Franz Boas

Water takes five of his ten planets, air three, and a single one each in fire and earth. The Sun, Mercury and Saturn fill thirteen degrees of Cancer, and Saturn sits five arcminutes from the end of it. Neptune was the only retrograde planet. The record says Boas dismantled scientific racism from inside anthropology, showing that head shape changed within a generation of migration, and that he trained most of the next generation, including Mead and Hurston.

Mercury sits in mild friction with Uranus at under three quarters of a degree, and the reading is thought jumping the rails: nervous tension, changing position abruptly, and being right in a way nobody has the context to follow. The last clause is the one with a record behind it. Demonstrating from skull measurements that a supposedly fixed racial characteristic moved inside one generation was being right in a field built on the opposite, and the field did not have the context to follow for some time.

The Sun sits conjunct Mercury at four fifths of a degree as well, which the vocabulary glosses as a person being their own thinking: a sense of self bound up with being articulate or being right, and taking disagreement more personally than they would admit. In an anthropologist whose working life was an argument against a prevailing science, that is a reading with evidence on one side and no way at all to check the other. Mercury sits in easy contact with Mars at a tenth of a degree, the tightest usable contact here, mental energy that goes somewhere: thinking clearly under pressure, and finishing an explanation once it is started.

His Moon sits on the twenty seventh degree of Gemini at noon with Cancer still possible, so it is left out, and a three planet group in Gemini comes down to two. He died in New York on 21 December 1942, at eighty four. Uranus came back to its own natal degree that day at under half a degree from exact, and the arithmetic matters more here than the coincidence: Uranus takes about eighty four years to go round, so anybody who dies at eighty four dies near a Uranus return whether or not anything else is true. Neptune stood in easy contact with his natal Uranus at five hundredths of a degree as well. The Moon was gibbous and ninety nine per cent lit.