How can I know? An astrological take on the life and death of Marilyn Monroe.

These words from a song were running around in my head over and over this morning, the next line is ‘just trust your feelings’.  But what if your feelings are often obscured by second guessing and self doubt or disconnection?

Also what about the fact that we live in a world with many people out to scam or grab something for themselves without really caring about the cost to us? People who are willing to tell us anything. How can we know they are real?

Then there is the matter of people putting their spin and interpretation on other people’s lives, often without a true or deep understanding of the reality, a reality that may have been obscured by more powerful powers that be.

Recently  I watched a documentary on the  death of Marilyn Monroe.  In it evidence was given that essential information including a red diary was removed from the scene of her death before police arrived. A paramedic was interviewed who attended the scene and found Marilyn alive following a suspected overdose.  He witnessed her current osychotherapist Dr Greenson who appeared with Peter Lawler in her room administer a massive injection into her ribs after which she died.

Around this time Marilyn had been having an affair with John F Kennedy, who had promised to marry her. Was this true or did Marilyn just imagine it? In any case it was argued that she had theeatened to expose him (a serial adulterer) to the public when he tried to discard her. Quite a lot of believable evidence surrounding the movement of people close to the then President visiting her room that early morning and the night before indicates something extremely suss was going on.

This week I watched a two part miniseries in which Marilyn was portrayed as a helpless, drug addled woman desperate to be loved and torn apart with anguish over the machinations of yet another narcissist, living in a world of fantastical denial.  Certainly she was no victim, she stood up to studio bosses, ended a relationship with Joe Dimaggoo after he hit her in anger over the scene where she exposed her underwear from the movie The Seven Year Itch. And she confronted a very powerful man.  None of that last part of her life surrounding the hidden side of dealings with both John and Bobby Kennedy was shown. It is widely known both boys were raised by a narcissistic father intent on propelling his immigrant success agenda on his sons and more than happy to lobotomise a daughter who dared to show primal feelings that evoked for him an unfaceable shame.

If we look at Marilyn’s astology we see she had the Moon which rules the mother, inner child and emotions in Aquarius opposite Neptune in Leo and square to Saturn in Scorpio.  The Moon Saturn square speaks of maternal deprivation and lack of nurture and the opposition to Neptune of the mental illness that dogged her mother, Gladys, who spent much of her daughter’s life in and out of psychiatric institutions.

What upset me about the mini series was that it depicted Marilyn as someone who gave up and failed to help herself succumbing to alcohol and drugs, a perfect target for a faked suicide/actual muder by a powerful narcissistic man who in trading on portraying her as a screwed up victim could hide the crime.  I felt angry with the screen writer above all for perpetuating what has all the traits of a confused Neptunian emotional tangle in which myth parades as reality.

So what is true? And how does that truth alter in the face of others powerful projections, manipulations and denial?

Marilyn was no angel, she was hell bent on fame seeking the love, attention and recognition denied to her.  Born in the sign of the twins with Sun and Venus both in Gemini she could be mercurial and tried to project an image often at odds with the hungering traumatized child within. But she was also a modern heroine with whom I am sure so many of us can identify.  We love and loved her most of all for her fragile vulnerability as well as her sassy attempt to claim for herself an expressive life out of the ruins of an emotional wasteland.  I feel sad today to have seen her portrayed as a tormented victim.  These are just my questioning perceptions, perhaps my take on it is incorrect, but my heart cried for Marilyn : a fundamentally loving soul whose childhood wounds left her vulnerable to powerful narcissists. And who in  seeking to expose powerful narcissists may possibly have brought down the wrath of their destruction upon her head.