With an eager heart, Zodiac Dispatch watched basketball mega-star LeBron James and his Los Angeles Lakers move ever closer to a coveted championship this week. What was most striking about the game, however, wasn’t the action on the floor so much as the way the NBA has embraced Black Lives Matter in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police in Minneapolis. The courts and jerseys were emblazoned with BLM logos and slogans for social justice and equality. Compared to the conservative NFL, the US’s funereal American Football league, this all seemed well-nigh revolutionary.
It is in the spirit of this kind of activism that Zodiac Dispatch has decided to look a bit more closely at LeBron’s birth chart. Our main focus here: the astro-politics of a single date, March 23, 2012, during which the juggernaut hoopster began a consequential planetary conjunction involving Pluto and his Sun in the 7th House of Justice. That’s a mouthful of gnomic astro-jargon, so let’s clarify some key concepts now.
Our Sun is related to self, identity, and ego. It is at the center of the birth chart and it is quite figuratively where you shine. LeBron was born with his Sun in Capricorn, which tends toward a calm, stoic, business-as-usual energy. Capricorns are also “all business”--meaning that they tend toward commercial interests rather than social ones.
If our Sun in a given sign limns a general sense of identity, Pluto disrupts that. Pluto is a transformational energy and power. It is slow-moving and dark, digging deep into whatever it contacts and unearthing hidden resources inside us.
Due to Pluto’s slow orbit (it takes almost 250 years), many people don’t experience the powerful Pluto/Sun conjunction, which is characterized by a massive shift in identity and the way we are perceived. But on March 23, 2012, just as Pluto aligned with his Sun, Lebron posed, at his request, for a pre-game photograph with his Miami Heat teammates in matching hooded sweatshirts pulled low to shroud their faces. This now iconic gesture was meant to protest the death of Trayvon Martin, a black teenager who had recently been fatally shot by “vigilante” George Zimmerman, a wannabe cop roaming his gated community with a gun to keep it “safe.” Trayvon’s crime? Wearing a hooded sweatshirt, being black.
The unexpectedly political nature of the photo was unprecedented in LeBron’s ‘business as usual,’ Capricorn career, which up until then pretty much revolved around basketball. But if we think of Pluto as a kind of cosmic bulldozer, we can imagine it breaking ground, so to speak, on LeBron’s Sun/Self this day, bringing up a deeper version of his identity heretofore unseen by the social world. And when we consider that this conjunction was occurring in the 7th House of Justice, ruled by Libra, the astrological valences of this moment become even more pertinent.
The photo of LeBron honoring Trayvon’s life and protesting his death was taken over eight years ago. Given the current climate in America, expect more moments of LeBron and others like him, wearing hoodies or jerseys or T- shirts or hats that continue to call for Justice, which, like Pluto, moves, sadly, slowly.