Paris, 31st August 1997. The dashboard clock shows 00:25. A luxurious limousine, launched at full speed to escape the pack of its pursuers, collided with terrible violence against one of the pillars of the Pont de l’Alma. At dawn, media around the world announce the news of Lady Diana’s death. In a few minutes, a junk princess is transformed into a modern myth, the untouchable madonna of the poor of the Earth. The one whom the media crucified on the front pages of scandalous newspapers suddenly rises to the right hand of God, by the grace of the same “journalists”.
.png "Thème de naissance pour Diana Spencer — Thème écliptique — AstroAriana")
.png "Thème de naissance pour Diana Spencer — Thème de domitude — AstroAriana")
.png "Thème de naissance pour Diana Spencer — Hiérarchie des Planètes — AstroAriana")
When Diana Frances Spencer was born in Sandringham (52° 50′ N, 0° 30′ E) on 1st July 1961 at 18:45 UT, his father is not very satisfied at first. Viscount Althorp, 8th Earl Spencer, would have preferred to have a boy. That’s the only side “tomboy” of little Diana. Before going on to study her natal chart and the myth that she became after her death, let us briefly recall what background she comes from and what type of childhood she had: these influences forge our character as surely as our astral chart.
Diana was born into a very wealthy gentry family. During her young years, she never lacked anything materially, but almost everything emotionally. His parents didn’t get along. Her father, cold and distant, was absent most of the time. Her mother, who spent her time bemoaning her suppressed ambitions and the failure of her marriage, entrusted the education of Diana and her younger brother to nannies who succeeded each other at a hectic pace. They divorced when Diana was only 8 years old. It was a trauma for her and a first for the English aristocracy.
From gloomy castles to boarding schools for wealthy young girls, Diana was educated to hold her rank as the scion of a noble family. Not enough to make anyone happy. Not gifted at all for studies, she only liked dancing, but had to give up this passion because of her too large size. The rest, you probably know: the unhappy marriage with Prince Charles in 1981, their separation in 1992, the birth of two princes, eighteen years of media frenzy and photogenic scandals…
The dominant planetary configuration in Lady Diana’s chart is the conjunction Sun-Mercury who lies down in the Sign of Cancer. A certain astrology has made Mercury the planet of intelligence. However, the princess did not shine, to say the least, by her intellectual qualities. Perhaps it would be better to speak, about Mercury, from “good intelligence”, that is to say, the ability to communicate, to seek to spontaneously enter into contact with others. In this sense Diana, who was always a funny, playful, communicative person, even in the most dramatic periods she lived through, was indeed a “mercurian”. She had the qualities, but also the faults: superficiality, dispersion, inconsistency. Still about Mercury, one of his biographers recounts his “sense of humor without malice, at times laden with self-mockery”: when you’re Mercurian, you may be a princess, but you don’t always manage to take yourself completely and all the time seriously…
Diana was not only mercurian: she was also powerfully influenced by the Sun. A dominant sun gives the need to appear, to be recognized, unconditionally accepted and admired not for what one does, but for what one represents. On this side, she did very, very strong: “She is sensitive to criticism from the newspapers but nevertheless continues, despite the pleas of her friends, to swallow every word they write about her… Happy to be praised, she is distressed when she is criticized”, remarks Andrew Morton, her authorized biographer, while one of the friends points out that “His deepest fear is to be forgotten or rejected”.
With a conjunction Sun-Mercury Dominant in Cancer, Diana was at the same time extremely sociable, open, ready for all encounters (Mercury) as long as she was on familiar ground, in collusion (Sun) but also very concerned about protecting herself from the outside world (Cancer): “When she feels confident, she takes up space and knocks down obstacles. But as soon as her armor takes a hit, she goes back into her shell.”
Sun-Mercury paradox in Cancer: we want to open up to others, but be able to protect ourselves at all times. We want to catch their attention, attract their indulgent sympathy, do the interesting so that they are interested in us, but we don’t want to be invaded. According to one of her close friends, Diana “encourages familiarity, but when someone gets too close, she closes off, terrified that someone who knows her well will find she has less to offer than you might imagine seeing her”. We cannot better describe Sun-Mercury in Cancer. She has the same kind of reactions with the troop of journalists who follow her every move: “Sometimes she would happily go skiing with the journalists and the next moment burst into tears in front of the photographers, begging them to leave her alone.”
People strongly marked by Cancer and Virgo (this is the case of Lady D.) powerfully feel the need to put barriers between themselves and the outside world. In a closed environment with well-defined borders, they feel safe from real or imaginary attacks. Cancerian Diana’s protective shell wanted to contain everything. Description of her drawing room at Kensington Royal Palace: “Her living room, cluttered with an innumerable crowd of earthenware animals, framed photos, enamel boxes and figurines that bring her comfort, gives her the image of a woman who tries to protect herself from the inroads from the outside world.”
In the R.E.T. system (initials of Representation-Existence-Transcendence) discovered by the astrologer Jean-Pierre Nicola, the Sun and Mercury have one thing in common: these two planets raise awareness of Extensive representation, which concerns the need to appear, to disseminate and deploy one’s image, to be implicitly recognized and valued. For ordinary mortals, a dominant Sun-Mercury conjunction makes, positively, sociable individuals, having a great thirst to be an obvious center of interest within their group. On the negative side, it makes them dependent on the esteem and opinion of others, unconsciously narcissistic and overly impressionable.
Lady D. did not belong to ordinary mortals: prominent figure, aristocrat married to a member of a royal family, this tendency to “extensive representation” has taken on monumental proportions. Placed permanently in the spotlight to the frenetic rhythm of the trumpets of fame, she could not resist the temptation of glory, celebrity and glitter: “How to escape self-centeredness, when half the world is watching everything you do”, asks his biographer A. Morton. Less forgiving, a friend of the Queen observes that she “can no longer do without the limelight that her marriage has shone on her. It’s like a drug. To feed this insatiable desire, she is ready to do anything.”
.png "Thème de naissance pour Élisabeth d’Angleterre — Thème écliptique — AstroAriana")
.png "Thème de naissance pour Élisabeth d’Angleterre — Thème de domitude — AstroAriana")
.png "Thème de naissance pour Élisabeth d’Angleterre — Hiérarchie des Planètes — AstroAriana")
Queen Elizabeth of England, it is true, was born under a dominant Mars-Jupiter-Saturn and with a Sun “blind” which easily distances her from the seductions and temptations of the media and Representation: nothing to do with the Princess of Wales. The funeral oration of Diana, prisoner of the Permanent Representation, was without indulgence but prophetically pronounced in 1992 by the Bishop of Petersborough: “When you live through the media, you have to die through the media.”
A dominant Sun-Mercury conjunction also encourages you to bend to the expectations of others to be better accepted… at the risk of experiencing the most extreme difficulties in being yourself. We are then transformed into an attractive image, a media puppet with a deserted interiority, with devastated intimacy… or else we scrupulously conform to the codes and implicit rules of our social environment to avoid disappointment, being rejected, frowned upon, misunderstood: “When I go to the Palace for a garden party or a summit meeting, observed Lady Diana, I am a completely different person. I conform exactly to what is expected of me, so that they cannot find fault with me when I am in their company.”
At other times, when one is less prisoner or more aware of one’s image, the same dominant Sun-Mercury conjunction pushes one to be spontaneous, natural in human relationships. Such behavior was for Diana, already corseted by a severe aristocratic education, almost antinomic with the strict etiquette of British royalty, which requires its members to show themselves in a cold, austere, stuffy light. Her mercurian dominance no longer able to bear this heavy straitjacket, Diana tried in her naive and clumsy way to change the image of the Crown: “His ambition would be to create a more relaxed style, made of spontaneity and simplicity mixed together.” The best that Sun-Mercury could have given in this very particular context. His divorce and his death left him neither the time nor the opportunity…
Diana was known to be a great seductress, almost a sex symbol… and yet, unlike Marilyn Monroe or Brigitte Bardot for example, Venus is not at all dominant in its chart. In reality, she experienced the greatest difficulty in spontaneously experiencing her affectivity. With an undervalued Venus, opposed to Neptune and square to Mars-Uranus, she experienced the feelings as a dangerous vertigo over which she had no control and which, at the limit, frightened her.
As soon as she separated from Prince Charles, she was beset by packs of suitors. Unlike the scandalous and free Sarah Ferguson (born under a conjunction Venus-Pluto dominant), Diana did not have an erotic and desirous nature: “As soon as they start telling me that everyone is madly in love with me, it’s immediate rejection. I find it repulsive”, she confessed. According to psychologist Dennis Friedman, who knew her well as a patient, “Diana is looking for love from a distance, an idyll by phone, not the real union”. She asked men less to seduce her, to live a real relationship as a couple, than to distract her without her feeling too involved in the relationship (here we find her mercurian dominance, little inclined to affective fixations).
Love in Diana, it is perhaps rather to seek it on the side of the trine than Neptune sends to its Sun-Mercury conjunction: a quivering sensitivity towards (aside?) the marginalized, the excluded, those who have failed life which has contributed to shaping his myth of “princess of the destitute”. Generous and compassionate, Lady D.? Yes, but as long as generosity and compassion put her in the spotlight on TVs and magazines… And then after all, take care of “good works” is never more than a social obligation of a princess. Diana never gave up her lifestyle of unbridled luxury to put her fortune at the service of the poor.
What is a myth? According to the definitions, it is either the transposition, on the level of the legend, of the imagination, of collectively lived realities, or a pure construction of the mind not resting on any reality, a symbolic representation influencing social life. Humanity has always needed myths. In her early days, she transformed the unknown forces of nature into mythical gods. When the myth of the unique and bearded God faltered in the West, the myth of Progress replaced it. Even the rationalists most opposed to mythologies have mythologized reasoning reason, the supreme principle of universal man. To each people, to each era its myths.
Our time, precisely, and especially in the West, is well orphan of myths. The gods no longer make recipes. Progress, we no longer believe in it. Reasoning reason crumbles into the immense unknown of a cosmos that is definitively elusive by this means alone. There is indeed the cult of the Golden Calf, of money-king, a pathetic modern rehash of a very old myth… but it does not speak to our souls, it does not stimulate our imagination, it does not give metaphysical meaning to our lives.
At the end of a century and millennium disoriented in these increasingly individualistic societies where the ancient collective bond cemented by the unconsciously shared belief in the same mythical values is dissolving, we no longer know what to cling to, identify with, in what patterns we recognize. We live more and more in a world of images, virtual or not, in a world of television glitz that tries to make us forget the difficult prospects facing the human species.
What is Lady D.? A modern myth. Her poor life as a rich little girl locked in a golden cage has become a legend. Never mind her pathetic and true existence: basically, Lady D. is only a construction of the collective mind. We want to recognize ourselves in a beautiful and rich princess full of media compassion. And too bad if in reality she was just a bulimic, neurotic and unhappy child. Myth is a pure representation that mocks concrete existence. In essence, the myth is unrealistic: “‘I would never call her realistic’ is a remark that often comes from her friends”, notes A. Morton. Diana lived in a world of images. It had become a collective image, that is to say a myth.
In the R.E.T. system, the formula of the Sun, dominant in Lady Diana, is the “representation of Representation”, which means the maintenance and reproduction of the image, the principle, the symbol… and therefore of the myth. Being herself a public image in perpetual representation, and given her situation as a pretty princess from a fairy tale (fairy tales are also myths), she had no difficulty, for the better (which one?) and above all for the worse, to put on the uniform of myth: she lent her flank, through the strong solar component of her personality, to all mythifications and mystifications.
What if Diana hadn’t died so young? Would she have managed to get rid of this cumbersome image? Nothing less certain: microphones, lenses and cameras attracted him irresistibly. It would have taken superhuman effort to become herself. It was not, however, totally impossible: Brigitte Bardot, radiant like Diana, managed to break the company of mythification of which she was the object at the same age. And then if Diana became a myth, it is because she died, and not because she was alive. If she were still alive, she would probably only be an image hunted down by image hunters, in other words a vulgar starlet. Her life was a mystification, her death sanctified her, elevated her to the rank of myth.
“Lucidity is the wound closest to the Sun”, said the poet. Reading her biographers, Diana seemed to realize lucidly, at the end of her short life, how much she was never herself and how much she needed to find herself. The paparazzi who were chasing their anxious, recalcitrant and consenting prey did not give him time, but the most famous Cancer of the media has not finished making metastases…
Article published in issue No. 3 of the Astrologie naturelle (July 1998).
Le petit livre du Cancer
par
49 pages. Illustrations en couleur.
Ce livre présente et explique les trois zodiaques : celui du décor des constellations, celui de l’astrologie traditionnelle basé sur les Quatre Éléments symboliques (Feu, Terre, Air & Eau) et celui de l’astrologie naturelle basé sur les phénomènes astronomiques objectifs.
Interprétation du Cancer selon la symbolique classique et selon ses réflexes dans le zodiaque naturel (force, vitesse, équilibre) ; interprétation du Cancer en fonction des planètes dominantes ; le Signe solaire & le Signe Ascendant.
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