We start off our grand parade with Prince Albert Edward Victor (Eddy), the eldest son of the eldest son of Queen Victoria, and thus the Prince of Wales, heir apparent. He, as the heading shows, is #16 in the Jones 1000 found in toto at the end of Marc Edmund Jones’s book, The Sabian Symbols in Astrology.
During Eddy’s life, there were a lot of rumors about his wayward lifestyle and whether he was the notorious Jack the Ripper. Royal records, of course, place him outside of London during the first of the murders, and his premature death coincided more or less with their abrupt halt. We will explore in this astrological essay if there is any validity to that claim.
The heir apparent
Prince Albert Victor was the first-born son of Albert Edward (known as Bertie), Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) and Princess Alexandra (called Alix) formally Alexandra Caroline Marie Charlotte Louise Julia of Denmark. Eddy, as he was familiarly called, was born at Frogmore House on 8th January 1864 at 8:58 PM, two months premature, weighing less than four pounds at birth. Grandmother Queen Victoria named him Albert Victor Christian Edward, and they christened him, as was the custom, 40 days later in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace on Thursday, 10th March 1864.
His Royal Grandmother’s indulgent hand was all over his rearing. She chose the Reverend Neal for the education of both grandsons, but the tutor found Albert Victor’s interest in his studies lacking. That may have been attributed to his inherited deafness, that ran on his mother’s side, but we do not know how much his hearing impacted him.
Every zodiacal sign rules a part of the body, and Taurus rules the neck and throat, and thus essentially the second house rules the neck too. But in the Prince’s chart, Taurus appears in the ninth house suggesting that “hearing” effected his studies, as traditionally no universities used textbooks — school attendance was just a series of lectures or as the British call it “readings” and students were expected to take good notes. That scenario would make Eddy dismissive of his teachers — oral transmission does not work if they student cannot hear it and prior to Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller lip reading was unknown. Both Cambridge and Oxford still refer to their professors as “readers.”
Saturn rules ossification and in Taurus’s essential domain, but here in the Prince’s chart has Libra or the balance between the physical self and spoken word. (Venus rules Libra like Taurus). If all of this does not make you think twice about the connection, his mother, Queen Alix, spent a large part of her life alone & “stone” deaf.
Prince George, as the second son following the Royal tradition, set off for a career in the military, but the Crown Prince accompanied him aboard the Royal Navy’s training ship HMS Britannia and together they sailed around the world. Mars shows these travels (Sagittarius) in his watery 4th house opposite the sign of brotherly love in the 10th house in the sign of the twins, Gemini.
The Cambridge years
Alan Leo, Aleister Crowley and Marc Edmund Jones (#16 ) 1 have the same map data for the Prince. Mr. Leo’s is the oldest of the three books, so we are crediting him with the find, but a search through the pages of the London Times, shows that he snatched the particulars from there. Still, Leo’s 1001 nativities were de rigeur for 50 years among astrologers. Everyone on both sides of the Atlantic subscribed to this publication, much like they did Raphael’s ephemeris, until it was finally closed with Great Britain entering World War II — a dozen years after Leo himself had reposed.
ith a preponderance of northern planets ( below the horizon) and the current addition of Uranus and Pluto above, we have the foresight to know that Eddy was a locomotive temperament type, who, like his father did what he wanted and enjoyed the raucous. But during his life, none of those planets were known, and he would be a Splash. Should we go with the future knowledge of what will come or stay with what was? Further charts will unveil that we assume. Jupiter is in his 3rd house, so Eddy had the gift of proverbial silver tongue, and was an elegant dresser and a ladies’ man.
During his life, the London papers, no better than now, reported that the Prince was an unsavory fellow, lazy and bisexual, who attended lots of brothels often going out with his brother George, with whom they said it he shared a whore. A manuscript of that era, claims he married an Irish Roman Catholic girl — hence the connection to Mary Kelley one of the Ripper’s victims — who worked in a shop opposite the brothel that Jack the Ripper frequented and they had a child named Alice Margaret. From these tidbits came the rumours that he was Jack the Ripper.³
Who marries who?
His Neptune in the 8th shows how he had to marry whomever the family chose, but that he fantasized otherwise. Originally, the family first choice was his cousin Alexandra Victoria Helena Louise Beatrice, (Empress Alexandra of Russia) but Queen Victoria’s sister Elisabeth, married to Tsarevitch Nicholas’s uncle Sergei, was appalled. She did not like the Duke of Clarence, repelled perhaps by the Fixed Star Sabik conjunct his Mars (typical in homosexual charts) and his attitude towards women.
The Arian lord Mars highlights the friction in Eddy’s and Mary’s relationship in the 4th house opposite Uranus in the 10th of personal honor and royal noblesse, that highlights her domineering tendencies against his free-wheeling spirit. Yet it would seem that Mary lived vicariously through his exploits and enjoyed them while the more dutiful George bored her.True to his Sun at 18 Capricorn in the fifth house, he was convivial & fond of amusements. His Mars opposite the Arabian Part of Fatality hints at virulent influenza epidemic that would take his life, and with two strong planets, Mars and the generational planet Uranus, in tow, influenza’s lethalness, and idiosyncrasy — striking some and not others — was hovering overhead.
Vitality and Fatality
The Prince has a cardinal mutable natural disposition as the only opposition in his chart is in mutable signs (Sagittarius 17 and Gemini 03) that are essentially cardinal houses. This aspect is another sign of him being a real libertine and the life of the party.
Hyperion Symbols
The Prince’s ascendant is 10 Virgo and is the “Lord of the Horoscope.” In the Hyperion symbols, this is a “Round stone hidden within another” hinting of his close friendship with his younger brother, George and the latter’s eventual triumph as king. It’s ruler is Mercury, found right on the 6th house cusp of servants and toil at 6 Aquarius 55 , or “two rivers converging at the water gap.” It’s keyword is “Agreement.” The prince did find schooling irksome and his tendency to rank-drop, hang out with the servants in what seemed like an embrace of universality, was really his way of fitting in with people he was far more comfortable, and unschooled.
Mercury in Aquarius is a place where conventional educational methods are favored. It is more experimental than scholarly here — the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison also has his Mercury there. This position explains the Prince’s diffident nature towards education and the comments by his schoolmasters. As Ascendant is inconjunct, his own Mercury at 04 Sagittarius and gets the images of “A shadow of the City of Ekbatan at dawn”, alluding to the King he may have been.
On January 9th, the Duke of Clarence, who was spending the Christmas holidays with his parents at Sandringham, got attacked with a bout of influenza. He had caught a cold at the funeral of his cousin Admiral HSH Prince Victor Ferdinand Franz Eugen Gustaf Adolf Constantin Friedrich of Hohenlohe-Langenburg GCB, the son of Queen Victoria’s half sister, during the Christmas holidays.
That cold, true to the Star Al Hecka 4 the fiery Martial star in Gemini, portends of inflammation in the lungs when conjunct Uranus it becomes erratic, — hitting one member and yet not another, and that happened here. While others received a minor brush, the Prince’s bout turned to pneumonia but without penicillin, yet to be invented by Sir Fleming for another fifty years, it was always fatal.
Prince Albert Victor died shortly after his 28th birthday on January 14, 1892, within a week of the day on which the news of his illness had first been released. His mother never fully recovered, they said at the time, that there was an extremely strong filial and maternal link between them. In true Victorian morbidness, she continued to keep his room at Sandringham undisturbed for the rest of her life.
They buried Albert Victor at the Albert Memorial Chapel at Windsor Castle. The despondent Princess May laid her bridal wreath of sweet smelling orange blossoms upon the coffin in a touching tribute, perhaps echoing the “fields of rich red clover” found at his Midheaven at Gemini 02.
His tomb, featured a recumbent effigy of the Prince in a Hussar, his military brigade, uniform. The statuary is a magnificent example of Art Nouveau sculpture. Pictures are here. After a suitable period of mourning, the Princess, with that beneficent Sun in her third house of brothers, and the continued the goodwill of her relatives, married the new heir apparent, Prince George, later to become King George V. This couple are the grandparents of the current monarch, Queen Elizabeth II.
Prince’s Death Notice from Alan Leo’s The Astrologer Magazine.
Virgo 10 Ascendant notables:
Prince Albert Victor shares an Ascendant with singers Tony Martin and Rod Stewart, painter Amedeo Modigliani (died at 36 from tubercular meningitis), comedians Peter Sellers, who started off as a mime, and Patty Duke, who played the mute Helen Keller.
Footnotes:
- In Alan Leo’s “1001 Nativities” 4th ed., the chart is #04.
- In Crowley’s book General Principles of Astrology c. 1927, originally co-written with Miss Evangeline Adams , the horoscope is Chart #8. pg. 602.
- In Marc Edmund Jones “The Sabian Symbols” c. 1953, the chart is #16
- op cit Crowley.
- D.M. Potts, “Queen Victoria’s Gene: haemophilia and the royal family” c.1999. London: Sutton Publishing. It is available here in paperback.
- Al Hecka is unfavorable for one’s career & tells of parental disharmony that had to be the case with Eddy’s antics always in the London Daily News. The fixed star portends sudden death from air borne mechanisms, like a virus, because according to Ptolemy it takes on the poignancy of a Mars attack.
Bibliography:
- Crowley, Aleister, Evangeline Adams. Your Place in the Sun. Philadelphia: Ordo Templi Orientis., 1927.
- Jones, Marc Edmund. The Sabian symbols in astrology. Stanwood,, WA: Sabian Pub. Society, 1955.
- Spiering Frank. Prince Jack: The True Story of Jack the Ripper. NY: Doubleday & Sons, 1st edition, 1955.
- Leo, Alan. 1001 Nativities. London, UK: L. N. Fowler & Sons, 4th edition.
- McClung, Gavin Kent. Hyperion Symbols. Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing, 2012 ISBN: 978-07414-7262-5.
- You can preview & purchase the e-book at Barnes and Nobles or get the paperback (it was never issued in hard cover) from Infinity Publishing on the Web.
- Ectaban Persia is also highlighted in Archibald MacLeish’s poem “You, Andrew Marvell,” on the emphemerality of life.
You, Andrew Marvell
And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth’s noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow growAnd strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia changeAnd now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward passAnd Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal onAnd deepen on Palmyra’s street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblownAnd over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hullsAnd Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that landNor now the long light on the sea:
And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on …
We constantly vet our essays for grammar, typos and factual errors and WordPress editor mishaps. This one was revised on December 21, 2019.
