
VITALIK BUTERIN AQUARIAN AVATAR . (rev. 7Jan )
( — — a speculative dash at Buterin’s chart, history of science, Aquarius and your anus . )
Mark Shulgasser
Vitalik Buterin, for those who don’t already know, is the 23-year-old prodigy who at 17 was already a principal Bitcoin developer. He went on to father the Ethereum project, whose Ether coin is now Bitcoin’s main rival in the cryptocurrency world. But Ethereum is much more than a currency. In less than a year it has been the vehicle for the blossoming of blockchain start-ups capitalized in the tens of billions. For a growing movement of techies and investors blockchain technology breaks the chains that have enslaved humanity immemorially (or at least replaces them), and Buterin, especially in the absence of a figurehead for Bitcoin, has modestly assumed the persona of one of the planets most important people. Yet, at 23 he seems quite child-like in some respects, with an extra-terrestrial detachment and patience in explanation.

First off, Vitalik Buterin is an Aquarius, which makes perfect sense, a revolutionary visionary in the Zodiacal company of the far-sighted originator of the modern scientific project, Francis Bacon, and a heritage of techno-futurists: Jules Verne, Herman Kahn, and both Ray Kurzweil and Michio Kaku, “probably the most prominent futurologists in the world today” (New Statesman). Also Faith Popcorn! All Aquarians! Likewise these brainy mystics: Douglas Hofstadter, Ken Wilbur, Eckhart Tolle, Fritjof Capra, Thomas Merton, Simone Weil and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Also these humane sages: Swedenborg, Martin Buber, Alfred North Whitehead, and especially, Charles Darwin who turned our attention away from individual egos and towards the species, along with the two influential and also Aquarian 19th century population theorists, Thomas Malthus and Francis Galton.
And in the context of cryptocurrency, a standout Aquarian is Joseph Schumpeter, the great theorist of the relationship between technological innovation and economic growth. Schumpeter introduced the concept ‘creative destruction’: the “gale of creative destruction” . . . “that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one”.
The center and the decentralized are two poles of a single conceptual entity; a point requires a periphery to become a center. In astrological metaphor, the high summer Leo represents centrality and autocracy, as the lion is king of the beasts and the Sun king of the solar system. Six months later, in wintry Aquarius, the Sun is at its dimmest, and realizes it has no true strength aside from fellowship. The Aquarian solar selfhood identifies with a democracy of circulating planets and the entire cast of the Zodiac, and crowd of many stars of which out sun is just one. Aquarius is the sign of the subduction of the egocentric, authoritative and vital solar personality. Against the compelling strength of the beating heart and the majesty of the Sun, Aquarius balances the voice of the high human faculty of transcendent reason. As Leo vitality can descend to the bestial, Aquarian reason can descend into scientism and the sacrifice of the individual to the group. Jeremy Bentham, father of Utilitarianism, was an Aquarius.
The Aquarian principles of liberty, equality and fraternity gained currency only with the discovery of the planet Uranus, anticipated planetary totem of Aquarius, which hove decisively into the telescope in 1781, as Kant was writing his essay “What is Enlightenment?” (Kant didn’t know it, but Uranus was exactly opposite the Sun at the time of his own birth, emblematic of “. . . the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”) The evolution of thought and technology brought the telescope.The first new planet to be discovered since the beginning of recorded time, Uranus seemed a world-wide herald of the falling away of limits previously supposed to be eternal. Rhetorically it was the torch that carried revolutionary fire from America to France. Planet of technological disruption it continues to amaze: now we know that it uniquely rotates perpendicular to the plane of its orbit, and flaunts a set of rings like its neighbor Saturn.)

The image of Aquarius the Waterbearer itself refers to decentralization and abstraction: the flow of heavenly rivers from Aquarius’s celestial urn, aka the Milky Way represents the full atmospheric cycle of cloud, rain, river, ocean, cloud, along with thunder, electrical discharge, and rainbow. (Note that the Sun still plays a vital role energizing the system.) So the visionary Aquarian novelist James Joyce in “Finnegans Wake” used the atmospheric cycle as a structural element in his telling of the dream of HCE (Here Comes Everybody), systematically punctuated with storms, thunder, lightning, rainbows, with a rhapsodic chapter in which the name of every river on earth is woven into the timeless murmurings of washerwomen on the banks of Dublin’s river, the Liffey.
Hence Aquarius is an Air sign, not a Water sign (the common mistake). In astrology the four classical elements, Earth, Air, Fire and Water are categories within which, for the sake of the game, phenomena are distributed. Under the rubric of Air various ideas about immateriality; prana, pneuma, wind, spirit, mind, atmosphere, breath, consciousness, reason, relation, number, language and thought come into play.
In Vitalek Buterin’s chart Mercury, Venus, and Mars are also in Aquarius; for the Earth’s 3 companions, most personal of the planetary influences, all to be in the same sign as the Sun, is somewhat rare, suggesting an early-formed concentration of interest and ability, the focused unification of the biological personality, in its mental (Mercury), affectional (Venus) and operational (Mars) inheritance, a firmly set basis on which the later, external and social influences of the outer planets can build. Such a pure predominance of Aquarius naturally produces overt ex-centricity. Yet the mental planet Mercury is they say in Aquarius ‘exalted’.
So much for Buterin’s Aquarian Sun. The Moon travels 13 degrees a day, so not knowing the time of birth often means one can’t be sure which 30 degree sign the Moon is in. In Buterin’s case the Moon moved out of Virgo and into Libra by 8AM.
Since Virgo is the sign associated with detail and process, data, statistics, code and algorithm, the grid, the weave, the precise inner works of things; I stick my neck out and say that Buterin was born before 8AM. Especially because of how important that Moon is in this chart; it’s the leading planet of a bowl formation (or the handle of a bucket formation, however you want to see it) and most probably a hemispheric singleton, two important emphases. The prominence of the Moon in Virgo very much describes Buterin’s leading role in the revenge of the nerds scenario.
Virgo also is associated with decentralization by being adjacent to Leo; as the signs sinusoidaly reverse polarity, adjacent signs are also in a sense opposites. Virgos are the workers, not the Kings. Mercury as the planet of observation and data is also the ruling planet of Virgo, bringing Mercurius to a very high level indeed in this chart.
Buterin’s Mercury, polished to a great shine in this chart, exalted in Aquarius, itself one of the loveliest of all planetary positions, is the seed of a further ‘genius’ configuration; a pair of close conjunctions, at exact 90 degree right angles, of said Mercury with Saturn (necessity) ‘squared’ Pluto (mass influence) conjunct the Moon’s node (personal contacts). There’s more: the Saturn that is conjunct the exalted Aquarian Mercury has just moved into the intense first degree of the adjacent, deeply intuitive final sign Pisces. Here we are not surprised to find the subtlest mathematical imagination. This cluster of Saturn, Mercury, Pluto, Pisces and Aquarius is prominent in Einstein’s chart.
Here I will start to obsess a bit and really stick my neck out: I would conjecture further that Buterin was born before 6 AM, because that will bring the 2nd and 8th houses into play. The 2nd House (along with the second sign, Taurus, the fixed-earth sign) represents real, physical possessions and stores of value, such as precious metals, chattels, real estate, things which cannot lose their value overnight like the bonds of a company that goes over; opposite, we have the 8th House, where reside all the social, interactive, non-physical, informational forms of wealth and exchange: credit and debt, interest, trusts, insurance, obligations, investment shares, currencies, financial markets, instruments and derivatives, wills and probate, taxation etc. Without putting too much weight on a hypothetical birthtime I only point out how strikingly those two houses are entangled and enriched when the Sun, ruling Buterin’s 8th, is seen at the cusp of the 2nd.
Not wishing to overstay my welcome in what I expect to be a hotbed of skeptics, I’ll limit myself to this: that if my morning chart were correct, Buterin would have Sagittarius rising, an appropriately forward-looking and illuminating sign, sign of the classical educator, the Centaur, and of Freeman Dyson and Nicholas Negroponte, and freedom apostles like Milton, Blake and Beethoven, the teacher and far-reacher, the 9th sign, and allied with the 9th House, on whose cusp, if the early chart is correct, the restless Moon will be found, making the native one who might predominantly live out of a suitcase. And the two odd-ball outer planets, Neptune and Uranus will inhabit the 1st house, of physical appearance.
* * * * *

It’s worth looking further into the meaning of the planet Uranus. It’s discovery coincided with social revolutions, when the idea of overturning suddenly became widely credible. If the heavens were not simply, timelessly there, but offered new discoveries, then perhaps the divine rights of monarchs are equally breachable and the relations among classes not immutable. Any peasant could understand that.
But Uranus is also quite specifically related to the idea of a modernity brought about by inspired technical ingenuity and theoretical insight. It is the planet of the thunderbolt illumination. The iconic Aquarian here is Thomas A. Edison (founder of General Electric, of public electrification, of the light-bulb, phonograph, movie camera, the first industrial research laboratory). Decades before the American Revolution the scientist/diplomat Ben Franklin was in communication with all the thought-leaders of his time, including Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus. World-famous for having tamed lightning with his kite experiment, his Mercury in Aquarius was exactly opposite Uranus.
(I can’t resist here digressing to the case of Roy Sullivan, Aquarian born with Mercury exactly conjunct Uranus at O degrees Aquarius, who was recognized by Guinness Book of World Records as “the Human Lightning Rod”. Having survived seven strikes, he died at the age of 71 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound over an unrequited love. . . The aptly-named and acerbic-tongued Aquarian novelist Muriel Spark was pursued by lightning, which struck her houses repeatedly, and on one occasion entered her bedroom and ‘danced across her upper lip.’ . . . The Aquarian poet Elizabeth Bishop was struck on the foot. . . Aquarian monk/poet/mystic Thomas Merton electrocuted himself with a badly wired lamp during a monsoon.)
— Our basic understanding of the behavior of Air, gasses and the atmosphere, derives almost entirely from the experiments and theories of two Aquarian scientists, Robert Boyle (b. 1627) and Daniel Bernoulli (b. 1700).
— Thomas Newcomen, ‘born in February’, created what he called the ‘atmospheric engine’ in 1712, a practical application of Doyle’s law.
— Another Aquarian, James Watt (b. 1736), made of the ‘atmospheric engine’ (via a number of inspired improvements) the modern steam engine, leading to the development of railroads and the generation of electricity. Among Watt’s inventions, incorporated into the perfected steam engine, is that emblem of industrialism, his patented ‘double-acting cylinder

and flywheel in a sun-and-planet motion”.
— Aquarian J. Willard Gibbs (often regarded the greatest native-born American scientist) sewed up chemical thermodynamics with the Gibbs phase rule, based on his understanding of the Centrifugal Governor invented by . . . James Watt.

So the Aquarian mind tracks the energy of cycles, flows, orbits, atmospheres. Not only was James Watt an Aquarian, but so were Georg Ohm, Andre-Marie Ampere, AND Alessandro Volta! the entire four-part structure of electrical current was discovered and named by Aquarian scientists. The graphic summary of Ohm’s laws looks strangely like a horoscope.
However, electricity is but one half of a unified phenomenon known as electro-magnetism. All these Aquarians have contributed to the understanding of electric current, in keeping with the Aquarians trope of circulation, and distribution. But to consider the development of our specific knowledge of the magnetic pole of electro-magnetism, one is immediately thrown into the company of natives of Gemini!

— The principal culprits would have to include William Gilbert, Simeon Poisson, Auguste Coulomb, James Clerk Maxwell and Oliver Lodge: all five of them Geminis. Which makes perfect sense because Gemini is also an Air sign and natives of the Twins naturally identify with a basic dualism.

Before the discovery of Uranus we regarded Saturn as the ruler of Aquarius, as well as the ruler of the adjacent sign Capricorn, and for various good reasons we still regard Saturn as a co-ruler. Confronted near the Zodiac’s last gasp, at signs 10 and 11, the coincidence that two planets with adjacent orbits are rulers of two adjacent signs cannot be without meaning. The slow-moving outer planets pace large-scale historical changes and generational effects. Surely Saturn, planet of wisdom, necessity and age, subsumes the idea of an economic institution built on money as store of value, while Uranus vibrates of money as pure, electrical currency, digital information.
[Aquarians mentioned: Sir Francis Bacon (1/22/1561), Jules Verne (2/8/1828), Herman Kahn (2/15/1922), Faith Popcorn (2/11/1947), Michio Kaku (1/24/1947) and Ray Kurzweil (2/12/1948), Douglas Hofstadter (2/15/1945), Ken Wilbur (1/31/1949), Eckhart Tolle (2/16/1948), Fritjof Capra (2/1/1939), Thomas Merton (1/31/1915), Simone Weil (2/3/1909), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2/4/1906), Emanuel Swedenborg (1/29/1688), Martin Buber (2/6/1878), Alfred North Whitehead (2/15/1861), Charles Darwin (2/12/1809), Thomas Malthus (2/13/1766), Francis Galton (2/16/1822), Jeremy Bentham (2/15/1748), James Joyce (2/2/1882), Thomas A. Edison (2/11/1847), Robert Boyle (1/25/1627), Daniel Bernoulli (2/8/1700), Thomas Newcomen (2/?/1664), James Watt (1/30/1736), Georg Ohm (2/16/1787), Andre-Marie Ampere (1/20/1775), Alessandro Volta (2/18/1745), J. Willard Gibbs (2/11/1839), Muriel Spark (2/1/1918), Elizabeth Bishop (2/8/1911).
[Gemini magnetists: William Gilbert (De Magnete; 5/24/1544), Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (6/14/1736), Simeon Poisson (6/21/1781), James Clerk Maxwell (6/13/1831), Oliver Lodge (6/12/1851), Anton Mesmer (5/23/1734).]
[*”What about Aquarians born in the Southern hemisphere?!” Yes, yes. We’ll talk about that later.]
