Olga Tokarczuk - Living In Between

by Shawn Nygaard

© Shawn Nygaard - published by The Evolving Astrologer, September 2023 / 14.11.2023

Olga Tokarczuk at the Frankfurt bookfair in 2019
 Source: Harald Krichel, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Natal chart, January 29, 1962, in Sulechów, Poland at 7:30 PM
Source: Astrodatabank

On October 10, 2019, Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature, noted by the Swedish Academy for her “narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.” Olga is an important figure for the astrological community to be aware of, as her book “Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead” (translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) includes the main character Janina Duszejko, an elderly eccentric woman whose primary passions in life include the poetry of William Blake, animal rights, and astrology. The book is filled with beautiful and insightful reflections on astrology, a subject Olga clearly knows in depth to be able to craft such rich, substantive, and eloquent passages.

What does the birth chart of this Nobel laureate show us? Born on January 29, 1962, in Sulechów, Poland at 7:30pm, we see that Olga’s chart includes five planets and a South Node all in the sign Aquarius, bookended by Mars in late degrees of Capricorn and Chiron in early degrees of Pisces. She was born with a Moon-Neptune conjunction in Scorpio, which with a generous range of orb degrees, squares her planets in Aquarius. Olga was also born with Pluto in Virgo on the Ascendant.

Perhaps a good entry point into Olga’s chart is her chart ruler, Mercury, which falls in the 6th House, retrograde, in the air sign of Aquarius. Her Mercury is conjunct Jupiter in Aquarius, also in the 6th House. Often Aquarius brings an innate capacity for systems thinking, sometimes with an almost scientific mind. Aquarius can be the iconic “outside of the box” thinker, looking at things from different and unique perspectives, often like an outsider looking in. With Olga’s abundance of planets in Aquarius, including Mercury, it’s no surprise that she says,

I can boldly say that encyclopedias were my favorite literary genre throughout my childhood.

Yet she did not stop there.

Olga read Greek mythology extensively, keeping track of the complicated relationships across the various versions of the myths, before expanding to read mythologies across other cultures. Creation myths and cosmologies fascinated her, as did fairy tales and fables from around the world. When her parents – both teachers – moved to the south of Poland, young Olga studied astronomy, cosmology, physics, and

everything that went beyond the ordinary, everyday world and crossed the borders of the here and now.

The 6th House is a rather complicated house, its meaning coming partly from its position at the twilight time of day, when the Sun has not set completely, and night has not fully taken hold. It’s a murky, shady, mysterious, and often beautiful time of day. Nothing is just black or white, and planets in the 6th House can live in the ambiguous state “in between” this or that, between day and night. The 6th House represents a place and a time where borders become blurred. This seems to be a quality Olga consciously embraces with intelligence and insight, not only in her writing but as a way of viewing the world. Of this in-between zone Olga remarks,

There is so much more truth there than in the black and white. I try to see the world rather as a continuum, and not one thing or another. Anyone who has experience with borders, not only national ones, sees the artificiality of people arbitrarily drawing them.

Olga’s natural inclination toward this way of perceiving the world is enhanced by her connection to her birth country of Poland and its history of shifting national borders. Here we can bring in Olga’s Moon-Neptune conjunction in Scorpio, which squares her Mercury-Jupiter conjunction in Aquarius. Neptune’s powerful presence here resists secure and solid boundaries of any kind, preferring to stay open to the boundless possibilities of the imagination. As if embodying this essential nature of her country (and her chart) in her writing, Olga says,

I belong, like it or not, to the great land that is Central Europe. It’s the space between the West and the East, the North and the South. Time flows differently here, not in a linear way, but by turning circles.

Olga’s deep sense of shifting borders and blurred boundaries, along with this sense of circular time allows her to perceive unusual connections between things. The looseness Neptune brings seems to suit Olga quite well, especially when it comes to writing literature. In “Drive Your Plow” she deftly defies any single genre with a fluid combination of murder mystery, fairy tale, tribute to romantic poet William Blake, animal rights, and social critique, with philosophical insight woven throughout via astrology, no less. She says of her role as a literary author that her task is to

synthesize and consolidate the world, looking for connections, both overt and hidden, and building an image of the world as a complex whole full of mutual relations.

How apt for someone born with an exact (cazimi) Sun-Venus conjunction! Olga not only recognizes the differences between things but also their innate relatedness.

Olga’s planets in the fixed sign of Scorpio are put to use via obsessive focus on her subjects at hand when writing a new novel, story, or article. For her tome “The Books of Jacob,” often described as her magnum opus, she spent almost ten years researching and writing to accurately depict the titular character Jacob Frank, a Polish-Jewish religious leader in the mid-eighteenth century, from numerous perspectives.

As if all of this tenacity is not enough, Olga’s path to becoming a writer was not straightforward, having first attended college to study psychology and immersing herself in the works of Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and James Hillman. Although she did not continue as a practicing psychologist (after feeling one day she was more disturbed than the patient in front of her!), she brings an undeniably rich psychological quality to her writing.

Note:
Quotes and various biographical information collected from https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2018/tokarczuk/biographical/ (last visited Friday August 13, 2023)

Published in: The Evolving Astrologer, September 2023.

Author:
Shawn Nygaard is a professional astrologer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He produces and hosts the “Imagine That!” podcast focusing on astrology and archetypes. He is a Tutor for MISPA (Mercury Internet School of Psychological Astrology) and has been a speaker at the AA, NCGR, UAC, SOTA, and NORWAC conferences, as well as the Minnesota Jung Association. His writing has been published in WellBeing Astrology Guide (Australia) and The Mountain Astrologer. Shawn is a graduate of the CMED Institute in Chicago, where he studied archetypes and symbolism with Caroline Myss. Shawn’s website is www.imagineastrology.com. 

© 2023 - Shawn Nygaard - The Evolving Astrologer

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