Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen shone the way a Virgo Sun shines: not by grabbing the limelight but by working, refining, and serving the word until it was as close to perfect as a devoted craftsman could make it. Before he ever picked up a guitar, he laboured through the 1950s and early 1960s as a poet and novelist, and only in 1967 did he turn that same discipline toward song. His Virgo Sun sat in the twelfth house, the unknowable house of spirit and dissolution, which is why his hymns to faith and mortality, betrayal and redemption seemed to arrive from somewhere oceanic and half-hidden. With his Virgo Ascendant, the mask he wore to the world was clean, elegant and self-scrutinising: he was famously his own harshest critic.

But it was his Pisces Moon, the sponge, the empath, the psychic luminary, that gave him "Hallelujah" and the tender ache running through every record from Songs of Leonard Cohen to You Want It Darker, released weeks before his death in 2016. He escaped through art, never letting the darkness swallow the light. He shone by being useful to the soul.