Jules Verne

The Moon sits on the fourteenth degree and twenty sixth arcminute of Scorpio and Saturn on the same degree and arcminute of Cancer, which makes an exact contact between them at an orb of zero, and both signs are certain. Water takes four of the ten planets, with two apiece in fire, earth and air. The chart holds two kites. The record says Verne wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and Around the World in Eighty Days, that this is one of the most translated authors who has ever lived, and that France treated the work for decades as writing for children.

A kite is a grand trine with a fourth planet opposing one of its corners, which gives a closed figure an outlet it would otherwise lack, and two in one chart is uncommon. Both here run through Venus, Saturn and Neptune, one closing with the Moon and the other with Jupiter. The reading for the exact pairing at the centre of it is emotional steadiness: people who are reliable in a crisis and who do not require much reassurance.

Not requiring much reassurance is the clause worth keeping, because the record supplies a test for it: one of the most translated authors in the world, dismissed at home for decades as a writer for children, and still producing. That is a reading about temperament meeting a record about reception, and the two fit without the chart having predicted anything at all. The Moon also sits conjunct Jupiter at seven tenths of a degree, generous feeling: warmth, hopefulness, and an emotional appetite that is not easy to satisfy.

Jupiter sits in easy contact with Saturn at the same seven tenths, growth that holds: sound judgement about risk, and a career that accumulates rather than spikes, which for a bibliography of that size is the duller and better reading. Mars sits on the first half degree of Sagittarius and Uranus on the last half degree of Capricorn, so two planets sit on a threshold, and Saturn was the only retrograde planet. Verne died at Amiens on 24 March 1905, at seventy seven. One contact came inside half a degree that day, Mercury square the natal Neptune at fourteen hundredths. The Moon was disseminating and eighty five per cent lit, a phase that passes on what was worked out and needs it to land.