George Orwell

George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair, was a conscience with a pen, the writer who taught the twentieth century to name its own nightmares. Out of his life as an imperial policeman in Burma, a soldier bleeding for the Republic in Spain, and a chronicler of the industrial poor in The Road to Wigan Pier, he forged a lucid, unforgiving prose. Then came Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and with them Big Brother, Newspeak, Room 101 and doublethink, the vocabulary we still reach for to describe tyranny.

His Sun and Moon both stand in Cancer, the double Cancer of the crab and its shell: a deeply emotional, protective heart guarding something soft inside for the right reasons, the mama-bear vitality that made him incapable of looking away from the vulnerable. That is the true root of his solidarity with the poor and the powerless. Both luminaries sit in the eleventh house of the tribe and the collective, so his mission and his psyche were bound up with humanity, community and the causes that shape society. Rising in Leo, the lion, he wore the regal mask of one born to hold a torch and light the path, and light it he did, straight into the dark of totalitarianism.