Libra is the sign of the scales, and the scales are the only symbol in the zodiac that is not a living creature. That is the first clue to the sign.

Libra is not about the self at all. It is about the space between selves, the relationship, the balance struck between you and another, and it is ruled by Venus and devoted to harmony, beauty, fairness, and peace. Where the first six signs build an individual, Libra opens the door at the exact center of the wheel and discovers other people, and it spends the rest of its life trying to meet them halfway.

The Libra hunger is for union, for the other half that completes the picture, and its great talent is for partnership and its great cause is peace. John Lennon was born with the Sun in Libra sitting directly on the Descendant, the precise point in the chart that represents the other person, and conjunct the North Node, the marker of destiny.

The chart could hardly say it more plainly. This was a man whose entire purpose ran through relationship, and who would spend his fame, and ultimately his life, in the service of harmony.

Begin with partnership, because nothing about Lennon makes sense without it. Libra cannot work alone, and Lennon never did. His genius was always a duet. First there was Lennon and McCartney, the most successful songwriting partnership in the history of popular music, a collaboration so balanced that the two names are still spoken as a single unit, each man sharpening and completing the other exactly as the scales require.

Then, when that partnership dissolved, he simply built another one, throwing himself into an all consuming creative and romantic union with Yoko Ono so total that they recorded together, protested together, and appeared together as a matched pair, two halves presented as one.

The Sun on the Descendant is the signature of a person who experiences themselves most fully in the presence of another, who finds identity not by standing alone but by joining, and Lennon lived that with an intensity that sometimes baffled the people around him. He needed the other. It was written into the most personal point of his chart.

Now the cause, which is the same impulse aimed at the whole world. With the Sun in Libra he carried the sign's instinct for peace, and with Mars also in Libra he did the most characteristic thing a person with that placement can do. He fought for it.

Mars is the planet of war and aggression, and Libra is the sign least suited to it, so Mars in Libra takes all that combative energy and points it at the goal of harmony, which produces the strange and wonderful figure of the peace warrior, the person who goes to battle on behalf of not battling.

Lennon turned his celebrity into a weapon for reconciliation. He staged bed-ins for peace, treating his own honeymoon as a press conference for nonviolence. He wrote Give Peace a Chance and handed the antiwar movement its anthem. And in Imagine he composed the purest distillation of the Libra dream ever set to music, a world with no countries and no possessions and nothing to divide one person from another, the scales finally balanced for all of humanity at once.

That utopian, universal note is sharpened by his Moon in Aquarius, the sign of the brotherhood of man, which lifts the Libra longing for one good relationship up to the scale of the entire species. You may say he was a dreamer, and the chart agrees, and tells you exactly which planets were doing the dreaming.

But Libra is balance, and a chart this devoted to peace would be a lie if it did not contain its opposite, and Lennon's does, written across the most visible axis in the sky. His Libra Sun sits opposite an Aries Ascendant, which means the face he showed the world, the instinctive personality, belonged to the sign of war.

Aries is the fighter, blunt, combative, quick to anger, and this was equally and famously Lennon. He was acid tongued and confrontational, capable of real cruelty, and he admitted late in life to a history of aggression and violence he was ashamed of.

His Mercury in Scorpio gave the same edge to his words, a penetrating, wounding wit that could draw blood, audible in the savagery of a song like How Do You Sleep and in the raw, scabbed-over pain of his most confessional writing. So the man was a living set of scales with a heavy weight in each pan.

On one side the Aries fist and the Scorpio tongue, on the other the Libra Sun and the Aquarian dream of universal love. He was war and peace in a single body, and the reason his peace activism rang true rather than sounding naive is that everyone could feel the violence it was holding back. He was not a gentle man preaching gentleness. He was a furious man choosing, in public and on purpose, to fight for its opposite.

That same Mercury in Scorpio, set against the steadying weight of Saturn, also points to the wound underneath the whole enterprise. Lennon's childhood was marked by abandonment, an absent father and a mother, Julia, who was killed when he was seventeen, and the grief of it runs through his work like a fault line, in Mother and Julia and the long howl of his primal-scream period.

Libra is the sign that cannot bear to be alone, and it is hard not to read his lifelong desperate reaching for partnership as a man trying to mend, through union after union, a bond that had been broken when he was a boy. The need for the other was not only an aesthetic preference for harmony. It was a Libra trying to heal.

He was murdered at forty, on a New York street, by a stranger, an end so brutally opposed to everything he stood for that the world has never quite finished grieving it. There is a terrible Libra symmetry even in that, the apostle of peace destroyed by a single act of senseless violence, the scales knocked to the floor.

But what he left tilts the balance back. He spent his gifts trying to join people to one another, in song, in marriage, in a movement, and in one quiet anthem that still asks the whole species to imagine living as one. That is the Libra mission in its highest form. He did not just want harmony for himself. He wanted to hand it to everyone, and he very nearly convinced us it was possible.