You can buy my 2026 Calendar with Oscar Wilde’s reproduction. You can also carry Him with you and your favorite books.
If Part One followed Oscar Wilde’s beginnings, in Part Two I move into Oscar Wilde’s second half of life, his Moon, the imagery of Boötes, into questions of unmanhood, authority, and symbolic castration, and into the long labor of De Profundis—writing not to bedazzle, but to endure the betrayals.
~ Moon in Leo & in the Mouth of Lion ~
“There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
~ Oscar Wilde
In ancient sky lore, the stars in the Lion’s head and jaws mark the place where speech turns theatrical and where desire denies discretion. What passes through the Mouth cannot be taken back. It is a region of charisma and appetite, but also of overreach—the roar that carries too far.
Astrologically, the Mouth of the Lion signifies a life lived in declaration. Planets here do not talk; the native is undone not by secrecy, but by brilliance overheard by power.
The Mouth reveals.
And Wilde’s Moon needs to speak up and be noticed [in Leo].
It is through this Moon that art, wit, hosting parties, and the theatrical personality play in the public sphere and become evident. In this sense, the Lion’s Mouth stands opposite the Scorpion’s Claw [his Mercury]: one consumes through speech, the other cuts through wit and judgment. Between them lies the tragedy of those whose genius insists on being spoken, even when silence would have preserved them.
Oscar Wilde’s emotional life intrudes abruptly. The Moon in Leo, governing his need for speaking, writing, roaring via or through the recognition, and his role as entertainer and host, moves through the eleventh house of friends, audiences, and social circles.
It is, unfortunately, struck by Uranus without warning [Moon-Uranus square].
These eruptions are sudden and dramatic, and they will undercut Mercury’s strategy. Mercury, holding the Moon in fall [Mercury hates attending to the need of the Moon in Leo], cannot understand these feelings. This creates the condition for distortion, and here Neptune, the illusionist, can slide in with its grandiose urges.
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
~ Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
If Mercury is the instrument through which Wilde’s language bewilders and seduces via Neptune [on Descendant], it is also the place of self-deception. The same eloquence that dissolves boundaries obscures consequences. The Moon, ruler of social pleasure and collective intimacy [in house eleven], is repeatedly shocked by Uranus [Moon-Uranus square]: friends turn into witnesses, gatherings into exposure, money into impoverishment, companionship into risk.
“Hearts are made to be broken.”
~ Oscar Wilde, De Profundis.
This is the axis:
Third House Communication
against the eleventh house society
against the ninth house of law.
What once entertained the group is suddenly judged by the state.
As he is charged, his secondary progressed Uranus moves from 15 degrees Taurus to 13, opposing exactly [partile] his Mercury from the house nine of law, justice.
Suddenly, he’s done.
~ Boötes ~ Sun ~ Venus ~ Unmanhood ~
Boötes rises with his Sun and Venus—the herdsman, the ox-driver. The ox is considered castrated: patient, submissive. Victorian society did more than merely punish Wilde; it symbolically unmanned him. Homosexuality functioned as a legal and cultural castration, stripping a man of public authority, lineage, and legitimacy. Wilde, who had embodied brilliance and excess, was reduced to a body, a joke, laughter, and hatred.
Yet Boötes is also a guardian: a figure who carries authority and punishment in the same hand. Wilde’s life always held this duality. He shouted with sarcasm and joy (like Boötes, look at his mouth and the syckle), and he shouted warnings and witty cries.
His work protected those who had no language—outsiders, aesthetes, men who loved men, those who did not fit the moral architecture of their time— and he became, paradoxically, a kind of world-mother (Boötes was considered that): feeding beauty to those who would otherwise starve.
In prison, the harvest came.
~ De Profundis ~ 1895–1897 — Imprisoned ~
If we look at Wilde’s Zodiacal Releasing from Spirit (career), he enters the Loosing of the Bounds (a rare moment) in 1896, and he enters a new Level One (very rare) in 1898. This is a new period guided again, by his Psychopomp—the friend and foe—Mercury.
De Profundis(Mercurial Letter from Prison) was written with a voice that is stripped. The wit is gone; what remains is perception. He writes of suffering not sentimentally, but analytically, as if examining a wound to understand its structure. Suffering becomes an instrument. Ego collapses. Art deepens. The libido of Spica—once extravagant, indulgent—is sublimated into attention.
He sees, finally, that he collaborated in his own destruction. Not because he was guilty, but because he believed intelligence exempted him from consequence. He thought beauty was protection. It was not.
Mercury, sitting in the dangerous territory where justice curdles into persecution, did not abandon him. Even imprisoned, even silenced, he continued to write. He accepted the underworld. Like Persephone, he learned its grammar.
After his release, exile and poverty followed. He died in 1900, still officially disgraced.
In the next part, I’ll look closer at his rising and setting stars and what happens after his death.
End of Part Two | Part One.
You can buy my 2026 Calendar with Oscar Wilde’s reproduction. You can also carry Him with you and your favorite books.
