Otto von Bismarck

Fire and air take three of his ten planets each, with two apiece in earth and water, and four of the ten are mutable. The chart holds a yod, made of Venus, Jupiter and Uranus. The record says Bismarck unified Germany through three deliberate wars and then spent twenty years keeping the peace he had made, and that he introduced the first state pension and health insurance, to undercut the socialists.

The closest contact in the chart is the Sun sixty degrees from Saturn at under two thirds of a degree, and the reading is structure supporting the self: steady competence, people who are trusted with responsibility early, and ambition that does not need to announce itself. Landed on a statesman who made a country out of three wars, that describes a reliable official and nothing more, which is a useful demonstration of how far this vocabulary does not reach. Three wars are not in it anywhere.

Mercury sits in mild friction with Mars at under a degree, thought and drive colliding: arguing for its own sake, impatience with slower thinkers, and saying the true thing in the most damaging available way. For a statesman whose record contains a pension scheme introduced specifically to undercut his opponents, the damaging true thing is the contact with the most in it, and it is about method rather than about scale. The record's two halves, three wars and then twenty years of keeping the peace, are the same method used twice, and no aspect here tells them apart.

Venus sits at an awkward angle to Jupiter at two thirds of a degree, pleasure without a brake, and at an awkward angle to Neptune at just under a degree, love and illusion, so Venus is uncomfortable in both directions. The Moon sits in quiet contact with Uranus at a degree and a third, comfortable with change, and a fifth of a turn from Pluto at a degree and three quarters, emotional endurance, with its sign certain at eight degrees of Capricorn, which manages feeling rather than expressing it. Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune were the three retrograde planets. He died at Friedrichsruh on 30 July 1898, at eighty three. Jupiter came back to within a degree and a quarter of its own natal place that day, the Sun stood in easy contact with his natal Uranus at half a degree, and Venus opposite his natal Mercury at under half. The Moon was gibbous and eighty nine per cent lit.