Laura Spelman Rockefeller

Four of her planets sit in air signs, with two each in fire, earth and water. Air stands outside a situation and works out what it actually consists of, which for somebody who gave money away systematically rather than impulsively is the relevant faculty. Rockefeller was an abolitionist, and the fund that carries her name went on to shape the social sciences in her country.

The Moon, Venus and Jupiter group across fourteen degrees of Libra, with Venus sitting conjunct Jupiter at half a degree. Libra is the sign of the other person and of what is owed between people, and having feeling, taste and the planet of scale together inside it is about as direct a chart statement of organised generosity as the zodiac produces. The Sun in Virgo supplies the insistence on doing it properly. Giving money away at that scale is Libra’s subject matter handed a budget and a century to work in.

Venus stands at a hard angle to Saturn at an eighth of a degree, the tightest contact here, so what she valued was permanently set against the planet of cost and duty. Mercury is square that same Saturn at two fifths, and Jupiter at a hard angle to it at two fifths as well. Four of the ten planets were retrograde, Mercury among them. In somebody whose working life was giving money away by the careful decade, taste permanently set against the planet of cost is the mechanism by which generosity becomes an institution rather than a gesture.

She died at Kykuit on 12 March 1915, at seventy five. The Moon that day was balsamic and ten per cent lit, the phase that finishes a thing and is already looking past it, which for somebody whose work was designed to continue without her is the fitting sky. Uranus stood square her natal Mars at a third of a degree, and the Sun had crossed into water against her natal earth. For a woman whose name outlived her on an institution rather than on anything she signed, a phase that finishes and looks past itself is the one the record would have chosen.