The Astrology of Pablo Neruda: A Cautionary 12th House Tale
Pablo Neruda’s birthday was on July 12th. With four planets (including the sun and moon) directly opposite the planetary confab in Capricorn that’s happening in 2020, I thought it might be worth spending some time examining his chart.
As a 10th house baby, the first place my eye always goes when I look at a chart is the very top, so the first thing I noticed about Pablo Neruda’s chart was Uranus in Sagittarius in the 10th house. Neruda is famous for two things: revolutionary politics and poetry. As a lit major, I know him for his poetry, but Uranus in the 10th house suggests to me that his political work wanted to be his life’s work.
This theory is reinforced by Saturn in Aquarius. With Saturn in the sign of the revolutionary, Neruda would have found satisfaction in supporting structures of a revolutionary nature. Saturn is the traditional ruler of Aquarius. Aquarius is the sign of the revolutionary, the airy dreamer. It is the outcast child who dreams that, one day, things will get better. Unlike the vague, watery dreams of Pisces, Aquarian dreams make specific plans. Saturn is the planet of the material world. More than the other air signs (Gemini and Libra), Aquarius is all about the mind getting down to brass tacks. What needs to be done to make the things better? In Aquarius, Saturn works to build structures and great works to support that future.
In life, Neruda courted a great deal of controversy for his support of Joseph Stalin. How could a man who was capable of creating such beautiful poetry also be capable of supporting a leader who murdered millions? What does building structures to support a utopian future have to do with the Gulag? How could a person with six planets in Cancer consider such a thing?
Looking at someone’s birth chart can’t tell you how they will vote. There is no Sign of the Poet who Supported Dictators, but a birth chart can tell a story about why people made the mistakes they did.
This is where Neruda’s Saturn in the 12th house comes in.
Planets in the 12th house tend to be things that we have a hard time working with consciously. In the physical sky, planets in the twelfth house are invisible, lost behind the glare of the rising sun. Like Arctic explorers who have become snow blind, planets in the 12th house tend to stumble around, feeling their way through a world they can’t really see. The ancients called the 12th house the “House of Self-Undoing.” Planets in the 12th house can feel like they’re acting behind our back.
This stumbling around in the dark quality of Neruda’s Saturn wouldn’t have been helped by the fact that he was born at night during the dark of the moon. A person outside beyond the reach of civilization at the moment Neruda was born would have literally been stumbling around in the dark without a light in the sky to see by.
Saturn’s position in Neruda’s 12th house suggests that he may have had difficulty thinking clearly about the revolutionary structures he was trying to support. Worse, since Saturn is the planet of moral boundaries and ethics, Neruda would have had a difficult time acting with consciousness and purpose on his beliefs in the physical world.
With his overwhelmingly watery chart (6 planets in Cancer, Pisces rising, Pisces south node in the 1st house), most of Neruda’s psyche was oriented toward the world of the emotions.
Cancer is a quiet, introverted sign, most at home caring for individuals. It is a nurturing sign that shows affection by making chicken soup and talking about feelings—or, with the presence of Venus and Mercury there, especially—writing love poetry.
Pisces is a dreamer like Aquarius, but Pisces’ dreams commune with all that is in the spirit of universal love. Saturn and Aquarius know that in the physical world, being one thing necessarily means not being something else, but Pisces resist limits and boundaries, the elements necessary to creating structures. With Pisces’ traditional ruler Jupiter in Aries, Neruda may have had a vague sense of the need to fight for his dreams, but with the Saturn, the planet that ruled his moral compass, stumbling around in the 12th house, it is easy to imagine him wringing his hands in horror, not sure what to concretely do.
And yet, with the north node in earthy Virgo, he would have found the call to manifest his vision in the physical world alluring. His soul wasn’t content simply to dream anymore. He needed to make something of his dreams.
He did, of course, make something of his dreams when he wrote poetry. A poem gives form to dreams.
Yet, as a man born at the dawn of the 20th century, he would have found himself navigating a world with little respect for poets, dreamers, and caretaking. He would have felt pressure to become a man of action, to lean into that difficult Saturn, and turn away from his cancerian heart.
In the end, it is the extent to which he turned away from political structures and toward the heart that that the world honors him. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.
