Brian Jones

Not one of his ten planets sits in a cardinal sign. Seven are fixed and three mutable, which is a whole mode standing empty. Earth takes four of the ten, air three, fire two and a single one water. Mars, Saturn and Uranus sit inside under four degrees of Taurus, and his Moon's sign is certain at eight degrees of Leo. Neptune and Pluto were the two retrograde planets. The record says Jones founded the Rolling Stones and played most of the instruments that made their early records odd, and that he drowned in his swimming pool a month after being pushed out of the band, at twenty seven.

An empty cardinal mode is the fact to take from this chart, and the record contradicts it in its first four words. Cardinal is the mode that starts things, and founding a band is about as cardinal an act as a musician gets to perform. The chart has nothing of it at all. What it has instead is seven fixed planets, which describes somebody who stays, and the record's second sentence is about being removed.

The two tightest contacts both run from the Moon and they agree with each other. It sits a fifth of a turn from Uranus at a quarter of a degree, comfortable with change, read as people who are not frightened by upheaval and who find routine harder than most, and a fifth of a turn from Mars at under four tenths, feelings translating into action cleanly. Playing most of the instruments on a run of records is what somebody who finds routine hard does inside a band, and it is the one part of this record the chart meets without being asked twice.

Mars sits conjunct Uranus at under two thirds of a degree, sudden force, read as decisiveness and physical daring, and the vocabulary attaches a standing caution about accidents and haste to it. That caution belongs to every chart carrying the conjunction and it was written for none of them in particular, so it explains nothing whatever about a drowning. He died at Hartfield on 3 July 1969, at twenty seven. Five of the six closest contacts that day landed on the Taurus group or on Neptune, the tightest being Pluto in easy contact with his natal Saturn at under a fifth of a degree. The Moon was disseminating and eighty two per cent lit.