Birth Chart – Victor Hugo

Here is the sharing of some ideas and thoughts on the chart of Victor Hugo.

Version française : https://explorastrologie.fr/2021/02/28/theme-victor-hugo/

Victor Hugo’s Sun is in Pisces. In the highest expression of the Piscean archetype and its quest, we find the exploration of Love at its highest level, a universal love, a selfless love, also bringing divine ideas and inspirations to Earth, embodying forgiveness, compassion (Pisces energy is often associated with Christ), connecting to the cosmic Whole. This is the final sign, where the ego crumbles, where the quest for greater is at its peak, as if the boundary between worlds is dissipating.

Psychologically, there is a great idealism, a longing for elsewhere in that sign, a form of melancholy at times, that of the loss of a lost paradise with much sensitivity and poetry. This sign also carries a reconnection to the sense of the sacred, and a strong dimension of service.

« In this last stage, (Pisces) the being has acquired such a collective consciousness that he is deeply touched by what surrounds him, by what others are experiencing and what is happening everywhere in the world. Like any water sign, it works on fusion and is charged, whether it is aware of it or not, with the energies it meets on its way« . Emilie Charton

And next to Victor Hugo’s Sun, we find Venus, which will channel the expression of this Pisces Sun – his sensitivity, connection to his inner life and those of the world, a need for transcendence – in art, poetry, the beautiful.

These two planets are also conjoined with Pluto, the planet of death and rebirth, which adds intensity, revealing an emotional world nourished by what is not seen, a finer psychological vision of human mechanisms and functioning. It adds a note of transformation to Pisces sentimentality, a more difficult aspect, which requires mastery of its depths, of violent emotions and experiences : death, separation, exile. With this Plutonian hue, Hugo scans, unveils the trivial reality that humanity faces, he expresses its ugliness and excesses, the shadows and light that make up the contrasts of humanity, or at least the forces that play out inside and outside of each of us, of which he is like a mirror, a reflection that is found in this water symbol (Pisces).

His natal chart talks about flowering beauty upon the shadows, an onirique (poetic) expression of individual and universal suffering (Pluto is also a collective imprint), in order to transmute pain through creation.

This alliance of planets is located in the 4th house, which is the house of roots, family, homeland and heredity. The fact that his Sun is in this house is not insignificant. One could read it in different ways, the incarnation of a father figure in society, the importance of his home and interiority in his creative process (Sun conjoined with Venus in the 4th house), a radiation at the level of his country, or himself representing his homeland… And also Pluto in the 4th house. The planet of death in the house of the family.

How not to think about the death of his daughter Leopoldine (also his black moon in Leo, which can be interpreted as a part of rage or unconscious suffering, often a driving force too). When one knows that Leopoldine Hugo died by drowning, and that this alliance of planets (Pluto Venus Sun in 4) is found in Pisces, that Victor Hugo is strongly marked by water signs (Pisces Ascendant Scorpio), which is however what took his daughter away from, this remains quite troubling.

It is as if the transmutation of this mourning passed through his art, and that by being in contact with one of the greatest sufferings that a human being can live, the loss of a child, that led him, consciously or unconsciously in his life, to express even more, and to put into words the emotional world, the pain, and dufferin, the states of mind of the other human beings, to make himself the spokesman of the collective (Les Misérables, Claude Gueux, he fought all his life for democracy and against death penalty in France…), also in its most intimate and visceral dimension, and always with this quest for beauty.

I also feel the sensation of powerlessness, especially of the male at the time (the loss of a child, the difficulties in bringing the desired changes in society, especially in terms of justice). But it is a partial failure, because there is still a posterity, a seed has been planted (4th house), even if we do not see the harvested fruits directly.

Pluto-Venus like he Victor Hugo has in his chart is also about art as a vehicle for transformation and healing, as a carrier of memories, how I recover, reunite the parts of my heart that have been fragmented by grief and loss.

May the mystical note of Pisces become a water that repairs, reconciles, soothes the broken hearts of those who have suffered.

« Tomorrow, at dawn, at the time when the countryside whitens,
I will leave. You see, I know that you are waiting for me..
I will go by the forest, I will go by the mountain.
I cannot stay far from you any longer.

I will walk eyes fixed on my thoughts,
Without seeing anything outside, nor hearing any noise,
Alone, unknown, the back curved, the hands crossed,
Sad, and the day for me will be like the night.

I will not look at the gold of the evening which falls,
Nor the faraway sails descending towards Harfleur.
And when I arrive, I will put on your tomb
A green bouquet of holly and blooming heather. »

Demain dès l’aube

Demain, dès l’aube, à l’heure où blanchit la campagne,
Je partirai. Vois-tu, je sais que tu m’attends.
J’irai par la forêt, j’irai par la montagne.
Je ne puis demeurer loin de toi plus longtemps.
Je marcherai les yeux fixés sur mes pensées,
Sans rien voir au dehors, sans entendre aucun bruit,
Seul, inconnu, le dos courbé, les mains croisées,
Triste, et le jour pour moi sera comme la nuit.
Je ne regarderai ni l’or du soir qui tombe,
Ni les voiles au loin descendant vers Harfleur,
Et quand j’arriverai, je mettrai sur ta tombe
Un bouquet de houx vert et de bruyère en fleur.

Victor Hugo, extrait du recueil Les Contemplations (1856)