Jayaram Jayalalithaa

Fire takes six of her ten planets, air three, a single one water and not one earth, and six of the ten were retrograde at her birth. Nothing here sits in the element that holds a thing where it was put, and the majority of the chart faces the other way. The record says Jayalalithaa was an Indian actress who became chief minister of Tamil Nadu six times.

The Sun sits on the fifth degree of Pisces, the sign that holds no fixed edge of its own and has real difficulty keeping a line. Against it, the Moon, Mars, Saturn and Pluto fill fifteen degrees of Leo, the sign that wants the room, with Mars, Saturn and Pluto all retrograde there. Her Moon sits at twenty eight degrees of Leo at noon, close enough to the next sign that it may have reached Virgo. For somebody who moved from film into six terms of office, a dissolving Sun against a reversed Leo group is the structure the whole record sits inside.

Jupiter is in three of the six closest contacts. Mars sits in easy contact with it at just over a fifth of a degree, effort that pays and well timed action; Mercury sits sixty degrees from it at four fifths, learning that comes easily; and it sits a fifth of the circle from Neptune at just under three fifths, generous imagination and a real ability to inspire other people. A mystic rectangle holds Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Uranus. Mercury also sits directly opposite Mars at just under three fifths, thought and drive colliding. In a record that moves from an actress to a chief minister six times over, a closed four sided figure is one that keeps finding a route through.

She died in Chennai on 5 December 2016, at sixty eight. Three separate bodies stood on her natal Saturn that day: the Moon directly opposite it at seventeen hundredths of a degree, Jupiter sixty degrees from it at half, and Mars opposite it at just over a degree and a third, while Saturn itself sat in easy contact with its own natal place at just over a fifth. The Moon was a crescent at twenty nine per cent, the phase that pushes against the weight of how a thing has always been done.