Paulo Coelho

Fire takes five of his ten planets, with two apiece in air and water and a single one in earth, and five of the ten are fixed. Mercury, Venus, Saturn and Pluto spread across fourteen degrees of Leo, and the Sun sits on the first degree of Virgo. Nothing in this chart was retrograde. The record calls Coelho a Brazilian novelist whose The Alchemist has sold in the tens of millions.

This is a loose chart and the looseness is worth stating rather than working around: nothing in it sits inside half a degree of exact. The closest is Mercury sixty degrees from Uranus at half a degree, inventiveness without friction, which is a mind that finds unexpected connections and is not troubled by arriving at unconventional conclusions. For a novelist the record gives one named book, a chart with nothing at all inside half a degree is worth admitting to early rather than late.

Mercury also sits conjunct Venus at under two degrees, and that reading is thought that is pleasing: a good ear for language, diplomacy, and a preference for the elegant answer over the exhaustive one. For a novelist whose one named book is short, plain and has sold in the tens of millions, a preference for the elegant answer over the exhaustive one is the best fit this chart has, and the orb is nearly two degrees, which is exactly why it is worth saying so out loud instead of quietly promoting it up the list.

Saturn sits conjunct Pluto at a degree and a third, total discipline: endurance, a capacity for hard and unglamorous work, and somebody shaped by circumstances they did not choose. Both of them sit in the Leo group with Mercury and Venus above them, so those four planets hold speech and taste at one end and limit and force at the other. The Moon sits in easy contact with that Pluto at two thirds of a degree and with Saturn at two degrees, emotional endurance and emotional steadiness, and its sign is certain at thirteen degrees of Sagittarius. Jupiter came back to its Scorpio birth degree on 19 September 2018, at seventy one, and five laps precede it. Scorpio commits totally to whatever it has chosen.