Fomalhaut and Mars: James Baldwin's Beauty and Anger

A few weeks ago I joined the absolute dream team of Kira Ryberg and Chloe Margherita on Threads of Fate to discuss the royal fixed star Fomalhaut. It was such a wonderful conversation and we had so many example charts there wasn't time to share them all. As Mars meets up with Fomalhaut in the sky today, I wanted to look at the chart of James Baldwin who was born with this configuration.

Fomalhaut Basics

Fomalhaut is one of four fixed stars known as the “royals.” Each “royal” fixed star is thought to have access to some kind of power, presence, the ability to hold court as a member of royalty would. Fomalhaut currently can be found at 4°10’ of Pisces. It is a lone bright star in it’s section of the sky and is the star that represents the mouth of the whale or the fish. It is of the nature of Mercury and Venus and is a very creative, spiritual star.

For more on the basics of Fomalhaut, listen to the episode of Threads of Fate that just came out with Kira and Chloe!

James Baldwin

As Mars meets up with Fomalhaut in the sky, I wanted to look at the chart of James Baldwin, American writer and civil rights activist whose essays and novels examined race, masculinity, class, and sexuality in the 1950s and 60s in America. Baldwin was an acclaimed writer whose analysis around race in particular was incisive and clear and is still relevant today.

For more on Baldwin's whole chart, listen to the Star Gays episode I did about him

When Baldwin was born, Fomalhaut was at about 2°50’ of Pisces. Although we don’t have a timed chart for Baldwin, we do know that he was born with Mars at 4°45’ of Pisces, within 2 degrees of Fomalhaut. It just so happened that Mars had stationed retrograde the week before Baldwin’s birth, magnifying Mars’ presence and meaning that Mars was applying to this royal fixed star. With Fomalhaut feeding Mars, we’d expect Baldwin’s experience of Mars to be infused with a spiritual, creative undercurrent. Mars, governing our experiences of conflict, what we’re willing to fight for, would not be interested in fighting for the sake of it, but rather in fighting for a cause. Mars is also locked into a tight opposition with Mercury at 4°20 Virgo so it is no surprise that Baldwin’s writing was the main avenue through which he fought.

Because we are talking about Mars, there is pain, anger, and hurt here. While Fomalhaut might be a beautiful fixed star, it is feeding Mars, a malefic planet, which means we don't get the beauty without the pain. And Baldwin does an incredible job of creating something beautiful, something that connects him to others, from moments of pain. This was something he experienced for himself first. As he wrote,

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

It was through his experiences of pain that he became more connected to others, that he accessed something deep and connective. That movement from solitude in heartbreak and pain, to connection with others in a shared experience of pain is what Fomalhaut offers to Mars. That connection, to what is alive, to be able to reach into the soup of creation and pull out something living, is one of the most profound aspects of Fomalhaut. Through his lifetime of writing, Baldwin consistently did this - by reaching inward, pulling out what was painful and turning that into incisive, incredible works of art - he created works of art which went beyond simple storytelling and spoke to the deep, painful truths of being Black and queer in a racist, homophobic world.

Baldwin wrote explicitly in novels and essays about the pervasive anti-Black racism in the united states. He wrote not just of specific instances of racism but pointed to the underlying racism that undergirds everything. In The Fire Next Time, he wrote to his young nephew,

“You were born where you were born and faced the' future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set for ever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could live and whom you could marry.”

Fomalhaut gives the ability to see what I refer to as “the river under the river.” To go beyond the surface level of comprehension and access the deeper, often hidden layers. While structural racism and unconscious bias are now much more commonly understood, Baldwin published The Fire Next Time in 1963. He was certainly not the only person to recognize just how deep the narratives around race in america go and how those narratives have material, violent impacts, but he was able to articulate the enormity of it and bring that “river under the river” to the surface for more people to see.

Baldwin’s anger was also righteous and informed by morality. In his essay, Notes on the House of Bondage, he wrote,

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”

His capacity to go beyond fighting for a single issue - to recognize the core of the issue - that all our struggles are interconnected, that every child - really every person - is equally deserving of our care and protection offers another example of the “river under the river.” Importantly, the capacity to recognize this"river" is a moral test. To him, it is a question of morality and integrity whether one can recognize the inherent humanity in all people, and then of course, to act in accordance with that knowledge. As we talked about in the Fomalhaut episode, Fomalhaut requires a commitment to morals, a commitment to integrity, it is not a star that grants power for power’s sake.

Mars conjunct Fomalhaut is ready to fight for a moral cause and Baldwin gives us a beautiful example of how to do that with integrity and skill.

I'll leave you with an untitled poem from Baldwin that captures Fomalhaut with Mars, the beauty and the pain.

 Lord,
              when you send the rain
              think about it, please,
              a little?
      Do
              not get carried away
              by the sound of falling water,
              the marvelous light
              on the falling water.
          I
              am beneath that water.
              It falls with great force
              and the light
Blinds
              me to the light.

Sources:

• James Baldwin, "The Doom and Glory of Knowing Who You Are", Life Magazine, May 24, 1963.
• James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, Dial Press, 1963.
• James Baldwin, "Notes on the House of Bondage", The Nation, Nov 1, 1980.
• James Baldwin, "Untitled", Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems, 2014.