Werner Herzog

His ten planets divide three in earth, three in air, two in fire and two in water, an even spread with no gap in it. Earth builds and air describes, and between them they hold six of the ten. Herzog is a German director who once ate his own shoe after losing a bet, which is the sort of detail that sounds like a stunt and is better read as somebody treating the terms of an agreement as binding whatever they cost.

The Sun sits at twelve degrees of Virgo with Mars and Neptune in the sign as well. Virgo does the thing precisely and takes a stated condition literally; Mars supplies the will to go through with it and Neptune the image it makes. Honouring a lost bet by actually cooking and eating the shoe is Virgo literalism carried past the point where anybody would have held him to it, and the chart has all three planets needed in one place. It is the same instinct a film set runs on when the director will not accept the easier version of a shot.

The Sun sits square Saturn four hundredths of a degree short of exact, the smallest orb anywhere in the chart, which is identity permanently braced against limit and cost. The Sun also makes easy contact with the Moon at a sixth of a degree, so the public and private halves agree with each other while both push against that same Saturn. Not one of the ten planets was retrograde at his birth.

Uranus stood once more on the Gemini degree it started from, on 20 July 2026, at eighty three. A Uranus return takes eighty four years, so it is the single circuit most charts never live to complete, and it belongs to the planet that refuses the arrangement everybody else accepted. For a director whose whole method has been to refuse the ordinary way of doing it, that is a fitting lap to have finished.