A. A. Milne

Eight of his ten planets sit in earth signs and the other two in air, so there is no fire in this chart and no water either. That is the most concentrated element count this project has measured, and what it describes is a chart that builds and arranges with nothing in it that charges at a thing or registers what any of it cost. The record says Milne was a successful playwright and Punch editor who wrote four children's books about his son's toys and was never allowed to be known for anything else.

Mercury sits square Saturn at just over a third of a degree, and the standing reading is thought meeting doubt: self criticism, difficulty being understood, and a mind that treats its own uncertainty as evidence of stupidity when it is usually evidence of care. For a writer the record describes as permanently misread, the middle of those three is the one with teeth in it, and this chart offers no comfort about the other two.

The Sun sits at twenty nine degrees of Capricorn with the Moon at twelve and Venus at twenty, so both lights sit in the sign that asks what a thing cost to keep, and both are certain. Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Pluto fill twenty two degrees of Taurus, with all but Jupiter retrograde. A grand trine closes between Venus, Jupiter and Uranus with every point of it in earth: a closed figure that asks nothing of the rest of the chart and gets nothing from it either. A playwright and editor whose four small books closed every other door to him is close to what a closed figure in earth looks like from outside.

He died at Hartfield in Sussex on 31 January 1956, at seventy four. Jupiter stood sixty degrees from his natal Mars at six hundredths of a degree that day, the closest thing in that sky, with Pluto square its own natal place at a third and Venus sixty degrees from his natal Jupiter at under two thirds. The Moon was disseminating and eighty one per cent lit, the phase that passes on what was worked out and needs it to land, which in his case it did, and then would not stop.