Simone Weil

Her ten planets divide almost evenly: three apiece in earth and air, two apiece in fire and water, with five of the ten in cardinal signs. Nothing here is scarce and nothing dominates. The record calls Weil a brilliant academic who worked in factories and fought in Spain to understand suffering directly, and says she died at thirty four having refused to eat more than rationed France was allowed.

Two yods close in this chart and both share two of their three points. The Sun sits at an awkward angle to Neptune at just under a degree, and from that pair one figure reaches to Mars and the other to Jupiter. A yod is the figure that will not resolve on its own terms, and two of them built on one base is about as close as a chart comes to saying the same unresolved thing twice. The Sun sits at fourteen degrees of Aquarius, an identity built on not being told, whose immovability the airy reputation of the sign disguises completely. An academic who went into factories to understand suffering directly had declined the available answer twice over, which is the one thing two unresolved figures can fairly be said to match.

The Moon sits directly opposite Venus at under three tenths of a degree, the closest contact here, and its sign is certain. The reading is that what soothes and what attracts disagree: wanting closeness and space at once, and seeking comfort in the exact thing that unsettles. Mercury sits a fifth of the circle from Mars at a third of a degree, mental energy that goes somewhere and thinking that holds up under pressure. Four of the ten planets were retrograde. In the record of somebody who went looking for hardship rather than away from it, that is the contact with the most to answer for.

She died at Ashford in Kent on 24 August 1943, at thirty four. Saturn stood conjunct her natal Pluto at three quarters of a degree that day, with Pluto in easy contact with her natal Saturn at just over a degree and a quarter, the two of them working on each other's places. The record states the cause and the chart has nothing to add to it: those are the angles that happened to be there, and that is the whole of what they are. The Moon was at its last quarter and a third lit, the phase that rethinks the whole premise rather than the details.