Diana, Princess of Wales

This is one of the few charts in this set with a rated birth time, so the houses can be used. The record gives a quarter to eight in the evening at Sandringham, rated A, which puts Sagittarius rising and allows the twelve divisions an unknown hour otherwise forbids. Earth takes four of her ten planets, water three, air two and a single one fire, with five of the ten fixed and four planets retrograde. The record calls Diana, Princess of Wales, one of the most photographed people of the twentieth century, remembered for her humanitarian work, and says she died in Paris in the early hours after a car crash.

Because the houses are available, a reader will find the thing this entry has to deal with before getting any further. Three of her planets sit in the eighth house: Mars, Uranus and Pluto. The eighth is the house conventionally attached to death and to what gets inherited, and she died at thirty six in a car crash in a tunnel. Those two facts are in the same paragraph here because keeping them apart would be worse, and the second does not come out of the first.

What three planets in the eighth house actually records is where the horizon stood over Norfolk at a quarter to eight on a July evening in 1961. A collision in Paris thirty six years later involved a car, a driver, a speed and a tunnel wall. No house division contains it, nothing in this chart predicted it, and a reader who feels the pull of that coincidence is feeling the pull of a filing system: houses are numbered from the ascendant, the ascendant depends on the minute of birth, and a different minute would have moved all three planets into different boxes without altering one thing about 1997.

The chart's own tightest contact is the Sun at an awkward angle to the Moon at under four tenths of a degree, and the reading is that the self being built and the comfort required want different things, which comes out as the person who cannot rest while succeeding or succeed while resting. In the most photographed woman of her century that is a reading a reader can do far too much with, and the record offers two facts to weigh it against: the photographs and the humanitarian work. Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune were the four retrograde planets. She died at Paris on 31 August 1997, at thirty six. One contact came inside half a degree, Neptune conjunct her natal Saturn at under a quarter. The Moon was balsamic and three per cent lit, and the standing reading printed for that phase is about finishing things and looking past them. It appears here because the phase was what it was. It is not a comment on the night, and a reader who makes it one is doing that without any help from this page.