David Hume

Earth takes five of his ten planets, fire three, and a single one apiece in air and water, with six of the ten fixed. One planet in air, in the philosopher who took empiricism to its most uncomfortable conclusions, is a count to print and then leave alone. The record says Hume was refused two professorships for irreligion, and that Kant said Hume woke him from his dogmatic slumber.

The tightest contact here is Uranus conjunct Pluto at a tenth of a degree, and it is worth almost nothing for him in particular, because those two move slowly enough that a whole cohort carries it. After that, Venus sits in mild friction with Saturn at three quarters of a degree, warmth meeting a wall, and Mercury sits sixty degrees from that Saturn at just over a degree and a third: structured thinking without strain, organisation, patience and long concentration. For a scholar twice refused a university chair who went on making the argument anyway, the second of those is the contact that did the work.

A grand trine closes between Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, a closed figure that asks nothing of the rest of the chart. The Sun sits at sixteen degrees of Taurus with Mercury at twenty four and Neptune on the first half degree, and the Moon answers from Capricorn at twenty one, where a feeling asks what the thing cost before anything else. Both lights are certain. Mars, Uranus and Pluto fill eight degrees of Leo. Jupiter and Pluto were the two retrograde planets. The professorships he never got are in the record, and this chart gives both lights to the signs that accumulate and count the cost, which is a fair description of going on with an argument that two institutions had already declined.

He died at Edinburgh on 25 August 1776, at sixty five. Uranus stood conjunct his natal Venus at two hundredths of a degree that day, the closest transit in that sky, with Neptune in easy contact with his natal Mercury at under a fifth and Mars conjunct his natal Saturn at four tenths. There is a particular awkwardness in writing a death sky for the man who argued that nobody ever observes causation, only one thing following another, so this project will apply his own rule to itself: these are positions, and positions are the whole of what they are.