The Creation that Speaks: The Astrology of Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and Anthropic

A version of this essay was delivered as a lecture for the Narrative Astrology Lab on July 28, 2026. Chart images were generated by Astro Gold Astrology Software.

Mary Shelley's history is breaking down into legend.

She is becoming a fossil. We can watch the woman unravel before our eyes, while the myths that have seeped up around her harden like stone. We don't know the date when Frankenstein’s so-called monster came to her in a dream, but we have a legend of that night with a date attached—as if the story is so fabulous the calendar refuses to hold it.

Like legendary heroes before her, her parents have practically become gods. She is commonly said to be the child of the first atheist and first feminist, even though atheism and feminism existed in one form or another long before Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin were born.

I can almost hear the epic music while I talk about this, but I’m describing a natural process. History becoming legend is what happens when you approach your Pluto return, and Mary Shelley’s Pluto return is due to happen at the end of Pluto's time in Aquarius. This unraveling is right on schedule.

We are in the early days of Pluto in Aquarius. We are living in a world like the one that Mary Shelley was born into. She dreamed of a scientist creating life. We live in a world where machines regularly pass the Turing test, convincing humans that they are other humans, not machines.

Our World vs. Mary Shelley’s World

Recently, I was doing a jigsaw puzzle on the Romantics, and it got me thinking about the parallels between their time and ours.

The first thing I wondered was: Where are we in the timeline? Mary Shelley wasn't born until the last minute of the last act of this Pluto chapter. Where are we now?

It turns out, Pluto is in the same place it was in 1778.

This is the middle of the American Revolution and about 10 years before the French Revolution. At this point, the French government is going broke from Forever Wars. The crown is trying to convince the church and the nobles to start paying taxes--any taxes at all--to keep the country afloat.

The gap between the rich and the poor was becoming astronomical. In five years, the French queen, Marie Antoinette will make a feeble attempt to bridge this gap, ordering her favorite architect to design a model agricultural village complete with farm animals so that her children will know where their milk and eggs come from. Ultimately, the royal family’s efforts to bridge the class divide will fail, and the Bastille follows.

Mary Shelley's mother Mary Wollstonecraft was directly involved in the French Revolution. She was one of the revolution's fiercest defenders in England, and she even moved to Paris in 1792 to lend support. She watched the movement collapse into the terror, and the attempt to understand what happened became one of her major philosophical projects.

Mary Shelley was born 5 years after her mother moved to Paris. Her mother died shortly after she was born.

Mary Shelley’s natal chart

The Astrology of Mary Shelley’s Grief for Her Mother

We can see the mark of the death of Mary’s mother in her natal chart. Her 29° Pluto was two degrees away from the midheaven. She became famous (midheaven) for a story about a scientist (Aquarius) who tried to tear down the boundary between life and death (Pluto). Her Pluto was directly opposite Mars in Virgo on the IC. Mars rules surgeons. Virgo is a sign of healing, and her mother died because of a botched surgery. And Pluto was sextile her Sagittarius (philosopher) moon (mother).

Sextiles are commonly called easy aspects. Who would claim that losing a mother is easy?

Death can excite inspiration, however.

My husband and I like to joke that Mary Shelley and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley were the original goths. He wooed her in the cemetery next to her mother’s gravestone. And her mother’s death showed up thematically in Frankenstein. The loss of Frankenstein’s mother was implied to be a driving force in Victor Frankenstein’s quest to reverse death.

Transit chart for Frankenstein’s authoring

The Astrology of the Writing of Frankenstein

We do not know exactly when Mary Shelley started Frankenstein, but we have a legendary date and story.

It was 1816: the year without a summer. A volcano in Indonesia erupted so violently it blotted out the sun for months all over the world. At the time, people in Europe had no idea what was happening. All they knew was that they were surrounded by a strange haze that would not go away, and crops froze in the middle of summer.

Mary and Percy were on a European tour with their friend Lord Byron and his entourage. They stopped in a house on Lake Geneva and found themselves bored on a dark and stormy night in the middle of June.

After reading a collection of German ghost stories together, Byron challenged everyone to write ghost stories of their own. Byron and Percy, the famous poets in the group, didn’t take the challenge seriously. They dashed off short stories to amuse themselves, but that challenge planted the seeds of two stories that would change English literature:. Lord Byron’s private doctor John Polidori wrote The Vampyre, the first modern vampire story, which was a major inspiration for Dracula, and Mary Shelley had her very first vision of Frankenstein.

Epic! So, what do we see when we look at the chart of the legend?

I cast this chart at midnight because midnight is the most epic time for the original dark and stormy night. Remember, we aren’t dealing with facts here. We’re dealing with legends!

With that time, we find four planets on the ascendant in Pisces, the sign of the Dreamer. The moon, Chiron, Sedna, and Pluto. The moon ghost of Mary Shelley’s mother, Chiron the doctor, Sedna the abandoned daughter and goddess of the underworld, and Pluto lord of the dead and buried treasure.

Venus and the north node are in the 3rd house, encouraging beautiful writing. With the south node in 9th house Sagittarius, conjunct Neptune and Uranus, the dreams of radical philosophers have an almost inescapable gravity. Resisting that gravity is necessary for anyone who wants to write beautiful stories during this transit.

Biwheel with Mary Shelley’s chart and the authoring chart for Frankenstein

The Synastry of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein

When we layer Mary Shelley’s chart on top of the legendary chart of Frankenstein’s authoring, something marvelous happens.

The ghost of her mother (Mary’s Sagittarius moon) appears right on the midheaven, with a two degree separation, just like Pluto in Mary’s chart. Ceres the Great Mother is conjunct Mary’s Mercury and opposite Frankenstein’s Pluto. Mary Shelley is the mother of the monster who speaks.

Additionally, we see that Mary was going through her first nodal return. She has the north node in Gemini in her chart, as well. She was 18 years old during the year without a summer. (Yes, that means she wrote Frankenstein when she was 18 years old. No, I won’t shut up.) Her soul longed more than anything to become a storyteller, and the soul of the world longed more than anything for a great story to be born.

It’s hard not to argue that Mary heard the call. Her talking monster is one of the most famous horror story creatures of all time. But she didn’t entirely escape the gravity of her south node in Sagittarius. The book she wrote is full of the dreams of the radical philosopher. If you’ve ever read the book (especially the second edition) you know that the monster is downright preachy! And the book is haunted by the ghost of her philosopher mother.

I don’t think that entirely escaping the south node was the point, though. Clearly, she succeeded at what she set out to do, and it’s because of the contributions of those Sagittarius planets.

The point, I think, was the struggle.

Triwheel with the chart of Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the founding of Anthropic

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and AI

I’ve been curious about the connection between Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and AI for a long time. I stumbled on Mary’s Pluto in Aquarius on the MC years ago, and I noted that her Pluto return was coming up. As AI began to fill the news, the quest for AGI started to sound more and more like Victor Frankenstein’s quest to create life.

I remembered this connection while I was researching Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, on a whim I looked up the chart of the founding of Anthropic, creators of Claude.

We find Anthropic’s Neptune on the ascendant of Frankenstein’s chart. At the moment when Anthropic was founded, the dream of the so-called monster is rising, exactly conjunct Mary’s Sedna, and between her book’s Sedna and Chiron. Just like Frankenstein’s creation, Claude’s creation was polarizing. Some dream of AI as the path to abundance and medical breakthroughs, seeing the abundance goddess and doctor in Sedna and Chiron. Others look at AI and see nightmares, the rejection side of Sedna and Chiron.

But the thing that made me gasp when I opened this chart?

Mary, her book, and Anthropic… all have the north node within 4 degrees of each other in Gemini.

Anthropic was born at the moment when the soul of the world was, once again, dreaming of a human-made creation that speaks.