After listening to the amazing episodes on the memoirs of Pricilla Presley and Jennette McCurdy, I had to table actually looking at Pricilla’s and Jennette’s astrological charts. Their stories were so harrowing and told such dark tales of innocence being swallowed up by the forces of manipulation and control. It took me some days just to process that these two young women had been forced into a dark underworld experience, one by her husband (a superstar adored by legions of fans) and the other by her very own mother. Understanding such evil is never easy, and the closest I could come was to consider that both Elvis and Debra McCurdy suffered from undiagnosed mental illness, most likely rooted in generational trauma.
With this perspective, I turned to Pricilla’s and Jennette’s charts and saw immediately that each had a Moon which was placed in difficult aspect to the planet Pluto. The Moon represents the child in us, our vulnerability, and its placement tells us something about our childhood. Pluto represents the darker, volcanic forces in life, the things that lie buried beneath denial and shame, which can erupt into our lives unexpectedly, changing us forever. Putting this planet in aspect with the Moon indicates that our innocence and vulnerability can be taken advantage of and used for those who feel such darkness that they need to extinguish the other’s light.
We see in both Pricilla’s and Jennette’s stories that they just wanted to love and be loved. Pricilla’s Moon in Scorpio tells us that she would have struggled to get the nurturing she needed from her own mother. Her father died in a plane crash when she was six months old, and when she was four, her mother remarried and she was adopted by her step-father. Her mother went on to have four more children, so Pricilla no longer had her mother to herself and was the odd-man-out in her family, the one who was not the “real” daughter. It is easy to understand how Elvis was able to lure her into captivity in Graceland by making her believe that, finally, she was the special one.
Jennette has her Moon in Taurus, which indicates her mother would be a dominant force in her life because the Moon is considered exalted in Taurus. With the Pluto opposition to this Moon, Jennette would experience her mother dominating her by controlling her basic needs. Debra McCurdy did everything for the physical care of her children long past the time when they were able to be independent of her. For years, Jennette accepted this treatment and was happy to have the chance to support her family financially because she believed this was love.
But both these stories have good endings: THEY GOT OUT. When I look at the charts, I see two survivors. The planet Saturn in both charts is strongly placed on an angle, giving both women a fearless determination to face the truth head-on, to draw boundaries, to formulate – and execute – an exit strategy which gave them the agency they needed to live the rest of their days whole and free.
And, astrology never disappoints – all this happened at their Saturn returns. As Saturn was moving through Cancer in 1972-3, joining her natal Saturn, Pricilla Presley began the affair that led to her freedom from Elvis. Saturn moving through Aquarius in 2021-22, crossing her natal Saturn, was when Jennette McCurdy exorcised the many years of abuse she suffered from her mother by writing and published her memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died. Occurring around the age of 29, the Saturn return marks a threshold we cross into adulthood, and it demands of us that we release what is no longer serving us before we can move forward to be the best version of ourselves in a world that badly needs our gifts and talents.
As difficult and dark as these memoirs are, they, in the end, provide us with such shining examples of the human potential for processing trauma and moving on from the darkness into light. They do not promise this is easy, but the stories of Pricilla Presley and Jennette McCurdy leave us with hope. I really appreciate Chelsea and her guests for sharing them with us. And most meaningful to me was Marcella Arguello’s final tearful take-away from Jennette’s story, that children are so vulnerable and to, please, “be good to the children in our lives.”
