Arthur Conan Doyle (May 22, 1859 – July 7, 1930)

I probably wouldn’t have considered looking at this man astrologically except for two shows: Houdini and Sherlock. Arthur Conan Doyle was a spiritualist, who could be fooled by psychic fraudsters. That seems impossible, given that his creation, Sherlock Holmes, was mostly never fooled by anyone.

Scientific enquiry into psychic phenomena? Not quite the same thing.

One online astrology site claims that this birth time was from his birth certificate. I cannot disagree, but I reserve the right to question it at a later date. That heavily loaded T-square might be why he couldn’t see the forest for the trees: Moon/Midheaven conjunction in opposition to Saturn, all squared to Mercury/Venus/Pluto conjunction. Very potent, to be sure, but the Venus portion may have been the blind spot.

In 1885 Doyle married Louisa (sometimes called “Touie”) Hawkins (1857–1906). She was the youngest daughter of J. Hawkins, of Minsterworth, Gloucestershire, and the sister of one of Doyle’s patients. Louisa had tuberculosis. In 1907, the year after Louisa’s death, he married Jean Elizabeth Leckie (1874–1940). He had met and fallen in love with Jean in 1897, but had maintained a platonic relationship with her while his first wife was still alive, out of loyalty to her. Jean outlived him by ten years, and died in London.

Family Life (Wikipedia)

In Houdini, his second wife is portrayed as a psychic medium, using automatic writing as her instrument. Harry Houdini calls her out as a fraud and Conan Doyle breaks off any further work with him. (Now, that may have been ‘just’ a poetic device to explain their ‘feud’ but it does present us with a conundrum. Was Conan Doyle blind to her unconscious fraud, as this show demonstrates?)

Doyle Suggested That He Had a Second Birthday (November 14, 1893)

This was the day that he finally turned his back on a Catholic life and joined the Society for Psychical Research. I’ve done a chart for that event, set for noon.

Ah, yes, there’s a Yod pointing at Pluto, formed by inconjuncts to Venus and Uranus. Interesting.

So, that’s alright, then…