivating friendships so Burroughs had several friends including Allen Ginsberg (Gemini), Brion Gysin (Capricorn) and Patti Smith (Capricorn) throughout his life. Some even became collaborators. But there were always complications rejections, betrayals, especially from those closest, and he eventually redefined his views in a very contrary Aquarian way ‘There are no friends…. There are allies and there are accomplices.”
Aquarius is that dual sign see-sawing between two rulers Saturn and Uranus- Chiron is said to be the bridge between the two as it orbits between them. Burroughs is both very Uranian (Uranus in Aquarius) and very Saturnian- (Saturn in Gemini) the combines both qualities in the weirdest of ways. But certainly, Air signs act as the conduit for electrical activity in flow of the communications. Let’s just look at two of these friends through the lens of synastry where two charts are overlayed one upon the other. It often reveals where the rapport exists between the two natives.
Ginsberg was another master of words. He was a Gemini sun sign who made his mark through ‘Howl’ (1955). With Ginsberg it was an all in love affair that became a long-lasting literary friendship. Ginsberg’s Sun and Mercury was on Burroughs Moon, IC and Saturn. This was Ginsberg’s reverence for him as the teacher, and Burroughs satisfied his need for stimulating conversations. Ginsberg’s Jupiter at 26° of Aquarius is on Burroughs’ Mercury/Ascendant and Ginsberg was instrumental in getting Burroughs’ work published. Jupiter represents publishing and promotion and Mercury in Aquarius is the dissemination of ideas. Ginsberg acted as his promoter bringing Burroughs to more widespread attention and he arranged the deal for ‘Naked Lunch’ to be published in 1959.
Brion Gysin, a Capricorn, was born just two years after Burroughs in 1916. He said ‘Writing is 50 years behind Painting’. So he tried to bring it into line with new innovations in abstract expressionism. Burroughs was almost in love with Gysin. They saw eye to eye on many things. Gysin’s North Node, Uranus and Mercury aligns very nicely with Burroughs Uranus, Sun and Mercury. They experimented, creating the ‘Dream Machine’ which had flickering lights that produced an altered state of consciousness. It was Gysin who popularised use of the Cut Up Technique for art work and Burroughs used it in his writing and eventually in his paintings too. Burroughs’ Moon in Gemini trines Gysin’s Mercury in Aquarius so they probably talked with spontaneity and speed and they were able to persuade each other easily.
2: The Return of the North Node
But for Burroughs love expressed itself more like obsession as revealed in Luca Guadagnino’s latest film ‘Queer’ based on the autobiographical novel from 1985. In that work Burroughs comes close to revealing the underlying drive for finding love usually with young men. He seeks a kind of ‘telepathy’ from his lovers that goes beyond the usual connection, a wordless communication of feelings. The character of William Lee (Burroughs) is self loathing and socially awkward. He is also emotionally sensitive which reflects Burroughs’ Neptune in Cancer inconjunct to his Ascendant. That is likely to make the native experience emotional disappointments, escaping into drink and drugs. So he’s a loner, an outsider, never getting what he wants. The search for telepathy is the solution.
Guadagnino (Leo) suggests that this may happen using the tropical mixture of Yagé now known as ayahuasca. Whether it is a hallucination or not, there is an extraordinary fusion in a choreographed scene where Burroughs (Daniel Craig, Pisces) and Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey, Scorpio) blur the boundaries of body and soul as the two melt into ectoplasmic single entity. Telepathy is a very Pluto-in- Aquarius phenomenon to be talking about right now- and for the next 20 years. Burroughs supposed that telepathy occurs through Egyptian-style pictographs but that was in the era before AI.
Whenever someone like Burroughs comes back into greater prominence in a celebrated film, I supect the astrology has something to say about it. Sure enough, the North Node continues to work posthumously. His North Node is at 16° of Pisces. The North Node has just arrived in Pisces so we are being reminded of all Piscean qualities including art, music, addiction to drugs, self sabotage, escapism and clinging to illusions, so Burroughs from his discarnate position somewhere beyond will have a transiting Node to natal Node conjunction. This point is significant because the Node slows down on that 16° as if to emphasise exactly that point. The North Node is always retrograde but from November 4th to November 17th 2025 it hovers at this degree momentarily going direct. The Nodes do this dance about 10% of the time.
The film is already in the news and has been favourably reviewed. So in November it could be the time when Daniel Craig receives further nominations and recognition for his portrayal of Burroughs. Or, either the film or William Burroughs will come back into the news again for another reason. The film’s UK release date was December 13th 2024. This was when transiting Saturn was on Burroughs’ Chiron/North Node in Pisces, and the Moon aligned perfectly at 11° of Gemini. And a Gemini Moon highlights someone who thinks their emotions rather than feels them. Guadagnino’s North Node/Mars happens to land on Burroughs’ Venus/Uranus in Aquarius and he talks of a long-standing motivation to make this film going back decades.
Burroughs included references to astrology here and there in his writing. Usually it’s a side swipe, poking fun at people who believe in the stars and planets. In Queer there’s a character called Tom Weston who is an ‘amateur astrologer’. He does not get predictions on the races correct and misleads the narrator. Weston is called ‘an old whore’. He crawls into a bar and the narrator says that “That Saturn Retrrogade dragging your ass, man?” Weston replies, “My ass is dragging because I need a beer.” Then it goes on saying it’s not good ‘auspices’ to have a beer because “Venus is in the 69th house with a randy Neptune”. It is part of Burroughs’ darkly comic style. Some might say ‘twisted’.
That it is there at all gives astrology some status in the 20th century novel. Yes, the astrologers are portrayed as wackos and not the finest of exemplars of this intuitive science.
At the beginning of The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (1969) there is more fun with the use of astrology. He introduces a character called Tía Dolores who sits under a stairwell in a lair padded by rats and astrology magazines. She talks of her ‘noonday eye’ because her eyeballs are like two spinning clocks : one going clockwise and the other counter clockwise. It’s satire but the fact is that Burroughs knew some astrology enough to make it a device in his work.
Burroughs thought there was no such thing as coincidence. For Burroughs every event in whichever order it happened was imbued with significance. This is also how astrologers see the world as they interweave the hermetic notion as above, so below, as within so without into daily life. Nothing is dismissed as trivial or unimportant. While he never specifically referred to Jung’s idea of ‘synchronicity’, it appears he intuitively ‘got’ that point – that coincidence can be ‘meaningful’. This allowed his cut-up technique where the pattern that words fall into creates multiple new interpretations more like a divinatory art.
3: Burroughs, the Walking Pharmacologist
Burroughs was a junkie with a lifelong on-off relationship to hard core drugs- Pisces in the first house. His friends said he was a walking pharmacologist. Even the doctors were hard put to know more than he did about drugs. That Chiron in Pisces is also significant. That’s his Achilles Heel but also by virtue of his knowledge what he was able to teach the world about drugs and addiction, how it affected the body viscerally (Neptune in the 6th House) and psychically. These were things that people did not previously know as they had never been said beore.
By allowing drugs to control him he learned gradually how to get free of that control. Mercury on the Ascendant points to his being known as a writer and he made of drug addiction a metaphor for all types of abusive government and medical control. He was not the first to make drugs the subject of literature: Thomas de Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are his literary precursors who also penned essays and poems inspired by drugs.
His whole life work was a search to become free from the things that seek to control us- other people, drugs, medics, government agencies, the police and lawyers. So, he was the ultimate outlaw. Not an obvious rebel, but just by his continuous questioning even of the beat culture. They said he was a Beatnik and the ‘godfather’ of the Beat Generation. Then he was thrown in with hippie culture all about liberation from establishment rules. But while he experimented with LSD along with the rest, he was definitely not a flower-power style hippy.
Then in the seventies the punks came along with the discovery of Chiron, when Uranus was exalted in Scorpio. To the punk movement he was more truly aligned as a natural maverick, at least before punk was co-opted into the mainstream. They named him the ‘godfather’of punk. It did not matter that he was homosexual too even though he married and had a son. He was super ‘cool’ by all estimations for the punk generation.
But he was too queer even for the queers of gay liberation. Perhaps in spite of that, that movement still looked to him as a precursor to their cause, and his presence loomed large as a visible homosexual in the USA along with Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol.
Burroughs could never be contained in any tidy package. He is by defintion a classic ‘contrarian’ as the archeype of the outsider fits him like a glove and in that sense he matches up well with Johnny Rotten. Burroughs however always behaved like a Southern gentleman. He was quietly spoken and did not openly attack interviewers. But he did shrug off any labels because he rejected any rules imposed upon him. He was a true anarchist in that sense, not a fake version for the sake of trendiness. Wherever there was a set of rules that popped up to enchain him, he went ahead and broke them albeit in a self-effacing way.
Even among heroin addicts, he was not a typical junkie. He did heroin differently to the street junkies that surrounded him in the Bowery. He still wore his white shirt-and-tie and a suit and looked more like a Capricorn politician or banker than an Aquarian rebel activist which is to say that he appeared to ‘do’ more of his Saturn than Uranus- the two rulers of Aquarius. The Sabian symbol for his Sun at 16° Aquarius is spot on as it is ‘a big businessman at his desk’. He was not a typical father to his estranged son Billy either; not a typical husband to his wife; not a typical gay lover by today’s standards; and not a typical writer. But it is as a writer that he will be remembered for shaking up the language to its roots and saying things in an original way which is very Mercury in Aquarius on the Ascendant ruled by its higher octave of Uranus .
4: Burroughs, the Aquarian from Interzone
The stellium of planets in Aquarius points to Burroughs as a prime example of the quintessential Aquarian. He had Jupiter, Uranus, Venus, the Sun, Mercury and his Ascendant all in Aquarius. All in his 12th House of the unconscious so posing very Aquarian problems in his life. This is only beaten by Dutch-French author J.K. Huysmans who had the Sun, Ascendant and the Moon co-mingled in Aquarius. Huysmans does in fact share the same birth date as Burroughs – February 5th. This makes Burroughs understandably ‘difficult’ – a word that fits Uranus so well. But Uranus is also associated with another word- ‘genius’- and Norman Mailer said that Burroughs is the only American writer who could “conceivably be possessed by genius.”
The concentrated intense shape of the chart points to natives who might be somewhat unbalanced or obsessive. This chart shape is similar to the charts of his parents. There are no planets in one hemisphere and a huge concentration in the sign of Aquarius. He is certainly not everyone’s cup of green tea, unless it follows Sheridan le Fanu’s story of that topic where it stimulates the pineal gland producing hallucinations. He would have liked that story and found it mordantly funny. There’s a lot to dislike and reject about Burroughs and fair enough- it’s personal taste- that alien Uranian side is super strong and can put people off for good. The nihilism in his bold outlook can be jarring as it is all encompassing. It flashes a stark clear light on all the paradoxes of the world.
He was an oddball character: awkward, stiff, with a Patrician manner, speaking almost like a ventriloquist’s dummy, barely moving his mouth as he spoke, and rarely if ever breaking into a smile. He was a flawed human. He had the look of a conservative with his suit and tie, he could have been a banker or an accountant. But many also noticed that he was kind, and considerate, liked meeting people. Many acolytes made their way to meet him. But he didn’t take people into his confidence easily. He was ‘old school’ a Seward of the Adding Machine dynasty which was a huge innovation of his grandather. He came from family, from money, and had studied English Literature and Anthropology at Harvard University. Plus, he had a job as a cockroach killer- an ‘exterminator’ so he knew how to get under the floorboards to root out pests.
Yet he was a psychonaut daring to voyage deep into his inner space. According to Levi Stevens his was a ‘magical’ universe of hexes and curses, phantoms, psychic visitations and possessions, hence the interest in parapsychology beyond the bounds of conventional science. He even had his own Reichian orgone accumulator box and was prepared to use ‘black magic’ to make lovers conform to his desires.
He could also be bleakly honest, dark, caustic and often unapologetic, so his work caused a rucus wherever it hit home. Apparently J.G. Ballard jumped out of his chair with glee when he read the first pages of ‘Naked Lunch’ which he called ‘a feast of a novel’ and a ‘roller coaster ride through hell’. Burroughs’ style stood out from his close friends and contemporaries Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. His use of language was unique and original with its non-linear, telegraphic broken sentences that read like film script directions. The first lines of The Wild Boys: a Book of the Dead are: ‘The camera is the eye of a cruising vulture flying over scrub, rubble and unfinished buildings on the outskirts of Mexico city.” That Mercury ruled by its ‘higher’ octave Uranus created a startling and ultra-modern style that disrupted any expectations in the reading public. It’s a style still being processed by readers as versions of his work are continually updated i.e. never finished.
To link words with a virus as in his phrase ‘the word virus’ now seems prophetic in today’s era of social media posts and memes going ‘viral’. He argued that ‘disease’ happens when words contaminate the public discourse, creating a chaotic kind of madness of the psyche. But he also hinted at the corruption of the medical industry, misuse of blood tests and diagnoses, and pointed towards the prevalence of mass contagions, of something very much like AIDs twenty-five years before it happened.
One judge called ‘Naked Lunch’ ‘literary sewage’ -could that be Pluto at 29° of Gemini? The reference to effluence is truer than it sounds as he was having a clear out, enacting a catharsis through his work. The words purged all his disorientation and pain but they also had the power to effect a transformation for his readers too, to galvanise them to think like he did.
But others gladly recognised him as a ‘sorcerer of words’ where he could say extraordinary things like ‘We must storm the citadels of enlightement. The means are at hand’; and “ As one judge said to another: Be Just. But if you can’t be just, be arbitrary”; “Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk?” For him the digust we feel, the sex devoid of love, the body horror experienced by his characters that shock ( the vein open like a festering mouth in Naked Lunch) is already within us. He was outlining what he called ‘the algebra of need’ and exposing the world’s lack of genuine human connection (Saturn conjunct Moon).
5: An Accidental Death in Mexico
Many cannot get over the fact that on 6th September 1951 Burroughs accidently shot his wife Joan Wollmer Adams. They were having a drinks party (with Oso Negro Gin) while they were staying in Mexico. The story was that they were just larking about playing at being ‘William’ Tell. Joan encouraged this kind of prank. They were drunk but placed a bet that he could show everyone what a good shot he was. This was their regular routine. But later Burroughs denied that it happened this way as a prank. But that story has fossilised into legend.
His natal Mars in Cancer, again echoing where it is now in early 2025, could be read as a shot in the stomach. But Mars on that fatal evening was also conjunct Pluto in Leo. This Mars and Pluto opposed his Sun and Venus in Aquarius. Transiting Chiron in Gemini opposed his natal Pluto at 29° of Cancer. His exact Nodal return had already occurred earlier in the year 1951, but in September, it was still 7° apart, still on the same axis and the Sun in Virgo was at the midpoint of the transiting and natal South Nodes.
The bullet hit Joan’s forehead, and not on the glass tumbler. It was an irrevocable moment. Technically it was ‘manslaughter’ not murder and he served a suspended sentence unable to return to the US for years. Friends observed that Joan actually had a death wish anyway and Burroughs loved to play with guns, so it was an accident waiting to happen. Even later in life he messed with guns as he was a good marksman. This is with the Vertex and South Node inconjunct to his Sun in Aquarius.
He was a man born with Moon and Saturn conjunct so would be accustomed to lifelong suffering forming an fierce armour of reserve around his emotions. So he rarely spoke of this event but he recalled a strange flood of tears which came upon him as he was walking down the street just before Wollmer’s death. He had brushed it off as he did not know what it meant at the time.
Friends and observers said this singular event was the real spur to his writing career as common or garden remorse for that accident was not appropriate for him. Was he possessed somehow in that moment? We’ll never know for sure.
With that intense pile up of planets in the 12th house he probably had more than his fair share of ‘inner demons’- the turbulent stuff that he could not hide manifesting as fate. This is an ‘all-or-nothing’ vibe going to extremes and of self undoing. This can also be the ‘suffering artist’ archetype yet Burroughs did not really ‘do’ sentimentality, or self pity- these were not his style. The Sun in the 12th also speaks of fame as it glamours people with its Piscean sheen from that position and it is said that people with this placement can be seen by others but not by themselves. But they lack control of it and Burroughs was obsessed with ‘control’ – both his wish to master it and to resist it at the same time.
He rarely spoke of this incident except in the introduction to ‘Queer’ where he talked of ridding himself of an ‘Ugly Spirit’, his shadow side, which was a kind of admission of guilt. The South Node in Virgo conjunct the Vertex could have brought challenging ‘fated’ situations into his life. This opposes Chiron in Pisces which is made of painful lessons life has to teach- particuarly sensitive in an area of love, compassion and sacrifice.
But his wife’s death radically changed him for life and turbo-charged his drive to write. This may explain the intensity and shock value that his books still have today. He had nothing left to lose. Uranus-driven people never try to simper or seduce into their way of thinking; they do not give a monkey’s what people think. Tuning in to your Uranus can be disruptive as it is a series of stroboscopic flashes of insight that lets the light expose what it may. But, like a lighthouse, it can save a few ships from being wrecked. But if you fail to pay attention to Uranus, the ship is more likely to lose its way.
We might feel this ramp up the electricity when Uranus moves into Gemini in July 8th, 2025. Mercury in the 12th is also very much the ‘Cut Up Technique’ channelling thoughts from the subconscious, presenting them as disordered, with non-linear dream logic, where the reader has to join the dots for themselves.
6: The Wild Boys of Rock Music
First a little astro-geography to be followed by some astro-synastry. This way the connections and cross-threads of Burroughs life to his work and his enormous influence on rock music can be highlighted.
Mexico in the early 1950s must have seemed the perfect place to write too as his Mercury/Ascendant line that runs right through Mexico city where he wrote ‘Queer’. His Pluto line runs through Ecuador where he went in search of Yagé (ayahuasca) in the jungle. Pluto is about transformation and intense experiences. The Sun/Venus line crosses Mexico too so he may have found it very comfortable there.
But he upped and moved on. In the mid-1950s Burroughs travelled to North Africa and spent years living in a male brothel in Tangier. This was in the international area which he named ‘Interzone’ which he positioned in his most famous book, ‘Naked Lunch’. Most of ‘Lunch’ was written there. He was on a roll and Ginsberg and Kerouac helped him hone the typescript and get it to a publisher in France. The astrocartography lines for Morocco show that his Mercury/MC and Moon/Ascendant lines cross just off the coast of Morroco. He would eat well here at his regular restaurant even though he was addicted to Eukadol pain killers and obtained the moniker ‘the invisible man’ for his capactiy to blend into the background.
There’s no exact date for the publication of ‘Naked Lunch’– roughly it was published by Olympia press around late July of 1959? This was when the Sun was opposite Jupiter, Mercury opposite his natal Mercury, but very interesting is that the Part of Fortune returned to its exact natal position at 21° of Gemini.
Naked Lunch (1959) was mired in controversy and classed as ‘obscene’. It was the last book in the US to be taken to the supreme court for alleged pornographic material – like Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the UK. It’s a picareseque phantasmagoric kind of disjointed novel. And one of those books that is still very much ‘out there’ beyond the pale. It’s love it or hate it. Most people find it shocking as he depicts the hanging of young men with all the spasms of erections caused by rigor mortis.
He said these scenes were a satire against capital punishment in the same manner of Jonathan Swift with his ‘Modest Proposal’ (1729) where Swift advised people to cook and eat babies as a solution to the population problem. It is satire at its darkest and grotesque as in the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch; and that’s the way to read Burroughs with that twist in mind. Shock tactics can have a moral value and it is so absurd it can make you laugh out loud. The sense of disgust includes strange creatures like mugwumps, centipedes and cockroach-beings that morph in and out of reality and this is reminiscent of the cosmic horror of H.P.Lovecraft.
The language is electric and pops off the page like brutal poetry. Phrases coined by William Burroughs are scattered across the whole rock/pop scene. Through him we get: ‘Steely Dan’, ‘Heavy Metal’ and ‘Soft Machine.’ Anyone’s face that appeared on the Sergeant Pepper’s album cover achieved iconic status as inspirations of the sixties counterculture. But Burroughs is there along with the others. He influenced Paul McCartney of the Beatles Revolution Number 9 has a very Burroughs-like flavour with tapes spliced and played backwards.
Burroughs’cultural influence has seeped like an all-pervasive ink blot on rock music – so it cannot easily be erased. He pops up everywhere. Specifically, he influenced the likes of Frank Zappa, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Psychic T.V/Throbbing Gristle, Patti Smith, Ian Curtis of Joy Division, Tom Waits, Hüsker Dü, Richard Hell, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, Debbie Harry, Sonic Youth, Ministry, Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and Thom Yorke of Radiohead. Add to this his influence on authors such as J.G.Ballard, Kathy Acker and Will Self.
Some said his novel ‘The Wild Boys’ even predicted the era of Punk Rock. These boys wore rainbow coloured jock straps and sandals, or went naked. They used 18-inch ‘Bowie’ knives which are ‘double edged’ when they went on their orgiastic rampage. The boys of rock acted wild on stage, but that’s where the analogy ends, except perhaps for David Bowie?
David Bowie started using the ‘cut up’ lyrics technique for Moonage Daydream as early as 1972 before he met Burroughs. And he continued on Diamond Dogs. Upon meeting apparently Burroughs trusted Bowie more than most other rock stars who tended to roll up and idolise him. Burroughs thought that Bowie expressed some of Burroughs’ ideas from ‘Nova Express’ but Bowie was eager to please the master and made up fantastic storylines for ‘Ziggy Stardust’ that had not been heard before. The two visionaries were in tune, as far as it went and they had a rollicking conversation when Burroughs was not always talkative. Burroughs said that “when you cut up the present, the future leaks in” and that’s what they both did. Aquarian Sun sign and Aquarius Ascendant- they had their fingers on pulse somehow.
Though Bowie was a Capricorn, he had an Aquarius Ascendant and, like Burroughs, people saw him as one who could see the future. Bowie’s Ascendant lands on Burroughs’ Jupiter at the beginning of the stellium in Aquarius and Bowie’s North Node lands on Burroughs’ Moon in Gemini. Theirs was a world of avant-garde ideas and Bowie in some ways helped make Burroughs more accessible to a wider audience.
Iggy Pop – possibly the wildest of all the wild boys of rock- even wrote a song called Gimme Some Skin (2014) which is a hats off to William Burroughs. It contains the Burroughs’ style lyrics:
“Typhoid Mary
She got soul
Sucks all night and blows my soul
She shoots speed right up her ass
She shoots speed and she smokes grass”
In Pop’s Lust for Life (1977) he sings:
Here comes Johnny Yen again
With the liquor and drugs and the flesh machine
He’s gonna do another strip tease.
It’s pure Burroughs: Johnny Yen first appeared as a Nova Mob character ‘hypnotising chickens’ in The Ticket That Exploded (1962). Iggy Pop and Burroughs were both ex-junkies so they both knew first hand about that ‘algebra of need’ but there are a few oppositions and squares in their synastry and they probably would not have become friends. But Pop’s Ascendant is approaching towards Burroughs’ Moon in Gemini and Pop’s Ascendant is on Burrough’s Neptune in late Cancer.
Burroughs’ influence is so all over the place in rock music that the question is what in his chart that hints that Burroughs is grandaddy of them all?
Regarding the music- he has Euterpe the muse of Music conjunct his Venus at the midpoint of the stellium in Aquarius which says a lot even though he preferred jazz to rock music. His Saturn in Gemini maybe, is the master of words , structured and restrucutred, with that Saturn trine to Uranus and Venus in the 12th? The Neptune in Cancer with its undercurrent of deep feelings suggest powerful levels of empathy? Rock music styles over the years have always evolved in tandem with specific drugs and their availability. Each sub culture has its preferences. There is even a 2003 book on Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination by Oliver Harris; and ‘fascination’ is often associated with Neptune which can cast a hypnotic spell for good or ill.
His words act like a self perpetuating virus, also associated with Neptune, which was even part of his goal. And there’s that magnified focus in Aquarius in the 12th house. That is ubiquitous- air like the current of electricity. Also, there is that ominous looking Pluto on the 29° of Gemini close to Mars. Pluto trines his Ascendant too, adding so much depth to the first impression he makes on people. His influence was transformative. Once you read a book by Burroughs, it’s hard to forget it. And the internet can be said to be Aquarian (along with a dose of Neptune and Pisces) in the era before it existed, so he basically was the internet. Burroughs was a collector of kookie ideas way ahead of their time and he was a connector of all these musicians and artists who influenced millions of their fans.
Patti Smith, a Capricorn, adored Burroughs. She not only regarded him as a good teacher, she even fancied him, which is strange as she has no planets conjunct any of his many placements in Aquarius. They even have Mars in opposition to the other’s Mars and his Pluto is square to her Moon- all increasing the likelihood for conflicts. But perhaps the rapport they felt is that his asteroid ‘Psyche’ lands on her Sun and her asteroid Psyche lands on his South Node/Vertex. Plus, her North Node lands on his Moon in Gemini. That is a pivotal relationship in anyone’s life.
Plus the fact that their work is better read aloud for best effect, both were devoted to the spoken word and the powerul effect of that sound. But with that hidden Venus in Scorpio and androgynous appearance, Smith is not easy to read. But it does seem had a penchant for deep relationships with gay men including in her early days with Robert Mapplethorpe. She is even incredibly loyal to ther memories. It was Burroughs who encouraged her to sing before her first album Horses was released. And at CBGB’s and the Bowery where he lived among all the junkies they were fellow New Yorkers.
Genesis P. Orridge, a Pisces, was became friends with Burroughs in the early 70s along with Gysin. It started with just a letter. Orridge was a serious artist and occultist often combing the two. He was complex and misunderstood as he followed a unique path of his own. He baffled people as much as he intrigued them eventually reorganising his face and body to an intersex creature of his own modeling. But his experiemnts with Burroughs helped create the ‘industrial’ soundscapes that influenced music throughout the 1980s. Burroughs’ Pluto and Mars across signs conjuncts Orridge’s natal Uranus, Ascendant; and his South Node/Vertex lands on Orridge’s natal Saturn. You could say that was a massive influence.
It has to be said that this quintessental Aquarian Bill Burroughs was lucky as a writer. He was enabled by his background from a rich family, so he was cushioned financially from poverty- at least in the early days. That would have hit others very hard. Plus, he was helped by friends and acolytes in ways that robbed him of personal agency as a writer and made his writing more of a join event. The ‘allies and accomplices’ did most of the typing and admin for him.
The writing would be preceded by what he called his ‘routines’: letters, talks, conversational gambits, jokes, skits, acted out behaviours that stimulated the spark to write and ended up in his novels. He was odd for several conflicting reasons: he was humble, seemingly without ego, a bit of a chamelon able to blend into any city he was living in. He was a real loner, a hermit, yet fully able to make friends quickly wherever he lived, and usually influential friends. He had a Burroughs’ style ‘network’.
And all this was in spite of immense steeliness and physical resilience to endure the decades of hammering from drink and drugs. He outlasted many of his contemporaries against all expectations. He still comes across as highly complex and intelligent and the soft southern accent belied the fact that his books are as provocative as any in history. They are part of an attitude that ‘questioned everything’ – likely the Uranian impulse -but this has ensured that his legacy as a writer up there with Joyce, Woolf, Kerouac and Beckett as a true innovator of the 20th Century. He was the original chaos magician of words. He died of a coughing fit that triggered a heart attack on August 2nd 1997 in Lawrence, Kansas. The Sun and Moon in Leo opposed his Jupiter/Venus/Sun in Aquarius. But true to his Uranian signature, it landed right on his Uranus return.
© Kieron Devlin, Proteus Astrology, February 4th, 2025, All Rights Reserved.
Astrology can help you to understand:
- life patterns, purpose and life path
- relationships, business and romantic
- money, and what it means to you
- career issues
- personal and spiritual development
- vision, hopes and wishes
- choices and decisions
- planning for the future
- health and well being, aligning your energies
- stimulating creativity
- the best places to travel and live
Proteus Astrology 