At the Lodge - 11th February 2008

Lodge Lecture |Class

Lodge Lecture

In her talk on Feb. 11, Helene Schnitzer took us back to the time when Pluto was last in Capricorn. The story she had to tell took place at the time of the French Revolution and after. The ‘royal’ love triangle actually consisted of three people who weren’t royals, or even aristocrats, to start with:

Napoleon Bonaparte (15/8/1769, 11.34 am, Ajaccio, France)
Desirée Clary (8/11/1777, no b.t., Marseille, France)
Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (26/1/1763, no b.t., Pau, France)

Napoleon’s story is, of course, well known. However, a little-known fact about him is that at some point he engaged himself to Desirée Clary, youngest of thirteen children of a well-to-do ship owner and silk merchant in Marseille. Disregarding his promise and the advantages of a substantial dowry, Napoleon broke the engagement and rather married the well-connected widow Josephine de Beauharnais. The rest is history…

Desirée Clary, after being jilted by Napoleon, had many suitors. Most of them, however, were sent to her by Napoleon, with the order to propose to her. She accepted one of them, General Duphot, but he was killed shortly afterwards. In 1798, she made her own choice and married General Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, one of Napoleon’s most successful generals. He was a self-made man, like Napoleon, and they knew each other since their days at the military academy. Throughout their lives, these two men were connected through mutual admiration and loathing. Their respective wives, btw., became good friends.

Napoleon made himself Emperor of France and bestowed royal titles on every member of his immediate and wider family circle. Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, however, was adopted by the then king of Sweden, Carl XIII, who was desperate for an adequate heir to the throne. And while Napoleon, finally felled by his megalomania and his enemies, ended up in exile, Bernadotte became Carl XIV Johan, King of Sweden in 1818. His wife Desirée, however, preferred to remain in France until 1829, when she finally moved to Stockholm and was crowned Desideria I of Sweden. They became the founders of a new Swedish dynasty that is still on the Swedish throne today.

So what was it that helped these three people to ascend from relatively humble origins to royalty? Helene had looked at 30+ available charts of their family members and made an astounding discovery: connections between Sun, Jupiter and Mars were prominent in each family. This calls for further investigation.

One problem was the lack of birth times, but Helene found a way to work around this. She not only used Whole Sign Houses, but the Sun as horoscopic indicator, meaning that she ended up using Solar Sign Houses. After all, she was looking for the life stories of these natives. Using Napoleon’s nativity as an example, she demonstrated that a Solar Sign chart can be read like a timed Placidus chart and gives just as accurate information. Desirée’s and her husband’s nativities were used to demonstrate how Solar Arc progressions correctly correspond to important events throughout the native’s life.

HS

Class

This was the first class in a series of four entitled Heaven's above with Andrew Morton looking at the Sun and the Moon and eclipses.

Lodge Lecture | Class