Stephen Hawking (January 8, 1942 – March 14, 2018)

When he was 20, Stephen Hawking met his future wife, Jane. When he was 21, he was diagnosed with ALS (also know as Lou Gehrig’s disease). Despite his prospects of poor health, eventually leading to his death, he and Jane married when he was 23. Most everyone knows the rest of his remarkable story.

Using that marker of marrying Jane when he was 23, I have rectified his chart, so that Venus is on his Descendant. (This goes against perceived wisdom of his being born at 2:29 am, or 10:08 am.)

The three inconjuncts that appear with this time frame (of 8 pm) perhaps are too dependent on it, so we cannot take it as read that the timing is correct, but it does provide an interesting reason for the auto immune disease: Moon/Neptune conjunct, both inconjunct to Mars. (Also the Sun is inconjunct to the Ascendant.).These were the (potential) lessons he had to overcome. I will only focus on one of them.

Mars Inconjunct Neptune

With this aspect you must learn to stand up for yourself and demand your rights forthrightly and directly. Often you feel that you don’t have enough energy to assert yourself or that any such effort would be futile. Unfortunately, some people with this aspect learn to work behind the scenes or dishonestly. Others simply give up or take a defeatist attitude toward life.

Sometimes this aspect operates on the physical plane as well. You may have a generally low energy level and feel tired all the time but not able to sleep because of nervousness. You may actually need more sleep than others, and if so, you should try to get it. This aspect may also indicate that you tend to have allergies and infections.

Planets in Youth (pages 236-7) by Robert Hand (1977)

As you can imagine, this disease had a very detrimental effect on his body, but his mind was as sharp as a tack. I suspect the position of Pluto (opposite Mercury) in the 12th House (of the Unconscious) would have been instrumental in the pursuit of his astrophysics career. At any rate he lived to the age of 76.

Amen.