Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fire and air take three of his ten planets each, with two apiece in earth and water, and five of the ten are mutable. The chart holds a yod, made of Mars, Uranus and Pluto. Uranus and Neptune were the two retrograde planets. The record calls Emerson the centre of American transcendentalism and the man who made a living from lecturing on ideas in a country that had not done that before, and says Self-Reliance is still the argument people have with him.

Mars sits sixty degrees from Uranus at nine hundredths of a degree, close enough to call exact, and the reading is quick reflexes: acting well in an emergency, and an instinct for the unconventional move. The second half is the one that lands. A record whose central fact is a trade that did not previously exist, invented by the person who then lived on it, is an unconventional move in the most literal sense, and this is the contact in the chart worth the space.

That same Mars is one corner of the yod, with Uranus and Pluto, and it stands at an awkward angle to Pluto at three quarters of a degree, force against force: power struggles, and situations where winning matters more than the thing being won. For a man whose most durable essay the record describes as an argument people are still having with him, a contact about winning mattering more than the thing won is pointed, and it is about temperament rather than about whether he was right. His Moon sits on the fourth degree of Leo at noon with Cancer still possible, so it is left out, and that costs one of the six closest contacts.

Mercury sits in hard contact with Jupiter at just over a degree, scale outrunning accuracy: exaggeration, promising more than was checked, and confident wrongness delivered well, which is the standing hazard of lecturing for a living and is printed here on that basis alone. Uranus sits in mild friction with Neptune at four tenths of a degree and at an awkward angle to Pluto at over four fifths, both of them slow pairs shared with a whole cohort rather than owned by a reader of them. He died at Concord on 27 April 1882, at seventy eight. The transiting Sun stood in hard contact with his natal Mars at under a third of a degree that day. The Moon was at its first quarter and seventy two per cent lit, a phase that acts decisively and often has to break something to do it.