The Pulpit and the Tunnel: Dr. King’s Astrological Legacy
Between McGiffert Hall and James Chapel at Union Theological Seminary, there is an underground tunnel. It runs beneath Claremont Avenue alongside many 6-inch white and blue utility pipes. The passageway is dark, often steamy, and echoes beautifully.
In my early days at Union, I heard a story about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was speaking at Riverside Church on the same block as McGiffert Hall. On April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his assassination, he offered the speech “Beyond Vietnam” before 3,000 people at Riverside. (It was originally scheduled to be held at James Chapel at Union, but moved due to turnout.) This speech marked a turning point in Dr. King’s life, as the FBI amplified the volume on their surveillance of King as he was becoming increasingly vocal about the war. This speech was not of the bright, hopeful timbre of his memorialized “I Have a Dream” speech; it was a prophetic warning. I learned at Union that the histories white folks “manage” favor Dr. King’s unity-and-oneness speeches while systematically forgetting his speeches that exorcise hypocrisy and call for material equity.
As King and his supporters pressed further into controversy, they grew more present to the target placed upon him. They increased security measures. After the “Beyond Vietnam” speech, Dr. King absconded to the very tunnel I walked everyday to class.
I imagine not one of us who learned about that wasn’t changed by it. So many of us took that tunnel after eating breakfast to a lecture where Dr. King was on the syllabus. Union, together with its own justice controversies, is a seminary where professors teach and students practice faith alongside social justice. The story of Dr. King escaping death threats through that tunnel literalized the path of speaking truth to power for me. That kind of metaphysical information, his historical presence in that tunnel, sunk into my bones. Treading that path daily made his legacy palpable, three-dimensional, to me. A daily tread of Dr. King’s footsteps. Here was the nexus of civil rights history and faith and the future, right here in this damp, dimly lit tunnel. And I got to pass through it: the fear, the redemption, the hope, the vocation, enroute to folding my socks. It was humbling. I am still humbled.
It wasn’t until last year it occurred to me to look at Dr. King’s natal chart. Last autumn, in an embodied astrology workshop, I imagined myself walking the path that the sun takes everyday through the sky. Up, up, over the horizon, high into the sky, then down, down, below the western skyline, into the deep, deep subterraneous realm of the night. Born at midday, I felt an amazing sense of relief as I traveled downward into the nest of the nadir. Others, born at night, reported feeling a stunning sense of openness and brilliance as they traveled to the top of the ecliptic, the sun’s path, the Medium Coeli. It’s a wonderful exercise anyone can do at home: travel in a circle and pretend you are the sun rising and setting. Notice what you feel.
As I was climbing, climbing, high into the sky in my solar fantasy, I had a waking dream that I was summitting a mountain. My mind played echoes of Dr. King’s words: “I have been to the mountaintop… I have seen the Promised Land.” His very last speech. I made note to look up his chart later that evening.
Dr. King’s birth time is not recorded on any official documents, but his mother stated he was born at “high noon.” A noon birthtime on January 15, 1929 gives us a chart with Taurus rising, Pisces moon, and Capricorn sun on the midheaven, the high noon point, the Medium Coeli. His 9th house sun is why I now refer to the 9th house as the Mountaintop house. This is the place where the sun begins its downward trajectory to the western horizon, having visited the highest point in the sky. It is known as the house of God, the place where the sun “finds its joy,” and is affiliated with all that religion and philosophy and law have to offer (and take away, I suppose). When I pulled Dr. King’s chart, I was covered in chills. “I have been to the mountaintop… I have seen the Promised Land.” In this ultimate speech, he went on to say, “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”
And this, now, is how I see the best of the 9th house: the role of the prophetic voice is not to state what others readily observe, but rather to travel to the highest places and bring the view back down. This motif, the prophet going up to the mountain and coming back down to the people, appears also in the Moses and Jesus narratives. The mountains are places where countless people journey for spiritual clarity. But the climb is not what makes a prophet a prophet. It is the descent. It is the rejoining of the people to share the good news. It is the sharing of the future that is Not Yet. It is the offering of maps of yet uncharted territory. It is not spiritual bypassing. It is deep engagement with the thread that weaves together our current realities and our dreams. What a beautiful expression of a Capricorn sun and Pisces moon: the meeting place of reality and dreams.
I want to end by signaling the white proclivity I mentioned earlier to glorify the mountaintop without also considering the tunnel. The 3rd house, opposite the 9th, is often referred to as the place of neighbors and other lateral connections, as well as heresy, or opposition to the Church and State. The tunnel beneath Claremont Ave was a tangible lateral connection through the neighborhood by which Dr. King escaped that fateful day. We might do well to consider the glory of the mountaintop alongside the subterranean realities of being Enemy of the State, to remember the level of terror of Dr. King’s experience in step with the hope. I think of Harriet Tubman and her shotgun and the Underground Railroad as an expression of this 3rd house reality that stands in opposition of the sunshine of the 9th house in which white folks prefer to bask. We do well to integrate both, give depth and breadth to the cause of justice, to understand that it begins with our neighbor: how we love them; how we object to and actually, tangibly respond to their mistreatment. May we bless and be blessed by Dr. King’s memory, in the pulpit and in the tunnel.
P.S. I hope to write more about Dr. King’s chart, about his Pisces moon and exalted Pisces Venus in the 11th house (of friends) (and the vast network of Black women who created and executed the Civil Rights Movement for which he became figurehead). About his Sun-Pluto opposition and his roguish 2nd house (of values) retrograde Mars in Gemini (a collective transit we’ve all just been through). His 8th house (of death and collectivity) Saturn and his 1st house (of self) Jupiter-Chiron conjunction. The 12th house (of hidden enemies) Saturn transit and the eclipse season at the time of his death. If you’re interested in learning more about his life and chart, these are good places to start.