Of Cazimi Kings and Queens and Peregrine Powers…

Here’s a good question to ask all your hip café-crowd real-world friends next time you’re congregating for lattés and croissants down the King’s Road: what do Jimmy Page, Annie Lennox and Carole King all have in common? Now the appeal of this question is that everyone is going to have an answer; they’re all iconic musicians, they each defined something of the cultural ambience of their time, they were all somehow credible and meaningful in their art, the list goes on but I’ll bet that nobody is going to pipe up with the fact that they all share a Cazimi Mercury!

Cazimi, an ancient term used in Arabic astrology to determine a placement within “the heart of the Sun” is rare because it requires a partile (exact) conjunction of a planet to Sol, the closer the better, in the tradition of Persian star-lore any conjunction of less than 17 minutes will be purified and exalted, although in practise, greater orbs than this appear to on occasion offer some remarkable power to the conjunction.

Whilst a Cazimi placement can refer to any planet in partile conjunction with the Sun, the commonest placement is that to Mercury who never strays more than 28° from the Sun’s place on the ecliptic. Often, this configuration confers true genius in some area or other, consider these 10 fascinating examples:

1. Alan Watts’ Cazimi Mercury in Capricorn (see this article for a full discussion).
2. Montgomery of Alamein’s too, in Scorpio (see this article for a full discussion).
3. Oprah Winfrey’s Cazimi Venus (at less than a minute of latitude!) in offbeat Aquarius.
4. Donna Summer’s Cazimi Jupiter in Capricorn, in the 5th house of songwriting.
5. Ed Moses’ Cazimi Venus in beautifully precise Virgo.
6. Meryl Streep’s Cazimi Uranus in mimic and actor friendly Gemini.
7. Alicia Silverstone’s Cazimi Pluto. There’s her source of hidden power!
8. Kevin Costner’s Cazimi Chiron (he always did seem sensitive somehow…)
9. Tony Blair, Yehudi Menuhin, Dan Rather and George Patton all shared a Cazimi Pallas!
10. And how about Denzel Washington’s Cazimi North Node? Denzel’s chart is remarkable for about 10 different reasons, so I shall definitely be writing a future article on his astrology!

Today though I want to focus on the function of Cazimi Mercury in the charts of iconic musicians, and we shall begin by looking at Carole King, whose 1971 album Tapestry is considered one of the great works of the singer/songwriter story and is ranked at #36 in the Rolling Stone Top 500 albums of all time list.

Evidently the grand-trine between dreamy Neptune conjunct the fame-inducing Aries point, Uranus in comfort-loving, rich and mellow Taurus (which rules the voice of course) and the point of competence of Pallas conjunct the IC show a great triangle of talent, but King’s ability to hint at the profound shows a measure of Aquarian genius which is expressed through her Cazimi Mercury in the home-loving 4th; there is a gentle, lilting and safe quality, a tremulous hearkening to warm Sunday afternoon’s sat cosily watching the rain outside in her music, and there is no questioning her intelligence as a songwriter: “Will you love me tomorrow?” sung by such diverse talents as Roberta Flack and Amy Winehouse, “The Loco-Motion” (you remember when Kylie was only taken seriously by 7 year olds?) and “(You make me feel) like a natural woman” were all penned by King in addition to her own internationally recognised hits. With no easy aspect to the Su/Me placement there is plenty of drive to express its quality, and once it reaches the Uranus apex of the grand trine, that energy flows serenely out into the world.

Jimmy Page has been described as “unquestionably one of the all-time most influential, important, and versatile guitarists and songwriters in rock history” by AllMusic and Rolling Stone ranked him at #9 in the Top 100 greatest guitarists ever list too; so there is no doubting his pedigree. Mercury of course rules the hands and if we look at Jimmy’s chart we see that not only his Mercury Cazimi, but the conjunction with Sol is also peregrine! This means that the conjunction of Sun and Mercury makes no Ptolemaic aspect with any other planet, it is what Noel Tyl calls a “Peregrine Island”, and unquestionably it gives Page’s hands an almost superhuman and exalted ability to create structure, his fingers exaltedly communicate his message with almost overwhelming power and perfection. Think of the nature of Capricorn, think of that being Cazimi, think of it being Peregrine and you can well imagine the countless hours of building up of working slowly, carefully and methodically toward the summit of peak Mercurial experience and expression until one day his unparalleled power and magnificence could shine out and dazzle the world. And you only watch Jimmy give forth the opening bars of White Summer in the Albert Hall performance of 1970 to see how very apt that is.

Annie Lennox has a reputation, initially as a singer and songwriter with the Tourists, the Eurythmics and latterly in her solo career which has arguably to an extent been eclipsed by her poster-child status for the feminist movement, since she encompasses a near-archetypal lyrical, vocal and enduring power that somewhat transcends her role as a musician. She recently won an Academy Award for best song, written for the closing credits of the movie The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003).

Annie’s chart is remarkable in many ways; without the inclusion of Chiron it evinces no oppositions, and her Cazimi Mercury is in Peregrine, the same as Jimmy Page’s, but her Moon is also Peregrine, a remarkable combination when you consider that her three most personal planets have almost no relationship with any other factor in her astrology. The message here is clearly one of isolation, and in the sign of Capricorn there is a “go it alone” mentality on the lonely road to success. It is reported that her childhood as an only child of a poverty-wracked family living among the shipyards of Aberdeen was unhappy and lonely because her father, overprotective of her interests, limited her independence. Her time at the Royal Academy of Music in London was similarly described as lonely, and there is a haunting note of loneliness or a certain apartness in Annie’s life which is strongly resonant in her music too. Capricorn is tough, it creates often harsh conditions, but especially it creates structure and Annie’s icy, chiselled bone structure is manifest in her iconically Capricornian good looks. Cheekbones like that define structure after all. And the pure peaks of her vocal range are almost unmatched in popular music. The disconnect of her personal planets from her wider nativity is an excellent example of the power of Peregrination in practise, here we see undiluted and startlingly pure Capricorn energy and once again we see the sheer, almost primal power of Peregrination at work, add to this the Cazimi factor and you have a voice of unremitting power and purity.

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