Original DOCTOR WHO TV series: Saturday 23 November 1963. 5.16pm. London.
DOCTOR WHO first appeared on BBC Television on 23rd November 1963, with 55-year-old William Hartnell playing the silver-haired Doctor.1
The actor's natal Sun-Uranus-Mercury conjunction in Capricorn was right on the mark for the image of an absent-minded, eccentric yet old-style Edwardian time-traveller, and perhaps more than any part he had ever played it allowed him to reveal that he was truly a Uranian in Capricorn clothing. This also fitted perfectly with the original story-editor's idea of the Doctor Who character as an old man whose "forgetfulness and vagueness alternate with flashes of brilliant thought and deduction".2 Hartnell's natal South Node in Capricorn, North Node in Cancer, was repeated on the DOCTOR WHO chart, and shows how the stricter, older, rather school-masterly Doctor Who gradually softened out in character as the programme developed. Bug-Eyed Monsters
At its inception, DOCTOR WHO was intended to be an educational programme, (Gemini rising, Sun in Sagittarius), about a time traveller moving back in time more often than forward. To present school children with information on historical events and cultures was the noble idea; with the suggestion of meeting any "Bug-Eyed Monsters" emphatically ruled out. But the chart of the show's beginning, and the mood of the viewing public, was having none of that patronising nonsense, and it soon became clear that Doctor Who's journeys into the alien future were the ones that made the ratings soar, (Aquarius Moon and midheaven).
The first of these alien creatures, the Daleks, became more well-known in the early and mid-60s than any other character in the programme, including the Doctor. The huge merchandising spin-offs could not have been dreamed possible at the outset of a series which had never enjoyed a unanimous blessing from the BBC. Had it not been for the incredible success of The Daleks pushing British television's Saturday tea-time viewing figures through the roof, DOCTOR WHO may have lived and died within a couple of seasons, remembered by few and applauded by fewer. The Aquarian midheaven guaranteed a reputation for anything offbeat and alien, and from The Daleks onwards, the Bug-Eyed Monsters - however ludicrous - became an essential part of the show's identity.
A Timelord for all Seasons
Doctor Who was truly a Timelord for all Seasons. William Hartnell's departure in 1966 did not bring the show to a halt but provided an ingenious precedent that enabled the series to transfuse itself with new blood at regular intervals, as new Doctors were allowed to transform from the old. Patrick Troughton was the first rebirth, followed at intervals of three to four years or so by Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, ColinBaker, Sylvester McCoy - and most latterly Paul McGann in a one-off 1996 special. The flexibility of a mutable birth chart permitted each actor to play The Doctor in his own style, obliged to keep only the common thread of having a body with two hearts (Gemini ascendant), being effortlessly eccentric (Aquarian Moon), possessing a natural tolerance for young female assistants (Venus conjunct descendant), and a special protective concern for the fate of Planet Earth (Node in Cancer). Both Venus and the Moon are angular on this chart, and although other Earthlings were given house-room in the Tardis, females were definitely favourite. The archetypal pairing of the Wise Old Man and the bright-eyed Virgin was too mythologically satisfying to fail to capture audience sympathy, and it probably rang an unconscious bell on more than one level. Firstly it was a re-run of the ancient story of Merlin and Vivienne, the otherworld sage and the spring goddess, set happily in the time before she betrayed him.
If this flirtatious theme was subliminal, it rarely surfaced or was acknowledged openly. It had started innocently enough with the first Doctor and his alien granddaughter, but the family connection was dropped when personnel changed. Some of the later Doctors, who were younger in Earth years, did appear to cast an appreciative eye over their respective assistants from time to time. In fact Tom Baker married his companion Romana [Lalla Ward] in real life. But in the original television series the sexual theme was never explored. "Two hearts, no dick", was the unofficial version,3 and it was supposed to be a children's programme after all.
Perhaps in an effort to avoid such relationship complications, the female other-halfs were sometimes paired off in a friendly way with other young male characters, although they still changed more rapidly than the Doctors did. Merlin's final disappearance from our world is blamed on a beautiful young fay called Nimue or Vivienne, who turned the knowledge of his magic against him. She had wile and guile and a mind that could absorb and learn from the master quickly. Not many of Doctor Who's early companions were really scripted in that mould.
Merlin the Kingmaker
In a perceptive essay in one of the earliest Transit magazines, Nicholas Campion analysed this chart of the birth of DOCTOR WHO with its connection to the death of President Kennedy, which had taken place only the day before.4 And more recently David Porter writing in the Astrological Lodge of London Newsletter, noted another bizarre statistic. Apparently the moment that the Tardis started to disappear at the end of episode 1, "must have occurred at almost the exact midpoint in time between the shooting of Kennedy, and the shooting of Oswald (on live TV)". 5
The death of kings, the death of Camelot - as Kennedy's reign would be dubbed - was the cue for the reappearance of the Merlin figure, the Kingmaker, even if we did not recognise it at the time. Two other grand old men intimately connected with science fiction also died that same weekend. Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) born 1894 was one, and C.S.Lewis (Out of the Silent Planet) born 1898, was the other. And this leads indirectly to the other possible origin of the Wise Man and Virgin theme, and harks back to the inventor of modern time travel himself: H.G.Wells. 6
Morlocks and Eloi
H.G.Wells' novel The Time Machine inspired much of the subsequent DOCTOR WHO. That they are of the same ancestry is clear, as H.G.Wells' Aquarian Moon is only two degrees from Doctor Who's, and the original Doctor was definitely dressed in Victorian garb. Both he and Wells' Time Traveller were oddly anonymous using titles rather than personal names (The "Doctor", the "Time Traveller") - Doctor Who being ultimately a question not a name.
The composite chart of H.G.Wells and Doctor Who has Pluto exactly on the Lower Heaven and the Moon exactly conjunct its South Node. A karmic interpretation might suggest a rebirth in the family line, with Doctor Who living through to completion some of H.G.Wells' unfinished futures. Both time travellers old and new used time machines that were untested or unreliable, landing them in situations for which they were never fully prepared, and The Time Traveller's only real companion in The Time Machine was the loyal and childlike Weena.
Once more the older man and younger female emerge, although Wells gave little hint of a relationship that was greater than friendship between them. A love story through time was not his purpose and poor little Weena became meat for the Morlocks (we are left to presume) after being abandoned in the dark forests of the eight-thousand-and-twenty-eighth century. Weena was an Eloi, a member of the beautiful but ineffectual human race of the future, the light half to which the mechanised, underground Morlocks were the shadow. Although possibly a remnant of the Victorian ideal of cultured gentility, Weena was still an alien by nineteenth or twentieth century standards. The first Doctor's granddaughter, Susan, was also an alien, as the title of the very first episode of DR WHO, An Unearthly Child, portrays. Her character was originally considered the pivot of the whole series. However, like the loss of Weena to the evil Morlocks, Susan soon lost out to the Daleks. Not in the physical sense, but certainly in the popularity stakes. The first Doctor Who and The Daleks story reflects The Time Machine in many ways, not least with the monstrous Daleks sharing their planet with the pretty-looking, peace-loving Thals.
In The Time Machine, H.G.Wells stirred many Victorians' deepest fears that not only might the upper and lower classes eventually evolve into two entirely different species, but that the have-nots would ultimately take revenge on the haves, and gain total control over them. (In the novel the Morlocks maintain the Eloi like farmed cattle). For a society at the pinnacle of its empire, this was not quite the vision of a future civilisation that the Victorians might have wanted to see. Seventy years later in the 1960s (and especially in the 1960s) social divisions of any kind were seen as having narrowed not widened, and this was one of Wells's Things-To-Come that obviously hadn't come.
But this concern with relationships of inequality can still be seen in the DOCTOR WHO chart's packed sixth house. From the legacy of The Time Traveller and Weena and H.G.Wells' own extra-marital affairs with younger women, came the teacher/pupil origin of DOCTOR WHO. Even we are on unequal terms with this Sagittarian teacher because he has personal powers greater than we know, and greater than H.G.Wells' Time Traveller. He is an alien after all; whether you take that as meaning a being from another time, dimension or galaxy.
The False Rebirth of 96; the real rebirth of 2005
In 1996 transiting Pluto hit the DOCTOR WHO Sun at zero Sagittarius, and the programme - which had faded from our screens a few years before - was reborn in a multi-million dollar transatlantic TV movie starring Paul McGann. Its British showing on 27th May 1996 at 8.30pm also had an ascendant at the beginning of Sagittarius conjunct the original DOCTOR WHO Sun with Pluto now rising here. It was a huge transformation in the DOCTOR WHO genre with a new Doctor, a new Tardis and a new and more equal female companion. Yet despite the slick and believable special effects, rather than the well-loved collapsing scenery of the early days, the big budget film was not entirely successful and failed to capture the American audience it was courting.
It was however very Plutonian. Not only in real life had one of the previous doctors (Jon Pertwee) just died, but the film began with an opening scene in which the last Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) emerged from the Tardis and was shot dead by a mugger. A long and laboured rebirth scene then took place in a local hospital (sixth house) from where the new Doctor eventually emerged. But we can see in retrospect that Pluto transiting the DOCTOR WHO Sun did not so much mean a regeneration for the Doctor Who series on television as a Doctor Who film on television about regeneration.
The question mark that always hung over DOCTOR WHO, and was sometimes embroidered into its clothing, was the enigma of a programme that seemed to hold a life of its own, defying any attempt to formulate its future. Because, like a time traveller, it can logically reappear at any time, and because - equally logically - the Doctor can reappear as a completely different person, it is probably one of the most obligingly flexible television dramas ever devised.
The next television series is already planned and underway for a broadcast in the autumn of 2005. Although we do not yet know the final date, Pluto will be transiting around the DOCTOR WHO Venus and Mars, with Neptune close to a transit over the Aquarian midheaven. This Aquarian midheaven would appear to be the key area in the DOCTOR WHO chart as it has already brought in a new Doctor played by an actor with an Aquarian Sun who will be going through his Uranus Opposition in 2005.
Christopher Eccleston was born 16 February 1964 at Salford, Lancashire with his Sun conjunct the DOCTOR WHO Moon. He was born in fact only a couple of months after the original television series first went on air. Maybe his mother had been watching the Daleks the night before she went into labour? (Well not quite, Christopher was born on a Sunday after the second part of the 2-part story The Edge of Destruction aka Inside the Spaceship when the Tardis swung into confusion after just escaping from Skaro, the planet of the Daleks). It means that the positioning of the Moon's nodes and the outer planets are virtually identical on the chart of programme and actor, with Jupiter and Saturn also being in the same signs. Saturn in Aquarius is particularly interesting because for different reasons it is strongly placed on both charts. On the DOCTOR WHO chart Saturn is conjunct the midheaven (one degree orb), while on the actor's chart it is conjunct the Sun (one degree orb). All this takes place in an arc between 17° and 26° Aquarius, conjunct the programme's Moon (23° Aquarius). This unusually strong identification obviously helps to explain why this particular actor beat off the competition and got the job. There is also something satisfyingly elliptical in the fact that the latest Doctor has a Sun-Saturn conjunction in Aquarius whereas the first Doctor (William Hartnell) had a Sun-Uranus conjunction in Capricorn. Saturn in Aquarius is the programme's reputation, time travel into the future is its business and a Doctor who is both eccentric and authoritarian sparks off its birth chart and enhances its status best.
1 William Hartnell: 8 January 1908 - 24 April 1975.
2 Guidelines to the Dr Who character quoted in Dr Who. The Sixties, Howe-Stammers-Walker, Dr Who Books, London, 1992.
3 Quoted in The Nine Lives of Doctor Who, Peter Haining, Headline, London, 1999.
4 Nick Campion, Time Travel: Fact Meets Fiction, Transit No.49, Astrological Association, London, May 1985.
5 David Porter, Notes on the Margins, Astrological Lodge of London Newsletter, Autumn 1997.
6 H.G.Wells: 21 September 1866, 4.30pm, Bromley, Kent. [AA data bank]
Paul F Newman is an astrologer and astrology teacher. He can be emailed here