The Man Born Under Two Suns

Before dawn, in a small room in an asylum in the south of France, a man stood at a barred window and watched the sky.

It was the spring of 1889. Vincent van Gogh had admitted himself to the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy after the worst year of his life. He wasn't allowed to paint in his bedroom. But he could look.

A few days later he wrote to his brother Theo:

"This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big."

Within weeks he had painted it: a swirling night over a sleeping village, a dark cypress like a flame, and, just to its right, one star brighter than all the rest. Astronomers have since checked the sky over Provence that spring. Venus, the morning star, was blazing in the east before dawn, close to its brightest. The painting is The Starry Night.

Five traditions read his birthday. Two of them, independently, called him the Sun.

IThe second Vincent

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853 in Zundert, a village in the south of the Netherlands, the son of a pastor.

Exactly one year earlier, on 30 March 1852, his mother had given birth to another son. That baby was stillborn. He was also named Vincent Willem van Gogh. As a child, the living Vincent would walk past a small grave in the churchyard carrying his own name and his own birthday.

Historians argue about how much it marked him. It's hard to imagine it didn't.

IIThe Ram: Aries

In Western astrology Vincent was an Aries, the first sign of the zodiac: the Ram, fire, impulse, the one who charges in. He tried life after life and threw himself into each one completely. He was an art dealer, a teacher in England, a bookseller, a would-be priest. As a preacher among coal miners in Belgium, he gave away his own clothes and slept on straw, until the church dismissed him for taking it too far.

He only started painting at 27. In the ten years he had left, he made around 860 paintings and more than 1,200 drawings. That is the Ram: no half measures.

IIIThe Water Ox

In the Chinese zodiac, 1853 was the year of the Water Ox. The Ox is the zodiac's labourer: patient, stubborn, devoted to hard work, the animal that carried the Rat across the river and came second for its trouble.

For most of his painting life, Vincent lived on money sent by Theo, who believed in him when almost no one else did. He painted every day, in fields, in the wind, in the heat, carrying his easel for miles. He famously sold very little in his lifetime. He kept going anyway, like an ox in a field that no one else thinks is worth ploughing.

IVThe Sun, twice

Here is where it becomes strange. In Ba Zi, Vincent's Day Master is Yang Fire (丙), whose classical image is the Sun: radiant, generous, impossible to ignore, giving its light whether or not anyone says thank you.

And on the other side of the world, in the Maya's sacred 260-day count, his birthday is 8 Ajaw. Ajaw means lord, and it is the day sign of the Sun.

Two traditions that never met, separated by an ocean and thousands of years, both gave him the same sign.

In 1888, in Arles, he painted sunflowers again and again: yellow on yellow, in vases, against blazing backgrounds. He painted wheat fields under suns that seem to spin, a sower under a huge yellow disc, and the yellow house he rented so artists could live and work together.

VThe Pisces underneath

Vedic astrology measures the zodiac against the stars, not the seasons, and in it Vincent's Sun falls in Pisces, the last sign. It's water, the sign of dreams, compassion, art and suffering, the boundary between this world and the next.

Vincent's mental illness has been debated ever since. Was it epilepsy, bipolar disorder, something else? He had episodes of terrible distress, and in December 1888, after a quarrel with the painter Paul Gauguin, he cut off part of his own ear. Between the episodes, he painted some of the most alive pictures ever made. He wrote hundreds of letters full of tenderness for ordinary people: miners, weavers, postmen, peasants eating potatoes by lamplight.

Western Aries charges in. Vedic Pisces feels everything. Both were true of him.

VIThe Sun that set too soon

In July 1890, at Auvers-sur-Oise, Vincent died of a gunshot wound, at the age of 37. Theo was with him. Theo died six months later. They are buried side by side, under a blanket of ivy.

After his death, Theo's widow, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, spent years organising his paintings and publishing his letters. Within a generation, the painter who had sold almost nothing was famous around the world.

The Sun gives its light to everyone, whether or not they say thank you. It doesn't stop shining because nobody is looking.

Have you ever kept doing something you loved when no one else could see its value yet?

Look again at the brightest star in The Starry Night. It's the morning star, and it's still there before dawn.