Severus Snape’s Natal Chart
Today I’m going to analyze the birth chart of the character Severus Snape, a lot like what I did with Mikasa’s birth chart. According to J. K. Rowling, Snape was born on the 9th January 1960. Once again we don’t have a birth time, so we’ll have to be happy with a more superficial analysis.
Snape has his Sun in Capricorn, in case you had any doubt. He displays a lot of capricornian features. He is stiff, demanding, pragmatic and he doesn’t seem to connect with people very easily and he’s in general a buzzkill. Having your Sun in Capricorn is not enough for you to be all this, but Snape actually has three planets in Capricorn: his Sun, his Mercury and his Saturn.
Mercury in Capricorn shows that the general traits he got from his Sun will be very present in his communication. Capricorn is an Earth sign and Snape’s voice (especially after he was played by Alan Rickman) is very emblematic by being paused and slow, typical Earth traits. Mercury is under the Sun’s beams, which means it is getting very close to the Sun and losing power. This is another testimony to the fact that Snape doesn’t like to talk that much.
The character actually has most of his relevant planets in two clusters in only two signs: Capricorn and Sagittarius (as I said before I don’t usually give Uranus, Neptune and Pluto a lot of importance). This pattern is very interesting because Sagittarius is a sign associated with great hope, faith and playfulness, and Capricorn is associated with depression, pessimism or, at best, a great dose of realism Sagittarius lacks.
Sagittarius is also a sign ruled by Jupiter, called the great benefic, and Capricorn is ruled by Saturn, called the great malefic. This discrepancy between the two signs perfectly mirrors the feelings Snape caused all of us while reading the series: Until the end we were never sure if he was a great villain or a great hero.
Saturn is in Capricorn which gives it unbelievable strength. This planet alone probably reflects the self control Snape has over his own feelings and mind (he is, after all, a master of occlumency), and how he could be a double agent for so long keeping a cold posture We could argue that the fact that Saturn is combust (too close to the Sun) weakens it, but if we read this in context the meaning becomes clearer. Combustion has been highly associated with secret or hidden things, and Snape’s Sun is actually under the power of Saturn because it’s in Saturn’s sign. This means that this combustion is actually very useful because Snape is a spy. He is able to keep his true strengths and motives hidden. Even from us, the readers.
The other sign with many planets, as I said, is Sagittarius. Sagittarius is usually associated with faith, hope and high ideals. Snape is, in the end, a dreamer and a freedom fighter so it’s not weird that this sign is so strong. Mars and Jupiter are in a relatively loose conjunction which shows that he has ideals and fights for them. He is probably also prone to some dramatic exaggeration, but generally we could expect Snape to be a person with unyielding ideals.
This, of course, raises some problems since Snape has been a death eater and a spy for Voldemort during the first wizarding war. His chart has a lot of dignified planets (Saturn in Sign, Jupiter in Sign, Moon in exaltation) which usually means that the person either has a very easy life, which we know is not the case, or is morally irreproachable. How do we account in astrological terms for the suffering and moral fluctuations that were always present in Snape’s life?
First of all, we see that Snape has lack of two of the four elements. These are Air and Water. This means that he is not very given to mental abstractions and intellectual thinking (even in his school book he usually wrote notes on how to do things more easily and pragmatically than the book described). He is not someone who reflects enough about his ideology, but he is someone who might be very passionate about it because of his Jupiter-Mars conjunction is Sagittarius. On the other hand, water prevents him to emotionally connect to people. Even with the love of his life, Lily, we find him being extremely awkward. By not connecting easily to people and by not thinking his ideas through, Snape ends up being faithful to vague ideals that can, of course, change.
Snape also has lack of the fixed mode (we’ll go back to his fixed Moon later) and a lot of mutable energy. Mutable signs are known to be unreliable and change their opinions easily. The lack of fixed energy will make him someone who can change his mind about importante matters, especially because all of his fixed energy is invested somewhere else.
Another reason for Snape to have such moral fluctuations is the fact that most of his planets do not make any aspects to other planets. If we only take into account the traditional astrological planets (Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) none of them is in any aspect other than a conjunction. This means that his resources, the many voices within his mind, and the various sides of his personality feel very disconnected from one another. This is also symbolic of him feeling alone, disconnected and generally bullied.
The last argument explaining the changes in his moral stances is the fact that he has two strong clusters connected to the great benefic and the great malefic. He is either a great hero or a great villain.
Now, we all know that one of the most defining aspects of Snape’s character is his love for Lily Evans. If this chart is at all accurate it should depict both the importance of this love in his behaviors and the tragic outcome of it.
Since we don’t have a birth time it’s hard to look for the 7th house and its ruler. We need to look to his Venus at first. Snape’s Venus is in Sagittarius, as we might have expected. Lily is one of the driving forces behind his moral choices. We can arguably say that his trauma of being bullied by James Potter and seeing him marry Lily is one of the reasons his mind went to a dark place. His suffering in general might have made him choose the great malefic part of his chart at first. It was also Lily’s death that brought him back to the resistance against Voldemort. Venus is conjunct a very nasty fixed star. I know most modern astrologers don’t use fixed stars anymore, but they are crucial in certain charts. Here Venus is conjunct Antares, the heart of Scorpio. This star is essentially the distilled essence of Scorpio, so it talks about deep feelings, tragedy and death. When conjunct Venus it represents tragedy caused by love. Some old authors even connect this conjunction to myths where a character destroys their life because of incest, like Oedipus. We can also say that the square between Venus and Pluto adds to this theme of tragedy, but it doesn’t really bring any new information.
So we now see that the tragedy of Lily’s death is present in Snape’s chart. Nevertheless, Venus is in a mutable sign, which is weird because his love is extremely fixed and does not change at all. This point is very important when discussing Snape’s Moon. Since we don’t have his birth time, we are not sure if the Moon is in Taurus or Gemini, because it changed signs that day. Nevertheless, since the Moon spent most of the day in Taurus and it would be the only planet in a fixed sign, I’m almost sure it was in Taurus.
This represents Snape’s feelings for Lily that were so strong that never changed during a life time. All his fixed energy is invested in this. The Moon is in its exaltation which also shows the strength of his love, how he has literally exalted Lily all of his life.
This is also useful because it means Snape was born before 2:30 pm, reducing his possible ascendants. We know now that he wasn’t a Cancer, Leo or Virgo rising. Nevertheless, we still have 9 signs to choose from which makes it very hard to infer the time of birth.
Despite having no time of birth, the chart for the symbolic birth date of Severus Snape seems to contain the most important features of this character, showing both his skill as a spy, his moral fluctuation and his love for Lily Evans.
