Corey Taylor

Corey Taylor sings for Slipknot, a band that performs in masks and numbers rather than names, which makes the chart of the man behind one an interesting thing to read.

He was born at Des Moines on 8 December 1973 with Mars directly opposite Uranus, seven minutes of arc from exact. That is the tightest thing in his chart and it is as confrontational a pairing as the sky offers: drive facing the planet of disruption, with nothing between them. A person with that aspect does not accommodate, and does not experience the breaking of a format as a risk.

Mars and Uranus are also two points of a T-square with Venus, so what he values is pulled at right angles by both. Taste caught between force and upheaval, with no resolution available. There is a yod as well, across Mercury, Venus and Saturn, which puts speech and taste awkwardly against restriction. Two unresolved configurations, both holding Venus, is the structural account of a singer whose entire output is about what is unbearable. A band that performs in masks and numbers is a format built to carry exactly that.

Air holds four of his planets against a single one in earth. That is a thinking, articulate chart with very little ballast, which fits a singer who also writes books: the register is verbal before it is physical.

His Sun is in Sagittarius, the sign of the larger horizon and the dislike of walls, and Mercury sits on the final degree of Scorpio. Speech at the very end of the most withholding sign in the zodiac, about to become the most unguarded. A frontman who also writes books has found two formats for the same problem.

Jupiter closed its circuit in January 2021, when he was forty seven. On a chart whose defining aspect is Mars against Uranus, a year of expansion is not a settling. The mask was never hiding a quieter man.