Joan of Arc

The record's last sentence is the place to start: the birth date is traditional. Everything below is cast for 6 January 1412 because that is the date handed down, which makes this a chart for a handed-down date rather than for a register. Earth and air take four of the ten planets each, with a single one apiece in fire and water, and four of the ten are cardinal. The record says Joan of Arc led French forces at seventeen on the strength of visions, was captured, tried and burned at nineteen, and was declared a saint nearly five centuries later.

With that caveat standing over the whole entry, the second closest contact here is the one a reader will not forget. The Moon sits in direct opposition to Mercury at under four fifths of a degree, and the reading is that what is felt and what is said pull apart, which it describes as the specific frustration of not being able to explain something that is perfectly clear internally. A vision is exactly that, and a trial is an attempt to make somebody explain one.

The fit is strong enough to need dismantling rather than admiring. That reading was written as a general statement about an angle between two planets, and handed to everybody born across a stretch of days. It names no vision and no court. The trial at Rouen was conducted by people with a political interest in its verdict, and the burning was carried out by other people on their instruction. Nothing in ten planets contains any of it, and a chart cast for a date the record itself calls traditional is in no position to claim otherwise.

Mercury sits in mild friction with Uranus at under a fifth of a degree, the tightest contact of all, thought jumping the rails: changing position abruptly, and being right in a way nobody else has the context to follow. The Sun sits at an awkward angle to Pluto at three quarters, identity in a power struggle: confrontation with authority. The Moon's sign is certain at twenty four degrees of Gemini, and Saturn, Neptune and Pluto were the three retrograde planets. Death came at Rouen on 30 May 1431, at nineteen. The transiting Sun stood square the natal Mars at under three tenths of a degree that day and in easy contact with the natal Uranus at a third. The Moon was at its first quarter and seventy per cent lit. For a record of three facts and a date handed down, those are the two contacts worth naming and there is nothing behind them.