bell hooks

Five of her ten planets sit in Libra, across twenty five degrees of it: the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Saturn and Neptune. Air takes five, fire three, and a single planet each in earth and water, with six of the ten cardinal. The record says hooks wrote about race, class and gender as one thing rather than three, in deliberately plain prose, and used lowercase so the work would matter more than the name, which is why her name is set that way here.

This chart holds four yods, and Jupiter is in every one of them. A yod is an unresolved figure, two planets in easy contact with each other and both at an awkward angle to a third, so the pressure arrives somewhere that has no way to discharge it. The four here are Mars and Jupiter with Neptune, Mars and Jupiter with Uranus, the Moon and Jupiter with Uranus, and the Moon and Jupiter with Neptune, which is two pairs reaching two planets in every combination available to them. For a writer whose record is an argument that three categories are really one, a chart built out of four unresolved figures is a shape worth describing before any single contact inside it.

The Moon sits conjunct Mars at half a degree, and the reading is emotion acting immediately: protectiveness, courage on behalf of other people, and a temper that arrives and departs faster than anybody else has adjusted to it. For a writer whose record is an argument made plainly on behalf of the people the argument was about, courage on behalf of others is the contact that meets the work. The Sun sits conjunct Mercury at under a degree as well, which is a person being their own thinking, and in a theorist that is either the plainest fit available or the emptiest, depending how much credit a reader wants to extend it.

Five planets in Libra, the sign that asks who else was in the room, in somebody who argued that three categories were one, is a resonance worth a sentence and no more than one. Jupiter sits at an awkward angle to Neptune at under a fifth of a degree, faith without evidence, and Jupiter alone was retrograde. She died at Berea on 15 December 2021, at sixty nine, in the state she was born in. Jupiter stood in easy contact with her natal Venus at eight hundredths of a degree that day and Neptune sixty degrees from her natal Jupiter at eleven hundredths, so both contacts inside a fifth of a degree ran to the planet all four yods pass through. The Moon was gibbous and ninety per cent lit, a phase that refines, questions and improves, and rarely calls anything finished.