Ingeborg Bachmann

Water takes five of her ten planets, fire three, and a single one apiece in earth and air, with four of the ten cardinal and four fixed. The Sun, Mercury and Pluto spread across twenty one degrees of Cancer. The record is short: Bachmann was an Austrian poet and novelist.

Three T-squares close in this chart, which is as many of that figure as the set has found in one birth. Venus is a point of two of them and Neptune of two, and the third holds the Sun, the Moon and Uranus. A T-square is a figure with no outlet, so three of them is a chart that keeps arriving at a dead end from three directions. For a poet the record gives no events at all, that structure is most of what there is to say.

The Moon sits sixty degrees from Jupiter at four tenths of a degree, the closest contact here, which is optimism as a resting state: resilience, and being somebody other people feel better around. Mars sits in hard contact with Neptune at two thirds, will without a clear direction. Venus sits square Jupiter at just over a degree, pleasure without a brake, and Mercury sixty degrees from Venus at just under two degrees. The Sun sits on the fourth degree of Cancer with Mercury at twenty four and Pluto at fourteen, the sign that counts what is still being held. Her Moon sits at twenty seven degrees of Sagittarius at noon, with Capricorn still possible, so the figure that uses it has to be set aside along with the contact above, which is a heavy loss in a chart whose structure is its whole content. Jupiter and Saturn were the two retrograde planets.

She died in Rome on 17 October 1973, at forty seven. The transiting Sun stood square her natal Mercury at three tenths of a degree that day. The Moon was disseminating and sixty seven per cent lit, a phase that passes on what was worked out and needs it to land.