John Lennon

This is one of the few charts in this set with a rated birth time, so the houses can be used. The record gives half past six in the evening at Liverpool, rated A, which puts four of his planets in the sixth house and three more in the first. Earth takes five of his ten planets, air three, and a single one each in fire and water, with six of the ten fixed. The record says Lennon was a singer, songwriter and peace activist whose work with The Beatles and beyond defined a generation, and that he was shot outside his New York home.

Because the houses are available, the thing worth printing is what is not in them. The eighth house is empty. The eighth is the house conventionally attached to death, and a man who was shot dead at forty has no planet in it at all. That is the useful half of having a rated time: the houses become checkable, and checked in a case like this they say nothing whatever. A reader who would have found three planets there significant has to accept that finding none is equally uninformative.

What the chart does have is Jupiter conjunct Saturn at under half a degree, both retrograde and both in the first house alongside Uranus, and the reading is ambition and realism in one: somebody who builds steadily and large, whose optimism has a structure under it. For a songwriter whose record pairs a band with a decade of work after it, building steadily and large is a fair account of an output, and three retrograde planets sitting together in one house is the structural oddity of this chart rather than any of its aspects.

The Sun sits a fifth of a turn from Pluto at eight hundredths of a degree, the tightest contact here, power that is usable rather than overwhelming: resilience, the ability to start again after a loss, and an instinct for what is really going on beneath a situation. The Moon sits opposite Pluto at under two thirds, need turning into compulsion, with its sign certain at four degrees of Aquarius. Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus were the three retrograde planets. He was shot at New York on 8 December 1980, at forty, by another person for reasons that belong in a courtroom and not in a chart. Mars stood in easy contact with his natal Saturn at fifteen hundredths of a degree that day. The Moon was new and two per cent lit.