Profile: French Writer Jean Genet

Genet is not well known outside certain circles, but he’s a remarkable example of reliving karma. Because of this,  I think there’s an important point about changing karma that can come from looking at his story. So, happy birthday to Jean Genet.

He was a French writer known for a handful of novels and plays. More than for his writing, though, he was famous for generating controversy. He was openly homosexual and openly criminal, and had a lot to say about the reality of the underbelly of society that no one really wanted to look at. My sense of him is that he was absorbed with himself and his criticisms of society and those who make it up.

He was born 19 December 1910, 7:45 PM, Paris, France.

There is a lot to explore with his Scorpio South Node in the 4th house and his prostitute mother and her giving him up for adoption, and then being raised without love in foster care. But I want to focus on something else.

Once as a boy while making what was probably harmless mischief, he was told by a policeman that he was a criminal. He decided to take this on, and he consciously became one. It was a conscious choice after being labeled as such. He was in and out of prison for years for a variety of petty crimes.

I look at the South Node by house, sign, and aspect as telling of the environments he comes from (including the families his soul chooses in its various human lives to be born into). Then I look at the South Node ruler as telling of the individual’s role in that environment. This ruler is Mars, also in Scorpio in the 4th, conjunct the true Black Moon Lilith.

He therefore will show up as a Scorpio/4th house figure carrying Lilith energy. The other aspects to this Mars matter, too. Mars is square Chiron and Arjunsuri in Aquarius in the 7th and Pallas Athene in Pisces in the 8th. This is about in his various lives receiving friction from wounded and traumatized people who cannot care for themselves and manage their emotions well.

The other aspects however are where I want to focus. This Mars is the finger of a yod, also known as a finger of God. The two inconjuncts or quincunxes are from Saturn-Vesta in Aries in the 10th and Pluto in Gemini in the 11th. This is a tremendous amount of pressure to do this Mars, to act it out. Yods often feel like we cannot escape them, hence the finger of God idea. It can feel as though God himself is pointing at you to do this thing, and the pressure is so great you probably cannot even conceive of not complying. Fingers of yods in practice tend to take over someone’s life, taking an inordinate amount of time and energy. In other words, they can dominate the person’s psyche.

Mars conjunct Lilith says that he shows up in his various lives as uncontrollable, raw, visceral, and primal. Lilith is about honoring the instinctive wild within and often in our collective history, people who show up as living Lilith’s themes are labeled evil at best and run out of town or raped or killed at worst. Lilith threatens the Saturnian status quo we’ve been working to shape over the last almost six thousand years of patriarchy. (Read other posts from me on Lilith here.)

Saturn-Vesta in Aries in the 10th house can manifest as harsh authority figures extremely serious about what they are doing, and not at all kind. Pluto in the 11th can be social forces that overpower a person. In his case, when the policeman told the boy Genet that he was a criminal, his karma was triggered. Karma is the sum of our beliefs about why things happen.

This yod has him believing so deeply that he is bad that a single comment from an authority figure, almost in passing, inspired Genet to become a criminal. This is a repeat of his other lives. Whether what he does in these lives is in fact criminal, he is/has been labeled as a negative influence or evil and punished for being a Lilith figure and doing so in Scorpio ways.

Because the South Node ruler is the finger of the yod, the entire configuration is telling of the emotional imprinting he was born with as Jean Genet. He has been so emotionally damaged in his various lives by being labeled as evil that in the life we are discussing, he embraced the label with relish as a sort of middle-finger gesture to life and the world, but really, all the people who get away with just being who they are and without labels. All those people who have support structures and warm families – all those people who get love.

I feel he was incredibly deeply imprinted by the combination of a lack of a loving home environment and being labeled as a criminal and as evil. The pain that came from this, including public shaming for his sexuality (Mars-Lilith in Scorpio quincunxed by Pluto in Gemini/11th and Saturn-Vesta in Aries/10th), is deep and vast. Yet his soul signed up to explore this configuration of energies – nothing happened to him that did not serve the learning journey his soul set out on by incarnating as a human. There are many ways to learn the lessons we sign up to learn, and just about half of them are difficult. We can however always turn things around – I have lived through changing some very difficult karma and help other people do it, too – it is possible! Our ideas of karma are ready to be updated with some good old free will, creative thinking, and willingness to change things.

If Genet came to me as a client, I’d invite him to look at and re-evaluate where love comes from, where it is supposed to come from. I’d ask him to consider that just because others labeled him as evil did not make it so, even if they together formed a mob he felt he couldn’t escape. I’d walk him through the process of looking at what kind of home life he wished he’d had as a kid, and to create that for himself now. Most of all, though, I’d listen to him without judgment. He has been karmically conditioned to be judged and to take it on as meaningful, and I’d do what I could through a quiet compassion to give him an opening to break that cycle.

But he wouldn’t come to me as a client until he was consciously or unconsciously ready to be done being angry about how he has been treated. Genet has many lives of being angry about many things. Eventually, though, a life associated with his soul will stop the cycle and look at those beliefs; look at how the treatment of others, no matter how horrible, isn’t grounds for self-hatred and self-destruction.

If you like this style of analysis, check out my book The Soul’s Journey I: Astrology, Reincarnation, and Karma with a Medium and Channel, with a foreword by evolutionary astrologer Steven Forrest. I’m offering free shipping till the end of the year, and it is also available as a PDF e-book from me, paperback via Amazon, and e-book via Kindle.

Tom Jacobs is an evolutionary astrologer, medium, channel, author, and coach offering insight into why your soul is here and guidance about how to make it happen. Contact him via his site for private readings and to learn about intuitive coaching. Tom is the author of five books on metaphysics and astrology available via his site and Amazon. Chiron, 2012, and the Aquarian Age: The Key and How to Use It is his new 11-hour MP3 course, also available through his site.