Eckhart Tolle

Eckhart Tolle wrote The Power of Now, a book about the uselessness of thinking about the past and the future, and the chart is a strange and rather exact fit.

He was born at Lünen, in Germany, on 16 February 1948 with six of his ten planets retrograde. That is a very high count and the single most unusual thing about the chart. A retrograde planet is conventionally read as working inward rather than outward, doing its business in an order not visible from outside. Six of them describes somebody for whom the whole apparatus runs backwards against the direction of travel, which in a working life tends to mean a long unexplained interval followed by a sudden outward turn.

His Sun is at twenty six degrees of Aquarius, the sign built on not being told, and five of the ten sit in fire with only one in earth. That is an assertive, impatient distribution for an author who became known for advocating stillness, and it is the part of the reading worth sitting with: the stillness is not temperamental. It is a position arrived at, which is a different and more interesting claim, and a far better basis for a book than a placid nature would have been.

Mars, Saturn and Pluto group together in Leo, which is force, restriction and pressure in the sign of the self. Mars is also in hard contact with Neptune, under three quarters of a degree, which is drive aimed at something that cannot be pinned down. A book that sold in the millions by instructing people to stop pursuing is that aspect resolved rather than suffered.

His Moon is in Taurus and sits a tenth of a degree from a hard angle to Uranus, as close as that pair gets. The Moon's most settled placement, wired directly into the planet of disruption. Comfort and upheaval at the same address is not a contradiction in a chart like this one; it is the mechanism the whole book came out of.