Albert Einstein's Birth Chart

Each feature is ranked by the weight traditional astrology gives it and by how seldom random 1870s births showed it. Sign dignities take the first three places: Mars exalted in Capricorn (about one chart in 13), Saturn fallen in Aries (about one chart in 8) and Venus in detriment beside it (about one chart in 7), all three fixed for the whole of March 14.

Fourth is the Moon's 26°21′ of southern declination, past the Sun's farthest reach (about 27%), also a whole-day fact. Fifth, at about one chart in 8, comes the count of eight planets above the horizon, the one ranked item that leans on the registered hour: it holds from 7:49 AM until Mars set at 12:47 PM.

Sixth is the exchange of signs between Mars and Saturn, so ordinary that some pair of planets forms one in about 45% of the sample. Saturn under the Sun's beams (about one chart in 26) is seventh and the bucket shape, with Uranus as its handle (about 26%), eighth. Facts that turn on the minute, such as Venus just inside the 10th house, are left to the provenance and positions sections further down.

Sunrise at Ulm came at 6:16 AM local mean time, and by the registered hour the Sun had climbed 38°18′. Sect turns on the Sun's center, which stood above the horizon from 6:21 AM to 5:58 PM, so the register's minute cannot tip this day chart. Saturn, Jupiter and the Sun, the planets of the day, therefore sit in sect, while the Moon, Venus and Mars, which belong to the night, do not; the sect calculator sorts any birth the same way.

Mars at 26°54′ Capricorn lies 1°05′ short of 28°00′ Capricorn, the degree traditional tables give for its exact exaltation. The page's scoring adds triplicity and term, then credits direct, swift motion and an angular 7th house, for 100 points against Jupiter's 73; only that angular credit rests on the minute. Mars is therefore lord of the geniture, though some traditional readers would mark it down as a nocturnal planet in a day chart.

Saturn has the reverse profile: fallen by sign, yet in sect, angular in the 10th house, swift, and 10°40′ from the Sun, inside the fifteen degrees classical texts call under the beams. Since Mars occupies Capricorn, Saturn's domicile, and Saturn occupies Aries, the domicile of Mars, William Lilly's school would let the pair borrow each other's footing. Venus at 16°59′ Aries, facing its own Libra, scores third-lowest of the ten.

The chart ruler is the Moon in both the traditional and the modern scheme, since Cancer has no second lord. It sits in Sagittarius in the cadent 6th house, out of sect, scoring 58, so the formal ruler is a middling planet and the dignity lies with Mars.

Entry No. 224 in the Ulm civil register for 1879, dated March 15 and signed by Hermann Einstein and the registrar Hartmann, records the birth on the previous morning at the family home, Bahnhofstraße B No. 135, destroyed in 1944. The editors of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein printed it as Document 1 of Volume 1 (Princeton University Press, 1987), with Anna Beck's English translation alongside, and noted that the Ulm Jewish community's family register gives the same Friday, the 19th of Adar 5639.

The clock is the softer part. Central European Time became German law only in 1893, and the Shanks and Gabriel atlases, as compiled by Alois Treindl, keep Württemberg on local mean time until 1891, hence the UTC+0:39:58 used here. Software that substitutes Berlin's local mean time, UTC+0:53:28, puts the moment 13 minutes too early, enough to carry Venus into the 11th house and Mars into the 8th house.

The opposite error is smaller. Oliver Zimmer's history of German clock time describes southern towns urged, not obliged, to adopt regional standards, and Württemberg's railways kept Stuttgart time, UTC+0:36:40, about 3 minutes behind Ulm's. On that clock no planet would change house, and only Neptune's wide sextile to the Ascendant, which lapses 2 minutes after the half hour, would go. Nothing specific to Ulm shows which clock its registry kept.

One other time circulates: 11:30 PM, printed without a source on machine-generated web pages, a twelve-hour slip that the register's Vormittags, morning, rules out. Cast for Ulm, it would raise Scorpio, make the chart nocturnal, give the rulership to Mars (traditional) or Pluto (modern) and move all ten planets to new houses, yet every planet, the fast Moon included, would keep its sign.

The Moon at 14°31′ Sagittarius had a declination of 26°21′ south, 2°54′ past the 23°27′ that bounded the Sun's path that year. Modern astrologers call such a Moon out of bounds and tie it to feeling that runs past ordinary limits. Its 1870s rate is high because the Moon's monthly swing was near the wide end of its 18.6-year cycle. Mars, at 21°37′ south, comes next and stays inside the limit.

Cancer rose at Ulm for 2 hours 27 minutes, so the sign survives a birth 53 minutes earlier or 1 hour 34 minutes later than registered. The degree is touchier: the Ascendant advanced 12°23′ an hour, so a quarter hour of rounding either way shifts it by about 3°05′.

Venus is the most exposed house placement: it crossed into the 10th house at 11:25:47 AM, 4 minutes before the registered time, and Mars entered the 7th house at 11:21:36 AM. Among the other planets Pluto has the thinnest margin, 27 minutes from slipping back into the 12th house.

Whole Sign houses counted from Cancer move the Sun from the 10th house to the 9th house and Jupiter from the 9th house to the 8th house. At this latitude the Placidus wheel swallows Taurus and Scorpio whole, so Neptune and Pluto share the 11th house with no cusp in their sign.

Mercury at 3°08′ Aries trails Saturn at 4°11′ Aries by 1°03′ and, as the faster planet, was still closing, a pairing in orb at any hour that day. In the traditional literature Mercury yoked to Saturn stands for slow, exacting, doubting thought; here the heavier partner is in its fall.

Only two contacts reach the exalted Mars: a sextile from the Sun (3°24′) and a trine to Pluto (2°11′). Jupiter's opposition to Uranus (3°48′) joins Aquarius to Virgo, signs that do not face each other, so whole-sign readers set it aside.

Contacts with an angle or the fast Moon hang on the clock. The Ascendant trines the Midheaven (1°12′) from 8:03 AM to 12:46 PM, and the Moon squares the Midheaven (1°41′) only from 11:05 AM to 12:06 PM; its trine to Venus (2°27′) formed at 1:16 AM and lasted past midnight. Neptune's sextile to the Ascendant, 3°46′ wide, is gone by 11:32 AM, the frailest item in the table; Venus's square to the Ascendant began only at 11:22 AM.

Every planet but Uranus fits inside 160°11′ of the zodiac, from the Moon in Sagittarius round to Pluto in Taurus, with Uranus alone across the open side at 1°17′ Virgo. Marc Edmund Jones called this a bucket and the lone planet its handle; the chart pattern analyzer finds it for any date. The handle here is the single retrograde planet, tied to the rim only by Jupiter's opposition and a quincunx to Mercury.

The Sun, Mercury, Venus and Saturn crowd the 10th house, while only the Moon and Uranus lie under the horizon. Fire and earth hold four points each, the Moon's sign breaking the tie toward fire; air has Jupiter alone, and cardinal signs lead the modes with five. The old temperament tally gives phlegmatic three of its five votes, but two of them come from the rising sign and its ruler, so that verdict lasts only while Cancer rises.

The table gives nine dates from Einstein's public life. On June 23, 1902, aged 23, he started as a technical expert, third class, at the Swiss patent office in Bern, as the German patent office's history of great inventors records. On June 30, 1905, Annalen der Physik received his paper on the electrodynamics of moving bodies, which set out special relativity.

On November 25, 1915, he submitted the field equations of general relativity to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. A joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society in London announced on November 6, 1919, that eclipse measurements matched his predicted bending of starlight, and on November 9, 1922, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences voted him the physics prize held over from 1921.

He reached Princeton on October 17, 1933, having left Nazi Germany, to join the first faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study. On August 2, 1939, he signed the letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning that a bomb built on a nuclear chain reaction might be possible. He swore the oath of United States citizenship in Trenton on October 1, 1940, and died in Princeton on April 18, 1955, aged 76.

Of the databank's pages, Vincent van Gogh's is the closest match, on a Sagittarius Moon and Cancer rising, and it rests on the same kind of evidence: a Zundert register entry made the day after his birth on his father's declaration. Both registers name a late-morning hour in March, hence the shared rising sign. Rihanna, Aamir Khan and Kurt Cobain follow on the Pisces Sun alone, and Aamir Khan's birthday, March 14, 1965, puts his Sun less than a degree from Einstein's.

Removing the Lahiri ayanamsa of 22°10′ pulls several placements back a sign. The Sun stays in Pisces, at 1°20′, Mars in Capricorn and Jupiter in Aquarius, but the Moon drops to 22°21′ Scorpio, Vrishchika, a sign it held all day, and Mercury, Venus and Saturn slip back into Pisces. The lagna is Mithuna at 19°28′ Gemini, a sign that rose from 10:03 AM to 12:22 PM; the unsourced evening time would make it Vrishchika.

Jyotish weighs these signs on its own terms. Pisces is Venus's exaltation and Scorpio the Moon's debilitation, so the sidereal chart reverses the tropical verdict on Venus and lowers the Moon. Mercury, lord of a Mithuna lagna, lands in Pisces, its own debilitation, while Mars keeps the Capricorn exaltation both systems grant it. Counted sign by sign from Mithuna, Pisces is the tenth house, so the four planets the Placidus wheel puts in its 10th house sit in the tenth here as well.

Saturn first regained 4°11′ Aries on April 23, 1908, at age 29.1, slid back across it retrograde on November 6, 1908, and crossed it for good on January 6, 1909. The second return repeated that pattern of three crossings between June 13, 1937 and February 26, 1938. In 1938 Jupiter passed over its birth degree three times, and its last return in Einstein's lifetime came on April 2, 1950.

The inputs to precise astronomical calculations are the instant 10:50 UTC on March 14, 1879 and the center of Ulm, 48°23′ N, 9°59′ E; the zodiac is tropical, the house cusps Placidus and the lunar node the true one. The windows for the rising sign, houses and aspects come from recasting the chart across the local day. Each rate compares the chart with a large sample of random 1870s births in cities worldwide; it measures how common a feature was, not what it means.