In my PREVIOUS POST, I discussed some of the indicators that astrologers use to track past life karma into a person’s present day birth chart. Some of these indicators include the Nodes of the Moon, Saturn, Eighth House and Twelfth House placements, retrograde Planets, and any Planets, Signs, or Houses that might be intercepted in a chart.

Unfortunately, in that same post, I left out yet another indicator that some astrologers favor when digging into past life information: this indicator is one of the bodies in the main Asteroid belt, that – like its fellow comrades there – makes its circuit around the Sun within the region lying between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. This particular Asteroid bears the number 3811, and the name…Karma.

The idea here is that you can pick up some clues about your past life experiences by analyzing the Sign and House placements of Asteroid Karma in your chart, along with any fairly tight Aspects it might make with any of your other natal Planets.

Full disclosure: I’ve never used the Asteroid called Karma for these purposes, but I thought it might be fun to give it a public workout. For my test subject, I settled upon Napoleon Bonaparte, figuring that most readers would be at least somewhat familiar with him (the Wikpedia bio on him states, “More plays and films have been produced about Napoleon than any other figure in history except Jesus,” which bodes pretty well for the mightiness of his name recognition factor here…).

So as you can see from the accompanying chart, the Asteroid called Karma was moving through the Sign of Libra when Napoleon was born, and it occupies his Eleventh House.

I haven’t found any sort of widely accepted “Ye Olde Gospel” when it comes to interpreting 3811 Karma in a chart, so I’m kind of winging it a bit here. Most of my own work in this area has focused on the Nodes of the Moon, and the Nodes are very user-friendly and symmetrical in that one of them (the South Node) details past life experiences and karma, while the other (the North Node) points the way ahead, toward karmic processing, cleansing, and release. Unfortunately, there’s only one 3811 Karma, so I’m thinking that maybe it has to do double-duty if we use it…? At the very least, I’m allowing for that possibility here…

First, let’s see what happens if we look at this Asteroid as an indicator of Napoleon’s past life experiences and lingering karma in the life we know him for.

As mentioned, 3811 Karma is in Libra in Napoleon’s H11. This could mean he came into his well-known life from a previous one that had been marked by endless stretches of Libran peace. Maybe he built up a lifetime’s accumulation of an itchy, fidgety need for conflict and competition, but found none…and so became a military archetype in his subsequent incarnation to make up for all that.

Maybe he was also boxed into life as just another cog in some great, group-think machine that allowed for no individual expression. This is, after all, one of the less palatable but definite possibilities when the tribe-centric Eleventh House is emphasized. This might prompt someone to reincarnate with a highly intensified need to be noticed for their own individual traits and accomplishments.

Napoleon’s 3811 Karma is also square his natal Venus, which lies in Gemini in his Eighth House. What does that all mean in plain English…? It could be that his tribal membership resulted in him being denied those relationships he had most desired, forcing him to try to subsist on an unfulfilling diet of interpersonal contacts that felt like the barest of nibbles to him in that prior lifetime, yielding almost zero “nutrition” for his former self. Being denied everyone you ever craved might conceivably lead you to feel in a subsequent life that conquering everyone around you would grant you access to all the relationships you could ever want and more. And given the H8 influence, you might be more than willing to add some death and darkness to the mix if it could satisfy your hungers.

So far, we can definitely make a case for some or all of the above analysis fitting what we know of Napoleon as he lived his famous life here on Earth from 1769 to 1821.

But then what about the other half of the karmic equation? What if we look at 3811 Karma as a guidepost pointing toward karmic healing, or as a warning of what might materialize if its lessons aren’t heeded?

If we treat 3811 now as more of a North Node than a South Node kind of thing, the advice might be to seek healthier versions of that tribal belonging. That is, instead of being swallowed up, homogenized, and lost within a collective, it could be that Napoleon’s karmic mission was to find a worthy tribe to belong to, and to do it in a Libran context of balance and tranquility.

And it could be that he failed in that mission…and one of the possible pitfalls of the H11 signature is that of landing in a place of alienation, outlaw or criminal standing, or even…exile. And we all know the circumstances of Napoleon’s last days before he breathed his last.

Obviously, there’s some great utility in choosing a well-known person to serve as an example in chart analysis – everyone knows who we’re talking about, and they can therefore follow along! But there’s also the danger of trying to retrofit the details of the chart and the interpretations of those details so that they’ll line up well with the facts of that person’s life. What I’m driving at is: I may have landed on some possibilities in this rundown for Napoleon that I wouldn’t have arrived at had I not known whose chart I was reading. So take all of the above with a few jumbo-sized grains of salt!

But if 3811 Karma interests you as a possible indicator of past life karma, then it may be worth your time and energy to explore it a bit. You can use my own work above as a template, or you can venture off on your own analytical course and see what happens. I’m not ready to bump the Nodes in favor of this particular symbol when looking into past life signatures in charts, but I may continue to keep it in the mix to see if it consistently yields results that feel on point. After all, it’s probably not named “Karma” for nothing!