Karl Marx

Karl Marx was born with both his luminaries in Taurus, a doubling of the earthy Venusian bull that makes for the most immovable of foundations. His Taurus Sun is the sign of solid opinion and value, the one who could have the universe itself beg him to change his mind and simply would not. Fittingly, this is a thinker who put value and material foundations at the very centre of his system, tracing all of history to who owns the means of production. His Moon is exalted in Taurus, its healthiest and most steadfast seat, and it gave him the sheer patient endurance to sit for decades in the British Museum Reading Room, in stateless exile in London, grinding out the four volumes of Das Kapital.

Both lights fall in the third house, the mercurial realm of communication, the writer and go-getter whose ego and emotion pour straight onto the page; from the 1848 Communist Manifesto onward, words were his weapon. His Aquarius Ascendant is the mask of the alien-on-Earth, the black sheep and revolutionary who beats to his own drum and loves humanity in the abstract. Class conflict, historical materialism, the promised classless society: a fixed bull's foundation, dressed as a rebel.