Margaret Atwood

Fire holds four of her ten planets, with two apiece in earth, air and water, and only one of the ten sits in a cardinal sign while five are fixed. Five were retrograde at her birth. The record calls Atwood a Canadian novelist of The Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace, a poet since the 1960s, born in Ottawa and raised partly in the bush of northern Quebec.

Mercury sits conjunct Venus at under half a degree, which fuses speech and taste into one faculty: the instinct for the right word and the instinct for the pleasing one arriving together. In a record that names novels and then says poet, that is the contact to keep, and both planets sit in Sagittarius, the sign that measures a thing by how far it got from where it started. The Sun sits at twenty six degrees of Scorpio, which will not be known on anybody else's schedule, and the Moon at twenty three of Aquarius, which handles a feeling by stepping back to examine it.

Two yods close in this chart and both rest on the same base. Saturn sits at an awkward angle to Neptune at just over two thirds of a degree, and from that pair one figure points at the Sun and the other at the Moon, so both lights are hooked to the same argument between limit and image. A yod is a figure that will not resolve on its own terms. The Sun also sits at that awkward angle to Saturn at three tenths of a degree and sixty degrees from Neptune at four tenths, so it is tied to each end of the base separately as well. In a novelist the record also calls a poet, two figures resting on a single base is at least a shape that matches a working life carried on in two forms.

Uranus came back to its Taurus birth degree on 5 March 2024, at eighty four. That return happens once in a life or not at all, and what it asks is whether there is anything left to be besides who the arrangements have made you. One cardinal planet, in somebody the record has publishing since the 1960s, is the fact to sit with: almost nothing in this chart starts, and a great deal of it holds.