Anthony Bourdain: Fascinating Highlights of his Horoscope

I was not familiar with Anthony Bourdain and his TV show and his writing until his passing (by suicide) and today I have been pondering his life as reported in the New York Times. He was found dead on Friday during a |Karmically difficult or sobering third| of a week (this week), re-emphasizing the fact that these periods are real and important and can be decisive, which is why I point them out to you every week.  Things look gloomier than they really are at those points. I cannot know the reasons for Mr. Boudain's decision, but his mother and others who knew him said that he was wealthy, free to do whatever he pleased, and had seemed very happy. 

I am not setting out on a complete "reading" of his chart, which would take hours. But I have been looking at it and will mention some highlights, especially some of the symbolic degrees.

Mercury is the high-focus planet in a vise-shaped chart (one empty square) and its symbol, 12 Gemini 13 (represented as 12 in the chart but read as 13 in the books which set forth the symbols because 0 Gemini is Gemini 1): According to Borelli and Sepharial:  "Two wolves are devouring a carcass in the moonlight.  One of a crafty, subtle nature . . . The native will lead a roaming and unsettled life. It is a degree of Voracity and Self-seeking."   This fits beautifully. The voracity is shown by Bourdain's saying that he had been determined to try, taste, and eat anything, any dish which anyone prepared anywhere in the world, not shrinking from what many of us would find repulsive or disturbing.  The wolfishness of his sensibility might be described here by himself, as quoted by Pete Wells in the NYT: " “Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay,” he wrote in the opening sentence of that [first famous] New Yorker piece, and it set the tone for all the work that followed."

His sun is at the degree 3 Cancer 4; in Borelli's symbols: "A well-appointed table, with the remnants of a feast lying upon it.  A person of worldly tendencies, with an appetite for the good things of life, which will not be denied. Extravagant and reckless prone to all kinds of excess and passionate impulses . . . Has a certain richness of heart and camaraderie, but goodwill finds expression mostly through the sensuous nature.  It is a degree of Sensuality."  Again, his own words confirm this. He went to Vassar College where he was following a girlfriend, "where he spent long nights drinking and smoking pot. He dropped out after two years. “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructing and thoughtless young lout,” he wrote in “Kitchen Confidential.”  (NYT article by   Kim Severson, Matthew Haag and Julia Moskin)

Finally, the degree for his Venus is revealing, 28 Gemini 29, again Borelli's symbol with Sepharial's interpretation: "A gloomy sky filled with scudding clouds. A flight of blackbirds are struggling against the wind.  A person of pessimistic nature; one who will abandon his many projects for want of hope and perseverance. An endless succession of thoughts and schemes, but always in the black mantle of doubt and misgiving. . . Prolix, versatile, but lacking in continuity. . . . It is a degree of Doubt and Change."  Now the final sentence in Pete Wells's article, again quoting Bourdain himself:  “Life is complicated. It’s filled with nuance. It’s unsatisfying,” he once said. “If I believe in anything, it is doubt.”

Cosmic Piper

P. S. Ever the hopeful reformer, more than the gloomy soothsayer, I have to add that in my view Bourdain's life could have ended more happily and after another decade or three if he had known his own horoscope and all of the symbolic degree symbols in it (not just the three I have pointed out) and learned from them something about possible destinies he could have invoked rather than the one he did. However, I judge not, and perhaps his life was just what it had to be, for one lifetime. He is now preparing for another, according to my deeply held convictions.

CP / HHH