Neil Gaiman

Water takes four of his ten planets, with three apiece in fire and earth, and not one of the ten sits in air. The Sun, Mercury and Neptune fill nine degrees of Scorpio, and five of the ten are fixed. The record is one line: Gaiman is an English writer of Sandman and American Gods.

Three planets inside nine degrees of Scorpio put identity, speech and the imagination together in the sign that commits totally to whatever it has chosen and will not be known on anybody else's schedule. With no air anywhere in the chart there is nothing here whose business is to circulate a thing or set it beside something else, which in a writer of long books is a balance worth noticing: this is a chart arranged to go downwards rather than across. Mercury sits inside that group, retrograde, on the twelfth degree of Scorpio.

The Sun sits in easy contact with Mars at fourteen hundredths of a degree, close enough to call exact, and the reading is effort that comes easily and in a person's own interest: physical confidence, and somebody who does not need to be talked into starting. For a writer the record gives two long works and nothing else, not needing to be talked into starting is the plainest useful thing in the chart, and it is a reading about output rather than about quality. The Moon's sign is certain at six degrees of Leo, which expects to be watched.

The two remaining tight contacts are both readings about private life, and neither has anything in the record to meet it. Venus sits in mild friction with Neptune at twelve hundredths of a degree, love and illusion, which runs from disappointment built in from the start through to attraction to people who are unavailable in some structural way. The Sun sits in mild friction with Jupiter at under three tenths, belief in one's own scale meeting a limit, including the particular discomfort of having been confident in public and wrong. Both are generic readings, printed for every chart that carries the angle, and a record consisting of a nationality and two titles gives no grounds at all for attaching either of them to a person. Mercury alone was retrograde. Jupiter came back to its Capricorn birth degree on 15 December 2019, at fifty nine, and four laps precede it.