Yoko Ono

In 1964, Yoko Ono published Grapefruit, a book of short instructions for imaginary artworks. "Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put them in." Years later John Lennon said the book had inspired "Imagine," and in 2017 she was formally credited as a co-writer of the song. Long before she met him, Ono was an established figure in the New York avant-garde, a conceptual artist whose work was built on words, instructions and the participation of the audience.

She was born at 8:30 p.m. on February 18, 1933, in Tokyo, the commonly cited time. Her Sun sits in the final degree of Aquarius, with Venus in Aquarius and Mercury in Pisces nearby, all in the fifth house, where astrologers look for creative self-expression. Aquarius is the sign of the radical, the experimental and the ahead-of-its-time. An Aquarius Sun in the fifth describes someone whose creative work breaks with convention, and Ono's early pieces, from Cut Piece, in which audience members cut away her clothing with scissors, to her instruction paintings, were genuinely pioneering.

Her Moon is in Sagittarius in the third house, the area of words, writing and communication. Sagittarius is philosophical and expansive, and in the third it describes a mind that thinks in large ideas expressed through language, a fair summary of an artist whose work so often took the form of written instructions.

She grew up in a wealthy banking family in Tokyo, lived through the firebombing of the city during the Second World War, and experienced hunger after the family fled to the countryside. She was the first woman admitted to the philosophy program at Gakushuin University, then moved to New York, studied at Sarah Lawrence and became part of the Fluxus movement.

Libra is on her Ascendant, the sign of partnership, and Pluto in Cancer sits at the top of her chart, a placement associated with an intense, transformative public life. In 1966 she met John Lennon at her exhibition at London's Indica Gallery, where he climbed a ladder to read the word "YES" written on the ceiling. They married in 1969, staged their Bed-Ins for peace, and made music together until his murder in 1980. For decades she was blamed by some fans for the breakup of the Beatles, an accusation the surviving members have rejected.

Mars and Jupiter, both retrograde in Virgo, fall in the twelfth house of hidden work and quiet endurance. After Lennon's death she spent decades protecting his legacy while continuing her own art and activism, including the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland and the Strawberry Fields memorial in Central Park.

The avant-garde artist who wrote instructions for imaginary paintings ended up co-writing one of the most famous songs ever recorded. The Aquarius Sun was simply early, as Aquarius usually is.