You can read more about my approach to the astrology of fiction here.
To kick off the astrology of Person of Interest, there’s no better place to start than with the man who started it all, Harold Finch. If you haven’t watched the show, fair warning that this article will likely contain some spoilers (but it’s also been off the air for 6 years, so).
Harold Finch embodies the reclusive billionaire archetype. A brilliant programmer and technological genius, Harold often finds himself in the midst of the conflict between progress and moral responsibility. A core feature of his character is his protean identity, shifting between aliases all based on names of birds. Finch spent his career as the anonymous brain behind a wildly successful software company, preferring to work behind the scenes while his less technically proficient but more socially adept and charismatic friend served as the public face. During the show, Finch prefers to work alone from his abandoned library home base while sending his operatives into the field.
It should come as no surprise that Finch’s Sun is in Aquarius, the Sun’s sign of detriment. For Finch, identity is, more often than not, a liability. And his has been morphing and shifting since he was a teenager. Finch embodies Saturnian discipline, and he frequently wrestles with hard philosophical questions and the weight of the consequences of his actions.
Finch is someone who, for a long time, was able to build a philosophical and moral system rational enough to bypass emotional data and big, messy questions about morality. Unsurprisingly for a programmer, Finch’s moral philosophy involves strict boundaries and limits and has a certain utilitarian quality. In building his machine, he creates a clear demarcation in its purpose, which is to prevent pre-planned events which would cause significant casualties. And he initially rejects the notion that he has a responsibility to those smaller, individual threats the machine also identifies. He does this not out of callousness but out of a sense of respect for human nature. Does he dare disturb the universe? Finch understands that efforts to improve humanity often end up causing more greater harm and strives to strike a balance between saving lives and control.
This is a very Saturnian approach, one that involves drawing strict boundaries and building an incredibly complex system to interfere only to a certain level. Perhaps a more Jupiterian person might see a Machine like Finch’s as an opportunity to keep taking power toward an idealistic goal of improvement. Saturn has no such utopian illusions. Saturn imposes strict boundaries because she understands what happens when the wrong people have too much power and control.
Cancer rising may surprise some people (or not), but the placement of the chart ruler in Gemini is incredibly appropriate for Finch. He has a natural talent for taking things apart in order to understand how they work, a mercurial pursuit if there ever was one. Notably, both the ruler of the ascendant and the ruler of the tenth house fall in Gemini. Finch’s mercurial talents are doubly reinforced, and they play a big role in his reputation.
The Moon is also, in fact, associated with the mind. But it’s also associated with the people as a collective and a sense of responsibility toward one another. As airy and Saturnian as he is, Finch is fundamentally people-focused, and his work often comes from a deep sense of care. One of his earliest projects was a machine to supplement the memory of his father as he slowly succumbed to dementia.
Reflecting the tension between this watery rising and his airy chart, two major shifts in Finch’s life come when he is pulled out of his head and forced to reckon with realities of grief and the pain inherent in being human. First, 9/11 inspires Finch to being the process of building the machine. Second, his friend and long-time partner’s death spurs him to continue his friend’s work of intervening in the smaller, individual threats his machine had identified and that he had initially coded as irrelevant. It took a reminder of the personal consequences of his choices for him to set his sights on helping people as individuals, not just humanity as a collective.
Of course, his goals were always lunar. The Moon is the closest planet to the earth both literally and in the celestial spheres. It has associations with the people, and the goals of the machine are ultimately toward the common good. While some may assign this humanitarian streak to Finch’s Aquarius placements, I see his lunar rulership as equally if not more responsible for these inclinations. He simply takes this a step further when he chooses to begin intervening in the everyday violent crimes identified by the machine.
The placement of Finch’s ascendant ruler in the 12H along with the ruler of his 10H is very deliberate. Gemini’s mutability speaks to Finch’s various aliases, and the 12H reinforces his anonymity. We as the audience never even learn his given name. With the 10H ruler in the 12H, we see a person who is literally a silent partner, serving as the brains behind his company completely unbeknownst to everyone except his partner. Most of his chart falls in dark houses for a reason. Everything about his character speaks to hiddenness, solitude, and isolation.
In drawing up these charts, I had to think about how to speak to the concept of surveillance with astrology. After all, the ancients weren’t especially concerned with wire-tapping or CCTV cameras. I asked for some help on Twitter and got the expected answers of the 8H and the 12H, private places where nefarious activity often occurs. But one other idea was also affirmed by others—the 10H as the highest point in the chart, overcoming the ascendant, plays a role in this as well. In horary charts, for instance, the 10H can represent authority figures. (Another note: the emphasis on air is also deliberate, particularly with the rise in mass surveillance as great conjunctions between Jupiter and Saturn have shifted into air signs).
The ruler of the 10H in the 12H certainly speaks to a career spent lurking in the shadows, working in secret. But it also speaks to the product of that career, a secretive machine designed to sift through data and identify serious threats of violence and harm. The Machine is, quite literally, hidden. At any given time, maybe a dozen or so people in the world know for certain that it exists, and they have a habit of turning up dead. Its location is also a mystery even to most of those people. The ruler of the 1H copresent with the ruler of the 10H speaks to the alliance between Harold and his creation, the way that the machine is perhaps the only person who truly knows him and truly understands him.
Additionally, what describes data turning into action better than Mars in Gemini? Mars is furthermore indicative of both the ends and the means of the machine—designed to prevent violence and doing so often through violent means. Mars in Gemini in this case is a representative of precise and targeted violence, dictated by a Saturnian Mercury operating from a strict moral code.
I also want to highlight Venus as the ruler of the 11H, placed in the 7H with triplicity dignity and a co-presence with Saturn. Prior to the show, one of most important people in Harold’s life (one of the only people really) is his friend and business partner Nathan Ingram, the public face to Harold’s reclusive genius. While the 7H is naturally associated with marriage partners, it is just as representative of business partners. And how better to see going into business with a friend than through L11 in the 7H? Venus here shows Nathan as the sociable one, the one who is good with people. Saturn adds a longevity here, and we know this partnership and friendship continued until Nathan’s untimely death. Following his death, Finch feels duty-bound to continue his friends’ work of helping those he had once deemed irrelevant. Finch exemplifies devotion, and he has a romantic streak that’s so telling of a Capricorn Venus.
While Saturn in the 7H lends itself to some degree of loneliness, the relationships Finch does form involve a deep and lasting loyalty. Saturn in Capricorn, after all, does serve as the final dispositor for the chart. As much as he remains isolated, Saturn tethers Finch to other people, without whom he would be entirely ineffectual. Harold Finch needs his close relationships as much as he resists intimacy within them. Despite faking his death for his fiancée’s protection, he remarks once that he will get to grow old with her, just not together. What could be more Venus/Saturn?
What about the actor?
Michael Emerson, who plays Harold Finch, spent a good portion of his career playing cunning, sinister villains. His vocal cadence is certainly unique, and his monotone can easily read ominous. Person of Interest is a distinct shift, and we get to see a softer side of his work.
Even without a confirmed birth time, Emerson’s chart has some interesting parallels to my hypothetical chart and speaks in its own ways to Finch’s character. For starters, both charts are heavily mercurial and saturnian, with Finch being the airy version and Emerson himself embodying the earthier side of these planets. Interestingly, the Moon/Mars conjunction I hypothesized in Harold’s chart shows up again in Emerson’s, as does the Venus/Saturn conjunction.
Although he obviously doesn’t share the same interests or career path as Harold Finch, his chart line’s up with Harold’s nature in a pretty fascinating way. His relative monotone certainly feels very Saturnian, and this distinctive vocal feature figuring so prominently in his career speaks also to Mercury.
If you liked this post, stay tuned for more analysis on Person of Interest. And if you have any TV shows or movies you’d like my take on, let me know!