Paul Ehrlich

Not one of his ten planets sits in an air sign. Earth takes six, water three and fire one, with five of the ten mutable. The Sun, Venus and Neptune spread across twenty one degrees of Pisces, and Saturn, Uranus and Pluto across twenty five of Taurus. The record says Ehrlich was a German physician who founded chemotherapy and won the Nobel.

Six planets in earth with none at all in air is an unusual balance, and the readable part of it is the absence. Air is the element of what gets said, compared and circulated. Earth is the element of what gets made and tested. A chart weighted this far into earth is arranged around the result rather than around the argument about it. For a man whose Nobel came out of a laboratory that is a resonance worth naming once and not pressing, because six planets in earth would read exactly the same way in somebody who laid bricks.

Venus sits in direct opposition to Mars at four tenths of a degree, the closest contact here, which is attraction and drive disagreeing: wanting what fights back, a pattern of pursuit and withdrawal, and friction between affection and appetite. That is a reading about private life and the record contains no private life to test it against, so it stays a standing reading and nothing more. Mars sits in easy contact with Pluto at over four fifths of a degree, power under command: strategic effort, and strength that does not need to be demonstrated. Saturn sits a fifth of a turn from Neptune at just over a degree, imagination made durable and faith that survives scrutiny, which in a research life is the useful version of both. Mercury, Venus and Mars were the three retrograde planets.

He died at Bad Homburg on 20 August 1915, at sixty one. Jupiter stood sixty degrees from his natal Saturn at one hundredth of a degree that day, which is about as near exact as a transit comes, and Mercury stood in direct opposition to his natal Venus at a fifth of a degree and conjunct his natal Mars at just over a fifth, so the transiting Mercury reached both ends of his tightest natal pairing on the same day. Neptune stood in hard contact with his natal Pluto at that same fifth of a degree. The Moon was at its first quarter and seventy six per cent lit, a phase that acts decisively and often has to break something to do it.