Buster Keaton

Mercury sits conjunct Saturn at two hundredths of a degree, on the same degree and nearly the same arcminute of Scorpio, which makes it the tightest contact in this chart by a long way. Air takes four of his ten planets, water three, fire two and a single one earth. The chart also holds two yods. The record says Keaton performed his own stunts, including a house front falling around him with inches to spare, and never smiled on camera, and that he lost creative control in 1928 and called it the worst mistake of his life.

The reading for that pairing is disciplined thought: precision, a serious and often slow mind that arrives at better answers than quicker ones, and a person who does not speak until they are sure. Set against a record whose central image is a man standing in exactly the right place while a wall falls past him, precision at two hundredths of a degree is about the closest thing to a fit this entry could have asked for, and the second clause is nearly as good: a silent comedian who never smiled on camera is somebody not speaking until sure, taken to a professional extreme.

It is worth being clear about what that is and is not. The reading was written for every chart carrying a Mercury and Saturn conjunction, which is a common one, and it says nothing whatever about comedy, stunts or film. What makes it worth the space is the orb and the specificity of the record, not any claim that the chart produced the man. Mars sits in easy contact with Pluto at three quarters of a degree as well, power under command: strategic effort, and surviving what would stop most people, which in somebody who did his own falling is a sentence a reader will enjoy.

Two yods close here, both running through the Moon and Uranus, one with Venus and one with Neptune, and the Moon's sign is certain at twenty degrees of Aries, so both figures stand. A yod is an unresolved figure, and two of them sharing two planets means the same pressure arrives twice. Venus, Neptune and Pluto were the three retrograde planets. He died at Los Angeles on 1 February 1966, at seventy. Pluto stood square his natal Neptune at one hundredth of a degree that day and sixty degrees from his natal Uranus at eight hundredths, with the transiting Sun in easy contact with his natal Pluto at fifteen hundredths and Uranus conjunct his natal Venus at a third. The Moon was at its first quarter and eighty per cent lit.