John McCain

Earth takes five of his ten planets, fire two, water two and a single one air, with five of the ten mutable. The Sun, Venus and Neptune spread across seventeen degrees of Virgo. This is a loose chart: nothing in it comes inside two thirds of a degree. The record says McCain was held for five and a half years in Hanoi, refusing early release because others had been there longer, that he served thirty one years in the Senate, and that he lost a presidential election gracefully.

Five planets in earth is the only structural fact of any size here, and earth is the element a reader will be told means endurance and what gets kept rather than what gets said. A record whose first sentence is five and a half years of captivity, with a declined release inside it, is endurance stated as a date range. That is about as close as a count comes to a fit, and a count is a weaker thing than an aspect: the same five planets in earth belong to everybody born across those weeks.

The refusal of early release is the part of that record a chart has no business near. Declining to leave a prison because other men had been there longer is a decision taken by one person in a particular room, and nothing in ten planets contains it, predicts it, or explains why somebody would. What the chart does offer is Mercury a fifth of a turn from Jupiter at two thirds of a degree, learning that comes easily: breadth, genuine curiosity, and an ability to make complicated things sound simple, which across thirty one years of legislating is a working skill rather than a virtue.

Jupiter sits square Neptune at just over a degree, faith without evidence: wishful thinking, and promises that felt entirely real when they were made, which is a reading any long political career supplies examples for and this record declines to. His Moon sits on the twenty ninth degree of Capricorn at noon with Aquarius still possible, so it is left out, and that costs two contacts and the tightest transit on the day he died. Saturn and Uranus were the two retrograde planets. He died at Cornville on 25 August 2018, at eighty one. Jupiter stood sixty degrees from his natal Neptune at under a quarter of a degree that day and Saturn square his natal Mercury at the same orb. The Moon was gibbous and one hundred per cent lit.