Nicholas II

Fire takes five of his ten planets, earth two, water two and a single one air, and six of the ten sit in cardinal signs. The Moon, Jupiter, Neptune and Mars fill twenty two degrees of Aries, the sign that goes first. Saturn alone was retrograde. The record says Nicholas was the last tsar, that he abdicated in 1917, and that he was shot with his entire family in a cellar at Yekaterinburg the following year.

Two contacts sit inside fifteen hundredths of a degree and both involve the Sun. It sits in mild friction with Venus at six hundredths, taste slightly out of step with self worth, and in quiet contact with Mars at thirteen hundredths, which reads as effort coming easily and in one's own interest: physical confidence, and somebody who does not need to be talked into starting. A monarch who gave up a throne is about as flat a contradiction of that second reading as this project has printed, and the honest thing is to put the aspect and the record side by side and leave the gap visible.

Mercury sits in mild friction with Neptune at under a quarter of a degree, thinking that gets misty and a tendency to believe the version of events that feels best, and directly opposite Saturn at just over a degree and a quarter. Mars sits a fifth of a turn from Uranus at three fifths, quick reflexes. The Moon answers from Aries at nine and its sign is certain, where feelings arrive at full volume and leave again almost as fast. A monarch whose record is an abdication and a cellar gets a chart with its two tightest contacts running to Venus and Mars, and neither of them is the reason for either event.

He died at Yekaterinburg on 17 July 1918, at fifty. Pluto stood square his natal Jupiter at under four tenths of a degree that day, Neptune in easy contact with the same Jupiter at the same orb, and Uranus square his natal Sun at seven tenths. What the record describes is a decision other people took in a cellar, about him and about his children, and there is nothing in a birth chart that contains it or accounts for it. The Moon was at its first quarter and sixty per cent lit.