Jeff Buckley, Venus & Neptune
“We are spirits and the whole tension is that we don’t know that we are. Yet music is able to touch this.” -Jeff Buckley. Reflections on Neptune and Venus in his birth chart.
Captured by the archetype of Venus and Neptune coming together in the heavens, this reflection was born. This particular transit that has occured in the heavens, Venus joining Neptune in the sign of Pisces, hit my birth chart particularly sharp. These two planets are conjunct by one separating degree of my Piscean natal Moon in the seventh house. Being directly connected to my natal chart, and hitting an angular house makes this transit all that more potent. Days leading up to this transit, I had obsessively been listening to Jeff Buckley. His music has always hit me in the most tragically romantic fashion, including his own life story. His songs are consistently centered around unrequited love with heavy spiritual undertones. Heavy guitar, his style is unique and untouchable in skill. Captivating and crooning from deep bluesy notes to high pitches effortlessly. At times if you close your eyes, you may mistake you are listening to a female singer. He has a beautiful cover of Nina Simone’s “Lilac Wine”, you feel poetically drunk as he swoons in a bluesy tone. His music hits dark places in the heart, and stirs intense emotional wells you may never known you possessed.
Venus can represent the arts and music, creation and creativity, beautiful adorned objects, pleasure and love and harmony. Neptune has symbolism around spiritual, divine matters, imagination, idealism and transcendence.
He left this world too early at the age of 31, in a drowning accident. His own father, a celebrated musician as well, also tragically departed this world when he was just a young boy. His father overdosed on heroin and morphine when he was just 28 years old. He only met his father once, but he decided to take his name nonetheless when he reached his later years, perhaps it was an attempted bridge to connect son to father. Buckley’s career really took off when he was invited to participate in a tribute concert for his father in NYC. Jeff performed, and the crowd went wild. His voice, his guitar, together, surpassed anyones excpectations, and he was immediately welcomed into the New York music scene. From there, he catapulted as a musician, a bridge was built between him and his father.
There are so many fascinating facets to Jeff’s life and his birth chart in particular. Yet what is relevant to this post and to the Venus/Neptune transits, is his stellium in Scorpio. In Jeff’s birth chart, his 4th house (themes of home, family, ancestral roots) lives the following planets by degree; Neptune (22), Mercury (23), Sun, (25) and Venus (27). The South Node also sits in this house just two degrees off his IC, also pointing to further karmic entanglement and heavy themes centered around home and father. This is one deep and murky Scorpio house that possesses all you would associate. All of these planets swimming in the vast wells of heavy emotions, communication through poetry, music, instruments, symbolism. A life driven to create purpose, meaning and art through an otherworldly spiritual connection to music.
Jeff once spoke of music in this way, “If I wasn’t able to do this, I think I would really lay down and die. Music comes from a very primal, twisted place. When a person sings, their body, their mouth, their eyes, their words, their voice says all these unspeakable things that you really can’t explain but that mean something anyway. People are completely transformed when they sing; people look like that when they sing or when they make love. But it’s a weird thing–at the end of the night I feel strange, because I feel I’ve told everybody all my secrets.”
His mother spoke of Jeff’s passion for music from a young age, he knew from the start he wanted to throw his whole being into making music. He never swayed.
“We are born to live, we are born to understand, we are born to carry a cursed pattern and be transformed by pain”.
The Sun in astrology can speak to the father, it can speak to one’s overarching goal in life, it can speak to divinity. Having the Sun in the fourth house of home and ancestral roots, with the tight conjunctions to Neptune, Venus and Mercury, it is no surprise he followed and was driven by the path of the father. Even the fact that he had no real relationship, it was the spirit of music that connected them, it was on a more etheric level and bonds were formed. Him and his father both utilized music and the creative process to touch liminal spaces. Sometimes it wasn’t enough.
“We are spirits and the whole tension is that we don’t know that we are. Yet music is able to touch this.”
There is tragedy that exists in the Neptune/Mercury combustion with the Sun, never feeling fully in this world and using the power of music to find any connection. Being able to dive into deeper realms, yet not fully understanding how to return to mundane, mortal realms.
All of these planets are also receiving a whole sign square from an Aquarian Moon (6), and from Leo rising with Jupiter (4). Checked from both signs, this fourth house will directly influence who he is and how the world perceives him, and it will be directly tied into relationships. His last personal relationship, which is an aside as its own wild story, has a very direct connection to his father. The fourth house is always applying through trine to Saturn and Chiron (22/21). Jupiter and the Moon also sit in opposition to one another.
This is it! The heavy stellium receives power plays from the greater benefic Jupiter, but is in the possession of a crippled Saturn in the 8th house. The 8th house possessing our fears, owning our darker psychology, and asking us to repay karmic debts. The Aquarian Moon that sits in the house of marriage and partnerships, speaks to his disconnected and challenged intimate relationships that are heavily influenced even by his father’s past. Challenged by still croons for all of the broken hearted sweethearts out there. His soul was hungry with romantic yearnings, and this fueled his art but never fulfilled his heart. The tension was real in his life. His ultimate love was music, and creating it, this was his most divine force and it lived in his first house. He shared through performances, brave and shining like a Leo lion, his connection with this deeper Jupiterian wisdom.
He swam in the aphrodisiac scented Neptune waters, and he lost his way. He drowned on May 29, 1997 in the Wolf River, right down the road from Beale Street where he had just performed. Fully clothed, no traces of alcohol or drugs. His 12th house, a liminal space representing endings and self-undoing, is Cancer. A water signed ruled by an Aquarian Moon. The Moon that night was hovering over his natal Saturn and natal Chiron in Pisces, signaling bodily harm, possibly by water. Buckley intuited in his song “I Know It’s Over”- “Oh Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head. See the sea wants to take me.” The day of his death, Mars was conjunct his natal Mars and Pluto, sitting in opposition to the other malefic natal Saturn, Chiron and transiting Moon. Venus herself was sitting in a T-square to both the 2nd house placements of Pluto, Mars and Uranus and Saturn and Chiron in ithe 8th. Hades was activated, the death drum rolled and the waves overcame.
Rest in peace and serenade us from the heavens, you beloved angel.