Mitch Hedberg

Earth takes four of his ten planets, with two apiece in fire, air and water, and four of the ten mutable. Jupiter, Uranus and Pluto are spread across twenty eight degrees of Virgo, which is wide enough that calling them a group at all is generous. The record is two facts: Hedberg delivered one liners sideways, and a cult grew around him after his death.

Three of the contacts here involve the Sun, Venus and Mars, and all three are easy ones. Venus sits sixty degrees from Mars at just over a fifth of a degree, the closest in the chart, which is desire that moves easily: warmth, creative energy and an uncomplicated relationship with wanting things. The Sun sits in quiet contact with Venus at under four tenths and with Mars at under two thirds, which is effort that comes easily and in a person's own interest. A chart whose tightest group is three planets in comfortable contact with each other is an unusually unforced one. That is worth saying plainly about a comedian whose delivery the record calls sideways rather than forced.

Saturn lies at an awkward angle to Neptune at just over a degree, and that reading is structure dissolving: disillusionment, effort that seems to drain away, and the slow discovery that something relied upon was not solid. A reader who knows that he died at thirty seven will try to put that contact to work. The record gives no cause of death, and this entry is not going to supply one. The contact is a slow one, it is about a mood rather than an event, and a comedian with four planets in earth and a delivery the record calls sideways is better described by the easy half of this chart than by the one aspect that can be bent towards an ending.

The Moon sits in easy contact with Pluto at a quarter of a degree, emotional endurance: people who survive things and are strengthened rather than hollowed out by them. Its sign is certain at twenty two degrees of Capricorn, which manages feeling rather than expressing it and is privately convinced that having needs is a weakness. Venus sits at an awkward angle to Pluto at a degree and a third as well, love and control. Mercury, Jupiter, Uranus and Pluto were the four retrograde planets. He died at Livingston on 29 March 2005, at thirty seven. One contact came inside half a degree that day, the Moon conjunct his natal Neptune at just under half, and nothing else was near. The Moon was disseminating and eighty four per cent lit, a phase that passes on what was worked out and needs it to land.