Sting

Six of his ten planets are cardinal, with two fixed and two mutable. Air takes four, fire three, earth two and a single one water. The Sun, Saturn and Neptune sit inside nineteen degrees of Libra, and Mercury sixteen arcminutes from the end of Virgo. Jupiter was the only retrograde planet. The record says Sting was the bassist and singer of The Police and a solo songwriter since, working across pop, jazz and lute music with equal seriousness, and that he was born Gordon Sumner in Wallsend, in the shadow of the shipyards.

The Sun sits in direct opposition to Jupiter at four fifths of a degree, and the reading is belief in one's own scale meeting a limit: over-promising, over-extending, and the particular discomfort of having been confident in public and wrong. The record's own phrase is working across three forms with equal seriousness, and the word doing the work there is seriousness, because one of the three is the lute. Somebody who decided to be serious about an instrument the public found funny has been confident in public in exactly the way that reading describes, and whether he was wrong about it is not a question a chart answers.

Three planets certain in Libra is the structural half. Libra asks who else was in the room and is genuinely destabilised by conflict, and a songwriter whose record splits between one band and four decades of solo work has identity, limit and imagination all sitting in the sign that negotiates. Mars sits in mild friction with Uranus at four tenths of a degree, action without warning: abrupt breaks, and a temper that arrives with no build-up at all, which is the one contact here with nothing in the record to meet it.

Saturn sits in mild friction with Pluto at seven hundredths of a degree, the tightest contact in the chart and also the emptiest, being a slow pair held for everybody born across several years. His Moon sits on the twenty sixth degree of Libra at noon with Scorpio still possible, so it is left out, and a four planet group in Libra comes down to three. Venus sits in mild friction with Neptune at under three quarters of a degree, love and illusion. Jupiter came back to its Aries birth degree on 16 February 2023, at seventy one, and five laps precede it. A Jupiter return opens a new twelve year chapter, and Aries measures a thing from its first line.