Baruch Spinoza

Not one of his ten planets sits in an air sign and not one sits in a cardinal sign either. Fire and earth take four each and water two, with five fixed and five mutable. Two absences in one chart, and the missing ones are the element that stands back to argue and the mode that starts things. The record says Spinoza was expelled from his synagogue at twenty three for his ideas about God, ground optical lenses for a living, and wrote the Ethics in geometrical form.

The Sun, Venus, Mars and Saturn fill twenty three degrees of Sagittarius, the sign that measures a thing by how far it got from where it started, and the Moon, Jupiter and Pluto fill fifteen degrees of Taurus opposite. Seven of the ten sit in those two signs. A scholar expelled at twenty three who went on publishing anyway is somebody the distance question applies to twice over, once for the leaving and once for the work.

Venus sits at an awkward angle to Jupiter at three tenths of a degree, the closest contact here, and the Moon directly opposite Neptune at four tenths, which is feeling without edges: absorbing the mood of a room whether or not it wants to, and genuine difficulty telling one's own feelings from somebody else's. The Sun sits conjunct Saturn at just over a degree and a quarter, self definition through discipline. No air at all, in a man who wrote a book of propositions and proofs, is the absence to sit with.

He died at The Hague on 21 February 1677, at forty four. Saturn stood conjunct his natal Jupiter at a third of a degree that day, Pluto sixty degrees from his natal Moon at a quarter, and Mars square his natal Uranus at under a fifth. The record says he ground lenses and it does not say what he died of, so neither does this. The Moon was disseminating and eighty five per cent lit, which is the phase that passes on what was worked out and needs it to land.