Abu Ma‘shar (Albumasar)

Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi, known to Latin Europe as Albumasar, was the greatest astrologer of the Abbasid court and one of the most influential the art has ever produced. Born in 787 in Balkh, in what is now Afghanistan, he came up as a scholar of hadith and did not turn to the stars until he was forty-seven. A famous dispute with the philosopher al-Kindi convinced him to master mathematics, and from there he wrote the practical manuals, above all his Great Introduction to the Science of Astrology, that shaped Muslim intellectual life and, once translated in the twelfth century, the whole of medieval Europe. He even puzzled over the tides, sensing the Moon drew the sea by some hidden virtue.

His chart is a fitting one for such a life. The Sun sits in Leo, its own domicile, blazing at full royal strength, the born king of his own solar system, and it shines from the fourth house of home, roots and lineage. His Taurus Moon is exalted, the luminary at its most peaceful, steady and devoted, and it rises on a Taurus ascendant so his very presence broadcast earthy, immovable strength. A lion's heart, built on foundations no argument could shift.