Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

Not one of his ten planets sits in an earth sign. Air and water take four each with two in fire, and five of the ten are cardinal with a single mutable. Venus, Jupiter and Neptune fill six degrees of Libra. The record says Lula da Silva is a Brazilian president and a former metalworker who returned to office after prison.

No earth at all, in a man the record introduces as a metalworker, is an inverse worth putting first. Earth is the element of what gets made and handled, and a reader who knows the trade will expect it to be the heaviest thing in the chart. It is empty. The weight sits instead in air and water, which are the elements of what gets said and what gets felt, and for a record that also contains an office, a prison and a return that is not obviously the wrong arrangement. It is simply not the one the first fact predicts.

Mars sits conjunct Saturn at under a quarter of a degree, and the reading is controlled force: discipline, stamina, cold effectiveness, and somebody who works long past the point where other people stop. For a record whose shape is a trade, an office, a prison and then the office again, stamina is the reading that meets the whole sentence rather than any one part of it. Mars also sits a fifth of a turn from Neptune at fourteen hundredths of a degree, the closest contact here, which is effort with imagination behind it: action that benefits from feel rather than from force. The two together give drive that is disciplined and intuitive at once, which is a flattering pair and a commonplace one.

Saturn sits a fifth of a turn from that same Neptune at under four tenths of a degree, imagination made durable, so all three planets of the tightest group reach each other in every available direction. His Moon sits two arcminutes into Leo at noon with Cancer still possible, which is about as marginal as a placement can be, so it is left out, though the cost is low here because both contacts running to it are loose ones. Venus sits sixty degrees from Pluto at a degree and a quarter, loyalty that survives difficulty. Uranus alone was retrograde. Jupiter came back to its Libra birth degree on 22 June 2017, at seventy one, and five laps precede it. Libra asks who else was in the room.