Ludwig Wittgenstein

Earth takes five of his ten planets, air three and a single one apiece fire and water, with five of the ten in fixed signs. The Sun, Mercury, Venus and Mars fill fourteen degrees of Taurus, the sign built on what has accumulated rather than what was announced, whose stubbornness the person usually experiences as simply being right. The record says Wittgenstein published one book in his lifetime, decided it had solved philosophy, became a village schoolteacher, then came back and argued against most of it.

Four personal planets in Taurus, in a man who declared a subject finished and then spent years dismantling his own answer, is the tension the whole record turns on. The Sun sits conjunct Mercury at just under a degree and a half inside that group, so identity and the act of stating a thing are one gesture here. Mercury sits in easy contact with Jupiter at just over half a degree, which is learning that comes easily, breadth, and a knack for making complicated things sound simple. His Moon sits at twenty four degrees of Pisces at noon, with the sign before it still possible, Aries, so it is left out.

Venus sits square Saturn at just under a fifth of a degree, the closest contact in the chart, and the standing reading is warmth meeting a wall: feeling unworthy, and withholding first rather than risking a refusal. Saturn also sits a fifth of a turn from Neptune at half a degree, which is imagination made durable, faith that survives being examined. Venus, Jupiter and Uranus were the three retrograde planets. A man who left the subject to teach in a village school and then came back to argue with himself had both of those readings available to him, and the record does not say which was operating.

He died at Cambridge on 29 April 1951, at sixty two. Mars spent that day working both ends of his natal Venus to Saturn square, conjunct the Venus at a third of a degree and square the Saturn at half, while the transiting Sun sat in easy contact with his natal Jupiter at five hundredths and Uranus sixty degrees from his natal Sun at six hundredths. The Sun was in Taurus, the sign his own Sun occupies. The Moon was at its last quarter and forty per cent lit. That is the phase that rethinks the whole premise rather than the details.