Franz Kafka

Few writers have left a name that became an adjective, yet Franz Kafka did: to call a situation Kafkaesque is to name that peculiar dread of the individual crushed by faceless, incomprehensible powers. Born in Prague in 1883 into a German-speaking Jewish family, he trained as a lawyer and spent his days in insurance offices, relegating his true work to the margins of the night. The Metamorphosis, The Trial, The Castle: nearly all of it published only after his death in 1924, and only because his friend Max Brod defied Kafka's instruction to burn it.

His Sun sits in tender Cancer in the twelfth house, the crab hidden in its shell and the light dissolved into the ether. This is the Jesus House of dreams, spirits and the collective unconscious, an unknowable, deeply psychic place where the ego almost vanishes, and no signature fits Kafka's guilt-haunted, self-erasing genius more exactly. His Moon in Gemini, in the eleventh house of community, sought comfort in words and letters, the hundreds he wrote to family and friends. And Leo rises: the regal mask over the reclusive soul. He wished to disappear; instead he became immortal.