Claus von Stauffenberg

Water takes five of his ten planets, with two apiece in fire and air and a single one in earth, and four of the ten are fixed with four mutable. This chart holds no closed figure of any kind. The record is one sentence and it carries everything: Stauffenberg placed the bomb that nearly killed Hitler in July 1944 and was shot the same night in a Berlin courtyard.

Mars sits in quiet contact with Saturn at six hundredths of a degree, close enough to call exact, and the reading is sustained effort: craftsmanship, training, and the rare ability to work at something for years. The Sun sits in easy contact with that same Saturn at just over a degree, structure supporting the self: steady competence, people who are trusted with responsibility early, and ambition that does not need to announce itself. In a career army officer those two are the readings with real work in them, and they describe a training and a temperament.

What they do not describe is the decision. A man who put a bomb under a table in July 1944 did something no arrangement of planets contains, predicts or explains, and the gap between a chart that says steady competence and a record that says a bomb and a courtyard is the whole distance between a reading and a life. Mercury sits in hard contact with Mars at under a degree, thought and drive colliding, and in easy contact with Saturn at just over a degree, structured thinking without strain, which is one mind described two opposite ways within a degree of itself. That is the most this chart can honestly offer about somebody the record gives a single night.

His Moon sits on the twenty seventh degree of Pisces at noon with Aries still possible, so it is left out. Mercury, Saturn, Neptune and Pluto were the four retrograde planets. He was shot at Berlin on 21 July 1944, at thirty six. One contact came inside half a degree that day, Pluto in easy contact with his natal Venus at a third. The Moon was new and one per cent lit, and the standing reading printed for that phase is that it starts things without waiting to see the whole of them. It is written for birthdays, and it appears here because the phase was what it was and not because it is a comment on the night. A reader will make it one anyway, so this entry says in advance that it is not.