Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson made the best selling album ever recorded, was a global star from the age of eleven, and the allegations against him have never been settled in public. The record here says exactly that and no more, and this reading does not go beyond it: a chart describes a disposition, not a life, and certainly not a verdict.

He was born at Gary, Indiana, on 29 August 1958 with the Sun in Virgo and the Moon in Pisces, directly opposite one another. The two are built against each other. Virgo is doing the thing properly and being useful, with a standard applied hardest to oneself and a habit of treating work as the price of being acceptable. A Pisces Moon absorbs the mood of a room whether it wants to or not and needs time alone afterwards to work out which of the feelings were its own. A child working professionally at eleven, in public, with that pair, had the most demanding version of both: a perfectionist for a Sun and a sponge for a Moon.

Mercury, Venus and Uranus sit together in Leo, the sign the Sun rules and the sign of performance. Venus is taste, Mercury is the detail, Uranus is the refusal to repeat, and the three grouped in Leo is about as close to a technical description of a stage act as a chart gets. Venus also makes a creative angle to Jupiter, a fifth of a degree short of exact, which is ease and scale together: ability that is not a struggle and arrives at a large size.

The difficulty is Saturn in hard contact with Neptune. Structure against dissolution, the slow discovery that something relied upon was not solid. With four planets in fire and only one in air, there is very little in this chart that steps back and checks, and that aspect is where the unreality collects. A career conducted in public from childhood, with no part of it ever ordinary, is the condition it describes.

He died in Los Angeles on 25 June 2009, at fifty, on a new Moon only 13% lit, the phase that starts things before their shape is clear. Neptune and Jupiter were both facing his Mercury that day, within a degree and a half: the planet of fog and the planet of scale, on the planet that speaks. For a man whose public account of himself was never settled, that is a strangely apt last sky, and it is as far as a chart can honestly go.