Omar Khayyam

Omar Khayyam was one of those rare minds that refuse a single lane, and his chart carries the signature of the eternal twin. Born in Nishapur in 1048, in the Persia of the Seljuks, he was mathematician, astronomer, philosopher and poet at once. His Sun and Moon both sit in Gemini, the sign of "between," the marriage of Helios and Mercury, forever two persons in one. That doubled Gemini glows exactly where his life ran: the Sun in the third house of the busy, dexterous mind, shining through the hands and the intellect, and the Moon at the bottom of the chart in the fourth, drawing his emotional roots home to Persia and its soil. As a mathematician he classified and solved cubic equations with the elegant intersection of conics; as an astronomer he measured the solar year with startling precision and built the Jalali calendar, whose 33-year cycle still underpins the Persian calendar nearly a thousand years on. Yet the same restless twin also wrote the rubaiyat, quatrains on wine, doubt and the fleeting hour, later carried to the English world by Edward FitzGerald in 1859. A Pisces Ascendant lent him the mystic's dreaming face over that dazzling mercurial fire.