Edgar Allan Poe

Water takes five of the ten planets, with two apiece in fire and earth and a single one in air, and six of the ten are mutable. The Moon, Venus, Jupiter and Pluto fill seven degrees of Pisces, the sign that holds no fixed edge of its own. The record says Poe invented the detective story, refined the short horror tale, and died at forty in circumstances that have never been explained.

The Sun sits conjunct Mercury at nine hundredths of a degree, close enough to call exact, and both of them sit on the very last degree of Capricorn. The reading is that you are your thinking: a sense of self bound to being articulate or being right, and taking disagreement personally more than the person would admit. For the writer who invented a form built entirely on somebody reasoning out loud, identity welded to speech at nine hundredths of a degree is as close as this project gets to a record.

Venus sits in easy contact with Uranus at a quarter of a degree, which is independent affection and unconventional arrangements that work. The Moon sits at sixteen degrees of Pisces and its sign is certain, absorbing whatever is in the room whether it wants to or not, and sits conjunct Jupiter at just over a degree and a third. Four planets in Pisces, under a Sun on the last degree of the sign before it, is the shape here. Nothing in this chart was retrograde. A poet and short story writer with four planets in the sign that holds no edge of its own, under a Sun on the last degree of the one before it, is a chart sitting on a threshold in two places at once.

Poe died at Baltimore on 7 October 1849, at forty. Venus stood directly opposite its own natal degree at just over a tenth of a degree that day and sixty degrees from the natal Uranus at a third. The record says the circumstances have never been explained, and this chart does not explain them either: it was not built to, and a sky on one afternoon in Baltimore holds no more of an answer than anything else does. The Moon was disseminating and sixty five per cent lit.