Catherine the Great

There is something unshakeable about Catherine the Great, a woman who arrived in Russia as a minor German princess named Sophie and, through sheer foundational will, became one of the great powers of Europe. That is her Taurus Sun, the bull, the earthy Venusian pillar who builds something solid and refuses to yield: she shone as the connoisseur and the patron, presiding over a renaissance of art, science, cities and universities across her long reign from 1762 to 1796. Taurus knows the value of things, and she poured that instinct into the Russian Enlightenment and the classical face she gave her empire. With this Sun in the third house, the mercurial house of self-effort, communication and the written word, she was the tireless correspondent and reformer, a ruler who governed with her pen as much as her armies.

Her Moon in Gemini lived in the mind: quick, curious, endlessly talkative, comforted by ideas rather than sentiment, and in the fifth house it fused her psyche to her creations and her many favourites, her love affairs and her cherished projects. Her Capricorn Ascendant was the patient mask of the boss, the old soul who waits like the crocodile, then seizes the throne.