David Graeber

Earth takes four of his ten planets, water three, fire two and a single one air, with five of the ten cardinal. The Moon, Jupiter and Saturn fill eight degrees of Capricorn, and Mars sits on the first quarter degree of Cancer. The record is one line: Graeber was an American anthropologist of debt and bullshit jobs.

The Sun sits in direct opposition to Uranus at an orb of zero, the same degree and the same arcminute in opposite signs. Most pairs that land at zero in this project are two slow planets and therefore belong to a whole generation. This one is a personal planet against a slow one, which makes it his. The reading is that the urge to break out arrives at the wrong moment: restlessness, abrupt reversals of direction, and a pattern of leaving things just before they mature.

In an anthropologist whose two named subjects are debt and jobs that should not exist, a chart whose exact centre is an argument between the self and the planet of revolt is a fit worth printing and worth bounding. The reading describes a temperament that cannot settle. The record describes a body of work about why other people cannot settle either. Those are different things and the chart has no way of telling them apart. Jupiter lies at an awkward angle to that same Uranus at nine hundredths of a degree, and the Sun in quiet contact with Jupiter at the same orb, so three planets here are tied inside a tenth of a degree.

Mercury sits in mild friction with Jupiter at under a third of a degree, scale outrunning accuracy: exaggeration, and confident wrongness delivered well. Mercury also sits in mild friction with Saturn at just over a third, thought meeting doubt: self-criticism, and a mind that treats its own uncertainty as evidence of stupidity when it is usually evidence of care. Those two are a fair enough account of what writing in public costs, and they contradict each other, which is the honest condition of most charts. The Moon's sign is certain at seventeen degrees of Capricorn. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were the three retrograde planets. He died at Venice on 2 September 2020, at fifty nine. Mercury stood in easy contact with his natal Saturn at fifteen hundredths of a degree that day and nothing else came inside half a degree. The Moon was full and one hundred per cent lit, which is as exact as that phase gets.