Overcoming Titans...with Julia Child

Last Saturday, I spent Astrology Day with Kepler College celebrating the spring equinox and the new Hellenistic astrology certificates that Kepler has just started offering (one on natal astrology and one on ancient timing practices)! Many of the inaugural faculty in the program gave short presentations showcasing different facets of the ancient syncretic approach to reading charts. Here’s a link if you want to check out the panel I was on with the absolutely brilliant astrologers Amy Angelo, Nadia Anderson, and Brian Forman, in which we analyze the enigmatic life of Julie Child (don’t miss the other panels as well! It’s all free to watch on Kepler’s youtube). 

I'll also be teaching a 5-week course at Kepler starting May 10th called Telling the Houses: Building Narrative through House Delineation. The class is going to take a unique approach to studying the 12 astrological houses, combining practice-based astrology with creative writing. If you want to develop a practice of writing as part of your metaphysical toolkit or connect more intuitively with the process of chart delineation, sign up at the link!

In the meantime, here is a text version of my talk where I walk through the process for determining which planet in an aspect is overcoming! (Many of the slides from the presentation are included, but if something’s missing reach out and I’m happy to send it to you.)

Image 1: Text, Overcoming is a principle in ancient aspect theory that determines which planet in an aspect relationship impresses their energy and influence on the other planet.

Image 2: Illustration of planets in overcoming aspects in Julia Child's Chart. Saturn overcomes Venus and Mercury, Venus and Mercury overcome Jupiter, Jupiter overcomes Saturn.

Determining which planet overcomes the other is a key part of evaluating any aspect in ancient astrology because it completely changes how we interpret the combination of two planets' energies. Venus overcoming Saturn, for example, is mostly a positive aspect where Venus is able to lighten Saturn's more moribund qualities, while Saturn overcoming Venus can be a controlling drag on Venus' easy nature.

Before we get into determining which planet overcomes the other, some basic principles that help to illustrate why overcoming matters.

Key Principles:

1. Overcoming is helpful or harmful according to the nature and condition of the planet.

Think of it like being "overcome" with emotion, like sadness or dread or excitement or inspiration. The feeling infuses every part of you and moves you to action on its behalf. That's what it's like when one planet overcomes another. The literal meaning of overcoming—overtaking from behind—echoes this duality too. On one hand, if you're running away from someone (I'm looking at you Mars and Saturn), being overcome from behind is the worst case scenario. At the same time the political charge of the word (like in the lyrics of the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome) expresses a yearning for the oppressed to dismantle the hierarchies that place one person ahead of another. From the word itself and the positioning of the planets involved, we get a sense that coming up from behind actually places you in a unique position of power.

2. Squares and opposition from the benefics are beneficial to the planet!

Any overcoming aspect from Venus or Jupiter is helpful to the planet being overcome. That means the exact signs and houses that are the most challenging to each other may also be the most capable of benefitting us through that confrontation or tension.

This helps us understand Julia Child's chart manifested so incredibly in the events of her life, despite the most dominant aspects being squares and oppositions (Venus overcomes Jupiter by square, and Jupiter overcomes Saturn by opposition).

3. Planets can be bonified or maltreated by overcoming
   

Pretty much the best and worse things (respectively) that can happen to a planet in ancient astrology are bonification and maltreatment. This only happens in very special circumstances. In the case of overcoming, a planet is bonified if it is overcome by Venus or Jupiter from a good house (1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11) and it is maltreated if it is overcome by Mars or Saturn in a dark house (2, 6, 8, 12).

Determining Who is Overcoming Who

Understanding which planet is ahead and which is behind can become confusing quickly, so I'm going to give you my quick trick to know which planet is overcoming the other and get it right every time. I'm going to use Julia Child's chart as an example.

The Method

Lets say you want to know if Saturn is overcoming Venus. Saturn is in the 1st house and Venus is in the 4th.

1. Start from Saturn's exact degree in the chart (3 degrees and 15 min Gemini) and draw a line across the chart to the exact opposite point (3 degrees and 15 min of Sag)

2. Now, imagine the chart from Saturn's perspective

3. Draw teeth on the right side of the line from the POV of the planet you've chosen

4. If it eats it, it overcomes it. Saturn is overcoming every planet that the teeth point towards. If a planet is in aspect with another planet and it's not overcoming that planet, that means it is the one being overcome.
   

In short: 1. Choose a planet. 2. Draw a line across. 3. Draw teeth on the right side of the line (from that planet's POV). 4. Eating is overcoming.

The trick works exactly the same for oppositions. Let's do it again for the opposition between Jupiter and Saturn, focusing on Jupiter. We want to know if Jupiter is overcoming Saturn, so we:

1. Start at Jupiter's position and draw a line across to the other side

   

   
   

2. From Jupiter's perspective...

3. ...draw teeth on the right side of the line

   

   
   

4. Jupiter eats Saturn at 3 degrees of Gemini, to the right of the line from Jupiter's perspective.

   
   

Hurling a Ray

The final important piece of overcoming is hurling a ray. Whenever one planet overcomes another planet, if they are within 3 degrees of each other by aspect, the planet that is being overcome hurls a ray back at the overcoming planet. Just like overcoming, a benefic planet (or a very well placed planet in the chart) will hurl a beneficial ray that improves the condition of the overcoming planet, while a malefic planet (or a very poorly placed one) will throw a shady ray that harms the overcoming planet's condition and it's ability to benefit the person.

*The 3 degree orb is debatable based on existing texts.

**The good and bad houses mentioned for bonification and maltreatment also vary from author to author.

Overcoming Titans

So, how do all of these dynamics of overcoming and hurling rays in Julia's natal chart play out in her actual life?

(I'm just going to mention a couple iterations of the aspects I highlight to give a sense of overcoming, but there are endless layers to explore if one were doing a full study of her chart.)

Saturn Overcoming Venus // Venus Hurling a Ray

A common manifestation of Saturn in the 1st house—the house of the physical body, our outward appearance, and how we're encountered by other people—is being othered or ridiculed for something about your physical appearance or your mannerisms that you can't control, whether something unique to you, or a marker of your race, gender, or sexual identity. In Julia's case, her towering height, light mustache, and huge personality where all at tension with her domineering society's repressive standards of femininity. At the same time, it's fascinating in Julia's case how all of the things about her appearance and behavior that defied stereotypes of femininity actually went on to benefit her and lead her more towards her calling. This feels like such a nice articulation of the power of Venus hurling a ray back at Saturn, redirecting some of Saturn's constriction and limitation.

Both B&W photos used in this article are by Paul Child (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard). The color image is a still from the documentary Julia (2021).

One very literal version of this for Julia is that she was rejected by the military for being too tall, a policy that essentially delineated who did and who did not belong to the category of womanhood based on an arbitrary physical marker. While the army's rejection of her was unjust, it's also what led her to go into intelligence research, a job which was much more suited for her particular talents and her fastidious and penetrating mind. Interestingly, Julia said she originally applied to work at OSS because she thought she'd make a great spy, since no one would think a woman her size would ever be undercover. Like a stroke of synchronicity, this is what led her to her life abroad and her husband Paul, both of which inspired her later culinary career. 

Daddy Saturn

Saturn overcoming Venus is also embodied in the strained relationship Julia had with her conservative father, who wanted Julia to stay nearby and be a homemaker. He started a pressure campaign to get Julia to marry the heir to the LA Times fortune and stay close to home, but Julia persistently refused, pursuing her own ideals and dreams.

Quote from Julia (2021)

Doesn't this quote sound like Venus hurling a ray back at Saturn? It's still Venus, so the ray is charming and funny, but Julia really didn't give in to her father's (or society's) expectations of her.

Eventually, it would be Julia's lack of pretension and non-conformity to patriarchal standards of domesticity that endeared her to people and enabled her to invite people into the French culinary tradition that was, at that time, gatekept and rarified. Julia willingly showed her cooking mistakes on TV, a choice which, in its vulnerability, gave everyone else permission to fail as well. What a stark contrast to most lifestyle media, which is designed to make women feel bad about themselves in comparison to an idealized celebrity embodiment of Womanhood. This is still true today: just look at the emergence of influencer "trad wives"— dead-eyed Handmaids whose enthusiastic embrace of the patriarchy makes Julia Child look like an anarcho-feminist dousing her coq au vin in vaginal blood and calling for the public castration of the Michelin man.

All of this is not to say that Julia experienced the army’s literal rejection of her for her body or men's disparagement towards her for her appearance and behavior as particularly positive experiences when they were happening; Saturn is still overcoming Venus in fall by square. But in Julia's chart we see how the influence of both benefics on Saturn—Venus hurling a ray and Jupiter overcoming—seem to have enabled her to take the detours that life threw at her and bend them towards her particular (and unlikely) destiny. 

Jupiter Overcoming Saturn ie The Titanomachy

As the patriarch of the titans, the old Gods, Saturn can embody the conventions and conservatism Julia struggled against, first with her father, and later in her path to inventing a new genre of television. Julia's divergence from suffocating ideals of womanhood led to a kind of patriarchal paradox: men derided her for not being womanly enough, while at the same time dismissing her as incapable or unserious as a professional in the industry precisely for being a woman.

But in Julia's chart, just as in the titanomachy of ancient Greek mythology, Jupiter overcomes Saturn, and overthrows the old order.

Astrologically, Jupiter overcoming Saturn improves Saturn's condition, and we know that Julia’s own Jupiterian charm and charisma are certainly a big part of what “overcame” people in the television and publishing industries' resistance to her. She simply acted like what she wanted was going to happen (against all probability) and eventually most of it did!

A Glance of Recognition: Venus Overcoming Jupiter // Jupiter Hurling a Ray While Julia's internal Jupiter was obviously strong, her Jupiter in the 7th also clearly represents her partner, Paul Child. We know that Paul was an expansive, supportive, and influential presence in Julia's life from the time they met, introducing her to the French cuisine she fell in love with, and offering a path away from the constricting influence of her (Saturnian) father. Paul eventually dedicated himself full time to supporting her career, long before there was any notion she might become famous. Julia tells stories about how Paul was crammed under the desk in her early television episodes, holding up notecards to her while she was cooking for the camera above.

I love how Venus overcoming Jupiter is both a symbolic expression of this dynamic in her life and also a literal reenactment of Julia and Paul's physical positions in this anecdote. That is, the astronomical logic for why one planet overcomes another is because that planet will rise before the other one in the course of the day. If we move Julia's chart forward a couple of hours (rotating it clockwise, like the sun moves in the course of a day), we see that Venus rises up over the eastern horizon long before Jupiter, showering her influence and effluence down on him (and any other planet in the half of the chart below her).

Julia's Chart adjusted to a few hours later in the day, when Venus rose over the eastern horizon before Jupiter

In this cosmic staging, the horizon is the desk on which Julia is cooking, and Paul (Jupiter) is hiding below it (undeniably enthralled with her).

This is also an instance in which both overcoming and hurling a ray are beneficial. Jupiter benefits from being overcome by Venus, and Venus gets to enjoy the buoyant rays of Jupiter. When I think about Julia and Paul, I see Jupiter hurling a ray back at Venus like a glance over the shoulder of acknowledgement and gratitude, or better yet, remuneration for the years that she supported and uplifted his life both domestically and professionally.

I hope this helps to illustrate some of the richness and subtlety of interpretation that can come from this seemingly simple ancient idea, and that my planetary cannibalism method will help you remember how to identify overcoming in any chart!

Pull up your own chart and see if you can figure out if one planet is overcoming another, and what that might say about you and your life experiences. One way to do this is to use the houses that the planets are in as a guideline for interpretation. Since certain house themes natural overcome other house themes, we can ask ourselves how one part our our life overcomes another part. Here are a couple examples off my head (but choose the relevant house themes for yourself):

After deciding which planet is overcoming the other, simply choose one theme from each house and consider how one might overcome the other in your life (for better or worse, remember, depending on the aspect and planet involved!).

With whole sign houses, we also see how these ancient narrative threads are still alive and potent today. Here are some very simple examples of house themes that overcome each other.

Tapping into these invisible narrative pathways in the astrological houses will be a big focus of the Telling the Houses course, and I'm sure you can already see from this one small piece of ancient house delineation how much potential there is in this approach.

As always, I love receiving any questions or thoughts you have (technical or big and philosophical), so feel free to shoot me a message! And of course, you can always set up a reading with me and we'll uncover the narrative of overcoming in your chart and life together.