A 400-year-old botany book contains what could be
the only known portrait of Shakespeare made in his lifetime, according to an
academic expert. Botanist and historian Mark Griffiths cracked an
"ingenious cipher" to identify the playwright in an engraving in the
16th-Century work. "This is what Shakespeare looked like, drawn from life
and in the prime of life," he said. Details of his discovery are revealed
in this week's issue of Country Life. Mark Hedges, the magazine's editor,
hailed it as "the literary discovery of the century". May 19 http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-32782267
How
appropriate that news about the famous English bard should come to us exactly
as Mercury turns retrograde in Gemini – the sign associated with writers. Moreover,
Mercury is placed in the mundane 3rd house which is linked to skills
with languages and self-expression [1]. A chart drawn for the retrograde
station at London has Neptune on the Ascendant square Mercury. Neptune combining with Mercury is gifts
writers with the power of imagination. But more significantly, Neptune and the
Ascendant are conjunct stars of Pegasus. About Pegasus, Diana Rosenberg writes:
Pegasus, it was
said, stamped his hoof upon a rock, bringing forth the Hippocrene Spring of poetic
inspiration: there are chart elements here of 1st century BCE-CE
Roman poet/ mythologist Ovid; 14th century lyric poet/ humanist
Petrarch, 18th – 19th century poet/playwright Schiller;
epileptic painter Edward Lear creator of whimsical nonsense verse (“The Owl and
the Pussycat”); poets Longfellow, Poe, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, poet/
philosopher Santayana; playwrights Moliere and Beckett; authors George Sand,
Hawthorne, Emerson, Turgenev, Gorki, Mailer, Malamud, Isherwood, Henry Miller,
Hesse and many others.
Mercury also
forms a Yod with Jupiter and Pluto. Mercury-Jupiter could be a successful writer
and Mercury-Jupiter-Pluto in Ebertin’s words is “a person exercising an
influence over the masses”. That would certainly apply to William Shakespeare.
So all the
elements in the Mercury station retrograde chart are in place to explain a
discovery connected with a writer (Mercury) from the past (retrograde). But why
an image or picture of the writer. Well for that we do not have to look very
far. The asteroid Photographica
[15sa] that deals with images and pictures [2] is opposite Mercury [13ge].
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