Elton John

A single one of his ten planets sits in an earth sign, with three apiece in fire, air and water, and five of the ten are fixed. His Moon's sign is certain at nine degrees of Taurus. The chart holds two yods, which are two quincunxes meeting at a point, and both of them run through Mercury and Neptune, so they are one arrangement with two apexes rather than two separate figures. Four of the ten were retrograde: Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Pluto. The record says Elton John is a pianist and songwriter whose partnership with the lyricist Bernie Taupin produced five decades of hits, that he was born Reginald Dwight in Pinner, and that he trained at the Royal Academy of Music as a boy.

Neptune is the hinge of this chart and the numbers say so plainly. Four of the six closest contacts run to it, both yods pass through it, and every reading it carries is about something not being quite solid: misty thinking with Mercury at six hundredths of a degree, need becoming fog with the Moon at two thirds, and love and illusion with Venus at just over a degree. In a songwriter with five decades of hits behind him, that is a great deal of chart pointing at one planet and very little in the record for any of it to land on.

A reader will want to join that to the record's middle fact, which is a man born under another name. This entry declines, and the reason is the usual one. A working name is a decision made outwards, about billing and about what looks right on a record sleeve, and these Neptune readings are all about confusion felt inwards. They are not the same thing, and a chart has no way to tell a reader which of the two it is describing.

Mars lies at an awkward angle to Saturn at seven tenths of a degree, drive meeting refusal, read as effort that meets obstruction repeatedly until it becomes either resentment or real competence. That reading offers two outcomes and the record picks one of them: a boy sent to train at the Royal Academy of Music is repeated effort against difficulty, and five decades of hits is the competence rather than the resentment. He is living, so there is no death sky here. On 27 October 2018 Jupiter came back to the degree it held at his birth, at seventy one, which is a new twelve year chapter opening and the kind of expansion that has to be decided about rather than waited for.