King Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud

The chart places four planets in earth signs, with two each in fire, air and water. Earth builds slowly and holds what it has, and nothing else is scarce enough to argue with it. Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud modernised his country, led the oil embargo of 1973, and was shot by his nephew, which is a record in which the building and the ending are both stated plainly and neither is softened.

The Sun sits at twenty three degrees of Aries, the sign that acts before it consults, while the Moon answers from Capricorn, which counts the cost and meets the obligation. That pairing is the structure of somebody who moves decisively and then administers what he has started, and a programme of modernisation imposed from the top requires exactly both halves rather than either one on its own. A programme of reform imposed from a throne needs the deciding and the administering in the same person.

Mercury sits square Uranus nine hundredths of a degree away from exact, which is the smallest gap the arithmetic allows: speech braced directly against the planet that breaks the established arrangement. Two T-squares run through the chart and both of them hold Mercury, so the faculty of speech is under structural load twice over. Mercury, retrograde at his birth, is also the planet doing the carrying. For a king who governed by proclamation, the faculty of speech under that much structural load is the job itself.

He died at Riyadh on 25 March 1975, at sixty eight, shot by his nephew. The Sun had come back to his own sign of Aries, and Pluto stood opposite that natal Mercury within two fifths of a degree while squaring the Uranus it was already locked to. The planet of what cannot be negotiated, arriving on the one pairing his chart had held tightest since birth. The Moon that day was gibbous and ninety four per cent lit, which is the phase that keeps refining and rarely calls anything finished, which is a hard sky for an ending that was decided by somebody else.