A Dieu, Princess Diana

As the pathetic details of Sunday morning's death of Diana, Princess of Wales emerge, the scenario becomes less surreal and more down-to-earth, but no less heart-breaking. As with John Lennon, Diana had re-emerged into public consciousness after a lot of inner re-creating, declaring her freedom from the imprisoned world of royalty. Some people would argue that you can't compare the two as historical figures, but I think within her own world, Diana took being a revolutionary as far as she could go. Even in our society that so desperately covets money and power, we know that the super-rich and famous have a hard time just being people. She was claiming her turf. That is a revolution. Watch her become canonized, a saint of the church of modern society. Patron of what I am not sure yet -- hopefully of the idea that you're a person no matter who you are. That was her real gift to the House of Windsor. Indeed, her death is tragic human loss. My deepest feeling, though, is that the Princess was a big girl, and her partner, Dodi Fayed, was a big boy, and between them they could have figured out how to have a designated driver. As she smashed into some solid object at 121 miles-per- hour-with a drunk chauffeur, and probably drunk and possibly drugged herself, Princess Diana was experiencing some very, very intense astrology. This included a tangled mess on her 8th house Pluto, including an exact transit of the Sun, Mercury retrograding onto it (those psychotic photographers on their motorcycles), and a solar eclipse about to happen right there. Di has always been very sensitive to eclipses, which have a knack for thrusting her into the public con- sciousness in not-so-positive ways. And my colleague Anne Black points out that Pluto is on the cusp of her natal 12th house, a transit she says has brought dozens of clients to her office at one death's door or another, pleading for mercy as their old life was stripped away from them, reciting a "litany of sorrow" as they lost a grip on their realities. Pluto's motto: Transform or die. In that state, it is possible to make the kind of a fatal error in judgment that Diana apparantly made. Neptune exactly transing her Saturn just reinforces this theme, of delusion and dissolution of structure, and a need to take special efforts to keep one's world intact -- and to be particularly cautious around alcohol or drugs of any kind, even prescription medications, as Neptune itself was being squared by Chiron. Finally, Uranus was exactly transiting the ruler of her ascendant, Jupiter. Here, we have "the gods of change," the outer planets, all working in concert within her natal chart to provoke some kind of huge upheaval. As the current planetary setup unfolds in the next three weeks, we will certainly learn a lot more and see this in new ways. Mercury will station in about a week, and the Moon, the Goddess Diana, will be eclipsed. We shall see. I don't know who her astrologer is, but I hope he or she warned her that these few weeks would be a touchy time. I am warning you. We have yet to go through what could be a tumultuous Mercury stationing direct on the 8th, a very disruptive Moon-wobble phenomenon at around the same time, a lunar eclipse, and then finally, mercifully, the Fall Equinox. Take it easy till then. Don't get so drunk that you forget your hotel room number, and please, put on a few extra security guards. None of us were there, but let's take a trip back to the scene of the disaster using astrology as a guide. It was Saturday night in Paris, a beautiful midnight in late summer, starring two people newly in love just coming from a dinner party. Not exactly a time when prudent judgment is running high. To the contrary, at the time of the crash and for about two hours before, there was an exact Moon-Jupiter opposition -- classic astrology of Dionysian excess, with the Moon throwing all that Piscean Jupiter energy out of whack. In an accident chart set for 12:05 am CED, Paris ("just after midnight" as quoted by the police), the Moon ruled the third house of local transportation -- the chauffeur. In horary, the Moon also indicates the main subject of the chart, and is an apt significator for the Princess as well, particularly named after the Moon goddess herself; both she and her driver are afflicted by the same thing at the same time. And Jupiter rules the 7th -- everyone else. My hunch is that they were partying with the driver, and maybe he turned them onto something a little more interesting than booze, something that boosted their confidence and colored their judgment. Or perhaps prescription drugs were involved; Chiron's square to Neptune suggests this is a possibility. Whatever the exact chemical combination -- and there are plenty of them in this world -- you have to be pretty out of sorts yourself to get in the car with a blotto chauffeur, whose blood contained nearly 2,000 ppm alcohol -- nearly *one-fifth of one percent pure alcohol in his blood* -- double what we would call criminally drunk in America, and triple in France. Someone of the three people in that car could have felt the vibes and said, "Stop the show." When you're rich and don't drive your own car, I equate *having* a drunk driver to *being* a drunk driver. By whatever miracle, they managed to die without taking out 10 or 20 other people in other cars with them. The Moon's next stop was sextile to Venus in the 5th house of romance and risky behaviors, and no doubt there was also what you could call an air of dare-devil energy, and what I feel was an erotic distortion on their judgment. What fun to go blazing through the Paris night, drunk and hot and horny, chased by wild journalists at 121 miles per hour. The Moon's next and last stops for the evening were aspects to Saturn -- the wall -- which was approaching an exact opposition to Venus, and then moments later, to the Lunar Nodes, which represent the coming eclipse, which can feel like a very solid object approaching until you get there and realize it's a vortex, a door. The nodes also represent all of us who are thinking about this, the mass public. The Sabian Symbol for the Part of Fortune in the crash chart is 4 Cancer 44, "At a railroad crossing, an automobile is wrecked by a train" -- what happens when the individual will and the collective will collide. Indeed, astrology has always been remarkably revealing in Princess Di's life, and this has been true very much in spite of fact that nobody has ever been able to nail down her birth time. This has presented big lessons for astrologers. For anyone who wants to look into this yourself, I will briefly relate the history as told by Geoffrey Cornelius in his excellent book on horary and divination, *The Moment of Astrology.* I suggest you read the chapter which focuses on these charts -- it's very revealing about the nature of our astrology, as is the entire book. At the time of her public emergence, Buckingham Palace said Princess Di was born July 1, 1961 in Sandringham (00E30, 52N50) at 2 p.m. British Summer Time (BST). Astrologers worked with this chart for years, and it functioned very well. Later, Buckingham corrected the birth time to 7:45 BST that evening, and this became the "official" time. Note that BST is *summer* time and *not* standard time, according to Raphael's, the leading British astrological publisher. This chart worked very, very well, too -- down to zero-degree orb progressions and transits, as did the 2 pm chart. Over the years, three other possible birth times have emerged in interviews and private communications with the Princess: 2:15 p.m., 7:29 p.m. and then "late in the afternoon," meaning the truth is very, very hazy. Lois Rodden currently reports that the "real" time is 7:45 p.m. British Daylight Time, which is the same as "summer" time, which ACS reports was indeed in effect at the time. I have favored the 7:45 p.m. chart because it is an accurate picture of her life, if not an accurate birth time -- I and can report the following in relation to her death. I already mentioned that the whole episode of her death centered around her 8th house Pluto in a very complex natal setup in that house (which rules death, sex, money and power). Mars and Uranus there suggest a sudden, unexpected and violent death, and an eclipse can surely activate that phenomenon. An eclipse on Pluto in the 8th, all by itself, is powerful death symbolism. The North Node in that house suggests a need to live on the edge. And the Part of Fortune there suggests that she would find her fortune through the values and money of others, and also indicates that she placed a real value on death as an escape from physical existence. It is remarkable that in her death chart (4 a.m. CDT on the 31st of August in Paris, attributed to the attending physician) the degree rising is the *exact degree of her natal Part of Fortune in the 8th*, and the death Part of Fortune exactly conjoins her 8th house Uranus, an apt association for sudden death. If these death charts bear Diana's signature, these Parts of Fortune are it. The nature of the 8th house is to draw us into it, to seduce us with dark passions and pleasures, with the lure of money and power that surpass the ego's ability to resist, and in her case appear to have been very much a part of an evolu- tionary calling. Sometimes with powerful 8th house types, that temptation or calling is very, very strong, and cir- cumstances of the outer world always play into things. And certainly, Princess Di lived most of her life in that world, the world of more than anything you can possibly imagine, and very little of some very basic things. If you live that way, it's necessary to really keep a grip on the fact that your energy, your choices, your ideas are the sum total of your destiny -- if, of course, you want to come out of any particular tunnel into which you disappear. Sometimes I find the best astrological interpretations come from my non-astrologer friends.