Star Wars’ George Lucas
Lucas admits that his relationship with
his father was strained, especially when
he refused to go into the family business.
“My father wrote me off,” Lucas confesses,
“he thought I wasn’t going to amount to
anything”.2 Lucas’ father regarded George
as an irresponsible dreamer destined for
failure. “George was hard to understand,”
complained George Sr., “he was always
dreaming things up”.
Difficulty with authority was evident in
high school as well. Lucas was a rebellious
student with abysmally low grades,
which is testament to a low-functioning
Mercury in the 12th as focal planet of
the t-square with Moon and Pluto. His
teachers allowed him to graduate only
because they thought George was going
to die following a serious car accident
just before school ended in his senior
year. But Lucas fooled his teachers and
survived. Later, at U.S.C. film school, he
constantly broke rules and challenged the
authority of his teachers. Lucas is famous
for his hostility toward Hollywood
executives, bankers and lawyers – anyone
with control over him. After making his
first commercial film, THX 1138, the
filmmaker was infuriated over the ‘final
cut’ prerogative of studio executives who
had the power to edit and change his film
any way they pleased. Again, there is the
theme of an intrusive authority (studio
executive) who tries to appropriate
George for his own ends.
Lucas’ fear of being controlled by
studio heads prompted him to break
with the industry and set up Zoetrope
Studios in San Francisco with Francis
Ford Coppola in the late ’sixties, thus
repeating the theme of pushing away
the father. The Hollywood grapevine
immediately characterised them both as
rebels and renegades. “We are the pigs,”
Lucas ranted in a 1979 interview, “you
[Hollywood] can put us on a leash, keep
us under control, but we are the guys
who dig out the gold”.3 This statement is
telling in light of the fact that Pluto often
manifests as a fear of being dominated.
Pluto also rules underground riches as in
“we are the guys who dig out the gold”.
The Leo-Aquarius theme
While the underlying issue is a MoonPluto one, it revolves around themes
that pertain to Leo and Aquarius, the two
14
Sep/Oct 2015 The Astrological Journal
Star Wars’ George Lucas
signs involved in the opposition. Leo, of
course, signifies the need for creative selfexpression, while Aquarius pertains to
themes of progress, change, technological
innovation, revolution, and liberation.
On a more mundane level, Aquarius
deals with the products and the means
to change, such as advanced technology
and computers. With Moon Aquarius in
the 10th, we can expect to see Aquarian
themes played out in his career and in his
relationships with authority. For example,
it might manifest as an emotional need to
break free from the conventions of the
past and move toward a broader and more
inclusive sense of family (Moon). Family
could mean friends of like mind bound
together for a common cause (Aquarius),
such as the liberation of the masses from
authoritarian repression (10th house).
Lucas admits, “There was a lot of
rebellion when we came to San Francisco.
We moved here in 1961 when I was 23
years old. We thought we were going to
change the world”.4 A decade later, when
Lucas set out to create Skywalker Ranch
and his innovative special effects unit,
‘Industrial Light and Magic (