Bill Hicks

Fire takes five of his ten planets, earth three, and a single one apiece in air and water, with six of the ten mutable. The Sun, Mercury, Mars and Venus fill ten degrees of Sagittarius, the sign built around freedom and the pursuit of something larger, whose cost is over promising. The record says Hicks was a stand-up whose material on politics, religion and consumerism got a whole set cut from Letterman, and that he died of pancreatic cancer at thirty two.

Three of those four Sagittarius planets are fused inside three quarters of a degree. The Sun sits conjunct Mercury at just over a fifth, which is being your own thinking and taking disagreement personally more than the person would admit; conjunct Mars at half, which puts the self and the will in one place and makes criticism land as attack; and Mercury sits conjunct that Mars at three quarters, which is the tongue used as a weapon whether or not it was meant that way. For a comedian whose record is a set that was cut, identity, speech and drive fused at those orbs is about as close as a chart gets to a job description.

The Moon sits a fifth of the way round from Jupiter at just under half a degree, optimism as a resting state, and its sign is certain. Uranus sits at that same angle to Neptune at five hundredths of a degree, which is the tightest pairing here and belongs to a whole cohort rather than to him. The record gives the cause of death and the chart adds nothing to it.

He died at Little Rock on 26 February 1994, at thirty two. Pluto stood sixty degrees from his natal Saturn at eight hundredths of a degree that day, with Mercury at that same angle to its own natal place at under a third and to his natal Sun at half. The Moon was full and ninety nine per cent lit, which is the phase that sees a thing clearly and usually through other people.