On the Fixed Star Betelgeuse Part II

Today’s newsletter is a deep dive on the fixed star Betelgeus, found in the right shoulder of the Orion constellation. You don’t need to have much technical knowledge of astrology to appreciate the stars. We have been writing stories and praying to them since we have been looking up. This essay is meant to help readers connect more deeply to these divine messengers and better understand ourselves. If you want to know if Betelgeus touches your chart, see if you have any planets or significant placements within 2º of 28º Gemini. Even if not, you have so much to learn from this powerful star.

If you are still mystified by the fixed stars and how they fit into your chart, I have recently released an introductory class on the stars!

It gives a basic overview of what stars are, both astronomically and astrologically, traditional opinions on the stars, plus how to fit them into your astrology practice.

Learn more and purchase the class here.

If you want to learn more about how the stars touch and guide your beautiful life, and what your soul is asking of you, book a fixed star reading with me ⭐. You have to feel the magic of the stars yourself to believe it. P.S. everyone who purchases my intro course gets 20% off their next fixed star reading ;)

To read Part I on Betelgeuse, click here

The Rising Dead

Heroes must often die in some way before they achieve victory. We have figures like Horus and Jesus Christ, sons of gods who are killed in order to be brought back with true knowledge of their divine lineage. Joseph Campbell even includes death as part of the hero's journey via the Supreme Ordeal that often leads to a sort of ending, even if it's just metaphorical or the death of a weaker part of themselves. They come back not because they are merely mortals but that because, they were seen as deities themselves, those not bound to conventional time. Brady even calls Orion “an archetype of a god”.¹ This resurrection allows this god-like nature to come forward and "grants him greater power or insight necessary in order to fulfill his destiny or reach his journey's end".² But first Betelgeuse natives must reckon with the ending.

As precession moved the constellation closer and the closer to the horizon, Orion has become more and more intimate with death. This downward movement has created the “concept of an afterlife given to us by a god who dies,” a very potent moment of “Gods, they’re just like us!”.³ In doing so the god promises us some of his immortality by offering us a life after death, the promise from which the terra cotta soldiers, among countless else, sprang; even death is just a name for another door.

Brady also points out that Ursa Major and Minor, stars more aligned with the feminine Bellatrix, left shoulder and “twin” of Betelgeuse, are located near the pole and thus never rise nor set. The goddess remains eternal. While the goddess gathers, feels, intuits, the god springs into action and acts in the earthly world. There is risk to this action of course, but Betelgeuse promises that even if you lose, die even, there is always another life.

Take the most famous character named for this star: Beetlejuice. In the 1988 Tim Burton movie, Michael Keaton plays a sallow, moldy “bioexorcist” who helps ghosts rid their old houses of their human occupants by haunting them away. Beetlejuice screenwriter Michael McDowell chose that name for the titular character because the star “is housed in the infinite blackness of space but in the same constellation as the more famous star Orion”⁴ a hero surrounded by blackness, reveling in the splendor of the void. Beetlejuice seems to enjoy his death, reveling in the power and trickery it entails him. He shows that life just keeps going, just in different ways and places.

Betelgeuse may promise success but does not promise it will be anywhere safe or on this plane. If you have Betelgeuse anti-culminating or as a hearthstone star, you may not even achieve the success or notoriety you desire until after death. You can expect these rises and falls from a connection to this star not because of any inability to master Betelgeuse but because that's what a does— dies and becomes something else.