T. E. Lawrence

Fire takes four of his ten planets, air three, water two and a single one earth, with five of the ten fixed and only one cardinal. The Sun, Mercury and Saturn fill twelve degrees of Leo. Nothing in this chart was retrograde. The record says Lawrence fought with the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans and wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom about it, then enlisted in the RAF under a false name to get away from the fame, and that he died in a motorcycle crash.

This is one of the loosest charts in the set and the number is the thing to say first: exactly one contact in it comes inside a degree and a half of exact. That one is Mars in quiet contact with Uranus at half a degree, and the reading is quick reflexes: acting well in an emergency, and an instinct for the unconventional move.

An instinct for the unconventional move, in a man whose record holds a desert campaign, a book about it, and then an enlistment under a false name to escape the book, is a fit worth having. Signing up under an alias in order to become anonymous again is about as unconventional a move as a record can describe. It is also one clause of one contact in a chart that otherwise says very little, and the honest version of this entry is that the chart is thin and the record is not.

Beyond that the orbs run from a degree and three fifths outward. Venus sits square Neptune at a degree and three fifths, love and illusion; Mercury sixty degrees from Uranus at the same distance, inventiveness without friction; and the Moon in easy contact with Mercury at a degree and seven tenths, feelings that articulate easily, with its sign certain at eighteen degrees of Sagittarius. He died at Bovington on 19 May 1935, at forty six, and the record gives the cause as a motorcycle crash, which is a road and a machine and is not in this chart anywhere. Mars stood in easy contact with his natal Pluto at sixteen hundredths of a degree that day and the transiting Sun opposite his natal Jupiter at under a fifth. The Moon was full and ninety nine per cent lit.