Anne, Princess Royal

Water takes four of her ten planets, earth three, fire two and a single one air, with four of the ten mutable. The Moon, Mercury and Saturn sit inside five degrees of Virgo, which is a very tight group of three. The record calls Anne the hardest working member of the royal family by engagement count, and an Olympic equestrian for Britain in 1976.

Mercury sits conjunct Saturn at thirteen hundredths of a degree, close enough to call exact, and the reading is disciplined thought: precision, a serious and often slow mind that arrives at better answers than quicker ones, and a person who does not speak until they are sure. Both planets sit in Virgo, the sign built on doing something properly and being useful, and the Moon is in the group with them, so what she needs, how she thinks and what limits her are all in one register four degrees wide. The record's other fact is an Olympic equestrian place in 1976, which that group of three does nothing whatever to explain.

A record whose first fact is a count of public engagements rather than any single achievement is the rare case where a chart's claim can be set beside something measurable, and precision with a serious slow mind is a fair match for a working life that is counted by attendance. It is also the sort of reading that would flatter any civil servant, and this entry claims no more than that. Mercury sits in quiet contact with Pluto at three quarters of a degree as well, depth without strain: strategy, persuasion, and an unusual tolerance for uncomfortable information.

Mercury sits in mild friction with Mars at over four fifths of a degree, thought and drive colliding: impatience with slower thinkers, and saying the true thing in the most damaging available way, which is the one contact here a reader may well have an opinion about already. Saturn sits in quiet contact with Pluto at under nine tenths, durable strength and authority that has genuinely been earned, and the Sun in mild friction with Uranus at the same orb, the urge to break out arriving at the wrong moment. The Moon's sign is certain at fourteen degrees of Virgo, and Venus sits on the last degree and a half of Cancer. Jupiter alone was retrograde. Jupiter came back to its Pisces birth degree on 17 January 2022, at seventy one, and five laps precede it.