Pope John Paul II

Earth takes five of his ten planets, with two apiece in fire and water and a single one in air, and six of the ten are fixed. The Sun, Mercury and Venus fill thirteen degrees of Taurus. Mars was the only retrograde planet. The record says he was the first non-Italian pope in 455 years, that he travelled to 129 countries and is widely credited with helping end communism in Poland, and that he was shot in St Peter's Square and later forgave the gunman.

Two contacts in this chart fit that record almost too well, and they are the same two a reader should trust least. Saturn sits in direct opposition to Uranus at over half a degree, order against revolt: the fight between security and freedom, and frustration with rules that serve nobody. Uranus sits in easy contact with Pluto at under nine tenths, change that succeeds, which the reading glosses as reform that holds rather than reform that merely breaks.

Order against revolt, and reform that holds, in a pope the record credits with helping end a political system, is the neatest pair of fits in the chart, and both are between slow planets. Saturn and Uranus held that opposition, and Uranus and Pluto that trine, for everybody born across a stretch of 1920, almost none of whom became pope or ended anything. The fit is real and the contacts are shared with millions of people, and those two statements have to sit next to each other.

What is his is milder. The Sun sits a fifth of a turn from Neptune at under a fifth of a degree, the closest contact in the chart, imagination available without cost: creative facility, and a natural, undramatic kind of empathy. Mars sits a fifth of a turn from Jupiter at half a degree, effort that pays, and Mercury a fifth of a turn from Uranus at three fifths, inventiveness without friction. His Moon sits on the last degree of Taurus at noon with Gemini still possible, so it is left out, and a four planet group in Taurus comes down to three with it. The shooting in that record was a thing another person did and no arrangement of planets contains it. He died at Vatican City on 2 April 2005, at eighty four. Mars stood in direct opposition to his natal Neptune at under a fifth of a degree that day. The Moon was at its last quarter and forty six per cent lit.