The Cat's Meow

From March 31st to April 14th, The Sun will be passing through Revati.  Revati is ruled by Pushan, the Vedic deity that is the caretaker of the animals.  People who have important planets in Revati or who are born in the first half of April, tend to have an affection for animals. 

It is easy to take a trait, like the love of animals, for granted, if you are not an animal lover, yourself.  Personally, I have never been a big animal person, but my wife, Terri, is an animal lover.  Living with Terri over the years caused me develop an interest in the astrology of pet lovers.    In my book, Path of Light, Volume 2, I even devoted an entire chapter to pets, as shown in the their owner’s natal charts.

At the end of the chapter on pets, I wrote the story called “Misadventures in Feline Astrology”, in which I told about how I gave Terri a kitten as a present for our first Christmas together, and how I did the chart of that kitten, writing a simplified reading in the Christmas card that went with the kitten.  I really wasn’t taking the reading seriously, thinking that horoscopes were really more applicable to human beings, so I overlooked the negative traits and only described the positive ones.  I learned the hard way that animals, like people, definitely play out the positive or negative karma shown in their charts. They have definite personalities, and can sometimes be complicated.  Even though Terri totally loved that cat, whose name was Washake, he ended up having some rather annoying traits.   If you would like to read that story click here.

Anyway, that experience taught me a lesson, and I swore that if we ever had another cat, I would be much more careful, and try to find one that was born on a good day, and that had a very good horoscope.  Washake had fairly long list of annoying behaviors.  He would bite, pee on the carpet, suck, drool, and my favorite - drag his stuffed bear around  the house, and then hump the bear, meowing all the while at the top of his  lungs.  “For a cat that has been fixed,” I used to say, “he sure seems to think he is Don Juan!”  “Next time I am going to pay attention to the chart, and we are only getting a cat that has Venus in the first house, a positive horoscope and a pleasant personality!”

Fast forward 30 years, Washake is no more, its 2018, and we have gone 10 years without having a cat in our house.  My wife, Terri,  and I had been talking about getting another cat.  To be more precise, Terri had been talking about getting another cat, and I have been supporting this desire because I know how much she loves cats.  I reminded her that my only request was to take our time and find a cat that is “astrologically correct”, no sucking or drooling or humping allowed!    Terri liked that idea and we decided that the easiest way to do that was to get a pure bred cat, since then we could find out from the breeder when the birth took place and that would allow me to check the chart in advance.  So we decided to get a couple of Siamese kittens from and we found a breeder.

Simple, right?  All we have to do is to wait until one of the breeders female cats has a litter and then check the charts.  If the birth doesn’t take place on a good day, then we just wait until the next litter.  The only problem is that the logistics of this whole plan ended up being easier said than done.  I won’t go into all of the details, but suffice it to say, it became very impractical to wait for the perfect cat.  And besides, Terri wanted her kitty!  So we decided to be less manipulative and controlling with mother nature, and just go for a couple of kittens born in April of 2018.  Their names are Chakri, a male, and Charu, his half-sister. 

To keep this story short, I am going to tell you a bit about Chakri’s chart and his life so far.  First, I got my desire for Venus in the first house.  In fact, Chakri has Venus in Taurus in the first house, making him beautiful, and very affectionate.  He loves to be pet and he loves people.  On the other hand, Chakri also has a Mars/Saturn conjunction in his eighth house, making him feel frustrated sometimes.  He gets frustrated about two things.  First, being a card-carrying Taurus ascendant, the sign that signifies the mouth, he loves food, and he voices his demands for food with very loud and demonstrative meeowwws!  And he seems to always be hungry!   Another area he gets riled up about is attention.  He wants to be picked up and pet, and he voices his annoyance loudly if we (mostly Terri) are not paying attention to him.   It is also worth mentioning here that for a person with a Taurus Ascendant, Mars in the 8th house can produce a power issue or control issue with respect to the people around him.  It can produce a tendency for person, or cat, to use guilt tactics to get what he wants. 

In Chakri’s case this led him to the precipice of the loft in our main room.  Whenever Terri would watch TV or read a book in the living room, and not pay attention to Chakri, he would walk up the stairs, and then walk out on the railing that overlooks the main room below.  Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but he was only 8 months old, and the railing of the loft is 14 feet High.  Chakri would meow angrily at Terri to turn off the TV or put down her book to give him attention.  Not wanting to encourage this behavior, Terri simply ignored him.  Over the course of a few months, Chakri escalated his guilt-tripping behavior by reaching down the side of the loft, clearly threatening to commit suicide by hurling himself into the abys and down to the hard wood floor below, unless Terri paid his ransom-attention demand.  But Terri kept her cool, and didn’t let herself be intimidated by the truculent kitty. 

Another astrological feature that Chakri has in his chart is his ascendant in Mrigashira nakshatra.  Mrigashira has a story about how Brahma the creator, had a daughter, who was very beautiful.  He became attracted to his own daughter, and chased her.  She took the form of a doe and ran across the sky.  He took the form of a stag and chased after her.  When Shiva saw what was going on, he snipped of the head of the stag, and it took its place in the heavens as the constellation of Mrigashira, the  stag’s head.

Mrigashira is a great nakshatra, but as the story indicates, those who have Mrigashira prominent in their charts, adamantly chase after their desires and sometimes get their heads snipped off, learning the hard way about going after desires that are not good for them.  It was an impulse from this part of himself, that led Chakri back to the loft on New Year’s Eve.  Terri was reading a book in the living room, and Chakri was shouting, in plaintive kitty yelps, that, “unless you give me attention, I will jump to my death!”  It is worth noting here that the Moon was passing through Swati Nakshatra, ruled by Vayu the god of the wind, on that day.  The desire of Swati is the desire to roam freely throughout the universe, and it is a nakshatra that is frequently seen in the charts of airplane pilots.  Whether it was the Moon in Swati, or just simple frustration, Chakri leaned down from his perch more precariously than ever and, after a few particularly impassioned meows, jumped into the air, giving one final scream, as he rushed towards the ground. 

Now just imagine how it must have felt, to be 8 months old, and to throw yourself off a 14 foot ledge towards a hard wooden floor below.  In fact, I can easily imagine it, because, at the age of 6, while running on the railing of our family deck, an activity that was strictly forbidden, I accidently ran off the end, and fell 10 feet to the ground below. Time seemed to stand still, and I seemed to have no boundaries, coupled with an indescribably uneasy, out-of-control feeling in my stomach, as the adrenalin saturated my blood stream, in the brief moment it took to reach the ground below.   Maybe Chakri felt a similar sense of bewilderment and helplessness, as he rushed towards the ground.  In any case, he hit the hard wooden floor with a loud waaap!

Terri, stood up from her chair to see what had happened. When she located Chakri, in a heap on the floor, she was horrified, and for a moment she thought he must be badly injured.  And at first, it seemed that he was injured, as he slowly got up and limped pitifully towards the sofa.  He crawled under the sofa and stayed there for the next half an hour, before he eventually rose from the dead.  Emerging from his tomb, a shakier, humbler kitty, he resumed his normal activities.  In fact, later that night, while perched on the edge of a bath tub full of bubbles, he did a small encore by jumping into the tub with Terri.  Again, much to his chagrin, hot water was not to his liking. Now, Chakri no longer likes to go to the loft and doesn’t threaten to commit suicide.  He also refrains from jumping into bath tubs.   Sometimes it’s important to let you pets, or even your children, learn the hard way. 

Feline foibles aside, Terri is over-the-Moon in love with her two little kittens.  And even I have become attached to them as well.  They both have affectionate, quirky, complicated personalities. And even though neither of them suck or drool,  I completely failed in my attempt to weed out all negative traits by picking a good time for birth.  In fact, in the end, it is all of their quirks and mischief-making that make Chakri and Charu so lovable, just like with people. Life is both positive and negative.  Our problems and weaknesses are the flip side of our strength. As a poet once said,  “Loss and possession, death and life are one, There falls no shadow where there shines no sun.”