Alan Turing

Three of the ten planets sit on the twenty eighth degree of a sign: Venus and Pluto together on the twenty eighth of Gemini, and Saturn on the twenty eighth of Taurus. Air takes four, water three, fire two and a single one earth. The record says Turing formalised what a computation is, broke naval Enigma at Bletchley Park, and asked whether a machine could think, and that the prosecution came in 1952 for being homosexual, with a posthumous pardon in 2013.

Those three planets make the two closest contacts in the chart between them. Saturn sits in quiet contact with Pluto at nine hundredths of a degree, durable strength: rebuilding after loss, and authority that has genuinely been earned. It is also a pair of slow planets, so that orb belongs to everybody born across several years rather than to one person, and it is worth saying so first rather than last. For a record giving three contributions and one prosecution, a tightest contact that belongs to a whole cohort is worth knowing at the outset rather than at the end.

Venus sits conjunct the same Pluto at under half a degree, total attraction: relationships that transform the person, and an all-or-nothing approach to love that leaves very little room for the ordinary. The record's fourth sentence is a prosecution for being homosexual, and a reader will put the two side by side. They must not be joined. That reading is printed for every chart carrying a Venus and Pluto conjunction, it describes an intensity rather than an orientation, and what happened in 1952 was a statute and a court. Nothing in a birth chart contains a law.

Jupiter stands at an awkward angle to Neptune at a fifth of a degree, faith without evidence, and the Moon sits square that same Neptune at three quarters, need becoming fog, with its sign certain at twenty two degrees of Libra. Jupiter and Uranus were the two retrograde planets. Turing died at Wilmslow on 7 June 1954, at forty one. Nothing came inside three tenths of a degree of a natal planet that day, which leaves the sky as quiet as the record is loud, and the nearest thing to it was a Mercury return at a degree and a sixth, which comes round about once a year. The Moon was a crescent at forty one per cent, a phase that pushes against the weight of how things have always been done.