John Adams

This is a balanced chart with nothing missing from it. Air and water take three of his ten planets each and fire and earth two each, with four cardinal, four fixed and two mutable. The Sun, Mercury and Venus spread across twenty one degrees of Scorpio. The record says Adams defended the British soldiers accused after the Boston Massacre because he believed they deserved counsel, and that he died on the fiftieth anniversary of independence, hours after Jefferson.

That second fact is the most improbable date in this set and it needs arithmetic rather than awe. Two men who signed the same document died within hours of each other on its fiftieth anniversary. The anniversary is a human institution, the fiftieth of it is a round number because people count in tens, and neither death was scheduled. It is a coincidence famous precisely because it is improbable, and improbable things happen without anything arranging them.

The chart's own content is mostly slow. Jupiter sits a fifth of a turn from Pluto at under half a degree, effective power: reform that succeeds, and Saturn at an awkward angle to that same Pluto at under three fifths, pressure against pressure: confrontation with power. In a lawyer the record introduces by an unpopular defence, confrontation with power is a reading with a case behind it, and the case is the record's own first sentence: taking the brief nobody in Boston wanted.

His Moon sits on the twenty sixth degree of Aries at noon with Taurus still possible, so it is left out, and a yod using that Moon with Mercury and Neptune goes with it. Nothing missing from the elements and nothing missing from the modes makes this one of the few charts here with no absence to open on, which is why this entry opened on the balance instead. Venus, Saturn and Neptune were the three retrograde planets. He died at Quincy on 4 July 1826, at ninety. Nothing came inside three tenths of a degree of a natal planet that day. The Moon was balsamic and nought per cent lit, a phase that finishes things, lets them go, and is already looking past them.