Christopher Hitchens

This chart has planets in two elements only. Fire takes six of the ten and air four, with none at all in earth and none in water. Six of the ten are cardinal and a single one is mutable. The Sun, Mercury, Venus and Mars sit inside six degrees of Aries. The record says Hitchens wrote against Kissinger, Mother Teresa and religion, supported the Iraq war and lost most of his friends on the left for it, and wrote about his own dying without a word of self-pity.

The Sun sits conjunct Mercury at fifteen hundredths of a degree, and the reading is that a person is their own thinking: a sense of self bound up with being articulate or being right, and taking disagreement more personally than they would admit. That is about as close as this vocabulary comes to a portrait, and the record's middle fact tests it: he took a position and lost most of his friends over it, which is what happens when being right matters more than being agreed with.

Two elements and nothing else is the structural half of this chart. Fire and air are the elements of starting things and of saying things, and the chart has nothing in what gets made and nothing in what gets felt. Six planets in fire with six cardinal planets describes somebody who goes first and argues, and four planets inside six degrees of Aries, the sign built around going first, says it again. The record is four controversies and a death, which is a career made of beginnings.

The Sun also sits conjunct Venus at under a degree, self-worth and taste fusing, which carries a standing clause about a vanity the person is usually unaware of, and about being liked easily and therefore rarely tested. The record's middle fact contradicts that second half directly, because being tested is exactly what it describes. His Moon sits on the twenty eighth degree of Libra at noon with Scorpio still possible, so it is left out, and the tightest contact in the chart goes with it. Saturn, Neptune and Pluto were the three retrograde planets. He died at Houston on 15 December 2011, at sixty two. Saturn stood in easy contact with his natal Uranus at nine hundredths of a degree that day and the transiting Sun in easy contact with his natal Mercury at seven hundredths. The Moon was disseminating and seventy four per cent lit, a phase that passes on what was worked out and needs it to land, and the record's last fact is a man writing about his own dying.