“Do not consider me now as an elegant female intending to plague you, but as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart.”
— Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen helped bring me up. I was in my mid-teens when my school class began reading Pride and Prejudice. I was a mess; my parents’ separation a few years previously had resulted in two households where, for various reasons, I was neither schooled nor nurtured.

Portrait of Jane Austen by her sister Cassandra (c. 1810).

So I turned for help to the best books I could lay my hands on, and Jane’s were among them.

For an author so well known, the details of Jane Austen’s life are strangely vague. Part of the reason for this was that her family burnt most of her letters after her death: her beloved sister Cassandra did not wish the younger members to see the “sometimes acid or forthright comments” Jane had written about their elders.

What is known is that she was born in Steventon on Dec. 16, 1775, to a rector and his wife. She had seven siblings. Her father allowed his daughters the run of the family library, and supported their artistic ambitions and supplied paper. All of this was unusual. According to the standards of the time, a woman’s education was supposed to be limited; as Jane herself remarked in Northanger Abbey, “A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.” Women were also not meant to have any public station; for women, publicity meant notoriety.

Hence the very gift that made Jane Austen so unique was frowned upon in wider society. During her lifetime, her works were published anonymously; her gravestone epitaph by her brother James, following her death at the age of 41, does not explicitly mention her writing. It was only after she died that she was identified as the author of her novels.

Jane’s writing itself bucked another trend of the times. Sentimental and Gothic novels were in vogue, as was the poetry of Byron and Cowper. In Love and Freindship [sic], which she wrote at only 15, she cleverly skewered the fashion for sentimentality and the smugness behind it. Northanger Abbey was a pastiche of Gothic fiction, parodying the cartoonish villainies and ludicrous predicaments of that genre while explaining, through the character of General Tilney, what a real villain did.

She was not unaware of controversial social issues, either: openly mentioning slavery in one novel, and in another giving a repulsive character the same surname as a well-known slave owner. In Mansfield Park, she also criticized the double standards of morality imposed on men and women.

So what of her astrology? Well, unusually for someone born in the 18th century, we have a birth time: a quarter before midnight. This gives Jane Virgo rising. It’s very clear that she cared about getting the details correct; her vocabulary and character drawing were both tools she wielded with minute precision. Neptune rising, also in Virgo, combines that attention to detail with a potent imagination.

Her sense of humor can be found in the Sagittarius Sun and Mercury, with Venus (her Moon ruler) in Scorpio perhaps adding the acerbic wit. Mercury’s third-house position is suggestive of the local flavor of her writing; Vesta in the fifth house shows her devotion to her craft, which helped her to break out of a restrictive web of social mores.

I could probably rattle on for several paragraphs longer, but I’ll leave further discussion for the comments, and hand you over to the lady herself:

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?
— Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen’s natal chart, courtesy of Solar Fire.

It’s not often you get a perfect juxtaposition like this. Two news stories, unrelated but happening concurrently. Two protests, together laying bare like an X-ray the hypocrisy, racism and colonialism woven into the infrastructure of a nation.

On one side North Dakota, where the Standing Rock camp opposing an oil pipeline was raided Thursday by police using rubber bullets, grenades and armored vehicles, among other things. On the other, a wildlife refuge in Oregon, taken over by armed men playing soldier back in January. They were found not guilty of conspiracy to impede federal officers by an Oregon court, also on Thursday.

A scene from Standing Rock on Thursday, from the Democracy Now! site.

The protests may look similar on a superficial basis — the little guy standing up to The Man — but ideologically and morally they could not be more different.

The Bundys and their friends subscribe to a view that control of federal lands should be devolved to state or private ownership; most likely so that they can graze their cattle on them. This is environmentally hazardous, not to mention selfish. To make their point, the Bundy-led militia took over a bird sanctuary, whose relationship to their articulated grievances was at best spurious. The standoff ended several weeks and an estimated $3.3 million worth of damage later.

Meanwhile, the Sacred Stone camp is designed to protect treaty land from the imposition of the Dakota Access Oil Pipeline, a behemoth well over 1000 miles long. Even the Department of Interior expressed concerns earlier this year about the pipeline’s proximity to the Standing Rock Reservation and the risk of water pollution from potential spillages.

Having already endured unlicensed security with attack dogs (following which Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! was threatened with prosecution for the heinous crime of doing journalism), camp members were subjected to a militarized police raid Thursday, during which 141 people were arrested. Police even used military vehicles and fired rubber bullets at horses. There were reports of beatings and live ammunition as well.

Any new oil pipeline is a grave concern in terms of pollution and global warming — but as this Truthout article reveals, this pipeline is wrong on another level entirely:

In discussing #NoDAPL, too few people have started from a place of naming that we, as Indigenous people, have a right to defend our water and our lives, simply because we have a natural right to defend ourselves and our communities. When “climate justice,” in a very broad sense, becomes the center of conversation, our fronts of struggle are often reduced to a staging ground for the messaging of NGOs.

Photo by USFWS: some of the damage done by Bundy and fellow occupiers.

Yes, everyone should be talking about climate change, but you should also be talking about the fact that Native communities deserve to survive, because our lives are worth defending in their own right — not simply because “this affects us all.”

Every Native at Standing Rock — every Native on this continent — has survived the genocide of 100 million of our people. That means that every Indigenous child born is a victory against colonialism, but we are all also born into a fight for our very existence. We need that to be named and centered.

Good grief. So in one case we have white ranchers feeling butthurt because they can’t do whatever they want, wherever they want. In the other, we have Native Americans pointing out that maybe 200+ years of genocide and colonialist land-grabbing is long enough, in the face of once again being squashed for the convenience of whitey.

To complete the picture of contrast, the damage caused by the Oregon occupation was found to have risked “the destruction and desecration of culturally significant Native American sites,” and actually to have included harm to tribal artifacts.

So colonialism is alive and well. I guess that’s no surprise when it’s an inextricable factor in a land built on the suffering of whole groups of people. It would seem there is still a long road ahead to a better nation and a better world. The only thing to do, it seems, is to keep traveling.

A couple of astrological footnotes. The chart for the Bundy case acquittals has Neptune rising to the degree: potentially a reference to the jury being swayed by Bundy’s 10-hour testimony (yes, really); this Ascendant is also exactly on Nessus in the U.S. Sibly chart. Meanwhile, as the raid at Standing Rock began, the Moon was on the MC (top of the chart), on the Aries Point and aligned with the Sibly MC within a few arc minutes. This by itself suggests that each of these events is a commentary on the state of the nation; put them together, and the point could not be clearer.

Chart for the acquittal of the Oregon occupants.

Chart for the beginning of the raid at Standing Rock.