Gustav Holst

Earth takes five of his ten planets, air three, and a single one apiece in fire and water. Five of the ten are fixed. The chart holds no closed figure of any kind. Saturn, Neptune and Pluto were the three retrograde planets. The record says Holst wrote The Planets, a suite based on the astrological characters of the planets rather than the astronomy, and that he taught at a girls' school in Hammersmith for most of his working life.

That first fact puts this entry in an unusual position and it is better to say so than to pretend otherwise. A suite built on the astrological characters of the planets rather than on the astronomy is the most widely heard version of exactly the vocabulary this page is written in. Holst took the conventional character of each planet and set it to music. This site takes the conventional reading of each planet and sets it to prose. Both are conventions, neither has a mechanism underneath it, and the man who made one of them famous is now having the other applied to him.

Mercury sits conjunct Jupiter at nine hundredths of a degree, the tightest contact in the chart, and the reading is large thinking, glossed as a natural teacher or storyteller, with a warning attached about the small print being harder than the big picture. The record's second fact is that he taught at a girls' school in Hammersmith for most of his working life. A natural teacher, in a man who taught for a living for decades, is the plainest direct fit in this batch, and the warning clause has nothing in the record to test it against.

The Sun sits in mild friction with Uranus at under four tenths of a degree, read as restlessness, abrupt reversals of direction, and a pattern of leaving things just before they mature. A single post held for most of a working life answers all three. His Moon sits on the twenty ninth degree of Capricorn at noon with Aquarius still possible, so it is left out, and one contact in the death sky goes with it. He died in London on 25 May 1934, at fifty nine. Jupiter stood sixty degrees from his natal Uranus at three hundredths of a degree that day. The Moon was at its first quarter and eighty five per cent lit.