Eric Gill

Not one of his ten planets sits in a fire sign and not one sits in a cardinal sign, which is an element and a mode both standing empty. Earth takes six of the ten and water three, with a single one in air, and the ten divide five fixed and five mutable. Mercury and Uranus were the two retrograde planets. The record says Gill cut the typefaces Gill Sans and Perpetua and carved the Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral, and that his diaries, published in 1989, record the sexual abuse of his own daughters.

That second sentence is the most important thing on this page, and it is also the point at which this chart gets put down. The closest contacts Gill has are a cluster about charm, taste and pleasing thought, and setting any of them next to a record of child abuse would hand that record a vocabulary of excuse. Nothing in ten planets causes, explains, predicts or softens what the diaries contain. The people that sentence is about are his daughters, and a chart is neither evidence nor a defence.

What the chart holds is a measurement, and it is reported here as a measurement and nothing further. The Sun, Mercury and Venus sit inside fifty four hundredths of a degree of each other in Pisces, which is three planets occupying barely half a degree of the zodiac between them, and four more spread across twenty three degrees of Taurus. A group that tight puts identity, thinking and taste in effectively one place, and in a trade that consists of cutting letter shapes the only honest thing to add is that the chart is dense and the record is separate from it.

His Moon sits on the fifth degree of Taurus at noon with Aries still possible, so it is left out, and with it go the tightest contact in the chart and the closest thing in the death sky, which stood at an orb of exactly zero. Mars sits in mild friction with Neptune at fifteen hundredths of a degree, will without direction, which nothing in the record tests and which is not being offered here as anything. He died at Uxbridge on 17 November 1940, at fifty eight. Saturn stood conjunct its own birth place at under three degrees, which is his age restated, because Saturn takes about twenty nine and a half years to go round and two circuits come to fifty nine. The Moon was full and ninety five per cent lit.