LEO (July 23-August 22)

Of course, dying is one of those things that never happen in horoscopes. The planets spin in their circles forever, and while they might help you out from time to time with dates and job interviews, they’re also entirely untroubled by your death. Astrological time is cyclical and repetitive. As Roland Barthes notes, ‘the stars never suggest that order could be overturned, but merely exert a little day-to-day influence, remaining respectful of social status and of the working week as defined by one’s employers.’ Barthes was in many ways a classic Scorpio: always piercing, always interpreting, clawing through the surface of things to find the buried truth inside, and only then discovering that it was always hollow. I’ve not been able to find a horoscope for the 25th of February, 1980, the day he was fatally hit by a laundry van on the streets of Paris, but with a roughly constructed natal chart and an ephemeris it’s possible to approximate. On that day the Sun was at seven degrees Pisces, in his eleventh house, suggesting that it would have been a good day to focus on friendships or close colleagues. Jupiter was in the fifth, indicating a particularly fertile period for literary and creative endeavours. Perhaps the stars had fated the new ideas buzzing ceaselessly in his head to find expression through a collaborative project, possibly with François Wahl or Julia Kristeva. But instead he died in hospital, and the stars kept on shining, heartlessly distant: they didn’t care.