Birds of Passage: Novalis and Astrology

Sometimes scholarly research leads to the most surprising places

Recently I have been working on a truly enjoyable writing project: an introduction to a forthcoming edition of Novalis’s Christianity or Europe? for Angelico Press. I have loved Novalis since I first read Hymns to the Night almost forty years ago and have written about him before in The Submerged Reality and The Heavenly Country, but never at length. The Hymns, indeed, are an essential text in the literature of Sophiology as are the German Romantic poet’s The Novices of Sais and the romance Heinrich von Ofterdingen, both left unfinished when he died at the age of twenty-eight on the Feast of the Annunciation (March 25^th to you heretics) in 1801.

Novalis, whose real name was Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg, published very little during his lifetime, but he was an important presence and spirit in the flowering of Romanticism that occurred as if by miracle during the years straddling the arrival of the eighteenth century. As the great Romantic poet, critic, and translator August Wilhelm Schlegel wrote following Novalis’s death, “He was like a bird of passage, tired from its flights over immeasurable oceans, stopping on a green island, and forgetting there its former fatherland, and the vast regions of free thought.”

An indispensable aid to me in this project has been Andrea Wulf’s wonderful 2022 telling of the story of early Romanticism in Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self. Though she has command of the material (and in the German) hers is not a scholarly treatment (I’ve read a ton of them on Novalis lately… but I CAN’T EVEN) but it is beautifully written, intelligent, and enormously engaging—exactly the kind of thing the Romantics might have written themselves.

Along the way of doing all of the reading such a project requires, I was reminded that Novalis was born on 2 May 1772. My birthday, as it so happens, is 3 May, so I don’t know why Novalis’s birthday never registered with me before. I must have seen it. So, anyway, on a whim, I decided to find Novalis’s birth chart and compare it to mine. I was kind of shocked by what I discovered.

Novalis's chart and mine--apologies for the size difference

First of all, our Suns are at the same degree of Taurus (which is not surprising, given we were almost born on the same day of the year). But our Moons are also at nearly the same degree of Taurus, his at 4 degrees and mine at 8 (which means we were both born just before the New Moon). But wait! There’s more! We both have Mercury in Gemini, the sign it rules, his at 2 degrees and mine at 0 (that’s a pretty close conjunction). And we both have Venus in Gemini, though these are a bit farther apart, his at 24 degrees and mine at 6. But, stay with me, I’m just getting started. We both have Mars in Aries, his at 4 degrees and mine at 7—also very close. His Jupiter is at 29 degrees of Aquarius and mine is at 7 degrees of Pisces—still close enough to be called a conjunction. The only planet of traditional astrology that we do not have in close proximity is Saturn, his at 22 degrees of Leo and mine at 11 degrees of Aquarius; but they are in a slightly wide opposition to each other.

Finally, I found the relationship of his rising sign and my midheaven to be curiously related. His rising sign stands at 13 degrees of Gemini and my midheaven is at 11 degrees of the same sign. In all my years as an astrologer, I have never seen two charts not from the same year and day that had so much in common.

I never really identified with Novalis as a person, though his poetry and aesthetic have always inspired me. But this is really because of the portrait of the poet that has been handed down to us—that of an ethereal, otherworldly seer and prophet, melancholic and doomed to an early death: the archetype of the Romantic poet. And while Novalis was without a doubt gloomy and depressed, even suicidal, following the death of his fiancée, Sophie von Kühn, in 1797, the portrait painted of him as the ghostly mystic is far from accurate. As a double Taurus, he was as sensual as they come, and, combined with all of that Gemini, he was gregarious and outgoing—his brothers even teased him as “Fritz the flirt.”

Wulf describes him in the following way:

“Novalis was tall, lean and handsome in an almost girlish way, with a delicate face and lips. His skin was almost translucent and he wore his light brown hair long. His clothes were plain but his eyes, his friends said, had an almost ethereal blaze that kept all captivated. He talked fast, jumping from one subject to another without taking a breath [Mercury in Gemini]. A ravenous reader, he could absorb a book in a quarter of the time it took his friends, and then recite its contents months later. His voice was melodic, one friend said, with a natural grace and lightness. Never haughty or arrogant, Novalis was animated by an almost childish cheerfulness.”

With the exception of the ethereally blazing eyes, this is not far from how my friends would have described me in my twenties. In fact, once when I was a musician in the 1980s and my dad saw Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders on the front of Spin magazine, he congratulated me for making the cover. When I told him, “That’s a woman, Dad” he responded with “That’s not my problem.” God, I miss him.

Me looking pretty girly back in the day.

In addition, unlike the rest of the Jena circle—with the exceptions of Fichte, Schelling, and Frierich Schlegel, who worked as professors—Novalis, though born to the minor nobility (he was actually a baron), had to work for a living—and not as a writer or poet (then, as now, not very secure employment). So what did he do? The most Taurus (the earth sign) job you can have: he worked as a mining engineer. Though a double Taurus like my man, I have not made it that far underground, but I have had my hands in the soil as a farmer and gardener for most of my adult life—also a very Taurus occupation.

Another thing we have in common is a profound, I might even venture to say “all consuming,” obsession with the reimagination of Christianity and the ascendance of Sophia to her rightful place in the Christian imagination. Comparing our charts, I wonder how much the sensuality of Taurus has combined with the gift of language bestowed by all of that activity in Gemini—undergirded by the intense energy of Mars in Aries—has contributed to the sophianic insights at which we both arrived, not to mention the encounters with death in our youth (as I mentioned recently in A Work of Mourning) that brought us both, albeit unwillingly, to the threshold of the spiritual world. Nowhere is this so beautifully spoken than at the end of Novalis’s first Hymn to the Night (here in Dick Higgins’s sublime translation):

“Praise the world queen, the higher messenger of a holy word, a nurse of blessed love—she sends me you—for I’m yours and mine—you called the Night to life for me,—humanized me—tear my body with spirit fire, so I can mix with you more inwardly, airily, and then the wedding night will last forever.”

So, astrology types and other Friends of Sophia, fellow birds of passage, what do you make of these coincidences? Let me know in the comments below.

Either me or Chrissie Hynde in the mid-eighties, a great period of modern Romanticism.