The Woman Who Glowed in the Dark

It was late, and they should have gone home.

Instead, Marie and Pierre Curie walked back through the dark Paris streets to the shed: a leaky old building with a glass roof that let in the rain, freezing in winter and stifling in summer. A visiting German chemist called it a cross between a stable and a potato cellar. They didn't light the lamps.

They didn't need to. On the shelves, in glass tubes and little dishes, something was glowing: faint, bluish, impossible. Marie later wrote that the glimmers seemed to hang suspended in the darkness, and that coming back at night to see them was one of their great joys.

It had taken years of stirring boiling vats of crushed rock with an iron rod almost as tall as she was. Now here it was, shining as if it were alive. It was the greatest discovery of her life. It was also what would kill her.

Five traditions read her birthday. Four describe her perfectly. One gets her completely wrong. Keep reading.

IThe Fire Rabbit

In the Chinese zodiac, Maria Skłodowska was born in the year of the Fire Rabbit. The Rabbit is the zodiac's gentle soul: kind, refined, cautious, fond of comfort and peace. As a little girl in Warsaw, the shy, bookish youngest of five children of two teachers, she fitted it well enough.

But Warsaw wasn't gentle. The city was ruled by the Russian Empire, and Polish children were taught in Russian by inspectors who checked they didn't learn too much about their own country. When Maria was eight, her oldest sister died of typhus. Two years later her mother died of tuberculosis.

She finished school at the top of her class, and then hit a wall: women were not allowed into university in Russian-ruled Poland. So she studied in secret, at the illegal "Flying University," which moved from house to house to stay ahead of the police.

Remember the Rabbit. We'll come back to it.

IIThe jewel in the forge

In Ba Zi, the Chinese Four Pillars, the heart of a chart is the Day Master, the element of the day you were born. Marie's is Yin Metal (辛), the jewel: precious, precise, a perfectionist. But her birth year was a Fire year, and in Ba Zi, Fire controls Metal. A jewel isn't made by being left alone. It is shaped in the forge.

Marie's forge began with a promise. Her sister Bronisława dreamed of studying medicine in Paris. Neither could afford it. So Maria would work as a governess and send money; when Bronya qualified, she'd pay for Maria. While she worked, Maria fell in love with the family's eldest son, and his parents forbade the marriage: a penniless governess wasn't good enough. She stayed in the job anyway, because Bronya needed the money.

She was 24 when she finally arrived in Paris. Her attic room was so cold that, the family story goes, she piled every piece of clothing she owned on her bed to sleep. Two years later, she finished first in her year in physics. Metal, refined by fire.

IIIThe partner

In Vedic astrology, which measures the zodiac against the stars, Marie's Sun is in Libra, the sign of partnership. In Paris she met Pierre Curie: shy, brilliant, as uninterested in money as she was. They married in 1895, and spent their honeymoon cycling around the French countryside.

Together they announced two new elements in 1898. She named the first polonium, after the country she'd had to leave. The second was radium. She also gave the world the word radioactivity.

But in Vedic tradition the Sun is considered weak in Libra: the placement of someone whose light struggles to be recognised. In 1903 the Nobel Prize in Physics was set to go to Pierre and Henri Becquerel. Not to Marie. A committee member warned Pierre, and Pierre insisted she be included. She became the first woman ever to win a Nobel Prize. She almost didn't.

IVThe hidden thing

In Western astrology, Marie was a Scorpio: the sign of intensity, obsession, hidden forces and transformation. She spent her life chasing something no one could see, a force inside matter that changes one element into another.

On a rainy April afternoon in 1906, Pierre slipped in a busy Paris street and was killed under the wheels of a horse-drawn wagon. Marie was 38, with two daughters. She kept a journal for months afterwards, written to him, as if he could still read it.

She took over his teaching post and became the first woman professor at the Sorbonne. At her first lecture, it's said, she began at the very sentence where his last lecture had ended. In 1911 she won a second Nobel Prize, in Chemistry. She is still the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. That same year the press attacked her private life, and a Nobel committee member suggested she stay away from the ceremony. She replied that her science had nothing to do with her private life, and went to Stockholm.

And all the while, the glowing thing she had found was slowly working inside her.

VThe Eagle

In the Maya's sacred 260-day calendar, her birthday is 13 Men, the Eagle: vision, seeing from high above what others cannot. When war came in 1914, she saw what the army hadn't. X-rays could find bullets inside wounded soldiers, but the machines were far from the front. So she fitted cars with X-ray equipment, learned to drive, and took them to the front herself, with her 17-year-old daughter Irène. Soldiers called them petites Curies.

She gave doctors the eagle's eye. And she never patented the way to produce radium. She believed it belonged to everyone.

VIThe one that got her wrong

So which tradition missed? The Rabbit. The gentle, comfort-loving Rabbit who avoids a fight. This is a woman who studied in an illegal school, slept in a freezing attic, refused to be left off her own Nobel Prize, and walked into a ceremony she'd been told to avoid. If Marie Curie was a Rabbit, she was a Rabbit that never once ran.

Unless you're in Vietnam, where the Rabbit's place belongs to the Cat. A Fire Cat, patient, fierce and impossible to scare off, sounds a lot more like her.

Have you ever been called "the gentle one," and quietly proved everyone wrong?

Marie Curie died on 4 July 1934, of a blood disease almost certainly caused by a lifetime of radiation. In 1995 she was laid to rest in the Panthéon in Paris, the first woman honoured there for her own achievements.

Her notebooks are still radioactive. They're kept in lead-lined boxes in France's national library, and anyone who wants to read them must sign a waiver.

More than a century later, her work is still glowing in the dark.