Frederick the Great

Not one of his ten planets sits in a water sign. Fire takes four, earth and air three each, and five of the ten are fixed. The element that would register what any of it cost is absent from the chart of a king the record credits with turning a state into a great power through war. The same record says he played the flute and corresponded with Voltaire in between campaigns.

The Moon sits conjunct Saturn at under half a degree and its sign is certain. This is the hardest contact the Moon makes and also the most quietly capable: feeling under control, seriousness, dependability, and a childhood in which comfort was conditional or scarce. Mars sits directly opposite that same Saturn at four fifths of a degree, drive meeting refusal, and the Moon opposite the Mars at just over a degree and a quarter, so the three of them make one argument about what can be felt and what can be done about it. A king who made war and played the flute had a childhood in it somewhere, and this is the contact the record does not describe and the chart does.

The Sun sits on the fourth degree of Aquarius with Mars at twelve and Mercury at twenty one, three planets in the sign built on not being told, and Jupiter sits at nineteen degrees of Capricorn. The record's two halves, a war and a flute, are the sort of pairing a reader expects a chart to reconcile, and this one declines to: it gives the war no fire to spare and the flute no water at all. Saturn, Uranus and Pluto were the three retrograde planets.

He died at Potsdam on 17 August 1786, at seventy four. Saturn stood conjunct his natal Mars at three fifths of a degree that day and directly opposite its own natal place at just over a degree and a third, so the planet his Moon was born welded to was working both ends of the chart at once. Pluto sat conjunct that same natal Mars from a degree out. The Moon was at its last quarter and forty one per cent lit, a phase that rethinks the whole premise rather than the details.