Graham Chapman

Seven of his ten planets sit in earth signs and the other three in fire, which leaves nothing at all in air and nothing in water. Four of the ten were retrograde: Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. The Moon, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus fill seventeen degrees of Taurus, with the Moon's sign certain at nineteen. The record says Chapman was a qualified doctor who played the lead in Holy Grail and Life of Brian, and that he died the day before Monty Python's twentieth anniversary.

No planet in air, in a man who wrote comedy, is the inverse worth opening on. Air is the element of what gets said, compared and circulated, and a sketch does not exist until it has been said out loud to somebody. Seven planets in earth is the other half of the same fact, earth being the element of what gets made and maintained. A chart weighted that far into the practical, in a man who qualified as a doctor and then did not practise, fits the training and not the career, and the record gives both.

The Sun sits in mild friction with Mars at a third of a degree, drive and identity arguing, which the reading glosses as somebody who either overreaches and burns out or holds back and resents it. The Sun also sits in easy contact with the Moon at a degree and a third, what a person wants and what they need agreeing, which comes with a claim about a comparatively settled early home. Those two pull in opposite directions and the record settles neither, because what it contains is a qualification, two films and a date.

That date is worth a sentence for what was made of it rather than for what it was. He died the day before the troupe's twentieth anniversary, and the response from inside the group was that this was the worst possible taste, which treats the coincidence as a joke about timing rather than as a sign, and is the correct way to treat it. Venus stands at an awkward angle to Saturn at a third of a degree, warmth meeting a wall, a reading about private life that the record does not enter. He died at Maidstone on 4 October 1989, at forty eight. Saturn stood in easy contact with its own natal place at sixteen hundredths of a degree that day. The Moon was a crescent at eighteen per cent.