Vogue Looks at Billie Eilish

The cover article from the March 2020 issue of Vogue was a fascinating piece about the singer Billie Eilish. Those who attended the online Empowered Astrology Seminar in March 2020 will recall that she was the first example chart in my Annual Profections lecture. Her music is known for its dark themes, and the Vogue article includes some interesting personal background about her early experience with depression that has informed both her songs and her signature fashion styles. The astrology that suggests the onset of this depression--and some relief she experienced from it last year--is pretty intriguing. Thought I would share this with you all.

I'm including her Placidus chart here. Notice that she has Sa Rx in her Third House of cognition, suggesting the possibility of depression stemming from self-worth issues taken on in the early home life. Ve rules her Third House, and conjoins Pl, suggesting intense emotions and dark themes, indeed possibly about mortality itself, framing her mindset. Ve also rules her Eighth House of psychology, dark interior places, and death, reinforcing that these themes may never be far from her thinking. Sa Rx opposes Pl-Ve, a combination that Noel describes as "The fear of losing love, the sense of tragedy." This opposition squares the ASC, that is, her self-projection and physical appearance.

Could we conclude that this is a young woman who has struggled from an early age with mature themes well beyond her years that have both informed--and been shaped by--her physical appearance and her efforts to integrate into her personal environment? The article clarifies some of this for us. Although Eilish seems to have had a fairly well-adjusted early home life, with what seems to be a close family, she has suffered from depression since around age 11. She offers a handful of explanations for the onset of the depression, but stresses above all that it stemmed from her self-consciousness about developing into puberty too early. She says, "I just hated my body. I would have done anything to be in a different one...I really wanted to be a model really bad, and I was chubby and short, I developed really early. I had boobs at nine. I got my period at 11. So my body was going faster than my brain." She wrote some of her first song at age 11, including one about suicide called "Why Not?"

Let's look at what was going on astrologically at that time in her life. SA Sa perfected its squ to the ASC at age 8-9 as she became self-conscious about her rapidly maturing body. At age 11, when she marks the start of her depression, she saw SA Sa perfect the opp to Ve, ruler of her Third and her Eighth Houses. It was at this point that she began writing songs about suicide and other dark themes. She wrote things on her wall that worried and upset her mother, like "Why am I alive?" According to Eilish, she never genuinely felt suicidal, but enjoyed "writing a song about something I didn't know about." Meanwhile, she also began thrifting and designing her own clothes around what the article describes as a "strategy to obscure or distract herself from the body in which she felt uncomfortable."

While the dark themes that featured in her earliest songs continue to feature in much of her professional albums, she claims to have turned a corner in June of last year that enabled her to step out from the depression. There are still a number of fairly heavy solar arcs at work in her life that seem likely to reinforce the depression she has long wrestled with. But last June, she saw Tr Ju cnj Ve, and seems to have made some changes in her life--she won't say which--and "the fog began to lift," according to the article. "When people ask me what I'd say to somebody looking for advice on mental health, the only thing I can say is patience," Eilish says. "I had patience with myself. I didn't take that last step. I waited. Things fade."

Hers will be an interesting situation to watch over the next 18 months, not simply because she is one of the most astonishing successes in music history, but also with respect to her struggles with the depression that continues to define her "brand." Tr Ne is currently squ Ve, again ruler of her Third House of thinking, suggesting the possibly of uncertain, idealized related to relationships that could involve some hard lessons in disillusionment. In October, she will experience SA Pl=Me, where Me rules her Seventh House of relationships. Roughly a year later, she has SA ASC=Sa. I'll be rooting, and praying, for her.