I only really like mysteries that have some chance of being solved and I believe the following solves the question around Bernard Shaw’s father and carries some implications beyond that.
(The young Bernard Shaw)
There may have been some late exaggeration in the telling, but it’s fairly apparent the childhood of dramatist George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was almost heartbreakingly deprived and dreadful. Chief culprit was his mother, Bessie. Her disappointment with life and marriage took the form of almost wholly ignoring her only son and mostly ignoring her spouse, the effete George Carr Shaw who was long alcoholic though he had originally lied to Bessie that he was teetotal. For much of his life Shaw (GBS) did not wish to be called George as he despised his supposed father without loving his mother.
Bessie who eventually set up as a music teacher in London had some talent for singing and music in which she was encouraged by the socially enterprising and musically gifted Vandeleur Lee (1830 -1886). This romantic figure with a suitable Byronic limp hailed from Co Clare and would become a mover and shaker on the Dublin music scene. Eventually he moved into the Shaw family home and later moved the family home. This would be seen as, or suspiciously like, a menage a trois.
It is inevitably disputed whether Shaw was a love child by Lee, an idea which for whatever reason (apparently respect for his mother despite everything) GBS wasn’t inclined to accept, though to some it seemed obvious enough. A long time friend, the Fabian Beatrice Webb, privately recorded the resemblance between the two was strikingly obvious. Appearance apart, one can’t help thinking the father would need to be a bit of a musical genius for the young GBS to have finished so successfully self-taught in music as in much else.
There is a lot of biography and gossip here but what does astrology say? I would maintain it supplies a distinct conclusive answer and one that incidentally helps make the modern case for reading the asteroids.
THE BIRTH PATTERN
The standard birth chart (for 26th July 1856 0,55 am Dublin, Ire ) is plainly accurate and a few words about it first. Shaw was a theatrical Leo, but writerly, verbose, inventive Gemini was rising at birth with Saturn rising in the first house, testimony to a difficult life arriving at success following half a lifetime’s extreme labour.
Parental and domestic problems through especially the mother are indicated not just by Saturn in the mother and home sign of Cancer, but by the difficult Taurus moon. It is conjunct “eccentric” Uranus in the confining 12th sector and conjunct also the often hate filled and protesting Lilith. (This can be taken as a promise of the Shavian dramas around unconventional and assertive women – Mrs Warren, Eliza Doolittle, Saint Joan etc and Shavian advocacy of the Ibsenite theatre of the freedom seeking, individualistic woman.
Something painful and heavy around the father is indicated by the sun/Venus conjunction in difficulty square to the always heavy Pluto factor. Although sun and moon symbolize father and mother in a very general way for astrology, more detail about the parents is derived from the axis of the fourth and tenth houses and their rulers. (The fourth house normally describes the father and the tenth the mother unless it is obvious from known facts that the reverse must be the case).
SO…THE FATHER IS?,,,,,,,,
GBS keeps to the regular pattern. The Aquarian tenth of the mother ruled by eccentric Uranus fits with Bessie’s maternal neglect, her obsession with spiritualism, the Ouija board and conversing with the great and glorious dead. The fourth house cusp at 15 Leo picks the most difficult degree of the world points to associate with the father, but Leo still renders the sun ruler of the parental theme . It even allows for a possible star figure as a father. But if that means Lee, not retiring George, where is the proof?
GBS’s sun at 3 Leo conjuncts Venus at 4 .This would be consistent with a father in the arts, indeed one whose life and religion beyond nominal Catholicism if not plain agnosticism (he stsopped family prayers in the home) was said to be music. This attachment which could wel \lbe shown by TERPSICHORE , goddess of music, in the house of the father.
But even the name is given…… GBS’s 3 Leo sun conjuncts asteroid LEE!
Directly aspecting LEE at 4 Leo by opportunity aspect is ELIZABETTA at 4 Gemini
Asteroids work translingually by sound and sense, not spelling. And Shaw’s mother was Lucinda Elizabeth called Bessie. In the absence of Lucinda, Elizabeth or Bessie asteroids we may apply an equivalent that so obviously fits.
Where, it may be asked is the supposed father George Carr Shaw? There is no Shaw asteroid, but there is a Carr one. Its opposition to the truth factor Jupiter in the house of friends may be pointing to a contented agreement to the lie involved in the menage.
A FEW FACTS and some UNCONSCIOUS FACTORS
Coincidence in all this is so unlikely as to be conclusive for the old paternity claims about Lee, but I will take things a bit further and ask whether GBS is also any “son of Erin” and via Lee. Why ask? It is because Shaw’s attitudes invite the question and because I believe it matters for a reason of which presently.
Never like Yeats and others, and even Shaw’s wife a little, was GBS an Irish nationalist in fact or feeling, Shaw even told GK Chesterton, who rightly saw only Irish absurdity in the statement, that he was typically Irish because his family hailed from Yorkshire.
It is undeniable that the paternal family line of Shaw and the maternal line of Gurley are Scotttish family names. Also there is record that a Captain William Shaw of Scottish background came to Ireland from Yorkshire and fought at the battle of the Boyne (1690) and was subsequently awarded lands for it. By this means the Shaw ancestor became part of the Anglo-Irish ruling caste, a caste which truly was one and more socially than religiously – its members reckoned not even to communicate with native Catholics. The attitudes and habits stuck and the Shaws, though fallen among the genteel poor of nineteenth century Dublin, did still consider themselves aristocrats. It is even possible that the menage a trois belonged with the more secular ways of these “aristocrats” removed from the more theologically influenced families further north.
If Protestant and Catholic didn’t mix, the question arises where and how did the young Shaw learn and know quite so much about the Irish world and psyche? Granted that without a drop of Irish blood anyone could be Irish by cultural osmosis, the results of government policy or whatever – AE and Jung would doubtless remind us there are the effects of a spirit of place and earth breath to consider; but if so, these factors are less likely to cover for such as influence of the archetypes, dreams and more innate factors.
NOT QUITE GOETHE but
The point is relevant to my belated conviction that Shaw is one of the most significant and cosmopolitan of all Irish writers. Like Goethe to Germany he is a key to many things from what look like lacunae in the national myth, to reasoning about sex. At times Shaw is Ireland’s Shadow in Jungian terms, and certainly on occasions its devil’s’ advocate or Mephistopheles. But this is more explicable if we can cite some ethnic input. And of course that’s possible.
The simple fact is the Anglo-Irish caste system was never impermeable, especially where passion was concerned. Notoriously there was even the widespread custom of a landlord’s right to the first night. This itself over the centuries would affect the gene pool. Little is known about Vandeleur Lee’s origins and background but one would guess some soldier of King William’s Protestant army or some offspring of Huguenot refugees married into the native people.
What clues to being a son of Erin might the skies supply us?
With IRELAND in his 12th house of the unconscious at 18 Gemini and in semi-sextile to writing and speaking Mercury at 18 Cancer, GBS was well set up to dialogue with and to convey home archetypal truths. He would so incline even if he had reservations about the legacy given the tension square to the fated nodes at 18 Aries. But where was the family connection for this acute knowledge?
With ERIN at 3 Cancer in semi sextile to the tell-all sun Venus conjunction of 3/4 Leo, the source has to be the true father,LEE.
Now and again however there could be a feeling of being neither his father’s nor Erin’s child but the devil’s advocate, the mouthpiece of those “blasphemies” GBS oddly believed might precede or support truth. GBS was a mystical atheist and the signature for this looks to be LUCIFER at 3 Gemini in aspect to LEE the Byronic hidden father.
HEAVENS THAT SPEAK
Use of asteroids in astrology is relatively new, and though results are impressive I must not give the impression the system is already fully understood or infallible with an answer to just everything. For example, though a person’s significant other is normally described through the seventh house of marriages and partnerships and with a relevant asteroid often placed there, for Shaw the unions sector does not contain Charlotte for his wife, the heiress Charlotte Payne-Townsend. Is this proof of the unreliability of the system, or possibly a call to think definitions more clearly? It is true the Shaw marriage was in all ways peculiar, not least for its non sexual nature, and it might be significant that Charlotte is widely conjunct GBS’s tricky mother and incest fears related moon/Uranus complex.
All I can say is that very often and against statistical probability, the asteroids convey meaningful and unexpected truths.A quite remarkable case was recently supplied on this site in the pre Christmas article New Proofs around Bethlehem Star Theory which supplies one surprise after another.
However, just this surprise factor may work against the system gaining the kind of familiarity and testing it deserves. More perhaps than for even regular astrology, there is hesitation and fear around admitting the possibility of an eye-of-heaven type knowledge, or the element of fatedness involved.
The knowledge we think we want we may not want; and as for the Shaw family it might not be completely convenient.
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