Mohammed VI of Morocco

Mohammed VI became king of Morocco in 1999, succeeding his father, which is a job nobody applies for and the only one on this record.

He was born at Rabat on 21 August 1963 with the Sun on the twenty eighth degree of Leo, the sign the Sun rules and the sign of the throne in every tradition that has one. Identity there is unusually solid and unusually visible, with a pride that treats criticism as an attack rather than as information. Inheriting a position rather than winning it does not test a Leo Sun; it confirms it, which is the easier and the more dangerous of the two.

Four planets group in Virgo: the Moon, Mercury, Uranus and Pluto, with the Moon conjunct Mercury within a degree and a third. Virgo is doing the thing properly and being useful, and having feeling and speech fused inside it describes a ruler more administrative than rhetorical. Four planets in earth against one in water supports the same reading: a chart that manages rather than emotes. For an inherited throne rather than an elected office, that is the more useful of the two temperaments.

Jupiter makes an easy angle to Saturn seven minutes of arc from exact, which is the most precise thing in the chart and an unusually fortunate one for anybody holding an institution. Expansion and limit on good terms is the configuration of a reign that neither overreaches nor calcifies, at least on the chart's own terms. Both planets are retrograde, which turns the same qualities inward: reform conducted quietly rather than announced, which is how a king who succeeded in 1999 has spent a quarter of a century in the job without the job changing hands.

Jupiter arrived back at its starting degree in April 2023, five months after Saturn had done the same. Two slow planets closing their circuits within one year is a marker rather than an event, and on a chart whose best aspect is the agreement between them, it is the one worth noting.