William Herschel

A single one of his ten planets sits in fire and a single one in air. Water takes five and earth three, and six of the ten are cardinal with only one mutable. His Moon's sign is certain at fourteen degrees of Capricorn. The chart holds a yod on the Sun, Mars and Jupiter, with the Moon, Venus and Uranus inside ten degrees of Capricorn and the Sun, Mercury and Pluto across nineteen degrees of Scorpio. Four of the ten were retrograde: Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune. The record says Herschel discovered Uranus with a telescope he ground himself, the first planet found since antiquity, and that he was a working musician who wrote twenty four symphonies before he turned to the sky.

Six cardinal planets against a single mutable one is the fact to take from this chart. Cardinal is the mode that begins things, and a chart with six of them in it belongs to somebody who starts rather than to somebody who adjusts. The record is a man who began twice: twenty four symphonies and then the sky, which is not a change of emphasis but a second career entered from nothing with a telescope he had made himself.

The Moon sits sixty degrees from Mercury at seven hundredths of a degree, the tightest contact in the chart, read as feelings articulating easily and as people who explain difficult things kindly. The Sun sits at an awkward angle to Jupiter at just under a degree, belief in one's own scale meeting a limit, glossed as over-promising and as the specific discomfort of having been confident in public and wrong. That second one is the inverse, and the record says how far: the first planet found since antiquity is a public claim that held.

The day he died carries two contacts that look like destiny and are both his age restated. Uranus stood conjunct its own birth place at four tenths of a degree, a full return, and Neptune stood opposite its own at twelve hundredths. He was eighty three. Uranus takes about eighty four years to go round and Neptune about a hundred and sixty five, so half of Neptune's circuit is eighty two and a half, and anybody dying at eighty three collects both without anything arranging it. The coincidence worth naming is only that the returning planet was Uranus, which is a coincidence about a name he was given credit for. He died at Slough on 25 August 1822. The Moon was at its first quarter and fifty eight per cent lit.