Alexander Scriabin

Six of his ten planets are cardinal and only one is mutable, which is a chart that begins things and almost never revises them. Earth takes four, water three, fire two and a single one air. The Sun, Mercury and Saturn fill ten degrees of Capricorn, and the chart holds a T-square on the Moon, Mars and Pluto, with the Moon certain at seventeen degrees of Scorpio. The record says Scriabin had synaesthesia and wrote a symphony with a part for a colour organ, that he planned a week-long work in the Himalayas that would end the world, and that he died of a lip infection at forty three.

Six cardinal planets with one mutable is the fact worth the record it has. Cardinal begins and mutable revises, and a chart arranged that far towards beginning belongs to somebody who starts things on a scale that makes finishing them somebody else's problem. A week-long work in the Himalayas intended to end the world is the largest unfinished start available to a composer, and the chart describes an appetite for it without saying anything about whether it could be done.

A T-square closes on Pluto using the Moon and Mars, and the Moon sits square Mars at under half a degree inside it, need and drive colliding: irritability, defensiveness, and reacting before understanding. The Moon also sits opposite Pluto at a degree and a quarter, need turning into compulsion. Two readings about a want that will not be talked down, in a man whose record contains a plan to end the world with music, and the honest note is that the readings are generic and the plan is the remarkable thing.

Mercury, Jupiter, Uranus and Pluto were the four retrograde planets, Mercury on the sixth degree of Capricorn. A single planet in air, in a composer with synaesthesia, is a count worth a line, and synaesthesia is a fact about a nervous system that no chart contains. He died at Moscow on 27 April 1915, at forty three, of a lip infection, which is a very small cause set against a very large ambition. The transiting Sun stood in easy contact with his natal Mercury at sixteen hundredths of a degree that day. The Moon was gibbous and ninety three per cent lit, a phase that refines, questions and improves, and rarely calls anything finished.