Isaac Newton

Four of Newton's ten planets sit in water signs, with two each in fire, earth and air. Water registers before it decides, which is not the distribution most people would predict for the man who set out the laws of motion and universal gravitation and invented the calculus while he was about it.

The Sun sits at fourteen degrees of Capricorn and the Moon in Cancer directly across from it. Capricorn builds a structure and expects it to hold; Cancer keeps everything and lets nothing go. Those two facing each other describe somebody who assembled a complete system and then defended it for the rest of a long life, which is a fair account of the record. The Sun makes easy contact with Jupiter nine hundredths of a degree away from exact.

The Moon makes easy contact with Mars at eight hundredths of a degree, feeling and drive on effortless terms, and those two aspects are the tightest in the chart by a distance. Saturn makes a quintile to Pluto at two thirds, an easy skill with pressure rather than a struggle. Pluto alone was retrograde, and nothing here forms a yod, a T-square or a grand trine. In a man who assembled a complete system and defended it for decades, two aspects that tight and nothing bracing them is a chart with very little internal argument.

He died in London on 31 March 1727, at eighty four. A Uranus return takes about eighty four years, and the sky that month had brought Uranus back to within a degree and a half of where it stood at his birth: the one circuit most charts never complete, closing almost exactly as his life did. The Moon that day was at its first quarter, the phase that acts decisively and usually breaks something doing it. The Sun had reached Aries, fire, against his natal Capricorn earth, and Neptune sat conjunct his natal Pluto within a degree and a half. For a man who spent his later decades defending a system rather than building one, a sky dominated by the slowest planets returning to their own places is a fitting close.