The Eyes of Tammy Faye
This is the title of the bio-flick just release about Tammy Faye Bakker. It stars Jessica Chastain as Tammy and Andrew Garfield as her slippery husband, Jim. The film portrays the rags-to-riches ascent of this couple to mega-stardom on Christian television and their sudden decline. That decline ended with Jim being hauled off to jail and Tammy, though never charged with a crime, living under a cloud of shame.
People who didn’t live through the 1980s might wonder why anyone would be interested in fallen televangelist and his wife but, in many ways, Jim and Tammy were the ultimate representatives of the tawdry materialism of that decade. Jim preached the gospel of wealth, telling his audiences that God wanted them to be rich and, in order to set the proper example, he and Tammy surrounded themselves with ostentatious opulence.
I haven’t seen the movie, but I am familiar with the horoscope of Tammy Faye Bakker. (Click on Tammy Faye to see the chart.) Back when the drama was playing out I looked at it several times wondering how this woman, who seemed so free of bad intentions, could let herself be led by such a dishonest and immoral man. Of course, the answer to that question starts with the placement of her Sun in Pisces.
Pisces people can be amazingly preceptive. Often they can intuit what is not readily apparent to the rest of us. However, they can also fail to see things that are obvious to everyone else, particularly if seeing those things might threaten their emotional tranquility. With Pisces, turning a blind eye for the sake of love, or security or even just momentary pleasure is all too easy.
The fact that Tammy’s Sun is placed in the Third House also played a role in this. As I say in my new book, Behind the Horoscope, people with the Sun in the Third are attuned to the immediate and the close-at-hand. This makes them very good at dealing with day-to-day problems but taking a step back and looking at the bigger, more pervasive problems takes effort. It is easy for Sun in the Third House people to postpone that effort until it is forced upon them.
In Tammy’s horoscope the Moon in Scorpio is square Venus. The Moon in Scorpio deepens the natural emotionality of the Sun in Pisces. Tammy was certainly someone who led with her heart. On the couple’s TV show, she was often seen in tears.
Another thing about this square between the Moon and Venus is that, in the charts of women, it often leads to an exaggerated femininity. Tammy Faye Bakker was definitely a “girly” girl. She loved frilly clothes and was famous for her heavy applications of makeup. Moreover, for a woman coming out the culture in which Tammy was brought up, femininity also meant deferring to one’s husband and looking past his faults.
A lot of attention in this chart is focused on Jupiter which is trine her Venus, square her Sun and quincunx her Moon. However, despite all these aspects, Jupiter is not strongly placed in the horoscope. It is weak by both sign and house placement. So even though Tammy exerted a Jupiterian vibe with her clothes, her makeup and her singing, that Jupiter inspired expansiveness was always constrained by and secondary to that of her husband (who had Jupiter conjunct Mars in his First House).
Finally, we have Neptune which is also heavily aspected and placed in the Ninth House of philosophy and religion. Above all else, Tammy Faye Bakker was a woman of faith and, with Neptune in the Ninth, that faith had nothing to do with scripture or doctrine. It was a faith based on what she felt at both an emotional and spiritual level. Life gave Tammy Faye Bakker a pretty rough ride. We can only hope that the spirituality of Neptune in the Ninth helped even out the bumps.
