Dark Passion
Birth 21 November 1965
No sign of the zodiac is more misunderstood than Scorpio. Even those who don’t care for astrology know that Scorpio stands for scheming, vengeance, sex, war and death! While the sign can signify all of these, the key to the Scorpio temperament lies in its being a water sign, and therefore fundamentally emotional.
Scorpios have passion – the deeper and darker the better – and if an experience doesn’t deliver intensity, they lose interest. Here one might mention such Scorpio rockers as Neil Young, Antony Keidis and Jeff Buckley. It’s no surprise, then, to find Bjork’s songs littered with references to ocean depths (as in ‘The Anchor Song’) and volcanic eruptions. Like the scenery of her native Iceland, her emotional landscape is stark and extreme, where even joy carries a threat (‘Violently Happy’). She even opens one song ‘Excuse me but I have to explode’ – it’s no coincidence the song is called ‘Pluto’, a planet linked to Scorpio (along with Mars), as Bjork evidently knows.
Bjork’s astrological interests, which probably come via her hippie mother, certainly extend to knowing she is a ‘double Scorpio’, with both her Sun and her Moon in the sign, adding even more emphasis on the sign’s qualities. Bjork was also said to be the reason why drum’n’bass maestro Goldie – with whom she was having an affair – visited an astrologer on his 29th birthday, discovered that what was happening in his life was mixed up with the 29 year cycle of Saturn, and subsequently wrote his album ‘Saturnz Return’.
It was at her own ‘Saturn return’ in 1994 that Bjork made her breakthrough into world stardom, following the release of her first solo album ‘Debut’. In fact, Bjork had made her real debut many years before as a childhood musical prodigy. She had a hit album at age 12, singing Icelandic nursery rhymes, and came to international attention as singer with the Ice cubes in the late Eighties.
Bjork’s birth chart reflects her gifts as an artist and as a public personality. The artistic planets of Venus (creativity), Mercury (thinking) and Neptune (intuition) are in exact alignment. What’s more they link to Saturn, planet of strength, and the powerful duo of Uranus and Pluto. This last pair orbits the Sun so slowly they meet in the sky only every 120 years, the last time being at the ‘psychedelic wars’ of the mid 1960s. The fact they feature so prominently in Bjork’s horoscope makes her attuned to her generation and to the wider collective. Something similar is there in the chart of Kurt Cobain, though feeling ‘connected’ to humanity eventually overwhelmed Kurt.
The strength in Bjork’s chart makes it very unlikely that she would ever be knocked off course. Her biggest problem is likely to be the opposite – that she hates not being in control of her situation…or of other people. The energy and intensity in her chart (not to mention Scorpio’s legendary sex drive) means the elfin singer tends to ‘burn out’ other people, as the collective of the Sugarcubes and various celebrity boyfriends have discovered.
Bjork has, nonetheless, had to face some difficult periods in her life. The long slow passage of Pluto (the planet that makes Bjork ‘want to explode’) through her sign Scorpio made the Eighties the time of discovery. Shortly after Pluto arrived and passed across her Moon (home and motherhood) in 1985, Bjork gave birth to her first son, Sindi. Her emergence as a solo force arrived when Pluto passed across her Sun in 1994, simultaneous with her Saturn return.
In Matthew Barney, the acclaimed American artist who is her ongoing partner, Bjork has met her match, and perhaps her soul mate. Born 18 months after Bjork on 25 March, 1967, Barney is a high energy Aries who is as driven and ambitious as Bjork (*1). Their charts mesh beautifully. Most strikingly, Barney, an impetuous romantic, has his ‘passion planets’ Mars and Venus exactly in line with Bjork’s Scorpio Moon. One suspects, nonetheless, that there are some stubborn arguments behind closed doors. (*2)
One problem Scorpio types face is that the sign is so stubborn, they find change difficult, preferring to stick to what they now. That Bjork has Mercury, the thinking and talking planet, in the freewheeling sign of Sagittarius, means she is always seeking out new challenges and new ideas. Engaging with Lars Von Trier to make Dancer In the Dark, is one example, manifesting Scorpio themes of sex, death and suffering onto the cinema screen. Bjork has continued to experiment with her music, and it’s appropriate her album, Medulla, which used only her voice for its sounds, was created as Pluto crossed Mercury, the planet of the voice (it also has more oceans and submarine references).
Currently, Bjork is at an enchanted spot, and not just because she now has a second son with Barney. With Jupiter, the planet of expansion and good fortune, in her sign for the next year (where it was when she made and released Debut) she is starting another cycle in her art. At present she is in fertile period, a feeling that is amplified elsewhere in her horoscope (*3). For the next six years her music is heading further out…and you thought she was out there already!
*1. Barney has a Sun-Saturn conjunction, and has his Moon in the middle of that mid-sizties Uranus-Pluto conjunction.
*2. Barney’s Sun-Saturn in Aries squares Bjork’s Mars in Capricorn.
*3. Uranus, the planet of innovation, is in her fellow water sign of Pisces and aspecting her Scorpio planets.