Henry Moore

Seven of his ten planets sit in mutable signs, with two fixed and only one cardinal. Air takes four, fire three, earth two and a single one water. Uranus sits twenty nine arcminutes from the end of Scorpio, retrograde. The record calls Moore a miner's son from Yorkshire whose reclining figures with holes through them stand outside public buildings all over the world, and says he drew Londoners sheltering in the Underground during the Blitz.

Jupiter sits sixty degrees from Saturn at seven hundredths of a degree, close enough to call exact, and the reading is growth that holds: sound judgement about risk, and a career that accumulates rather than spikes. In a sculptor that phrase is unusually literal, because the accumulation is physical and still standing in public squares, and a career of that shape is the opposite of a spike by definition. The orb is the reason it leads this entry.

Seven mutable planets is the other fact, and in a sculptor it reads oddly. Mutable is the mode that revises and adjusts, and carving is the least revisable trade there is, because material comes off and does not go back on. A chart arranged almost entirely to adjust, belonging to somebody whose medium forbids it, is an inverse worth a sentence. Venus sits a fifth of a turn from Uranus at just over a tenth of a degree, independent affection without conflict, and the Sun sixty degrees from Mars at half a degree, effort that comes easily.

His Moon sits twenty one arcminutes from the end of Sagittarius at noon with Capricorn still possible, so it is left out, and that costs one of the three closest contacts in the chart. Saturn and Uranus were the two retrograde planets. He died at Much Hadham on 31 August 1986, at eighty eight. Mercury came back to its own natal degree that day at thirteen hundredths, which is a Mercury return and happens roughly once a year rather than once a life, so it is the least rare of the returns and worth no more than a mention. The transiting Sun stood square his natal Mars at six hundredths of a degree, Venus in easy contact with his natal Neptune at just over a seventh, and Neptune in easy contact with his natal Mercury at under four tenths. The Moon was balsamic and fifteen per cent lit.