Salvador Dalí's Birth Chart

Dalí's four Taurus planets, packed into 20°35′, supply most of the ranked list: Venus at home, Mercury retrograde, Mercury and Mars combust, Mars in detriment, all independent of the hour. The Moon on the Midheaven and the crowded upper half of the wheel are not.

Astrotheme credits the hour to a birth record it does not show; a thin search turned up no rival time. The clock is the open question: Spain's legal hour had been Greenwich time, UTC+0, since 1901, but Figueres local mean time, UTC+0:11:52, would move the birth about 12 minutes earlier.

No planet but the Moon would change house with that shift: it had crossed the meridian less than 3 minutes before the recorded minute, and a birth that much earlier puts it in the 10th house. Pluto is closer still to a cusp; a birth 2 minutes later moves it into the 11th house. The Moon's sign is safe on either clock, Aries since 3:50 AM.

The chart's only aspect figure puts the Moon square to Neptune (4°01′ Cancer, orb 1°33′) and Uranus (29°24′ Sagittarius, orb 3°03′), themselves opposed across a sign boundary.

Dalí's Moon, 2°28′ Aries, sits just west of the Midheaven, 3°11′ Aries: 9th house for Placidus, 10th for Whole Sign. The cohort's figure for a Moon within five degrees of any angle is about one chart in 9.

Mercury, 23°28′ Taurus, was backing up by 0°33′ daily, a retrograde the cohort shows in about one chart in 5. Uranus, at 23°38′ south declination, past the Sun's 23°26′ reach, is the chart's lone out-of-bounds body.

The tightest aspect is the Sun's applying square to Saturn at 20°39′ Aquarius, 0°26′ wide. Saturn squares Mercury and Mars too, but not Venus, which instead makes the next-closest contact, a sextile to Neptune within 0°33′. Modern textbooks tie Sun–Saturn squares to effort and restraint.

Every planet fits in 184°37′, from Uranus round to Neptune, leaving 175°22′ empty. Marc Edmund Jones's bowl stays within half the wheel, so Dalí's chart is classed a locomotive, a shape found in about one chart in 7 from the 1900s sample.

Uranus, in the 6th house, is alone below the horizon; the sample has eight or more planets above it in about one chart in 10, and a birth 1 hour 27 minutes earlier would sink Neptune too. Earth ties fire and fixed ties cardinal, and the Sun's Taurus breaks both ties.

Sunrise was 4 hours 13 minutes old and the Sun 44°50′ high, so the chart is diurnal, and Hellenistic sect rules make Mars the malefic working against it. Mars is also combust (1900s sample: about one chart in 13) and in detriment in Taurus (about one chart in 6), scoring 38 of 100.

Mercury, combust at 3°15′ (cohort rate: about one chart in 4) and slow in its retrograde, ranks last at 15. Venus, domiciled in Taurus (true of about one chart in 6), ranks first at 100, angular in the 10th house. Saturn, at home in Aquarius, follows at 96.

Among the databank's pages, Rabindranath Tagore lies closest, sharing Dalí's Taurus Sun and Aries Moon; LeBron James shares the Moon and Cancer rising, Audrey Hepburn and David Beckham only the Sun. Nobody else listed shares May 11, 1904.

Take off the Lahiri correction of 22°31′ and Dalí's Sun lands at 27°41′ Aries, his Moon at 9°56′ Pisces and his Ascendant at 29°43′ Gemini, which a birth 2 minutes later would turn to Cancer. Mercury and Mars keep Taurus, Pluto falls back into it from Gemini, Venus slips to Aries and Saturn to Capricorn.

Saturn completed its first circuit on February 23, 1934, with Dalí aged 29.8, and its second in three passes between April 8, 1963 and January 3, 1964, as Jupiter's fifth return began. Jupiter came back seven times before Dalí died on January 23, 1989.

Precise astronomical calculations, run for 08:45 UTC on May 11, 1904 with Figueres at 42°16′ N, 2°57′ E, supply every position, on tropical signs and Placidus cusps. Rates compare simulated 1900s births with random times and size-weighted towns, the clock-dependent ones scaled to the latitude band of Figueres.