Alex Honnold

The chart places four planets in fire signs and only one in air, along along with three in water and two in earth. Fire acts and air is the element that would stand outside and talk itself out of it. Honnold climbed El Capitan without ropes, which is three thousand feet of granite with no second chance anywhere on it, and is the kind of afternoon almost nothing else in this set compares to.

The Sun sits at twenty five degrees of Leo with Mercury and Mars in the same sign, so three planets in the one that works where it can be seen. The Moon answers from Virgo, which checks everything twice and is never quite satisfied. A free solo is precisely those two things joined: an enormous public act, and years of private rehearsal in which every hold is worked out and worked again until nothing is left to chance.

Mercury makes easy contact with Uranus at a sixth of a degree, the tightest pair in the chart, which puts the thinking faculty on effortless terms with the planet of sudden change. In most charts that reads as quick wit; in somebody whose working life depends on reacting correctly to an unplanned event at height, it is the whole survival mechanism. Four of the ten were retrograde, Mercury among them. Climbers call that reading the rock. The chart calls it the thinking faculty on easy terms with the planet of sudden change, and on a free solo the two amount to the same thing.

Jupiter closed a twelve year circuit on 2 February 2021, back where it began in Aquarius, at thirty five. Aquarius stands for the thing done in a way nobody sanctioned, and the planet of reach in it counts distance from the ordinary route rather than progress along one. Three circuits lie behind that date, and no measure the chart offers fits the record better than that one. His Moon in Virgo sits a degree from a mild angle to Mercury, which keeps the checking and the thinking in close company, and on a wall with no rope that is not a personality trait but a procedure.