Lamenting Her Womb.

On the evening of October 3rd, 1992, at Rockefeller Plaza, Manhattan, New York, Sinead O’Conner, then 25 years old, sang a cappella cover of Bob Marley’s “War” for the closing performance of Saturday Night Live. Looking directly into the camera she changed the original lyrics from:

Until the ignoble and unhappy regime

That hold our brothers in Angola

In Mozambique

South Africa

Sub-human bondage

Have been toppled

Utterly destroyed

Everywhere is war.

to

Until the ignoble and unhappy regime

Which holds all of us through

Child-abuse, yeah, child-abuse yeah

Sub-human bondage has been toppled

Utterly destroyed

Everywhere is war.

Then holding up a photograph of Pope John Paul II to the camera, she ripped it to pieces as a protest against sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. Finishing her act with the words “fight the real enemy”, the torn image fluttered to the floor as Sinead blew the candles out and walked off stage… no one clapped.

Accusations and cover-ups about abuse within the Catholic church had begun to receive public attention in the 1980’s but it was not until the early 2000’s that the full-scale of abuse was revealed and reported on mainstream media. In 1992, when Sinead made her statement, people were not ready to hear it and she was cancelled. Many felt it was the end of her career.

That photograph of Pope John Paul had been on the wall of her mother’s bedroom for years; for Sinead it represented liars and abusers. Sexually, physically, emotionally, and mentally abused by her mother (and others), Sinead reported that the abuse began from birth and continued until age 13. Her mother stamped and kicked her abdomen and genitals in an attempt to “burst her womb”, because says Sinead, “she did not want me to be female… she tried to destroy my reproductive system”.

Years later at the age of 49 Sinead had a radical hysterectomy in Ireland where, according to Sinead, “they removed my ovaries for no reason”. That happened in 2015, the same year that one of her children became seriously ill… and interestingly the same year that she began writing her memoirs. After the hysterectomy Sinead’s mental health declined- “Nobody had explained to me or my family that she’s going to be a crazy bitch because we took her ovaries for no reason”.

The news of Sinead’s death on 26th July 2023 has opened a rancid can of worms… layer upon layer of unspoken things from the personal and collective shadow, and a deep vein of poison that threatens to spill open. We are left to make sense of a life a blown apart by some very dark forces that ripped through not only the singer’s life but the lives of many who had been denied a voice. As a truth teller she did not look away and even amid much personal suffering and chaos, did not betray herself or the people she spoke for.

Contained within this one death, this one event is a heavy legacy of ancestral trauma, trauma-based mind control, and, as some maintain, cultural genocide and the breaking of a powerful racial spirit. Of working class Ireland in the 1970’s Sinead says,

“I’m Irish and I grew up in the 70s when to be a good Catholic you had to think you were shit; you weren’t allowed to boast, you weren’t allowed to be proud of yourself.”

As a Scots/Irish woman I concur that the same mentally was also rife in 1970’s and 80’s working class Scotland. I am sure this was true for boys and girls, men, and woman, but speaking from personal experience there was a special kind of misogynistic hatred reserved for girls who were pretty, sexual, clever, spirited, or outspoken.

That Sinead’s death happened with Pluto in the final degree of Capricorn speaks of a deep dive into the exposure of institutional corruption. Since Pluto entered Capricorn in 2008 many issues have been brought to the fore from the underground bunkers of the collective unconscious…none as uncomfortable as the realisation of the extent of sexual abuse of children from within the cloth of society.

Astrology is only one language, but it is a good one, and one that through symbolism opens doorways into the unconscious and astral realms. I am currently looking at Sinead’s natal chart, the chart of the photograph ripping event, and her death chart. There are other signs and symbols, not only astrological, which shed light on hidden things and begins to dismantle dark webs.