James Black

Not one of his ten planets sits in an earth sign. Air and water take four each and fire two, with three of the ten cardinal, three fixed and four mutable. The record is one line: Black was a Scottish pharmacologist who developed beta blockers.

Mars is in three of the six closest contacts and the chart turns on it. It sits in hard contact with Pluto at a fifth of a degree, force against force; a fifth of a turn from Jupiter at under a quarter, effort that pays and well timed action; and in easy contact with Saturn at four tenths, sustained effort and the rare ability to work at something for years. A grand trine closes between the Sun, Mars and that Saturn, a self contained figure asking nothing of the rest of the chart. A pharmacologist the record reduces to one class of drug gets a chart built around Mars, and a closed figure holding drive, limit and identity is a fair enough instrument for forty years in a laboratory.

Drive in easy contact with the planet of limit, in the pharmacologist who made a drug whose entire job is to put a limit on a racing heart, is a coincidence a reader will like very much. It is two unrelated uses of the idea of a brake, and the only honest thing to do with it is say so out loud and move on. Mercury sits in mild friction with Venus at fifteen hundredths, and the Moon in quiet contact with Jupiter at seventeen hundredths, with the Moon's sign certain at fourteen degrees of Scorpio. Venus, Jupiter and Saturn were the three retrograde planets.

He died in London on 21 March 2010, at eighty five. Venus stood square its own natal place at sixteen hundredths of a degree that day, and nothing else sat inside half a degree. The Moon was a crescent at twenty nine per cent, a phase that pushes against the weight of how things have always been done.