Roald Dahl

Venus is in four of the six closest contacts in this chart, which is unusual, and one of the four is at an orb of zero. Fire and water take three of his ten planets each, with two apiece in earth and air, and only one of the ten is mutable. The chart holds two T-squares, Venus with Mars and Jupiter, and Mars with Jupiter and Neptune. The record says Dahl was a wartime fighter pilot who wrote children's books with a streak of real cruelty in them, and adult short stories with more, and that he helped invent a valve for treating hydrocephalus after his son's injury.

Venus sits in quiet contact with Pluto at an orb of zero, the same degree and the same arcminute, and the reading is depth in relating: loyalty that survives difficulty, and an instinct for what somebody actually needs. Venus also sits conjunct Neptune at a quarter of a degree, idealised affection: artistic sensibility, tenderness, and a persistent tendency to see people as they might be rather than as they are. Both of those readings are about how somebody treats other people, which is exactly the part of this record worth testing them against.

Four Venus contacts, two of them about tenderness and one of them exact, in a writer the record introduces by a streak of real cruelty, is a contradiction the record resolves by itself without any help from the chart. The same two sentences that give the cruelty also give a man who helped invent a surgical valve after his own son was hurt, which is an instinct for what somebody actually needs in the most literal sense available. Both things are true, the record holds them in one line, and a chart with only the Venus contacts in it would have got half of him.

Mercury sits in easy contact with Uranus at just over a fifth of a degree, inventiveness without friction: a mind that finds unexpected connections and is not troubled by unconventional conclusions, which in a writer of short stories with endings is the practical contact here. Venus sits square Jupiter at under half a degree, pleasure without a brake, and it is that Venus and Jupiter which close the first of the two T-squares, on Mars. One mutable planet, with four cardinal and five fixed, is the balance: this chart starts things and holds them and revises almost nothing. Jupiter and Uranus were the two retrograde planets. He died at Oxford on 23 November 1990, at seventy four. Nothing came inside half a degree of a natal planet that day, and the Moon was a crescent at thirty per cent, a phase that pushes against the weight of how things have always been done.