Nellie Bly

The Sun sits at fifteen degrees of Taurus, the Moon at twelve and Pluto at twelve as well, three planets inside four degrees of the sign that accumulates rather than announces, and both lights are certain. Earth and air take three of her ten planets each, with fire and water two apiece. The record says Bly had herself committed to an asylum to report from inside it, and then travelled round the world in seventy two days to beat a fictional record.

The Moon sits conjunct that Pluto at a third of a degree, which is feeling at full depth: an all or nothing emotional life, and unusual perceptiveness about what people are hiding. In the record of somebody who got herself locked up in order to see what was being hidden, that contact does more work than anything else in the chart.

Four yods close here, which is as many figures of one kind as this set has found in a single chart, and three of the four run through Mars and Saturn: one with Pluto, one with the Moon and one with the Sun, while the fourth holds Venus, Jupiter and Uranus. A yod does not resolve on its own terms, so four of them is a chart that keeps arriving at the same unanswerable arrangement. Mars stands at an awkward angle to Saturn at just under a degree, and the Moon at the same angle to it at the same orb.

She died in New York on 27 January 1922, at fifty seven. Saturn stood directly opposite her natal Neptune at under three tenths of a degree that day, with the transiting Sun sixty degrees from that same natal Neptune at just over a fifth and Neptune square her natal Sun at three fifths. The Moon was balsamic and entirely unlit, the phase that finishes things, lets them go, and is already looking past them.