Erik Satie

Earth and water take three of his ten planets each, with two apiece in fire and air, and five of the ten are fixed with a single mutable. Saturn was the only retrograde planet. The record says Satie wrote the Gymnopedies and invented furniture music, meant to be ignored, and that after he died his friends opened his room and found two grand pianos stacked on each other and hundreds of identical umbrellas.

Mercury sits sixty degrees from Uranus at under seven tenths of a degree, and the reading is inventiveness without friction: a mind that finds unexpected connections and is not troubled by arriving at unconventional conclusions. A composer who invented a kind of music whose stated purpose was to be ignored, and whose room turned out to contain two grand pianos stacked on each other, is that reading with the evidence already attached. The record did the work there, not the chart.

Mercury also sits in mild friction with Venus at under three fifths of a degree, which is about as hard an angle as those two can make, and the reading is a tendency to say the agreeable thing rather than the accurate one. In somebody the record remembers for a joke about furniture and a hoard of umbrellas, that is the least convincing contact in the chart, and it is printed because it is there rather than because it fits. His Moon sits on the seventh degree of Cancer at noon with Gemini still possible, so it is left out.

And then the thing worth the whole entry. Saturn came back to its own natal degree on the day he died, at one hundredth of a degree from exact. Satie died at Paris on 1 July 1925, at fifty nine, which makes that a second Saturn return rather than a first, and what a Saturn return asks is whether what was built was built on anything. A return arriving that close to exact on the date of a death is two calendars crossing, the orbital one and the medical one, and neither of them knew anything about the other. It is the most precise alignment in this entry and it means nothing at all, which is the only honest way to print it. The Moon was at its first quarter and seventy one per cent lit.