Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was born on the birthday of the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and his father, a Lutheran pastor, named him after the monarch. The boy who arrived on that royal anniversary would spend his adult life attacking the foundations of the Christian morality his father preached, declaring that "God is dead" and calling for a revaluation of all values.

He was born on October 15, 1844, in Röcken, in Prussian Saxony, at about ten in the morning, a time handed down in biographical sources. His Sun is in Libra, in the eleventh house. Libra is the sign of balance, harmony and aesthetic refinement, which may seem an unlikely Sun for a man who described himself as dynamite. But Libra is also the sign of judgment and the scales, and Nietzsche's lifelong project was a weighing of values, a question of what each belief was really worth.

His Moon is in Sagittarius in the first house, the most visible part of the chart. Sagittarius is the philosopher of the zodiac, restless, seeking meaning and drawn to wandering. A first-house Sagittarius Moon puts that search right into the personality. Nietzsche spent his most productive years as a wanderer, moving between Sils-Maria in the Swiss Alps, Nice, Genoa and Turin, writing as he walked for hours each day.

Scorpio is his rising sign, in its final degrees. Scorpio concerns destruction and regeneration, the stripping away of illusion to reach what lies beneath. One of his last books carried the subtitle How to Philosophize with a Hammer.

His father died in 1849, when Friedrich was four, and his younger brother died months later. He was a brilliant student, and in 1869, at only twenty-four, he was appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Basel before he had even completed his doctorate. He became close to Richard Wagner, and his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, appeared in 1872. The friendship later collapsed bitterly.

Mercury in Libra and Mars in Virgo both sit in the tenth house of vocation and public reputation. Virgo is critical and exacting, and with Mars there, his public work took the form of relentless critique. His health was poor from his twenties; after serving as a medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War he suffered from dysentery and diphtheria, and in 1879 he resigned his professorship. Living on a small pension, he wrote The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality, books that sold almost nothing during his lucid years.

In January 1889 he suffered a mental collapse in Turin and never recovered. He spent his last decade in the care of his mother and then his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who took control of his archive and reshaped his work to suit her own nationalist and antisemitic views, a distortion later exploited by the Nazis. Nietzsche himself had openly despised antisemitism.

He died in Weimar on August 25, 1900. The Libra Sun had spent a lifetime weighing values; the Scorpio Ascendant made sure the weighing was done with a hammer.