One Final Look Back At Michael And His Doppleganger, Prince

The King of Pop And The Prince Of Cherry Poppin’.

More, more Michael Jackson, MJ 24/7. The media is now officially feasting on the emaciated corpse of his legacy. We’re talking about a news cycle that will be long and deep. Get used to it. Court battles, rumor, intrigue, innuendo, biographies, TV specials, you name it. Michael Jackson’s death and life will hang like a skin-bleached specter over lives throughout the summer and beyond (side note, the MJ suicide count is up to ten now).

But there will be a backlash when Uranus goes retrograde and opposes Saturn in Virgo one last time. People will have had enough and the public debate will then turn to the ethics of piling on the King Of Pop. Once Uranus slams it into reverse and Saturn plods forward towards their fated conjunction, the media will cannibalize themselves. They’ll eat until there’s nothing left and then they’ll eat each other. Now that’s going to be some good viewing.

Meanwhile, The Big O admin will put the petal to the metal on health care reform, the clean waters act, the anti-hate speech bill, etc, as quickly as possible to capitalize on the feeding frenzy of Michael and who knows who else. By the way, has anyone seen Joe Biden lately?

I did my post on Michael and I’ll do one more unless it’s vital that I stay with the topic of his life and death.

I’m fascinated with the parallels between Michael and Prince. In fact Michael even named a son after the purple one. Michael and Prince occupy the esoteric duality of Mercury. Michael being the Virgo and Prince, Gemini. Both had tempestuous relationships with their respective fathers and both rose to fame at roughly the same time, but they couldn’t have been more different.

While Michael lived out in some ways, the archetypal life of a Virgo, the pursuit of perfection in form to disastrous excess, moving towards the neuter/neutrality of the androgyne, Prince danced in a decidedly different direction. With Pluto sitting directly on his mid-heaven, Prince is here to display the powers of Pluto to all. On stage he is pure gyration and longing, seeking salvation through sex, redemption through the bump and grind. For Prince God is in the orgasm and in the act of stepping over the line, going too far and asking for forgiveness. It’s utterly plutonic and his career is an open book to this process.

From Dirty Mind onwards, Prince has gone about balancing the inherent duality of Gemini on the world’s stage. Don’t forget, he grew up in the heart of Calvinism, the very white, Minneapolis, finding solace in the jazz centric zones of Alphabet City, where his father would play in the clubs, outside the judgmental gaze of John Calvin and his descendants and yet this was Prince’s fertile crescent. While Jackson had to deal with the excess of morality, much of it pious and patently false, Prince had in some ways to deal with the lack of it.

Interestingly, both have their Moon in Pisces, but Prince’s lies at the beginning of the sign at 1 degree, while Michael’s was directly in the middle at 10 degrees. The Sabian Symbol for Prince’s moon is a “In A Crowded Marketplace Farmers And Middlemen Display A Great Variety Of Products.” For Jackson, ironically enough it’s “An Aviator Pursues His Journey, Flying Through Ground-Obscuring Clouds.” As these two are seen together, it marks a stark contrast for one another. Images of buying, selling, trading earthy goods in the marketplace, flat, horizontal, grounded mark Prince’s Moon, while Michael’s Moon is rife with imagery of flying, aviation, escaping the gravity of this plane (see my last post on Jackson and The Little Prince). Prince’s Moon falls in his 4th house, versus the 5th for Jackson.

Both of their moons oppose Pluto, but for Jackson, we see the shadow of the moon in his darkened relationship with his father. For Prince it’s in the house of the mother and yet, we rarely hear about his relationship with her on the surface. In “Purple Rain” it’s his tempestuous relationship with his father that’s on display. But what Prince doesn’t tell, he shows.

If anyone has followed him closely, his career has been buttressed by the femme fatale, his psychic other. Whether it’s Sheila E, Appollonia, Vanity, Sheena Easton, Cat, Mavis Staples, Wendy and Lisa, I could go on, Prince venerates and adores these women and they haven nothing but respect and praise for him. If we look at the axis of energy with his Moon/Pluto opposition, Prince uses the feminine force at the base of his psycho-emotional crucible. He generates inspiration, power, and sexual energy from collaborating and producing them. Then he lifts that energy straight up through to the zenith of his chart, where it gets expressed in all of it’s oedipal, yet semi-secret glory for us to witness. So what exactly is Prince looking for when it comes to redemption? Is it the act of sex itself, or is it a more primal connection with his mother that he is continually exer and exorcising?

Ironically, Prince has not fathered any children (that we know of) but the one time he was expecting the child was apparently horribly disfigured and died not long after birth.

While Michael’s Mars was in the more conservative sign of Taurus, Prince’s Mars is raging at 0 degrees Aries. His energy is legendary, playing a three-hour-stadium show, then hitting an after hours club for another three hours was his calling card in the nineties. He and The new Power Generation would just show up at a club, hit the stage and blow the crowd away. Jackson’s frail condition and adherence to strict diet and health protocols during that time would never have permitted him to indulge in that type of frantic and manic schedule.

Prince with his Mercury and Sun in Gemini (though not conjunct) is uber inventive and hyper creative, especially when it sextiles both Mercury and Mars. His attention span is, shall we say. not given to long moments of lingering. That’s not to say that he can’t be focused. His Venus in Taurus grounds him as does a trine with Saturn and Pluto. Prince can focus if he wants to or needs to, it’s just that he’s fascinated by invention and restlessly driven to express it.

Michael’s Mercury is in Leo and for Michael, being heard and being loved, having praise heaped upon him and sharing it with others was what drove him. Herein lies the difference between the two. If I could assign to cultural ciphers for Michael and Prince, two predescors it would be Sammy Davis Jr and Jimi Hendrix respectively. Michael was a world class performer, Prince, a world class artist. In this regard, Prince does not qualify as a classic puer. He’s far too driven to achieve a form of personal excellence, concerned with legacy and consciously aware of his psychic process to get lost in the ethers of earthly dissatisfaction. However, if Prince were convinced that sex in the afterlife were just as good, if not better than here, all bets might just be off.

That’s it. Unless something outrageous comes out about Michael, I’m done. Rest in peace.